Keeper of the Light (40 page)

“Why do you have Mom’s tools out?”

He turned to see Lacey standing in the doorway. Her hair was growing out into an almost comical pattern of red and black.

“Olivia Simon’s going to borrow some of them.”

“Why can’t she use Tom’s?”

“Tom’s not teaching her right now, and she’s to the point where she needs some tools of her own, so I suggested she come over to take a look at Mom’s.”

“She’s coming
here?
” Lacey’s eyes widened. “I thought you weren’t going out with her anymore.”

“I was never actually going out with her, Lace. She’s a friend. I explained that to you.” He wondered if asking Olivia over here tonight had been a mistake. He could have dropped the tools by her house. The memory of the last time he was in her living room slipped through his mind, and he shook his head. Well, he could have dropped them by her office.

The doorbell rang, and he heard Clay sprint down the stairs to answer it. He’d spoken to Clay earlier, letting him know Olivia was coming over and why, and Clay had responded with an uncharacteristic, positively lecherous grin. Now Alec heard Olivia’s voice in the living room, and Clay’s laughter in reply.

“I have to study,” Lacey said, taking the door that led to the kitchen rather than the living room so she would not have to pass Olivia on her way upstairs.

Olivia and Clay walked into the den.

“I’m on my way out, Dad,” Clay said.

Alec looked up from the tools. “Okay. Have fun.”

Olivia smiled as she watched Clay leave the room. She had on a pink and white striped jersey dress with a dropped waist. It was perfect for her, he thought, the perfect camouflage. No one would know if she were pregnant or not.

“Your son looks so much like you it’s uncanny,” she said, setting her tote bag on the chair by the work table. She dropped her eyes to the tool case. “Wow.”

“These are kind of a mess,” he said. “Annie would have been able to pick out what you need without any problem, but I can’t begin to tell you.”

“I think I can figure it out.” She glanced up at him and caught sight of the oval windows through the door of the den. “Oh, Alec.” She walked into the living room and over to the windows. It was still light enough outside so that the designs and their colors were vivid. “They’re beautiful.”

He stood next to her. “Your husband was fascinated by them, too.”

“Was he?” She pointed to the one in the center. “Why did she make this one clear?”

“She didn’t. I broke it a couple of weeks ago. I threw a glass at it.”

She looked at him. “I didn’t think you were the violent type.”

“I’m not, ordinarily.”

“Were you aiming at someone?”

“At God, I think.” He laughed, and she touched his arm.

“Tom’s trying to put it back together for me.” He started toward the kitchen and she followed him. “Want some iced tea?”

“Please.”

He took the pitcher of iced tea out of the refrigerator and got two of the green tumblers from the cabinet over the sink. “So, how’s Olivia doing?” he asked as he poured. “I really haven’t spoken to you since the day we went to Norfolk.”

She took the tumbler of iced tea from his hand and leaned back against the counter. “Olivia’s a little mixed up.” She looked down at her glass, and her eyelashes lay dark and thick against her cheeks. “A lot’s happened since the last time we spoke, besides the fact that I’ve become the least popular physician in the entire Outer Banks.”

He shook his head. “I’m sorry.”

“But the other day I got a job offer. The medical director of Emerson Memorial called to offer me a position in their trauma unit up there.”

“Really?” Alec set his tea on the counter, a little disconcerted. “Will you take it?”

“I don’t know. I like it here, and I’ll like it even better if I begin to feel trusted as a physician again. But there’s more.” She sipped her tea, looking at Alec over the rim of her glass. Her eyes were the same green as the tumbler. “Paul returned from his trip a changed man,” she said. “He’s being very attentive.”

Alec’s smile froze into place. “That’s great, Olivia. Is he over…old what’s-her-name?”

“I don’t think he’s completely through with her, but he’s really trying. The thing is, he says the Outer Banks make him think of her, so he wants us to leave here.”

“Ah. So the job in Norfolk would be ideal.” He picked up his tea and started walking toward the den. “I thought it was just a matter of time,” he said. He wanted to know more. He wanted to know if they’d made love. “Have you told him about the baby?”

“Not yet.”

They were back in the den, back above Annie’s old tools, and the scent of them was almost too much for him. “That would do it, Olivia,” he said. “Paul’s such a romantic. If you told him…”

“I can’t yet.”

“He’s going to figure it out soon enough, don’t you think?”

She glanced down at the pink and white stripes of her dress where they hung loosely across her stomach. “Is it that obvious?”

“Not at all to look at you. But…I’m assuming…he’s your husband…” He felt himself flush, and Olivia smiled.

“I’m not letting him get that close to me yet.”

“Ah, I see.” He moved her totebag from the chair to the table. “Well, have a seat.”

The phone rang just as she sat down, and Alec picked it up on the desk. There was an emergency at the animal hospital, the operator told him. A dog with a burr in its eye.

He hung up and explained the situation to Olivia, smiling. “You’re the one who talked me into going back to work,” he said. “Take your time with this.” He gestured toward the tools. “I don’t know how long I’ll be, so don’t feel as though you have to wait. Lacey’s here if you need anything.”

He went upstairs to tell Lacey he was going. She was sitting on her bed, books and papers spread out in front of her and nerve-jangling music blaring from her radio. “I have an emergency at the hospital,” he said. “Olivia’s still here looking through Mom’s stained glass stuff. I’m not sure when I’ll be back.”

“Dad,”
she whined. “Make her
go
if you’re not going to be here.”

“She just got here, Lace. I’ll call if I’m going to be really late.”

He left her room before she could offer anymore objections and walked down the stairs. He stopped in the doorway of the den, but Olivia was deep in concentration. A sheet of graph paper lay on her lap, and she bent over it, her lower lip caught pensively between her teeth and a pair of Annie’s scissors in her hand. He left without disturbing her.

Outside, the damp, salty air enveloped him. It covered Olivia’s Volvo with a faint mist, glistening in the pink light of the sunset, and he ran one hand down the warm, slick side of the car as he walked out to the street and his Bronco.

Lacey appeared in the doorway of the den. Olivia looked up from the tool case and was struck by how much older she looked than fourteen. “Hi, Lacey,” she said. “How are you?”

“Okay.” Lacey slipped into the den and pulled her father’s chair from his desk to the work table. She sat down, hugging her knees, her bare feet up on the chair. It was difficult to look at her hair and keep a straight face. “What are you working on?” she asked.

Olivia thought for a minute. She couldn’t tell her she was making a panel for a nursery—she could hardly let Lacey know she was pregnant when her own husband had no idea. “I’m making a panel for one of the bedrooms in my house,” she said.

“Do you have a design? Mom always worked with a design.”

“Yes.” Olivia lifted the graph paper from her lap to the table. The hot-air balloons probably looked simplistic to Lacey after the kinds of things her mother had done. But Lacey smiled.

“That’s nice,” she said, and she sounded sincere. She watched as Olivia pulled a roll of copper foil from the case. “You never told my father you saw me in the emergency room,” she said.

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because what happens in the ER is confidential.” She looked up at Lacey. “How’s your friend doing? The boy who used crack?”

Lacey wrinkled her nose. “He wasn’t my friend. He’s gone back to Richmond. He was an asshole, anyway.”

Olivia nodded. “He took a major risk with his life.”

“He didn’t care. Some people’s lives are so screwed up they don’t care.” Lacey picked up one of the spools of solder and began playing with it. Her fingernails were chewed short; a couple of her fingertips looked red and sore. There was a scared little girl behind that tough facade.

“Your father told me you have a collection of antique dolls,” Olivia said.

“Yeah.” Lacey didn’t look up from the solder. “My mother used to give them to me for my birthday.”

“Could I see them?”

Lacey shrugged and stood up, and Olivia followed her up the stairs. They passed what had to be the master bedroom, the bed a beautiful four poster covered by a quilt. Lacey opened her bedroom door and Olivia could not prevent a laugh. “Oh, Lacey, this is great,” she said. There was a shelf going three fourths of the way around the room on which delicate, ruffle-dressed dolls sat, wide-eyed and prim. Above and below the dolls were posters of rock groups—young men in leather pants and vests, bare-chested, long-haired, ear-ringed and insolent-looking.

Lacey smiled at her reaction.

“Is this room a good description of you?” Olivia asked.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean half angel, half devil.”

“Three quarters devil, I guess.”

Olivia saw the textbooks on her bed. “What are you studying?”

Lacey groaned. “Biology and Algebra.”

Olivia picked up the biology text and skimmed through the pages, remembering how enthralled she’d been by her own biology book in high school, how she had read the entire book by the end of the first week of school. “What are you up to?”

“Genetic stuff.” Lacey picked up a worksheet from her bed. “This is my homework. I
hate
this stuff. I’m supposed to make this pedigree study into some kind of chart or something. It doesn’t make any sense to me.”

Olivia looked at the sheet, then at Lacey. “Let me help you with it.”

The girl colored. “You don’t have to.”

“I’d like to.” She kicked off her shoes and sat down on Lacey’s unmade bed. “Come on,” she said, patting the space next to her.

Lacey joined her on the bed, and Olivia talked about Punnett squares and dominant and recessive genes until Lacey had a grasp of the concepts herself. They were comparing earlobes and trying to roll their tongues—which she could do, but Lacey could not—when they heard Tripod barking downstairs.

“Anybody home?” A female voice called out from the kitchen.

“It’s Nola,” Lacey said. She raised her voice. “We’re up here, Nola.”

They heard footsteps on the stairs and then an attractive blond woman dressed in a dark blue suit appeared at Lacey’s door, holding a pie in her hands. This was the woman who had “designs” on Alec, Olivia remembered.

“Oh, excuse me, Lacey,” Nola said. “I didn’t know you had company.”

Olivia leaned forward on the bed and lifted her hand to shake Nola’s. “I’m Olivia Simon,” she said.

“She’s a friend of Dad’s,” said Lacey.

“I’m just helping Lacey with her biology.” Olivia felt as though she owed Nola some sort of explanation. “Alec had an emergency at the animal hospital.”

“Oh.” Nola looked a little lost. She patted a strand of her pale hair back into place above her ear. “Well, I brought this pie over for him. You’ll let him know, Lacey?”

“Sure.”

“I’ll leave it on the kitchen counter. It’s his favorite, strawberry rhubarb.”

Nola left the room, and neither of them spoke again until they heard the back door open and close downstairs. “She’s my best friend’s mother,” Lacey said. “I think she wants to be
my
mother, too.”

“You mean…marry your father?”

“Exactly.”

“Would you like that?”

“Yeah, about as much as I’d like to die in a stampede of elephants.”

Olivia laughed.

Lacey drew little circles in one corner of her homework paper. “I don’t think my father will ever get married again.”

“No?”

Lacey shook her head. “He loved my mom too much.”

Olivia looked up at the row of dolls. They were a little spooky-looking, with their huge, watchful eyes. “It’s nice you have all these dolls to help you remember her,” she said. “Do you have a favorite?”

Lacey stood up and walked over to the other side of the room to take one of the dolls—a beautiful black-haired toddler—down from the shelf. She plopped back on the bed and set the doll in Olivia’s lap just as they heard a car pull into the driveway.

“Dad’s home,” Lacey said, but she didn’t move from Olivia’s side.

“Olivia?” Alec called from the den.

“We’re up here,” she and Lacey chorused, and Lacey giggled.

They heard him climb the stairs and then he appeared in the doorway, unable to mask his surprise at finding the two of them looking like lifelong buddies, Lacey clutching her biology book, Olivia with the raven-haired doll in her lap.

“Well… Hello.” He smiled.

“How’s the dog?” Olivia stood up. “She’ll survive.”

“Olivia helped me with my homework.”

“And Nola stopped by with a pie for you,” Olivia said. She had a pleasant sense of belonging in this house, standing there in bare feet, a welcome guest in the bedroom of Alec’s daughter. “It’s your favorite,” she said. “Strawberry rhubarb.”

“She worked her fingers down to bloody stumps hulling those strawberries just for
you,
Dad.”

“Don’t be catty, Lacey,” Alec said, but there was laughter behind his smile. He looked at Olivia. “Want some pie?”

“Yes.”
Lacey jumped up from her bed. “I’ll go cut it.”

Alec looked after Lacey as she raced out of the room and down the stairs. He turned to Olivia. “She’s acting like a human being,” he said. He ran his fingers down her arm and squeezed her hand before letting go. “What did you do?”

Olivia’s mood was light on the way home. She was humming when she pulled into her driveway, smiling as she walked up the front steps. But she nearly stumbled over an enormous floral arrangement sitting on the deck. The fragrance of the flowers filled her head as she knelt down to read the card propped up against the vase.