The Lighthouse

The unspoken lay heavy on his mind, if not on hers. He had had blackouts three times, and on each occasion someone-or something-had died. First the dog, and finally Mandy Barnett. And part of his fear was that he might be responsible for the deaths of those two girls as well. She could see that fear, feel it, almost smell it.

The empty snifter slipped out of Jan’s hand, bounced on the rag rug and then onto the floor, and lay there rolling slightly back and forth. He didn’t seem to notice. But Alix watched it as if it were an object of fascination.

“Ah Christ, Alix,” he said in a choked voice, “don’t you see? I don’t know what I do when I have those spells, what I might be capable of. I can’t believe I could hurt anyone, and yet… Novotny’s dog.. I just don’t know.”

She wanted to go to him, comfort him, but she felt frozen, suspended in a time warp between the present and that long-ago night in Boston. Then, as he’d revealed the emptiness and sadness of his life, his pain had been genuine and deep; but this pain cut to the core of him, a hundred times more acute. All this time, since he’d first learned of his disease, he had been living a hellish existence: alone when he should not have been alone, shouldering a torment-a series of torments-that he should have shared with her.

She could do nothing to change the past, or alleviate his fear of his imminent blindness; but she could relieve him of the other part of his terror. She said, “The dog was an accident. And you didn’t hurt anyone else; you couldn’t have.”

“Are you so sure of that?”

“Yes. I know you, I know you’re not capable of-”

“You’re my wife. Naturally you feel that way.”

Had she been so absolutely sure of him all along? If she hadn’t, she must never admit it even to herself. She said, “There’s more than that. Actual physical evidence. The detective, Sinclair, told me Mandy was killed by someone driving a dark-green car or truck; you couldn’t possibly have run her off the road. And whoever strangled Mandy must have strangled that other girl, too. You had nothing to do with either one.”

He sat motionless for a moment. Then he took off his glasses, scrubbed at his eyes as if to wipe away some of the fear. And at last, seeing him do that, she was able to go to him-to kneel down to him, pull his head into the protective curve of her shoulder.

“The dog-” he began.

“An accident. ”

“But the blackouts-”

“Whatever you do during them, you’re not dangerous to anyone except when you’re behind the wheel of a car. The doctors will find out why they’re happening, how to control them. They’ve got to.”

He was silent for a moment. Then he raised his head, but not to look at her, his gaze fixed on a point over her left shoulder. “No matter what the doctors find out about the blackouts, I’m going to be blind. Do you realize what that will mean? If you’re still with me, I’ll become a burden to you. A sick, dependent, blind husband.”

Now the reason for his silence about his illness was becoming clear. He’d been afraid she would leave him! But how could he have been so unsure of her? And needlessly so; leaving him had never crossed her mind, even when she had doubted his sanity.

She said, “You can’t really believe that matters so much to me.”

He continued to look away, not answering.

She reached up, put her hand against his bearded cheek, moved his head until he was looking into her eyes. “Why would you even think that it makes a difference? That I’d leave you?”

“Because… dammit!” He took her wrist, removed her hand. “Because people have been leaving me all my life. Why not you, too?”

Anger flared up; she struggled to control it. After a moment she said, “I’m not just ‘people.’ I’m your wife and I love you. I’d have to have a far better reason than blindness to make me go away from you.”

His face, squeezed tight by tension, relaxed slightly. “I admit,” he said, and stopped and then started again, “I admit I was probably being irrational. But I just couldn’t bring myself to tell you, to put it to the test. I was terrified of losing you.”

She’d been aware that in a marriage of many years’ duration, the partners tended to conceptualize their spouses-not necessarily as they were, but as extensions of their own selves. Somehow, though, she had never applied this common psychological phenomenon to her own marriage, and yet that seemed to be exactly what she and Jan had both been doing. Years of comfortable routines and patterns had evidently robbed them of real communication, and each had transferred his own fears and failings to the other. Jan had translated his fear of loved ones leaving him to actual potential desertion on her part. And she, because she sometimes doubted her own worth as an adult woman, had imbued him with a similar lack of worth, doubted him as she doubted herself.

The irony was that these mutual doubts had surfaced with the first major crisis they’d had to face in years. At a time when they should have drawn closer, the doubts had threatened instead to pull them apart.