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wasn’t surprised when he asked his father if he could build a
little chapel on the land next to the inlet.
Daddy L laughed.
“It’ll wash away in the first storm,” he said, but he told
Jamie to go ahead. He couldn’t deny his favorite son anything.
We’d made friends with a few other year-round people on
the island and across the bridge in Sneads Ferry, and three or
four of them bought into Jamie’s idea of a new kind of church
before the storm
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and volunteered to help him build it. Daddy L suggested he
build the foundation and walls out of concrete like the Op
eration Bumblebee towers that seemed able to withstand
anything Mother Nature handed out. Jamie built his chapel in
the shape of a pentagon with a steeple on top, so that no one
would mistake it for anything other than a house of worship.
Panoramic windows graced four sides of the building. He
made heavy wooden shutters that could be hung over the
windows when the weather threatened the island. Over the
years, the wind stole the steeple four times, but no window
was ever broken until Hurricane Fran in ’96. Even then, the
concrete shell of the chapel remained, rising out of the earth
like a giant sand castle.
There was no altar in the chapel, no place for a minister to
stand and preach. That’s the way Jamie wanted it. He would
be one of the congregation. Marcus, who was still living at
home in Wilmington while attending community college,
came down to help Jamie build pews out of pine, even though
he never really bought into the whole idea of Jamie starting
his own church. The pews formed concentric pentagons inside
the building. Daddy L burned the words Free Seekers Chapel into
a huge piece of driftwood, and Jamie hung the sign from a post
buried deep in the sand near the front door.
Despite Jamie’s desire to be one of the congregation, he did
become an ordained minister of sorts. He saw an ad in the back
of a magazine, and for thirty dollars, purchased a certificate
showing him to be an ordained minister in the Progressive
Church of the Spirit. He didn’t take it seriously. He thought it
was pretty funny, actually, but it enabled the people who loved
his vision to call him Reverend, and that meant something to them.
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diane chamberlain
Jamie and I agreed to wait to start a family until after the
chapel was built, and as soon as the last pew was in place, I
stopped my pills. The pediatrician I worked for warned me it
would take a while to get pregnant after being on the pill for
several years, but I must have conceived almost immediately,
because within a couple of weeks, I knew something about my
body was different. Sure enough, the pregnancy test I took in
the obstetrician’s office was positive.
I managed to keep the secret until that night, when Jamie
and I indulged in one of our favorite pastimes: bundling up—
it was October—and lying on the beach behind the cottage.
Each of us wrapped in a blanket, we lay close together like two
cocoons, wool hats pulled over our heads, staring in contented
wonderment at the autumn sky.
“There’s one,” Jamie said, pointing north. We were trying
to distinguish satellites from the stars.
“Where?” I followed his finger to the only constellation I
recognized—Pegasus.
“Look southeast of Pegasus,” he said.“And watch it closely.”
“You’re right.” I followed the slow drift of the light toward
the north.
The sky behind our house was always full of stars, especially
in the fall and winter when we had the dark northern end of
the island nearly to ourselves. The sound of the waves was
music in our ears. Suddenly, I felt nearly overcome with the
miracle my life had become. I lived in one of the most beau
tiful places on earth, in a round house like something out of a
fairy tale, with a man whose love for me was matched only by
mine for him. I thought of the tiny collection of cells inside
me that would become our baby, how soon the globe of sky
before the storm
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above us would be mirrored by the globe of my belly. I thought
of how our child—our children—and our children’s children
would someday lie on this beach and watch the same stars and
hear the same waves. And suddenly the thoughts were too
enormous for me to contain any longer. Overwhelmed, I
started to cry.
“Hey.” Jamie lifted his head. “What’s the matter?”
“I’m happy.”
He laughed. “Me, too.”
I leaned even closer to my husband. “And I’m pregnant.”
I could barely see him in the darkness, but I heard his sharp
intake of breath. “Oh, Laurie.” He opened his blanket and
pulled my cocoon inside his, planting kisses all over my face
until I giggled. “How do you feel?”
“Fantastic,” I said. And I did.
He looked down at me, touching my cheek with the ten
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