The Night Mark(87)
“Ozzie threw up a hairball in my wicker flower basket. Turnabout is fair play.”
“How’s our girl?” Carrick asked, still breathing too hard for her liking.
“Curled up in a ball and keening. So about as well as you.”
She unscrewed the cap from the canteen and brought it to his lips. He drank deeply but carefully. When he nodded again, she put the cap back on. Carrick grinned.
“What?” she demanded.
“I would marry you if you weren’t already married,” Carrick said. “Do you want to marry me?”
“You nearly killed yourself carrying a teenage girl up one hundred and ten stairs. That was still the most romantic thing I’ve ever seen. If you weren’t half-dead and if Dolly weren’t up here with us, I’d do things to you to make a sailor blush.”
“If I knew that’s what put you in the mood, I’d carry a different girl up those stairs every day of my life. No, I wouldn’t. That was the hardest f*cking thing I’ve ever had to do.”
“Watch your language.”
“It’s not true anyway. Standing there in the water waiting for you to come up again—that was the hardest thing I’ve ever done.”
“Carrick, I’m sorry. I didn’t—”
“I stood there watching the water like my whole life was there in front of me, and if you came up, I’d live, and if you didn’t, I wouldn’t.”
“You would have lived.”
“Aye, but I wouldn’t have wanted to, and that’s worse than death, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” Faye said. “That is worse than death. I’ve been there.”
“When you went under, it killed me to think you might die never knowing that I’ve loved you from the moment I saw you, since the moment you flew off that swing and into my arms, since the moment you said—”
“My hero.”
“God’ll just have to forgive me for declaring my love to a married woman. I won’t act on it. I won’t. But I had to tell you. And if the day ever comes when that husband of yours takes a long walk off a short pier, I’ll marry you by sundown.”
Faye bowed her head and sighed, Pat’s words ringing in her ears.
If you don’t tell him the truth, it’s not you he loves.
“What if we don’t have to wait, Carrick?”
“Wait for what?”
“For Marshall to take a long walk off a short pier. What if I wasn’t married?”
“I know you are. I was there.”
“What if I said that wasn’t me?”
Carrick looked at her long and hard. Then he sighed, pulled her to him. “I know it wasn’t you,” he said.
“You know?” She leaned away and looked at him.
“I know it was your mother making you marry him. But that doesn’t change that in the eyes of the law and in the eyes of God you are married. I’d risk my soul for a night with you, but I won’t let you risk yours. I’m not worth it.”
She’d tried telling him and just couldn’t do it. Not with the way he was looking at her, looking at her like a man in love. A man in love with a dead woman. Faye knew that look all too well.
“You’re worth it.”
Faye took his face in her hands and kissed him lightly on the lips. Right now he looked like Carrick, just Carrick, and not like Will at all. But she loved his face nonetheless.
She settled against him, clung to him. Faye’s love for Will wasn’t gone, but in Carrick’s arms the ache of it dissipated like the waves on a pond after someone threw a stone into the water. The stone had sunk to the bottom and would remain there always, yet once more the water was calm, at peace. And so was Faye.
Faye saw Dolly raise her head. She saw Faye and Carrick clinging to each other and rolled her eyes. When Faye waved her over, Dolly came up on her hands and knees and crawled across the floor to join them in their pile of arms and legs and wet clothes and relief. Carrick held Faye. Faye held Dolly. Soon enough Ozzie bounded up the stairs and Dolly held him, too, as he purred loud enough to give the wind outside a run for its money.
The whole family was alive and well. Let the wind blow the world away tonight. This lighthouse was her ark and she had all she needed in here. Tomorrow they’d find dry land. Tonight they’d be one another’s sanctuary.
Faye let Dolly sleep and Carrick rest while she took care of the beacon. She cranked the clockwork to keep the lens rotating all night, and even went up to the lantern room to make sure the windows were clear of debris. Faye monitored the anemometer readings and recorded them in Carrick’s station log like he had taught her. When the winds died down to ten miles per hour, Carrick sent her and Dolly back downstairs to the house so they could get some real sleep in real beds. He would stay until the sun came up to clean the windows and the lens. It would certainly need it after this storm. Faye worried Dolly would have to be carried downstairs again, but no, Dolly devised her own solution for getting down the steps. She sat on them, and while clinging to the banister, she bump-bump-bumped on her bottom all the way down, Ozzie following Dolly and Faye following Ozzie.
When they emerged from the lighthouse, it was to an island that looked like it had survived a drinking binge. By the first gray and pale pink rays of dawn light, Faye spied tree branches littering the beach like broken glass on a bar floor. Sand had been swept all the way up to the back steps like spilled liquor. One green shutter hung sideways, giving the window the look of a bruised and swollen eye. Kelp hung off the corner of the roof like a discarded bra tossed aside in a drunken fling.