Maidenstone Lighthouse (4 page)

Aunt Ellen. She didn't give hugs and kisses but I always knew she loved me. I hoped she knew how much I loved her.

I stretched and sank lower in the tub so the soothing jets could do their magic on my neck, stiff from the long drive.

When another drive swam into my thoughts. I still have nightmares where the truck crosses the center line and smashes into the side of the car. I cringed.

Even at ten Mother insisted I sit in the backseat buckled into the middle. She'd read somewhere that air bags were dangerous to children. So I was safe, not a scratch on me, but because the truck hit the side of the car Mother's air bag didn't save her.

My father and I were alone.

It was Aunt Ellen who was there for us, for me. I never saw her cry but her strength helped my father and me through that first horrid year and after that I spent every summer here.

Starting to prune, I got out of the tub and went upstairs to bed.

T
hat night I dreamt of Bobby.

But my dream, for a change, was not one of the foolish longing fantasies with which I had been torturing myself ever since his disappearance.

Instead, that night, snug in my sturdy old sea captain's bed, with the October wind rattling the windows of my secure cocoon and the soothing glow of the fairy lamp fending off the freezing darkness outside, I dreamt of the day I had first met Bobby, and of the life we had shared together.

It was early on a bright autumn morning. Dressed in baggy sweats and bedraggled from an intense aerobic workout at my women's health club, I was coming out of a Seventh Avenue bakery, a bag of croissants in one hand, my open wallet carelessly clutched in the other.

Intoxicated by the delicious yeasty smell of the warm bread and squinting happily down the sun-splashed street, which looked fresh-scrubbed from a brief spring shower that had ended just seconds before, I could have been the poster girl for Mugging Victims Anonymous.

Suddenly, I heard the rapid slap of sneakers on the concrete behind me, and something hard and brutal—a fist, as it later turned out—landed squarely in the center of my back. I briefly glimpsed a pair of large, dirty running shoes as I fell face-forward onto the wet pavement and felt the wallet being ripped from my fingers.

Then the running footsteps were receding into the distance and someone was shouting in a deep, enraged voice.

I sat up groggily, clutching my bleeding nose and still only dimly aware of what had just happened to me. Slowly I realized that the angry shouting had not stopped. Looking down the glistening street, I saw that the noise was coming from a tall, blond-haired man in a worn leather jacket and jeans. He stood twenty yards from me, leaning over something in the rain-filled gutter.

Attracted by the shouts and my first startled scream, people were coming out of the bakery. I felt gentle hands helping me up. Concerned voices were asking if I was okay and debating with one another about whether or not to call the cops.

When I looked down the street again the blond giant was just stepping away from another man who was squatting by the curb, holding his ribs. The blond shouted a final threat and the other man staggered to his feet and weaved away, arms still wrapped tightly around his chest, his cruel, stubbled face pale as ashes.

Then, without warning my leather-jacketed hero was standing in front of me like some gorgeous avenging angel straight out of a Hollywood action film.

He held out my wallet and stooped slightly to peer closely at my damaged nose.

I tried smiling but it hurt too much. So I gave him sort of a lopsided grin and tilted my head like a wounded parakeet, trying to think of something appropriately grateful to say.

Meanwhile, content that I had been taken in hand, the small crowd of Manhattan sidewalk gawkers was drifting away.

“I think maybe you need to see a doctor,” my handsome savior said in a pleasingly basso voice that was edged with a crisp Midwestern twang.

I shook my pounding head vigorously. “I'm fine,” I mumbled past my aching jaw. “Jus wanna go home now.”

He must have seen me starting to sway, for I was suddenly overcome by a wave of dizziness. Before I had a chance to topple I felt his strong hand under my elbow. “Home it is, then,” he said, effortlessly holding me upright with one hand while retrieving my miraculously undamaged bag of croissants with the other. “Is it close enough to walk, or should I call a cab?”

At my insistence, we had walked. Rather, he walked while I stumbled along, leaning heavily on him.

Ten minutes later I was seated at the chrome 50s dinette in my little apartment while he tenderly applied an ice-filled towel to my battered nose. I submitted to the soothing treatment like a broken marionette, gazing stupidly into the most devastating pair of ice-blue eyes I had ever seen, and marveling silently at the way the sunlight pouring in through the window at his back shone like gold on his wheat-colored hair.

The whole scene was so steeped in melodrama that I halfway expected violins to start playing an accompaniment to the ringing in my ears.

Of course, I was miserable to a degree far exceeding the superficial bumps and scrapes that had been dished out by my mugger. For I could only imagine what I must have looked like to my hero, all mud-stained and bloody, and with a jagged rip in one knee of my sweats.

And if my bedraggled appearance alone was not enough to send my kind new friend running for the hills, I had clearly demonstrated to him by my carelessness in having openly flashed my wallet on a busy Manhattan street that I was a complete moron, to boot.

So I kept waiting for the golden idol to finish up his obligatory first aid, make some hurried excuse and beat a hasty retreat.

Instead, he lavishly tended my mashed nose and scraped knee, then made hot tea for me. In the process, I learned that his name was Robert Jonathan Hayward—“but you can call me Bobby”—and that he was a commercial pilot. He said he was originally from Colorado. And when I asked about the Midwestern accent he confided to me that the laconic twang was something all professional pilots affect in the cockpit when talking on the radio, so that nobody on the ground will suspect how shit-scared they are most of the time, he added with a grin.

I had laughed then, which brought tears to my eyes, because my poor battered jaw really did hurt like hell.

Saturday morning slipped effortlessly into afternoon as I learned more about Bobby Hayward. He was an ex-navy fighter pilot, had lost both parents in a car crash when he was twelve, had no other family and did not generally make a habit of cracking the ribs of New York muggers, unless they ran head-on into him while making their escape, as mine apparently had.

Just before dark he finally left my apartment, explaining that he had to run out to LaGuardia to check on some repairs to a plane he was scheduled to fly to Greenland on Monday morning.

Coming from anyone else, such an outrageous macho claim would have sounded like pure Manhattan singles bar bullshit. At that point, however, I think that Bobby Hayward could have told me that he was blasting off to Mars for the weekend and I would have swallowed it whole.

So I had merely nodded meekly as he promised to return—just to be sure I was okay, he said—and threatened to take me somewhere for X-rays if the swelling in my jaw had not gone down appreciably in the interim.

The moment the door closed behind him I jumped into the shower, then found some clean clothes and tried to pull myself together. Afterward, I sat in the living room, staring at my scarred front door like a lovesick teenager and absolutely positive that I'd never lay eyes on him again.

Nevertheless, after a couple of hours, Bobby returned, bringing with him a huge container of steaming chicken and matzo ball soup—in honor of my injured jaw, he explained—and pastrami sandwiches from the corner deli. He also brought a bottle of delicious Chilean red wine and a bouquet of dewy spring flowers, which I ceremoniously enshrined in a priceless Steuben Crystal bowl that I was minding for an antique-dealer friend.

Later, we sat cross-legged on my authentic but sagging Duncan Phyfe sofa, eating the deli take-out and listening to classic country-western CDs while Bobby quizzed me about my life, my work and my dreams.

Sunday morning was just dawning as we slipped into the bedroom and made shy, gentle love for the first time.

Except for one brief foray to a neighborhood market for supplies, we remained together in the apartment all day Sunday, cooking, laughing and making love to the soothing sound of the gentle spring rain.

Early Monday morning, Bobby left on his trip, promising to call me when he arrived in Greenland.

I stayed home from work that day, nursing my jaw, which had gone from being grotesquely swollen to merely turning a hideous shade of purple. Too agitated to concentrate on a book or the stack of appraisals I had brought home to write up on my laptop over the weekend, I alternately dozed and watched a mindless parade of game shows, soaps and other trash TV as I attempted to assess what had happened to me.

Handsome and gentle, wild and adventurous, Bobby Hayward had swept into my life out of nowhere. Like the lead character in an idyllic, never-never land romance novel he had cared for me with the utmost concern and tenderness, talked with me for hours about books, music, life and philosophy. And, finally, perhaps more as the result of my desire than his own, for I certainly was no competition for Cindy Crawford and he was clearly fearful of further aggravating my injuries, he had made sweet, exquisitely thrilling love to me…

Then he had flown off to a faraway place that I hadn't previously imagined even had such normal, everyday things as people and airports and houses.

Expecting my romantic bubble to burst at any moment, I hovered by the phone at the appointed hour when he'd said he was scheduled to arrive in Greenland.

Miraculously, the phone rang and, sounding like he was across town and not in some distant, frozen land where the nights were six months long, Bobby confessed that he'd thought of me all the way across the North Atlantic. And I haltingly admitted that he had been on my mind as well. Then, suddenly, we were both talking and laughing like we'd known each other all our lives, and I had insisted on going out to the airport on Thursday to meet him.

 

God, it was all just so perfectly beautiful and exciting that it defies description. I never, ever wanted it to stop. And, except for the all-too-frequent times when Bobby was away on extended long-distance flying assignments, it didn't. Not really. For though we'd had problems—mostly having to do with his erratic, often dangerous work and the amount of time he was gone—the time we did have together was fantastic.

Bobby moved in with me the week after he returned from Greenland. Eighteen months later, we bought the loft on lower Broadway, which we were slowly remodeling. And we had been talking very seriously of late about getting married and having a baby…two or three babies, in fact.

Then, just as suddenly and unexpectedly as it had all begun, my life with Bobby had ended.

He'd been gone for over a week, flying three top executives of the oil company halfway around the world to conclude a merger with an Indonesian producer. And he was supposed to be coming home the next day, a Friday.

I'd happily planned a long, lazy New York summer weekend for us, a concert on Saturday, picnicking in the park on Sunday afternoon, with lots of lovemaking in between. I had been hanging around the office, waiting for his call—Bobby always called from his last stop, to tell me when he'd be “wheels down” at LaGuardia, where the company's planes were based.

But that last phone call never came.

Instead, late on Thursday afternoon, a somber-looking young company executive in an equally somber gray summer-weight suit had appeared at my office, where I was impatiently coaxing the final details of a large estate appraisal out of Damon.

I felt my whole life draining away as the nervous oil company emissary haltingly informed me that Bobby's plane was overdue and “presumed down somewhere in the Indian Ocean.” The plane had only one passenger onboard, having dropped off the other two company executives for a short meeting before the long return flight to the United States.

The man had kept on talking, relating a bewildering array of technical details about bad weather in the area, the massive air-sea search that had already begun by several cooperating nations and the U.S. Navy destroyer that had been dispatched from the American base on the remote island of Diego Garcia. But I had absorbed little or none of it.

All I knew was that Bobby was gone…

I awoke with a start, bitter tears of anguish and regret streaming down my cheeks. The wonderful dream of Bobby had turned suddenly into a horrible nightmare.

And then I realized that I was not alone in the turret bedroom.

D
ressed all in white and shimmering with a faint fluorescent glow, she stood motionless beside the casement window farthest from my bed. Her back was turned to me and she was holding aside one of the sheer lace curtains, gazing intently through the rain-streaked glass into the black and forbidding night beyond.

At first I thought I was imagining her, the way children sometimes imagine they can see the figures of animals in the puffy white clouds of a summer's day.

Limned by the faint blue light of the fairy lamp and half-hidden by the shadow of Damon's wardrobe, she looked like a creature of pure imagination. The simple, flowing lines of her diaphanous gown merged seamlessly into the folds of the sheer floor-length curtain in her hand. And she stood as still and as silent as a sculpture of palest Carrera marble.

Stunned by the eerie sight before me, I felt my mouth go dry. The blood was pounding in my temples as I slowly sat up and stared, half-expecting her slender form to vanish among the deep, lurking shadows beside the wardrobe.

But she remained standing precisely where she was, one bare white arm raised nearly to her cheek, slender fingers clutching the transparent fabric of the intricately patterned lace curtain.

Despite the dim lighting, I seemed to see her with exceptional clarity. A luxuriant cascade of raven hair interwoven with narrow strands of pink satin ribbon fell down her back to below the waist. A chain of cunningly hand-sewn rosebuds decorating the bodice of her dress precisely matched the shade of the ribbon in her hair.

As I continued to stare at the apparition before me I realized that the garment she wore was not a dress at all but an elaborate nightgown, such as a new bride might wear to her wedding bed. And though her face was completely hidden from my view, I somehow knew that she was beautiful, and too young to have died.

Several more seconds passed and still she had not moved. I hardly dared to breathe as a frantic argument raged within my head. The logical part of my brain was insisting that there must be some perfectly rational explanation for what I was seeing. But my foolish emotional side—the part of me that regularly conjured up all of those impossible daydream fantasies of Bobby's miraculous return—said I was looking at a spirit.

I didn't know then whether I even believed in such things. But one can scarcely dabble in the antiques business for very long without being regaled with ghost stories.

I recalled having heard somewhere that the dead most often return to places where in life they underwent some profound emotional trauma. So it crossed my mind that the spectre at the window might possibly be my aunt Ellen. Though she had lived her life as a spinster, I knew she had once been engaged to marry. But her fiancé, a handsome local yachtsman, had died in a tragic sailing accident before they could be wed.

Had poor Aunt Ellen secretly watched and waited for her lost lover from this very room? In her grief and distraction over her loss had she donned her lovely bridal nightgown and crept up to this lonely turret room night after night? Stood by that very window, peering out into the darkness and longing to see his boat slipping safely into the harbor below?

And now that she was free at last from the prison of her time-ravaged Earthly flesh, had Aunt Ellen returned to resume her lonely nighttime vigil? Was she somehow trapped on this Earthly plane, unable to cross over to the other side until her long-lost lover sailed home to Freedman's Cove to claim her for his bride?

Even as those wildly romantic thoughts were racing through my mind, there was a soft swirl of motion at the window. And I found myself looking into the sad, luminous eyes of the lovely young woman in the long white gown.

But it was not Aunt Ellen.

I gasped and clapped a hand to my mouth at the sudden realization that I had seen her face before, the unforgettable face of the girl in the old photo album, my disgraced female ancestor whose name Aunt Ellen had refused to reveal to me three years before.

“Who…Who are you?” My voice was high and tremulous and I felt as if I might faint at any second.

The apparition at the window wavered like smoke and then she very slowly dissolved before my eyes. The soft oval of her face lingered before the window for just a moment longer than her body.

Then it too was gone.

I sat there for a very long time, staring at the spot where she had been. Then I switched on the bedside reading lamp, instantly filling the room with soft yellow light. I swung my feet out from under the covers and crossed the chilly floor to the window, just as the beacon from the lighthouse swept past.

Positioning myself where the ghostly figure had stood, I lifted the lacy curtain and peered out into the darkness, hoping to discover what had drawn her to that particular window. But there was nothing to be seen except the shadowy forms of the maples in the yard being stripped naked by the howling wind. That and the pale finger of the lighthouse on Maidenstone Island and the black sea beyond.

Returning to the snug comfort of my bed I turned off the bedside light and gazed at the window. As the soft blue glow of the fairy lamp once more suffused the room I lay propped against my pillows, trying to make some sense of what I had just seen. To my great surprise, I was more exhilarated than frightened by the eerie experience. Because, unless my eyes had deceived me and I really was losing my mind, I felt that the sad spectre at my window proved there was something beyond this Earthly life.

In my grief-stricken state that was a great source of comfort at that moment. It implied that Bobby, too, might still exist somewhere, in some peaceful afterlife that I could only dimly imagine. And I was filled with an overwhelming sense of hope that my lost love and I would be reunited again someday, somewhere.

With those soothing thoughts caressing my exhausted brain I fell into a deep, untroubled sleep, the first I had experienced without pills since the day the nervous young man from the oil company had stepped into my office with the news that my lover was gone.

I dreamed again of Bobby as he had looked on that very first day with the sunlight glowing in his golden hair. And I imagined I felt the gentle weight of his hard body on mine as we made love for the very first time.