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Outside, a cold rain beat against the house’s wood siding and thrummed steadily against the windows. It had rained all day, a cold and icy rain, and she and her mother had skidded a couple of times as they drove to Manteo.
“Remember how it snowed on Christmas last year?” her mother had said as Lacey complained about the rain. “Let’s just pretend this is snow.”
Her mother was an excellent pretender. She could make any situation fun by twisting it around so that it was better than it really was. Lacey was too old for that sort of pretending, but her mother could always charm her into just about anything. So, they’d talked about how beautiful the snow-covered scenery was as they passed it, how the housetops were thick with white batting and how the whitecaps on the ocean to their left were really an icy concoction of snow and froth. The dunes at Jockey’s Ridge were barely visible through the rain, but her mother said they looked like smooth white mountains rising up from the earth. They pretended the rain falling against the windshield of the car was really snowflakes. Lacey had to put her fingers in her ears to block out the pounding of the rain in order to really imagine that, but then she could see it—the wipers collecting the snow and brushing it from the car. It fluttered past the passenger side window like puffs of white feathers.
“The first Noel …” Her mother began to sing now as she used salad tongs to set a small pile of greens on the plate of a young girl, and the other volunteers joined in the carol. It took Lacey a bashful minute or two to join in herself, and the beaten-looking women standing in line took even longer, but soon nearly everyone was singing. The smiles in the room, some of them self-conscious and timid, others overflowing with gratitude, caused Lacey to blink back tears that had filled her eyes so quickly she had not been prepared for them.
A tall woman smiled at Lacey from across the table, nudging her son to hold his plate out for some green beans. The woman was singing “Oh Christmas Tree” along with the group, but her doe-eyed son was silent, his lips pressed so tightly together that it looked as though no song would ever again emerge from between them. He was shorter than Lacey but probably around her age, and she smiled at him as she spooned the beans onto his plate. He looked at her briefly, but then his gaze was caught by something behind her, and his mouth suddenly popped open in surprise. Or maybe, she wondered later, in fear. His mother had stopped singing, too. She dropped the good china plate filled with turkey and mashed potatoes, and it clattered to the floor as she stared past the volunteers toward the door of the room. Lacey was afraid to turn around to see what had put such fear in the woman’s eyes. One by one, though, the women and children and volunteers did turn, and the singing stopped. By the time Lacey could force herself to look toward the door, the only sound remaining in the room was the beating of the rain on the windows.
A huge man stood in the doorway of the room. He was not fat, but his bulk seemed to fill every inch of the doorway from jamb to jamb. His big green peacoat was sopping wet, his brown hair was plastered to his forehead and his eyes were glassy beneath heavy brows. Held between his two pale, thick, shivering hands was a gun.
No one screamed, as if the screams had already been beaten out of these women. But there were whispered gasps—”Oh, my God” and “Who is he?”—as the women quietly grabbed their children and pulled them beneath the tables or into the hallway. Lacey felt frozen in place, the spoonful of green beans suspended in the air. The tall woman who’d dropped her plate seemed paralyzed as well. The doe-eyed boy at her side said, “Daddy,” and made a move toward the man, but the woman caught his shoulder and held him fast, her knuckles white against the navy blue of his sweatshirt.
Lacey’s mother suddenly took the spoon from her hands and gave her a sharp shove. “Get into the hall,” she said. Lacey started to back away from the table toward the hallway, but when she saw that her mother wasn’t moving with her, she grabbed the sleeve of her blouse.
“You come, too,” she said, trying to match the calmness in her mother’s voice but failing miserably. Her mother caught her hand and freed it from her sleeve.
“Go!” she said, sharply now, and Lacey backed slowly toward the hallway, unable to move any faster or to take her eyes off the man.
In the hallway, a woman put an arm around her, pulling her close. Lacey could still see part of the room from where she stood. Her mother, the tall woman and her son remained near the tables, staring toward the doorway, which was out of Lacey’s line of sight. Behind her, she could hear a woman’s voice speaking with a quiet urgency into the phone. “Come quickly,” she was saying. “He has a gun.”
The man came into view as he moved forward into the room. The woman grabbed the doe-eyed boy, pulling him behind her.
“Zachary,” the woman said. She was trying to sound calm, Lacey thought, but there was a quiver in her voice. “Zachary. I’m sorry we left. Don’t hurt us. Please.”
“Whore!” the man yelled at his wife. His arms were stretched out in front of him and the gun bobbed and jerked in his trembling hands. “Slut!”
Lacey’s mother moved in front of the woman and her child, facing the man, her arms out at her sides as though she could protect them more efficiently that way.
“Please put the gun away, sir,” she said. “It’s Christmas.” She probably sounded very composed to everyone else in the room, but Lacey knew her well enough to hear the tremulous tone behind the words.
“Bitch!” the man said. He raised the gun quickly, squeezing his eyes together as he pulled back on the trigger. The blast was loud, splitting apart the hushed silence in the room, and the women finally started to scream. Lacey’s eyes were on her mother, who looked simply surprised, her deep blue eyes wide, her mouth open as if she’d been about to speak. The tiniest fleck of red appeared in the white fabric of her blouse, just over her left breast. Then she fell to the floor, slowly, as if she were melting.
The man fell to the floor, too. He dropped the gun and lowered his face to his hands, sobbing. One of the volunteers ran into the room from the hallway. She grabbed the gun from the floor and held it on him, but the big man no longer looked like a threat, just weak and tired and wet.
Lacey broke free from the woman holding her and ran to her mother, dropping to her knees next to her. Her mother’s eyes were closed. She was unconscious, but not dead. Surely not dead. The bullet must have only nicked her, since the amount of blood on her blouse was no more than the prick of a thorn would produce on a fingertip.
“Mom!” Lacey tried to wake her up. “Mom!” She turned her head toward the man, who still sat crumpled up on the floor. “Why did you do that?” she yelled, but he didn’t lift his head to answer.
Women crowded around her and her mother. One of them knelt next to Lacey, holding her mother’s wrist in her fingers.
“She’s alive,” the woman said.
“Of course she’s alive,” Lacey snapped, angry that the woman had implied anything else was possible. The sound of sirens mixed with the pounding of the rain. “Her body just needs rest from being so scared.” She could hear her mother’s voice in her own; that was just the sort of thing Annie O’Neill would say.
The woman the man had meant to kill was huddled in the corner, her arms around her son. Lacey could hear her speaking, saying over and over again into the pine-scented air of the room, “I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry,” and another woman was telling her, “It’s not your fault, dear. You were right to come here to get away from him.” But it was her fault. If she and her son hadn’t come here, this crazy man wouldn’t have run in and shot her mother.
The room suddenly filled with men and women wearing uniforms. They blurred in front of Lacey’s eyes, and their voices were loud and barking. Someone was trying to drag her away from her mother, but she remained on the floor, unwilling to be budged more than a few feet. She watched as a man tore open her mother’s blouse and cut her bra, exposing her left breast for all the world to see. There was a dimple in that breast. Just a trace of blood and a small dimple, and that gave Lacey hope. She’d had far worse injuries falling off her bike.
She stood up to be able to see better, and the woman who had tried to pull her away wrapped her arms around her from behind, crossing them over her chest and shoulders, as though afraid she might try to run to her mother’s side again. That was exactly what she wanted to do, but she felt immobilized by shock as much as by the heavy arms across her chest. She watched as the people in uniform lifted her mother onto a stretcher and wheeled her from the room. The man was already gone, and she realized the police had taken him away and she hadn’t even noticed.
Lacey tugged at the woman’s arms. “I want to go with her,” she said.
“I’ll drive you,” the woman said. “We can follow the ambulance. You don’t want to be in there with her.”
“Yes, I do!” Lacey said, but the woman held her fast.
Giving in, she let the woman lead her out the front door of the house, and she turned to watch them load her mother into the ambulance. Something cool touched her nose and her cheeks and her lips, and she turned her face toward the dark sky. Only then did she realize it was snowing.
1
June 2003
THE CHAIN AT THE END OF THE GRAVEL LANE hung loose from the post, and Lacey was grateful that Clay had remembered she’d gone out for dinner with Tom and had left the entrance open for them.
“Will you put the chain up after you drop me off?” she asked Tom.
“No problem.” He drove between the posts and onto the forest-flanked lane, driving too quickly over the bumps and ruts.
Lacey pressed her palm against the dashboard for balance. Although it was only dusk, it was already dark along the tree-shrouded gravel lane leading to the Kiss River light station. “You’d better slow down,” she said. “I nearly ran over an opossum on this road last night.”
Obediently, Tom lifted his foot from the gas pedal. “I’m glad you don’t live out here alone,” he said in the paternal tone he occasionally used with her since learning he was her biological father a decade ago. “I’d be worried about you all the time.”
“Well,” Lacey sighed. “I won’t be living out here too much longer.” The Coast Guard had finally decided to turn the nearly restored keeper’s house into a museum, a decision she had hoped would never come.
“You’re upset about it, huh?”
“Oh, a bit.” She was frankly scared, although of what, she couldn’t say. The isolation the keeper’s house had offered her had been more than welcome, it had been necessary, especially this last difficult year. “They’ve restored every inch of it except the living room and the sunroom.” She shared a studio in Kill Devil Hills with Tom, but she’d turned the sunroom of the keeper’s house into a small studio, as well, so she could work on her stained glass when she was at home. “They’ll restore the sunroom after I leave, and the living room will be turned into a little shop and information area.”
“When do they want you out?” he asked. They were nearing the end of the road. A bit of dusky daylight broke through the trees and she could clearly see the gray in Tom’s wiry blond ponytail and the glint of light from the small gold hoop in his ear.
“Some time after the first of the year,” she said.
“Where will you … holy shit.” Tom had driven from the gravel road into the parking lot, and the keeper’s house came into view in the evening light. The upper portions of nearly every window were aglow with her stained glass creations.
She followed his gaze to the house. “In the year and a half I’ve lived here, you haven’t seen the keeper’s house at night?” she asked.
Tom stopped the car in the middle of the lot and a smile came slowly to his lips. Shaking his head, he leaned over to pull Lacey toward him, wrapping her in the scent of tobacco as he kissed the top of her head. She had gotten him to stop drinking, but had failed at getting him to give up cigarettes.
“You’re your mother, Lace,” he said. “This is just the sort of thing she would do. Turn her home into a … I don’t know. Someplace magical.”
She felt defeated. She wanted to tell him that she was not her mother any longer, that she had worked hard this last year to rid herself of her mother’s persona. Apparently she had not succeeded. It was hard to succeed when you had no identity of your own to take the place of the one you were trying to discard.
She was surprised to see her father’s van parked in the lot next to Clay’s Jeep. “Dad is here,” she said. “Weird.”
“He doesn’t come to visit you much?” Tom asked, and she heard the competitive edge in his voice. Tom often displayed a quiet envy of Alec O’Neill for having had the honor of raising her.
“He’s smitten with Rani,” she said, not really answering the question. “He likes having a grandbaby.”
Tom laughed. “You have one hell of a complicated family, you know that?”
“I do, indeed.” Lacey unfastened her seat belt. The tight little nuclear family she’d grown up in had added and subtracted so many people that it sometimes seemed difficult to keep track of them all. To complicate her life even further, she worked with both her fathers, spending her mornings in the animal hospital run by the father who had raised her and her afternoons in the art studio with the father who had given her life.
“Is that a kennel?” Tom pointed toward the large fenced area near the edge of the woods. “Is Clay training dogs again?”
“Uh-huh,” she said. “He’s been back at it a few months now.” With Gina and Rani in his life, her brother had undergone a metamorphosis. He was a devoted husband, and practically overnight, he’d developed parenting skills she had never expected to see in him. But it was the day she’d watched him roll chunks of wood and concrete into the forest—obstacles for the dogs he trained in search-and-rescue work—that she knew he was once again a man at peace with his world.
She realized that Tom had not moved his car from the center of the lot.
“Park your car and come in for a while,” she said.
He shook his head. “No, I’ll just head on home.”
“You know you’re welcome,” she said.
“I know that, sugar. But … I just never feel comfortable around Alec. Your dad.”
Lacey smiled. “I’m nearly twenty-six years old, Tom,” she said. “What happened between you and my mother is ancient history and you know my father got over it a long time ago.”
“Some other time,” Tom said.
“Okay.” She opened the car door and stepped out. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”
She waved as he turned the car around and drove back onto the gravel lane. Slipping off her sandals, she dangled them over her fingertips and started walking across the sand toward the house. The air was thick with salt, and the rhythmic pounding of the waves against the shore was nearly drowned out by the buzz of cicadas.
She often wondered if she should tell Tom the truth about her mother. It was clear that he thought he had been her only affair, as if he alone had been so irresistible that he could cause a woman as saintly as Annie O’Neill to stray. As far as Lacey knew, he did not date anyone, still so haunted by Annie’s ghost that he thought it impossible to find a woman who could take her place. Yet Lacey couldn’t bring herself to hurt him with the truth.
Inside the house, Clay’s black lab, Sasha, ran into the kitchen to greet her, and she dropped her sandals on the floor and bent down to scratch the dog behind his ears. The room smelled of Gina’s cooking—cardamom and turmeric, coconut and ginger. She could hear voices coming from the living room.
“Who’s here, Sash?” she said, as if she didn’t know. “Let’s go see.”
Sasha led the way through the kitchen to the living room, tail wagging, and Lacey stopped in the doorway of the room, not wanting to interrupt the scene in front of her. Gina was stretched out on the sofa, grinning, her arms folded behind her head as she watched Clay and Alec playing on the floor with Rani and her dolls. Clay was making the Indian Barbie, which was bedecked in a pink sari, walk across the rug toward the plastic dollhouse.
“Let’s go to Rani’s house!” he said in a high-pitched voice.
Alec was walking a brown-skinned baby doll—a big blob of a doll compared to the slender, shapely Barbie—around on the carpet. “No,” he said. “I want to go fishing!”
Rani looked alarmed, reaching for the baby doll. “No, no, no!” she said, her enormous black eyes wide in her caramel-colored face. “Everyone comes to my house.”
Lacey laughed. At nearly two and a half, Rani tried hard to control her world. She’d had so little opportunity to control it during her first two years that she was making up for lost time. The little girl looked up at the sound of Lacey’s laughter, then jumped up from the floor.
“Lacey!” she said, running toward her. “I love you!”
Lacey bent down to pick her up. She was a little peanut of a child. So tiny. So full of joy. And so, so wanted.
“Hi, baby,” Lacey said. “I love you, too.”
Gina had struggled to adopt Rani, and once Clay had fallen in love with Gina, he had joined that struggle with his whole heart. They’d spent from July to September in India the year before, fighting the system to get the court’s permission to adopt Rani. The little girl had desperately needed heart surgery, but so many obstacles stood in the way of the adoption that Gina had feared the toddler might die before she could bring her home. Once permission had been received, the three of them were quickly ushered out of the country, escaping before the foreign adoption antagonists could become involved. By that time, Rani was so weak from her heart condition that she could barely hold her head up, and Gina and Clay feared it might be too late to save her. Gina had already made contact with a surgeon in Seattle, so she flew there with Rani. The surgery was successful and the two of them remained in Seattle as Rani healed. Clay had moped around the keeper’s house, unable to think of anything other than the woman and baby he had fallen in love with. He and Gina talked for hours on the phone—for so long, in fact, that Lacey had insisted he get a separate phone line installed in the keeper’s house. In February, Gina and Rani traveled across the country to the Outer Banks. Gina and Clay were married the following day, and Rani, who had arrived shy and quiet and skinny as a twig, quickly blossomed into an insatiable chatterbox who fully recognized her role as the center of the universe. She was spoiled—if it was possible to spoil a child who had spent her first two years with little more than dirt and deprivation—and no one cared.
Lacey carried Rani over to the sofa and sat down next to Gina’s bare feet. She looked at her father, who still sat on the floor, holding the fat baby doll on his lap. “What are you doing here, Dad?” she asked.
Alec set the doll down on the rug and leaned back on his hands. “I wanted to talk to you and Clay,” he said. His serious tone was worrisome. She looked from her father to Clay, who shrugged, apparently as much in the dark as she was. The two men looked so much alike. Long, lanky bodies, translucent blue eyes. The only difference between them were the lines on her father’s face and the gray in his hair. Clay could look at Alec O’Neill and know exactly how he, himself, would look in another twenty years.
Gina sat up and reached for Rani. “I’ll put her to bed,” she said, as if knowing this conversation was meant for Alec and his children and not necessarily for her.
“Good night, sweetie.” Lacey planted a kiss on Rani’s cheek before handing her over to Gina.
Her father stood up as Gina left the room. “Let’s go outside,” he said.
She and Clay followed him through the kitchen, down the porch steps and onto the sand, which felt cool now beneath her feet. In another few weeks the sand would be warm, even at night, never losing the heat from the day. As if on automatic pilot, the three of them started walking side by side toward the remains of the lighthouse. Illuminated by the half-moon, the white lighthouse glowed, its broken rim a ragged line across the night sky. A breeze had kicked up in the short time she’d been inside the house, and Lacey’s long, wild hair blew across her face. If she’d known about the change in weather, she would have tied her hair back before stepping outside. People thought her hair was impossibly beautiful. She thought it was merely impossible.
“What’s up, Dad?” Clay asked, and Lacey wondered if he, too, was remembering the last time their father had asked to speak to both of them, the day he told them that their mother had been unfaithful to him throughout their marriage.
“I received a letter today,” their father said. “I forgot to bring it with me for you two to read it, but essentially it stated that a parole hearing is scheduled in September for Zachary Pointer.”
Clay stopped walking and turned to face his father. “Parole?” He sounded as astonished as she felt. “He’s only been in prison … what? … twelve years?”
“Apparently that’s long enough to get him out on parole.”
Lacey caught her hair in her hands and began to braid it down her back, concentrating hard on the task. She didn’t want to think about Zachary Pointer or relive that night, although the memory was always so near the surface that just the mention of his name would bring it back. Nothing could prevent her from remembering his face, the crazed look in his wild eyes. She could still hear his angry and ugly words toward his wife and see her mother’s noble—and successful—attempt to protect the woman.
Lacey had refused to attend the trial back then; in those days she could focus on nothing other than trying to survive the pain of losing her mother. But once and only once, before she realized what she was looking at and could turn away, she saw Pointer on television. The big man was leaving the courthouse with his lawyer. She’d been riveted by the sight of him. He wept when he spoke to the reporters. She’d been struck by the humanness in his face, by the unmistakable remorse and sorrow and shame she saw there. Now she pictured him in prison all this time, alone with the pain of that remorse. He’d been sick. Mentally ill. There’d been no doubt in her mind, but the jury had adamantly ruled against an insanity plea. Maybe she and Clay and their father should listen to the arguments for allowing him out on parole. Twelve years was a long time.
Stop it, she thought to herself. She had her mother’s genes, whether she wanted them or not; she was doomed to feel compassion for everyone.
“He should have been fried,” she said, the words so alien coming from her mouth that her brother and father both turned to stare at her.
“Well, we’re in agreement then,” her father said after a moment. “We’ll fight his parole. I’ll hire an attorney to find out what our next step should be.”
In her bedroom later that night, Lacey opened the windows wide and let the strong breeze whip the sheer seafoam-colored curtains into the room. Sitting on the edge of her bed, she could hear laughter coming from Clay and Gina’s room. She loved them both and loved that they were together, but the sound of their laughter increased the feeling that often crept over her in the evenings: loneliness. The feeling would only intensify once she was under the covers. That was the most alone time in the world, being in bed at night, in the dark, when all you had for company was your thoughts. The emptiness she felt was not new. It had started when her mother died. She’d lost her father then, too, as he became absorbed in grief. Once he started seeing Olivia, the woman he’d eventually married, he’d shifted that absorption to her. Although Olivia had been very kind to Lacey, she’d been more parent than friend, wrapped up in her own pregnancy and her growing love for Lacey’s father.
Sometime that year Lacey learned that she could fill the void with boys, however temporary that filling might be. She grew to be a woman, the boys grew to be men, but the void remained, yawning and insatiable, and she’d continued to fill it the only way she knew how. She hadn’t had all that many lovers. Not as many as Clay seemed to think when he chastised her about her promiscuity. But all the men she selected seemed to fit the same mold: they were “bad boys,” edgy and exciting, who wanted nothing more from her than a good night in bed. That was the one thing she’d excelled at. Maybe the only thing.
It had not been a conscious choice for Lacey to begin emulating her mother after her death. She’d tried only to be the sort of woman her mother would have wanted her to be, taking on volunteer activities, tutoring kids, reading to the seniors at the retirement home, donating blood as often as allowed. But the pull she’d felt to the wrong sort of men had always distressed her; surely her mother would have disapproved. Little did she know that she was emulating her mother in that regard, as well, and the revelation had shocked her. Annie O’Neill had been, quite simply, a fraud.
Since learning the truth about her mother and her adulterous behavior, Lacey had not had a single lover. Not a single date. She had avoided men altogether, distrustful of her own judgment. She felt like Tom, trying to fight his yearning for alcohol. Tom could not have a single drink or he would be right back where he started. It was the same with her and men.
She’d discarded other qualities she thought of as her mother’s, as well, pulling back from the many volunteer activities she used to do, turning inward. At Clay and Gina’s insistence, she’d seen a counselor, a woman who had been too damn insightful for Lacey’s comfort level. Lacey had presented herself to the woman as a sex addict. The label comforted her somehow, a neat little package that could be addressed through a twelve-step program, the way Tom’s alcoholism was being treated. But the counselor had not agreed. “Depression, yes,” she’d said. “Some self-esteem issues, yes. Sex addiction, no. You don’t fit the criteria.” She’d forced Lacey to look at pieces of her behavior she could not bear to examine. “You’re always doing things for other people,” the counselor had said, “as though you don’t feel you deserve anything for yourself. Focusing on others keeps you from feeling your own pain. You need to let yourself feel it, Lacey, before you can fix it.”
Well, she thought as she slipped beneath the covers on her bed, she was feeling it now.
2
FROM THE OUTSIDE, THE STAINED-GLASS STUDIO in Kill Devil Hills looked the same as when her mother had worked there. Set back just a few yards from Croatan Highway, its floor-to-ceiling windows were filled with stained-glass panels, but the trained eye would be able to detect a difference between then and now. Tom’s glasswork had changed over the years and was now more geometric, and there was less of it since he had gradually shifted his focus to photography over the years. Lacey’s stained-glass panels hung intermingled with his. She did not think her work was as beautiful as her mother’s had been; she had never mastered some of Annie’s special touches, which had seemed more of an infusion of feeling rather than the result of a specific technique. But Lacey’s work was popular, nonetheless. She had her own style, and her subject matter leaned more toward animals and florals than the stunning gowned women her mother had been known for. Lacey’s worktable was the same one her mother had used, placed next to Tom’s, as it had always been. She used her mother’s tools, as well. For a long time she used her mother’s green safety glasses, in spite of the fact that they were scratched and worn. A year ago, though, she’d tossed them away and bought her own glasses, amazed at how clearly she could suddenly see her work and the world.
Two women—tourists—were in the studio, oohing and aahing over the artwork. Although Tom was out to lunch, a third woman stood next to his worktable, seemingly mesmerized by the work in progress resting on the tabletop. From the corner of her eye, Lacey saw one of the women run her fingers lightly over a stained-glass egret hanging in the window. She would buy it, Lacey knew. She could read the people who came into the studio. Those who were simply spending idle time held their arms folded across their chests as they walked around the room, looking without really seeing. Others, like the woman touching the egret, could not tear themselves away from a particular piece. They studied it from every angle. They reached out and touched. They imagined how the colors would look in their homes. They’d drag a friend over to see the piece. The friend would nod. Sold.
Sure enough, the woman walked toward Lacey, a smile on her lips.
