The Night Mark
The Night Mark
Tiffany Reisz
From the bestselling author of The Bourbon Thief comes a sweeping tale of loss and courage, where one woman discovers that her destiny is written in sand, not carved in stone.Faye Barlow is drowning. After the death of her beloved husband, Will, she cannot escape her grief and most days can barely get out of bed. But when she's offered a job photographing South Carolina's storied coast, she accepts. Photography, after all, is the only passion she has left.In the quaint beach town, Faye falls in love again when she sees the crumbling yet beautiful Bride Island lighthouse and becomes obsessed with the legend surrounding The Lady of the Light–the keeper's daughter who died in a mysterious drowning in 1921. Like a moth to a flame, Faye is drawn to the lighthouse for reasons she can't explain. While visiting it one night, she is struck by a rogue wave and a force impossible to resist drags Faye into the past–and into a love story that is not her own.Fate is changeable. Broken hearts can mend. But can she love two men separated by a lifetime?
From the bestselling author of The Bourbon Thief comes a sweeping tale of loss and courage, where one woman discovers that her destiny is written in sand, not carved in stone.
Faye Barlow is drowning.
After the death of her beloved husband, Will, she cannot escape her grief and most days can barely get out of bed. But when she’s offered a job photographing South Carolina’s storied coast, she accepts. Photography, after all, is the only passion she has left.
In the quaint beach town, Faye falls in love again when she sees the crumbling yet beautiful Bride Island lighthouse and becomes obsessed with the legend surrounding The Lady of the Light—the keeper’s daughter who died in a mysterious drowning in 1921. Like a moth to a flame, Faye is drawn to the lighthouse for reasons she can’t explain. While visiting it one night, she is struck by a rogue wave and a force impossible to resist drags Faye into the past—and into a love story that is not her own.
Fate is changeable. Broken hearts can mend. But can she love two men separated by a lifetime?
Praise for Tiffany Reisz’s The Bourbon Thief (#u5dfc0014-26a7-5683-8c38-2537ef8d0be1)
“A dark, twisty tale of love, lust, betrayal, and murder...this novel is not one to be missed.”
—Bustle
“I loved [Reisz’s] Original Sinners series, and this book looks like an epic to delve into on a long, lazy afternoon. Her prose is quite beautiful, and she can weave a wonderful tight story.”
—New York Times and USA TODAY bestselling author Jennifer Probst
“The Bourbon Thief isn’t just good, it’s exceptional. The story captured my imagination; the characters captured my heart.”
—Literati Literature Lovers
“Reisz fills the narrative with rich historic details; memorable, if vile, characters; and enough surprises to keep the plot moving and readers hooked until the final drop of bourbon is spilled.”
—Booklist
“Beautifully written and delightfully insane...Reisz vividly captures the American South with a brutal honesty that only enhances the dark material.”
—RT Book Reviews, Top Pick
“Impossible to stop reading.”
—Heroes and Heartbreakers
“The Bourbon Thief is the sort of book that knocks you off your feet, steals your sanity and keeps you up all night reading! Fair warning—this is definitely a nontraditional love story... Not for the faint of heart!”
—RT Book Reviews
“Prepare yourself for soap-operatic level twists, and also to ignore everything else in your life as you race to the end of this eyebrow-raising tale.”
—RT Book Reviews
The Night Mark
Tiffany Reisz
www.mirabooks.co.uk (http://www.mirabooks.co.uk)
To the men and women who tended the world’s lighthouses and to everyone who ever kept a light shining in the dark...
Contents
Cover (#u4cae1de4-253e-518f-b3f0-5d5edce5344a)
Back Cover Text (#ud1587225-4abf-5ed2-a86f-84ff4c01c3c3)
Praise (#ud8652f2d-f47f-5bf9-bdf3-b20fe426c333)
Title Page (#ub4f5e4ba-9129-55cd-8a95-2a77d4e7a207)
Dedication (#ub9f9f26b-2549-5e8c-bac6-2acf8a8b3981)
Chapter 1 (#uce929b38-d581-506d-807e-94f044f39980)
Chapter 2 (#ud3a375b9-c134-5e36-9328-1cca67cf78a3)
Chapter 3 (#u9520f938-d821-5077-91e5-3ee44f614353)
Chapter 4 (#u1d73d48a-71ea-51f1-b77c-df8d12991b6c)
Chapter 5 (#u6b2c3f3b-d404-5dc7-b590-910d57ca94bc)
Chapter 6 (#u7ec1b18e-7471-543a-b43d-fabd122a8d75)
Chapter 7 (#u74dd855b-0de0-57de-a6ab-d9d0535e798b)
Chapter 8 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 9 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 10 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 11 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 12 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 13 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 14 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 15 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 16 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 17 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 18 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 19 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 20 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 21 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 22 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 23 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 24 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 25 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 26 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 27 (#litres_trial_promo)
Author’s Note (#litres_trial_promo)
Extract (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
1 (#u5dfc0014-26a7-5683-8c38-2537ef8d0be1)
Faye closed her eyes and thought of Casablanca.
Easy to do since she’d been watching it earlier that day. She’d also watched it the week before and the month before that. In the past four years, she’d watched it at least ten times, definitely more, but ten was all she would admit to if asked. And her husband had asked when he’d come home from work and found her watching it.
“Again?” Hagen had asked.
“It’s a classic” was all Faye had said.
Now, hours later, as Hagen kissed the back of her neck, her thoughts returned to Casablanca. It was nine o’clock on Friday night, the one hour of the week they usually made the effort to show up for their marriage. But she hadn’t felt well all day—tired, aching—and all she wanted to do was close her eyes and go to sleep. Since she couldn’t sleep, she dreamed of Rick and Ilsa and Morocco while Hagen did his best to pretend theirs was a real marriage.
Faye was far more concerned about Bogie’s Rick than Hagen. Had Rick ever found someone else to love or had he made a monk of himself, living in celibate devotion to his beloved Ilsa for the rest of his life? Or maybe he’d died shortly after Ilsa got on that plane, killed by fascists or Nazis on his way to Brazzaville with Louis. Faye hoped he had died. Better that than live for decades still in love with a woman he could never have again.
Whoever first said it was better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all had neither loved nor ever lost.
But Faye had. She’d loved and she’d lost and as she lay in the bed of a man who didn’t love her any more than she loved him, she would have sold her soul to not have done either.
“Faye?” Hagen said in her ear. He’d been nice to her today, so she opened her eyes.
“Yes?”
“Your phone’s beeping.”
She reached for the phone on the bedside table and saw she had a text message.
Check your email asap
It was from Richard, her friend who owned the only decent camera store in Columbia, South Carolina. There was no good reason he would be emailing or texting her on a Friday night that she could think of and many bad reasons.
“Emergency text. I’ll be right back,” she told Hagen who immediately rolled onto his back and stared up at the ceiling, silently seething—as usual. Why did she even bother lying? He was always angry at her these days. She looked at him, looked at him longer than she meant to, longer than she had in a very long time. Wives of her husband’s coworkers called Hagen a “catch.” That he was handsome—brown hair, brown eyes, good body—was merely the smallest part of the equation. He was a good provider. That was what one of her neighbor ladies had called him, and here in the South, where men were still expected to be breadwinners, patriarchs and kings of the castle, that was the trump card. It didn’t matter that Hagen spent every free moment outside work golfing with his buddies, that he rarely spoke to her except to criticize how she’d spent her days and that the sole reason he was trying to have sex with her was so they could pretend they were happy together when they both knew better.
Faye shut the bathroom door and read her email.
Hey, Faye—I just had to cancel some work. Got too busy with weddings. If you’re interested, I’ll give them your name. The ladies of the Lowcountry Preservation Society need a photographer for their annual “Journey through Time” fund-raising calendar: $10,000 for 100 exclusives. Landscapes, beach scenes, historical houses, ladies in dresses, the usual old-timey tourist shit. Due date August 1. Yes or no?
Work.
A job offer.
She hadn’t expected that. She hadn’t taken on a professional photography assignment in almost four years. Last week she’d stopped by Richard’s camera shop to buy a replacement lens cap for her Nikon. It had fallen off during a walk two weeks ago and rolled into a gutter. She’d mentioned to Richard she missed going out on assignments. He’d told her to help him with his summer wedding load, and she’d simply smiled at him and said, “No, thanks. I don’t do weddings.”
But this job wasn’t a wedding.
Faye knew she’d been in the bathroom long enough she was risking a fight, and though she wasn’t scared of getting in a fight with Hagen, she was just too tired for it tonight. Out of guilt she made herself try to go. When she did, she discovered exactly why she’d been feeling so tired and miserable and aching all day.
To stall for time, Faye washed her hands. She washed them till they went pruny and then kept washing them. She washed them for so long she forgot why she was washing them. Once she’d read a phrase in a book—the valley of tears. She didn’t know where she’d read it, but she guessed the Bible. This was the moment she should go into that valley and find her tears. She wanted them. She needed them. In her heart she wandered through brambles and thorns and down a steep ravine and into the valley. At the bottom she found a river, where all her tears were supposed to be. The riverbed was dry. She had no more tears left.
She heard a soft knock on the bathroom door and started.
“Faye?”
“Yes?”
“It’s been ten minutes.” His voice was testy, impatient, his usual tone with her these days. All day every day.
Faye dried her hands and opened the door.
“Sorry,” she said.
He nodded and turned around. “I’m going back to bed. Hurry up, okay?”
Faye didn’t want to hurt Hagen; she truly didn’t. She didn’t want to hurt anyone, but there was no way to say it that wouldn’t hurt him.
So she hurt him.
“I’m bleeding.”
He stopped. His broad, powerful shoulders slumped and the air seemed to go out of his body like a balloon with a pinprick in it.
Slowly, he turned around.
“I’ll call Dr. Melzer.”
“Don’t call anybody.”
“But—”
“Don’t.” She couldn’t face any more doctors. She couldn’t face more pity, more sympathy, more tests, more shots, more touching parts of her she never wanted touched again.
He started toward her and she took a step back.
“Please don’t touch me,” she said. If she thought for one second he would hold her to comfort her, she might have let him. But he didn’t want to comfort her. Hagen wanted her to comfort him, and that she couldn’t do. She had nothing to give him.
“Faye?”
“I think I should just go to bed.”
His eyes looked black in the low light of the hallway. Her toes were cold on the hard bamboo floor. Where were her woolen socks? Hagen always kept the house so cold.
“You’re having another miscarriage, and you’re going to bed.” Hagen wasn’t asking her a question. He was registering his disgust with her.
“You have to be pregnant to have a miscarriage. It didn’t take,” she said. Hagen had begged, practically demanded, she try one more IUI procedure, and she’d agreed to it when he’d called it their “Hail Mary.” Well, they’d hailed Mary and Mary hadn’t hailed back.
“Do you have a fever?”
“No.”
“How heavy are you bleeding? Maybe it’s still—”
“It’s over, Hagen. It’s just... It’s all over.”
Somewhere in the valley, the tiniest trickle of water appeared in the riverbed, the tiniest trickle of water appeared on her face. She wiped it off immediately.
“Faye...please.”
“Don’t worry about me.”
“Don’t worry about you? You tell me you’re losing the baby, and I’m not supposed to worry about you?”
She returned to the bedroom, Hagen following her. The bedroom. Their bedroom. Their ridiculous bedroom. Hagen had picked out all the furniture. It looked like something from the Biltmore—king-size iron bed; chocolate-colored walls; brick fireplace; oversize espresso leather armchairs, artfully distressed, of course; gilt-frame landscape paintings on the wall picked out by the decorator by artists neither of them could name. It was a showroom more than a bedroom. Look how much money we have. Look at how sexy we are. Look at how glamorous our marriage is. She hated everything about the room except for the pillow-top mattress. Sleeping was her favorite pastime these days. She took her mattresses seriously.
“I wasn’t pregnant. It didn’t work. And even if I was, it’s not like you can do anything about it,” she said, climbing back into bed. She reached for her book. It would make a fine shield between them.
“What are you doing?”
“Reading.”
“You’re reading. While having a miscarriage.”
“I got my period. It is what it is.”
“You don’t care, do you? You don’t care that this is happening?”
“I can’t care,” she said.
“Why can’t you care?”
“Because if I let myself care about anything that happens to me, I wouldn’t be able to get out of bed.”
“You don’t get out of bed anyway.”
She sighed and met his gaze. He was looking at her, eyes boring into her. Did he see her at all? Or did he just see what he wanted to see? Pretty brunette with violet eyes and good breasts. Quiet, biddable when necessary, like when he trotted her out for company functions and she painted on a smile and wore it until her cheeks hurt.
“Oh,” she said. “Good point.”
“Do you care at all?”
“Please leave me alone, Hagen. Please don’t make me have this conversation now. I was washing blood off my hands five minutes ago. If you won’t let me read, then let me sleep.”
“Sleep? I called you at noon, and you were still in bed.”
“It’s almost impressive, isn’t it? Give the lady a prize, right?”
“Don’t say that.”
“What?”
“Don’t bring Will into this.”
“Oh, yeah, I forgot I’m supposed to pretend he never existed. I’m sorry.”
Hagen stopped at the edge of the bed. Faye tried to rest her head back but the stupid iron headboard might as well have been a wall of nails.
“You know what your problem is?” Hagen asked.
“Yes,” she said, because she did, but Hagen went on as if he hadn’t heard her.
“You want to live in the past. You watch old movies. You haven’t read a book written after 1950 in four years. You listen to Frank Sinatra and Ethel Merman all day long like a goddamn ghost in my house.”
“That’s not true.”
“It’s not? Really?”
“I got this book yesterday, and it was written two years ago.”
Hagen plucked it out of her hands and read the title in as cold and cruel a voice as any man had ever read a book title.
“The Bride of Boston; A Jazz Age Mystery. Who the hell is the bride of Boston?”
“A girl who disappeared in 1921,” Faye said. “Vanished into thin air. But it has a happy ending.”
“Oh, yeah? What’s the happy ending?”
Faye smiled. “She was never seen again.”
Hagen threw the book across the room.
“Jesus Christ, Faye, what the hell is wrong with you? Women would kill to be in your place.”
She rolled onto her side and into the fetal position. Tears leaked from the corners of her eyes onto the pillow. She willed them away, willed Hagen away, willed the world away. But they didn’t go away because her Will was gone.
Hagen must have seen he’d gone too far. He knelt by the bed so they could look each other eye to eye. As he reached out his hand she flinched, fearful he’d strike her even though he never had before.
“Faye.”
“Will never threw anything but baseballs,” she whispered to herself.
“You can’t live in the past. It’s not living. The past is dead,” he said, his hand on her face. It did nothing to comfort her.
“Everything I love is dead.”
“Don’t say that.” Hagen spoke through gritted teeth. He had such nice straight white teeth. “Don’t say stupid stuff like that. It’s melodrama.”
“I’m a melodrama queen.”
“I believe it. Do you think you’re the only person who has ever lost anybody? Everybody loses somebody eventually.”
“But not everybody loses Will.”
“I lost Will, too. Goddamn it, Faye, he’s dead. And I’m not and you’re not. You have a husband who loves you very much—”
This is the most you’ve talked to me in six months.
“You live in a mansion.”
I hate this house. It feels like a prison. Everything’s made of iron and it’s turning me to iron.
“We have all the money we could ever need or ever want.”
Your money, not mine.
“You don’t even have to work.”
“I miss working.” She said that out loud because Richard’s email had reminded her how much she missed working and how much she resented Hagen telling her she shouldn’t. “But you don’t want me to work. It makes you look bad in front of your boss because he’s a chauvinist.”
“He’s old-fashioned. That’s all.”
“And you say I live in the past.”
Hagen turned his back to her. Who could blame him? Why he hadn’t dropped her yet she didn’t know. Masochism maybe? Heroism? Maybe he wanted to save her. Maybe he was too embarrassed to admit he couldn’t.
And the truth was he had a point. She did live in the past. She hadn’t watched a movie made after 1950 in four years. Today she’d watched Casablanca while lying in their bed. They were all dead—Rick and Ilsa and Sam who never did play it again. A DVD of The Maltese Falcon sat on top of the television, waiting to be watched for the tenth or twelfth time; she couldn’t remember. Bogie was dead. Hammett was dead. And the Maltese Falcon never did get found, did it? People searched for it, fought for it, died for it, and in the end it was nothing but a hoax, lead where there should have been gold.
“Okay,” she said.
He narrowed his eyes at her.
“Okay, what?”
“I’ll stop living in the past.”
“You will?” He sounded skeptical, as if she’d agreed just to shut him up.
She climbed out of bed and walked to the closet. From the top shelf she pulled a battered silver suitcase—eighty dollars from Target—with a peeling Boston Red Sox sticker on the side. A relic from her old life. She’d carry it into the new one.
“Faye?”
“I’m going to New Hampshire to stay with Aunt Kate and Mom. Then we can file there.”
“File?”
“For divorce,” she said.
Hagen laughed.
“You’re filing for divorce. In New Hampshire.”
“New Hampshire—famous for maple syrup and quickie divorces. I need to see Mom anyway. Not that she’ll see me, you know. She doesn’t remember anything that happened after 1980. She thinks there are just the two Star Wars movies. I’m not going to tell her any different. I must get my living-in-the-past tendencies from her.”
“She has dementia. She has an excuse. You don’t.”
“You’re right. I don’t have an excuse to live in the past, so I won’t live in the past anymore. I will move on with my life and into the big bright future. I can’t wait to see what this beautiful world we live in has to offer me—can you?”
Her anger gave her a rush of energy like she hadn’t felt in years. She stuffed clothes and socks and shoes and underwear into the suitcase, haphazardly but with purpose. Hagen watched her with bemusement at first, a look that slowly turned to realization as she slipped on her jeans. She wasn’t kidding.
She snatched her book off the floor and flattened the pages Hagen had crushed by throwing it across the room. She found her purse and her charger. She grabbed her phone. And as soon as it was in her hand, she felt it buzz with a text message.
Faye—forgot to tell you that they need an answer by tomorrow. If you want the job, let me know soon as you can.
“You’re actually leaving,” Hagen said, and she heard the first note of sincerity in his voice all evening. They were an ironic couple, never saying what they meant. Irony had failed them tonight.
“You want children, and I can’t give them to you.”
“We can try IVF. We can adopt. We can—”
“I don’t want to try IVF, Hagen. I don’t want to adopt. I don’t want...”
“What do you want?”
What did she want? She looked at her handsome husband with the good job that paid all the bills and took all her worries away. He could give her everything she was supposed to want.
“I don’t want to die here,” Faye said.
It wasn’t the dying that bothered her in that statement. It was the here. She didn’t want to die here in this cold, cold house with this cold, cold husband she slept with in a bed made of cold, cold iron.
“And I will die here if I stay,” she said with cold iron finality.
The look on his face said he believed her even if he wasn’t willing to admit it. She waited. He didn’t say anything more.
She paused at the bedroom door. She’d stay at a hotel tonight, then fly to her aunt’s house in Portsmouth tomorrow. She’d file for divorce there and let Hagen have everything. There would be nothing for the lawyers to fight over as long as she didn’t ask for anything. She’d be divorced by June 5, her thirtieth birthday. Ah, June—a great month for weddings, a better month for divorces. Widowed and divorced, two miscarriages and two failed IUI treatments, all before she turned thirty.
Give the lady a prize.
“You won’t contest the divorce?” Faye asked.
“No,” Hagen said.
Faye nodded.
“For what it’s worth,” Faye said, “I wish...”
Her throat tightened to the point of pain.
“What, Faye? What?”
“I wish I’d never married you. For your sake. Not mine.”
She looked at him, and he looked at her. She wondered if they’d ever see each other again. And she waited for her tears to come but they were gone, the valley dry again.
“Yeah, well,” he said, “you’re not the only one.”
And that was it. He didn’t weep. He didn’t scream. He didn’t argue. He didn’t beg. And when she picked up her suitcase and left Hagen alone in the bedroom, he didn’t follow her. It was over.
She put the suitcase in the trunk of her Prius—a gift from Hagen that he would probably demand she give back—and hit the button to open the garage. Before she backed out, she pulled her phone from her jeans pocket.
She reread Richard’s email. Sounded like a big project, this fund-raiser calendar thing. Landscapes, houses, ladies in dresses... She hadn’t worked a big job like that since getting married. She hadn’t done much of anything since getting married. But she’d need the money. And she’d need the distraction.
Faye hit Reply and typed her answer.
Richard—I just left husband.
In other words, I’ll take the job.
2 (#u5dfc0014-26a7-5683-8c38-2537ef8d0be1)
Faye made the divorce easy on Hagen and he stayed true to his word and made it easy on her. Faye asked for nothing but the Prius and the twelve thousand dollars she’d had in her bank account on their wedding day. He handed over the car keys and wrote her a check. And that was that. He got the house, the other car, the boat, the money and the all-important bragging rights. She’d left town, which gave him the freedom to conjure up any story he wanted. He could tell the world she’d cheated on him with every man alive if he so desired to play the cuckold. He could say she’d refused marriage counseling if he wanted to play the martyr. Or he could tell them the truth—that he wanted babies and her body clearly wasn’t on board with this program. She’d lost Will’s baby. She’d lost Hagen’s. And the two insemination attempts had failed.
Three strikes was an out, but four balls was a walk.
Faye walked.
It was easier to do than she’d thought it would be. Hagen hadn’t put up a real fight. Knowing him, he’d probably been secretly relieved. The past four years she’d slowly lost touch with the world until everything had started to take on the feel of a TV show, a soap opera that played in the background. Occasionally, she’d watch, but never got too invested. Finally, she’d simply switched off the television. The Faye and Hagen Show was over. No big loss. The show only had two viewers and neither of them liked the stars.
A couple months on the coast would do her good. The saltwater cure, right? Wasn’t that what the writer Isak Dinesen had said? “The cure for anything is salt water—sweat, tears, or the sea.” Faye should get more than enough of all three photographing the Sea Islands in the middle of summer.
As soon as she’d packed her bags and drove away from Hagen’s house for the final time, Faye hit the road. In summer tourist-season traffic, the drive from Columbia to Beaufort took nearly four hours. Who were all these people lined up in car after car heading to the coast? What did they want? What did they think they’d find there? Faye wanted to work, that was all. She wanted to do well with this assignment since one good job led to another and then another. Life stretched out before her from now until her death, her work like the centerline of the highway and if she kept her eye on that line maybe, just maybe, she might not careen off the edge of the road.
Faye took the exit to Beaufort, the heart of what was known as Lowcountry in South Carolina. It felt like its own country as the terrain turned flatter and greener and swampier the deeper she drove into. After the exit, she passed a huge hand-painted sign off to her right. Lowcountry Is God’s Country, it read in big black letters. Interesting. If she were God she’d pick the Isle of Skye in Scotland maybe. Kenya. Venice. But Lowcountry? Seemed an odd choice. She wondered what being “God’s country” entailed, and then she passed four different churches, four different denominations, and all in a quarter-mile stretch. Clearly God owned a whole lot of real estate around here.
Faye made it to Beaufort by dinnertime. Needing to conserve her money, Faye had rented a room in Beaufort. Just one room in someone else’s home. She wouldn’t have a private bathroom, a situation Hagen would have found an unacceptable affront to his dignity, but Faye found she didn’t mind, not at all. Now that she didn’t have to think of anyone’s needs but her own, she’d discovered just how little she needed.
The house was on Church Street, a faded Southern Gothic Revival river cottage, a revival someone had forgotten to revive. White paint in need of power washing, three tiers of verandas missing a baluster or five, Spanish moss and ivy competing for ownership of the trees... Faye liked it immediately. It was owned by Miss Lizzie, a woman who rented the rooms out mostly to college kids attending the University of South Carolina’s Beaufort campus. So few students attended classes in the summer, however, that Faye had ended up with what Miss Lizzie said was the best room in the house.
Faye’s hopes were not high, but Miss Lizzie, an older black woman with a spray of pure white hair around her head like an icon’s nimbus, welcomed her into the house with a wide smile that seemed genuine. Faye did her best to match it. The third-floor room she’d been given surpassed Faye’s low expectations by a large margin.
“Here you go,” Miss Lizzie said. “I keep this as my guest room. No kids up here. I’d hate to put a grown woman like you in the same hall as my college boys. They get a little rowdy. You’ll like it up here if you don’t mind the stairs. My sister stays here when she visits but she’s not coming round again until October. Too hot for her.”
“It’s beautiful,” Faye said, wearing a smile she didn’t have to fake. She hadn’t been impressed by anything in a long time, but this room spoke to her in its spareness. The floors were hardwood, a deep cherry stain polished to a high shine so that in the evening sunlight she could see every last rut and groove on the floor, elegant as an artist’s brushstrokes. The wounds gave it character and beauty. The bed was a four-poster, narrow, like something she’d seen in preserved historic homes. It bore an ivory canopy on top and ivory bed curtains; an ivory bedspread with a double-wedding-ring Amish quilt in a shade of dark and light blue was folded at the bottom. In case she got cold, Miss Lizzie said. South Carolina in June and July? Faye was fairly certain she wouldn’t have to worry about catching a chill.
“Closet over there,” Miss Lizzie said, pointing at a buttercream-yellow door. “Dresser there. These doors lead to the balcony,” she said, indicating a set of French doors. “No screen doors, so try not to let the mosquitoes in.”
“Are you Catholic?” Faye asked.
“Of course not. I go to Grace Chapel. It’s AME.” The tone of denial Miss Lizzie employed made it sound as if Faye had asked her if she were a government spy hiding out on foreign soil. Then again, that was what many people once thought of Catholics in the United States.
“I saw the prie-dieu.” Faye pointed at the carved wooden kneeler by the bed. A ceramic gray tabby cat sat on top of it next to a lamp. “That’s why I ask.”
“The what? I thought that was some kind of step stool or side table.”
“It’s for praying. Private prayer. You kneel on this bottom step here and maybe rest your prayer book on the top part.”
“You’re of the Catholic faith?” Miss Lizzie asked, touching her chest as if to clutch at nonexistent pearls.
“No, but I’m a photographer. I did a photo shoot of Catholic churches for a book once.”
“I see. You here to photograph things?”
“For a calendar. A fund-raiser.”
“Well, that’s nice, then. Who doesn’t need funds these days?”
Faye laughed. “Anyway, it’s very pretty.” Faye touched the prie-dieu. It was simply carved but sturdy stained rosewood. The wood was lighter where the knee would go on the bottom board as if someone had prayed on it many times. Were his prayers answered? Why did Faye assume it was a he?
“It’s from the lighthouse, the old one,” Miss Lizzie said.
“Lighthouse? The one on Hunting Island?”
She shook her head. “Not that one. North of Hunting Island, there’s another island. Bride Island.”
“Bride Island? That wasn’t in my guidebook.”
“Only locals call it that. And it wouldn’t be in the guidebook. It’s private. Rich black lady owns it,” Miss Lizzie said with quiet pride. “Paris Shelby.”
“Any idea if Ms. Shelby allows visitors on the island?”
It sounded promising, an old lighthouse on a private island. Maybe it hadn’t already been photographed to death. Perfect subject for a preservation society calendar.
“I wouldn’t know. And Mrs. Shelby hasn’t been around much this summer.”
“Thank you anyway. Maybe I can find a way out there.”
“Here’s your key,” Miss Lizzie said, handing her a silver key on a brass ring. “Now, you remember this isn’t a hotel. I won’t be changing your sheets or bringing you breakfast. That’s your job.”
“I don’t need much of anything, I promise.”
“You can use the kitchen. We let the kids use it as long as they clean it up, so you can use it, too. The top shelf in the fridge is yours. I cleaned it off.”
“I appreciate it. I’m only here to work this summer. I’ll stay out of your hair.”
“My hair thanks you kindly,” Miss Lizzie said with a debutante’s coy smile. “There’s not much left of it to get into anyway.” She patted the wispy curls back into place and left Faye alone in her new home.
Faye set her suitcase on the luggage rack and her equipment case on the bed. A fine room. Perfect for her needs. She’d live the simple life this summer—no television, no movies, no surround-sound speakers and five remote controls only Hagen knew how to work. She’d sleep and she’d eat and she’d work, and when she wasn’t working she would walk or read or do nothing at all.
She lay on the bed, staring up at the canopy and planning her itinerary for tomorrow. A drive around the islands to scout locations and maybe a few pictures if the light was right. No time to waste. She was no one’s wife anymore. If she didn’t work, she didn’t eat. She should have been afraid, but she wasn’t. Supposedly she’d lost “everything” in the divorce and had been left with almost nothing. Turned out almost nothing was exactly what she wanted.
With help from a sleeping pill, Faye slept well that first night in her new room. In the early dawn hours, when the sun had just begun to peek into the room, she woke up and felt the strangest sensation, a sensation she hadn’t felt in more than four years.
Hope.
Hope for what, she didn’t know, but she knew it was hope because it got her out of bed before six o’clock. She knew there was something out there she wanted and something told her if she chased it, she just might catch it. She put on her bathrobe and opened the French doors, but froze when she saw the visitor perched on the wooden railing of the little balcony.
She wasn’t sure what it was—a heron or a crane or an egret—but it was a big damn bird, that was for certain. Two feet tall, white body, blue-black head and a long bill, sharp as a knife. Faye considered retreating but stayed riveted in place, staring.
“Have we met before?” she asked the bird. Its only reply was to turn its head rapidly toward the sun. She wasn’t sure if that was a yes or a no.
“Wait a second... I remember you.”
Faye recalled a cold morning on the Newport pier, a morning she would never forget, though she might want to. She’d gone at sunrise, early so no one would see her and try to stop her. On that winter morning, she’d found herself the sole visitor on that lonely pier, a sorrowful sight in her gray trench coat and Will’s ashes so terribly heavy in her hands. As she walked to the end she was tempted to keep walking. What was that old insult? Take a long walk off a short pier? Yes, that was exactly what she’d wanted to do. But then a large white bird with a black head had landed on a boat tie-up, startling her with its size and sudden appearance. They’d eyed each other for a few seconds before Faye had continued walking toward the end of the pier. She’d fully expected the bird to take off as she neared it, but it hadn’t. It stayed while she knelt on weathered gray wood and poured the ashes into the water and it stayed when she stood up again. It flew off only as she started to walk toward land. For a second—a foolish stupid second—she’d thought the bird was watching over her, making sure she didn’t take that long walk off that short pier.
“What are you?” Faye asked the bird, not expecting an answer. The bird merely shook its wings in reply, and Faye sensed it readying to take off.
“Hold on. Stay there one second, big bird. I want to get my camera. Just a camera. Don’t be scared.” Faye backed into the room, trying her hardest not to make the floor squeak under her feet. From her leather camera bag, she pulled out her Nikon. Carefully, she crept to the doors, but the moment she lifted the camera to her eye, the bird launched itself off the balcony. The one shot she captured was a blur of white in the distance. Faye laughed. Well, there was a very good reason she hadn’t gone into nature photography.
After an early breakfast of cereal and tea, she found Miss Lizzie weeding her garden out back. Faye sidestepped a discard pile of murdered plants. Discerning what was weed and what was garden took better vision than Faye’s twenty-twenty, and she wasn’t sure Miss Lizzie could tell the difference, either. Faye asked her if she knew anyone with a boat. Miss Lizzie suggested she talk to Ty Lewis in Room 2 on the first floor. He was a marine biology student doing some project on the islands over the summer. He went out on a boat often, Miss Lizzie said. Even if he couldn’t take her out he could probably point her in the direction of someone who could.
When she returned to the kitchen she found her man. Had to be him. He wore a T-shirt—a shark and octopus locked in battle on the front with the words The Struggle is Real underneath. He had dark brown skin inked with dozens of black tattoos up and down both arms—fish, it looked like, lots and lots of fish—and half a dozen silver piercings: eyebrow, both ears, nose and lip, plus a bonus upper-ear piercing. He had dreadlocks pulled back in a ponytail. He was also handsome enough Faye had to remind herself she was thirty, not twenty.
Twice she reminded herself of that fact.
“Are you Ty?” she asked, pulling a mason jar—Miss Lizzie’s version of iced tea glasses—from the cabinet.
“I am if you’re asking.” He gave her an appraising look and the appraisal came in high.
“I’m asking,” she said. “Faye Barlow. And don’t flirt with an old lady. Our hearts can’t take that much excitement.”
“If you’re old, I’m Drake. What can I do for you?”
“I heard you have a boat? Or access to a boat?”
“I might have access to a boat,” he said between bites of scrambled eggs and sausage. He sat on the counter, not at the table. When was the last time she’d sat on a kitchen counter? High school?
“Would you let me pay you to take me out somewhere on your boat? I need to take some pictures of a lighthouse.”
“You can drive to the lighthouse. Best beach in the state. Don’t tell anybody that, though. I wanna keep the tourists at Myrtle Beach, where they belong.”
“Miss Lizzie said there’s another lighthouse, one on some place called Bride Island. Do you know it?”
“I know it. Hard to get near it, though. There’s a sandbar in the way.”
“Guess that’s why they needed a lighthouse. Can you get into the area at all? I have a long-range lens on my camera.”
“I can probably do that.”
“Today? Tomorrow?”
“This evening? Five?” He hopped off the counter and poured himself a massive glass of orange juice, so big it made her teeth hurt and her blood sugar spike just looking at it. Did college kids know that their days of eating and drinking like that were numbered? She wanted to tell him, then decided to spare him the awful truth that time was a thief, and a metabolism like his would be the first thing it stole.
“What’s the charge?”
“Dinner. With me. You know, after we get back from the boat.”
“You’re too young for me, and I’ve been divorced for about—” she pretended to check her watch “—ten days.”
“You celebrate the divorce yet?”
“Is that a thing people do? Celebrate the painful dissolution of a marriage?”
“Who wanted the divorce?”
“I did.”
“You love him?”
“No.”
“Like him?”
“No, but he didn’t like me, either.”
“You have kids?”
“No.”
“Good in bed?”
“Fair to middling,” Faye said, shrugging.
Ty laughed. “Then hell, yeah, it’s a thing to celebrate.”
“I will have an age-appropriate celebration. You’re too young for me.”
He looked at her, tight-lipped and disapproving. “I’m twenty-two.”
“I’m thirty.”
“Thirty? Oh, my God, Becky, where were you when JFK was shot?” he asked in a Valley girl voice.
She glared at him.
“You flirt weird. Did you learn this in one of those men’s magazines with a woman in a metallic bikini on the cover?”
“Possibly. Is it working?”
Faye sighed. “It’s working. But just dinner. I’m not sleeping with you. I’m supposed to be sad.”
“Are you sad?” he asked, stepping up to her and looking her right in the eyes. She couldn’t remember if Hagen had looked her in the eyes the entire last year of their marriage. She’d forgotten how scary it was to be seen.
“Yes,” she said.
“Because of the divorce.”
“No, not that.”
“Then why?”
Faye smiled. “Who knows?” A rhetorical question. She knew why she was sad, but Ty didn’t need to know.
“We’ll go to the ocean today,” he said. “It knows things. Maybe it can help you.”
Okay.
So.
Faye had a date with a twenty-two-year-old college student. That was unexpected. Probably a very bad idea, as well. Maybe a terrible idea. Then again, he did have a boat. And he was cute. And she was single again.
And... For a split second while flirting with Ty, Faye had been almost okay. The saltwater cure seemed to be working already. And for a woman who’d been in mourning for four straight years, Faye knew “almost okay” was as good as it was probably ever going to get.
But she would take it.
3 (#u5dfc0014-26a7-5683-8c38-2537ef8d0be1)
Ty had the boat, but Faye had the car. Unless she wanted to ride twenty miles on the back of Ty’s scooter, she would be driving herself on her own date. It was nice. She felt very modern. Old but modern.
Ten minutes into the drive to the dock on Saint Helena Island, Faye pulled over in a church parking lot and gave Ty the keys.
“You want me to drive?” he asked, cocking his pierced eyebrow at her.
“I can’t drive and location scout at the same time without getting us in a wreck. I assume you can drive?”
“I have my learner’s permit,” he said, taking the keys.
“You’re cute.”
“The goddamn cutest,” he said as he opened the door and got behind the wheel.
As Ty drove, Faye stared out the window and jotted the occasional note on her steno pad. She should take pics of the old Penn School. The trees surrounding it were some of the most photogenic she’d ever seen. She also noted a crumbling ruin of a church that would make for a beautiful shot, maybe even the cover of the calendar. Thankfully Ty didn’t pester her with small talk as he drove them to the boat. He pointed out interesting scenery here and there—that road took her down to the old fort, this road took her to a converted plantation house... Useful things. Helpful things. She made notes of them all.
They arrived at the dock, and Faye nodded her approval at the boat. It looked adequately seaworthy, some kind of speedy fishing boat converted into a research vessel. It had a blue-and-white hull with the words CCU Marine Science painted on the bow and the number four on the stern.
“You won’t get in trouble for taking me out on your school’s boat, will you?” she asked.
“It’s mine for the summer. As long as I give it back in one piece with a full tank of gas, and I get my work done, they don’t care what I do with it.”
“What are you working on this summer?” Faye asked as Ty took her hand to steady her on the wobbling boat ramp. Inside the boat she sat on the battered white vinyl seat, mindful of the box of instruments on the floor as Ty settled in behind the wheel.
“Beach pollution mostly,” he said, as he steered the boat away from the dock. “The effects of pollution on coastal wildlife, the fish especially. I’m taking water samples all summer up and down the coast.”
“Are these beaches polluted?” she asked. “They look clean to me.”
“Think about rain,” Ty said. “Think about a rainstorm in your town. Water comes down and washes everything clean, right? What sort of stuff gets washed away in a rainstorm?”
“Bird shit,” she said.
“Squirrel shit.”
“Bat shit,” she said, and they both laughed.
“Oil from your car on the street. All that gets washed into the gutter, which goes into the sewer. Where does that sewer go?”
“Please don’t tell me the ocean.”
“Goes right to the ocean. Decades ago they built these drainage pipes from the cities, and those pipes empty into the ocean near the beaches. That’s why you shouldn’t swim around here after a rainstorm. Like swimming in a sewer.”
“That’s disgusting.”
“It is what it is,” he said with a shrug. “People want to pretend all that shit magically disappears into the gutter and is never seen again. But it’s gotta go somewhere, right?” He started the engine and eased the boat toward open water, steering it neatly between two sailboats, one with the elegant name Silver Girl and the other with the less-than-elegant name The Wet Dream.
The boat bounced hard as it skimmed over the top of a large wake left by a fifty-foot yacht. But Ty seemed imperturbable at the helm. He drove with a focused calm, intent without intensity—a true expert. She liked experts. The world needed more people who were good at their jobs.
“So why marine biology?” Faye asked, shouting over the steady hum of the engine.
“Grew up near Myrtle Beach, watched sea turtles hatching when I was a kid and fell in love. That’s all I’m trying to do—keep these beaches for the turtles. Don’t give a shit about the people.”
“That’s not very nice.”
“People are why we’re in this mess. Last year I pulled ten plastic bags, two Coke cans, half a nylon fishnet, and a goddamn pink Croc shoe, size six, out of the stomach of a shark. You know what we say about that down here?”
“What do we say about that down here?”
“That ain’t right. That’s what you say. You try it.”
Faye put on her thickest faux Southern accent. “That ain’t right.”
“Not bad. I took pics of all that mess, made signs and hung them up on every beach from here to Savannah.”
“You must make lots of friends that way.”
Ty snorted a laugh. “Yeah, they aren’t too happy with us when we tell everybody their fun summer vacations are killing the wildlife. They think we’re scaring off tourists. We are, but we’re not doing it to be assholes. We’re doing it to wake people up.”
“Are you waking them up?”
“All we can do is ring the alarm. Most people aren’t going to start paying attention until they have dirty ocean water on their doorstep. Bad as it is, I admit I’m gonna laugh when those rich white boys are playing golf in three feet of seawater.”
“My ex-husband was one of those rich white boys. He loved coming down here to golf with his buddies.”
“Sorry,” he said, looking awkward.
“I’m not.” She winked at him.
Ty smiled and hit the gas. Coming here had been a good idea. She should thank Richard for sending her the job. This job was just what she needed—work. Real work. Meaningful work. Plus sand, surf, seafood and a chance to be her old self again. She knew the old Faye, the Faye who’d existed before the miscarriages and the failed marriage... The old Faye wasn’t sad like the new Faye. The old Faye felt things, felt them deeply. The old Faye fought for things, too, didn’t give up or give in. And the old Faye would definitely go on a date with Ty. Absolutely.
Ty glanced at her out of the corner of his eye. A college boy had just checked her out.
Maybe the old Faye and the new Faye had something in common.
“Is that it?” Faye asked, pointing to the top of a lighthouse peeking out from the tree canopy.
“That’s Hunting Island. Pretty lighthouse. You can climb it for two dollars.”
“I think I can cover that. I’ll go tomorrow. Today I want to see Bride Island’s lighthouse.”
“We’re a couple miles out from there still. The lighthouse is on the north beach. You can see it a lot better than the Hunting Island lighthouse. It was never moved so it’s right on the water.”
“What do you mean it was never moved?” Faye asked, pausing to dig a strand of hair out of her mouth. She’d forgotten how windy it got on a boat.
“You see that long spit of sand there?” Ty pointed to what looked like a yellow cat’s tail lounging a few hundred yards out into the water.
“I see it.”
“That used to be land. And that’s where the Hunting Island lighthouse stood. Built in the 1870s, but they had to move just a few years later. The land had eroded that much already. Going, gone, almost gone...”
“It’s really all going away, isn’t it? The coast?”
“Let’s just say you won’t catch me buying a beach house.”
“It’s too bad. I always feel like a better person when I’m on the water.” The air smelled cleaner here. The water seemed purer. She wanted to strip off her clothes and dive off the side of the boat and let the water baptize her a free woman.
“The ocean is big,” Ty said. “And we aren’t. It’s good to be humbled every now and then.”
“You ever go through a divorce?” she asked.
“Not yet.”
“Trust me, I know from humble.”
“You don’t seem humbled,” Ty said.
“What do I seem like?”
“Like a woman who just got out of jail.”
Faye grinned and was about to ask him what a woman just out of jail ought to do first when Ty raised his arm and pointed.
“There it is,” Ty said, and Faye looked up from the dancing blue water to the island on their port side.
“That’s Bride Island?”
“That’s it.”
Faye studied it, not sure what she was looking for except something to justify the trip out here. From this distance, about five hundred yards from shore according to Ty, it looked like Hunting Island. White sandy beach, a line of ocean debris where the tide met the shore and a thick forest of trees. Faye picked up the binoculars and studied the trees. She saw no palms or palmettos, no pines, no evergreens at all.
“Are those live oaks?”
“I don’t think they’re dead oaks,” Ty said.
“You know what I mean.”
“They’re white oaks. Lady who owns the island owns a bourbon distillery in Kentucky. They get the trees for the bourbon barrels from here.”
“White oak? Interesting. Naturally occurring or did the owner plant them?”
“You know anything about Bride Island?” Ty asked, slowing the boat.
“Not a thing except I couldn’t find it on the guidebook map.”
“It’s just Seaport Island on the maps,” he said. “But call it Bride Island if you want to sound like a local.”
Ty turned off the boat and let it bob gently in the water.
“Where’d the name come from?” Faye asked.
“Some rich planter came over from France in 1820 or something. He sent home for a girl to marry and they shipped her over here, got her in the rowboat to bring her in. They say it was love at first sight. She was so beautiful he waded right into the water to meet her boat. And when she saw him coming for her, she got out of the boat in her fancy dress and eight hundred skirts underneath and waded out to meet him. But the water weighed her down so hard, she started to go under, and he picked her right out of the water and carried his bride to shore. So it’s Bride Island.”
“Romantic,” Faye said. “Minus the almost drowning. Don’t swim in big dresses.”
“Gets more romantic. Their kid fell out of a tree and broke his neck. The bride drowned herself. And the husband went crazy and committed suicide by burning the house down with him inside it. But he was a slave owner so you know what we say to that?”
“That ain’t right?” Faye asked.
“Nope. We say this.” Ty raised his hand and defiantly flipped off the island. Faye smiled. She appreciated the sentiment. “Legend is, if a girl swims naked in those waters, she’ll find her true love right after. But don’t do that. Lotta girls have drowned out here. Only man they meet is Jesus.”
“I’ll make a note not to do that, then.”
“You don’t want to find your true love?” he teased. “Or drown trying?”
“I just got divorced.”
Ty shrugged. “Nobody wants to be alone.”
“I do. I’m never getting married again—that’s for sure.”
“You say that now...”
Faye shook her head, tried not to smile. Had she been this sure of herself at twenty-two? Probably. She wouldn’t tell him he’d be awash with self-doubt by thirty. Maybe he was one of the lucky ones blessed with eternal certainty of purpose. Once she thought she knew it all, too. All Faye knew now was that she knew nothing except what she’d told Ty—she never wanted to be anyone’s wife ever again.
While pretty and picturesque, Faye didn’t see anything on the south shore of the island worth photographing. No houses, no landmarks, no rock formations or wildlife. Only sand and grass and trees. Ty started the boat back up, and they made their way around a bend to the north shore of the island.
And there it was.
Faye stood up and gripped the gunwale, camera momentarily forgotten.
The lighthouse appeared like something from a dream or a painting of a dream. Solid white and shimmering wet after a recent rain, it shone like a pillar of pure moonstone. The roof of the lighthouse was black and glinting and below it the widow’s walk around the lantern room was like an iron choker. The glass panels surrounding the lantern room looked intact, and in the evening sunlight they winked and flashed, casting the illusion that the beacon inside still burned. True, the paint was peeling and the stone facade chipped and cracked, but it was magnificent, dignified and elegant, like an English stage actor who’d played Hamlet in his youth and in his later years strode the boards as Lear. Once a mad prince, now a mad king.
“You like it?” Ty asked.
“I love it,” she breathed.
“It’s not bad,” Ty said. “Only one on the East Coast with a solid white day mark.”
“Day mark?” Faye repeated.
“Lighthouses have a day mark and a night mark. The day mark is what they call the paint job,” Ty said. “Some lighthouses have wild paint jobs. I’ve seen candy stripes and diamond patterns, red stripes and black stripes.”
“And the night mark?”
“The night mark is the pattern the light flashed. Some lighthouses had a steady beam. Some lights flashed. That’s how navigators told lighthouses apart. Every part of a lighthouse had a use. You have electronics and radar and sonar and GPS on boats now. Imagine trying to get from here to Maine without any of that.”
“I couldn’t get from Columbia to Beaufort without my GPS.”
“Yeah, I’d last three days if that before I ran into a sandbar or reef. Lighthouses saved a shit ton of lives.” Ty narrowed his eyes at the lighthouse and shook his head. “Probably won’t last much longer before it falls into the ocean.”
“I’ll make it immortal,” Faye said, pulling her camera out of her bag. She lifted it to her eye and got off a few dozen shots as quickly as she could. Despite sitting on the very edge of the water, the lighthouse looked secure enough to climb if she could find a way to it. It sat on a base of rock four feet or more above the sand. Behind it she saw another line of rock.
“What’s back there?” Faye asked, pointing at the rocks.
“Probably where the keeper’s cottage stood,” Ty said, squinting at the shore. “It was a nice job if you could get it. You get a house and you go to work ten feet from your back door. The beach is your front lawn. Of course, you have to climb about a million stairs a day. And there’s nobody else for miles around if you get hurt or get sick. And when the hurricane hits, you got nowhere to go except inside the lighthouse.”
“That sounds like my dream job,” Faye said. “I’d take pictures of the beach every single day and watch it change through the seasons. And I’d have killer quads climbing those stairs three and four times a day.”
“Sounds boring as shit to me,” Ty said.
“Maybe I was a lighthouse keeper in my past life.”
“Maybe you were boring as shit in your past life.”
“Distinct possibility,” she said, getting off a couple more shots as they rounded the island’s northern shore.
“It’s a shame the lighthouse is locked away on a private island. It should be open to the public.”
“What? You want tourists climbing up and down it every day, putting their gum on the steps and tossing their Coke bottles off the top?”
“Maybe not. But I want to climb it,” Faye said. She didn’t want to climb it. She needed to climb it.
“I’m sure there’s a way. Just not from here. You can’t see it from here, but there’s one nasty sandbar under the water by the pier.”
“It’s okay. I’ll find a way out there. I’ll sweet-talk anyone I need to.”
Near the base of the lighthouse, Faye noticed the remnants of an old pier, thick, rotting wood pillars poking out of the water like a hundred tiny islands. At the last pillar where the pier had once ended, Faye saw a bird land—a white bird with a long bill and a blue-black head.
“Ty? Do you know what that is?” She pointed at the bird. Ty narrowed his eyes. She handed him the binoculars and he peered through them. He laughed.
“Somebody must be having a baby,” he said.
“What is it?”
“A stork. A wood stork.”
“Do you see wood storks around here often?” she asked.
“Never seen one out here. Not too many of them around anywhere.”
“I swear to God that very same bird or its identical twin was perched on my balcony at six o’clock this morning. Bizarre.” She didn’t tell Ty about seeing a bird just like it when she’d scattered Will’s ashes. She liked Ty and didn’t want him thinking she was imagining things like birds stalking her.
“You sure you aren’t pregnant?” Ty asked.
“If I were, I’d still be married.”
“Just checking. I mean, you know how storks are.”
Faye stared across the water at the stork. It turned its large head and seemed to stare back at her.
“I had this baby book once,” Faye said. “Don’t ask me why, doesn’t matter. But it had a whole chapter on the stork symbol. Supposedly in Egyptian mythology, the stork was the symbol of ‘ba’ or the soul. While a person slept, their soul would fly in the form of a stork and come back to him. They could even carry the souls of the dead back to the body. I think. Read it a long time ago.”
“That stork is carrying some dead guy’s soul? I like babies better. Long as it’s not my baby.”
“Can you kill the engine? I don’t want to scare it away.”
Ty cut the engine and peered through the binoculars again. Faye lifted her camera to her eye but took no pictures. She was waiting. She sensed the second her shutter snapped the bird would fly off, and she would lose the shot. She had to get it right the first time.
The boat bobbed in the water, drifting ever closer to the pier. The shot lined up the way she wanted—the lighthouse filled the background, the pillar and the stork were left of center and the trees formed a frame on either side.
One...two...three...
Faye clicked the shutter and got off as many shots as she could in quick succession. Her instincts had been right. As soon as the clicking reverberated over the water, the bird took off. Faye couldn’t have planned it better. The wood stork soared into the sky, heading straight toward the sun fearless as Icarus, and she captured every last beat of its wings.
“Perfect,” she said, flipping the camera over. She scrolled through the pictures, creating a sort of flipbook as the bird tensed, stretched its wings and then launched itself into the sky. She scrolled backward and set the stork back down onto the pier like magic.
“Damn,” Ty said, glancing over Faye’s shoulder. “You’re good.” His shoulder butted against hers, and he seemed genuinely impressed by her work.
“I’m not bad.”
“You make much money doing this?” he asked.
“I didn’t become a photographer for the money. Nobody does, I promise.”
“Why’d you do it, then?”
“When I was younger, I thought I wanted to be a photojournalist. A modern Dorothea Lange.”
“Who?”
“You’ve seen her pictures. She took photographs of migrant workers during the Great Depression. People in bread lines, starving people, people driving across the country to get jobs picking fruit in California. When those pictures were published, it woke the country up. FDR’s New Deal might not have happened without her pictures. Before her the poor were seen as defective, as inferior. She took beautiful pictures of poor people, dignified pictures. People saw themselves in the suffering. They saw the humanity. One photographer, one woman, in the right place and the right time could change the world.”
“You gonna change the world?”
“That was the plan. Once upon a time. But every college kid thinks they can save the world.” She grinned at him, and he rolled his eyes. “But it’s a hard gig to get into, the changing-the-world gig. I settled for working at a tiny newspaper in Rhode Island out of college. Newspaper jobs are nearly impossible to get now. Good thing my ex-husband had money or I might have starved. Or worse, had to get a real job.”
She joked about it, but the truth was, she regretted letting Hagen’s money keep her at home when what she should have done was go back to work doing what she loved. But when they’d gotten married she’d been in no shape to save the world. She could barely get out of bed the morning of their wedding. So what was stopping her now?
“Dorothea Lange took pictures of people suffering from the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl, and now the Social Security Administration and Medicaid exist. I take pictures of lighthouses for desk calendars. So much for saving the world.”
“Hey,” Ty said, “your pictures could save that lighthouse. It’s a piece of history. That light saved lives, and you can return the favor. People see that lighthouse and they start to care about it. Out of sight, out of mind, right? So isn’t the reverse in sight, in mind? Maybe if somebody like you took pictures of these islands a hundred years ago, they wouldn’t be in the shape they are now. And even when that lighthouse is gone, when all the islands are gone, we’ll have your pictures. Better than nothing.”
“Right. Better than nothing.”
Faye smiled and looked at her pictures again. She couldn’t believe her luck. A dozen gorgeous shots, any one of them could grace the cover of the calendar. A home run on her first at bat. That never happened.
Ty started the boat’s engine up again. With a relaxed, practiced air, he steered them around the ruins of the pier and back into open water.
“Where to now?” Faye asked, slipping her camera back into her bag.
“Dinner. Oysters if you can handle it.”
“I can handle oysters. You buying?” she teased. She’d never make a college kid buy her dinner.
“How about this? I’ll give you the oysters in exchange for the clam.”
Faye stared at him. “That is the grossest thing anyone has ever said to me. I’m almost impressed. No, I am impressed. Good job.” She slapped him on the back.
“Thank you, baby. I’ll be here all week.”
Faye was too amused and too happy to be offended. Not that Ty could offend her if he tried. After four years in a bad marriage, one dirty pussy joke couldn’t begin to ding her armor. Oh, but that smile of Ty’s, that sweet, sexy smile could. It wriggled its way through the chinks in her chain mail.
Tonight she was going to make very bad decisions.
The rest of the evening passed in a blur. Faye and Ty both had a little to drink at dinner and then a lot to drink back at the Church Street house. So it wasn’t that much of a rude awakening to find Ty still in her bed when she woke up around 3:00 a.m.
He lay on his stomach, facing away from her, looking so painfully young and terribly sweet. She forced down any guilt she might have felt. This hadn’t been his first time, and it wouldn’t be his last. Might not even be his last time tonight. She’d almost told him during their first round that it was the best sex she’d had since getting married, but she kept that comment to herself. After all, Hagen had set a low bar.
Faye slipped out of bed, put on her bathrobe and went to the bathroom. Ty stirred as she slid back in next to him.
“Just me,” she whispered as Ty rolled over to face her.
“Did I fall asleep? Sorry. Your bed is bigger than mine.”
“I don’t mind. Just be careful sneaking out. I don’t want to get in trouble with Miss Lizzie. She seems a little on the religious side.”
“She makes Mother Teresa look like Miley Cyrus.” Ty slid from bed and started gathering his clothes. She rolled over onto her side to watch him dress in the dark. “Luckily she sleeps so hard we could knock the headboard through the wall and she wouldn’t wake up.”
“That sounds like the voice of experience.”
“Did you think I was a virgin?” he asked, crawling over the bed to her.
“No, but I was.”
He laughed softly and kissed her. “Hope you had fun,” he said.
“I did.”
“You sure?” he asked. Faye blushed in the dark. She hadn’t been able to come during the sex. She’d tried, but it was going to take a while before she figured how to use her body for anything other than baby making again. But Ty didn’t need to hear that.
“I did have fun,” she said. “Don’t take my lack of orgasms personally. I’m a little out of practice.”
One more kiss and one more smile. “Practice makes perfect.”
On his way out of her room she stopped him with a whispered question.
“Hey,” she said. “What’s the name of the island with the lighthouse again? Not Bride Island, the real name? Sea Island?”
“Seaport Island.”
“Thanks. I need it for the caption.”
“I’ll take you out there again anytime you want.”
“I might take you up on that. How much will you charge me for it?” she asked, smiling.
“One clam.”
Ty crept into the hallway and was gone, leaving Faye laughing in bed. She didn’t hear a single footstep creaking on the hardwood.
Faye tried to go back to sleep, but it eluded her. Her new life had officially begun with a bang and a whimper or two. Sliding out from under the covers, she walked naked to her camera bag sitting on the floor. She enjoyed the breezy tickle of the night air on her breasts as it wafted in under the blinds. It made her tingle in a pleasant way.
She hadn’t had a chance to upload today’s pictures yet and wanted to see the lighthouse again. She plugged her camera into her computer. Ah, there they were, her beautiful photos. The stork, the trees, the glimmering ivory lighthouse. Faye would get this photo printed out and she’d hang it in her room. It was possibly the best work she’d ever done. Maybe she’d finally found her subject. Man Ray had his nudes. Dorothea Lange had her migrant workers. Ansel Adams had his landscapes. Maybe Faye Barlow would have her lighthouses.
She typed “Seaport Island Lighthouse” into the spreadsheet she kept to label her photographs. Out of curiosity she entered that phrase into Google image search to see who else had been taking pictures of the lighthouse. She found a few amateur pictures of the island, most of them obvious iPhone pictures posted on Pinterest. As she scrolled through the results she found a few historical pictures. One of the iron skeleton of the lighthouse as it was being built in 1884. Another when it was completed.
Faye was about to shut her computer down when a tiny thumbprint photograph caught her eye. It was a faded and sepia-toned picture of one of the lighthouse’s keepers who’d been stationed there after World War I, according to the caption.
Faye narrowed her eyes at the photograph. Her heart raced. She clicked on the link and enlarged the picture until the face of the lighthouse keeper filled up the fifteen-inch screen.
“No way...” she breathed, putting the laptop onto the sewing table and leaning in closer, staring at the photograph until her eyes watered. And she stared at it even longer until the watering turned to tears.
Faye reached out to touch the photograph on her screen.
She knew the face in the photograph, knew it well.
It was the face of the only man she’d ever loved.
Will’s face.
4 (#u5dfc0014-26a7-5683-8c38-2537ef8d0be1)
When the Beaufort County Library opened the next morning, Faye was the first one through the double doors. Unfortunately, the librarian at the reference desk was fairly new to the area, a transplant from Tennessee, and she’d never heard of Bride Island and/or Seaport Island and had no idea there was a lighthouse other than the Hunting Island Light. She suggested Faye walk down to the local tourist center with a smile and a “God bless.”
Thankfully everything that wasn’t an island was within walking distance in Beaufort. The tourist center was housed in a clementine-colored brick storefront house on Bay Street. Between last night and this morning, the wholly uncanny feeling of the lighthouse keeper’s photograph had faded from her consciousness the way a nightmare fades, mostly gone but leaving a strange, smoky pall over the day.
And yet...it was strange. Too strange to ignore, although too strange to take seriously, as well. But finding out the man’s name wouldn’t hurt, would it?
In the front window sat six watercolor paintings on easels. All of them were paintings of Lowcountry—the beach, the Hunting Island lighthouse, the Penn School...
And there it was, set off behind the others, a single painting of a solid white lighthouse and the pier that no longer existed. At the end of the pier stood a woman in a light gray trench coat. The woman faced the ocean and seemed to be holding something in her hand, something Faye couldn’t see. And behind the woman on the pier?
A large white bird perched on a pillar.
Faye froze, unable to walk away from the painting, unable to look away. The uncanny feeling returned times a hundred. First the photograph and now this...
What the hell was going on?
Faye tore herself from the painting and entered the tourist center’s front office. She found a teenage boy with his nose buried in his phone manning the receptionist’s desk. Either covering for his mother, she surmised, or doing community service for any of the usual teenage misdemeanors that deserved a punishment more than grounding but less than prison.
“Do you know anything about that painting of the lighthouse in the window?” she asked.
“Which one?”
“The one with the lady in the painting.”
“Lady painting. Um...hold on,” he said, sounding tired, hungover, stoned maybe. He wasn’t moving very fast, either, as he took a binder off a shelf and flipped through the pages. She’d been amused by the terrapin-crossing warning signs she’d seen around Beaufort with the outline of the turtle in the middle. If she had such a sign she’d hang it over this boy’s head. Then she would clobber him with it.
“Okay, here it is,” the boy said between yawns. “Watercolor. Sixteen by twenty inches. The Lady of the Light. Fifty bucks.”
“That’s it? That’s all it says about the painting?”
“Um...no. It says if you buy it, the artist accepts personal checks made out to the Historical Society.”
“I wasn’t planning on buying it. I want to know who the woman in the painting is.”
“I told you—the Lady of the Light.”
“Who’s that?”
“Some lady.”
“Okay,” Faye said, counting to ten before she murdered this boy. “What about the artist? From the angle of the painting, it looks like he or she painted it from the beach, which meant they were out there. You’re not supposed to be out there, since it’s a private island. You know anything about any of that?”
“Um...”
“I’ll take that as a no.”
“You can ask Father Pat about it, I guess.”
“Father Pat?”
“He’s a priest.”
“Why would I ask a priest about the painting?”
“Because he painted it.”
“He’s a priest and a painter?”
The boy shrugged. “What else are you going to do if you’re a priest? Not like you can join Tinder. Maybe you can. I’m not Catholic.”
“Is his number in the phone book?”
“What’s the phone book?”
Now he was just messing with her. She hoped.
“His number’s in here. Hold on.” The boy waved her off and flipped through the binder again. Finally, he found the phone number and wrote it down for her.
“Thank you,” she said.
“You should buy the painting. Father Pat would really like that.”
“I just got divorced. Took one week. Do you know how much money I had to give up to get my divorce finalized in one week?”
“You can have it for twenty-five dollars. It says so in the book.”
“Fine. Give it to me.”
Faye wrote out her personal check to the Historical Society. At least it was a tax write-off. The boy offered to wrap up the painting for her in some newspaper—she was shocked he knew what a newspaper was—but she declined and carried it back to the Church Street house. Faye wondered if sweat could damage a watercolor before recalling how much she had paid for it. As she opened the gate, Ty opened the front door. He stopped, looked at her and at the painting.
“Don’t ask,” she said.
He held up his hands in mock surrender. “I’m not asking a thing,” he said before putting on his helmet and scootering away.
Faye set the painting on her desk, propping it against the wall. Father Patrick Cahill might be an amateur, but he was a talented one. His work had a Degas flavor to it, blurry, shaky, giving the impression of the lighthouse and the outline of the woman without giving way the details. She wondered if he painted en plein air or if this had been a work of pure imagination. He could have seen the lighthouse from a boat like she had and then painted it at a different angle later. But what about the woman? What about the white bird on the pier? Either the universe was trying to tell her something, or...
She was losing her mind. Faye thought she could put money on the second option.
First, so as not to be intrusive, Faye attempted to send Patrick Cahill a text message. She composed it carefully, saying she had bought the painting of the lighthouse and the lady and admired it greatly, and if it wasn’t too much of a bother, she’d like to ask him a few questions about it. She signed her name and sent the message. She received an immediate error message.
It was a landline.
Fabulous. Father Cahill had a landline. How quaint. Now Faye understood why Hagen was so annoyed with her wanting to live in the past. She took a deep breath and dialed the number next. She hated cold-calling the man. Priests didn’t make her nervous, but she’d talked to very few of them in her time. Even when on assignment photographing the interiors of churches, she’d spent more time with the secretaries and deacons than the priests, who had more pressing matters to attend to. Father Cahill didn’t answer, but he did have an answering machine. Not voice mail. Answering machine. Would she need a time machine just to find the man?
She relayed her message to his answering machine and thanked him profusely for his time, which he actually hadn’t given to her yet. Still, this was the South, and she knew it was best to play the honey card instead of the vinegar card if she wanted a man to do her bidding.
After gathering her gear, she set out again to work. She had never accomplished anything by sitting and waiting for the phone to ring, so she drove out to Saint Helena Island. She preferred shooting her outdoor photography in the early-morning and late-evening hours, but she didn’t want to waste an entire day brooding and overthinking things. She’d done enough of that in her life.
First stop, the Penn School. According to its historical marker, Northerners during the Civil War had come to the region to start a school for the people newly freed from slavery. Faye could imagine how well that went over with the local white population. But the school, with its cream-colored exterior and red tile roof, was lovely even in the vertical noon sunlight. Faye made a circuit of the school, shooting it at every angle, even climbing a tree to get a shot of it through the branches sagging with Spanish moss. A good picture, but not good enough. She would have to suck it up and come back tomorrow morning around dawn to get the shot the way she envisioned it.
Next Faye drove down to the Chapel of Ease, or what was left of it. Four walls of tabby plaster, no roof and that was it. She took a few shots of the chapel but focused most of her pictures on the adjacent cemetery. A lovely, peaceful place until a bus arrived and belched tourists out onto the hallowed ground. Faye waited until they loaded up again and had driven off before taking the picture the way she wanted, with the chapel in the background and the cemetery in focus front and center.
The chapel’s historical marker said the place had burned in the 1860s—a forest fire—and no one had bothered to rebuild it. Now it was a ruin, a beautiful relic, perhaps more loved in its wreckage and decay than it had been while intact. Were it still an active church, Faye would have driven past it like she’d driven past a dozen other churches on this stretch of road. Perhaps Ty was onto something with his sangfroid about the imminent destruction of the Sea Islands. Those people taking pictures of the Chapel of Ease wouldn’t have set foot inside it during a Sunday service. Maybe it was simply human nature to only love a thing after losing it. Maybe they should all lose more things so they could appreciate what they had. Faye could count her possessions now on her two hands—car, camera, laptop, suitcase of clothes and shoes, phone, her beloved grandmother’s necklace and an old ring she couldn’t wear because it was much too big for her hands. Yet she wouldn’t get rid of it. Not to her dying day.
The shots of the cemetery turned out better than she’d anticipated. If they didn’t end up in the calendar, she could sell them to a stock-photo website. When she packed up her gear in the car, she had a missed call. The voice mail message said it was Pat Cahill calling and he was more than happy to hear someone had finally gotten suckered into buying one of his masterpieces. If she wanted to see him today, he’d be painting the marshlands on Federal Street, and she surely couldn’t miss him. He’d be the old man on the front lawn covered in paint.
On the way to Federal Street, Faye’s phone rang again. She didn’t want to answer, not because she was driving, but because this time she knew who was calling.
“Hello,” she said, keeping her voice even, flat, unemotional. It was easy for her to do, too easy.
“That’s all I get? Hello?”
“Hello there? That better?” she said.
“You know I’m not the bad guy, remember? You can at least fake being polite to me.”
“Hello there, Hagen. How are you?”
“God, you are really something.”
Faye heard his aggravated exhalation on the other end of the line.
“What do you want?” she asked. “I’m driving and can’t really talk.”
“I don’t want anything. I’m calling to see how you’re doing. Call it a bad habit.”
“I’m fine. Just working. How are you?”
“Working. Look, I found some stuff of yours in the guest room closet. Do you want it?”
Faye should have known he wasn’t calling just out of the goodness of his heart.
“What is it?”
“I don’t know. Do you really want me digging through your stuff?”
Faye sighed. Hagen had a gift for making things more difficult than they needed to be.
“How am I supposed to tell you if I want it or not if you won’t tell me what it is?”
“You could come here and look at it.”
“You can look in the box.”
“I don’t want to.”
“Hagen, I didn’t keep pet snakes. You can look in the damn box.”
“I think it’s Will’s stuff.”
Faye fell silent. She saw a gas station on the right, pulled in and shut off the car. It took her ten full seconds before she could speak again.
“It’s not Will’s stuff,” she said finally. “I have a few things, and his family has the rest.”
“And what about, you know... Will?”
Faye rubbed at her forehead. “I would not leave Will’s ashes in a cardboard box in a guest room closet. I scattered them in the ocean two years ago.”
“Without me?”
“I was in Newport visiting family. It seemed like the right time and the right place.”
“Without me, you mean. He was my best friend,” Hagen said.
“He was my husband.”
“Yeah, so was I.” Hagen nearly shouted the words, and each one landed on her like a heavyweight champ’s fist. A right, a right, a left and then a brutal jab straight to the solar plexus.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I had to do it alone.”
“You were alone?”
“Yes,” Faye said. “I mean, except for a bird. There was a big white bird there, too. Maybe he knew Will.” She laughed at herself, and fresh hot tears fell from her burning eyes.
“You don’t sound good, Faye. Where are you?”
She wished he wouldn’t talk to her so gently. It made it harder to stay angry, and she needed her anger. It gave her energy.
“I don’t have to tell you that.”
“Jesus, do you think I’m going to stalk you or something? If I was obsessed with you I could have dragged the divorce out a couple years. It could have been ugly. I didn’t, though, and I don’t remember you saying thank you for that.”
“I’m supposed to thank you for not torturing me with a protracted divorce? Okay. Thank you, Hagen. Thank you very much.”
The pause between her last words and his next words was so long she thought he’d hung up on her. No such luck.
“I was never going to be Will,” Hagen said at last. “And it wasn’t fair of you to expect me to be him.”
“I never expected you to be Will, and I didn’t want you to be Will.”
“Because no one could be Will, right? Except Will, because Will was perfect.”
“Will wasn’t perfect,” Faye said slowly, as if speaking to a child. “No one is perfect. Especially not a man who left dirty dishes under the bed and never cleaned a toilet in his life. But this is what Will was—Will was the man who loved me, all of me, even though I yelled at him and called him a thoughtless child when he almost burned the house down trying to cure a baseball mitt in the oven. He cleaned the oven, he bought me flowers and he told me he was sorry. So no, Will was not perfect. Will was better than perfect. He was too good for this world. The world didn’t deserve him and neither did I.”
In the pit of the night when Faye was alone with her thoughts and her loneliness, she would tell herself that Will was too good for her. It was her only explanation for why he was taken from her. The only explanation that ever made sense.
“Hagen, I know—I do—that you thought by marrying me you were honoring Will, doing what he would have wanted you to do, doing what he would have done in your place. I thought so, too. But it was a mistake.”
“I kept you from killing yourself for nearly four years and you call that a mistake?”
Faye shrugged, shook her head and remembered the night Hagen had taken the pill bottle out of her hand. By the next day every gun, knife and pill in the house had been locked in a safe.
She didn’t have the heart to tell him half the reason she’d had that pill bottle in her hand was because she’d married him.
“Hagen, I really have to go.”
“Can I ask you one thing now that’s it’s all over? One question, one answer. I think you owe me that after four years of marriage and carrying my child and eating my food and sleeping in my bed and living in my house and taking my cock without complaint all that time.”
Faye sighed. She’d been pregnant for a mere six weeks three years ago and Hagen still talked about that lost pregnancy like she’d given birth to a living child who’d died in his arms. He’d lost children. Faye had lost herself. They couldn’t even grieve together.
“Faye?”
“Ask,” she said. “But don’t get pissed at me if you don’t like the answer.”
“Did you ever love me?”
“I tried.” Faye closed her eyes, and twin tears rolled down her cheeks, scalding hot on her cold skin. “I swear I did try.”
“So no?”
“No,” Faye said.
This time when the silence came she knew Hagen had hung up.
Faye hated this part, hated when it hit her full body like she’d been thrown against a wall and nothing could stop her from feeling everything she didn’t want to feel. Her chest ached and her face, too. Her throat tightened like a strong man’s hand was clutched around it, squeezing. Her stomach roiled like boiling water. From her feet to her guts to her heart to her eyes, she ached with pure unadulterated panic. She hadn’t had a panic attack since before Will died. But she remembered this feeling, this vise on her chest, this unbearable urge to run away, to scream, to fly and to fight. She’d tumbled headfirst into the pit, and nothing could get her out of it—not a rope or a pickax or her own bare hands clawing at the dirt walls.
She lowered her head to the steering wheel and squeezed the leather as hard as she could. In her twenties her panic attacks had been triggered by her student loan debt combined with her erratic income from freelancing. One bill could send her spiraling into the cold sweats, nausea and a sense of being choked to death by an invisible hand. Pills helped a little, but nothing helped more than Will putting her on his lap and holding her as he rubbed her back.
“Breathe, babe. In and out,” he’d say, his voice strong and calm as she gasped and swallowed air. “It’s not the end of the world. It only feels that way. We’ll just be poor,” he would say to make her smile. “We’ll live in a cabin in the middle of nowhere with no electricity or running water. We’ll smell horrible. We’ll grow our own food. We’ll have cows and chickens and no TVs. We’ll have so much free time, babe. I don’t even know what we’ll do with all that free time... Wait. I got it. Blow jobs three times a day.”
And Faye would laugh through her tears, which only Will could make her do.
“What about baseball?” she’d asked him.
“Just a game, babe. It’s just a game. You and me, we’re the real thing. Right?”
“Right.” She’d put her head back on his big broad chest and ride out the wave of her panic in his arms.
“Breathe, sweetheart,” Will would say, rocking her like a child. “I’m here, and I love you.”
But he wasn’t here anymore.
And he didn’t love her anymore.
If the dead could love, they had a terrible way of showing it.
But breathe she did—in and out—and sure enough, when she raised her head she saw people walking into the gas station, a little boy racing to beat his sister to the door so he could be the one to hold it open for their mother. A robin pecked at a rotting pretzel on the asphalt. A shiny blue Corvette with Georgia plates pulled in for a fill-up. Life. It was still happening. The world hadn’t ended. Not even her little corner of it.
Once she was back in control of her emotions, Faye started her Prius. As always she was taken aback by how quietly the car ran. She really never knew if it was running until it moved. Same with her—she didn’t know she was alive unless she was moving—so she kept moving.
The phone rang again. Hagen calling back, either to keep fighting or to apologize. She ignored the call, and she also ignored the urge to toss the phone out of the car window into Port Royal Sound.
Faye found Federal Street easily, thanks to her tourist’s map. Father Pat Cahill had said he’d be painting the marshlands, but that didn’t narrow things down much. The entire place was surrounded by marshlands. She drove to the very end of the road; if she’d kept driving she’d drive straight into the water. Although tempting—today especially—Faye imagined with her luck the car would land on a dense patch of swamp, and she’d have a few hours to wait before sinking enough to even get her feet wet. Although she couldn’t think of many good reasons to go on living, she also couldn’t think of any good reasons for dying. So she went on as most people did for want of a viable alternative.
Two beautiful old white houses stood proud and dignified on either side of Federal Street, but only one of them had a man sitting on the lawn in front of an easel. The house he painted was a grand antebellum mansion, three stories, white, red roof, green shutters and a porch one could get lost on without a map and a compass. Before leaving the car, Faye checked her face in the mirror looking for any telltale signs of her recent breakdown. The makeup was an easy fix, but she couldn’t do a thing about the redness in her eyes except hope Father Cahill didn’t notice it. She grabbed her camera bag from the backseat. Might as well get some work done while she was here.
She strode across the lawn toward him, and he turned her way and gave her a broad smile.
“Are you my new patron?” he called out. “If so, I thank you and owe you an apology.”
Faye smiled back. “No apologies necessary. The kid let me have it for twenty-five bucks.”
“Twenty-five? Highway robbery.” He rubbed his palms on his paint-smeared khaki slacks, and then held out his hand to her. She was struck by how much he looked like Gregory Peck in the late actor’s last years. Minus the mustache but still with the glasses. His black T-shirt was as paint riddled as his pants. Did he wipe his paintbrushes on his clothes?
“Thanks for meeting with me, Father Cahill.” He had a nice handshake, firm and friendly.
“Pat, please. And I’m retired, so it’s not like I have a full dance card. Pull up the stool and tell me about yourself.” He didn’t say card, he’d said cahd. She knew she was dealing with an old Boston boy. If Kennedy had lived, this was probably how he would have sounded in his seventies.
He passed her his wooden stool and he sat on the stone bench where he’d set up his paints and brushes.
“Not much to tell. I’m in town for a couple months taking pictures for a fund-raising calendar.”
“I know that calendar well. They preservation society ladies are nice enough to buy my paintings every now and then. Their mission in life is to take pity on old relics.”
Faye laughed. “You’re not an old relic.”
“What makes you think I was talking about me?” He winked at her to show he was kidding. “How’d you swing this gig? You’re not a local. Sound like a damn Yankee to me.”
“Friend got me the job. But you’re not a local, either,” Faye said.
“What gave it away?” he asked.
She smiled. “I’m from New Hampshire. You’re not my first Masshole.”
Pat laughed loudly, a good rich laugh.
“Guilty. I was a pastor here in the midsixties. My first church. Fell in love with the islands back then. Always planned to come back, and here I am.”
“Midsixties? You must have been a baby.”
“I was. Big twenty-seven-year-old baby. God help that dumb do-gooder kid. I was not ready for the South during desegregation. Let me tell you this—anyone nostalgic for the past never lived there.”
“Says the man who is painting a two-hundred-year-old plantation house. Thought you were painting the marshes.”
“Marshlands. That’s the name of the house. The owner wasn’t a planter. He was a doctor. The doctor who discovered a treatment for yellow fever. You discover something that can save lives during an epidemic and you get a free pass to own a nice house.”
“Fair enough,” she said. “It is a gorgeous house.” Faye pulled out her camera and examined it through the viewfinder.
“Light’s not very good today,” he said. “Too overcast. I doubt you’ll get a decent shot. At least in painting I can pretend the sun’s there.”
“I’ll come back tomorrow if the sun’s out. I got some beautiful shots of the Bride Island lighthouse yesterday. A friend took me out on his boat.”
“Yes. It’s very nice.” He didn’t sound as enthusiastic as she’d expect from someone who had painted the lighthouse so lovingly. Very nice? That’s all?
“What can you tell me about the lighthouse?”
“Not much. Only what Ms. Shelby told me. She said it was built to protect ships from the sandbar. Third-order Fresnel lens. Seven-second night mark. Solid white day mark. Decommissioned in, oh, ’45, ’46? It’s been rotting there ever since. That’s about it.”
“Ms. Shelby? You know her?”
“I do. Met her at a party, and she and I had a nice talk. I asked if I could paint it, and she said I could go out there anytime I want as long I stayed out of the lighthouse. It’s not structurally sound anymore. That whole corner of the island is very dangerous.”
“What else is out there?”
“Ms. Shelby prefers to keep the land as pristine as possible. There’s not much out there.” He flicked a fly off his canvas. “Trees. A few houses, but those are on the south side of the island. A barn. Handful of horses and horse trails. A few ruins. A few graves. And then there’s the lighthouse and what’s left of the keeper’s cottage, which isn’t anything but the stone foundation.”
“How did a lighthouse get on private property?”
“The government leased the land from the old owners. Four acres, which is a postage stamp on that island. That was back in the 1800s, when lighthouses were popping up along the coast. After they decommissioned the light in the forties, they left it up. Cheaper to let the elements have it than tear it down. Can I ask what your interest is in the lighthouse?”
Before Faye could answer, a small gray tour bus rattled up the driveway to the Marshlands and stopped. Pat gave a dramatic sigh as it unloaded a batch of tourists onto the lawn.
“Now, before we go into the house,” the pretty young tour guide said, shouting over the murmur of elderly tourists, “let’s walk over to the telescope and take a look at the sound.”
“Every single damn day...” Pat sighed. “I should have found a different mansion to paint.”
“Through the telescope,” the tour guide went on, oblivious to Pat’s annoyance, “you can see the sound side of Seaport Island, or what we locals call Bride Island. It’s an unusual island rich with history. If you look up you’ll see the top of a beautiful white lighthouse peeking through the tree line,” the woman said in her sweet-as-pecan-pie accent. “Pretty as it may be, the lighthouse is closed to the public. The water is notoriously choppy at the north seaside of the island, and more than three dozen people have lost their lives in those waters in the past hundred years—”
“Including the Lady of the Light,” Pat recited along with the tour guide, word for word, not missing a single beat. “Faith Morgan, the lighthouse keeper’s beautiful teenaged daughter...”
“You’ve heard this all before?” Faye asked.
“It’s enough to make a man toss a tour guide into the swamp. That’s her in the painting, by the way.”
“The tour guide?”
“No,” he said. “Faith Morgan.”
“The girl on the pier with the bird? That’s her?”
Pat nodded as he capped a paint tube and dropped it into his gear bag.
“Why did you paint her?” Faye asked. “Why not the Bride of Bride Island? Didn’t she drown, too?”
“The subject picks the artist, not the other way around.”
“That’s not very helpful.”
Pat glanced at her before turning his attention back to his painting.
“I didn’t realize you needed my help,” he said.
Faye sensed she was asking Pat questions he didn’t particularly want to answer.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I know I’m being nosy. I have a reason for asking, I promise.”
“What’s the reason?”
“It’s a stupid reason.”
“Tell me your stupid reason, Faye. You’ve piqued my curiosity.”
“I just... When I saw the painting, I thought she was someone I knew. That’s all.”
He gave her a long searching look.
“Someone you knew. Who?” he asked.
“You’ll laugh.”
“I’d never laugh.”
Faye sighed. She was pretty sure the man would laugh.
“Who did you think the woman in the painting was?” Pat asked, his voice awash with the tender concern that must have served him well in his decades as a priest.
“I thought, maybe... I thought she was me.”
5 (#u5dfc0014-26a7-5683-8c38-2537ef8d0be1)
“Sounds crazy, right?” Faye asked. “You can laugh.”
“I’m not laughing.” He wasn’t. He wasn’t even smiling. Maybe she’d scared him. It kind of looked like she had. “Like I said, that’s Faith Morgan in the painting. She was the old keeper’s girl.”
“I see. So if she was the lighthouse keeper’s daughter,” Faye said, “then who was the lighthouse keeper?”
“A former naval officer by the name of Carrick Morgan manned the light back then. Transferred from the Boston Light to Seaport in the fall of ’20, and his girl, Faith, joined him that next June. I think they say she was seventeen or so.”
Faye felt a mix of relief and embarrassment, all of which must have shown on her face. God, she felt so foolish. Well, she’d been a bigger fool before and survived.
“Never seen you before today,” he continued. “Honest. And even if I had, I’m not that good a painter. There’s a reason I paint landscapes and not portraits.”
He smiled gently. “What on earth made you think she was you?”
“Someone I loved died,” Faye said. “I went to a pier like the one in your painting to spread his ashes. It was cold, and I had on a gray coat. And I walked to the end of the pier holding the urn in my hands. The girl in the painting looks like she’s holding something. And there was this white bird on the pier when I was there. It was just like your painting. All of it. Minus the lighthouse, I mean. God, that does sound crazy.” Faye rubbed her forehead. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry. Anyone would be a little spooked to see a scene from their own life on canvas.”
“And that’s only half of it,” Faye said, laughing at herself.
“Well, let’s go over to the dock and talk about it. I want to hear the other half.”
Faye helped him gather his tools, and she slung her camera over her shoulder. They walked across the lawn in silence to the dock. Faye’s wedges sounded loud and hollow on the faded wood boards as they walked to the end and looked out onto the water. They were silent for a long moment. Faye sensed Pat sizing her up.
“So talk to me, Miss Faye. What are you not telling me?” Pat asked as they stood side by side, elbows resting on the dock’s wooden rail.
“Did you know that lighthouse keeper?” she asked.
“I knew him, yes. Long, long time ago.”
“Can I show you something?” she asked.
“Go right ahead.”
Faye took a printed piece of paper out of her bag and showed it to Pat. “Do you know who this man is?”
“He was much older when I knew him, but I’d know that face anywhere,” Pat said. “That’s Carrick Morgan.”
“Is it? Are you sure?”
“Of course I’m sure.”
Faye went silent a moment. His certainty had scared her.
“Faye?”
“Sorry. Can you maybe tell me more about him?”
“Carrick?” He shrugged. “When I knew him he was retired and living off his navy pension.”
“Interesting name. Irish?”
Pat nodded. “Son of Irish immigrants, named for the village they’d come from.”
“How’d he get the job as lighthouse keeper? I thought the Irish had trouble getting good work.”
“He’d been working at the Boston Light after the war. Carrick was brought down as an assistant keeper, took over as principle keeper when the previous family got transferred.”
“You said his daughter moved in with him,” Faye said. “What about his wife?”
Pat shook his head. “He said he was a widower.”
“But he had a daughter?” Faye asked. Interesting Carrick Morgan “said” he was a widower. Did that mean he wasn’t? Was his daughter illegitimate? That sort of thing didn’t fly back in the 1920s like it did now. Faye could easily imagine a man in a government job trying to protect his daughter from the stain of scandal by lying about his past.
“Where did you find this picture?” Pat asked. He hadn’t stopped staring at the picture since she’d handed it to him. “I’ve never seen it before.”
“I took that picture,” Faye said.
Pat’s brow furrowed. “Not possible. Carrick was dead long before you were born. Died in ’65.”
“It is possible, Pat, because this isn’t Carrick Morgan. This man’s name is Will Fielding.”
“Who?”
“My husband, Pat. My husband, who’s been dead four years.”
“My God...” Pat breathed. His shock was palpable. Faye felt it, too. “They’re twins.”
“Twins born a hundred years apart?”
Pat shook his head in obvious disbelief.
“Pat?”
“I’m sorry,” Pat said. “It’s just...strange. Very strange.”
“Imagine how I feel,” Faye said. “First I see a picture online last night of a man who looks like my dead husband. This morning I see a painting of a woman who looks like me the morning I scattered his ashes. And now I find out they were father and daughter? Oh, and that damn bird is back.” Faye looked up at the overcast sky and shook her head. “I am going crazy.”
“No, you are not, Miss Faye.”
“You sound pretty sure of that,” she said. “Wish I could be.”
She crossed her arms over her chest and faced him.
“Why did you paint her on the pier like that? You wouldn’t have been alive when she died.”
Pat turned and leaned back against the railing of the dock, putting the Marshlands before him and the lighthouse behind him.
“Retirement age for a priest is seventy. Did you know that?” he asked. It wasn’t what she expected him to say, but she trusted he had a reason.
“No. I’m not Catholic.”
“I retired from the Church when I was sixty-four. I should have hung on for six more years, but I couldn’t do it anymore.”
“Why not?”
“I’ve painted all my life. It’s my second religion. A few years ago my hands started shaking when I held anything heavier than five pounds. Then it was four pounds. Three pounds. A priest isn’t supposed to drop the communion wine. I had to take early retirement.”
“I wondered about your painting style. Kind of impressionistic, like Degas.”
“Degas was almost blind at the end. And I can’t hold a pen without it shaking like a leaf. I used to paint in a more realistic style. Impressionism was all that was left to me after the tremor started.”
“Your work is lovely.”
“It wasn’t, in the beginning. It was just awful, embarrassing. Whatever technique I’d developed over the years was gone. I painted like a child. Imagine if someone took your camera from you.”
“They can pry my camera out of my cold dead hands.”
“That’s what I always said about my brushes. But no one had to pry them out of my hands. They fell out.”
“I’m so sorry,” Faye said.
“It was hard to keep my faith after the tremor took the priesthood away from me, took painting away from me. My only two loves. So I went out to the lighthouse with a heavy heart. I had lied to Ms. Shelby, telling her I wanted to paint the lighthouse. But that wasn’t the real plan.”
Faye heard a note of shame in his voice, embarrassment maybe. She pictured herself curled up on the floor of the bathroom, the pill bottle in her hand while she worked up the courage to take off the lid. That was how Hagen had found her. The real plan, Pat had said. Yes, she knew exactly what the real plan had been.
“That would be quite a fall from the top of the lighthouse, wouldn’t it?”
“And onto rocks,” he said. “When the tide’s out, it’s nothing but rocks. A quick drop to a certain death.”
“I’ve been there,” Faye said.
He nodded. “I imagine a widow would know that place all too well.”
“What changed your mind?” she asked.
“The lighthouse. I won’t pretend a miracle happened. No angel stayed my hand. No voice from heaven. The lighthouse has always been a beacon of hope. That’s why you see it so often in Christian art. ‘A city set on a hill cannot be hidden. Nor do people light a lamp and put it under a basket, but on a stand, and it gives light to all...’”
“Very pretty.”
“Matthew 5:15. I suppose it’s a cliché to say I saw the light. But there was a moment, an instant where I thought I saw the lighthouse lamp burning again. Just the sunlight tricking my eyes, I know. But it... I don’t know, it made me feel something I hadn’t felt in years.”
“Hope?”
He nodded. “Hope. Something told me to paint the lighthouse. And when I did paint it, I painted it well. Not like my old style, but not bad. And I painted it again. Eventually I wanted to paint it more than I wanted to throw myself off the top of it.”
“And the lady in the painting? The Lady of the Light? Why did you paint her?”
“Carrick never got over losing Faith. Maybe I just wanted to bring her back to life. The lighthouse gave me my life back. I guess I wanted to return the favor.”
“Pat,” Faye said. “I need to get out to that lighthouse.”
“Bad idea.”
“Why?” she asked.
“That lighthouse is dangerous.”
“You said it saved your life.”
“It could have taken it, too. It’s not safe out there. Some kids went out there a few years ago, got drunk on the beach and drowned when they went for a midnight swim. The lighthouse was there for a reason. There’s the sandbar and one hell of a riptide, too. We already have one Lady of the Light. We don’t need another.”
“How did she get that nickname?”
“People swear they see her sometimes. But lighthouses are notorious for having ghost stories attached to them. Parents use her as a warning, a scare story to keep their kids from breaking into the lighthouse or swimming near that corner of the island. The real story is much sadder. Faith hadn’t been at the lighthouse long. Just a few days. Nobody knows why she went out on the pier at night, but she did. A wave hit hard and high, and she fell into the water.”
“How old was she?”
“I can’t say for sure. A young woman.”
“Where was she before? In school or something?”
“She was with other family members,” Pat said.
“And why did she come down here?”
“A love affair gone wrong,” Pat said. “She was a beauty, they say. But you wouldn’t know anything about that, would you?”
“Stop it.”
“I’d love to paint you. I’d have to get the right purple paint for your eyes. Elizabeth Taylor eyes.”
“Got them from my grandmother. I swear, I think her proudest achievement in life was passing her eye color on to me. She wanted to be Elizabeth Taylor when she was a girl. Even did her hair like hers. Black bouffant even in her sixties.”
“I might have had to go to confession after seeing Father of the Bride as a boy.”
“You know, I can tell when someone is changing the subject. Why don’t you want to talk about Faith Morgan?”
“It’s...” He waved his hand dismissively. “Some things just don’t make sense to me. Priests want things to make sense. She came down here to start a new life. Instead she died. And Carrick never recovered from losing her.”
“Ah,” Faye said, nodding. “Carrick and I have something in common then.”
Pat crossed his arms over his chest. He would have to be seventy-six or seventy-seven if he was twenty-seven in 1965. He didn’t look much over sixty to her. But now he did look older, just for a moment. Faye saw his hands tremble slightly. He clenched his fists, released them, and the tremor was gone.
“Poor girl,” he said. “Had it been today she might have been fine. She had a dress on, a heavy dress, heavy shoes. And she couldn’t swim.”
“A lighthouse keeper’s daughter who couldn’t swim?”
“Women didn’t do a lot of swimming back then. Carrick tried to save her and couldn’t. Jumped in the water, swam after her... Waves got her. Haunted him the rest of his life.”
“It wasn’t his fault.”
“Ah, but Carrick was a lighthouse keeper, a man whose job was keeping people safe. To lose her like that, on his watch...and then to find her body days later.”
Faye held up her hand to stem the tide of his words. She didn’t want to hear any more. She’d been spared seeing Will’s body until they’d cleaned him up at the hospital. And that had been bad enough, the sickening indentation in the side of his forehead, the shaved patch of hair, the crude stitches, the blue-gray pallor of his cold skin, the sheet pulled up to his neck hiding his otherwise perfect corpse from her. But to find the body of your own child...bloated, battered by the current...
“It was the beginning of the end of the lighthouse when Faith died,” Pat said. “Carrick couldn’t keep the light anymore. They merged the Bride Island station with the Hunting Island station and automated the light in 1925, which was a tragedy of its own.”
“How so?”
“Lighthouse keepers did more than just keep the lighthouse. They watched the coast, too, gave aid when necessary, rescued people in distress when called for. In the fall of ’26, a fishing boat broke apart right off Bride Island’s north shore during a storm and all fourteen souls aboard died. If the lighthouse had been manned at the time, those men might have lived. The world needed Carrick’s light but losing Faith... That snuffed it right out.”
Pat took off his glasses, wiping them with the only clean corner of his T-shirt.
“Carrick moved down to Savannah after leaving Charleston. He worked for a shipping company and then the Georgia Port Authority. By his own account it was a long and hard and very lonely life. He came back to Beaufort after he retired just like I did. He said it was the last place he was ever happy.”
“Was he a good man?”
“Too good,” he said. “Too good for this world anyway.”
“Funny,” Faye said, although it wasn’t.
“What is?”
“Today I said exactly the same thing about Will.”
6 (#u5dfc0014-26a7-5683-8c38-2537ef8d0be1)
Faye sat in the living room of Father Pat’s little Duke Street cottage, a pretty fern-green one-story nothing-special sort of house. Nothing special on the outside, but the inside was an art gallery, a Pantone dream. He’d painted every room a different hue—sunflower gold for the kitchen, cornflower blue living room, lagoon-green bathroom. And every wall boasted watercolor paintings of the sea and the sun; every horizontal surface held books on paintings, on how to paint watercolors, on the history of painting. She expected something in the house to give a sign that it belonged to a priest, but there was nothing, not a cross in sight.
Pat got her settled on his sofa and gave her iced tea in a Pilsner glass.
“I’d never guess you were a priest,” she said. “By your house or anything really.”
“Ah, that’s the point. Now show me your husband. You have me intrigued to the point of day drinking.”
Faye opened her laptop and showed Pat both pictures side by side as he sipped at his beer and she her tea. She’d taken an old picture of Will and run it through Photoshop, aging the background, changing the colors. But she hadn’t touched his face, hadn’t changed the way he looked at all. Pat stared at them a long time before closing the lid of her laptop and passing it back to her.
“Okay,” he said. “So I told you about Carrick and Faith. Now you tell me about Will and Faye.”
“I’m a baseball widow. Ever heard of us?”
“I’ve heard of you. Women who say goodbye to their husbands in April and don’t see them again until October?”
“I’m a real baseball widow. My husband was a professional baseball player.”
“What team?”
“When we met Will was playing on a Triple-A team in Rhode Island. I was the local paper’s photographer. One game I took a good picture of him making a double play. You should have seen it. This huge guy barreling toward second base, starting a hard slide, and Will tagging him, one arm in the air for balance and his glove just brushing the guy’s back, inches from the bag.” Faye mimed the move, the image burned into her brain. She’d been a baseball fan all her life and had never seen anything so athletic, so elegant as Will Fielding spinning like a bullfighter to get the out. “The picture ran in the paper with the caption, ‘Olé!’ I didn’t think anything of it other than it was a good shot with lucky timing. But the very next game after the photo ran, Mr. Olé came up to me and thanked me. His teammates had given him the nickname ‘The Matador’ after that. He’d always wanted a good baseball nickname. Hank Aaron was ‘Hammer’ and Ruth was the ‘Sultan of Swat.’ Now he was Will ‘The Matador’ Fielding. He said I’d made his dream come true with that picture. I was supposed to say something to that like, ‘No problem’ or ‘Just doing my job.’ But here was this big, tall wall of pure American maleness. Handsome and brown-eyed and grinning at me, and I ended up saying something like, ‘I will take pictures of anything and everything you want me to.’ And only after the words came out did I realize it sounded like I’d just offered to take naked pics for him. I probably would have had he asked.”
“That handsome?”
“Took my breath away,” Faye said. “But he was a good guy and didn’t ask for naked pics. Instead, he asked me about my work. When the game started he said he’d love to keep talking to me later. That night was our first date. Before Will I dated coffee-shop guys. You know, the skinny intellectuals with the earbuds and the Macs who drink expensive coffee and write thinkpieces for their incredibly boring blogs and magazines? Those guys. Never dated a guy who drank gas-station coffee before, who didn’t own a Mac but did own a grill and a drill. We met in July, got engaged in September and got married the next spring. Sometimes you just know. And we just knew.”
“I’ve known many a couple who just knew. A priest has to believe in love. It’s part of our job.”
“The day after Will asked me to marry him, he hit two home runs. He said I must be his good-luck charm, and who needed a rabbit’s foot when he had me? He called me Bunny sometimes, and you better believe he was the one man on earth who could call me Bunny and live to tell the tale.”
“I can tell you loved him,” Pat said.
“God, I loved him.” She blinked back her tears. “Will was one of the last good guys. The really good guys. Good inside and out. His dad worked at Jiffy Lube and his mother was a hospice nurse so...definitely not the most exalted of origin stories. But it was meant to be. You don’t grow up with the name Will Fielding without being destined to be a baseball player. And even when he was in the minors making less than minimum wage and living in cramped buses and roach motels, four players to a room, he felt like the luckiest man on earth. I can hear him in my head right now. ‘Babe, think about it—who gets to do what I do? Play baseball for a job? What’s next? Pay me to eat candy and sleep with you?’ He’d say that all the time with this look on his face like, ‘Really? Me?’ He never once thought he deserved it. He was just happy to be there. And he made me so happy.”
“I bet you made him happy, too.”
“I tried. And you know what? I did. I did make him happy. And it was my pleasure to do it. I hate sports puns, but Will was out of my league. I was as happy to be his wife as he was happy to be a ballplayer.”
“You’re the prettiest lady I’ve set eyes on in a long time. You aren’t out of any man’s league.”
“You’re sweet to say that, but it’s not what I meant. I don’t mean looks. I mean...before Will I was self-centered. Not in any way that anyone else isn’t self-centered. When you’re single, you don’t have to think about anyone else, and I didn’t. I couldn’t. I was broke, in student loan debt, worked constantly. But then Will came along, and I watched him spending his very few days off at children’s hospitals visiting sick kids and helping out underprivileged Little League teams. That was Will. You have any idea how grueling life is in the minors? He never once complained. He said a ballplayer complaining about road trips and sore shoulders was like a rich man complaining he had to hire an accountant to count all his money. I’ve been a feminist my whole life, independent. I went to an Ivy League school. I paid my own bills. I knew even if we had kids I’d never quit my working to be a stay-at-home mom. And you know what?”
“Tell me,” Pat said, looking her straight in the eyes.
“I’d give up the right to vote just to do one more load of Will’s dirty laundry.”
She laughed at herself—better to laugh than to cry again.
“I promise I won’t tell Gloria Steinem on you,” Pat said with a wink.
Faye laughed even harder at that.
“Will had these baseball T-shirts,” she said, trying to compose herself. “So many baseball T-shirts. Every team you could think of. Two weeks after he died I found a Bronx Bombers shirt in a bag under the bed. Can you imagine? A kid who grew up on the Sox with a Yankees shirt? Goddamn it, Will.”
Those stupid baseball T-shirts, they were all he wore when he wasn’t naked or in his uniform. The single time she’d seen him in a suit was at their wedding. Those shirts... He had so many of them she’d wash them all in one load. Laundry was sorted into whites, darks, towels and baseball shirts. She’d given the shirts away after he died to relatives and close friends who needed something of his. She’d kept one for herself—the soft heather-gray one with the big red B on the front that Will had worn on their first date. That was the one she’d always slept in when he was on his road trips. She didn’t sleep in it anymore. Crying oneself to sleep only worked in the movies.
Pat handed her a handkerchief and pressed it to her burning cheeks.
“Sorry about the ‘goddamn it.’ I shouldn’t swear in front of a priest.”
“You must not know any priests. You can say whatever the hell you want. Trust me—I’ve heard worse. Said worse, too.”
“Thank you,” she whispered, slowly bringing herself back under control. “Will really looked good in his T-shirts. Had the arms for them. Gotta say, there are a lot of perks to being married to an athlete. Having the sexiest husband at the beach was one of them, and I’m shallow enough to admit that.” She laughed again, remembering...remembering... “Will had this great baseball player walk. It wasn’t like a strut, more like an amble. This loose-in-the-hips amble. When he was leaving the house to go on a road trip, I’d always tell him, ‘I hate to see you go, but I love to watch you walk away.’ I didn’t know the last time I watched him walk away would be, you know, the last time I watched him walk away. If I’d known, I would have stared at his ass longer.”
Faye laughed again and cried again. Her body ached for Will. She could talk about his T-shirts but what she really missed was his body. The way he smelled after a game—sweat and leather. The way he picked her up and threw her into bed like a rag doll just because he could. The way he made love to her. He was twenty-three when they met and had just broken up with his high school sweetheart, the only girl he’d been with before her. But during sex he made her feel like she was the only woman in the world, and he was the lucky schmuck who got to have her. For a long time she had to think of Will to orgasm during sex with Hagen. That wasn’t something she had told anyone. Widows might as well be nuns for the careful way people treated them. What would people think if they knew what she missed most about her late husband was the sex? The hard-core full-body, full-soul, all-in, nothing-held-back sort of sex you could have with someone who knew everything about you. Will filled her up and emptied her out and gave her what she needed. And what she needed was him, just him, but all of him.
“I should be ashamed of myself for how much I miss having sex with him. Kind of shallow, I guess.”
“Taking pleasure in your own husband doesn’t make you shallow. I know a lot of husbands who wish their wives saw them like that.”
“Will was one of those guys born for heavy lifting and getting stuff off the top shelf. He made me feel small, and he made me feel safe, and it takes a special kind of man to make a woman feel both at the same time. One day I teased him that I heard ‘Like a Rock’ by Bob Seger automatically start playing when he walked into a room, and at the very next game, they played that as his walk-up song.” Faye laughed. Will had always looked for a way to make her smile. Even now, even through the tears, here she was smiling because of him.
“He sounds like one in a million.”
“He was. And we were so happy it doesn’t even seem real now. As good as it was, it somehow managed to get even better. I found out I was pregnant the same week Will got called up to the majors. Which meant, of course, I got called up, too. I was officially a WAG.”
“WAG? What on earth?”
“WAGs. Wives and Girlfriends of pro athletes,” Faye said.
“I see,” Pat said. “We don’t get to have those in the priesthood. At least, we’re not supposed to.”
Faye grinned as she wiped her face. “Probably for the best,” she said. “A couple days after Will went to Boston, I got invited to a WAG party at the house of one of the pitcher’s wives. Nice women, but every last one of them warned me my life was about to change, and not for the better. So many women told me about the jobs they’d had to quit, the dreams they’d had to give up for their husbands’ careers. And if I wanted to keep doing my little photography thing, they said, I should probably save it for the off-season, treat it like a hobby. I thought they’d be happy when I told them I was expecting. I just got this look like...”
Faye mimed the look of disapproval.
“I had committed the cardinal WAG sin,” Faye continued. “I was going to give birth during the season.”
“Shameful,” Pat said. “How dare you? I shouldn’t laugh, but...”
“You can laugh. Will did. He rolled his eyes so hard I thought they’d fall out of his head. He told me...” Faye paused, caught her breath. “He told me he would quit baseball before he missed the birth of our child. And he would never ever forgive me if I let his dreams get in the way of my own. He said the day I put down my camera, he would put down his bat and glove. He made me promise I would never give up my work for his. And if you were wondering why I said he was the best man who ever lived, that’s the reason.”
“He’s giving Carrick a run for his money.”
“There are no words for how happy Will was, how happy we both were. Then I went to shoot some pictures for a project I was working on, and Will went out to buy flowers to surprise me when I got back. On the way home, he sees two guys on the side of the road trying to change a flat. This was Will’s area. Son of a mechanic. He helped more stranded drivers than AAA. But they weren’t stranded drivers. They were a carjacking team. They went for the car, and Will tried to stop them. One of them hit him in the head with the tire iron. He died on the operating table from a rapid intracranial hemorrhage. They killed my beautiful husband for drug money and a 2005 Ford Focus.”
Faye exhaled and leaned back on Pat’s sofa, her hands on her face, trying to stifle the animal howl of grief welling up within her. A gentle hand touched her knee, and she grabbed Pat’s hand and held it like her life depended on it. She breathed through it—In and out, babe. The world’s not ending—and slowly found her voice again.
“He’d been in the majors all of one month. Batted .364. Best September of our lives. I’m always a wreck in September now. And I can’t even watch baseball anymore.”
Pat bowed his head and she wondered if he were praying for her. She’d take any help she could get.
“The police got the guys who killed him. Even got the car back. But they couldn’t bring me my husband back. I had that car, though. That stupid car.”
Pat clasped his hands between his knees and sighed. “If there’s anything fifty years in the priesthood taught me, it’s that I can’t say a damn thing to make you feel better right now.”
“At least you know that. ‘Everything happens for a reason’ sure doesn’t cut it.”
“Everything does happen for a reason. Sometimes it’s a bad reason.”
“Sounds like my second marriage,” she said, sitting up again, wiping at her face and then giving up. Too many tears, not enough tissues in the world. “After the funeral, Will’s best friend from college, Hagen, started hanging around our place all the time. It was nice. It helped, it really did. He said it was what Will would have done. And then a couple weeks later, he sat me down and told me he thought we should get married. It wasn’t much of a proposal. More like an escape plan. Like this would solve all my problems. I thought he’d lost his mind. Then Hagen said the magic words again—‘It’s what Will would have done.’”
“Was it?” Pat asked.
“If it had been Hagen who’d died, Hagen with a pregnant wife left behind, Will would have stepped in and been a father to that kid. So Hagen and I got married. Hagen had money, a big house. He told me I could have my own room, that he wouldn’t expect me to act like his wife until I was ready for it. Sounds like the beginning of a beautiful romance, doesn’t it? Hollywood thought so, too. A story ran in the Boston Globe about Will and me and Hagen, and the next day a producer called and said he’d already talked to a screenwriter about putting Will’s Cinderella story on the big screen—nobody kid from Nowhere, Mass, drafted in the forty-first round, ends up playing for the Red Sox. And it would end with me giving birth to Will’s baby. Triumph out of tragedy. Whatever. I talked to them because you go crazy when you’re grieving like that. And I just wanted Will to be remembered. Then I lost the baby at sixteen weeks and they stopped calling. Not even Hollywood could give me a happy ending.”
She didn’t tell Pat about the years of trying to get pregnant that came after losing Will’s baby. She could barely face her grief over losing Will. If she had to grieve for those lost years, she’d never make it out of this house in one piece. And Hagen? She couldn’t talk about Hagen, how once she’d lost the baby, he’d turned into a ball of quiet anger, like it had been her fault she’d lost the last part of Will left in the world.
Faye took a shuddering breath and forced herself to drink her tea. Crying so hard had given her dry mouth, and her throat felt like it had been dragged down a gravel road.
“I promise I’m not vomiting this whole story onto you for the fun of it,” Faye finally said, carefully lowering her glass to her knee. It left a wet ring on her white jeans, but she didn’t care. “I’m just so...freaked out, I guess. And I don’t even know why. So what? So Will and Carrick Morgan looked alike. What does it mean? Nothing. I know it means nothing. I’ve seen those internet clickbait stories where they show celebrities who look like people who’ve been dead for a hundred years. It happens. There are only so many faces in the world, I guess. But it feels like it means something. Do I sound crazy? You can tell me if I do. I can take it. Oh, and I think a stork is stalking me. Yeah, I sound crazy. I can hear it.”
“My job entailed me turning wine into God’s blood, so I don’t think I can judge you too harshly. I’m an open-minded spiritual man by trade.”
“I appreciate you listening to me. I can’t talk to anyone about Will. Hagen and I are divorced, and we can’t talk about anything anymore without it turning into a fight. Will’s parents are doing better than I am. They have grandkids from Will’s sister, and those kids are their whole life now. Every time I visit them, his mom has a breakdown and it takes weeks for her to get back on her feet again. I stopped talking to Will’s family two years ago. Too hard on all of us.”
“And your parents?”
“Dad died. Mom has dementia. I was an oops baby when they were both forty.”
“Friends?”
Faye shook her head. “I had friends. They were great until the funeral. After that, they had their own lives, and nobody knows what to say to a twenty-six-year-old widow. Will’s friends and teammates weren’t thrilled with me for getting married again so soon after he died. The medical bills and funeral expenses wiped out the life insurance. There I was, almost broke with student-loan debt up to my eyeballs and pregnant. I ran out of shoulders to cry on a long time ago.”
“You’re Lady Job,” Pat said with a sorrowful smile.
“Who?”
“Job, in the Bible. A very old Jewish story, very strange and mystical. You’ve heard the phrase ‘the patience of Job’?”
“Oh, that guy. Yes, I’ve heard of him. I don’t know if I’ve ever read the story.”
“Odd little book, but some of the loveliest poetry in the Bible. A man named Job has a wife, children and wealth. And he’s a good man. Satan goes to God and makes a sort of bet with him, saying that Job is only good because he’s blessed, but if you take his blessings away, he won’t be righteous anymore. God takes him up on that bet and wipes out Job’s entire family, his wealth and his health. He’s literally sitting in ashes using potsherds to scrape the sores off his body.”
“Oh, my God, that’s disgusting. Even I didn’t have it that bad.”
Pat laughed. “I told you it was a strange little book. But it does have a happy ending. Job keeps his faith in God, though he demands God explain himself.”
“Does he?”
“God shows up and gives the ‘who do you think you are?’ speech to end all speeches. The short version is basically ‘I am God. You’re not, so stuff it.’”
“Very poetic.”
Father Pat smiled but didn’t laugh. He took a breath and met her eyes.
“‘Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? Declare if thou hast understanding. Who hath laid the measures thereof, if thou knowest? Or who laid the cornerstone thereof, when the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy? Or who shut up the sea with its doors, when it brake forth, as if it had issued out of the womb? Hast thou entered into the springs of the sea? Or hast thou walked in search of the depth? Have the gates of death been opened unto thee?’”
Pat stopped and sighed. “It goes on like that for a long time. God wanted to make sure Job got the point.”
“That’s beautiful,” Faye breathed. “What does it all mean?”
“It means a lowly man may never understand the ways of God.”
“And you find that comforting?” she asked.
“A little. If lowly little me could understand God, then he wouldn’t be much of a God, right?”
“I guess,” Faye said.
“I do find this comforting, though—even after God tells Job off, he restores him. New wife. Children. Even more children than he’d lost. Twice as much wealth. And a life so long he meets his great-grandchildren.”
“If only,” Faye said.
“Yes,” Pat said. “If only.”
Faye wiped her face with Pat’s handkerchief again. She didn’t know many men who still carried handkerchiefs. Will always had—a red bandanna in his back pocket just like his dad.
“When Will and I got married, we did all the usual wedding vows. Love, honor, cherish, until death do us part. But that wasn’t good enough for Will. He added one more vow. He said...” She stopped to breathe even though it hurt to breathe, but she kept on doing it. Will would have wanted her to. “He said, ‘Come heaven or hell or high water, I will love you and take care you of you as long as you live, Faye.’ I asked him, ‘Don’t you mean as long as you live?’ He said no. He wasn’t interested in till death do us part. Even if he went first, he would find a way to take care of me. I treasure that vow. I hold it right here,” she said, touching her chest over her heart. “But I’m still waiting for him to keep it.”
Faye squeezed Pat’s hands again. He had nice hands, a younger man’s hands. A painter’s hands even if they did tremble.
“You can’t go back, you know,” Faye said.
“Go back where?” Pat asked.
“Once someone loves you that much, loves you more than you deserve, you can’t go back to being loved the normal way,” she said. “You ever been loved like that?”
“Only by my creator.”
“Pat, I have to tell you something else crazy,” she whispered.
“Tell me something crazy.”
“I think I’m supposed to go the lighthouse,” she said. “I think... I don’t know. I feel like someone wants me out there.”
“What do you hope to find there?” Pat asked, and Faye could tell he really wanted her to think about it before answering. So she thought about it and admitted she didn’t know the answer.
“I don’t want to see any ghosts, and I know Will’s not going to be there waiting for me. But it feels like I’ve had a nightmare, and if I got out there, I’ll wake up and know it was all a dream. I just... Maybe it would help me. Like it helped you.”
Pat took a steadying breath and nodded his head.
“All right. I’ll get you there. But if Ms. Shelby’s out there and catches you, you don’t know me, right?”
“Right. Promise. Never met you.”
“And you have to swear to me you’ll be careful. That lighthouse is old, and the water there is choppy as hell. It’s more dangerous out there than you can imagine. You swear you’ll be safe?”
“I swear,” she said.
“You swear you’ll stay out of the water?” he asked.
“I swear,” she said again. He gave her a long, searching look, then sighed like he knew he was wasting his time. Pat got a sheet of paper and scribbled a little map for her and walked her through the steps of how to find the road with the bridge, what turns to take and when to take them.
“Good enough?” he asked.
“Perfect,” Faye said, folding up the map and shoving it into her back pocket. “Thank you. I should go. I haven’t eaten much today, and I know I’ve taken up way too much of your time.” Faye’s head throbbed from hunger and crying so hard. She’d lost control of herself, something she rarely did. She didn’t want to lose it again in front of this kind old man.
“You made my day, young lady. Beautiful woman in my house? The neighbors are loving this. They can’t wait to find out what I’ve been up to with you in here.”
“Keeping me from having a nervous breakdown.”
“That’s not a very sexy rumor. We’ll have to do better than that.”
“I’m sure you’ll come up with something good. Feel free to ruin my reputation. I wasn’t using it anyway.”
“Count on it.” He helped her to her feet.
Before letting her leave, Pat pulled a small red book off his shelf and pressed it into her hands.
“Take this,” he said.
“What is it?”
“It’s a prayer book, a very special one,” Pat said.
“I’m not really religious.”
“I’m not giving it to you because I want to convert you. But I think you should have it. Please.”
“Are you going to pray for me?”
“For you. For Will. And for Hagen.”
“For Hagen?”
“Ex-husbands are people, too,” he said.
“If you say so,” she said and smiled.
He kissed her goodbye on the cheek and held her hand.
“I hope you find what you’re looking for, Faye,” he said. “But if you don’t find it...”
“I’ll be okay.”
“Just stay out of the water,” Pat said again. “Please.”
Faye promised him faithfully she would and then took her leave.
By the time Faye made it back to the Church Street house, she felt almost human again. She took a long shower, ate some homemade spaghetti with Miss Lizzie and another girl staying at the house that summer. Afterward she went up to her room to upload her pictures from the Marshlands.
As she suspected, most of the pictures were a bust. Maybe she could salvage a couple she’d taken off the dock for a stock photo site, but they wouldn’t do for the calendar. It was what it was. She’d get back to work tomorrow.
Although it was barely seven o’clock, Faye was already sprawled in bed wearing nothing but her black silk robe. Her summer robe, a gift from Hagen. A thoughtful gift. Pretty and practical. She could say that much for Hagen; he gave good gifts. They’d skipped dating, being engaged, but at their wedding he’d given her a band and a four-carat diamond engagement ring. Both were in her makeup bag. If she ran out of money, she’d have them to pawn.
An old Catholic prayer book, on the other hand, might be the oddest gift anyone had ever given her. She’d read it maybe. Who knew? She might find the perfect prayer for her. A prayer for a widow who had remarried too soon and had lost her late husband’s baby. Perhaps the generic “Prayer for Someone Suffering” would cover all that. Faye turned to the back where the index should be and found some handwriting in pen on a page.
The handwriting looked as old as the book, and the book, according to the title page, was printed in 1954. The ink was faded but the script neat and sturdy.
Lord, I give Thee thanks that Thou didst die upon the cross for my sins. Forgive me the blood on my hands. Forgive me the life I took and wash the blood from my hands and the stain of sin from my soul. Thou art infinite in mercy. Shower Thy mercy upon Thy son.
And the prayer was signed.
It was signed “Carrick Morgan.”
Faye sat straight up in bed.
This was Carrick Morgan’s prayer book? The lighthouse keeper?
Faye’s hands shook as she gingerly laid the book open on her lap and traced his words with her fingertip. Carrick Morgan had a beautiful signature, an old-fashioned, elegant script. She should have guessed he was Catholic, being of Irish stock. The prie-dieu in her room... Had he carved that himself? And he prayed for forgiveness and for mercy because he took someone’s life. He’d killed someone. Who? Father Pat had owned this book for years. Carrick Morgan himself must have given it to him. Pat would have known about the prayer for forgiveness, and yet he’d called Morgan the best man he’d ever known. It made no sense. None of it did. Staring at Carrick Morgan’s words in the prayer book made it impossible for Faye to sit still in her room and wait for tomorrow. It felt like an alarm was blaring somewhere and she had to go to the lighthouse to find a way to turn it off. It was growing dark, too dark for pictures. But this wasn’t about the photographs anymore.
Faye dug through her suitcase for a clean top and spied her little jewelry bag under her black tank top. When she opened it she found Will’s old college championship ring that he’d given her right after they started dating. “Does this mean we’re going steady now?” she’d said, teasing him. She’d worn the ring on a necklace until they’d gotten married and he’d slipped a wedding band on her finger—one that fit.
Though she no longer wore it, Faye treasured the ring. She wouldn’t pawn it, not if she were starving. The ring was white gold with a blue stone in it, Will’s name and a baseball insignia emblazoned on both sides. It comforted her to look at it, to hold it. She slipped it over her thumb and felt calmer in an instant. Here was the reason her marriage to Hagen had been so hard. It wasn’t that she’d had to pretend to be in love with Hagen. It was that she’d had to pretend she wasn’t in love with Will. She didn’t have to pretend anymore.
“I love you, Will,” she whispered, then kissed the ring for luck.
Faye pulled on her jeans and T-shirt, grabbed her camera bag and her car keys and headed out. Earlier that day Pat had asked her what she thought she’d find at the lighthouse. She hadn’t known the answer then, but she knew it now.
She went to the lighthouse for the same reason anyone went to a lighthouse.
She went because she needed the light.
7 (#u5dfc0014-26a7-5683-8c38-2537ef8d0be1)
Faye had to Google directions to find her way to where Pat’s map began. After one wrong turn on Hunting Island, she righted herself. She crossed the one-lane bridge, which was green with old paint and red with fresh rust. On the other side of the bridge she found a gate unlocked and standing wide-open. She usually wasn’t the sort of person who believed in things like “signs,” but usually she didn’t see photographs of men who’d been dead since the sixties who looked just like her husband. The gate being open was either a sign the universe wanted her on the island tonight or, more likely, a sign someone had forgotten to close it. Either way, here she was.
As she crossed over onto the island, Faye’s heart started a steady march through her chest with the feet of a thousand soldiers pounding the pavement. She could see it now—the cops would show up, arrest her for trespassing, and then she’d have to call Hagen to come and bail her out. She’d rather spend the night in jail than call him for help.
She drove slowly down the tree-lined path, the branches of the oaks forming a tunnel. Low-hanging branches scratched her car roof, and she winced. There wasn’t any money for a new paint job, so she better take care of the one she had. She wished she had some idea of where this road led—south beach or north beach or straight into a swamp? Pat’s map didn’t help much. The dense tree canopy threw off her usually strong sense of direction. Behind her she saw the last rays of the setting sun through a break in the treetops. The sun set in the west, which meant she needed to take a left to go north. She found a narrow road and turned onto it. Pat hadn’t exaggerated when he’d said the island contained nothing but trees. Faye saw no houses, no ponds, no street signs, no flowers. Only a few dirt horse trails, and a gravel road here and there and the trees.
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Tiffany Reisz
From the bestselling author of The Bourbon Thief comes a sweeping tale of loss and courage, where one woman discovers that her destiny is written in sand, not carved in stone.Faye Barlow is drowning. After the death of her beloved husband, Will, she cannot escape her grief and most days can barely get out of bed. But when she's offered a job photographing South Carolina's storied coast, she accepts. Photography, after all, is the only passion she has left.In the quaint beach town, Faye falls in love again when she sees the crumbling yet beautiful Bride Island lighthouse and becomes obsessed with the legend surrounding The Lady of the Light–the keeper's daughter who died in a mysterious drowning in 1921. Like a moth to a flame, Faye is drawn to the lighthouse for reasons she can't explain. While visiting it one night, she is struck by a rogue wave and a force impossible to resist drags Faye into the past–and into a love story that is not her own.Fate is changeable. Broken hearts can mend. But can she love two men separated by a lifetime?
From the bestselling author of The Bourbon Thief comes a sweeping tale of loss and courage, where one woman discovers that her destiny is written in sand, not carved in stone.
Faye Barlow is drowning.
After the death of her beloved husband, Will, she cannot escape her grief and most days can barely get out of bed. But when she’s offered a job photographing South Carolina’s storied coast, she accepts. Photography, after all, is the only passion she has left.
In the quaint beach town, Faye falls in love again when she sees the crumbling yet beautiful Bride Island lighthouse and becomes obsessed with the legend surrounding The Lady of the Light—the keeper’s daughter who died in a mysterious drowning in 1921. Like a moth to a flame, Faye is drawn to the lighthouse for reasons she can’t explain. While visiting it one night, she is struck by a rogue wave and a force impossible to resist drags Faye into the past—and into a love story that is not her own.
Fate is changeable. Broken hearts can mend. But can she love two men separated by a lifetime?
Praise for Tiffany Reisz’s The Bourbon Thief (#u5dfc0014-26a7-5683-8c38-2537ef8d0be1)
“A dark, twisty tale of love, lust, betrayal, and murder...this novel is not one to be missed.”
—Bustle
“I loved [Reisz’s] Original Sinners series, and this book looks like an epic to delve into on a long, lazy afternoon. Her prose is quite beautiful, and she can weave a wonderful tight story.”
—New York Times and USA TODAY bestselling author Jennifer Probst
“The Bourbon Thief isn’t just good, it’s exceptional. The story captured my imagination; the characters captured my heart.”
—Literati Literature Lovers
“Reisz fills the narrative with rich historic details; memorable, if vile, characters; and enough surprises to keep the plot moving and readers hooked until the final drop of bourbon is spilled.”
—Booklist
“Beautifully written and delightfully insane...Reisz vividly captures the American South with a brutal honesty that only enhances the dark material.”
—RT Book Reviews, Top Pick
“Impossible to stop reading.”
—Heroes and Heartbreakers
“The Bourbon Thief is the sort of book that knocks you off your feet, steals your sanity and keeps you up all night reading! Fair warning—this is definitely a nontraditional love story... Not for the faint of heart!”
—RT Book Reviews
“Prepare yourself for soap-operatic level twists, and also to ignore everything else in your life as you race to the end of this eyebrow-raising tale.”
—RT Book Reviews
The Night Mark
Tiffany Reisz
www.mirabooks.co.uk (http://www.mirabooks.co.uk)
To the men and women who tended the world’s lighthouses and to everyone who ever kept a light shining in the dark...
Contents
Cover (#u4cae1de4-253e-518f-b3f0-5d5edce5344a)
Back Cover Text (#ud1587225-4abf-5ed2-a86f-84ff4c01c3c3)
Praise (#ud8652f2d-f47f-5bf9-bdf3-b20fe426c333)
Title Page (#ub4f5e4ba-9129-55cd-8a95-2a77d4e7a207)
Dedication (#ub9f9f26b-2549-5e8c-bac6-2acf8a8b3981)
Chapter 1 (#uce929b38-d581-506d-807e-94f044f39980)
Chapter 2 (#ud3a375b9-c134-5e36-9328-1cca67cf78a3)
Chapter 3 (#u9520f938-d821-5077-91e5-3ee44f614353)
Chapter 4 (#u1d73d48a-71ea-51f1-b77c-df8d12991b6c)
Chapter 5 (#u6b2c3f3b-d404-5dc7-b590-910d57ca94bc)
Chapter 6 (#u7ec1b18e-7471-543a-b43d-fabd122a8d75)
Chapter 7 (#u74dd855b-0de0-57de-a6ab-d9d0535e798b)
Chapter 8 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 9 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 10 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 11 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 12 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 13 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 14 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 15 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 16 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 17 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 18 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 19 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 20 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 21 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 22 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 23 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 24 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 25 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 26 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 27 (#litres_trial_promo)
Author’s Note (#litres_trial_promo)
Extract (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
1 (#u5dfc0014-26a7-5683-8c38-2537ef8d0be1)
Faye closed her eyes and thought of Casablanca.
Easy to do since she’d been watching it earlier that day. She’d also watched it the week before and the month before that. In the past four years, she’d watched it at least ten times, definitely more, but ten was all she would admit to if asked. And her husband had asked when he’d come home from work and found her watching it.
“Again?” Hagen had asked.
“It’s a classic” was all Faye had said.
Now, hours later, as Hagen kissed the back of her neck, her thoughts returned to Casablanca. It was nine o’clock on Friday night, the one hour of the week they usually made the effort to show up for their marriage. But she hadn’t felt well all day—tired, aching—and all she wanted to do was close her eyes and go to sleep. Since she couldn’t sleep, she dreamed of Rick and Ilsa and Morocco while Hagen did his best to pretend theirs was a real marriage.
Faye was far more concerned about Bogie’s Rick than Hagen. Had Rick ever found someone else to love or had he made a monk of himself, living in celibate devotion to his beloved Ilsa for the rest of his life? Or maybe he’d died shortly after Ilsa got on that plane, killed by fascists or Nazis on his way to Brazzaville with Louis. Faye hoped he had died. Better that than live for decades still in love with a woman he could never have again.
Whoever first said it was better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all had neither loved nor ever lost.
But Faye had. She’d loved and she’d lost and as she lay in the bed of a man who didn’t love her any more than she loved him, she would have sold her soul to not have done either.
“Faye?” Hagen said in her ear. He’d been nice to her today, so she opened her eyes.
“Yes?”
“Your phone’s beeping.”
She reached for the phone on the bedside table and saw she had a text message.
Check your email asap
It was from Richard, her friend who owned the only decent camera store in Columbia, South Carolina. There was no good reason he would be emailing or texting her on a Friday night that she could think of and many bad reasons.
“Emergency text. I’ll be right back,” she told Hagen who immediately rolled onto his back and stared up at the ceiling, silently seething—as usual. Why did she even bother lying? He was always angry at her these days. She looked at him, looked at him longer than she meant to, longer than she had in a very long time. Wives of her husband’s coworkers called Hagen a “catch.” That he was handsome—brown hair, brown eyes, good body—was merely the smallest part of the equation. He was a good provider. That was what one of her neighbor ladies had called him, and here in the South, where men were still expected to be breadwinners, patriarchs and kings of the castle, that was the trump card. It didn’t matter that Hagen spent every free moment outside work golfing with his buddies, that he rarely spoke to her except to criticize how she’d spent her days and that the sole reason he was trying to have sex with her was so they could pretend they were happy together when they both knew better.
Faye shut the bathroom door and read her email.
Hey, Faye—I just had to cancel some work. Got too busy with weddings. If you’re interested, I’ll give them your name. The ladies of the Lowcountry Preservation Society need a photographer for their annual “Journey through Time” fund-raising calendar: $10,000 for 100 exclusives. Landscapes, beach scenes, historical houses, ladies in dresses, the usual old-timey tourist shit. Due date August 1. Yes or no?
Work.
A job offer.
She hadn’t expected that. She hadn’t taken on a professional photography assignment in almost four years. Last week she’d stopped by Richard’s camera shop to buy a replacement lens cap for her Nikon. It had fallen off during a walk two weeks ago and rolled into a gutter. She’d mentioned to Richard she missed going out on assignments. He’d told her to help him with his summer wedding load, and she’d simply smiled at him and said, “No, thanks. I don’t do weddings.”
But this job wasn’t a wedding.
Faye knew she’d been in the bathroom long enough she was risking a fight, and though she wasn’t scared of getting in a fight with Hagen, she was just too tired for it tonight. Out of guilt she made herself try to go. When she did, she discovered exactly why she’d been feeling so tired and miserable and aching all day.
To stall for time, Faye washed her hands. She washed them till they went pruny and then kept washing them. She washed them for so long she forgot why she was washing them. Once she’d read a phrase in a book—the valley of tears. She didn’t know where she’d read it, but she guessed the Bible. This was the moment she should go into that valley and find her tears. She wanted them. She needed them. In her heart she wandered through brambles and thorns and down a steep ravine and into the valley. At the bottom she found a river, where all her tears were supposed to be. The riverbed was dry. She had no more tears left.
She heard a soft knock on the bathroom door and started.
“Faye?”
“Yes?”
“It’s been ten minutes.” His voice was testy, impatient, his usual tone with her these days. All day every day.
Faye dried her hands and opened the door.
“Sorry,” she said.
He nodded and turned around. “I’m going back to bed. Hurry up, okay?”
Faye didn’t want to hurt Hagen; she truly didn’t. She didn’t want to hurt anyone, but there was no way to say it that wouldn’t hurt him.
So she hurt him.
“I’m bleeding.”
He stopped. His broad, powerful shoulders slumped and the air seemed to go out of his body like a balloon with a pinprick in it.
Slowly, he turned around.
“I’ll call Dr. Melzer.”
“Don’t call anybody.”
“But—”
“Don’t.” She couldn’t face any more doctors. She couldn’t face more pity, more sympathy, more tests, more shots, more touching parts of her she never wanted touched again.
He started toward her and she took a step back.
“Please don’t touch me,” she said. If she thought for one second he would hold her to comfort her, she might have let him. But he didn’t want to comfort her. Hagen wanted her to comfort him, and that she couldn’t do. She had nothing to give him.
“Faye?”
“I think I should just go to bed.”
His eyes looked black in the low light of the hallway. Her toes were cold on the hard bamboo floor. Where were her woolen socks? Hagen always kept the house so cold.
“You’re having another miscarriage, and you’re going to bed.” Hagen wasn’t asking her a question. He was registering his disgust with her.
“You have to be pregnant to have a miscarriage. It didn’t take,” she said. Hagen had begged, practically demanded, she try one more IUI procedure, and she’d agreed to it when he’d called it their “Hail Mary.” Well, they’d hailed Mary and Mary hadn’t hailed back.
“Do you have a fever?”
“No.”
“How heavy are you bleeding? Maybe it’s still—”
“It’s over, Hagen. It’s just... It’s all over.”
Somewhere in the valley, the tiniest trickle of water appeared in the riverbed, the tiniest trickle of water appeared on her face. She wiped it off immediately.
“Faye...please.”
“Don’t worry about me.”
“Don’t worry about you? You tell me you’re losing the baby, and I’m not supposed to worry about you?”
She returned to the bedroom, Hagen following her. The bedroom. Their bedroom. Their ridiculous bedroom. Hagen had picked out all the furniture. It looked like something from the Biltmore—king-size iron bed; chocolate-colored walls; brick fireplace; oversize espresso leather armchairs, artfully distressed, of course; gilt-frame landscape paintings on the wall picked out by the decorator by artists neither of them could name. It was a showroom more than a bedroom. Look how much money we have. Look at how sexy we are. Look at how glamorous our marriage is. She hated everything about the room except for the pillow-top mattress. Sleeping was her favorite pastime these days. She took her mattresses seriously.
“I wasn’t pregnant. It didn’t work. And even if I was, it’s not like you can do anything about it,” she said, climbing back into bed. She reached for her book. It would make a fine shield between them.
“What are you doing?”
“Reading.”
“You’re reading. While having a miscarriage.”
“I got my period. It is what it is.”
“You don’t care, do you? You don’t care that this is happening?”
“I can’t care,” she said.
“Why can’t you care?”
“Because if I let myself care about anything that happens to me, I wouldn’t be able to get out of bed.”
“You don’t get out of bed anyway.”
She sighed and met his gaze. He was looking at her, eyes boring into her. Did he see her at all? Or did he just see what he wanted to see? Pretty brunette with violet eyes and good breasts. Quiet, biddable when necessary, like when he trotted her out for company functions and she painted on a smile and wore it until her cheeks hurt.
“Oh,” she said. “Good point.”
“Do you care at all?”
“Please leave me alone, Hagen. Please don’t make me have this conversation now. I was washing blood off my hands five minutes ago. If you won’t let me read, then let me sleep.”
“Sleep? I called you at noon, and you were still in bed.”
“It’s almost impressive, isn’t it? Give the lady a prize, right?”
“Don’t say that.”
“What?”
“Don’t bring Will into this.”
“Oh, yeah, I forgot I’m supposed to pretend he never existed. I’m sorry.”
Hagen stopped at the edge of the bed. Faye tried to rest her head back but the stupid iron headboard might as well have been a wall of nails.
“You know what your problem is?” Hagen asked.
“Yes,” she said, because she did, but Hagen went on as if he hadn’t heard her.
“You want to live in the past. You watch old movies. You haven’t read a book written after 1950 in four years. You listen to Frank Sinatra and Ethel Merman all day long like a goddamn ghost in my house.”
“That’s not true.”
“It’s not? Really?”
“I got this book yesterday, and it was written two years ago.”
Hagen plucked it out of her hands and read the title in as cold and cruel a voice as any man had ever read a book title.
“The Bride of Boston; A Jazz Age Mystery. Who the hell is the bride of Boston?”
“A girl who disappeared in 1921,” Faye said. “Vanished into thin air. But it has a happy ending.”
“Oh, yeah? What’s the happy ending?”
Faye smiled. “She was never seen again.”
Hagen threw the book across the room.
“Jesus Christ, Faye, what the hell is wrong with you? Women would kill to be in your place.”
She rolled onto her side and into the fetal position. Tears leaked from the corners of her eyes onto the pillow. She willed them away, willed Hagen away, willed the world away. But they didn’t go away because her Will was gone.
Hagen must have seen he’d gone too far. He knelt by the bed so they could look each other eye to eye. As he reached out his hand she flinched, fearful he’d strike her even though he never had before.
“Faye.”
“Will never threw anything but baseballs,” she whispered to herself.
“You can’t live in the past. It’s not living. The past is dead,” he said, his hand on her face. It did nothing to comfort her.
“Everything I love is dead.”
“Don’t say that.” Hagen spoke through gritted teeth. He had such nice straight white teeth. “Don’t say stupid stuff like that. It’s melodrama.”
“I’m a melodrama queen.”
“I believe it. Do you think you’re the only person who has ever lost anybody? Everybody loses somebody eventually.”
“But not everybody loses Will.”
“I lost Will, too. Goddamn it, Faye, he’s dead. And I’m not and you’re not. You have a husband who loves you very much—”
This is the most you’ve talked to me in six months.
“You live in a mansion.”
I hate this house. It feels like a prison. Everything’s made of iron and it’s turning me to iron.
“We have all the money we could ever need or ever want.”
Your money, not mine.
“You don’t even have to work.”
“I miss working.” She said that out loud because Richard’s email had reminded her how much she missed working and how much she resented Hagen telling her she shouldn’t. “But you don’t want me to work. It makes you look bad in front of your boss because he’s a chauvinist.”
“He’s old-fashioned. That’s all.”
“And you say I live in the past.”
Hagen turned his back to her. Who could blame him? Why he hadn’t dropped her yet she didn’t know. Masochism maybe? Heroism? Maybe he wanted to save her. Maybe he was too embarrassed to admit he couldn’t.
And the truth was he had a point. She did live in the past. She hadn’t watched a movie made after 1950 in four years. Today she’d watched Casablanca while lying in their bed. They were all dead—Rick and Ilsa and Sam who never did play it again. A DVD of The Maltese Falcon sat on top of the television, waiting to be watched for the tenth or twelfth time; she couldn’t remember. Bogie was dead. Hammett was dead. And the Maltese Falcon never did get found, did it? People searched for it, fought for it, died for it, and in the end it was nothing but a hoax, lead where there should have been gold.
“Okay,” she said.
He narrowed his eyes at her.
“Okay, what?”
“I’ll stop living in the past.”
“You will?” He sounded skeptical, as if she’d agreed just to shut him up.
She climbed out of bed and walked to the closet. From the top shelf she pulled a battered silver suitcase—eighty dollars from Target—with a peeling Boston Red Sox sticker on the side. A relic from her old life. She’d carry it into the new one.
“Faye?”
“I’m going to New Hampshire to stay with Aunt Kate and Mom. Then we can file there.”
“File?”
“For divorce,” she said.
Hagen laughed.
“You’re filing for divorce. In New Hampshire.”
“New Hampshire—famous for maple syrup and quickie divorces. I need to see Mom anyway. Not that she’ll see me, you know. She doesn’t remember anything that happened after 1980. She thinks there are just the two Star Wars movies. I’m not going to tell her any different. I must get my living-in-the-past tendencies from her.”
“She has dementia. She has an excuse. You don’t.”
“You’re right. I don’t have an excuse to live in the past, so I won’t live in the past anymore. I will move on with my life and into the big bright future. I can’t wait to see what this beautiful world we live in has to offer me—can you?”
Her anger gave her a rush of energy like she hadn’t felt in years. She stuffed clothes and socks and shoes and underwear into the suitcase, haphazardly but with purpose. Hagen watched her with bemusement at first, a look that slowly turned to realization as she slipped on her jeans. She wasn’t kidding.
She snatched her book off the floor and flattened the pages Hagen had crushed by throwing it across the room. She found her purse and her charger. She grabbed her phone. And as soon as it was in her hand, she felt it buzz with a text message.
Faye—forgot to tell you that they need an answer by tomorrow. If you want the job, let me know soon as you can.
“You’re actually leaving,” Hagen said, and she heard the first note of sincerity in his voice all evening. They were an ironic couple, never saying what they meant. Irony had failed them tonight.
“You want children, and I can’t give them to you.”
“We can try IVF. We can adopt. We can—”
“I don’t want to try IVF, Hagen. I don’t want to adopt. I don’t want...”
“What do you want?”
What did she want? She looked at her handsome husband with the good job that paid all the bills and took all her worries away. He could give her everything she was supposed to want.
“I don’t want to die here,” Faye said.
It wasn’t the dying that bothered her in that statement. It was the here. She didn’t want to die here in this cold, cold house with this cold, cold husband she slept with in a bed made of cold, cold iron.
“And I will die here if I stay,” she said with cold iron finality.
The look on his face said he believed her even if he wasn’t willing to admit it. She waited. He didn’t say anything more.
She paused at the bedroom door. She’d stay at a hotel tonight, then fly to her aunt’s house in Portsmouth tomorrow. She’d file for divorce there and let Hagen have everything. There would be nothing for the lawyers to fight over as long as she didn’t ask for anything. She’d be divorced by June 5, her thirtieth birthday. Ah, June—a great month for weddings, a better month for divorces. Widowed and divorced, two miscarriages and two failed IUI treatments, all before she turned thirty.
Give the lady a prize.
“You won’t contest the divorce?” Faye asked.
“No,” Hagen said.
Faye nodded.
“For what it’s worth,” Faye said, “I wish...”
Her throat tightened to the point of pain.
“What, Faye? What?”
“I wish I’d never married you. For your sake. Not mine.”
She looked at him, and he looked at her. She wondered if they’d ever see each other again. And she waited for her tears to come but they were gone, the valley dry again.
“Yeah, well,” he said, “you’re not the only one.”
And that was it. He didn’t weep. He didn’t scream. He didn’t argue. He didn’t beg. And when she picked up her suitcase and left Hagen alone in the bedroom, he didn’t follow her. It was over.
She put the suitcase in the trunk of her Prius—a gift from Hagen that he would probably demand she give back—and hit the button to open the garage. Before she backed out, she pulled her phone from her jeans pocket.
She reread Richard’s email. Sounded like a big project, this fund-raiser calendar thing. Landscapes, houses, ladies in dresses... She hadn’t worked a big job like that since getting married. She hadn’t done much of anything since getting married. But she’d need the money. And she’d need the distraction.
Faye hit Reply and typed her answer.
Richard—I just left husband.
In other words, I’ll take the job.
2 (#u5dfc0014-26a7-5683-8c38-2537ef8d0be1)
Faye made the divorce easy on Hagen and he stayed true to his word and made it easy on her. Faye asked for nothing but the Prius and the twelve thousand dollars she’d had in her bank account on their wedding day. He handed over the car keys and wrote her a check. And that was that. He got the house, the other car, the boat, the money and the all-important bragging rights. She’d left town, which gave him the freedom to conjure up any story he wanted. He could tell the world she’d cheated on him with every man alive if he so desired to play the cuckold. He could say she’d refused marriage counseling if he wanted to play the martyr. Or he could tell them the truth—that he wanted babies and her body clearly wasn’t on board with this program. She’d lost Will’s baby. She’d lost Hagen’s. And the two insemination attempts had failed.
Three strikes was an out, but four balls was a walk.
Faye walked.
It was easier to do than she’d thought it would be. Hagen hadn’t put up a real fight. Knowing him, he’d probably been secretly relieved. The past four years she’d slowly lost touch with the world until everything had started to take on the feel of a TV show, a soap opera that played in the background. Occasionally, she’d watch, but never got too invested. Finally, she’d simply switched off the television. The Faye and Hagen Show was over. No big loss. The show only had two viewers and neither of them liked the stars.
A couple months on the coast would do her good. The saltwater cure, right? Wasn’t that what the writer Isak Dinesen had said? “The cure for anything is salt water—sweat, tears, or the sea.” Faye should get more than enough of all three photographing the Sea Islands in the middle of summer.
As soon as she’d packed her bags and drove away from Hagen’s house for the final time, Faye hit the road. In summer tourist-season traffic, the drive from Columbia to Beaufort took nearly four hours. Who were all these people lined up in car after car heading to the coast? What did they want? What did they think they’d find there? Faye wanted to work, that was all. She wanted to do well with this assignment since one good job led to another and then another. Life stretched out before her from now until her death, her work like the centerline of the highway and if she kept her eye on that line maybe, just maybe, she might not careen off the edge of the road.
Faye took the exit to Beaufort, the heart of what was known as Lowcountry in South Carolina. It felt like its own country as the terrain turned flatter and greener and swampier the deeper she drove into. After the exit, she passed a huge hand-painted sign off to her right. Lowcountry Is God’s Country, it read in big black letters. Interesting. If she were God she’d pick the Isle of Skye in Scotland maybe. Kenya. Venice. But Lowcountry? Seemed an odd choice. She wondered what being “God’s country” entailed, and then she passed four different churches, four different denominations, and all in a quarter-mile stretch. Clearly God owned a whole lot of real estate around here.
Faye made it to Beaufort by dinnertime. Needing to conserve her money, Faye had rented a room in Beaufort. Just one room in someone else’s home. She wouldn’t have a private bathroom, a situation Hagen would have found an unacceptable affront to his dignity, but Faye found she didn’t mind, not at all. Now that she didn’t have to think of anyone’s needs but her own, she’d discovered just how little she needed.
The house was on Church Street, a faded Southern Gothic Revival river cottage, a revival someone had forgotten to revive. White paint in need of power washing, three tiers of verandas missing a baluster or five, Spanish moss and ivy competing for ownership of the trees... Faye liked it immediately. It was owned by Miss Lizzie, a woman who rented the rooms out mostly to college kids attending the University of South Carolina’s Beaufort campus. So few students attended classes in the summer, however, that Faye had ended up with what Miss Lizzie said was the best room in the house.
Faye’s hopes were not high, but Miss Lizzie, an older black woman with a spray of pure white hair around her head like an icon’s nimbus, welcomed her into the house with a wide smile that seemed genuine. Faye did her best to match it. The third-floor room she’d been given surpassed Faye’s low expectations by a large margin.
“Here you go,” Miss Lizzie said. “I keep this as my guest room. No kids up here. I’d hate to put a grown woman like you in the same hall as my college boys. They get a little rowdy. You’ll like it up here if you don’t mind the stairs. My sister stays here when she visits but she’s not coming round again until October. Too hot for her.”
“It’s beautiful,” Faye said, wearing a smile she didn’t have to fake. She hadn’t been impressed by anything in a long time, but this room spoke to her in its spareness. The floors were hardwood, a deep cherry stain polished to a high shine so that in the evening sunlight she could see every last rut and groove on the floor, elegant as an artist’s brushstrokes. The wounds gave it character and beauty. The bed was a four-poster, narrow, like something she’d seen in preserved historic homes. It bore an ivory canopy on top and ivory bed curtains; an ivory bedspread with a double-wedding-ring Amish quilt in a shade of dark and light blue was folded at the bottom. In case she got cold, Miss Lizzie said. South Carolina in June and July? Faye was fairly certain she wouldn’t have to worry about catching a chill.
“Closet over there,” Miss Lizzie said, pointing at a buttercream-yellow door. “Dresser there. These doors lead to the balcony,” she said, indicating a set of French doors. “No screen doors, so try not to let the mosquitoes in.”
“Are you Catholic?” Faye asked.
“Of course not. I go to Grace Chapel. It’s AME.” The tone of denial Miss Lizzie employed made it sound as if Faye had asked her if she were a government spy hiding out on foreign soil. Then again, that was what many people once thought of Catholics in the United States.
“I saw the prie-dieu.” Faye pointed at the carved wooden kneeler by the bed. A ceramic gray tabby cat sat on top of it next to a lamp. “That’s why I ask.”
“The what? I thought that was some kind of step stool or side table.”
“It’s for praying. Private prayer. You kneel on this bottom step here and maybe rest your prayer book on the top part.”
“You’re of the Catholic faith?” Miss Lizzie asked, touching her chest as if to clutch at nonexistent pearls.
“No, but I’m a photographer. I did a photo shoot of Catholic churches for a book once.”
“I see. You here to photograph things?”
“For a calendar. A fund-raiser.”
“Well, that’s nice, then. Who doesn’t need funds these days?”
Faye laughed. “Anyway, it’s very pretty.” Faye touched the prie-dieu. It was simply carved but sturdy stained rosewood. The wood was lighter where the knee would go on the bottom board as if someone had prayed on it many times. Were his prayers answered? Why did Faye assume it was a he?
“It’s from the lighthouse, the old one,” Miss Lizzie said.
“Lighthouse? The one on Hunting Island?”
She shook her head. “Not that one. North of Hunting Island, there’s another island. Bride Island.”
“Bride Island? That wasn’t in my guidebook.”
“Only locals call it that. And it wouldn’t be in the guidebook. It’s private. Rich black lady owns it,” Miss Lizzie said with quiet pride. “Paris Shelby.”
“Any idea if Ms. Shelby allows visitors on the island?”
It sounded promising, an old lighthouse on a private island. Maybe it hadn’t already been photographed to death. Perfect subject for a preservation society calendar.
“I wouldn’t know. And Mrs. Shelby hasn’t been around much this summer.”
“Thank you anyway. Maybe I can find a way out there.”
“Here’s your key,” Miss Lizzie said, handing her a silver key on a brass ring. “Now, you remember this isn’t a hotel. I won’t be changing your sheets or bringing you breakfast. That’s your job.”
“I don’t need much of anything, I promise.”
“You can use the kitchen. We let the kids use it as long as they clean it up, so you can use it, too. The top shelf in the fridge is yours. I cleaned it off.”
“I appreciate it. I’m only here to work this summer. I’ll stay out of your hair.”
“My hair thanks you kindly,” Miss Lizzie said with a debutante’s coy smile. “There’s not much left of it to get into anyway.” She patted the wispy curls back into place and left Faye alone in her new home.
Faye set her suitcase on the luggage rack and her equipment case on the bed. A fine room. Perfect for her needs. She’d live the simple life this summer—no television, no movies, no surround-sound speakers and five remote controls only Hagen knew how to work. She’d sleep and she’d eat and she’d work, and when she wasn’t working she would walk or read or do nothing at all.
She lay on the bed, staring up at the canopy and planning her itinerary for tomorrow. A drive around the islands to scout locations and maybe a few pictures if the light was right. No time to waste. She was no one’s wife anymore. If she didn’t work, she didn’t eat. She should have been afraid, but she wasn’t. Supposedly she’d lost “everything” in the divorce and had been left with almost nothing. Turned out almost nothing was exactly what she wanted.
With help from a sleeping pill, Faye slept well that first night in her new room. In the early dawn hours, when the sun had just begun to peek into the room, she woke up and felt the strangest sensation, a sensation she hadn’t felt in more than four years.
Hope.
Hope for what, she didn’t know, but she knew it was hope because it got her out of bed before six o’clock. She knew there was something out there she wanted and something told her if she chased it, she just might catch it. She put on her bathrobe and opened the French doors, but froze when she saw the visitor perched on the wooden railing of the little balcony.
She wasn’t sure what it was—a heron or a crane or an egret—but it was a big damn bird, that was for certain. Two feet tall, white body, blue-black head and a long bill, sharp as a knife. Faye considered retreating but stayed riveted in place, staring.
“Have we met before?” she asked the bird. Its only reply was to turn its head rapidly toward the sun. She wasn’t sure if that was a yes or a no.
“Wait a second... I remember you.”
Faye recalled a cold morning on the Newport pier, a morning she would never forget, though she might want to. She’d gone at sunrise, early so no one would see her and try to stop her. On that winter morning, she’d found herself the sole visitor on that lonely pier, a sorrowful sight in her gray trench coat and Will’s ashes so terribly heavy in her hands. As she walked to the end she was tempted to keep walking. What was that old insult? Take a long walk off a short pier? Yes, that was exactly what she’d wanted to do. But then a large white bird with a black head had landed on a boat tie-up, startling her with its size and sudden appearance. They’d eyed each other for a few seconds before Faye had continued walking toward the end of the pier. She’d fully expected the bird to take off as she neared it, but it hadn’t. It stayed while she knelt on weathered gray wood and poured the ashes into the water and it stayed when she stood up again. It flew off only as she started to walk toward land. For a second—a foolish stupid second—she’d thought the bird was watching over her, making sure she didn’t take that long walk off that short pier.
“What are you?” Faye asked the bird, not expecting an answer. The bird merely shook its wings in reply, and Faye sensed it readying to take off.
“Hold on. Stay there one second, big bird. I want to get my camera. Just a camera. Don’t be scared.” Faye backed into the room, trying her hardest not to make the floor squeak under her feet. From her leather camera bag, she pulled out her Nikon. Carefully, she crept to the doors, but the moment she lifted the camera to her eye, the bird launched itself off the balcony. The one shot she captured was a blur of white in the distance. Faye laughed. Well, there was a very good reason she hadn’t gone into nature photography.
After an early breakfast of cereal and tea, she found Miss Lizzie weeding her garden out back. Faye sidestepped a discard pile of murdered plants. Discerning what was weed and what was garden took better vision than Faye’s twenty-twenty, and she wasn’t sure Miss Lizzie could tell the difference, either. Faye asked her if she knew anyone with a boat. Miss Lizzie suggested she talk to Ty Lewis in Room 2 on the first floor. He was a marine biology student doing some project on the islands over the summer. He went out on a boat often, Miss Lizzie said. Even if he couldn’t take her out he could probably point her in the direction of someone who could.
When she returned to the kitchen she found her man. Had to be him. He wore a T-shirt—a shark and octopus locked in battle on the front with the words The Struggle is Real underneath. He had dark brown skin inked with dozens of black tattoos up and down both arms—fish, it looked like, lots and lots of fish—and half a dozen silver piercings: eyebrow, both ears, nose and lip, plus a bonus upper-ear piercing. He had dreadlocks pulled back in a ponytail. He was also handsome enough Faye had to remind herself she was thirty, not twenty.
Twice she reminded herself of that fact.
“Are you Ty?” she asked, pulling a mason jar—Miss Lizzie’s version of iced tea glasses—from the cabinet.
“I am if you’re asking.” He gave her an appraising look and the appraisal came in high.
“I’m asking,” she said. “Faye Barlow. And don’t flirt with an old lady. Our hearts can’t take that much excitement.”
“If you’re old, I’m Drake. What can I do for you?”
“I heard you have a boat? Or access to a boat?”
“I might have access to a boat,” he said between bites of scrambled eggs and sausage. He sat on the counter, not at the table. When was the last time she’d sat on a kitchen counter? High school?
“Would you let me pay you to take me out somewhere on your boat? I need to take some pictures of a lighthouse.”
“You can drive to the lighthouse. Best beach in the state. Don’t tell anybody that, though. I wanna keep the tourists at Myrtle Beach, where they belong.”
“Miss Lizzie said there’s another lighthouse, one on some place called Bride Island. Do you know it?”
“I know it. Hard to get near it, though. There’s a sandbar in the way.”
“Guess that’s why they needed a lighthouse. Can you get into the area at all? I have a long-range lens on my camera.”
“I can probably do that.”
“Today? Tomorrow?”
“This evening? Five?” He hopped off the counter and poured himself a massive glass of orange juice, so big it made her teeth hurt and her blood sugar spike just looking at it. Did college kids know that their days of eating and drinking like that were numbered? She wanted to tell him, then decided to spare him the awful truth that time was a thief, and a metabolism like his would be the first thing it stole.
“What’s the charge?”
“Dinner. With me. You know, after we get back from the boat.”
“You’re too young for me, and I’ve been divorced for about—” she pretended to check her watch “—ten days.”
“You celebrate the divorce yet?”
“Is that a thing people do? Celebrate the painful dissolution of a marriage?”
“Who wanted the divorce?”
“I did.”
“You love him?”
“No.”
“Like him?”
“No, but he didn’t like me, either.”
“You have kids?”
“No.”
“Good in bed?”
“Fair to middling,” Faye said, shrugging.
Ty laughed. “Then hell, yeah, it’s a thing to celebrate.”
“I will have an age-appropriate celebration. You’re too young for me.”
He looked at her, tight-lipped and disapproving. “I’m twenty-two.”
“I’m thirty.”
“Thirty? Oh, my God, Becky, where were you when JFK was shot?” he asked in a Valley girl voice.
She glared at him.
“You flirt weird. Did you learn this in one of those men’s magazines with a woman in a metallic bikini on the cover?”
“Possibly. Is it working?”
Faye sighed. “It’s working. But just dinner. I’m not sleeping with you. I’m supposed to be sad.”
“Are you sad?” he asked, stepping up to her and looking her right in the eyes. She couldn’t remember if Hagen had looked her in the eyes the entire last year of their marriage. She’d forgotten how scary it was to be seen.
“Yes,” she said.
“Because of the divorce.”
“No, not that.”
“Then why?”
Faye smiled. “Who knows?” A rhetorical question. She knew why she was sad, but Ty didn’t need to know.
“We’ll go to the ocean today,” he said. “It knows things. Maybe it can help you.”
Okay.
So.
Faye had a date with a twenty-two-year-old college student. That was unexpected. Probably a very bad idea, as well. Maybe a terrible idea. Then again, he did have a boat. And he was cute. And she was single again.
And... For a split second while flirting with Ty, Faye had been almost okay. The saltwater cure seemed to be working already. And for a woman who’d been in mourning for four straight years, Faye knew “almost okay” was as good as it was probably ever going to get.
But she would take it.
3 (#u5dfc0014-26a7-5683-8c38-2537ef8d0be1)
Ty had the boat, but Faye had the car. Unless she wanted to ride twenty miles on the back of Ty’s scooter, she would be driving herself on her own date. It was nice. She felt very modern. Old but modern.
Ten minutes into the drive to the dock on Saint Helena Island, Faye pulled over in a church parking lot and gave Ty the keys.
“You want me to drive?” he asked, cocking his pierced eyebrow at her.
“I can’t drive and location scout at the same time without getting us in a wreck. I assume you can drive?”
“I have my learner’s permit,” he said, taking the keys.
“You’re cute.”
“The goddamn cutest,” he said as he opened the door and got behind the wheel.
As Ty drove, Faye stared out the window and jotted the occasional note on her steno pad. She should take pics of the old Penn School. The trees surrounding it were some of the most photogenic she’d ever seen. She also noted a crumbling ruin of a church that would make for a beautiful shot, maybe even the cover of the calendar. Thankfully Ty didn’t pester her with small talk as he drove them to the boat. He pointed out interesting scenery here and there—that road took her down to the old fort, this road took her to a converted plantation house... Useful things. Helpful things. She made notes of them all.
They arrived at the dock, and Faye nodded her approval at the boat. It looked adequately seaworthy, some kind of speedy fishing boat converted into a research vessel. It had a blue-and-white hull with the words CCU Marine Science painted on the bow and the number four on the stern.
“You won’t get in trouble for taking me out on your school’s boat, will you?” she asked.
“It’s mine for the summer. As long as I give it back in one piece with a full tank of gas, and I get my work done, they don’t care what I do with it.”
“What are you working on this summer?” Faye asked as Ty took her hand to steady her on the wobbling boat ramp. Inside the boat she sat on the battered white vinyl seat, mindful of the box of instruments on the floor as Ty settled in behind the wheel.
“Beach pollution mostly,” he said, as he steered the boat away from the dock. “The effects of pollution on coastal wildlife, the fish especially. I’m taking water samples all summer up and down the coast.”
“Are these beaches polluted?” she asked. “They look clean to me.”
“Think about rain,” Ty said. “Think about a rainstorm in your town. Water comes down and washes everything clean, right? What sort of stuff gets washed away in a rainstorm?”
“Bird shit,” she said.
“Squirrel shit.”
“Bat shit,” she said, and they both laughed.
“Oil from your car on the street. All that gets washed into the gutter, which goes into the sewer. Where does that sewer go?”
“Please don’t tell me the ocean.”
“Goes right to the ocean. Decades ago they built these drainage pipes from the cities, and those pipes empty into the ocean near the beaches. That’s why you shouldn’t swim around here after a rainstorm. Like swimming in a sewer.”
“That’s disgusting.”
“It is what it is,” he said with a shrug. “People want to pretend all that shit magically disappears into the gutter and is never seen again. But it’s gotta go somewhere, right?” He started the engine and eased the boat toward open water, steering it neatly between two sailboats, one with the elegant name Silver Girl and the other with the less-than-elegant name The Wet Dream.
The boat bounced hard as it skimmed over the top of a large wake left by a fifty-foot yacht. But Ty seemed imperturbable at the helm. He drove with a focused calm, intent without intensity—a true expert. She liked experts. The world needed more people who were good at their jobs.
“So why marine biology?” Faye asked, shouting over the steady hum of the engine.
“Grew up near Myrtle Beach, watched sea turtles hatching when I was a kid and fell in love. That’s all I’m trying to do—keep these beaches for the turtles. Don’t give a shit about the people.”
“That’s not very nice.”
“People are why we’re in this mess. Last year I pulled ten plastic bags, two Coke cans, half a nylon fishnet, and a goddamn pink Croc shoe, size six, out of the stomach of a shark. You know what we say about that down here?”
“What do we say about that down here?”
“That ain’t right. That’s what you say. You try it.”
Faye put on her thickest faux Southern accent. “That ain’t right.”
“Not bad. I took pics of all that mess, made signs and hung them up on every beach from here to Savannah.”
“You must make lots of friends that way.”
Ty snorted a laugh. “Yeah, they aren’t too happy with us when we tell everybody their fun summer vacations are killing the wildlife. They think we’re scaring off tourists. We are, but we’re not doing it to be assholes. We’re doing it to wake people up.”
“Are you waking them up?”
“All we can do is ring the alarm. Most people aren’t going to start paying attention until they have dirty ocean water on their doorstep. Bad as it is, I admit I’m gonna laugh when those rich white boys are playing golf in three feet of seawater.”
“My ex-husband was one of those rich white boys. He loved coming down here to golf with his buddies.”
“Sorry,” he said, looking awkward.
“I’m not.” She winked at him.
Ty smiled and hit the gas. Coming here had been a good idea. She should thank Richard for sending her the job. This job was just what she needed—work. Real work. Meaningful work. Plus sand, surf, seafood and a chance to be her old self again. She knew the old Faye, the Faye who’d existed before the miscarriages and the failed marriage... The old Faye wasn’t sad like the new Faye. The old Faye felt things, felt them deeply. The old Faye fought for things, too, didn’t give up or give in. And the old Faye would definitely go on a date with Ty. Absolutely.
Ty glanced at her out of the corner of his eye. A college boy had just checked her out.
Maybe the old Faye and the new Faye had something in common.
“Is that it?” Faye asked, pointing to the top of a lighthouse peeking out from the tree canopy.
“That’s Hunting Island. Pretty lighthouse. You can climb it for two dollars.”
“I think I can cover that. I’ll go tomorrow. Today I want to see Bride Island’s lighthouse.”
“We’re a couple miles out from there still. The lighthouse is on the north beach. You can see it a lot better than the Hunting Island lighthouse. It was never moved so it’s right on the water.”
“What do you mean it was never moved?” Faye asked, pausing to dig a strand of hair out of her mouth. She’d forgotten how windy it got on a boat.
“You see that long spit of sand there?” Ty pointed to what looked like a yellow cat’s tail lounging a few hundred yards out into the water.
“I see it.”
“That used to be land. And that’s where the Hunting Island lighthouse stood. Built in the 1870s, but they had to move just a few years later. The land had eroded that much already. Going, gone, almost gone...”
“It’s really all going away, isn’t it? The coast?”
“Let’s just say you won’t catch me buying a beach house.”
“It’s too bad. I always feel like a better person when I’m on the water.” The air smelled cleaner here. The water seemed purer. She wanted to strip off her clothes and dive off the side of the boat and let the water baptize her a free woman.
“The ocean is big,” Ty said. “And we aren’t. It’s good to be humbled every now and then.”
“You ever go through a divorce?” she asked.
“Not yet.”
“Trust me, I know from humble.”
“You don’t seem humbled,” Ty said.
“What do I seem like?”
“Like a woman who just got out of jail.”
Faye grinned and was about to ask him what a woman just out of jail ought to do first when Ty raised his arm and pointed.
“There it is,” Ty said, and Faye looked up from the dancing blue water to the island on their port side.
“That’s Bride Island?”
“That’s it.”
Faye studied it, not sure what she was looking for except something to justify the trip out here. From this distance, about five hundred yards from shore according to Ty, it looked like Hunting Island. White sandy beach, a line of ocean debris where the tide met the shore and a thick forest of trees. Faye picked up the binoculars and studied the trees. She saw no palms or palmettos, no pines, no evergreens at all.
“Are those live oaks?”
“I don’t think they’re dead oaks,” Ty said.
“You know what I mean.”
“They’re white oaks. Lady who owns the island owns a bourbon distillery in Kentucky. They get the trees for the bourbon barrels from here.”
“White oak? Interesting. Naturally occurring or did the owner plant them?”
“You know anything about Bride Island?” Ty asked, slowing the boat.
“Not a thing except I couldn’t find it on the guidebook map.”
“It’s just Seaport Island on the maps,” he said. “But call it Bride Island if you want to sound like a local.”
Ty turned off the boat and let it bob gently in the water.
“Where’d the name come from?” Faye asked.
“Some rich planter came over from France in 1820 or something. He sent home for a girl to marry and they shipped her over here, got her in the rowboat to bring her in. They say it was love at first sight. She was so beautiful he waded right into the water to meet her boat. And when she saw him coming for her, she got out of the boat in her fancy dress and eight hundred skirts underneath and waded out to meet him. But the water weighed her down so hard, she started to go under, and he picked her right out of the water and carried his bride to shore. So it’s Bride Island.”
“Romantic,” Faye said. “Minus the almost drowning. Don’t swim in big dresses.”
“Gets more romantic. Their kid fell out of a tree and broke his neck. The bride drowned herself. And the husband went crazy and committed suicide by burning the house down with him inside it. But he was a slave owner so you know what we say to that?”
“That ain’t right?” Faye asked.
“Nope. We say this.” Ty raised his hand and defiantly flipped off the island. Faye smiled. She appreciated the sentiment. “Legend is, if a girl swims naked in those waters, she’ll find her true love right after. But don’t do that. Lotta girls have drowned out here. Only man they meet is Jesus.”
“I’ll make a note not to do that, then.”
“You don’t want to find your true love?” he teased. “Or drown trying?”
“I just got divorced.”
Ty shrugged. “Nobody wants to be alone.”
“I do. I’m never getting married again—that’s for sure.”
“You say that now...”
Faye shook her head, tried not to smile. Had she been this sure of herself at twenty-two? Probably. She wouldn’t tell him he’d be awash with self-doubt by thirty. Maybe he was one of the lucky ones blessed with eternal certainty of purpose. Once she thought she knew it all, too. All Faye knew now was that she knew nothing except what she’d told Ty—she never wanted to be anyone’s wife ever again.
While pretty and picturesque, Faye didn’t see anything on the south shore of the island worth photographing. No houses, no landmarks, no rock formations or wildlife. Only sand and grass and trees. Ty started the boat back up, and they made their way around a bend to the north shore of the island.
And there it was.
Faye stood up and gripped the gunwale, camera momentarily forgotten.
The lighthouse appeared like something from a dream or a painting of a dream. Solid white and shimmering wet after a recent rain, it shone like a pillar of pure moonstone. The roof of the lighthouse was black and glinting and below it the widow’s walk around the lantern room was like an iron choker. The glass panels surrounding the lantern room looked intact, and in the evening sunlight they winked and flashed, casting the illusion that the beacon inside still burned. True, the paint was peeling and the stone facade chipped and cracked, but it was magnificent, dignified and elegant, like an English stage actor who’d played Hamlet in his youth and in his later years strode the boards as Lear. Once a mad prince, now a mad king.
“You like it?” Ty asked.
“I love it,” she breathed.
“It’s not bad,” Ty said. “Only one on the East Coast with a solid white day mark.”
“Day mark?” Faye repeated.
“Lighthouses have a day mark and a night mark. The day mark is what they call the paint job,” Ty said. “Some lighthouses have wild paint jobs. I’ve seen candy stripes and diamond patterns, red stripes and black stripes.”
“And the night mark?”
“The night mark is the pattern the light flashed. Some lighthouses had a steady beam. Some lights flashed. That’s how navigators told lighthouses apart. Every part of a lighthouse had a use. You have electronics and radar and sonar and GPS on boats now. Imagine trying to get from here to Maine without any of that.”
“I couldn’t get from Columbia to Beaufort without my GPS.”
“Yeah, I’d last three days if that before I ran into a sandbar or reef. Lighthouses saved a shit ton of lives.” Ty narrowed his eyes at the lighthouse and shook his head. “Probably won’t last much longer before it falls into the ocean.”
“I’ll make it immortal,” Faye said, pulling her camera out of her bag. She lifted it to her eye and got off a few dozen shots as quickly as she could. Despite sitting on the very edge of the water, the lighthouse looked secure enough to climb if she could find a way to it. It sat on a base of rock four feet or more above the sand. Behind it she saw another line of rock.
“What’s back there?” Faye asked, pointing at the rocks.
“Probably where the keeper’s cottage stood,” Ty said, squinting at the shore. “It was a nice job if you could get it. You get a house and you go to work ten feet from your back door. The beach is your front lawn. Of course, you have to climb about a million stairs a day. And there’s nobody else for miles around if you get hurt or get sick. And when the hurricane hits, you got nowhere to go except inside the lighthouse.”
“That sounds like my dream job,” Faye said. “I’d take pictures of the beach every single day and watch it change through the seasons. And I’d have killer quads climbing those stairs three and four times a day.”
“Sounds boring as shit to me,” Ty said.
“Maybe I was a lighthouse keeper in my past life.”
“Maybe you were boring as shit in your past life.”
“Distinct possibility,” she said, getting off a couple more shots as they rounded the island’s northern shore.
“It’s a shame the lighthouse is locked away on a private island. It should be open to the public.”
“What? You want tourists climbing up and down it every day, putting their gum on the steps and tossing their Coke bottles off the top?”
“Maybe not. But I want to climb it,” Faye said. She didn’t want to climb it. She needed to climb it.
“I’m sure there’s a way. Just not from here. You can’t see it from here, but there’s one nasty sandbar under the water by the pier.”
“It’s okay. I’ll find a way out there. I’ll sweet-talk anyone I need to.”
Near the base of the lighthouse, Faye noticed the remnants of an old pier, thick, rotting wood pillars poking out of the water like a hundred tiny islands. At the last pillar where the pier had once ended, Faye saw a bird land—a white bird with a long bill and a blue-black head.
“Ty? Do you know what that is?” She pointed at the bird. Ty narrowed his eyes. She handed him the binoculars and he peered through them. He laughed.
“Somebody must be having a baby,” he said.
“What is it?”
“A stork. A wood stork.”
“Do you see wood storks around here often?” she asked.
“Never seen one out here. Not too many of them around anywhere.”
“I swear to God that very same bird or its identical twin was perched on my balcony at six o’clock this morning. Bizarre.” She didn’t tell Ty about seeing a bird just like it when she’d scattered Will’s ashes. She liked Ty and didn’t want him thinking she was imagining things like birds stalking her.
“You sure you aren’t pregnant?” Ty asked.
“If I were, I’d still be married.”
“Just checking. I mean, you know how storks are.”
Faye stared across the water at the stork. It turned its large head and seemed to stare back at her.
“I had this baby book once,” Faye said. “Don’t ask me why, doesn’t matter. But it had a whole chapter on the stork symbol. Supposedly in Egyptian mythology, the stork was the symbol of ‘ba’ or the soul. While a person slept, their soul would fly in the form of a stork and come back to him. They could even carry the souls of the dead back to the body. I think. Read it a long time ago.”
“That stork is carrying some dead guy’s soul? I like babies better. Long as it’s not my baby.”
“Can you kill the engine? I don’t want to scare it away.”
Ty cut the engine and peered through the binoculars again. Faye lifted her camera to her eye but took no pictures. She was waiting. She sensed the second her shutter snapped the bird would fly off, and she would lose the shot. She had to get it right the first time.
The boat bobbed in the water, drifting ever closer to the pier. The shot lined up the way she wanted—the lighthouse filled the background, the pillar and the stork were left of center and the trees formed a frame on either side.
One...two...three...
Faye clicked the shutter and got off as many shots as she could in quick succession. Her instincts had been right. As soon as the clicking reverberated over the water, the bird took off. Faye couldn’t have planned it better. The wood stork soared into the sky, heading straight toward the sun fearless as Icarus, and she captured every last beat of its wings.
“Perfect,” she said, flipping the camera over. She scrolled through the pictures, creating a sort of flipbook as the bird tensed, stretched its wings and then launched itself into the sky. She scrolled backward and set the stork back down onto the pier like magic.
“Damn,” Ty said, glancing over Faye’s shoulder. “You’re good.” His shoulder butted against hers, and he seemed genuinely impressed by her work.
“I’m not bad.”
“You make much money doing this?” he asked.
“I didn’t become a photographer for the money. Nobody does, I promise.”
“Why’d you do it, then?”
“When I was younger, I thought I wanted to be a photojournalist. A modern Dorothea Lange.”
“Who?”
“You’ve seen her pictures. She took photographs of migrant workers during the Great Depression. People in bread lines, starving people, people driving across the country to get jobs picking fruit in California. When those pictures were published, it woke the country up. FDR’s New Deal might not have happened without her pictures. Before her the poor were seen as defective, as inferior. She took beautiful pictures of poor people, dignified pictures. People saw themselves in the suffering. They saw the humanity. One photographer, one woman, in the right place and the right time could change the world.”
“You gonna change the world?”
“That was the plan. Once upon a time. But every college kid thinks they can save the world.” She grinned at him, and he rolled his eyes. “But it’s a hard gig to get into, the changing-the-world gig. I settled for working at a tiny newspaper in Rhode Island out of college. Newspaper jobs are nearly impossible to get now. Good thing my ex-husband had money or I might have starved. Or worse, had to get a real job.”
She joked about it, but the truth was, she regretted letting Hagen’s money keep her at home when what she should have done was go back to work doing what she loved. But when they’d gotten married she’d been in no shape to save the world. She could barely get out of bed the morning of their wedding. So what was stopping her now?
“Dorothea Lange took pictures of people suffering from the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl, and now the Social Security Administration and Medicaid exist. I take pictures of lighthouses for desk calendars. So much for saving the world.”
“Hey,” Ty said, “your pictures could save that lighthouse. It’s a piece of history. That light saved lives, and you can return the favor. People see that lighthouse and they start to care about it. Out of sight, out of mind, right? So isn’t the reverse in sight, in mind? Maybe if somebody like you took pictures of these islands a hundred years ago, they wouldn’t be in the shape they are now. And even when that lighthouse is gone, when all the islands are gone, we’ll have your pictures. Better than nothing.”
“Right. Better than nothing.”
Faye smiled and looked at her pictures again. She couldn’t believe her luck. A dozen gorgeous shots, any one of them could grace the cover of the calendar. A home run on her first at bat. That never happened.
Ty started the boat’s engine up again. With a relaxed, practiced air, he steered them around the ruins of the pier and back into open water.
“Where to now?” Faye asked, slipping her camera back into her bag.
“Dinner. Oysters if you can handle it.”
“I can handle oysters. You buying?” she teased. She’d never make a college kid buy her dinner.
“How about this? I’ll give you the oysters in exchange for the clam.”
Faye stared at him. “That is the grossest thing anyone has ever said to me. I’m almost impressed. No, I am impressed. Good job.” She slapped him on the back.
“Thank you, baby. I’ll be here all week.”
Faye was too amused and too happy to be offended. Not that Ty could offend her if he tried. After four years in a bad marriage, one dirty pussy joke couldn’t begin to ding her armor. Oh, but that smile of Ty’s, that sweet, sexy smile could. It wriggled its way through the chinks in her chain mail.
Tonight she was going to make very bad decisions.
The rest of the evening passed in a blur. Faye and Ty both had a little to drink at dinner and then a lot to drink back at the Church Street house. So it wasn’t that much of a rude awakening to find Ty still in her bed when she woke up around 3:00 a.m.
He lay on his stomach, facing away from her, looking so painfully young and terribly sweet. She forced down any guilt she might have felt. This hadn’t been his first time, and it wouldn’t be his last. Might not even be his last time tonight. She’d almost told him during their first round that it was the best sex she’d had since getting married, but she kept that comment to herself. After all, Hagen had set a low bar.
Faye slipped out of bed, put on her bathrobe and went to the bathroom. Ty stirred as she slid back in next to him.
“Just me,” she whispered as Ty rolled over to face her.
“Did I fall asleep? Sorry. Your bed is bigger than mine.”
“I don’t mind. Just be careful sneaking out. I don’t want to get in trouble with Miss Lizzie. She seems a little on the religious side.”
“She makes Mother Teresa look like Miley Cyrus.” Ty slid from bed and started gathering his clothes. She rolled over onto her side to watch him dress in the dark. “Luckily she sleeps so hard we could knock the headboard through the wall and she wouldn’t wake up.”
“That sounds like the voice of experience.”
“Did you think I was a virgin?” he asked, crawling over the bed to her.
“No, but I was.”
He laughed softly and kissed her. “Hope you had fun,” he said.
“I did.”
“You sure?” he asked. Faye blushed in the dark. She hadn’t been able to come during the sex. She’d tried, but it was going to take a while before she figured how to use her body for anything other than baby making again. But Ty didn’t need to hear that.
“I did have fun,” she said. “Don’t take my lack of orgasms personally. I’m a little out of practice.”
One more kiss and one more smile. “Practice makes perfect.”
On his way out of her room she stopped him with a whispered question.
“Hey,” she said. “What’s the name of the island with the lighthouse again? Not Bride Island, the real name? Sea Island?”
“Seaport Island.”
“Thanks. I need it for the caption.”
“I’ll take you out there again anytime you want.”
“I might take you up on that. How much will you charge me for it?” she asked, smiling.
“One clam.”
Ty crept into the hallway and was gone, leaving Faye laughing in bed. She didn’t hear a single footstep creaking on the hardwood.
Faye tried to go back to sleep, but it eluded her. Her new life had officially begun with a bang and a whimper or two. Sliding out from under the covers, she walked naked to her camera bag sitting on the floor. She enjoyed the breezy tickle of the night air on her breasts as it wafted in under the blinds. It made her tingle in a pleasant way.
She hadn’t had a chance to upload today’s pictures yet and wanted to see the lighthouse again. She plugged her camera into her computer. Ah, there they were, her beautiful photos. The stork, the trees, the glimmering ivory lighthouse. Faye would get this photo printed out and she’d hang it in her room. It was possibly the best work she’d ever done. Maybe she’d finally found her subject. Man Ray had his nudes. Dorothea Lange had her migrant workers. Ansel Adams had his landscapes. Maybe Faye Barlow would have her lighthouses.
She typed “Seaport Island Lighthouse” into the spreadsheet she kept to label her photographs. Out of curiosity she entered that phrase into Google image search to see who else had been taking pictures of the lighthouse. She found a few amateur pictures of the island, most of them obvious iPhone pictures posted on Pinterest. As she scrolled through the results she found a few historical pictures. One of the iron skeleton of the lighthouse as it was being built in 1884. Another when it was completed.
Faye was about to shut her computer down when a tiny thumbprint photograph caught her eye. It was a faded and sepia-toned picture of one of the lighthouse’s keepers who’d been stationed there after World War I, according to the caption.
Faye narrowed her eyes at the photograph. Her heart raced. She clicked on the link and enlarged the picture until the face of the lighthouse keeper filled up the fifteen-inch screen.
“No way...” she breathed, putting the laptop onto the sewing table and leaning in closer, staring at the photograph until her eyes watered. And she stared at it even longer until the watering turned to tears.
Faye reached out to touch the photograph on her screen.
She knew the face in the photograph, knew it well.
It was the face of the only man she’d ever loved.
Will’s face.
4 (#u5dfc0014-26a7-5683-8c38-2537ef8d0be1)
When the Beaufort County Library opened the next morning, Faye was the first one through the double doors. Unfortunately, the librarian at the reference desk was fairly new to the area, a transplant from Tennessee, and she’d never heard of Bride Island and/or Seaport Island and had no idea there was a lighthouse other than the Hunting Island Light. She suggested Faye walk down to the local tourist center with a smile and a “God bless.”
Thankfully everything that wasn’t an island was within walking distance in Beaufort. The tourist center was housed in a clementine-colored brick storefront house on Bay Street. Between last night and this morning, the wholly uncanny feeling of the lighthouse keeper’s photograph had faded from her consciousness the way a nightmare fades, mostly gone but leaving a strange, smoky pall over the day.
And yet...it was strange. Too strange to ignore, although too strange to take seriously, as well. But finding out the man’s name wouldn’t hurt, would it?
In the front window sat six watercolor paintings on easels. All of them were paintings of Lowcountry—the beach, the Hunting Island lighthouse, the Penn School...
And there it was, set off behind the others, a single painting of a solid white lighthouse and the pier that no longer existed. At the end of the pier stood a woman in a light gray trench coat. The woman faced the ocean and seemed to be holding something in her hand, something Faye couldn’t see. And behind the woman on the pier?
A large white bird perched on a pillar.
Faye froze, unable to walk away from the painting, unable to look away. The uncanny feeling returned times a hundred. First the photograph and now this...
What the hell was going on?
Faye tore herself from the painting and entered the tourist center’s front office. She found a teenage boy with his nose buried in his phone manning the receptionist’s desk. Either covering for his mother, she surmised, or doing community service for any of the usual teenage misdemeanors that deserved a punishment more than grounding but less than prison.
“Do you know anything about that painting of the lighthouse in the window?” she asked.
“Which one?”
“The one with the lady in the painting.”
“Lady painting. Um...hold on,” he said, sounding tired, hungover, stoned maybe. He wasn’t moving very fast, either, as he took a binder off a shelf and flipped through the pages. She’d been amused by the terrapin-crossing warning signs she’d seen around Beaufort with the outline of the turtle in the middle. If she had such a sign she’d hang it over this boy’s head. Then she would clobber him with it.
“Okay, here it is,” the boy said between yawns. “Watercolor. Sixteen by twenty inches. The Lady of the Light. Fifty bucks.”
“That’s it? That’s all it says about the painting?”
“Um...no. It says if you buy it, the artist accepts personal checks made out to the Historical Society.”
“I wasn’t planning on buying it. I want to know who the woman in the painting is.”
“I told you—the Lady of the Light.”
“Who’s that?”
“Some lady.”
“Okay,” Faye said, counting to ten before she murdered this boy. “What about the artist? From the angle of the painting, it looks like he or she painted it from the beach, which meant they were out there. You’re not supposed to be out there, since it’s a private island. You know anything about any of that?”
“Um...”
“I’ll take that as a no.”
“You can ask Father Pat about it, I guess.”
“Father Pat?”
“He’s a priest.”
“Why would I ask a priest about the painting?”
“Because he painted it.”
“He’s a priest and a painter?”
The boy shrugged. “What else are you going to do if you’re a priest? Not like you can join Tinder. Maybe you can. I’m not Catholic.”
“Is his number in the phone book?”
“What’s the phone book?”
Now he was just messing with her. She hoped.
“His number’s in here. Hold on.” The boy waved her off and flipped through the binder again. Finally, he found the phone number and wrote it down for her.
“Thank you,” she said.
“You should buy the painting. Father Pat would really like that.”
“I just got divorced. Took one week. Do you know how much money I had to give up to get my divorce finalized in one week?”
“You can have it for twenty-five dollars. It says so in the book.”
“Fine. Give it to me.”
Faye wrote out her personal check to the Historical Society. At least it was a tax write-off. The boy offered to wrap up the painting for her in some newspaper—she was shocked he knew what a newspaper was—but she declined and carried it back to the Church Street house. Faye wondered if sweat could damage a watercolor before recalling how much she had paid for it. As she opened the gate, Ty opened the front door. He stopped, looked at her and at the painting.
“Don’t ask,” she said.
He held up his hands in mock surrender. “I’m not asking a thing,” he said before putting on his helmet and scootering away.
Faye set the painting on her desk, propping it against the wall. Father Patrick Cahill might be an amateur, but he was a talented one. His work had a Degas flavor to it, blurry, shaky, giving the impression of the lighthouse and the outline of the woman without giving way the details. She wondered if he painted en plein air or if this had been a work of pure imagination. He could have seen the lighthouse from a boat like she had and then painted it at a different angle later. But what about the woman? What about the white bird on the pier? Either the universe was trying to tell her something, or...
She was losing her mind. Faye thought she could put money on the second option.
First, so as not to be intrusive, Faye attempted to send Patrick Cahill a text message. She composed it carefully, saying she had bought the painting of the lighthouse and the lady and admired it greatly, and if it wasn’t too much of a bother, she’d like to ask him a few questions about it. She signed her name and sent the message. She received an immediate error message.
It was a landline.
Fabulous. Father Cahill had a landline. How quaint. Now Faye understood why Hagen was so annoyed with her wanting to live in the past. She took a deep breath and dialed the number next. She hated cold-calling the man. Priests didn’t make her nervous, but she’d talked to very few of them in her time. Even when on assignment photographing the interiors of churches, she’d spent more time with the secretaries and deacons than the priests, who had more pressing matters to attend to. Father Cahill didn’t answer, but he did have an answering machine. Not voice mail. Answering machine. Would she need a time machine just to find the man?
She relayed her message to his answering machine and thanked him profusely for his time, which he actually hadn’t given to her yet. Still, this was the South, and she knew it was best to play the honey card instead of the vinegar card if she wanted a man to do her bidding.
After gathering her gear, she set out again to work. She had never accomplished anything by sitting and waiting for the phone to ring, so she drove out to Saint Helena Island. She preferred shooting her outdoor photography in the early-morning and late-evening hours, but she didn’t want to waste an entire day brooding and overthinking things. She’d done enough of that in her life.
First stop, the Penn School. According to its historical marker, Northerners during the Civil War had come to the region to start a school for the people newly freed from slavery. Faye could imagine how well that went over with the local white population. But the school, with its cream-colored exterior and red tile roof, was lovely even in the vertical noon sunlight. Faye made a circuit of the school, shooting it at every angle, even climbing a tree to get a shot of it through the branches sagging with Spanish moss. A good picture, but not good enough. She would have to suck it up and come back tomorrow morning around dawn to get the shot the way she envisioned it.
Next Faye drove down to the Chapel of Ease, or what was left of it. Four walls of tabby plaster, no roof and that was it. She took a few shots of the chapel but focused most of her pictures on the adjacent cemetery. A lovely, peaceful place until a bus arrived and belched tourists out onto the hallowed ground. Faye waited until they loaded up again and had driven off before taking the picture the way she wanted, with the chapel in the background and the cemetery in focus front and center.
The chapel’s historical marker said the place had burned in the 1860s—a forest fire—and no one had bothered to rebuild it. Now it was a ruin, a beautiful relic, perhaps more loved in its wreckage and decay than it had been while intact. Were it still an active church, Faye would have driven past it like she’d driven past a dozen other churches on this stretch of road. Perhaps Ty was onto something with his sangfroid about the imminent destruction of the Sea Islands. Those people taking pictures of the Chapel of Ease wouldn’t have set foot inside it during a Sunday service. Maybe it was simply human nature to only love a thing after losing it. Maybe they should all lose more things so they could appreciate what they had. Faye could count her possessions now on her two hands—car, camera, laptop, suitcase of clothes and shoes, phone, her beloved grandmother’s necklace and an old ring she couldn’t wear because it was much too big for her hands. Yet she wouldn’t get rid of it. Not to her dying day.
The shots of the cemetery turned out better than she’d anticipated. If they didn’t end up in the calendar, she could sell them to a stock-photo website. When she packed up her gear in the car, she had a missed call. The voice mail message said it was Pat Cahill calling and he was more than happy to hear someone had finally gotten suckered into buying one of his masterpieces. If she wanted to see him today, he’d be painting the marshlands on Federal Street, and she surely couldn’t miss him. He’d be the old man on the front lawn covered in paint.
On the way to Federal Street, Faye’s phone rang again. She didn’t want to answer, not because she was driving, but because this time she knew who was calling.
“Hello,” she said, keeping her voice even, flat, unemotional. It was easy for her to do, too easy.
“That’s all I get? Hello?”
“Hello there? That better?” she said.
“You know I’m not the bad guy, remember? You can at least fake being polite to me.”
“Hello there, Hagen. How are you?”
“God, you are really something.”
Faye heard his aggravated exhalation on the other end of the line.
“What do you want?” she asked. “I’m driving and can’t really talk.”
“I don’t want anything. I’m calling to see how you’re doing. Call it a bad habit.”
“I’m fine. Just working. How are you?”
“Working. Look, I found some stuff of yours in the guest room closet. Do you want it?”
Faye should have known he wasn’t calling just out of the goodness of his heart.
“What is it?”
“I don’t know. Do you really want me digging through your stuff?”
Faye sighed. Hagen had a gift for making things more difficult than they needed to be.
“How am I supposed to tell you if I want it or not if you won’t tell me what it is?”
“You could come here and look at it.”
“You can look in the box.”
“I don’t want to.”
“Hagen, I didn’t keep pet snakes. You can look in the damn box.”
“I think it’s Will’s stuff.”
Faye fell silent. She saw a gas station on the right, pulled in and shut off the car. It took her ten full seconds before she could speak again.
“It’s not Will’s stuff,” she said finally. “I have a few things, and his family has the rest.”
“And what about, you know... Will?”
Faye rubbed at her forehead. “I would not leave Will’s ashes in a cardboard box in a guest room closet. I scattered them in the ocean two years ago.”
“Without me?”
“I was in Newport visiting family. It seemed like the right time and the right place.”
“Without me, you mean. He was my best friend,” Hagen said.
“He was my husband.”
“Yeah, so was I.” Hagen nearly shouted the words, and each one landed on her like a heavyweight champ’s fist. A right, a right, a left and then a brutal jab straight to the solar plexus.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I had to do it alone.”
“You were alone?”
“Yes,” Faye said. “I mean, except for a bird. There was a big white bird there, too. Maybe he knew Will.” She laughed at herself, and fresh hot tears fell from her burning eyes.
“You don’t sound good, Faye. Where are you?”
She wished he wouldn’t talk to her so gently. It made it harder to stay angry, and she needed her anger. It gave her energy.
“I don’t have to tell you that.”
“Jesus, do you think I’m going to stalk you or something? If I was obsessed with you I could have dragged the divorce out a couple years. It could have been ugly. I didn’t, though, and I don’t remember you saying thank you for that.”
“I’m supposed to thank you for not torturing me with a protracted divorce? Okay. Thank you, Hagen. Thank you very much.”
The pause between her last words and his next words was so long she thought he’d hung up on her. No such luck.
“I was never going to be Will,” Hagen said at last. “And it wasn’t fair of you to expect me to be him.”
“I never expected you to be Will, and I didn’t want you to be Will.”
“Because no one could be Will, right? Except Will, because Will was perfect.”
“Will wasn’t perfect,” Faye said slowly, as if speaking to a child. “No one is perfect. Especially not a man who left dirty dishes under the bed and never cleaned a toilet in his life. But this is what Will was—Will was the man who loved me, all of me, even though I yelled at him and called him a thoughtless child when he almost burned the house down trying to cure a baseball mitt in the oven. He cleaned the oven, he bought me flowers and he told me he was sorry. So no, Will was not perfect. Will was better than perfect. He was too good for this world. The world didn’t deserve him and neither did I.”
In the pit of the night when Faye was alone with her thoughts and her loneliness, she would tell herself that Will was too good for her. It was her only explanation for why he was taken from her. The only explanation that ever made sense.
“Hagen, I know—I do—that you thought by marrying me you were honoring Will, doing what he would have wanted you to do, doing what he would have done in your place. I thought so, too. But it was a mistake.”
“I kept you from killing yourself for nearly four years and you call that a mistake?”
Faye shrugged, shook her head and remembered the night Hagen had taken the pill bottle out of her hand. By the next day every gun, knife and pill in the house had been locked in a safe.
She didn’t have the heart to tell him half the reason she’d had that pill bottle in her hand was because she’d married him.
“Hagen, I really have to go.”
“Can I ask you one thing now that’s it’s all over? One question, one answer. I think you owe me that after four years of marriage and carrying my child and eating my food and sleeping in my bed and living in my house and taking my cock without complaint all that time.”
Faye sighed. She’d been pregnant for a mere six weeks three years ago and Hagen still talked about that lost pregnancy like she’d given birth to a living child who’d died in his arms. He’d lost children. Faye had lost herself. They couldn’t even grieve together.
“Faye?”
“Ask,” she said. “But don’t get pissed at me if you don’t like the answer.”
“Did you ever love me?”
“I tried.” Faye closed her eyes, and twin tears rolled down her cheeks, scalding hot on her cold skin. “I swear I did try.”
“So no?”
“No,” Faye said.
This time when the silence came she knew Hagen had hung up.
Faye hated this part, hated when it hit her full body like she’d been thrown against a wall and nothing could stop her from feeling everything she didn’t want to feel. Her chest ached and her face, too. Her throat tightened like a strong man’s hand was clutched around it, squeezing. Her stomach roiled like boiling water. From her feet to her guts to her heart to her eyes, she ached with pure unadulterated panic. She hadn’t had a panic attack since before Will died. But she remembered this feeling, this vise on her chest, this unbearable urge to run away, to scream, to fly and to fight. She’d tumbled headfirst into the pit, and nothing could get her out of it—not a rope or a pickax or her own bare hands clawing at the dirt walls.
She lowered her head to the steering wheel and squeezed the leather as hard as she could. In her twenties her panic attacks had been triggered by her student loan debt combined with her erratic income from freelancing. One bill could send her spiraling into the cold sweats, nausea and a sense of being choked to death by an invisible hand. Pills helped a little, but nothing helped more than Will putting her on his lap and holding her as he rubbed her back.
“Breathe, babe. In and out,” he’d say, his voice strong and calm as she gasped and swallowed air. “It’s not the end of the world. It only feels that way. We’ll just be poor,” he would say to make her smile. “We’ll live in a cabin in the middle of nowhere with no electricity or running water. We’ll smell horrible. We’ll grow our own food. We’ll have cows and chickens and no TVs. We’ll have so much free time, babe. I don’t even know what we’ll do with all that free time... Wait. I got it. Blow jobs three times a day.”
And Faye would laugh through her tears, which only Will could make her do.
“What about baseball?” she’d asked him.
“Just a game, babe. It’s just a game. You and me, we’re the real thing. Right?”
“Right.” She’d put her head back on his big broad chest and ride out the wave of her panic in his arms.
“Breathe, sweetheart,” Will would say, rocking her like a child. “I’m here, and I love you.”
But he wasn’t here anymore.
And he didn’t love her anymore.
If the dead could love, they had a terrible way of showing it.
But breathe she did—in and out—and sure enough, when she raised her head she saw people walking into the gas station, a little boy racing to beat his sister to the door so he could be the one to hold it open for their mother. A robin pecked at a rotting pretzel on the asphalt. A shiny blue Corvette with Georgia plates pulled in for a fill-up. Life. It was still happening. The world hadn’t ended. Not even her little corner of it.
Once she was back in control of her emotions, Faye started her Prius. As always she was taken aback by how quietly the car ran. She really never knew if it was running until it moved. Same with her—she didn’t know she was alive unless she was moving—so she kept moving.
The phone rang again. Hagen calling back, either to keep fighting or to apologize. She ignored the call, and she also ignored the urge to toss the phone out of the car window into Port Royal Sound.
Faye found Federal Street easily, thanks to her tourist’s map. Father Pat Cahill had said he’d be painting the marshlands, but that didn’t narrow things down much. The entire place was surrounded by marshlands. She drove to the very end of the road; if she’d kept driving she’d drive straight into the water. Although tempting—today especially—Faye imagined with her luck the car would land on a dense patch of swamp, and she’d have a few hours to wait before sinking enough to even get her feet wet. Although she couldn’t think of many good reasons to go on living, she also couldn’t think of any good reasons for dying. So she went on as most people did for want of a viable alternative.
Two beautiful old white houses stood proud and dignified on either side of Federal Street, but only one of them had a man sitting on the lawn in front of an easel. The house he painted was a grand antebellum mansion, three stories, white, red roof, green shutters and a porch one could get lost on without a map and a compass. Before leaving the car, Faye checked her face in the mirror looking for any telltale signs of her recent breakdown. The makeup was an easy fix, but she couldn’t do a thing about the redness in her eyes except hope Father Cahill didn’t notice it. She grabbed her camera bag from the backseat. Might as well get some work done while she was here.
She strode across the lawn toward him, and he turned her way and gave her a broad smile.
“Are you my new patron?” he called out. “If so, I thank you and owe you an apology.”
Faye smiled back. “No apologies necessary. The kid let me have it for twenty-five bucks.”
“Twenty-five? Highway robbery.” He rubbed his palms on his paint-smeared khaki slacks, and then held out his hand to her. She was struck by how much he looked like Gregory Peck in the late actor’s last years. Minus the mustache but still with the glasses. His black T-shirt was as paint riddled as his pants. Did he wipe his paintbrushes on his clothes?
“Thanks for meeting with me, Father Cahill.” He had a nice handshake, firm and friendly.
“Pat, please. And I’m retired, so it’s not like I have a full dance card. Pull up the stool and tell me about yourself.” He didn’t say card, he’d said cahd. She knew she was dealing with an old Boston boy. If Kennedy had lived, this was probably how he would have sounded in his seventies.
He passed her his wooden stool and he sat on the stone bench where he’d set up his paints and brushes.
“Not much to tell. I’m in town for a couple months taking pictures for a fund-raising calendar.”
“I know that calendar well. They preservation society ladies are nice enough to buy my paintings every now and then. Their mission in life is to take pity on old relics.”
Faye laughed. “You’re not an old relic.”
“What makes you think I was talking about me?” He winked at her to show he was kidding. “How’d you swing this gig? You’re not a local. Sound like a damn Yankee to me.”
“Friend got me the job. But you’re not a local, either,” Faye said.
“What gave it away?” he asked.
She smiled. “I’m from New Hampshire. You’re not my first Masshole.”
Pat laughed loudly, a good rich laugh.
“Guilty. I was a pastor here in the midsixties. My first church. Fell in love with the islands back then. Always planned to come back, and here I am.”
“Midsixties? You must have been a baby.”
“I was. Big twenty-seven-year-old baby. God help that dumb do-gooder kid. I was not ready for the South during desegregation. Let me tell you this—anyone nostalgic for the past never lived there.”
“Says the man who is painting a two-hundred-year-old plantation house. Thought you were painting the marshes.”
“Marshlands. That’s the name of the house. The owner wasn’t a planter. He was a doctor. The doctor who discovered a treatment for yellow fever. You discover something that can save lives during an epidemic and you get a free pass to own a nice house.”
“Fair enough,” she said. “It is a gorgeous house.” Faye pulled out her camera and examined it through the viewfinder.
“Light’s not very good today,” he said. “Too overcast. I doubt you’ll get a decent shot. At least in painting I can pretend the sun’s there.”
“I’ll come back tomorrow if the sun’s out. I got some beautiful shots of the Bride Island lighthouse yesterday. A friend took me out on his boat.”
“Yes. It’s very nice.” He didn’t sound as enthusiastic as she’d expect from someone who had painted the lighthouse so lovingly. Very nice? That’s all?
“What can you tell me about the lighthouse?”
“Not much. Only what Ms. Shelby told me. She said it was built to protect ships from the sandbar. Third-order Fresnel lens. Seven-second night mark. Solid white day mark. Decommissioned in, oh, ’45, ’46? It’s been rotting there ever since. That’s about it.”
“Ms. Shelby? You know her?”
“I do. Met her at a party, and she and I had a nice talk. I asked if I could paint it, and she said I could go out there anytime I want as long I stayed out of the lighthouse. It’s not structurally sound anymore. That whole corner of the island is very dangerous.”
“What else is out there?”
“Ms. Shelby prefers to keep the land as pristine as possible. There’s not much out there.” He flicked a fly off his canvas. “Trees. A few houses, but those are on the south side of the island. A barn. Handful of horses and horse trails. A few ruins. A few graves. And then there’s the lighthouse and what’s left of the keeper’s cottage, which isn’t anything but the stone foundation.”
“How did a lighthouse get on private property?”
“The government leased the land from the old owners. Four acres, which is a postage stamp on that island. That was back in the 1800s, when lighthouses were popping up along the coast. After they decommissioned the light in the forties, they left it up. Cheaper to let the elements have it than tear it down. Can I ask what your interest is in the lighthouse?”
Before Faye could answer, a small gray tour bus rattled up the driveway to the Marshlands and stopped. Pat gave a dramatic sigh as it unloaded a batch of tourists onto the lawn.
“Now, before we go into the house,” the pretty young tour guide said, shouting over the murmur of elderly tourists, “let’s walk over to the telescope and take a look at the sound.”
“Every single damn day...” Pat sighed. “I should have found a different mansion to paint.”
“Through the telescope,” the tour guide went on, oblivious to Pat’s annoyance, “you can see the sound side of Seaport Island, or what we locals call Bride Island. It’s an unusual island rich with history. If you look up you’ll see the top of a beautiful white lighthouse peeking through the tree line,” the woman said in her sweet-as-pecan-pie accent. “Pretty as it may be, the lighthouse is closed to the public. The water is notoriously choppy at the north seaside of the island, and more than three dozen people have lost their lives in those waters in the past hundred years—”
“Including the Lady of the Light,” Pat recited along with the tour guide, word for word, not missing a single beat. “Faith Morgan, the lighthouse keeper’s beautiful teenaged daughter...”
“You’ve heard this all before?” Faye asked.
“It’s enough to make a man toss a tour guide into the swamp. That’s her in the painting, by the way.”
“The tour guide?”
“No,” he said. “Faith Morgan.”
“The girl on the pier with the bird? That’s her?”
Pat nodded as he capped a paint tube and dropped it into his gear bag.
“Why did you paint her?” Faye asked. “Why not the Bride of Bride Island? Didn’t she drown, too?”
“The subject picks the artist, not the other way around.”
“That’s not very helpful.”
Pat glanced at her before turning his attention back to his painting.
“I didn’t realize you needed my help,” he said.
Faye sensed she was asking Pat questions he didn’t particularly want to answer.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I know I’m being nosy. I have a reason for asking, I promise.”
“What’s the reason?”
“It’s a stupid reason.”
“Tell me your stupid reason, Faye. You’ve piqued my curiosity.”
“I just... When I saw the painting, I thought she was someone I knew. That’s all.”
He gave her a long searching look.
“Someone you knew. Who?” he asked.
“You’ll laugh.”
“I’d never laugh.”
Faye sighed. She was pretty sure the man would laugh.
“Who did you think the woman in the painting was?” Pat asked, his voice awash with the tender concern that must have served him well in his decades as a priest.
“I thought, maybe... I thought she was me.”
5 (#u5dfc0014-26a7-5683-8c38-2537ef8d0be1)
“Sounds crazy, right?” Faye asked. “You can laugh.”
“I’m not laughing.” He wasn’t. He wasn’t even smiling. Maybe she’d scared him. It kind of looked like she had. “Like I said, that’s Faith Morgan in the painting. She was the old keeper’s girl.”
“I see. So if she was the lighthouse keeper’s daughter,” Faye said, “then who was the lighthouse keeper?”
“A former naval officer by the name of Carrick Morgan manned the light back then. Transferred from the Boston Light to Seaport in the fall of ’20, and his girl, Faith, joined him that next June. I think they say she was seventeen or so.”
Faye felt a mix of relief and embarrassment, all of which must have shown on her face. God, she felt so foolish. Well, she’d been a bigger fool before and survived.
“Never seen you before today,” he continued. “Honest. And even if I had, I’m not that good a painter. There’s a reason I paint landscapes and not portraits.”
He smiled gently. “What on earth made you think she was you?”
“Someone I loved died,” Faye said. “I went to a pier like the one in your painting to spread his ashes. It was cold, and I had on a gray coat. And I walked to the end of the pier holding the urn in my hands. The girl in the painting looks like she’s holding something. And there was this white bird on the pier when I was there. It was just like your painting. All of it. Minus the lighthouse, I mean. God, that does sound crazy.” Faye rubbed her forehead. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry. Anyone would be a little spooked to see a scene from their own life on canvas.”
“And that’s only half of it,” Faye said, laughing at herself.
“Well, let’s go over to the dock and talk about it. I want to hear the other half.”
Faye helped him gather his tools, and she slung her camera over her shoulder. They walked across the lawn in silence to the dock. Faye’s wedges sounded loud and hollow on the faded wood boards as they walked to the end and looked out onto the water. They were silent for a long moment. Faye sensed Pat sizing her up.
“So talk to me, Miss Faye. What are you not telling me?” Pat asked as they stood side by side, elbows resting on the dock’s wooden rail.
“Did you know that lighthouse keeper?” she asked.
“I knew him, yes. Long, long time ago.”
“Can I show you something?” she asked.
“Go right ahead.”
Faye took a printed piece of paper out of her bag and showed it to Pat. “Do you know who this man is?”
“He was much older when I knew him, but I’d know that face anywhere,” Pat said. “That’s Carrick Morgan.”
“Is it? Are you sure?”
“Of course I’m sure.”
Faye went silent a moment. His certainty had scared her.
“Faye?”
“Sorry. Can you maybe tell me more about him?”
“Carrick?” He shrugged. “When I knew him he was retired and living off his navy pension.”
“Interesting name. Irish?”
Pat nodded. “Son of Irish immigrants, named for the village they’d come from.”
“How’d he get the job as lighthouse keeper? I thought the Irish had trouble getting good work.”
“He’d been working at the Boston Light after the war. Carrick was brought down as an assistant keeper, took over as principle keeper when the previous family got transferred.”
“You said his daughter moved in with him,” Faye said. “What about his wife?”
Pat shook his head. “He said he was a widower.”
“But he had a daughter?” Faye asked. Interesting Carrick Morgan “said” he was a widower. Did that mean he wasn’t? Was his daughter illegitimate? That sort of thing didn’t fly back in the 1920s like it did now. Faye could easily imagine a man in a government job trying to protect his daughter from the stain of scandal by lying about his past.
“Where did you find this picture?” Pat asked. He hadn’t stopped staring at the picture since she’d handed it to him. “I’ve never seen it before.”
“I took that picture,” Faye said.
Pat’s brow furrowed. “Not possible. Carrick was dead long before you were born. Died in ’65.”
“It is possible, Pat, because this isn’t Carrick Morgan. This man’s name is Will Fielding.”
“Who?”
“My husband, Pat. My husband, who’s been dead four years.”
“My God...” Pat breathed. His shock was palpable. Faye felt it, too. “They’re twins.”
“Twins born a hundred years apart?”
Pat shook his head in obvious disbelief.
“Pat?”
“I’m sorry,” Pat said. “It’s just...strange. Very strange.”
“Imagine how I feel,” Faye said. “First I see a picture online last night of a man who looks like my dead husband. This morning I see a painting of a woman who looks like me the morning I scattered his ashes. And now I find out they were father and daughter? Oh, and that damn bird is back.” Faye looked up at the overcast sky and shook her head. “I am going crazy.”
“No, you are not, Miss Faye.”
“You sound pretty sure of that,” she said. “Wish I could be.”
She crossed her arms over her chest and faced him.
“Why did you paint her on the pier like that? You wouldn’t have been alive when she died.”
Pat turned and leaned back against the railing of the dock, putting the Marshlands before him and the lighthouse behind him.
“Retirement age for a priest is seventy. Did you know that?” he asked. It wasn’t what she expected him to say, but she trusted he had a reason.
“No. I’m not Catholic.”
“I retired from the Church when I was sixty-four. I should have hung on for six more years, but I couldn’t do it anymore.”
“Why not?”
“I’ve painted all my life. It’s my second religion. A few years ago my hands started shaking when I held anything heavier than five pounds. Then it was four pounds. Three pounds. A priest isn’t supposed to drop the communion wine. I had to take early retirement.”
“I wondered about your painting style. Kind of impressionistic, like Degas.”
“Degas was almost blind at the end. And I can’t hold a pen without it shaking like a leaf. I used to paint in a more realistic style. Impressionism was all that was left to me after the tremor started.”
“Your work is lovely.”
“It wasn’t, in the beginning. It was just awful, embarrassing. Whatever technique I’d developed over the years was gone. I painted like a child. Imagine if someone took your camera from you.”
“They can pry my camera out of my cold dead hands.”
“That’s what I always said about my brushes. But no one had to pry them out of my hands. They fell out.”
“I’m so sorry,” Faye said.
“It was hard to keep my faith after the tremor took the priesthood away from me, took painting away from me. My only two loves. So I went out to the lighthouse with a heavy heart. I had lied to Ms. Shelby, telling her I wanted to paint the lighthouse. But that wasn’t the real plan.”
Faye heard a note of shame in his voice, embarrassment maybe. She pictured herself curled up on the floor of the bathroom, the pill bottle in her hand while she worked up the courage to take off the lid. That was how Hagen had found her. The real plan, Pat had said. Yes, she knew exactly what the real plan had been.
“That would be quite a fall from the top of the lighthouse, wouldn’t it?”
“And onto rocks,” he said. “When the tide’s out, it’s nothing but rocks. A quick drop to a certain death.”
“I’ve been there,” Faye said.
He nodded. “I imagine a widow would know that place all too well.”
“What changed your mind?” she asked.
“The lighthouse. I won’t pretend a miracle happened. No angel stayed my hand. No voice from heaven. The lighthouse has always been a beacon of hope. That’s why you see it so often in Christian art. ‘A city set on a hill cannot be hidden. Nor do people light a lamp and put it under a basket, but on a stand, and it gives light to all...’”
“Very pretty.”
“Matthew 5:15. I suppose it’s a cliché to say I saw the light. But there was a moment, an instant where I thought I saw the lighthouse lamp burning again. Just the sunlight tricking my eyes, I know. But it... I don’t know, it made me feel something I hadn’t felt in years.”
“Hope?”
He nodded. “Hope. Something told me to paint the lighthouse. And when I did paint it, I painted it well. Not like my old style, but not bad. And I painted it again. Eventually I wanted to paint it more than I wanted to throw myself off the top of it.”
“And the lady in the painting? The Lady of the Light? Why did you paint her?”
“Carrick never got over losing Faith. Maybe I just wanted to bring her back to life. The lighthouse gave me my life back. I guess I wanted to return the favor.”
“Pat,” Faye said. “I need to get out to that lighthouse.”
“Bad idea.”
“Why?” she asked.
“That lighthouse is dangerous.”
“You said it saved your life.”
“It could have taken it, too. It’s not safe out there. Some kids went out there a few years ago, got drunk on the beach and drowned when they went for a midnight swim. The lighthouse was there for a reason. There’s the sandbar and one hell of a riptide, too. We already have one Lady of the Light. We don’t need another.”
“How did she get that nickname?”
“People swear they see her sometimes. But lighthouses are notorious for having ghost stories attached to them. Parents use her as a warning, a scare story to keep their kids from breaking into the lighthouse or swimming near that corner of the island. The real story is much sadder. Faith hadn’t been at the lighthouse long. Just a few days. Nobody knows why she went out on the pier at night, but she did. A wave hit hard and high, and she fell into the water.”
“How old was she?”
“I can’t say for sure. A young woman.”
“Where was she before? In school or something?”
“She was with other family members,” Pat said.
“And why did she come down here?”
“A love affair gone wrong,” Pat said. “She was a beauty, they say. But you wouldn’t know anything about that, would you?”
“Stop it.”
“I’d love to paint you. I’d have to get the right purple paint for your eyes. Elizabeth Taylor eyes.”
“Got them from my grandmother. I swear, I think her proudest achievement in life was passing her eye color on to me. She wanted to be Elizabeth Taylor when she was a girl. Even did her hair like hers. Black bouffant even in her sixties.”
“I might have had to go to confession after seeing Father of the Bride as a boy.”
“You know, I can tell when someone is changing the subject. Why don’t you want to talk about Faith Morgan?”
“It’s...” He waved his hand dismissively. “Some things just don’t make sense to me. Priests want things to make sense. She came down here to start a new life. Instead she died. And Carrick never recovered from losing her.”
“Ah,” Faye said, nodding. “Carrick and I have something in common then.”
Pat crossed his arms over his chest. He would have to be seventy-six or seventy-seven if he was twenty-seven in 1965. He didn’t look much over sixty to her. But now he did look older, just for a moment. Faye saw his hands tremble slightly. He clenched his fists, released them, and the tremor was gone.
“Poor girl,” he said. “Had it been today she might have been fine. She had a dress on, a heavy dress, heavy shoes. And she couldn’t swim.”
“A lighthouse keeper’s daughter who couldn’t swim?”
“Women didn’t do a lot of swimming back then. Carrick tried to save her and couldn’t. Jumped in the water, swam after her... Waves got her. Haunted him the rest of his life.”
“It wasn’t his fault.”
“Ah, but Carrick was a lighthouse keeper, a man whose job was keeping people safe. To lose her like that, on his watch...and then to find her body days later.”
Faye held up her hand to stem the tide of his words. She didn’t want to hear any more. She’d been spared seeing Will’s body until they’d cleaned him up at the hospital. And that had been bad enough, the sickening indentation in the side of his forehead, the shaved patch of hair, the crude stitches, the blue-gray pallor of his cold skin, the sheet pulled up to his neck hiding his otherwise perfect corpse from her. But to find the body of your own child...bloated, battered by the current...
“It was the beginning of the end of the lighthouse when Faith died,” Pat said. “Carrick couldn’t keep the light anymore. They merged the Bride Island station with the Hunting Island station and automated the light in 1925, which was a tragedy of its own.”
“How so?”
“Lighthouse keepers did more than just keep the lighthouse. They watched the coast, too, gave aid when necessary, rescued people in distress when called for. In the fall of ’26, a fishing boat broke apart right off Bride Island’s north shore during a storm and all fourteen souls aboard died. If the lighthouse had been manned at the time, those men might have lived. The world needed Carrick’s light but losing Faith... That snuffed it right out.”
Pat took off his glasses, wiping them with the only clean corner of his T-shirt.
“Carrick moved down to Savannah after leaving Charleston. He worked for a shipping company and then the Georgia Port Authority. By his own account it was a long and hard and very lonely life. He came back to Beaufort after he retired just like I did. He said it was the last place he was ever happy.”
“Was he a good man?”
“Too good,” he said. “Too good for this world anyway.”
“Funny,” Faye said, although it wasn’t.
“What is?”
“Today I said exactly the same thing about Will.”
6 (#u5dfc0014-26a7-5683-8c38-2537ef8d0be1)
Faye sat in the living room of Father Pat’s little Duke Street cottage, a pretty fern-green one-story nothing-special sort of house. Nothing special on the outside, but the inside was an art gallery, a Pantone dream. He’d painted every room a different hue—sunflower gold for the kitchen, cornflower blue living room, lagoon-green bathroom. And every wall boasted watercolor paintings of the sea and the sun; every horizontal surface held books on paintings, on how to paint watercolors, on the history of painting. She expected something in the house to give a sign that it belonged to a priest, but there was nothing, not a cross in sight.
Pat got her settled on his sofa and gave her iced tea in a Pilsner glass.
“I’d never guess you were a priest,” she said. “By your house or anything really.”
“Ah, that’s the point. Now show me your husband. You have me intrigued to the point of day drinking.”
Faye opened her laptop and showed Pat both pictures side by side as he sipped at his beer and she her tea. She’d taken an old picture of Will and run it through Photoshop, aging the background, changing the colors. But she hadn’t touched his face, hadn’t changed the way he looked at all. Pat stared at them a long time before closing the lid of her laptop and passing it back to her.
“Okay,” he said. “So I told you about Carrick and Faith. Now you tell me about Will and Faye.”
“I’m a baseball widow. Ever heard of us?”
“I’ve heard of you. Women who say goodbye to their husbands in April and don’t see them again until October?”
“I’m a real baseball widow. My husband was a professional baseball player.”
“What team?”
“When we met Will was playing on a Triple-A team in Rhode Island. I was the local paper’s photographer. One game I took a good picture of him making a double play. You should have seen it. This huge guy barreling toward second base, starting a hard slide, and Will tagging him, one arm in the air for balance and his glove just brushing the guy’s back, inches from the bag.” Faye mimed the move, the image burned into her brain. She’d been a baseball fan all her life and had never seen anything so athletic, so elegant as Will Fielding spinning like a bullfighter to get the out. “The picture ran in the paper with the caption, ‘Olé!’ I didn’t think anything of it other than it was a good shot with lucky timing. But the very next game after the photo ran, Mr. Olé came up to me and thanked me. His teammates had given him the nickname ‘The Matador’ after that. He’d always wanted a good baseball nickname. Hank Aaron was ‘Hammer’ and Ruth was the ‘Sultan of Swat.’ Now he was Will ‘The Matador’ Fielding. He said I’d made his dream come true with that picture. I was supposed to say something to that like, ‘No problem’ or ‘Just doing my job.’ But here was this big, tall wall of pure American maleness. Handsome and brown-eyed and grinning at me, and I ended up saying something like, ‘I will take pictures of anything and everything you want me to.’ And only after the words came out did I realize it sounded like I’d just offered to take naked pics for him. I probably would have had he asked.”
“That handsome?”
“Took my breath away,” Faye said. “But he was a good guy and didn’t ask for naked pics. Instead, he asked me about my work. When the game started he said he’d love to keep talking to me later. That night was our first date. Before Will I dated coffee-shop guys. You know, the skinny intellectuals with the earbuds and the Macs who drink expensive coffee and write thinkpieces for their incredibly boring blogs and magazines? Those guys. Never dated a guy who drank gas-station coffee before, who didn’t own a Mac but did own a grill and a drill. We met in July, got engaged in September and got married the next spring. Sometimes you just know. And we just knew.”
“I’ve known many a couple who just knew. A priest has to believe in love. It’s part of our job.”
“The day after Will asked me to marry him, he hit two home runs. He said I must be his good-luck charm, and who needed a rabbit’s foot when he had me? He called me Bunny sometimes, and you better believe he was the one man on earth who could call me Bunny and live to tell the tale.”
“I can tell you loved him,” Pat said.
“God, I loved him.” She blinked back her tears. “Will was one of the last good guys. The really good guys. Good inside and out. His dad worked at Jiffy Lube and his mother was a hospice nurse so...definitely not the most exalted of origin stories. But it was meant to be. You don’t grow up with the name Will Fielding without being destined to be a baseball player. And even when he was in the minors making less than minimum wage and living in cramped buses and roach motels, four players to a room, he felt like the luckiest man on earth. I can hear him in my head right now. ‘Babe, think about it—who gets to do what I do? Play baseball for a job? What’s next? Pay me to eat candy and sleep with you?’ He’d say that all the time with this look on his face like, ‘Really? Me?’ He never once thought he deserved it. He was just happy to be there. And he made me so happy.”
“I bet you made him happy, too.”
“I tried. And you know what? I did. I did make him happy. And it was my pleasure to do it. I hate sports puns, but Will was out of my league. I was as happy to be his wife as he was happy to be a ballplayer.”
“You’re the prettiest lady I’ve set eyes on in a long time. You aren’t out of any man’s league.”
“You’re sweet to say that, but it’s not what I meant. I don’t mean looks. I mean...before Will I was self-centered. Not in any way that anyone else isn’t self-centered. When you’re single, you don’t have to think about anyone else, and I didn’t. I couldn’t. I was broke, in student loan debt, worked constantly. But then Will came along, and I watched him spending his very few days off at children’s hospitals visiting sick kids and helping out underprivileged Little League teams. That was Will. You have any idea how grueling life is in the minors? He never once complained. He said a ballplayer complaining about road trips and sore shoulders was like a rich man complaining he had to hire an accountant to count all his money. I’ve been a feminist my whole life, independent. I went to an Ivy League school. I paid my own bills. I knew even if we had kids I’d never quit my working to be a stay-at-home mom. And you know what?”
“Tell me,” Pat said, looking her straight in the eyes.
“I’d give up the right to vote just to do one more load of Will’s dirty laundry.”
She laughed at herself—better to laugh than to cry again.
“I promise I won’t tell Gloria Steinem on you,” Pat said with a wink.
Faye laughed even harder at that.
“Will had these baseball T-shirts,” she said, trying to compose herself. “So many baseball T-shirts. Every team you could think of. Two weeks after he died I found a Bronx Bombers shirt in a bag under the bed. Can you imagine? A kid who grew up on the Sox with a Yankees shirt? Goddamn it, Will.”
Those stupid baseball T-shirts, they were all he wore when he wasn’t naked or in his uniform. The single time she’d seen him in a suit was at their wedding. Those shirts... He had so many of them she’d wash them all in one load. Laundry was sorted into whites, darks, towels and baseball shirts. She’d given the shirts away after he died to relatives and close friends who needed something of his. She’d kept one for herself—the soft heather-gray one with the big red B on the front that Will had worn on their first date. That was the one she’d always slept in when he was on his road trips. She didn’t sleep in it anymore. Crying oneself to sleep only worked in the movies.
Pat handed her a handkerchief and pressed it to her burning cheeks.
“Sorry about the ‘goddamn it.’ I shouldn’t swear in front of a priest.”
“You must not know any priests. You can say whatever the hell you want. Trust me—I’ve heard worse. Said worse, too.”
“Thank you,” she whispered, slowly bringing herself back under control. “Will really looked good in his T-shirts. Had the arms for them. Gotta say, there are a lot of perks to being married to an athlete. Having the sexiest husband at the beach was one of them, and I’m shallow enough to admit that.” She laughed again, remembering...remembering... “Will had this great baseball player walk. It wasn’t like a strut, more like an amble. This loose-in-the-hips amble. When he was leaving the house to go on a road trip, I’d always tell him, ‘I hate to see you go, but I love to watch you walk away.’ I didn’t know the last time I watched him walk away would be, you know, the last time I watched him walk away. If I’d known, I would have stared at his ass longer.”
Faye laughed again and cried again. Her body ached for Will. She could talk about his T-shirts but what she really missed was his body. The way he smelled after a game—sweat and leather. The way he picked her up and threw her into bed like a rag doll just because he could. The way he made love to her. He was twenty-three when they met and had just broken up with his high school sweetheart, the only girl he’d been with before her. But during sex he made her feel like she was the only woman in the world, and he was the lucky schmuck who got to have her. For a long time she had to think of Will to orgasm during sex with Hagen. That wasn’t something she had told anyone. Widows might as well be nuns for the careful way people treated them. What would people think if they knew what she missed most about her late husband was the sex? The hard-core full-body, full-soul, all-in, nothing-held-back sort of sex you could have with someone who knew everything about you. Will filled her up and emptied her out and gave her what she needed. And what she needed was him, just him, but all of him.
“I should be ashamed of myself for how much I miss having sex with him. Kind of shallow, I guess.”
“Taking pleasure in your own husband doesn’t make you shallow. I know a lot of husbands who wish their wives saw them like that.”
“Will was one of those guys born for heavy lifting and getting stuff off the top shelf. He made me feel small, and he made me feel safe, and it takes a special kind of man to make a woman feel both at the same time. One day I teased him that I heard ‘Like a Rock’ by Bob Seger automatically start playing when he walked into a room, and at the very next game, they played that as his walk-up song.” Faye laughed. Will had always looked for a way to make her smile. Even now, even through the tears, here she was smiling because of him.
“He sounds like one in a million.”
“He was. And we were so happy it doesn’t even seem real now. As good as it was, it somehow managed to get even better. I found out I was pregnant the same week Will got called up to the majors. Which meant, of course, I got called up, too. I was officially a WAG.”
“WAG? What on earth?”
“WAGs. Wives and Girlfriends of pro athletes,” Faye said.
“I see,” Pat said. “We don’t get to have those in the priesthood. At least, we’re not supposed to.”
Faye grinned as she wiped her face. “Probably for the best,” she said. “A couple days after Will went to Boston, I got invited to a WAG party at the house of one of the pitcher’s wives. Nice women, but every last one of them warned me my life was about to change, and not for the better. So many women told me about the jobs they’d had to quit, the dreams they’d had to give up for their husbands’ careers. And if I wanted to keep doing my little photography thing, they said, I should probably save it for the off-season, treat it like a hobby. I thought they’d be happy when I told them I was expecting. I just got this look like...”
Faye mimed the look of disapproval.
“I had committed the cardinal WAG sin,” Faye continued. “I was going to give birth during the season.”
“Shameful,” Pat said. “How dare you? I shouldn’t laugh, but...”
“You can laugh. Will did. He rolled his eyes so hard I thought they’d fall out of his head. He told me...” Faye paused, caught her breath. “He told me he would quit baseball before he missed the birth of our child. And he would never ever forgive me if I let his dreams get in the way of my own. He said the day I put down my camera, he would put down his bat and glove. He made me promise I would never give up my work for his. And if you were wondering why I said he was the best man who ever lived, that’s the reason.”
“He’s giving Carrick a run for his money.”
“There are no words for how happy Will was, how happy we both were. Then I went to shoot some pictures for a project I was working on, and Will went out to buy flowers to surprise me when I got back. On the way home, he sees two guys on the side of the road trying to change a flat. This was Will’s area. Son of a mechanic. He helped more stranded drivers than AAA. But they weren’t stranded drivers. They were a carjacking team. They went for the car, and Will tried to stop them. One of them hit him in the head with the tire iron. He died on the operating table from a rapid intracranial hemorrhage. They killed my beautiful husband for drug money and a 2005 Ford Focus.”
Faye exhaled and leaned back on Pat’s sofa, her hands on her face, trying to stifle the animal howl of grief welling up within her. A gentle hand touched her knee, and she grabbed Pat’s hand and held it like her life depended on it. She breathed through it—In and out, babe. The world’s not ending—and slowly found her voice again.
“He’d been in the majors all of one month. Batted .364. Best September of our lives. I’m always a wreck in September now. And I can’t even watch baseball anymore.”
Pat bowed his head and she wondered if he were praying for her. She’d take any help she could get.
“The police got the guys who killed him. Even got the car back. But they couldn’t bring me my husband back. I had that car, though. That stupid car.”
Pat clasped his hands between his knees and sighed. “If there’s anything fifty years in the priesthood taught me, it’s that I can’t say a damn thing to make you feel better right now.”
“At least you know that. ‘Everything happens for a reason’ sure doesn’t cut it.”
“Everything does happen for a reason. Sometimes it’s a bad reason.”
“Sounds like my second marriage,” she said, sitting up again, wiping at her face and then giving up. Too many tears, not enough tissues in the world. “After the funeral, Will’s best friend from college, Hagen, started hanging around our place all the time. It was nice. It helped, it really did. He said it was what Will would have done. And then a couple weeks later, he sat me down and told me he thought we should get married. It wasn’t much of a proposal. More like an escape plan. Like this would solve all my problems. I thought he’d lost his mind. Then Hagen said the magic words again—‘It’s what Will would have done.’”
“Was it?” Pat asked.
“If it had been Hagen who’d died, Hagen with a pregnant wife left behind, Will would have stepped in and been a father to that kid. So Hagen and I got married. Hagen had money, a big house. He told me I could have my own room, that he wouldn’t expect me to act like his wife until I was ready for it. Sounds like the beginning of a beautiful romance, doesn’t it? Hollywood thought so, too. A story ran in the Boston Globe about Will and me and Hagen, and the next day a producer called and said he’d already talked to a screenwriter about putting Will’s Cinderella story on the big screen—nobody kid from Nowhere, Mass, drafted in the forty-first round, ends up playing for the Red Sox. And it would end with me giving birth to Will’s baby. Triumph out of tragedy. Whatever. I talked to them because you go crazy when you’re grieving like that. And I just wanted Will to be remembered. Then I lost the baby at sixteen weeks and they stopped calling. Not even Hollywood could give me a happy ending.”
She didn’t tell Pat about the years of trying to get pregnant that came after losing Will’s baby. She could barely face her grief over losing Will. If she had to grieve for those lost years, she’d never make it out of this house in one piece. And Hagen? She couldn’t talk about Hagen, how once she’d lost the baby, he’d turned into a ball of quiet anger, like it had been her fault she’d lost the last part of Will left in the world.
Faye took a shuddering breath and forced herself to drink her tea. Crying so hard had given her dry mouth, and her throat felt like it had been dragged down a gravel road.
“I promise I’m not vomiting this whole story onto you for the fun of it,” Faye finally said, carefully lowering her glass to her knee. It left a wet ring on her white jeans, but she didn’t care. “I’m just so...freaked out, I guess. And I don’t even know why. So what? So Will and Carrick Morgan looked alike. What does it mean? Nothing. I know it means nothing. I’ve seen those internet clickbait stories where they show celebrities who look like people who’ve been dead for a hundred years. It happens. There are only so many faces in the world, I guess. But it feels like it means something. Do I sound crazy? You can tell me if I do. I can take it. Oh, and I think a stork is stalking me. Yeah, I sound crazy. I can hear it.”
“My job entailed me turning wine into God’s blood, so I don’t think I can judge you too harshly. I’m an open-minded spiritual man by trade.”
“I appreciate you listening to me. I can’t talk to anyone about Will. Hagen and I are divorced, and we can’t talk about anything anymore without it turning into a fight. Will’s parents are doing better than I am. They have grandkids from Will’s sister, and those kids are their whole life now. Every time I visit them, his mom has a breakdown and it takes weeks for her to get back on her feet again. I stopped talking to Will’s family two years ago. Too hard on all of us.”
“And your parents?”
“Dad died. Mom has dementia. I was an oops baby when they were both forty.”
“Friends?”
Faye shook her head. “I had friends. They were great until the funeral. After that, they had their own lives, and nobody knows what to say to a twenty-six-year-old widow. Will’s friends and teammates weren’t thrilled with me for getting married again so soon after he died. The medical bills and funeral expenses wiped out the life insurance. There I was, almost broke with student-loan debt up to my eyeballs and pregnant. I ran out of shoulders to cry on a long time ago.”
“You’re Lady Job,” Pat said with a sorrowful smile.
“Who?”
“Job, in the Bible. A very old Jewish story, very strange and mystical. You’ve heard the phrase ‘the patience of Job’?”
“Oh, that guy. Yes, I’ve heard of him. I don’t know if I’ve ever read the story.”
“Odd little book, but some of the loveliest poetry in the Bible. A man named Job has a wife, children and wealth. And he’s a good man. Satan goes to God and makes a sort of bet with him, saying that Job is only good because he’s blessed, but if you take his blessings away, he won’t be righteous anymore. God takes him up on that bet and wipes out Job’s entire family, his wealth and his health. He’s literally sitting in ashes using potsherds to scrape the sores off his body.”
“Oh, my God, that’s disgusting. Even I didn’t have it that bad.”
Pat laughed. “I told you it was a strange little book. But it does have a happy ending. Job keeps his faith in God, though he demands God explain himself.”
“Does he?”
“God shows up and gives the ‘who do you think you are?’ speech to end all speeches. The short version is basically ‘I am God. You’re not, so stuff it.’”
“Very poetic.”
Father Pat smiled but didn’t laugh. He took a breath and met her eyes.
“‘Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? Declare if thou hast understanding. Who hath laid the measures thereof, if thou knowest? Or who laid the cornerstone thereof, when the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy? Or who shut up the sea with its doors, when it brake forth, as if it had issued out of the womb? Hast thou entered into the springs of the sea? Or hast thou walked in search of the depth? Have the gates of death been opened unto thee?’”
Pat stopped and sighed. “It goes on like that for a long time. God wanted to make sure Job got the point.”
“That’s beautiful,” Faye breathed. “What does it all mean?”
“It means a lowly man may never understand the ways of God.”
“And you find that comforting?” she asked.
“A little. If lowly little me could understand God, then he wouldn’t be much of a God, right?”
“I guess,” Faye said.
“I do find this comforting, though—even after God tells Job off, he restores him. New wife. Children. Even more children than he’d lost. Twice as much wealth. And a life so long he meets his great-grandchildren.”
“If only,” Faye said.
“Yes,” Pat said. “If only.”
Faye wiped her face with Pat’s handkerchief again. She didn’t know many men who still carried handkerchiefs. Will always had—a red bandanna in his back pocket just like his dad.
“When Will and I got married, we did all the usual wedding vows. Love, honor, cherish, until death do us part. But that wasn’t good enough for Will. He added one more vow. He said...” She stopped to breathe even though it hurt to breathe, but she kept on doing it. Will would have wanted her to. “He said, ‘Come heaven or hell or high water, I will love you and take care you of you as long as you live, Faye.’ I asked him, ‘Don’t you mean as long as you live?’ He said no. He wasn’t interested in till death do us part. Even if he went first, he would find a way to take care of me. I treasure that vow. I hold it right here,” she said, touching her chest over her heart. “But I’m still waiting for him to keep it.”
Faye squeezed Pat’s hands again. He had nice hands, a younger man’s hands. A painter’s hands even if they did tremble.
“You can’t go back, you know,” Faye said.
“Go back where?” Pat asked.
“Once someone loves you that much, loves you more than you deserve, you can’t go back to being loved the normal way,” she said. “You ever been loved like that?”
“Only by my creator.”
“Pat, I have to tell you something else crazy,” she whispered.
“Tell me something crazy.”
“I think I’m supposed to go the lighthouse,” she said. “I think... I don’t know. I feel like someone wants me out there.”
“What do you hope to find there?” Pat asked, and Faye could tell he really wanted her to think about it before answering. So she thought about it and admitted she didn’t know the answer.
“I don’t want to see any ghosts, and I know Will’s not going to be there waiting for me. But it feels like I’ve had a nightmare, and if I got out there, I’ll wake up and know it was all a dream. I just... Maybe it would help me. Like it helped you.”
Pat took a steadying breath and nodded his head.
“All right. I’ll get you there. But if Ms. Shelby’s out there and catches you, you don’t know me, right?”
“Right. Promise. Never met you.”
“And you have to swear to me you’ll be careful. That lighthouse is old, and the water there is choppy as hell. It’s more dangerous out there than you can imagine. You swear you’ll be safe?”
“I swear,” she said.
“You swear you’ll stay out of the water?” he asked.
“I swear,” she said again. He gave her a long, searching look, then sighed like he knew he was wasting his time. Pat got a sheet of paper and scribbled a little map for her and walked her through the steps of how to find the road with the bridge, what turns to take and when to take them.
“Good enough?” he asked.
“Perfect,” Faye said, folding up the map and shoving it into her back pocket. “Thank you. I should go. I haven’t eaten much today, and I know I’ve taken up way too much of your time.” Faye’s head throbbed from hunger and crying so hard. She’d lost control of herself, something she rarely did. She didn’t want to lose it again in front of this kind old man.
“You made my day, young lady. Beautiful woman in my house? The neighbors are loving this. They can’t wait to find out what I’ve been up to with you in here.”
“Keeping me from having a nervous breakdown.”
“That’s not a very sexy rumor. We’ll have to do better than that.”
“I’m sure you’ll come up with something good. Feel free to ruin my reputation. I wasn’t using it anyway.”
“Count on it.” He helped her to her feet.
Before letting her leave, Pat pulled a small red book off his shelf and pressed it into her hands.
“Take this,” he said.
“What is it?”
“It’s a prayer book, a very special one,” Pat said.
“I’m not really religious.”
“I’m not giving it to you because I want to convert you. But I think you should have it. Please.”
“Are you going to pray for me?”
“For you. For Will. And for Hagen.”
“For Hagen?”
“Ex-husbands are people, too,” he said.
“If you say so,” she said and smiled.
He kissed her goodbye on the cheek and held her hand.
“I hope you find what you’re looking for, Faye,” he said. “But if you don’t find it...”
“I’ll be okay.”
“Just stay out of the water,” Pat said again. “Please.”
Faye promised him faithfully she would and then took her leave.
By the time Faye made it back to the Church Street house, she felt almost human again. She took a long shower, ate some homemade spaghetti with Miss Lizzie and another girl staying at the house that summer. Afterward she went up to her room to upload her pictures from the Marshlands.
As she suspected, most of the pictures were a bust. Maybe she could salvage a couple she’d taken off the dock for a stock photo site, but they wouldn’t do for the calendar. It was what it was. She’d get back to work tomorrow.
Although it was barely seven o’clock, Faye was already sprawled in bed wearing nothing but her black silk robe. Her summer robe, a gift from Hagen. A thoughtful gift. Pretty and practical. She could say that much for Hagen; he gave good gifts. They’d skipped dating, being engaged, but at their wedding he’d given her a band and a four-carat diamond engagement ring. Both were in her makeup bag. If she ran out of money, she’d have them to pawn.
An old Catholic prayer book, on the other hand, might be the oddest gift anyone had ever given her. She’d read it maybe. Who knew? She might find the perfect prayer for her. A prayer for a widow who had remarried too soon and had lost her late husband’s baby. Perhaps the generic “Prayer for Someone Suffering” would cover all that. Faye turned to the back where the index should be and found some handwriting in pen on a page.
The handwriting looked as old as the book, and the book, according to the title page, was printed in 1954. The ink was faded but the script neat and sturdy.
Lord, I give Thee thanks that Thou didst die upon the cross for my sins. Forgive me the blood on my hands. Forgive me the life I took and wash the blood from my hands and the stain of sin from my soul. Thou art infinite in mercy. Shower Thy mercy upon Thy son.
And the prayer was signed.
It was signed “Carrick Morgan.”
Faye sat straight up in bed.
This was Carrick Morgan’s prayer book? The lighthouse keeper?
Faye’s hands shook as she gingerly laid the book open on her lap and traced his words with her fingertip. Carrick Morgan had a beautiful signature, an old-fashioned, elegant script. She should have guessed he was Catholic, being of Irish stock. The prie-dieu in her room... Had he carved that himself? And he prayed for forgiveness and for mercy because he took someone’s life. He’d killed someone. Who? Father Pat had owned this book for years. Carrick Morgan himself must have given it to him. Pat would have known about the prayer for forgiveness, and yet he’d called Morgan the best man he’d ever known. It made no sense. None of it did. Staring at Carrick Morgan’s words in the prayer book made it impossible for Faye to sit still in her room and wait for tomorrow. It felt like an alarm was blaring somewhere and she had to go to the lighthouse to find a way to turn it off. It was growing dark, too dark for pictures. But this wasn’t about the photographs anymore.
Faye dug through her suitcase for a clean top and spied her little jewelry bag under her black tank top. When she opened it she found Will’s old college championship ring that he’d given her right after they started dating. “Does this mean we’re going steady now?” she’d said, teasing him. She’d worn the ring on a necklace until they’d gotten married and he’d slipped a wedding band on her finger—one that fit.
Though she no longer wore it, Faye treasured the ring. She wouldn’t pawn it, not if she were starving. The ring was white gold with a blue stone in it, Will’s name and a baseball insignia emblazoned on both sides. It comforted her to look at it, to hold it. She slipped it over her thumb and felt calmer in an instant. Here was the reason her marriage to Hagen had been so hard. It wasn’t that she’d had to pretend to be in love with Hagen. It was that she’d had to pretend she wasn’t in love with Will. She didn’t have to pretend anymore.
“I love you, Will,” she whispered, then kissed the ring for luck.
Faye pulled on her jeans and T-shirt, grabbed her camera bag and her car keys and headed out. Earlier that day Pat had asked her what she thought she’d find at the lighthouse. She hadn’t known the answer then, but she knew it now.
She went to the lighthouse for the same reason anyone went to a lighthouse.
She went because she needed the light.
7 (#u5dfc0014-26a7-5683-8c38-2537ef8d0be1)
Faye had to Google directions to find her way to where Pat’s map began. After one wrong turn on Hunting Island, she righted herself. She crossed the one-lane bridge, which was green with old paint and red with fresh rust. On the other side of the bridge she found a gate unlocked and standing wide-open. She usually wasn’t the sort of person who believed in things like “signs,” but usually she didn’t see photographs of men who’d been dead since the sixties who looked just like her husband. The gate being open was either a sign the universe wanted her on the island tonight or, more likely, a sign someone had forgotten to close it. Either way, here she was.
As she crossed over onto the island, Faye’s heart started a steady march through her chest with the feet of a thousand soldiers pounding the pavement. She could see it now—the cops would show up, arrest her for trespassing, and then she’d have to call Hagen to come and bail her out. She’d rather spend the night in jail than call him for help.
She drove slowly down the tree-lined path, the branches of the oaks forming a tunnel. Low-hanging branches scratched her car roof, and she winced. There wasn’t any money for a new paint job, so she better take care of the one she had. She wished she had some idea of where this road led—south beach or north beach or straight into a swamp? Pat’s map didn’t help much. The dense tree canopy threw off her usually strong sense of direction. Behind her she saw the last rays of the setting sun through a break in the treetops. The sun set in the west, which meant she needed to take a left to go north. She found a narrow road and turned onto it. Pat hadn’t exaggerated when he’d said the island contained nothing but trees. Faye saw no houses, no ponds, no street signs, no flowers. Only a few dirt horse trails, and a gravel road here and there and the trees.
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Tiffany Reisz
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Фэнтези про драконов
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
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О книге: From the bestselling author of The Bourbon Thief comes a sweeping tale of loss and courage, where one woman discovers that her destiny is written in sand, not carved in stone.Faye Barlow is drowning. After the death of her beloved husband, Will, she cannot escape her grief and most days can barely get out of bed. But when she′s offered a job photographing South Carolina′s storied coast, she accepts. Photography, after all, is the only passion she has left.In the quaint beach town, Faye falls in love again when she sees the crumbling yet beautiful Bride Island lighthouse and becomes obsessed with the legend surrounding The Lady of the Light–the keeper′s daughter who died in a mysterious drowning in 1921. Like a moth to a flame, Faye is drawn to the lighthouse for reasons she can′t explain. While visiting it one night, she is struck by a rogue wave and a force impossible to resist drags Faye into the past–and into a love story that is not her own.Fate is changeable. Broken hearts can mend. But can she love two men separated by a lifetime?