The Lake of Dreams (11 page)

“Really? I don’t remember a chalice in that story.” The glass near the base of the window was thick and slightly buckled, as if it had begun to slip and pool. “It looks as if it’s melting,” I added.

“It is, kind of. Glass isn’t really a solid. It always longs to return to its fluid state. Over time the lead weakens and gravity pulls at it—that’s why restoration is so necessary. Otherwise the glass will eventually flow out of its shape and the window will be lost.”

A buzzer sounded. Keegan stood up and opened the door to the studio. He had a quiet but hurried conversation with the new babysitter, during which I gathered my purse and the papers I’d been carrying around all day, feeling the tempo change, feeling both excited about the window and suddenly in the way.

“I’ll see you tomorrow, then?” I asked, starting down the stairs, and Keegan paused to smile and wave and tell me to meet him at St. Luke’s at ten.

The next tour had already started, the furnaces roaring, the guide explaining the process to a new group of mesmerized tourists. The only exit was through the gift shop, and I stopped to look at some of the work—vases and plates, stained-glass sun catchers and delicately blown spheres. As I turned, my purse caught the edge of a display, and when I reached to catch the perfect glass egg I’d jolted loose, I hit another display and started a cascade of plates tipping over one by one until the last one fell against a dark red bowl and sent it crashing to the floor.

“Hold still,” the sales clerk said, raising her hands, palms open as if to push back a wave. “Just stand still, and take a deep breath.”

I did, watching while she gathered up the pieces.

“Just one bowl,” she said, finally, and refused to let me pay. “It happens.”

I was very careful as I left, chagrined, suddenly exhausted, too. It was still a beautiful day, windy and changeable. The clouds that had threatened to gather were more scattered now, and the early afternoon was sunny. The Impala floated over the low hills, the lake flashing through the trees. I hadn’t expected to be so moved by seeing Keegan again. Maybe it was simply that things had ended so abruptly between us, with no sense of closure or any kindness on my part, but all the old stirrings from those last wild days of spring were present again, forceful and unsettling.

When I got home, the house was empty. My footsteps echoed, fading in the layers of space, above and below, and I had a moment of understanding why my mother had locked up so many rooms. I went upstairs and slept a deep, post-jet-lag kind of healing sleep, no dreams.

By the time I woke up it was late afternoon. My mother still wasn’t home. The windows were open in her narrow downstairs bedroom, fresh air flowing in through the pines. A yellow dress was tossed on the bed, half-slipping off the corner. Her closet door was open and clothes were askew on the hangers, hanging off the doorknobs, a kind of exuberant chaos that seemed completely out of character. Restless, I changed into the same bathing suit I’d used the day before, cobalt blue and still faintly damp from my last swim, then went down to the lake.

The boathouse doors swung back with a great groan, and I stepped into the cool darkness, water lapping just below the motorboat, which was in its hoist. I lifted my dark green kayak from its hooks and hauled it through the wide doors to the beach. Half in the water and half on the stony shore, it moved lightly with the waves. I waded into the lake and climbed into the boat, pushing my paddle against the rocky bottom until the water grew deep enough to stroke. There was a small breeze, and my muscles moved in a rhythm as familiar as breathing. Leaves fluttered against the vivid sky.

I skimmed across the dark blue water, traveling along the shore as it curved outward into the lake, to the place where sediment from a stream left a trail of silt and the marshes began—a stand of cattails, broken by purple flowers, songbirds flitting in and out, sharp reds and yellows and blues against the muted reeds. This was where we’d always stopped before, the invisible boundary between our land and the forbidden depot. My arms ached. I rested the paddle and let myself drift. The shadows of fish flashed below. Bass, maybe perch; my father would have smiled to see them. Wind rustled the reeds and waves lapped at the boat. On the shore trees had grown up, ending abruptly in fields that were themselves overgrown and rippling.

It happened unexpectedly, as moments of beauty so often do. As I sat quietly, adrift, piecing together the stirring discoveries of this strange day, the deer began to emerge from the trees. The legendary white deer, wild and elusive; I’d never seen them before, and I held very still. One by one, until there were five them, quivering for a moment at the edge of the trees before something startled them and they leaped high, running like swift clouds through the fields.

Chapter 5

THAT EVENING MY MOTHER CAME HOME IN A PALE GREEN Prius, laughing as she slipped her good hand through the flimsy plastic handles of the bags, standing and smiling at the car as it backed out, because one arm was in a sling and the other was full, and she couldn’t wave. The driver did, however, and stuck his head out the window to call good-bye. His face was angular and kind and he had salt-and-pepper hair, and my mother stood in the driveway until his car disappeared out of sight.

We ate our simple dinner—French bread, pitted kalamata olives, smoked Brie, and a green salad—at the counter, exchanging stories of our day. Hers were about people who’d been in and out of the bank, people I might remember; mine were about the changes all over town. She’d taken a tour of Keegan’s Glassworks last spring and showed me a plate she’d bought—bright yellow glass with a scalloped edge. Afterward, we cleaned up our few dishes, then poured some more wine and went out to the patio, where my mother supervised while I hung decorations for her solstice party: tiny lights nestled amid the bushes and the plants, even cascading from the overgrown peonies in her old night garden. I thought about my father as I worked. The last time I’d been here for this party, the summer before he died, he’d hung lanterns all along the shore and built a bonfire that lasted all night. I placed a few flowering plants in white baskets from the branches of the trees. I tied ribbons on the branches, too, and rearranged the furniture.

In the morning we got up early and I filled balloons from the party-sized helium tank my mother had bought, tethering them to the lawn and porch railings and the branches of trees, where they floated like small planets gone adrift. We drove into town a little early so I could meet Keegan at the church by ten. After I dropped my mother off, I parked and sat for a few minutes in the Impala, checking messages on my phone. Yoshi had e-mailed the dates for his Indonesian trip and a couple of suggestions about when to fly here. I started to text back, but suddenly I wanted to hear his voice, maybe to anchor me in the midst of all these unexpected dynamics from my past, so I called him instead. He picked up on the second ring, his voice so steady and familiar that I felt a rush of comfort, a surprising longing to see him.

“Hey, where are you?” I asked.

“In the kitchen. Having a drink. Going over some paperwork.”

“In the kitchen,” I repeated. “I wish we were dancing.”

“Ah. Me, too.”

“Yes—I’d like to be dancing in the darkness with you.”

Yoshi laughed, pleased, I could tell.

We talked for a moment about his travel plans, and when I hung up the air all around seemed clear and empty, somehow new.

Tourists had begun to stream into town for an art fair in the park, and I walked against the current to the church. Its doors were shaped like an arch, rounding upward, tapering to a point, painted dark red. They had old-fashioned hinges and hardware, with ornate patterns and deep keyholes, made to resemble workmanship from much longer ago. The intricate iron stood out sharply against the deep red color of the door. Inside, a rush of silence, a deep stillness that made me want to listen, and the scent of wood and wax. I paused at the threshold, adjusting to the quiet, the muted light. The floor was made of rust-colored ceramic tiles, the pews of dark polished oak, and the stained-glass windows were luminous, alive in the dimness of the church.

I closed my eyes for an instant, remembering. As a child, I had come here twice a week, for choir practice and for the slow Sunday service. Blake and I sat fidgeting in the pews, passing notes and drawings on the backs of the offering envelopes, our parents casting disapproving glances. I remembered the standing and the rising and the kneeling, the prayers spoken in unison, the same each week, and then the silent prayers, more mysterious, when I knelt self-consciously, aware of the breathing all around. In those days God seemed as silent as my father, as disapproving as my uncle, as distant as the portrait of my great-grandfather in the hall; when I closed my eyes, those were the gazes I felt, and I was always nervous. Still, at eight, ten, twelve, I did my best, praying for the usual things: grades, crushes, the baby chickadee fallen from its nest, its tiny life trembling in my palm. In seventh grade, alarmed about pollution, I prayed hard for the rivers and the lakes.

Yet even though the stories all seemed to exclude me—in my childhood, the only formal place for a woman in this church was helping with the altar cloths or singing in the choir—I was still drawn to something here I couldn’t name, the deep silence, perhaps, or the sense of mystery the silence evoked. Even as a teenager, riding wild with Keegan Fall, I still went to church. When the church rules finally changed—it had been a controversy, a bitter decades-long fight—I was among the first girls to become an acolyte. I remembered slipping into the white cotton robe falling in smooth folds to my ankles, tying the rope belt around my waist, lifting the heavy brass cross and leading the choir slowly down the central aisle. I felt both happy and defiant, my hair cut short that last spring I was home, wearing cutoff jeans beneath the flowing robes.

Then my father drowned. I sat in the usual pew during his funeral, his casket in front, piled with flowers.

Grant us grace to entrust thy servant, Martin
.... We filed up for communion, one by one, the church echoing with the sound of our shuffling steps, the muffled coughs and cleared throats. We knelt together at the railing, my mother on one side and Blake on the other, and in the pause between the wafer and the wine I listened to their soft breathing, my sadness and longing so great I imagined it would split me open. The priest moved behind the wooden railing, offering the wafers and then the chalice, lip to lip.
The Body of Christ, the Cup of Salvation
. I didn’t believe that literally, it made no logical sense, and yet nonetheless I had often felt a sense of mystery, of longing and longing answered, in this ritual, this place.

So I waited, kneeling between my mother with her red-rimmed eyes, her silver hair pulled severely back, and Blake in his suit grown a few millimeters too short on the sleeves. I waited, but when I stood up, the wine both sweet and bitter in my mouth, and walked through the narrow corridor around the organ and back to the sanctuary, I did not feel healed of my grief. Nor did the world appear transformed. I paused at the front of the church and looked at the rows of pews, full of familiar faces, among them my cousin Joey and Uncle Art, his wife Austen holding Zoe on her lap, everyone dressed in black, some weeping or wiping their eyes. The same people were wealthy, the boat owners and the business owners who had depended on my father to open their locks, to reveal their secrets and their treasures. And the same people were poor. They had the same dreams and secrets and losses and frustrations. My father was gone, forever gone, but in a few minutes we would all step back into our lives, and the day-to-day would close over his absence as seamlessly as water over a rock.

Lucy,
my mother whispered, slipping her arm through mine.
Lucy, honey
. She took a step down the aisle, and I did, too.

That was the last time I had been inside this church.

The air was still and hushed. In India and Japan I’d visited temples that held this same expanding silence, a quiet that invited stillness and careful listening; in Indonesia the call to prayer had wavered through the shimmering air five times a day. Yet it had been years since I’d encountered my own traditions, and the church felt familiar and new all at once—the sanctuary lighter, the windows more vibrant. I started down the center aisle. There was scaffolding in the front, by the window nearest the baptismal font, and the floor beneath this window was strewn with tools on a piece of canvas. The window itself was filled with plain glass. A moment later, Keegan walked through the narrow doorway that led behind the organ, whistling lightly.

“Hey,” he said, breaking into a smile when he saw me, his voice echoing.

“Hey.”

“How did you get in?”

“The door—it’s not locked.”

“Really? It should be. Just one second.”

He half-ran down the aisle. When he came back, he gestured to the blank window. “This one was taken out for repairs; it’s coming back this afternoon. I’m just getting rid of some of the old caulking to make the process go faster.”