Mary took in a long breath, suddenly exhausted. She pointed her thin, straight finger at her interviewer. “Sometimes, Mr. Macelli, things are not what they seem,” she said. “Not what they seem at all.”
Paul Macelli stared at her for a moment. Then he clicked off the recorder and lifted his briefcase to his lap. “You’ve been very helpful,” he said. “May I come back sometime to hear more?”
“Of course, of course,” Mary said.
Paul put the recorder in the briefcase and stood up. He looked out toward the waterfront for a moment and then down at Mary. “They tried to get you off lighthouse property in the early seventies, didn’t they?” he asked.
Mary stared up at him. He was a fool. He could have simply left, not tempting fate and her ire any more than he already had. Obviously, though, he couldn’t help himself.
“Yes, that’s right,” she said.
“Wasn’t it Annie O’Neill who helped you out back then?” he asked, and Mary wanted to say, You and I both know it was Annie, now, don’t we, Mr. Macelli? but she wanted this young man to come back. She wanted to tell him more stories of the lighthouse. She wanted to speak for hours into that little black recorder.
“Yes,” she said. “Annie O’Neill.”
She watched him walk down the sidewalk and get into his car. Then Mary leaned her head back against the rocker and closed her eyes. There was a burning pain in her belly that didn’t subside until she heard the sound of Paul Macelli’s car fade into the air.
Mary had met Annie in May of 1974, when she was seventy-three years old, practically a young woman. She’d been cleaning the windows in the lantern room of the lighthouse when she spotted a young girl down on the beach. Her beach, for the road leading out to the lighthouse was unpaved then and not too many people were willing to risk it. So at first Mary thought Annie was an apparition, and she stood at the window of the lantern room to see if the girl moved, if she was real. From that height, Annie was a tiny, doll-like figure, her dark skirt and red hair whipping out behind her as she stared out to sea.
Mary climbed down the stairs and walked out to the beach.
“Hello, there!” she called as she neared the girl, and Annie turned, shading her eyes with her hand and smiling broadly.
“Hi!” she said, her voice surprising Mary with its huskiness. So deep for such a young girl. Then she asked, as though Mary were the interloper here, “Who are you?”
“The keeper,” Mary replied. “I live here.”
“The keeper,” Annie exclaimed. “Well, you must be the luckiest woman in the world.”
Mary had smiled herself then, because that was exactly how she felt.
“I wanted to come out here by the lighthouse.” Annie looked down at the sand beneath her bare feet. “I met the man I married right here on this spot.”
“Here?” Mary asked, incredulous. “There’s never anyone around here.”
“He was painting and doing some repair work on the house.”
Ah, yes. Mary remembered. A few summers ago the place had swarmed with young men, half-naked and bronzed and beautiful, scarves tied around their foreheads to keep the sweat from their eyes. She must mean one of them.
“It was nighttime when I met Alec, though. It was very dark, but every time the lighthouse flashed I could see him. He was standing right here, just enjoying the evening. The closer I got, the better he looked.” She smiled, blushing, and turned her face back to the water. Her hair blew in long tufts up and around her head, and she lifted her hands to draw it back to her shoulders.
“Well.” Mary was startled to know this had gone on within a short distance of her home. “So this spot’s special for you.”
“Uh-huh. Now we’ve got a little boy. We’ve been living in Atlanta while Alec finished his training—he’s a veterinarian—but all the while we knew this was where we wanted to settle down. So, now we’re finally here.” She looked puzzled and glanced up at the lighthouse. “You’re the keeper?” she asked. “I didn’t think they still had keepers. Aren’t all the lighthouses run by electricity now?”
Mary nodded. “Yes, and this one’s had electricity since 1939. Most of them are maintained by the Coast Guard these days. My husband was the last keeper on the North Carolina coast, and when he died, I took over.” She studied Annie, who was shading her eyes to stare up at the tower. “Would you like to go up?” she asked, surprising herself with the question. She never invited anyone up with her. The tower had been closed to the public for many years.
Annie clapped her hands together. “Oh, I’d love to.”
They walked toward the door in the lighthouse, Mary stopping for the bucket of wild blackberries she’d picked earlier that morning.
She could still climb to the top of the tower with only one or two stops along the way to catch her breath and rest her legs. Annie had to stop too, or maybe she just pretended she needed to so Mary didn’t feel too old. Mary led her right up to the lantern room, where the enormous honeycomb lens took up so much space there was barely room to walk around it.
“Oh, my God,” Annie said, awestruck. “I’ve never seen so much glass in one place in my entire life.” She looked at Mary. “I love glass,” she said. “This is fantastic.”
Mary let her slip inside the lens, through the opening made when one segment of glass had to be removed a few years earlier after being damaged in a storm. Annie turned slowly in a circle, taking in all of the landscape, which Mary knew would appear upside down to her through the curved glass of the lens.
It took her a while to lure Annie away from the lens and down to the next level, where they stepped out onto the gallery. They sat on the warm iron floor, and Mary pointed out landmarks in the distance. Annie was quiet at first, overwhelmed, it seemed, and Mary watched her eyes fill with tears at the beauty spread out below them. She learned right then that nearly everything made this girl cry.
They spent a good two hours up there, eating berries and talking, the windows Mary had been cleaning in the lantern room forgotten.
Mary told her a little about Caleb, how she used to love to sit up here with him, how after decades of living at Kiss River they had never tired of the view. Caleb had been dead ten long years then, and having Annie to talk with, having someone listen to her so attentively, made her depressingly aware of how few friends she’d been able to make over the years, how hungry she was for companionship. For some reason, she told Annie about Elizabeth. “She hated living in such an isolated place, and she resented her father and me for making her live here. She just took off when she was fifteen years old. Quit school and married a man from Charlotte who was ten years older than her. She moved there and never sent us her address. I went there once to try to find her but without any luck.” Mary looked out at the blue horizon. “That child broke our hearts.” Why was she telling all this to a stranger? She no longer discussed these things even with herself. “She’d be forty-five now, Elizabeth.” Mary shook her head. “It’s hard for me to believe I’ve got a daughter who’s forty-five years old.”