A Charmed Place (33 page)

She heard the screen door whack closed and turned to her brother. The recklessness that seemed to be part and parcel of being in love with Dan Hawke seized her once more. "That's my fiancé you just threw out," she said triumphantly. "You'd better hope he doesn't take it personally."

George looked shocked, as if she'd announced she was marrying Jack the Ripper, and then he glanced at her finger.

"We haven't bought the ring yet," she explained. "But we will."

"Bullshit."

Maddie knew that upstairs, Claire was wearing their grandmother's ring, an exquisite diamond and sapphire affair. But Claire's ring—alas—had come with George attached. All in all, Maddie would rather have Dan at her side and a cigar band around her finger.

Her happy, punchy mood was lost on George. He scowled and said, "If you think Mother is going to stand for this, you're crazy. Do you have any idea how outraged she'll be?"

The trouble was, Maddie did have an idea. Some of her bravado evaporated.

"George, George, let it go," she pleaded in an entirely different tone. "It was such a long time ago. Claire told you what Dad said after they watched Dan on TV. If Dad forgave him, why can't you? What gives
you
the right to act as judge, jury, and hangman?"

Her brother became tight-lipped. "That son of a bitch wrecked Dad's career and now he makes more money than Dad could ever dream of—"

"But Dad wouldn't care!"

"He makes more money than
I
ever will, goddammit! And I
do
care!"

And that, at bottom, was what George was all about: money. Who had it, and how they got it. If Dan had inherited it, George wouldn't have blinked an eyelash. But Dan had earned it, by virtue of his skill, wit, and personality. And for that he would never be forgiven.

Maddie looked deeply into her brother's blue eyes for some small sign of relenting, if not right then, then later. On their wedding day, perhaps
... or if God let them have a child
... or on their silver anniversary. As long as it was someday.

But she came up empty.

"I'm so sorry you feel that way, George," she said, feeling him slip away from her outstretched hand. "You know that I love you, and I love Claire, and I love your unborn child. I want us all to stay a family. But I want, more than anything, that you accept Dan into it."

She turned and walked halfway up the old, worn steps, and then she paused and looked down at her brother. She saw the top of his balding head, the first cruel hint of the mortality that lay in wait for him and them all.

"I'm so, so sorry you feel that way, George," she whispered again.

But George had nothing to say.

The first crack of thunder was absorbed into his dream, a harrowing flashback to his months in
Afghanistan
. He was in
a hamlet just west of the
Khyber Pass
when a box of munitions stolen by rebels from an Army depot exploded, sending
a
storage shed near him sky high.

The second crack of thunder was worse. It turned into the bullet that
barely
grazed the back of
his head—fired by a Taliban thug
with a rotten aim.

But it was the third crack of thunder that woke Hawke up, because the third crack of thunder brought rain: sheets of it, wild and furious, driving against the lightkeeper's house, forcing itself through the window screen and bouncing off the sill onto Hawke's face as he dreamed.

He sat up in his bed, relieved that he was holed up in a lighthouse and not still tagging after a rebel band, and hastily shut the window, fully awakened by the pings of cold rain that stung his bare chest.

His mouth felt dry. It was the rain; it was making him thirsty. He padded down the hall to the bathroom for a glass of water, pausing at the small window to look out at the sea. He couldn't see anything, really; it was still dark. But he was able to feel the violence of the wind on the water, ancient allies in a dance of destruction. Would the lighthouse survive? It would this squall, certainly, and many others like it. But somewhere down the road a hurricane named Betty or Fred or
Virginia
was going to roar up Nantucket Sound and swallow what was left of the beach, knocking the lighthouse down, pulling it under. It was only a matter of time.

Another wild gust slammed into them. The house shuddered, like a frightened old woman locked out in the street in a bad neighborhood, and he actually found himself patting the bathroom wall to reassure it.

They'll get you to safety as fast as they can
, he said, beaming his thoughts to the frail, imperiled structure.
Hang on, old girl.

It was odd: he had bonded,
really bonded, with the light
keeper's house and its tower. They deserved a better fate than to be pounded to splinters and rubble. He wanted to see the tower lit again and sending comforting winks to sailors out there who were tired and cold and confused. What would it take to get hold of an old fresnel lantern? he wondered. It was almost guaranteed that the Coast Guard had one in an attic somewhere. He tried to think: did he know anyone who knew someone? He remembered getting drunk with a rear admiral once; he'd have to search around for the guy's card.

Hawke was awake now. On a whim, he decided to go up into the lighthouse itself. He stepped barefoot into a pair of moccasins and pulled a sweatshirt over his pajama bottoms, then went down to the first floor, crossed through the breeze- way, and entered the tower itself. The noise from the pelting rain was horrendous. It was like being in a drum going over a falls, he thought. He flipped a lightswitch and began to ascend the spiral staircase, wondering why he felt impelled to do it in the middle of a thunderstorm.

Was the lightning rod intact? God only knew. He remembered reading somewhere that early New Englanders objected to the idea of lightning rods on the towers because they considered the rods sacrilegious. Pity the early
New England
lightkeeper, if that was the case.

Ignoring the flashes
of lightning and cracks of thunder, he crept to the top, still not sure he wasn't going to end up toast, and walked around the deck of the lantern room. With the lantern dismantled, the chamber had the look of a giant socket with no bulb in it. Two of the safety-glass windows that used to surround the lantern were broken and gone now, boarded up with sheets of plywood. And the sashes of the windows that did remain were decayed. One of the curtain rods was still intact; rusty curtain rings hung on it, the fabric drapes mere shreds of rot.

The tower was in pretty sad shape—but standing there in the fury of the thunderstorm, Hawke had to admit to feeling a rush. What would it have been like to be a keeper of the flame in days gone by? Most of the keepers were dead and gone now, replaced by automatic beacons and radio signals and satellites. To modern technology, there was no such thing as a dark and stormy night. Cold, hungry, tired, scared—instruments never felt any of it. But the poor devil who used to have to force himself to refill the lamp oil with half-frozen fingers while his mariner counterparts struggled in the rigging on a storm-tossed sea
...
those
were the days.

Y
ou're getting sappy with nostalgia for a life you never
lived
, he told himself. Chalk it up to being moody in love. He gazed into wet, driven darkness toward the charmed place where Maddie was sleeping now, hopefully dreaming of him.

When she stepped aside in the basement earlier to let him pass instead of coming up the stairs with him, she was sending him a signal:
I have business to finish up here.
Had she had it out with her brother after he left? With no brothers of his own—that he knew of—it was hard for Hawke to imagine the emotional fallout that might result.

God knew, it hadn't cost Hawke much to break with
his
family—at the time, anyway. It was only a decade later that he let himself think about his parents with anything like homesickness, and by then it was too late; they were both dead. But his search had led him to a reunion with his sister, and she became the single spot of joy in his life. Until now. Until Maddie.

Madelyn, my Madelyn.

He sighed,
then laughed at himself. He was
pining like a medieval troubadour for her.

He was still peering through one of the lantern room windows into the slashing rain, trying to make out the gabled roof of
Rosedale
cottage in the distance, when suddenly the night sky was split by a blinding flash of light that knocked him to his knees and sent every hair on his body standing straight up. The noise from the thunderclap was as excruciating as the pain from the electrical surge. This was Zeus in all his fury, sucking out the air from Hawke's lungs, the life from his body. He couldn't hear and he couldn't see—but he could smell, and what he smelled was burnt hair, the sickening smell of his own burnt hair.

He was thrown back to the day he forced himself into a burning physics building and came out with Maddie's unconscious father, delivering him to firemen on the scene before he himself escaped into the crowd and made his way to an emergency room to be treated for his burns.

Oh hell, oh hell, oh hell, he thought, too dazed this time around to do anything except lie there. Oh, hell.

A moment later, the smell of burnt hair became overwhelmed by the smell of smoke. Somehow Hawke staggered to his feet. He was appalled to see that behind him the roof of the lighthouse—the keeper's dwelling,
his
dwelling—was on fire. The lightning bolt had hit the house, not the tower!

Ignoring the numbness in his knees, Hawke hobbled down the spiral staircase, fighting a nauseating wave of vertigo as he wound down in record tim
e, then ran through the breeze
way into the kitchen. He stabbed at the phone and punched in the nine, the one, and the one in what seemed like slow motion before he realized that the phone—obviously, of course, what a stupid asshole he was—was no longer in service. Fried!

Too far to a neighbor; someone else would have to call it in. He grabbed the coiled garden hose from the breezeway and ran up the stairs with it and hooked it up with rubbery hands to the old-fashioned sink in the bathroom. From there it was a stretch up the attic stairs, but he was able to poke the nozzle into one end and aim vaguely in the direction of the flaming wood around the center chimney.

Too much smoke. Just like the physics building, too much smoke. He was driven back, hacking and coughing and searching for a rag to wet and put over his face. He found a towel and gave it a shot and lasted longer this time before he was driven back down the stairwell. Somewhere during the struggle it came to him in another blinding flash that he was going to spend his afterlife burning in hell: why else have two close encounters with fire and brimstone? He knew karma when he saw it.

The welcome sound of sirens broke through his maniacal preoccupation. This time, like the other time, the fire brigade came to his rescue. This time, like the other time, he wanted to fall on his knees and thank the Lord.

"Hey, pal, you okay?"

For an answer the firefighter got a violent spasm of choking; Hawke felt fairly sure he'd coughed up his small intestine. Someone slapped an oxygen mask on him and told him to breathe easy, which was all very well
....

****

"But I'm temporary keeper of the flame, damn it! This is not what the expression means."

"Don't talk; breathe. Don't talk; breathe."

"Maddie, I'm fine. No kidding—I'm fine."

Maddie was hovering over him like a mama duck in early summer, alternately horrified and soothing. "I saw it all
... I was getting a glass of water and I saw it all... I can't believe it
... a lightning bolt, hitting the house
... my heart
... when I saw it, my heart
... it could've been so much worse.
... It struck the antenna, they said. If you'd been changing channels, you could've been electrocuted. You could've been dead now! Oh, my darling
.
.
.."

Maddie was the one who needed soothing
. The trauma was a throwback for
her
, too; Hawke knew that all too well. To distract her, he said, "You remember Professor Woodbine's theory about 'Forms with Power'? Well, by cracky, I think he's on to something there. Damned if that cone shape didn't protect me from—as you keep pointing out—an agonizing, hideous death. Shoo
, what if I
had
been
switching from news to a 'Gilligan's
Island
' rerun
?
Then
what?"

"Very funny," she said, whacking him in the chest.

He pretended to fall into a fit of coughing again, which sent her into a spasm of concern until he wrapped his arms around her and held her close, on the beach, in the light, in his pajamas, in front of the departing fire department and an assortment of town busybodies, including Trixie Roit
ers—there with her trusty Canon
to record it all for posterity—as well as the Countess, passing through with her two black Scotties for an update on the latest village scandal.