The Lake of Dreams (35 page)

He pressed something smooth and rounded into my palm, and in the second before I looked at it I remembered my dream again, and the yearning that had filled it; I flushed, as if Keegan might be able to read my thoughts.

The object in my hand was the shape we’d made together in the studio, fires roaring in their furnaces and the molten glass suspended on the end of the blowpipe. Keegan’s lips had been on the rim, his breath forming the glass from within, and then my lips pressed against the metal where his had been, my breath mingling with his in the hot embrace of glass, the sphere blooming, growing. It was curved and heavy, colors sliding over the surface, iridescent, like oil on water.

“I added the curl on top,” he said. “So you could hang it.”

“Thank you.” The curved glass fit perfectly in my palm. “I love holding it. And it’s beautiful, too.”

“You’re welcome.” He gazed across the fields at the lake. “I thought I’d take a walk while we’re here. Want to come?”

“Can we? Wouldn’t it be trespassing?”

He smiled. “When has that ever stopped us in the past, Lucy Jarrett?”

I laughed, and we set off across the field full of wildflowers to the trees.

Once we’d struggled through the underbrush at the transition from field to forest, the space opened up and became gladelike, oaks and maples and chestnuts growing high. The earth was loamy, springy beneath our feet, and carpeted with leaves and pine needles that cushioned our steps, silenced them. We grew quiet, too, walking amid the trees. The wind rustled the leaves high above, but around us the air was still.

“Do you know this place?” I asked Keegan, because he was walking with such an unhurried assurance that I’d simply fallen into step beside him.

“Never been here,” he said. “Still, it feels familiar, doesn’t it?”

“It’s the collective unconscious,” I joked.

“Maybe so.”

The land sloped gently; the distant sound of running water drew us on. Now and then animals scurried invisibly, rattling the low branches; light filtered in through the leaves and made dancing patterns on the forest floor. One bush was alive with tiny brown birds, which took flight and scattered as we passed. I felt I’d entered an enchanted place, a place out of time. We reached the edge of a shallow ravine, a stream running swiftly over the flat rocks below, and followed it, Keegan slipping down the bank so he could wade. My black sandals were crusted with dirt and debris, and I regretted my black dress, but I kept going. The silence of the forest seemed to extend from the silence of the chapel with its glowing windows, as if the whole world were a sacred place, and I wanted to go on, to see where the stream would end. It grew flatter and wider, the water eddying in shallow pools. I slipped off my sandals and stepped into the water. We walked until the trees began to open, until the stream poured itself into the lake and disappeared.

“Lucy,” Keegan said. We were standing up to our calves in the cold water. He turned and pressed one hand against my face and kissed me with the same soft assurance he’d had walking in the forest. His lips on mine, as if no time had passed. I thought of the roar and silence of the glass studio, the dance with fire, and I kissed him back.

“Not a good idea,” I said, pulling away. Keegan was hardly taller than me; his eyes, so close to mine, were warm. Kind.

“Why not? I’ve been wanting to do that since I saw you again.”

“For one, I don’t live here anymore,” I said.

“You’re here now,” he said, running one hand along my arm.

“Yes.” I tried to summon images of Yoshi on our tiny patio or lifting his weights in the living room, a fine sheen of sweat rising on his arms. The cobblestone streets, flowers spilling over fences, the trembling earth, all these flashed through my thoughts and were gone, until all I could remember was the empty static of the last call I’d made.

Keegan’s lips were on mine again, and mine on his.

I caught myself, stepped away. Distantly, a boat droned.

“You’re stirring everything up,” I said.

“I know.” He grinned. “I’m all shook up, too.” He touched my arm again. “Never mind, Lucy in the sky. We’ll head back and pretend it never happened.”

Not possible, of course. As we walked back, climbing along the side of the stream and then following our own trail through the trees, I was aware of Keegan with every step, every breath. Once, he stopped in a clearing and pointed out the flattened brush, the faint marks of hooves, and I imagined the white deer gathering here, as dense as snow that covered everything in winter, alive and magical and silent. I wanted to pretend the intervening years had never happened, that Keegan and I were still in that time before loss. We were quieter after that, moving softly through the forest and then across the open field, past the locked and silent chapel, but though I imagined the deer everywhere, as soft as rabbits, as fleeing as gazelle, as white as snowdrifts, we did not even glimpse them.

“Keegan,” I said, as he pulled open the door of his van, but then I couldn’t think what else to tell him.

He smiled, waved, and drove away.

Chapter 14

ON THE PATIO THAT EVENING, ANDY WAS POURING WINE FOR my mother—it was my mother, though it took me a second to recognize her, her hair so short, silvery gray and feathery, the emerald silk top with a mandarin collar resting so elegantly against her neck. She was wearing white slacks and gold sandals, and though she smiled when she saw me and stood up to hug me, her arm free of its cast and warm against my back, I was disconcerted, as if I’d stumbled into an intimate dinner party between strangers.

“Have a seat, Lucy,” Andy said, reaching for the extra glass they’d placed on the table and pouring me some wine. He was dressed up, too, wearing a tie. “We’re having a drink to celebrate your mother’s losing that cast, and then we’re headed off to Skaneateles. Your mother, I discovered, has never had the pleasure of dinner at Doug’s, which is without question the best fish fry I’ve ever had. So we’re going to do that, and then I have tickets to a violin concert in a church by the lake. You’re welcome to join us.” He glanced at my mother, who smiled her agreement. “I’m sure we could pick up another ticket when we get there.”

I thanked him and declined, truly regretful, because Skaneateles was always beautiful on a summer evening, the lake a clear turquoise blue, the village carefully preserved in all its charming late-nineteenth-century splendor. “Sounds like a nice evening, though,” I added, making a mental note about Doug’s Fish Fry, which sounded like a good place to take Yoshi when—or if—he ever got here.

“Are you going out again?” my mother asked.

“Maybe,” I said vaguely, though I was. Keegan had called an hour earlier and invited me on a boat ride because it was supposed to be such a nice evening. I said I’d like that, and he said okay, I’ll pick you up, and I said no, I’ll meet you at the glassworks around eight o’clock. Beneath this conversation, so mundane on the surface, ran the powerful currents of our walk through the forest and our kiss in the stream, and beneath even that were the deeper currents of our history, all the evenings we’d spent as teenagers driving wild through the countryside or drifting on the lake.

I’d spent the day swimming and floating on the raft, filled with the images from the chapel, which lingered so powerfully, and the letters Rose had written. From time to time, I’d come inside, the kitchen dim after the brightness of the sun on the lake, to get a glass of iced tea and check my e-mail. There had been a brief, not very satisfying message from Yoshi, giving me his updated itinerary and not much more; I didn’t know how his meetings had gone or exactly when he planned to leave for the island. I was torn between feeling concerned and feeling relieved. That kiss with Keegan in the stream had left me unsettled, unsure of what I was doing or what I wanted, distrustful of even my own motivations. It was better, it seemed, not to talk to Yoshi across all those vast miles until I’d come to terms with whatever was going on in my own heart.

Each time I closed the computer, I noted my feelings of both disappointment and relief. I went back outside and read passages from Rose’s letters over again, trying to imagine myself into her story, into her dreams and struggles. She must have felt so angry and abandoned, standing alone in the church, the chalice heavy in her hands, so alone and frightened that she betrayed the one part of her life she’d held most dear, slipping the silver cup between the folds of her skirt, slipping away.

They had given up so much to make this journey—friends and family, everything they’d known. They’d come seeking prosperity, a chance to remake their lives, but as logical as that vision sounded from my place in history, it seemed that, for those early years at least, she and Joseph had been little more than servants. It was easy to imagine Rose sitting on the periphery of a meeting or a tea, the talk of equal rights stirring her heart even as she kept her head bent over the mending and the hemming. Perhaps she’d stayed awake late into the night to read, the pamphlets and magazines she’d collected both shocking and alluring, drawing her back again and again, until it all welled up within her that morning of the march, when she left her gloves on the bushes and joined that crowd of women without measuring the cost, knowing only that this was a chance for her voice to matter in the world.

“Here’s to your mother,” Andy said, putting the bottle down and raising his glass. “To being cast-free!” My mother laughed and shook her head, raising her glass with the arm that had healed, and we drank.

“Well, I’m glad to have it off,” she said, her fingers lingering on the delicate stem of the glass. Nets of light reflected from the water made patterns on the table. “But you know, Andy, if it weren’t for the accident, we wouldn’t have met, would we? So I can’t regret it completely.”

They shared a private smile. I took a long swallow of wine.

“Sweetheart,” my mother went on, turning to me. “Are you sure you don’t want to join us? It’ll be fun. Plus, I feel like I’ve hardly seen you, even though you’ve been here over a week. Before you know it, Yoshi will be here. I can’t wait to meet him, but then you’ll be gone again. When does he get in?”

“He’s supposed to come Saturday,” I said, deciding not to mention that Yoshi had been vacillating about this the last time we spoke. I’d been avoiding thinking about our last conversation, which had all the early marks of so many of my breakups, the way I allowed distance to bloom up until I could justify leaving for good. Still, this was Yoshi, and I’d imagined a different life with him. The time we’d shared together in Jakarta, the languorous romance and our lives in the river house, calm and interwoven, was the closest I’d ever come to being completely happy, even if things hadn’t been so tranquil in Japan. He said once that I was always running away from things, and maybe it was true. Since I’d been here, I’d certainly boxed up all my feelings about Yoshi, plunging into the distractions of Rose’s fascinating history and the unfolding drama of the land. And then there was Keegan, and where was I going with that? Moving on, maybe? I’d done it often enough before. Yet now that Yoshi was hesitating about coming to visit, I was surprised by the depth of my sadness.

Andy urged me again to join them and I declined, though I didn’t mention my plans for the evening, as if I were still seventeen.

They weren’t in a hurry to leave—it was still early. Andy asked what the chapel had been like, and I went inside to get the pictures I’d printed. The rooms were cool, dim after the bright patio; the screen door slammed and the murmur of their voices followed me. The life I remembered in this house was gone, pure and simple, and had been for years.

Back on the patio, I spread the images of the windows across the glass-topped table. While they didn’t come close to capturing the splendor of the chapel, they were beautiful nonetheless. Andy and my mother passed them back and forth, commenting on the colors, the artistry, and the remarkable nature of this find. Andy said they ought to open it up for tours, and my mother agreed.

“I suppose it will depend on who ends up with that land,” she said pensively, still studying the images. “But maybe even a developer would see the value and keep it intact. Kind of like a centerpiece. I can imagine Art doing something like that, can’t you? Is it still a functioning church?”

“It was deconsecrated,” I said. The idea of the chapel surrounded by sprawling high-end homes filled me with a kind of helpless rage. It wasn’t proprietary, as I’d felt with Oliver, but rather a deep sense that the windows should be set apart, valued for something beyond their monetary worth. “That’s what Suzi said, anyway. There’s special liturgy, I guess. But apparently a church can be reconsecrated, too. I get the impression the church officials are trying to get it back. I hope they do. Because no, actually, I can’t see Art valuing these windows at all. Not in the way they should be valued.”

“Well, of course the church wants them back—beauty aside, the land must be worth a fortune,” Andy said, ignoring my comment about Art, and missing my point altogether.

“It must,” my mother agreed. “The land alone is worth a mint.”