The Night Mark(105)

Faye peeked out the front door at the ocean and saw an old friend of hers standing on the end of the pier. Wearing nothing but her slip, she walked out into the morning haze. The bit of grass between the porch and the seawall was cold and slick with dew. Her toes tingled, waking up the rest of her body.

“Hello, you,” Faye said to the white wood stork perched on the very end of the pier.

The wood stork eyed her and said nothing.

“Don’t worry. I won’t take your picture. Not yet anyway. I have to get some film first.”

The stork tilted its head sideways. Up close Faye was astonished by the sheer size of the bird. It must have been more than three feet tall. Perched as it was on top of the pier’s post, they met eye to eye.

The stork didn’t answer, but Faye hadn’t truly expected it to talk.

“Was this your doing?” she asked. “Who do you work for?”

The stork dipped its head and dropped something onto the pier at Faye’s feet.

It was golden and shining in the new morning light. Faye picked it up.

Will’s championship ring.

Faye gasped, tears instantly springing to her eyes.

“Will...” she breathed.

I told you I’d love you and take care of you for as long as you lived.

“Yes, you did, babe,” she whispered. “Thank you.”

Faye slipped the ring onto her thumb and smiled at the sunrise, smiled at the ocean, smiled at the stork and the ocean and the waves, the blessed waves that had brought her here.

She smiled until a wave came from nowhere and slammed into the end of the dock, knocking her into the water and sweeping her out to sea.





26


He looked like an elderly Gregory Pack again. His hands trembled with the palsy that plagued him as he passed Faye a glass of red wine.

“I saw the stork I’d seen at the lighthouse standing on the pier. I walked out and the bird gave me the ring.” Faye held up her hand to show off Will’s ring on her thumb. “A wave came out of nowhere and hit me. When I woke up, I was on the beach and it was 2015 again.”

Faye took a long sip of her wine. Pat said he’d had to drink at least two glasses a night or he couldn’t fall asleep, his hands would shake so hard. Faye was drinking for other reasons tonight. She missed her husband. She missed her island. She missed her home. She missed the peace she’d had there, however brief.

“You didn’t do anything at all?” Pat asked as he took a seat on the chair next to his sofa. “You didn’t go in the water, touch the water, drop anything in the water?”

“No.” She shook her head. “I was doing nothing but standing there, and the wave came for me. I didn’t see it coming, didn’t hear it coming. It just came.”

“You want to go back, I assume?”

“Of course I want to go back. My husband’s there.”

“I thought he was right here.”

Faye laughed, but it wasn’t a real laugh. There was no joy in it. In 2015 she wasn’t pregnant, and she felt the loss of it as keenly as she missed Carrick and Dolly. She had to go back, no matter what.

“Pat, why am I here? I knew. I knew exactly what I was doing in 1921.” She leaned back on the couch and stared at the ceiling. “I knew my purpose. I knew the plan. Everything I lost in this time I got back in the past. There’s no reason for me to be here again. None.”

“And yet here you are. Must be a reason. If there’s a reason you went there, there must be a reason you came back.”

“The hole,” she said. “I think it’s that hole.”

“What?”

“The hole in the fishing net. Remember?” She lifted her head and looked at him. “You said you thought of time as a fishing net. God—or whoever—knits the net and sometimes that net gets a hole in it and God, or whoever, has to mend the net. I’m the patch in the hole in the net. I have to be. I’m back here to mend the hole.”

“One more stitch in time?” Pat asked.

“Maybe. But I don’t know what to do to make that last stitch.” She couldn’t keep going back and forth, one foot in the present and her heart in the past. She had to find a way to stay back and stay for good.

“There has to be something, Faye. Something that keeps dragging you back here. If you were a ghost I’d say unfinished business.”

She shrugged, tears in her eyes.

“There’s nothing,” she said. “My father’s dead. My mother might as well be. She’s in good hands with her sister. I loved them. They were good parents but...it’s not them. I have no brothers or sisters. I have no kids. I’m widowed. I’m divorced. I’m...”

Faye stopped. She looked into the deep red cave of her wineglass.

“I’m divorced,” she said.

“Hagen?” Pat asked.

Faye nodded. “Hagen.”

“Does Hagen still love you?”

Faye reached into her purse and pulled out her phone. She hit a few buttons and showed it to Pat.

“Ten missed calls while I was gone,” Faye said. “And according to the clock and the calendar, I was gone twelve hours.”

“Nobody calls a woman ten times in twelve hours if he doesn’t care when she goes missing.”