He hung up the phone after talking with Olivia, knowing he would not be able to sleep. He got out of bed and pulled on the blue shorts he’d worn that day, zipping them up as he walked from the bedroom out to the second-story deck. He sat down on the glider, pumping gently with his bare feet, making the glider coast a little. The sound was dark. The water lapped gently against the beach in his back yard, and a damp breeze brushed over his chest and arms.
He needed to get Olivia and Paul back together again, quickly, before he told her anything more loaded than he liked the sound of her name. He couldn’t shake the feeling that he was doing something wrong, something inappropriate, just by talking to her from his bed. But he knew the reason for his guilt.
The call had come on a Sunday morning, a couple of years ago. He’d been sitting out here on the glider, reading the paper and drinking coffee from a mug when he heard Annie answer the telephone in the bedroom. She spoke quietly into the phone, her voice unusually subdued, which made him turn his lead to listen, but he couldn’t make out her words and he returned his concentration to the paper. After a few minutes she came out onto the deck and sat down next to him on the glider.
“That was the bone marrow registry,” she said. “I’m a perfect match for a little girl in Chicago.”
She had registered as a donor several years earlier and Alec had thought little of it at the time. Just another one of Annie’s good deeds. He had never expected it to amount to anything. From what he’d heard, it was extremely rare to find a match for bone marrow outside of one’s own family. Apparently, though, it was not impossible.
He set down the newspaper and took her hand, drawing it onto his thigh. “So what does that mean exactly?” he asked.
“I’ll have to go to Chicago. The surgery’s scheduled for Tuesday.” She wrinkled her nose, and when she spoke again her voice was small, hesitant. “Do you think you could go with me?”
“Of course.” He let go of her hand and smoothed her hair over her shoulder. “You’re sure you want to do this?”
“You bet.” She stood up and bent over to kiss him. “I’ll start breakfast.”
She was quiet for the rest of the day, and he didn’t press her to talk. He sensed she was grappling with something that she needed to work out on her own. At dinner that night, she told the children as much as she knew about the little girl who would surely die without her help. Lacey and Clay were eleven and fifteen, and they listened carefully, with serious faces. They would stay at Nola’s, Annie told them, and she and Alec would be home Wednesday night.
“How do they get the bone marrow out of you and into the girl?” Lacey asked.
“Well,” said Annie, her face animated, “first they’ll put us both to sleep so we don’t feel any pain. Then they’ll make a little incision in my back and take the marrow out with a needle and that’s that. The doctor said I’ll have a stiff back for a few days, but that will be the worst part. And I’ll be saving the little girl’s life.”
That night she could not sleep. She tossed and turned, finally working her way into Alec’s arms. “Please hold me,” she said.
She trembled as he pulled her close to him, and when she rested her head on his bare shoulder, he could feel the warm dampness of her cheek and knew she’d been crying.
He held her tighter. “What’s wrong?”
“I’m so scared,” she whispered. “I’m so scared I’m going to die during the surgery.”
He was alarmed. It was so unlike Annie to give a thought to herself. He leaned away from her, trying to see her eyes in the darkness. “Then don’t do it,” he said. “You don’t have to do it.”
“I do.” She sat up, facing him, her hand on his chest. “It’s a child’s only chance.”
“Maybe there were other matches.”
“They said I was the only one.”
“Christ. Nothing like a little guilt trip.”
“The feeling is so strong.” She shivered. “As though I’m definitely going to die. It would be punishment for all the bad things I’ve done.”
He laughed and lifted her hand from his chest to his lips. “You’ve never done a bad thing in your life.”
“I can’t stand the thought of not getting to watch Lacey and Clay grow up.” She began crying in earnest, and he knew her imagination was taking over as it so often did, tormenting her with the worst possible fantasy. “I’d never get to hold my grandchildren. I want to grow old with you, Alec.” She was pleading, as though there was something he could do to assure her of a perfect future.
“I want you to back out of this, Annie.” He sat up too, holding her hands, squeezing them between his palms. “Blame it on me. Tell them…”
“I can’t. The little girl needs…”
“I don’t give a damn about the little girl.”
She snapped her hands away from his. “Alec! How can you say that?”
“She’s anonymous. I don’t know her and I never will. You, on the other hand, I know very well, and you’re too frightened. It’s not good for you to go into surgery feeling this way.”
“I have to do it. I’ll be all right. I’m just…” She shook her head. “You know how nuts you can get in the middle of the night.” She lay down again and snuggled next to him, and it was another minute before she spoke again.
“Let me just ask you something, though,” she said. “Hypothetically.”
“Mmm?”
“If I died, how long would you wait before you started going out with someone?”
“Annie. Cancel the damn surgery.”
“No. I mean it, Alec. Tell me. How long?”
He was quiet for a moment, aware of how quickly he could lose her. She could, in a perfectly voluntary surgery, leave him forever. He pulled her closer. “I can’t imagine ever wanting to be with anyone else,” he said.
“You mean, sexually?”
“I mean period.”
“Well, God, I wouldn’t want you to be alone forever. But if I did die, would you wait a year please? I mean, that’s not too long to grieve for someone you completely and thoroughly adore, is it? That’s all I ask. Then you can do whatever you like, although it would be nice if you could think of me from time to time, and find your new woman lacking in almost every way.”
“Why not in every way?” he asked, smiling. “Go for broke, Annie.” He raised himself up on his elbow and kissed her. “Maybe we’d better make love one last time since you already seem to have a foot out the door.” He slipped his hand to her breast, but she caught his fingers.
“You didn’t promise yet, Alec,” she said. “Just one year. Please?”
“I’ll give you two,” he said, certain then that it was a promise he would have no trouble at all keeping.
She felt better in the morning, a cheery optimism replacing her maudlin mood. Alec, however, felt worse, as though she had transferred her fear to him. By the time they boarded the plane for Chicago on Tuesday, he was sick with nervousness. He sat with his head flat against the seatback, trying to ignore the nausea pressing in on him, while Annie held his hand and rested her head on his shoulder. She read him the article she’d torn from the Beach Gazette that morning, the article describing her trip to Chicago, yet another one of Annie O’Neill’s saintly deeds.
She had to stay in the hospital the night before the surgery and Alec took a room in the hotel across the street. He watched television the entire night. If he fell asleep he might miss the alarm, and Annie would be taken into the OR before he’d have a chance to see her.
He walked over to the hospital before dawn and went into her room as soon as they would let him. She looked beautiful, her hair falling around her shoulders, a smile of contentment on her face.
“Oh, Alec.” She reached for his hand. “You didn’t sleep.”
“Yes, I did,” he lied.
She shook her head. “You have circles under your eyes. You look awful.”
He tried to smile. “Thanks.”
The nurse came in, telling them it was time for Annie to be wheeled to the operating room. Alec leaned over to kiss her, leaving his lips on hers for a long time. When he pulled away she whispered, “Don’t be scared.” They wheeled her out of the room and he struggled to keep his tears and his terror in check as he watched her disappear down the hall.
The surgery went smoothly, and Annie was practically euphoric by the time he saw her back in her room.
“My first thought when I came out of the anesthetic was, ‘I’m alive!’” she told him with a tired smile. “I was sick as a dog. It was wonderful.”
Sitting on the plane was not easy for her. She fidgeted, adjusting her seat belt in an effort to get comfortable, but she didn’t utter a word of complaint.
“I’ve been thinking,” she said, when they were somewhere over Virginia. “There are some changes I want to make about us.”
“Like what?” he asked.
“We need more time together.”
“Fine,” he said.
“I propose that we meet for lunch one day a week.”
“Okay.”
“A two-hour lunch,” she said. “In a motel.”
He laughed. “I see.”
“I really need this, Alec.” She rested her head on his shoulder. “We never get time away together, without the kids around. It’s so important. It’s more important than you know, than I can possibly explain to you.”
They met on Fridays, from twelve to two, in any motel that would take them. In the winter it was easy to find a room, but during the summer, they paid an exorbitant price for the privilege of two hours in a prime-season motel. By that time, though, Alec knew those couple of hours were worth any amount of money. The intimacy they shared in the motel rooms spilled over to the other days of the week, and he saw a change in Annie. Her occasional moodiness, her periods of withdrawal, completely disappeared. Amazing that two hours a week could change so much.
“I’ve never been happier in my entire life than I’ve been this past year,” she told him. They’d been meeting for well over a year by then, and her contentment was so complete that when the depression took hold of her late in the fall, it was impossible to miss. She grew nervous. Jumpy. She was tearful when they made love on those afternoons in the motel room, quiet as they ate the lunch she’d brought. She avoided his eyes when she spoke to him. Sometimes she’d cry for no reason at all. He’d find her weeping in the bathroom as she soaked in the tub, or he’d wake up in the middle of the night to hear her crying softly into her pillow. It seemed far worse than the other times, or maybe it was just that it had been so long since he’d seen that misery in her.
“Let me in, Annie,” he’d say to her. “Let me help.” But she seemed no more aware of the reason for her distress than he was, and so he settled for holding her close to him, for trying to still her trembling with his arms.
Then suddenly, she was gone. In the hospital that Christmas night, he’d remembered his promise to her and it had seemed ludicrous to him that she’d asked him to grieve for only one year. He couldn’t imagine ever being interested in another woman. A year seemed no longer than one rotation of the lighthouse beacon.
Until he met Olivia, a woman as unlike Annie as a woman could be. She’s a friend, he told himself now as he coasted gently on the glider. She’s married to another man and carrying that man’s child.
Maybe he should call her earlier in the evening, before he got into bed, the bed that still seemed filled with Annie’s presence. Maybe he shouldn’t call her at all.