“I have to do it. I’ll be all right. I’m just…” She shook her head. “You know how nuts you can get in the middle of the night.” She lay down again and snuggled next to him, and it was another minute before she spoke again.

“Let me just ask you something, though,” she said. “Hypothetically.”

“Mmm?”

“If I died, how long would you wait before you started going out with someone?”

“Annie. Cancel the damn surgery.”

“No. I mean it, Alec. Tell me. How long?”

He was quiet for a moment, aware of how quickly he could lose her. She could, in a perfectly voluntary surgery, leave him forever. He pulled her closer. “I can’t imagine ever wanting to be with anyone else,” he said.

“You mean, sexually?”

“I mean period.”

“Well, God, I wouldn’t want you to be alone forever. But if I did die, would you wait a year please? I mean, that’s not too long to grieve for someone you completely and thoroughly adore, is it? That’s all I ask. Then you can do whatever you like, although it would be nice if you could think of me from time to time, and find your new woman lacking in almost every way.”

“Why not in every way?” he asked, smiling. “Go for broke, Annie.” He raised himself up on his elbow and kissed her. “Maybe we’d better make love one last time since you already seem to have a foot out the door.” He slipped his hand to her breast, but she caught his fingers.

“You didn’t promise yet, Alec,” she said. “Just one year. Please?”

“I’ll give you two,” he said, certain then that it was a promise he would have no trouble at all keeping.

She felt better in the morning, a cheery optimism replacing her maudlin mood. Alec, however, felt worse, as though she had transferred her fear to him. By the time they boarded the plane for Chicago on Tuesday, he was sick with nervousness. He sat with his head flat against the seatback, trying to ignore the nausea pressing in on him, while Annie held his hand and rested her head on his shoulder. She read him the article she’d torn from the Beach Gazette that morning, the article describing her trip to Chicago, yet another one of Annie O’Neill’s saintly deeds.

She had to stay in the hospital the night before the surgery and Alec took a room in the hotel across the street. He watched television the entire night. If he fell asleep he might miss the alarm, and Annie would be taken into the OR before he’d have a chance to see her.

He walked over to the hospital before dawn and went into her room as soon as they would let him. She looked beautiful, her hair falling around her shoulders, a smile of contentment on her face.

“Oh, Alec.” She reached for his hand. “You didn’t sleep.”

“Yes, I did,” he lied.

She shook her head. “You have circles under your eyes. You look awful.”

He tried to smile. “Thanks.”

The nurse came in, telling them it was time for Annie to be wheeled to the operating room. Alec leaned over to kiss her, leaving his lips on hers for a long time. When he pulled away she whispered, “Don’t be scared.” They wheeled her out of the room and he struggled to keep his tears and his terror in check as he watched her disappear down the hall.

The surgery went smoothly, and Annie was practically euphoric by the time he saw her back in her room.

“My first thought when I came out of the anesthetic was, ‘I’m alive!’” she told him with a tired smile. “I was sick as a dog. It was wonderful.”

Sitting on the plane was not easy for her. She fidgeted, adjusting her seat belt in an effort to get comfortable, but she didn’t utter a word of complaint.

“I’ve been thinking,” she said, when they were somewhere over Virginia. “There are some changes I want to make about us.”

“Like what?” he asked.

“We need more time together.”

“Fine,” he said.

“I propose that we meet for lunch one day a week.”

“Okay.”

“A two-hour lunch,” she said. “In a motel.”

He laughed. “I see.”

“I really need this, Alec.” She rested her head on his shoulder. “We never get time away together, without the kids around. It’s so important. It’s more important than you know, than I can possibly explain to you.”

They met on Fridays, from twelve to two, in any motel that would take them. In the winter it was easy to find a room, but during the summer, they paid an exorbitant price for the privilege of two hours in a prime-season motel. By that time, though, Alec knew those couple of hours were worth any amount of money. The intimacy they shared in the motel rooms spilled over to the other days of the week, and he saw a change in Annie. Her occasional moodiness, her periods of withdrawal, completely disappeared. Amazing that two hours a week could change so much.

“I’ve never been happier in my entire life than I’ve been this past year,” she told him. They’d been meeting for well over a year by then, and her contentment was so complete that when the depression took hold of her late in the fall, it was impossible to miss. She grew nervous. Jumpy. She was tearful when they made love on those afternoons in the motel room, quiet as they ate the lunch she’d brought. She avoided his eyes when she spoke to him. Sometimes she’d cry for no reason at all. He’d find her weeping in the bathroom as she soaked in the tub, or he’d wake up in the middle of the night to hear her crying softly into her pillow. It seemed far worse than the other times, or maybe it was just that it had been so long since he’d seen that misery in her.

“Let me in, Annie,” he’d say to her. “Let me help.” But she seemed no more aware of the reason for her distress than he was, and so he settled for holding her close to him, for trying to still her trembling with his arms.

Then suddenly, she was gone. In the hospital that Christmas night, he’d remembered his promise to her and it had seemed ludicrous to him that she’d asked him to grieve for only one year. He couldn’t imagine ever being interested in another woman. A year seemed no longer than one rotation of the lighthouse beacon.

Until he met Olivia, a woman as unlike Annie as a woman could be. She’s a friend, he told himself now as he coasted gently on the glider. She’s married to another man and carrying that man’s child.

Maybe he should call her earlier in the evening, before he got into bed, the bed that still seemed filled with Annie’s presence. Maybe he shouldn’t call her at all.



CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO


Tom Nestor helped Olivia load the bags of magazines and paperbacks into the trunk of her car after her lesson that Saturday. The Manteo Retirement Home wasn’t far from the Battered Women’s Shelter, and since she was volunteering there tonight, she thought it was about time she made good on her promise to get the magazines out of the studio.

“Thanks for doing this,” Tom said.

“I meant to take them long before now,” Olivia said as she got in behind the steering wheel.

“Hey, Olivia,” he said, giving her shoulder a squeeze through the window. “The panel’s a real peach.”

She smiled at him and then glanced down at the panel she’d finally completed that morning, a geometric blend of colored and clear glass that was pretty enough to hang in one of her windows—one of the windows Paul would be unlikely to see if he stopped by the house.

She drove into Manteo and parked across the street from the retirement home, directly in front of a small antique shop. Her eyes were drawn to the sidewalk in front of the little shop, where three antique dolls dressed in satin and lace sat on three splintery old wicker chairs. This must be where Annie had bought her daughter’s birthday gifts. She would have to tell Alec.

She got out of the car and shaded her eyes to look at the retirement home. It was a lovely old house, painted sky-blue with sparkling white trim. A broad porch ran its entire width. From the street, Olivia could see that several of the front windows were filled with stained glass panels, no doubt made and donated by Saint Anne.

She lugged the bags out of the trunk of the Volvo and walked across the street and up the sidewalk to the house. Although she’d been out of her air-conditioned car for only seconds, she was already perspiring. It was the hottest day of the summer so far and there was no breeze at all.

About a dozen sturdy-looking white rocking chairs lined the porch, but only a couple of them were occupied—one by a shriveled old woman who looked too frail to be sitting out side in the heat, the other by a white-haired woman wearing sneakers and holding a newspaper on her lap.

“Hello, there, young lady,” the woman in sneakers said as Olivia started up the steps. “You’re bringing us some magazines?”

Olivia set the bags down on the top step and shaded her eyes again. The woman sat clear-eyed and stick-straight in the rocker, but this close up, Olivia could see she was quite old, her face lined and leathery. Someone had carefully trimmed and shaped her short white hair.

“Yes,” Olivia said. “Is there someone inside I should leave them with?”

“Sandy’s in there.”

“Eh?” The second woman leaned forward, and the woman in sneakers spoke loudly into her ear.

“She’s brought us magazines, Jane, you know, like Annie used to do?”

Jane gave a slight nod before leaning back in her chair again and closing her eyes.

“You knew Annie?” Olivia stepped under the porch roof, out of the sun.

“Indeed I did.” The woman held out one long-boned hand to Olivia. “I’m Mary Poor, keeper of the Kiss River Lighthouse.”

Olivia smiled and shook her hand, struck by the strength in the woman’s slender fingers. “I’m delighted to meet you, Mrs. Poor. My name’s Olivia Simon.”