“Please.”
She cut a length of blue and white striped wrapping paper from a roll and began taping it around the box. “Annie came in here all the time,” she said, cutting off a piece of tape. “She just lit up the store. We still talk about her.” She attached a premade bow to the top of the box and slid it to him across the counter. “Everyone misses her so much.”
“She’d like that,” Alec said, handing her a check. “I think being forgotten was one of her biggest fears.”
He could hear Lacey’s music blasting from upstairs when he got home, but he stopped in the den first to call Nola.
“I have some news,” he said, “and you’re not going to like it. Brace yourself, okay?”
“What’s that, hon?”
“I’m resigning from the lighthouse committee.”
There were two beats of silence before Nola spoke again. “You’re joking,” she said.
“No.”
“Alec,
why
in God’s name would you…?”
“I couldn’t begin to explain it to you, Nola. I nominate you as the new chair, and I wish all of you great luck with your endeavors.”
“Wait! Don’t you dare hang up. You owe us an explanation, Alec. I mean, really, don’t you think? What am I supposed to tell the others?”
He ran his fingers over the silky blue on Lacey’s present. “Tell them I’ve had an epiphany,” he said. “Tell them I’ve been set free.”
He carried the box upstairs and knocked on Lacey’s door.
She let out a little scream. “Don’t come in yet, Dad,” she said.
“What’s the matter?”
“Nothing. I’m not dressed. Just a second.”
He heard her frantically rooting around in her room, and he wondered what he would find when he was finally allowed in.
She opened the door after a minute or two. She was dressed in her usual shorts and T-shirt, with her hair tucked under a wide-brimmed straw hat.
“What’s with the hat?” he asked.
“Nothing.” She was a little winded. She looked at the box in his hands. “What’s that?”
“A very belated birthday gift.”
She took the box from him and sat down on her bed, and he leaned against the door frame to watch her. She bit her lip as she raised the lid.
“Oh.” She gasped. “She’s
incredible,
Dad.” She lifted the doll from the tissue paper and touched its hair. “A redhead.” She looked up at him. “Where did you ever find one with red hair?”
He shrugged and looked secretive.
Lacey stood up and placed the doll in the center of the shelf above her dresser, just below the poster of a leather-vested, long-haired thug.
“Well,” she said, sounding suddenly timid. “I have something to show you too, but you’re gonna freak, Dad.”
Alec smiled and folded his arms across his chest. “You know what, Lacey? I think I’m just about unfreakable right now. What is it?”
She kept her eyes on him as she slowly lifted the hat from her head, revealing exceedingly short red curls. She had cut off every speck of black, leaving herself with very little hair at all, but all that was there was red.
“Oh, Lace,” he said. “It’s beautiful.” He pulled her against him, and she stayed easily in his arms. He held her close, pressing his cheek against the damp curls and breathing in the sweet, clean scent of her hair.
Someday he would have to tell her the truth about her parentage. Someday he would have to tell Tom. But not now. Right now, she was his.
C
HAPTER
F
IFTY-
F
OUR
Was it this painless to end a marriage?
Olivia got out of bed with the realization that she had not once thought of Paul since he left the house the afternoon before. Of course, she had worked late last night, later than she had to, letting the patients absorb her time and attention. She’d worked until she was so exhausted that she knew sleep would be immediate and dreamless once she got in bed.
Now, as she showered, as she dried her hair, she had the feeling she was carefully holding thoughts of Paul at bay, as if letting them in, letting them get a grip on her, might be more than she could manage.
She
was
thinking of Alec, though. She had the day off, and as she busied herself with housework, she listened for the phone to ring, willing him to call. She would not call him again. He needed to work this out in his own good time.
Around noon, she reluctantly left the house to go to the store. She had two bags of groceries with her when she turned onto her street an hour later, and she spotted Alec standing on the pier behind her house. Although she was three or four houses away, her view of him was nearly unbroken, and she stopped her car to watch him. He was leaning against one of the pilings, shading his eyes to look out at the sound. An aching tenderness filled her. What a horrendous day he must have had yesterday. As stunned as she had been by what she’d learned about her husband, it could not compare to what he’d learned about his wife.
She drove on, and he must have heard her pull into the driveway, because by the time she started unloading the groceries, he was helping her.
“I’m glad to see you,” she said, looking at him over the top of the car. “I wasn’t sure if you’d call, and I didn’t want to disturb you.”
“I thought I was taking a risk coming over here.” He lifted a bag of groceries into his arms. “I figured maybe Paul would be here, and I’m not ready to meet up with him yet.” He stopped midway to her front door. “He’s not here, is he?”
“No.” She unlocked the door. “Come in.”
He followed her into the kitchen and set his bag next to hers on the table. “So—” he glanced up at her as they began unloading the groceries “—have you spoken to him?”
She put a quart of milk in the refrigerator, then leaned back against the counter. “He stopped over yesterday afternoon,” she said. “He was very apologetic, very distraught. Absolutely dripping with remorse.” She heard the mockery in her voice and wondered if she sounded as hard to Alec as she did to herself. “He’d been a fool, he said, and he destroyed the taped interviews he’d made of Annie and burned all her pictures.” She shook her head. “I guess he never did lose his flair for drama. I told him about the baby, and if guilt could kill, I would have had a dead man on my hands.” She smiled ruefully. “He said he wants us to get back together, that we should try to work things out for the baby’s sake, but I just…” Her voice caught suddenly, surprising her, and she turned her face away from Alec.
“It’s all right, Olivia,” he said quietly. “Let it out.”
She shook her head. “But I’m not
sad.
” Tears filled her eyes and she wiped at them with her fingers. “Really, I’m not.”
Alec reached his arm toward her. His fingers slipped around the nape of her neck, and she let him pull her to him, shutting her eyes as his arms closed around her.
He held her, letting her cry for a long time. He offered no platitudes, no words of false comfort, as though he knew that her only chance for healing lay in her tears.
“I’m through with him.” She spoke into his shoulder. “It’s over. I don’t love him anymore. I don’t think I have for a long time.” She was quiet for a moment, relishing the closeness of Alec’s body, knowing this was where she wanted to be. She flattened her hand against the small of his back. “Yesterday must have been terrible for you,” she said. “Yes.”
“Do you want to talk about it?”
“Sometime,” he said. “But not right now.”
“Mary Poor knew exactly what she was doing, didn’t she?”
“Yes.” Alec pulled gently away from her. “That she did.” He picked up the yogurt and cottage cheese from the table and carried them over to the refrigerator. He bent down to put them on the bottom shelf, and she noticed he was not wearing his wedding ring. It had left a band of light-colored skin on his tanned finger.
When he stood up again, his eyes went to the window above the sink. “Where’s Annie’s peacock feather?” he asked.
“Oh,” she said. “I broke it the night Paul told me that he and Annie had…” She caught herself and looked away from him, out the window, trying to think of some way to finish the sentence without saying too much.
Alec finished it for her. “The night he told you that he and Annie had made love.”
She looked up at him, stunned. “How did you know?”
“Was it just once since you’ve been here?”
“As far as I know.”
“Just before Christmas, right?”
“Yes. But how…”
“I figured it out last night. I spent the night putting clues together. She gave me plenty, and I missed them all because it never occurred to me to look for them.” He leaned back against the refrigerator. “One night, just before Christmas, she came home late from the studio and she was extremely upset. She had a sliver of glass in her hand, and she couldn’t get it out herself. I took it out for her, and she cried the whole time. Then she wanted to take a bath before she came to bed. She said it would help her relax, but I guess she just wanted to wash away any evidence of Paul before she got into bed with me.”
He lowered his eyes to the floor, and Olivia bit her lip.
“When I was thinking about this last night, when I was putting the clues together, I realized something must have happened between her and Paul that night, but I was hoping that maybe they didn’t actually…” He looked up at Olivia. “But they did, huh? I mean,” he smiled wistfully, “it wasn’t just that he tried to coerce her and she steadfastly refused him?”
She returned his sad smile. “Paul said it was…a mutual thing.”
He shook his head. “I didn’t think you knew, Olivia. I figured that if you did, you would have thrown it up in my face when I accused you of being a less honest person than Annie.”
“I considered it,” she said, “but I didn’t want to hurt you.”
He took a step toward her and cupped her head in his palms, kissing her softly on her forehead. “Thanks,” he said. “I don’t think I could have handled hearing it from you just then.” He rested his hands on her waist and sighed. “Now I have to figure out when and how to tell my little girl that Tom is her father.”
“Oh,” she said. “I hadn’t thought of that. I suppose it’s something she needs to know. Medical history and all of that.”
He nodded. “I have to wait, though, until I can accept it myself before I can expect her to. I want to tell her in a way that won’t make her think less of Annie—that will make her feel
compassion
for her. I don’t think I can do that quite yet.”
“You’re a good father, Alec.”
“I thought you had some doubts about that.”
She shook her head. “About some of your methods, perhaps. But I never doubted your intentions or your love for Lacey.” She touched his cheek. “Are you glad you know the truth?”
He nodded. “Yes,” he said. He raised his hands until his thumbs grazed the sides of her breasts. “It’s eased my guilt about loving you.”
“You took off your ring,” she said.
“So did you.”
She smiled, pressing her forehead to his chin. “Alec…?”
“Hmm?”
“Could we go to bed?”
He laughed, his breath warm against her cheek. “Yes,” he said.
They made love at a more leisurely pace than the last time. The sun outside her window poured warm, thick, honey-like air into her room and slowed them down, made them take their time. She was straddling Alec as he came, and she watched his body strain and arch in the golden light, as he must have watched hers only seconds earlier.
When his breathing had settled down, he opened his eyes and looked at her. “You look beautiful up there,” he said. He stroked his fingers along the gold chain resting against her breasts. “I love you, Olivia.”
She was aware of her nakedness, something that had not concerned her at all only a few minutes ago. But now she felt as though she was all stomach, the rest of her body small and inconsequential.
“It scares me to love you,” she said.
“Why?”
“I just finished loving a man who wished I was Annie. I’m afraid that loving you might end up being the same thing.”
He shook his head against the pillow. “I want
you,
Olivia,” he said, his hands tightening on her thighs. “I want you just the way you are, with your organized mind, and your craving for structure, and your driving ambition, and your ability to put yourself first.” He touched her lightly where her body was joined to his, and she shivered. “And with your genuine, and thoroughly unsubtle, carnal needs.”
“And with my pregnancy?”
He slid his hands to the firm golden orb of her belly. “I’ve already raised and loved another man’s child,” he said. “I can do it again.”
C
HAPTER
F
IFTY-
F
IVE
September 1991
The electricity went out in the Manteo Retirement Home at about eight-thirty in the evening, and the portable radio grew scratchy and unintelligible. The residents, along with some of the staff, huddled together in the candlelit living room, taking turns playing with the knobs on the radio, fighting the dying batteries.
Mary sat off in a corner, the folded newspaper with its finished crossword puzzle resting on her knee. She didn’t need the radio to know what was happening outside. She could feel the devastation in her bones.
She’d opened the window in her room a few hours earlier and let the air blow over her skin. She’d sniffed it, tasted it, and she knew the storm was very close.
It’s time,
she thought. For days she’d had a feeling about this one. Even before the residents of the Outer Banks were told to evacuate, she knew this storm would be like no other. It would hit head-on, with a sudden punch at the defenseless coastline, the mere preamble to a beating that would last hours.
Trudy tried to talk her into joining a game of canasta.
“If anyone should be used to storms, it’d be you, Mary,” she said when Mary declined. “Look at you, sitting there like a scared little girl.”
She wasn’t scared, but she didn’t bother to defend herself to Trudy. She wasn’t afraid at all.
She went to bed far later than usual, but still she could not sleep. The wind was ferocious. It howled eerily through the big house, and every once in a while she could hear the crackling sound of a tree snapping in two. One of the windows in Jane’s room blew out during the night, and her screams brought everyone out into the hall. Jane spent the rest of the night on the pull-out sofa in the living room.