The Night Mark(94)

Dolly took the pencil from Faye’s hand.

“You getting married to the Chief?”

“Should I?”

“Your bad husband is dead, right?” Dolly wrote. “Why not?”

Faye stared at the words. How did she know about Will? She didn’t, of course. Dolly meant Marshall. Marshall was dead. Carrick must have told her what happened.

“Oh, my God,” Faye said out loud. “I’m a widow again.” And not just a widow again.

A pregnant widow again.

She groaned tiredly, drunkenly, and Dolly looked at her like she’d lost her mind. Maybe she had.

“Marry Chief,” Dolly wrote. She underlined marry and Chief twice.

“I don’t think that can happen,” Faye wrote. Dolly looked at her with a question in her eyes. It wasn’t enough of an answer for the girl. Faye sighed. “I may have to leave.”

“Why?” Dolly wrote.

“Hard to explain.”

“Because of the baby?” Dolly wrote.

Faye looked at her in shock. Dolly smiled and wrote something else.

“Only your belly is getting fat. I know what that means.”

Well, Dolly did have five younger siblings. She knew what pregnancy looked like.

“Yes,” Faye wrote. “The baby is my late husband’s.”

“Chief will marry you anyway,” Dolly wrote.

“You sure about that?” Faye replied.

Dolly must have been very sure about it, because she wrote, “When you get married, I get to make your dress.”

“You’re not helping much here,” Faye said but didn’t write it. Dolly ignored her as she sketched the outline of a simple empire-waist wedding dress.

Faye left Dolly to her dress designing as she brewed a pot of tea. She took comfort in the routine of the act—in boiling water, in straining the leaves, in deciding between one lump of sugar or two. Her sweet tooth won. She carried her cup onto the front porch. A light wind kept the water awake and dancing in the fading sunlight. The cool breeze and Faye’s hot tea did more to restore her than her nap had. The sun quickly dropped out of sight, and soon only pink light remained on the horizon. Pink turned to orange. Orange turned to red. Right as the last of the sunlight faded, the lighthouse came to life, and Faye took comfort in that, too.

Frogs and crickets started up a chorus of minor key singing as Faye sipped her tea. Her eyes followed the beam of light until it disappeared beyond human sight. The ocean was so vast it was a miracle anyone ever survived the crossing from one shore to the next. She wondered how her baby loggerhead turtles were doing out there in the deep blue ocean. She wondered what Carrick and Pat were talking about in the lighthouse. She wondered what she would have to do to get back to her time if Carrick sent her away. She wondered...

“Will, what’s happening here? Why me? Do you know?”

“Do I know what?” Carrick said.

Faye turned around. Carrick stood in the open front doorway to the house. He looked tired, beat even. She wanted to run into his arms again, but she held back. It wasn’t time for that. Maybe it would never be time for that again.

“Nothing,” Faye said. “I’m talking to myself. I do that sometimes.”

Carrick shut the door behind him and came to stand near her, not close but not far.

“I didn’t know you talked to yourself.”

“I’m lying to you,” Faye said, shrugging. “I talk to Will sometimes. It helps to talk out loud. Makes it less like he’s gone for good. Sometimes I can hear his voice in my mind.”

“Will? He was the man you loved, the one I remind you of?”

She nodded. “You’re learning a lot about me today,” Faye said.

Carrick said nothing for a very long time, long enough for Faye’s tea mug to cool in her hands.

“I don’t talk about the war if I can help it,” Carrick finally said. Faye looked at him wide-eyed. Of all the things she’d expected him to say, that hadn’t even been in the top one hundred.

Carrick went on. “It’s hard on a man, although we’re not supposed to take it hard. They say words to us like courage and valor and patriotism and they’re supposed to mean something. And they do, until that moment comes when words don’t mean anything and it’s all guts, smoke and terror like you can’t believe... I hope you never know terror like I’ve known.” He glanced up at the new night as if seeing something in the stars he wished he didn’t see. “But maybe you do,” he said.

“I saw your medals in the box in your closet.”

“We were under attack, started taking on water. I pulled some men out of a room that was flooding, sealed that room off the best I could, got the old tub running again, and we managed to sink them before they sank us. That was what all those medals were for.”

“Which I assume is Carrick-speak for ‘I single-handedly saved the lives of every man on my ship.’ Yes?”

Carrick only shrugged, but he didn’t argue.

“Call it penance,” he said.

“For what?”

“For what had happened a month before that. It was during a skirmish with a U-boat. We got the better of it, but it was a rough night. You learn to live with the fear, but it takes time. There were new kids aboard. And kids they were. Seventeen, eighteen. Boys so young you’d look at them and couldn’t believe you were ever that young. One of them, Francis Walter... Why this kid joined the navy, I’ll never know. From Iowa. I don’t even know if they have rivers in Iowa, much less thirty thousand miles of ocean. I don’t know if he had a screw loose or if being on the water for weeks on end loosened one of his screws, but he lost his mind one night and came at me with a knife.”