The Night Mark(84)

“You don’t want to go back and try to assassinate Hitler?” she said. It seemed like the sort of thing a young and passionate do-gooder priest would want to do.

“Hitler’s own men couldn’t kill him, and many of them tried. I don’t speak a word of German, but I’ve always wanted to get hanged or shot by a firing squad, so I might as well give it a go, right?”

“We could try to warn people what was coming.”

“If a girl walked up to us right now and said unless we assassinate the prime minister of Britain, World War III will break out in ten years, would you believe her?”

“No,” Faye said.

“How’s this? I’ll go back and try to kill Hitler. You go back and warn people of the Great Depression and the Third Reich. I’ll end up in a hangman’s noose and you’ll end up in an asylum. And there’ll be no one to get you out this time. One person can’t change the world.”

“We could change a tiny corner of it. Isn’t that enough reason to go back? To save even one life?”

“Whose life are you saving by going back? Carrick Morgan and Dolly Rivers Holt both lived into old age.”

Faye leaned forward and kissed Pat on the cheek. She had a feeling she would never see him again.

“Mine,” she said.

She squeezed his hand one last time and started toward her car. Pat called out after her.

“Be safe, Faye. Please. I’d like to think I’ll meet you again.”

“You think you’ll come back?”

“No, but I think if you live long enough, I’ll see you in 1965. I’ll be the baby-face priest who’s scared shitless of his own congregation.”

“And I’ll be an old lady. You won’t even recognize me.”

“I’d know those Elizabeth Taylor eyes anywhere.”

Faye smiled and blew him a kiss. She got back into her car and drove back to the Church Street house. She sat at her desk, at Dolly’s sewing table. She had paper, she had a pen, but she had no one to write to. Her father was dead, and her mother hardly knew her anymore. If she did die tonight or disappear or whatever happened when she left this time, who would miss her? She’d drifted away from her friends after Will’s death, and she’d remarried Hagen so suddenly...

“Dear Hagen,” she wrote on her stationery.

What was there to say to him that she hadn’t already said?

“You were wrong. I can live in the past.”

She signed it, and as she did she knew no one would ever read this. No one had noticed when she’d left the first time. No one would notice this time. Did it bother her that time and the universe would cover up her disappearance like dirt over an unmarked grave? No. It didn’t bother her. Maybe it should have, but she already felt like a ghost in 2015. She might as well haunt the past as the present.

Faye stood up and took a quick breath. Time to go. She only needed one more thing. The first time she’d dropped Will’s ring into the water by accident and the water had carried it away, drawing her in like a fish on a hook. Pat had dropped Carrick’s rosary and the same thing had happened to him. She needed an object, something from Will or Carrick, something to act as a key or an offering or a sacrifice. Faye dug through her luggage and found a small velvet box. She opened it and there they were—her wedding band and Will’s. She’d worn hers up until the minute before her courthouse wedding to Hagen. Will had worn his from the moment they said, “I do” until the moment they’d slipped it off his finger before his cremation. She couldn’t bring herself to sacrifice Will’s band, so she took her own wedding band and hoped it would be enough.

When she made it back to Bride Island, she parked in the bare patch between the trees behind the lighthouse again. She walked to the beach again. She took off her shoes again. She waded into the water again.

Faye looked up at the lighthouse, at the white tower so silent and so somber, at the lantern room dark and growing darker as the sun disappeared. From her pocket, Faye took out her wedding band. She slipped it onto her ring finger.

“Will, honey, tell me if I’m doing the wrong thing. Tell me if I’m crazy.”

You called me honey. That’s cute. Is this a Southern thing you picked up down here?

“God, I miss you.”

That’s not a good reason to go tossing yourself into the ocean, Bunny.

“I miss me. How’s that for a reason?”

You miss you? You’re standing right there. I can see you. Your tits look great in that shirt, by the way.

She sighed and the sigh became a laugh.

“You know this isn’t me. You know I haven’t been me since you died. But back there, back with Carrick and Dolly, I feel like me again.”

You love them?

“Like family.”

Family is worth taking big risks for. And it’s hard to be without family in this world. We aren’t made for it, are we?

“Very hard. And I don’t feel alone with them. I feel like I belong.”

He takes care of you, right?

“He killed an alligator with an ax to protect me.”

Well, I killed that spider in our bathroom that day. You remember that? Thing was as big as a baseball. Fucking tarantula.

“My hero.”

I should have used an ax. That would have been way more badass than swatting it with Sports Illustrated.