The Night Mark(98)

“You lost two?” Carrick asked, and the compassion in his voice nearly undid her.

Faye tried to answer but couldn’t, not with the rock in her throat.

“I’m sorry,” Carrick said. “Love, I’m so sorry.”

She tried to smile as she wiped her tears.

“Anyway, that’s it for my deep, dark secrets. Except for one—I’m thirty, not twenty. Although I like looking twenty again, and I’m shallow enough to admit that.”

“Do you look like Faith? In your own time, I mean?”

“I do, a little. When I look in the mirror, I see me looking back. This body feels like my body. This life feels like my life. I feel like I belong here, which is why... I mean, I know I should have told you before this. I just didn’t know how to tell you to make you believe me. I was terrified to tell you at first. I thought you’d haul me off to an asylum. Do you hate me yet? I wouldn’t blame you if you did.”

“No,” he said simply. “Although I wouldn’t mind going a couple rounds with your husband.”

“Will or Hagen? Or Marshall? I have too many damn husbands.”

“Hagen. God’s already taken care of Marshall.”

“Hagen’s not an evil man. He just wanted something I couldn’t give him.”

“Children?”

“Love. I think he thought if I had his children, I would love him through them. But it wasn’t meant to be.”

“Is this meant to be?” Carrick asked. “You and me, I mean?”

“Seems like someone out there is trying very hard to get you and I together.”

“If I didn’t look like him...would you still want to stay?”

“If you didn’t look like him, I wouldn’t have stuck around long enough to find a reason to stay,” she admitted. “If I’d woken up in this house with a total stranger, I would have run screaming from here as far and as fast as I could. And if I’d made it back to 2015, I would have stayed there and never looked back. That you looked like Will... It gave me a reason to stay until...you know. Until I had other reasons to want to stay. Now...that you look like Will is the least of those reasons.”

“I must be bait, then,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“Bait. Bait on a fishhook. I look like the man you loved, and that got the hook in you. And now whoever wants you here is reeling you in.”

“I’m hooked,” she admitted. “Hooked so hard I don’t even want to get unhooked.”

“That’s hooked, all right. But won’t you miss your time? You can’t say you won’t miss something.”

Would she miss anything? Cell phones? Netflix? Cars with seat belts? Air-conditioning? The Lilly Ledbetter Act? Fluoride?

“Penicillin, maybe?” Pat said.

Faye turned and saw Pat standing in the front yard looking up at the sky.

“Not this again,” she said.

“What’s peni...” Carrick asked.

“It’s a drug,” Faye said. “It hasn’t been invented yet. But it’s sort of a wonder drug. After it’s discovered, it saves millions of lives. As many lives as lighthouses have saved. Maybe more.”

Pat walked up the front porch steps.

“Millions and millions,” Pat said. “Faye keeps forgetting what she’ll be giving up if she decides to stay here. Access to modern medicine, for starters. In 2015 people can survive cancer, tuberculosis, scarlet fever. Vaccines eradicated polio and measles. Do you really want to live in a world with iron lungs and polio, Faye? Do you?”

“I guess I could go back to 2015 and live in a world with meth, heroin, terrorism, HIV and Ebola. Huge improvement, right? Sorry, Carrick,” she said, giving him a wry smile. “We must be speaking a foreign language again.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, but I know you need to talk about it,” Carrick said. “So I will leave you two to talk it out. If you need me, I’ll be up at the light.”

Carrick started to leave, and then turned back and kissed her on the lips.

“I needed that,” he said. “Sorry, Father.” Carrick winked at Pat and then left them alone on the porch.

Pat exhaled heavily.

“You’ve decided to stay, then?”

“Carrick says he wants me to. And I want to.”

“You’re giving up an awful lot of modern conveniences.”

“True. But gaining a lot in return. Carrick. Dolly. A baby.”

“Baby?”

“Yeah,” Faye said. “I’m pregnant.”

“Carrick’s?”

She shook her head no.

“I see,” Pat said. “Carrick spent his whole life wondering if Faith killed herself—and if she did, why.”

“I saw the note she left for Carrick. I guess she put it in her Bible.”

“She was buried with her Bible,” Pat said. “She was buried with the truth hidden inside, and Carrick never even knew...”

“He knows now. She couldn’t go back to Marshall, couldn’t stay with Carrick, couldn’t have the baby of the man who’d beaten and raped her...”

“That poor girl,” Pat said, gazing at the ocean with a faraway look in his eyes. “This is no time for fair and tender ladies.”