Alec sat alone in the den for a long time, aware of the stillness in the house.
She’s afraid of what it will be like when it’s just the two of you.
Wasn’t that what her school counselor had told him? He rose to his feet and started up the stairs.
He knocked on the door and pushed it open. Lacey sat cross-legged on her bed, clutching a dark-haired china doll to her chest. She looked horrid, her two-toned hair uncombed, her cheeks tear-streaked. She smelled like stale beer.
“I’m sorry, Daddy,” she said.
He sat down on the bed and pulled her into his arms, and for the first time in far too long she didn’t struggle to get away from him. She wept against his shoulder, her back shivering beneath his hands. He stroked her hair, afraid to speak, afraid his voice would give out.
Finally he drew away from her. He pulled a tissue from the box on her night table and held it to her nose.
“Blow,” he said, and she did. Then she looked up at him, with Annie’s blue eyes, waiting for him to speak.
“You must have been terrified to think you were pregnant,” he said.
She nodded, lowering her eyes quickly, and her tears flicked from her long lashes onto the back of his hand.
“Would it have been that boy’s? Bobby’s?”
She didn’t lift her head. “I don’t know whose it would have been.”
Something rolled over in his gut, and he struggled to keep his voice soft. “Oh, Lace,” he said, pulling her close again. He waited for her tears to stop before he finished his thought. “There are some changes we’re going to have to make,” he said.
“What do you mean?”
“I want you in at twelve on Friday and Saturday nights and ten on weekdays.”
She pulled away from him, staring at him in bruised disbelief. “
Dad.
It’s
summer.
”
“There’s still no reason for you to be out later than that. And I want to know where you’re going to be. I want phone numbers, and I want to meet the kids you’re going out with, too.”
“I
knew
you’d do this. You’re going to make me into a prisoner. You can’t keep me from having sex.”
“I know that,” he said quietly. “I wish you wouldn’t, though. You just don’t know—you can’t possibly understand what you’re doing. It should be
special,
Lacey. What’s it going to mean to you when you find someone you really love?”
“It meant something to Mom even though she did it when she was really young. She told me that with you she finally felt complete.”
Alec sighed. It seemed to him that Annie and her openness had a way of sabotaging every move he made with Lacey.
“Well, if you’re going to do it, you need to do it responsibly.” He stood up, frustrated. “But it’s really not a good idea to start on the pill so young. And you shouldn’t smoke if you take it…and, damn it, Lacey,
why?
You’re only fourteen. Is it because Jessica does it?”
“No.”
“Are you afraid the boys won’t like you if you say no?”
She looked down at her doll. “I don’t have any idea in the world why I do it.”
Her tone made him feel enormously sad. He took a step toward her bed and leaned down to kiss the top of her head. “Maybe you need to think about it a little, Lace, instead of just doing it.” He walked to the door and turned to face her again. “You can have anything you need in the way of birth control,” he said, “but please do me a favor and give it some thought. You’re too valuable to just give yourself away.”
C
HAPTER
F
ORTY-
F
OUR
There was no way out of it—Paul would have to speak to Mary Poor. His work was beginning to suffer. Sal Bennett, the editor of the
Gazette,
chastised him for being late with one article, inaccurate on another.
“Are you having some personal problems?” Sal asked, and Paul knew the obsession must show in his face. His thoughts were full of Annie, and of the girl he was coming to think of as his daughter.
He’d tried twice to get a look at her. He’d lurked in her neighborhood like a mad rapist, following her once to the beach, another time to the movies, where she’d sat with a boy who managed to slip his hand under her shirt sometime during the first hour, eliciting in Paul an unfamiliar paternal fury.
He’d held off on going to see Mary, hoping that by some sign from Lacey, some distinctive mannerism or familiar inflection in her voice, he would know the truth. Asking Mary required courage he did not have, but now that his job was being threatened as well as his sanity, he knew he could no longer put it off.
He found Mary at the retirement home, sitting as usual in one of the rocking chairs on the porch, the folded newspaper on the arm of the chair. She looked up as Paul sat down next to her.
“Where’s your recording machine?” the old woman asked.
“I don’t have it with me today,” Paul said, tapping his fingers on the arm of the rocker. “This isn’t an interview. I just have a few things I need to get straight with you.”
Mary rested the paper on her knees. “Such as?”
“Such as, exactly how well do you remember me?” He lowered his voice. “I mean, I guess you remember that I was Annie’s…friend, long ago.”
Mary nodded. “I can’t remember yesterday, sometimes, but I remember fifteen years ago well enough.”
“Then…do you remember the last time I was with Annie at your house at Kiss River? The day you kicked me out?”
“Yes.”
Paul sat on the edge of the chair, turning to face her. “I need to know…was she pregnant then? Is that why she wanted me to leave? She has a daughter who’s fourteen years old. Lacey. Is she my child?”
“What difference does that make? Annie’s husband is Lacey’s father now.”
“It makes an enormous difference. She may be the only child I’ll ever have, and she should know who her real father is.” He looked into the old woman’s clear blue eyes. “She’s mine, isn’t she?”
Mary lifted the paper to the arm of her chair again. “Think what you want,” she said, turning her attention back to the crossword puzzle.
Paul watched her for a moment before getting to his feet. He didn’t leave the porch, though, and after a while Mary looked up at him again.
“I can’t get free of her,” he said quietly. “Annie’s ruining my life.”
C
HAPTER
F
ORTY-
F
IVE
Mary watched Paul Macelli drive away, knowing this was not the last time she would see him. He would not be able to rest until he knew the truth, and maybe one day she would have to tell him.
She could understand someone’s need to do all they could for a daughter. She had felt that way about Annie, and it had led her to aid and abet her in a way she had come to regret.
You’re my savior, Mary,
Annie had said to her more than once, but the truth was, she’d done Annie far more harm than good.
She remembered well the day she banished Paul from Kiss River, and she remembered even more clearly the events that occurred a few days after his leaving.
There’d been talk of a storm back then—a brutal one—and some of the residents of the Outer Banks had already packed up their most treasured possessions and moved inland. Mary listened to the radio off and on during the day, and by late morning they had withdrawn the warning. “Looks like it’s going to miss us completely,” said the meteorologist, a mixture of relief and disappointment in his voice.
Mary stared disgustedly at the radio as she put the kettle on to boil. Why did she even bother to listen? She opened the back door and stepped outside. The sky above the dunes was white, with no sign of the usual gulls or pelicans or geese, and the sea oats stood arrow-straight in the still, heavy air. The ocean had that ominous swollen look, the nearly black water billowing into waves that broke high up on the beach. Mary sniffed the air and shook her head once more. They were fools, she thought, all of them. Tomorrow they would defend themselves, talking about how unpredictable storms could be, how there was simply no way they could have known.
Inside once more, Mary brewed herself a pot of tea and set about preparing for what she knew was coming. Caleb had taught her what to do, just as he’d taught her how to read the wind and the water. Mary filled the lanterns with kerosene and set them on the kitchen table. She took three jugs from the cupboard and carried them upstairs, where she filled them with water and left them on the dresser in her bedroom. Then she placed the old rubber stopper in the drain of the clawfoot bathtub and turned on the faucet, all the while thinking of Annie. When she woke up this morning and opened her bedroom window, she knew the storm was well on its way, and she’d called to warn her.
“Don’t go today, Annie,” she’d said. “The storm will hit while you’re driving back.”
“They’re saying it’ll miss us.” Annie’s voice was soft, a little frightened, although Mary knew it wasn’t the storm she feared. “I have to go while I’ve got my courage up,” she said.
Mary offered to go with her, but Annie laughed at the suggestion. “Don’t be ridiculous,” she said. “I’ll be fine.” Mary could just imagine the burden a seventy-seven-yearold woman would have been on her today, but every time she thought of Annie trying to drive home in the state she’d be in, she wished anew that she’d refused to take no for an answer.
The rain started around four that afternoon, while Mary was struggling to board up windows. She had done it by herself all the years since Caleb’s death, but she was not as strong as she used to be, and she had only enough plywood for those downstairs windows that faced the ocean. That would have to do, she thought, exhausted from the work. She brought the hanging plants in from the porch and carried her old photograph albums up to the second floor. She checked all the windows, cracking a few, remembering Caleb’s voice as she did so: “Houses can explode during a hurricane,” he had said to her that first year they were married, and he’d gone on to tell her stories of houses that had done exactly that.
Mary made one last tour of the yard for anything she might have neglected to batten down before returning to the house, securing the front door behind her. Then she sat down in the rocking chair in front of the fireplace to wait.
She turned the radio on after a while, smiling ruefully as the meteorologist admitted his error and once again advised his listeners to evacuate, but her smile faded as she thought of Annie. Where was she now? Perhaps she’d heard the new warnings and would find someplace on the mainland to spend the night. Mary hoped so. She had suggested Annie take a room so she wouldn’t have to drive home, but Annie’d refused to even consider the idea. “I’ll be too anxious to get home to Alec and Clay,” she’d said. Mary didn’t see how she would be able to face her husband and child tonight. “I can do it,” Annie reassured her. “I’ll just say I have a bellyache and take to my bed for a day or two. Women do this all the time.”
She knew Annie, though. She knew it was not the physical pain that would crush her spirit.
The wind picked up suddenly. It whistled through the upstairs, and rain began to spike against the plywood on her windows. The lights inside the house flickered but stayed on. Mary stood in front of the window next to the fireplace and watched the world darken in a few seconds’ time, dark enough to trick the lighthouse into thinking it was dusk, and the beacon suddenly flashed to life. She could make out the frothy whitecaps of the ocean, swelling ever nearer to the lighthouse, licking hungrily at the dunes.
Then she saw the headlights of a car bouncing through the rain and darkness toward the house. The car pulled up within a few feet of the front porch, and only then could she make out that it was Annie’s. She grabbed her slicker from the coat rack and struggled to push open the front door. The wind ripped it from her hands and flung it against the house with a
bang,
and she had to grab hold of the railing to keep from being blown off the porch herself.
Annie was crying as Mary pulled the car door open. She managed to wrap the slicker around the younger woman’s shoulders and pull the hood up over her head as they ran from the car to the house. Mary tugged the front door shut, breathless from the effort. When she turned around, Annie was already sitting on the couch, hunched over, clutching the wet slicker around her. She was sobbing, her face buried in her hands. Mary left her alone as she went into the kitchen to put the kettle on once more. She took two cups out of the cupboard just as the lights went out, leaving the house as dark as the world outside.
“Mary?” Annie called from the living room. She sounded like a child.
“I’m lighting the lanterns,” Mary called back, fumbling on the kitchen table for the matches. “I’ll be there in a minute.”
She left one lantern glowing in the kitchen and carried the other into the living room. She looked out the window, but all she could see was blackness. Even the beacon could not tell her how close the water was, how soon they should move upstairs.
“I couldn’t go home,” Annie said. Her face was gray in the lantern light and her teeth chattered as Mary helped her take off the slicker. “I just couldn’t face Alec.”
“I should call him to let him know you’re all right,” Mary said.
Annie looked at the phone on the desk in the corner. “Maybe I’d better,” she said. “He’d think it’s weird if I don’t talk to him.”
Mary moved the phone to the sofa so Annie didn’t have to get up. She had to dial the number for her, Annie’s hands were trembling so fiercely.
“Alec?” Annie said. “I stopped by to make sure Mary was all right, but it’s gotten so nasty that I think I’d better just stay put.”
Mary watched Annie’s face. Her voice would not give her away, but if Alec could take one look at the pain in her eyes, he would know instantly what she had done. It was good she had not gone home.
“Can I speak to Clay?” Annie asked. “Oh. Well, that’s good. Maybe he’ll sleep through the whole thing… Yeah, we’re fine, just sitting here, drinking tea.” She laughed, but tears were streaming down her cheeks and she wiped at them ineffectually with the back of her hand. Mary felt the threat of her own tears, and she breathed deeply to hold them back. “Alec?” Annie said, twisting the phone cord around her fingers. “I love you so much.”