The Lake of Dreams (23 page)

“My dad lets me,” he said, his small voice drifting back to me. “My dad does, all the time. Besides, I’m the leader.”

“Right. Okay. You’re the leader. Wait up anyway.”

I jogged to catch up and we walked awhile longer, Max staying just a few feet ahead, the path drawing near the outlet, which rushed in its banks, the surface as smooth and molten as glass, then moving back into the trees. My thoughts kept circling back to Keegan, to his lips against the metal pipe, to the swelling glass, to the play of fire reflected on his skin. We walked, and then my phone rang and I stopped to rummage in my purse.

“Hey, Max, hang on,” I called. He turned as I flipped open the phone and paused beneath the trees to talk. It was Keegan.

“What’s up?” I asked.

“Sorry, Lucy, slight change of plans. The supplier just called and he’s running late. So, why not just bring Max back here? Whenever you’re ready, I mean, there’s no rush. Everything going okay?”

“Everything’s fine. He’s a fun kid. Has a mind of his own.”

“Yeah, I know. I like to think he takes after his mother that way.”

“I’m sure. He must get the charming part from you, then.”

Keegan gave a low, familiar laugh. I closed my eyes for a moment, remembering his breath on my cheek, my lips against the metal.

“Glad you still think so.”

“Really, he seems like a sweet boy.”

I smiled as I spoke, then looked up, expecting to see Max in his red coat poking his stick impatiently on the ground. But the path was empty. He was nowhere in sight. I took a step, scanning the foliage—surely he was hiding somewhere, or had stepped off the trail to look at another bug. With the phone still against my ear I started hurrying.

“Well, bring him back whenever,” Keegan was saying. “I’m sure he’d love to stay out all day, but I know you must have things to do.”

“It’s okay,” I said, though it wasn’t—I’d rounded the curve and still didn’t see Max, and panic was beating through my blood. It was the panic of my dream. “Hey, do you let him walk ahead? He says you do.”

Keegan laughed. “He can tell you’re a novice. Don’t let him push you around.”

“All right. We’ll be back soon,” I said, already closing the phone, already starting to run, calling out for Max. The wet leaves flashed and slapped my arms, the gravel slipped under my feet. I shouted, but my voice faded in the dense wet air. There was no answer. He had stepped into the trees, perhaps, like a child in a fairy tale, lured by some treasure my grown-up eyes overlooked. I was thinking with terrible panic of stolen children, too—anyone could have been here, could have pulled him into the trees and be holding him there right now, even as I ran past shouting, calling his name.

The path curved again. I glimpsed Max’s red coat and felt a rush of relief. I slowed down a little, catching my breath, trying to still my racing heart.

Then I saw where he was.

There had once been a bridge across the outlet, but it had long since fallen down. Now there were only two piers remaining, one on the shore and one set a few feet into the river, with a little platform connecting them. Max was standing on this platform, right at its very edge, his hands clasped behind his back as if he were an old man, peering calmly down at the churning water below.

I kept walking, taking a deep breath to calm myself, because it mattered to be calm, I knew.

“Hey, Max,” I said, as evenly as I could, when I got close enough. “Hey there, fearless leader. What’re you doing?”

He turned and looked over his shoulder, smiling with excitement.

“I’m watching the water. It’s neat. I can see shapes in it, can you?”

“That really is neat,” I said, climbing up on the nearest pier, slowly, so I wouldn’t startle him. I didn’t step onto the concrete platform because I couldn’t tell how strong it was. Max was looking down again, studying the water, swirling and brown. I could see why he was so fascinated; at this point the outlet narrowed, and the water was forced through the banks with a wild rushing force, shape-shifting and mesmerizing. The tips of his flashy sneakers extended an inch into thin air.
Please,
I thought,
let me say the right thing
. “Hey, could you step back a little, Max? ’Cause your dad just called, and I have something to tell you.”

He didn’t. For a long moment we both just stood where we were, Max staring at the mesmerizing water, all its froth and force, tree branches and litter traveling on its surface, pulled abruptly under.

“Max?”

He turned around. He took one step, then another. I took his hand, and wouldn’t let him pull away when he tried to.

“Let’s jump,” I said, and we did, landing on the muddy earth.

“Ouch,” he said. “That was too far.”

“Hold my hand again,” I said, in a firm but friendly way. This time he did.

“What did my dad say?”

“Oh, he said it’s time to come home.”

“He did?”

“He did.”

“Okay.”

Max pulled away from me again on the way back, but not until I’d made him promise to stay close, and this time I kept up with him, I didn’t let him get out of reach. I was exhausted by the time we reached the glassworks. Keegan was standing at the edge of the road, talking with a man who had brought a load of sand. I was still shaking from what had almost happened. Max ran up and flung his arms around Keegan as if nothing had happened, and Keegan reached down absently, tousling Max’s dark curls while he kept talking. Finally, Keegan shook the supplier’s hand and took a step back, turning his full attention to Max.

“Hey, Max. How was the walk?”

“I showed her the trail,” he said. “I told her I knew the way, and I did.”

“He did,” I agreed, and then I told Keegan briefly what had happened, how Max had run ahead and found a lookout place right above the swirling waters. Keegan listened, his face growing as masked as it once had when we were children bearing schoolyard taunts, and when I finished he squatted down and took Max by the shoulders.

“Max. What do you think would happen if you fell in the river?”

“I didn’t fall.”

“I know. And I’m glad. But what if?”

“It would take me away like the branch,” Max said.

“It would take you away,” Keegan agreed, very serious. “And you wouldn’t be able to get back. And I would be so sad. My whole heart would break. Don’t do that again, Max. You understand? You don’t go near the water. You know that.”

“I’m so sorry,” I said. “I nearly stopped breathing when I saw where he was. I just keep thinking how horrible it would be if—”

“Lucy. Stop.” Keegan’s voice was calm, but firm. He stood up and sent Max to sit on a nearby bench for a minute, then caught my hand, his palms calloused from his work with fire. “Look, nothing happened, right? Trust me, if I spent every moment of parenthood doing the what-ifs, I’d drive myself absolutely crazy. Max is a handful. I should have gone with you. But everyone is just fine. So that’s a moment where we don’t have to linger.”

“All right,” I said, though I knew I’d carry that image of Max standing so calmly at the edge of the roiling water with me for the rest of my life. “You’re pretty good at this, you know,” I added. “This fatherhood stuff. You make it look easy.”

He laughed. “I’m totally winging it,” he said. “Everyone is. What do you think? Do you still have time? Want to take that boat ride?”

Keegan took one of Max’s hands and after a minute I took the other, and we climbed into the boat Keegan kept moored by the glassworks, at the docks where barges had once pulled up to load their wares. I sat next to Keegan near the bow, and Max, bundled securely in a bright orange life jacket, sat between us. The day had brightened and there were patches of blue, but it was still mostly overcast. I hugged my arms against the wind, glad to have my ratty old sweatshirt as we traveled out across the water, spray in our faces as we hit the white-crested waves. We traveled several miles down the lake, and I recognized the point where we crossed the border of the depot land into waters that had once been forbidden.

At first the green hills, forested or covered in swaying grasses, sloped down to the wide shale beach. Soon, however, the landscape began to change, grass-covered concrete bunkers rising out of the land in evenly spaced intervals. Even covered in sod they looked unnatural, rising out of the earth like the steady sound of a machine, like identical notes in the most boring piece of music in the universe. Their hunkering shapes and monotonous regularity made them seem ominous, too. Weapons bunkers, they must be; I’d seen an editorial from 1940 describing the soil as having been “seeded with bombs instead of wheat.” They were empty now, the weapons transferred, but even so I felt uneasy looking at them, the wild, organic beauty of the landscape lost to this precise and repetitious order.

Just past the last of the bunkers Keegan cut the motor, letting us drift with the waves. A cluster of machines, the yellow and orange and vivid green of crayons, stood on the shore. They had torn grass from the earth like a scalp, discarding it on one of the artificial hills, exposing the dark, rich soil. The area they had uncovered was large, and puddles had formed across it in the recent rains, so that in the overcast light it looked barren and uninhabitable; bleak, a quagmire.

“They sure don’t love the land, do they?” Keegan asked. “That’s the first stage of the first development. Not the one your uncle and Joey and Blake want to build, but a different company. We got a court order to have construction stopped temporarily. We’re trying to prove that the sale of those parcels was invalid.”

“I hope you can. You really should look into the groundwater. Because there’s a layer of shale beneath the soil that drains this whole area, and it looks like they’re damaging that here. Plus, the kind of development you’re talking about will strain the whole fragile ecosystem of the lake, which is already under stress. And this whole watershed drains into Lake Ontario, eventually. That’s the thing with water systems. Everything’s interconnected. Everything affects everything else.”

“Really, we’ll have to put you on the committee. I mean it—I called some friends while you were with Max, and it turns out the conservation groups have filed papers about the water table. That, along with the wildlife protection, is their main issue.”

“That’s good. What do you think? Will you win?”

“I don’t know. But here’s hoping.”

He turned the motor on again and took us past the lurid machines, past a forested section of land and a cluster of buildings, to a clearing. Here, the chapel stood by itself on a hill. It was built of red stone; the paint had peeled away from the doors, leaving them a weathered gray. A small graveyard, enclosed inside an ornate iron fence, stood beside it.

“There it is,” Keegan said. “I can’t wait to see the windows all uncovered. It’s a good thing they were boarded up, or we’d have lost them. I’m glad it’s far from the airstrip, too—less chance of damage from vibrations.”

“It looks so strange, here all by itself.”

Keegan nodded. “Believe it or not, the chapel was in the center of town. There was a blacksmith, a grocer, a seamstress. More than five hundred people lived there, and they were all scattered to the winds overnight. And before they came, the Cayuga and Seneca lived here, fished and hunted here.”

“I’m hungry,” Max announced.

“Granola bars and juice in the backpack,” Keegan said. “It’s up there, under the bow.” Max lifted a curtain and scooted into the cavelike space.

“He likes it in there,” Keegan said. “He’ll stay there the rest of the ride, I bet.”

We passed more forested land, more fields, and came to the shoreline my mother owned: the boathouse and my kayak on the shale beach, the wide lawn up to the house with its porches and French doors, its cupola.

“Remember that night you snuck out?” Keegan asked. “I was waiting right here in the canoe, trying to stay in the shadows. You were wearing a white dress.”

“I nearly tipped the canoe trying to get in,” I said. “I got soaked.”

“It was a warm night, as I remember.”

“It was,” I said, remembering how we’d sat spooned close together, me leaning back and Keegan’s arms around my waist, and the moon floating above us.

“We were so young, weren’t we?”

“Yes, we were. We were indeed.” Keegan lingered for a moment longer before he turned the boat in a wide curve and headed back, the damp wind rushing over our faces.

We docked, and Keegan lifted Max from the boat as we talked, making tentative plans to meet at the chapel on Wednesday. We parted at the sidewalk, but I stood watching them walk, Max skipping again, his shoes flashing, as they went hand in hand back to the glassworks, back to the fire and motion.

The Impala was stifling. I opened all the windows and doors to let it cool while I took out my phone to check my e-mail. Nothing more from Yoshi, which made me a little uneasy. Maybe he was just busy. I pulled up an earlier message and then a photo of the two of us, taken by a stranger outside the hot springs. Yoshi had his arm around my shoulders, and we were both smiling, and there was nothing in the picture to reveal our languorous dance in the dark kitchen, or the little flares of anger, or the trembling earth.

There was a message from the Serling College Special Collections office confirming that they had possession of the collected papers of Vivian Branch, and saying also that they were in the process of researching my request. Last was a message I didn’t expect, from Oliver Parrott. It was very formal, inviting me to visit the museum again to go through some of the images from his archives. Stuart would be there, he assured me, though the house wasn’t officially open on Saturdays, and I was welcome to bring someone, too. He had spoken to the church, he said, and felt quite passionately about the connections that were emerging. He could not wait to see the other windows, and he had stood for a long time this morning before the window on the landing of the woman with her arms full of flowers.

Full of irises,
I thought.

Yes,
I wrote back.
I will come.