Gull Island, Texas
"I'm sorry you're angry, Tom."
The night was black, not the subtle blackness of city night, where neon and halogen mitigate the darkness and cast a gray hue into the sky, but the blackness of deep underwater caves and the other side of the moon.
The interior of the car was matching blackness, softened by the blur of a yellow glow that spread over the console. The only sound inside their traveling cocoon was the soft brush of their breathing, the drone of the powerful German engine as it sought to accommodate both the air conditioner and the steep hills, and the whish-click of the wiper blades on interval/pause.
Maggie was tired and grateful that Tom seemed as disinclined to speech as she felt uninspired to listen. She sank down into the lush comfort of the velour seat, breathed in the air reminiscent of Paco Rabanne and closed her eyes, wishing herself asleep or on the plane.
This visit home had been a disaster. They’d spent the entire time arguing. Or, she realized in a burst of honesty, Tom had raged, she'd listened.
Maggie felt as though the June rain passed through the car, seeped into her clothes and weighed down each pore with humidity. She turned her head and stared out the window, past her own reflection and the mirror image of the yellow dash lights and beyond, to where the road dropped away to expose limestone cliffs. She didn't like driving on nights like these, wished Tom's anger didn't result in his taking the turns just a little too sharply.
"It's not fair."
She turned her head slowly. Tom glanced at her, his eyes dark shadowed pools of muted brown. He’d been angry ever since she'd told him her news.
"I've worked longer than you have, longer and harder."
A sentiment she’d heard before.
"I'm sorry you're disappointed, or feel cheated, or threatened, or whatever you're feeling."
She wasn't going to argue with him about fairness. She'd worked just as hard; she was proud of the National Geographic grant, proud of the work she'd done to acquire it.
The news had come yesterday; her celebration had been muted in deference to Tom's feelings, but it didn't mean that she wasn't thrilled. For two years she wouldn't have to worry about money or permits or the French or the Egyptian officials who were assigned, rightly she thought, to guard their country's heritage. The grant she'd won was prestigious enough to guarantee cooperation in whatever guise she sought it and financially large enough that she wouldn't have to ask her parents to finance her airline tickets home.
At this moment, she and Tom were combatants on a field not of honor, but of academic repute. Her grant and her field work would garner her a position at any well renowned university, could perhaps elevate her to a full professorship in a shorter time than she'd hoped. She’d be Tom’s equal then, not some worshipful student waiting for him to pay attention to her.
Once, he’d been her professor. Maggie had been nineteen when she'd fallen in love with Tom, an expression that now prompted her to think of a suicide's leap from a tall building.
Now, nearly ten years later, she realized that whatever emotion he felt for her was no match for his ego. He resented her for encroaching on his male preserve, for achieving recognition in a field filled with brilliant, media-conscious archeologists. He was clearly incensed because she'd won what he'd always coveted.
Tom was acting as if she'd emasculated him with one stroke, stealing his limelight along with his manhood. The dash board lights illuminated the truth of his expression. Equality was only a word to Tom, or only practiced as long as he was a little more equal than she.
Maggie reached over and placed her hand on his sleeve, but he shook off her touch. He turned, his eyes veering from the road too long, the look on his face a prelude to the words he was going to speak. Words, no doubt, of derision, of contempt, of betrayal.
She never heard them.
The lights from the pickup blinded them. Her last sight was Tom's look of horror as he realized he couldn't avoid the crash.
Metal mated with metal. Glass became sword-like shards glittering in the glare of one lone headlight.
And then Maggie woke.
The rattan headboard was spiny against her back as she sat up. Sleep wouldn't come again tonight.
She may have been rendered sightless by the accident, a result of rain slicked roads, a drunk driver, and Tom's inattention, but her nightly dreams jeered at her with Technicolor details. The highlights of Tom's auburn hair, the soft brown of his eyes, the crooked eye tooth, the dimple on the left side of his mouth. Small things to remember with perfect clarity.
Her dress had been yellow, with thin, spaghetti straps under the bolero jacket. A flirty dress with a skirt shorter than she normally wore. Months in the desert dressed in khaki jeans and long sleeved shirts made her want to dress up for the flight to Paris. They'd never been able to find her purse, but it had been soft yellow leather, with a gold clasp.
Maggie pushed back the cotton blanket and sheet, even though she shivered in the chill of the room. She flicked on the bedside lamp, cupping her hands over the bulb, feeling the instant warmth against her palms. Somehow, the knowledge of light eased the darkness.
How stupid to feel self-pity. She hadn’t died in the accident, and for that she was grateful. But what did she do with the anger? At whom did she get mad? The people she loved who'd only shown their love for her? Hardly. Who, then, did she blame for a moment of bad timing, bad luck, bad breaks? Tom?
His visits in the hospital had dwindled over time. He’d not been brave enough to face what had happened. After she'd been released, he'd come to her parent's house with flowers exactly twice. Only when she’d finally confronted him had he broken down, explaining that they had been growing apart even before the accident. The fact that she was now blind had nothing to do with his sudden and studied aversion to her.
Yeah, right.
But for chance, then, that nameless, impish god of revolving doors and split second timing, she'd be dead. Or untouched by the accident like Tom.
She would gladly choose his fate over hers.
Every night it was the same. The dream, then the awareness when she remembered that the darkness of her night was eternal. She'd never again pull on her working clothes, tie her hair back into a pony tail, wash the sleep from her eyes and, armed with a cup of coffee and leave her tent for a world thousands of years distant.
Never again would she be able to hold a shard of pot in her hand and marvel at the colors still visible on the terra cotta, faded aquamarine once a brilliant teal, amber once orange. She'd never be able to climb up the cliffs to read an obscure text in hieroglyph, or trace her fingers on the faintly embedded cartouche of a king.
Grieving over it wouldn’t make the loss easier.
She sat on the edge of the bed, seeing in her mind the room her brother, Jerry, had described when he’d brought her to Gull Island.
“Aunt Louise must have decorated the cabin recently. Think blue and gray,” he said. “What isn’t this dark blue color is gray. Gray pillows, blue bedspread."
She smiled. “What color is the wall?"
“Blue."
“And the floor?"
“It’s blue."
She suspected the bedroom wasn’t as dull as it sounded. But she’d taken pity on Jerry, releasing him from the chore of describing her surroundings.
“I don’t like leaving you alone,” he said before leaving her.
“We’ve gone through this before, Jerry. I’ll be fine. I have a phone. I’ll call if I get lonely."
“Who will you call if you need help?"
“With any luck I won’t need any. The island’s secure." The bridge had been locked, and there wasn’t any other way across the causeway except by boat.
“I don’t know, Maggie,” he said doubtfully.
“Go home, Jerry. Laura’s probably going into labor as we speak."
“Do you think that’s possible? She’s not due for another two weeks."
She shouldn’t have said that. This was their first baby and Jerry was all nerves. He’d spent the eight and a half months of his wife’s pregnancy reading books on childbirth, driving everyone crazy with his worry. If she knew her brother, he’d call Laura a few times on the way home, just as he had on the trip to Gull Island.
"I'll call if I need you, I promise."
She'd been able to say it with force, so he wouldn't know how terrified she suddenly was to be left alone here with only the sea and the sand as companions.
Opening the end table drawer, she extracted a small bit of bluish glass, formed by fire into an egg shape. A relic of her past, a find from an excavated worker’s house. Of no value to her colleagues or to the study of the area, it had remained a talisman over the years, something to remind her of all those days in the sun.
She closed her hand over the egg. Something that old had somehow managed to survive all those centuries.
Could she be as strong?
Her thoughts turned to her island companions. Strangers who, unlike most strangers she'd met, spurred her curiosity. What were the English doing on Gull Island?
There, a thought that pulled her from the past, and into the now of her life.
Richard stood at the window in the darkness, watching the shapes of night merge and disintegrate. The ocean waves were black shadows resting on a sea of midnight blue. The orange disk of the moon slid into a pocket of clouds. It was not a serene night; it heralded troubled dreams, a tinge of tears on the back of the throat, a melody just a note off key.
Tonight was an anniversary. Did the world mourn?
Eleanor was dead.
Three years had passed since she'd died, since she was buried in the cathedral at Andover. The solemn procession to her final resting place had been accompanied by old women crying into their tissues, old men wiping reddened eyes, young girls sobbing, and stoic young men.
For the past month, her picture was splashed across the front page of the tabloids. Eleanor, with her striking black Irish looks. Black hair, white skin, ruby lips, and flashing blue eyes, was a photographer’s treasure.
The reports, no doubt, were that he'd gone to ground to nurse his grief. They would speculate at the depth of his pain, want to scratch at his three year old scab and see if it still bled.
Richard, in mourning, would have been the perfect picture to accompany Eleanor's portrait.
What would they have printed if they'd know that, instead of grief, he only felt guilt?
He glanced to his left, at the small cottage squatting on the landscape. The light in one window stared steadily at him like an accusing eye.
A blind woman, with her light on.
Somehow, it seemed strangely apropos for this night filled with moon tossed clouds and salty breezes.