The Lake of Dreams (36 page)

My concerns about her plans for the house flared again. I hoped my mother wouldn’t use the chapel to justify selling Art the land. I wanted to say something, but with Andy there, I really couldn’t. And maybe I couldn’t anyway: it wasn’t my business, as both she and Blake had so clearly pointed out.

They finished their wine and invited me once more to join them. I waved from the porch as they pulled out. I collected my clothes from the dryer and carried them upstairs, where I spent half an hour putting things in order, lining the note cards about Rose up on the desk like a school project. Then I left, slipping on my jeans and a long-forgotten pair of heeled sandals that I’d found in the back of my closet, glad to get away from the house, the empty e-mail. I rolled the Impala windows down all the way, the rushing air tangling my hair. As I reached the village I had to slow down because the traffic was so thick. I parked behind Dream Master and crossed through the gravel lot to the dock.

Keegan was waiting for me, standing with his hands in the pockets of his cargo shorts, looking down the outlet to the place where it curved and disappeared into the trees. The outlet was calm and clear, the turbulent waters after the rain having receded. I shook off the memory of Max by the foaming water. From this distance, Keegan hardly looked older than he had in high school, though he’d traded his motorcycle for a van with side airbags, and his leather jacket for a windbreaker. I waved, smiling as if I were a teenager again. First with the arguments at the house and then with that kiss on the shore, I’d fallen in, been swept headlong into the dynamics of the past, which I thought I’d left behind. Keegan gave me his hand to help me into the boat. He sat behind the wheel, engaged the motor, and chugged slowly through the outlet to the lake. People were strolling, holding hands, eating ice cream; some of them waved from the sidewalk. We passed under the bridge and then traveled past the marina. Blake was on the deck of his boat, and I waved as we glided out into the open water, feeling contrite because I’d leaked his secret. I’d been angry with him about the land, angry with my mother, too, and I’d spoken without thinking. He waved back, and Keegan pressed the throttle hard. We took off, bouncing over the waves. He was relaxed, comfortable with the lake and the speed, like athletes so born to their sport that they seem to become other creatures when they swim or leap or run. Keegan in a boat had always been that way.

It was twilight when we started, the wealthy homes and the scars on the land all faded into the same dusk. The sky had deepened into darkness by the time Keegan finally slowed down in the middle of the lake. It was a clear night, the stars vivid, and even out this deep the water was smooth and calm.

“You thirsty?” he asked, opening the cooler stashed at his feet and pulling out a bottle of wine.

“Sounds nice, thanks. It’s a pretty night.”

“Doesn’t get any better,” he agreed. He opened the wine and poured some into plastic glasses, and we floated, not speaking, comfortable in the silence, the night growing deeper around us.
On a boat,
Rose had written,
you are no place at all.

Maybe it was the darkness, or the quiet, but I found myself telling Keegan about my dreams, the things I’d lost in the foliage and the trees and could never piece together once I finally found them, the wallet that had been lost and held for me for so many years, my identity sealed inside.

“I had dreams like those once,” he said. “A kind of series, not exactly the same. It was during the time when I was wandering around a lot, after I got out of art school, before I came back here. I was on a ship to Mexico. I’d got on it in California. It was a freighter, and they gave me work, and though I could speak enough Spanish at that point to get the jobs done and even joke around a little with the rest of the crew, I couldn’t really join in when they got together in the evening for a drink. There were a couple of other foreigners on the crew, but they didn’t speak much English, either. So I was alone a lot. Alone at sea. Not much to do but read the couple of paperbacks I’d thought to bring. Read and think. Work and sleep and dream.

“I started having this recurring dream around that time. It was in a forest, too, like yours, except I was always following a path, the trees getting thicker and denser and the trail more faint, and there was always a moment when I looked down and realized I wasn’t human anymore—I’d transformed into some sort of animal, a different one each night. A lynx, a wolf, a panther—something fierce and seeking.”

“And what happened? How did they end?”

“We got to Mexico. I got off the boat. There was a bus, and the name of the company was Linea de Los Lobos—Line of the Wolves. So it seemed kind of like a sign, and I got on. I took it to the last stop, which was a beautiful village in the highlands. I stayed there for a year. Fell in love, learned to speak the language. Then I got word that my mother was sick, so I came back.”

I nodded, drank a little more. I wondered who Keegan had been in love with. The patterns of his life were largely unknown to me, no matter how familiar he seemed.

“You came back,” I repeated. “And how was that, at first?”

Waves lapped at the boat. Keegan finished his wine before he answered.

“Truthfully? I didn’t think about it. I didn’t think about it as I was coming back. It was just something I was doing for the time being. Then I met Beth. Even then, I kept telling her I wasn’t planning to stick around, I didn’t want to get serious.” He gave a short laugh. “She’s a good person, Beth. She didn’t deserve a lot of the things I did. Out of sadness, when my mother died. Out of a feeling that I’d taken a wrong turn somewhere and ended up in a life I hadn’t really intended to lead. Talk about dreams—toward the end, after Max was born, I kept dreaming that I walked out the front door and found myself transformed into a lynx again, wandering in a city I didn’t know.”

“So you think they’re important, then? Dreams?”

“Oh, yeah. You know, the Iroquois take dreams very seriously. They see them as the secret wishes of the soul—the heart’s desire, so to speak. Not all dreams, maybe, but the important ones. And when they recur, I tend to think they’re important. I kept dreaming of the lynx when I was in the village, too. Then I’d be rushing through a jungle or swimming a river at night in a dream. This was during a time when I’d stopped doing any creative work, and the lynx kept taking me to fields where things were growing, or rivers where fish were leaping out and piling on the shore. So I knew I had to get back to a creative life again, a life of making things. It wasn’t just the bus, the outward journey. It was where it was taking me inwardly, as well. And that was true later, too.”

We were drifting near the middle of the lake. Below the water the land fell three hundred, four hundred, five hundred feet deep, a point where even at the height of day no light traveled through to reach the depths. For a second I felt breathless, imagining the vast water below and the vast air above, and myself so small, floating in the midst of all that space. I thought about all my dreams of lost spheres falling into pieces.

“I don’t know. My dreams don’t make a lot of sense.”

“Maybe you haven’t dreamed enough,” he suggested.

“Maybe not.”

I was thinking of Japan then, the faces of all those people floating just beneath the surface of the water, the jolting earth, the way I jerked out of sleep, paralyzed by the responsibility I felt to fix whatever had gone wrong. We drifted for a time, lost in our own thoughts.

“I’ve never told those dreams to anyone else,” Keegan said after a while.

“I guess I haven’t, either.” This was true. Yoshi had never asked to know what the dreams were about, but had simply turned and held me whenever I woke up from one.

“That’s good. You should be careful, sharing dreams.”

I thought of Rose, revealing her life’s dream in the ruins of the monastery, and of Joseph, his dreams like a net to snare the future.

“You know,” Keegan said, “after your father died I used to take the boat out and float in the water near your house, watching people move through the lighted rooms inside, hoping for a glimpse of you.”

“You did?”

His face wasn’t visible in the darkness, so I couldn’t tell what he might be feeling, though I remembered the numbed sense of loss and guilt that spread over everything and made it impossible for me to feel anything else during that time. I thought of the letters, Rose writing of that moment before she stole the chalice from the church,
that night I was so heartsick I could feel nothing else.
Looking back, I’d been that way, too, for years and years, shutting myself off, pressing sadness and loss down beneath my adventurous and busy days so I wouldn’t feel overwhelmed. Now grief engulfed me, as if I’d been walking on a thin crust that had formed on its surface and had broken through, falling suddenly and deeply into its darkness.

“I did. Not forever. Just for a couple of weeks.”

“I’m so sorry.”

“Are you crying? Look, Lucy, I’m not trying to guilt you. I just wanted you to know that I was thinking about you, even then.”

“I know,” I said, wiping my eyes. “I’m not really crying.”

“You really are.”

“It’s old stuff, that’s all. It’s still hard to remember that night, what might have happened, and what did. He was in the garden when you dropped me off. That was the last time I ever saw him.”

“Lucy.” Keegan took my hand then. He didn’t say anything else.

After a minute I pulled myself together and wiped my eyes. “I found out all this stuff about Rose,” I said, to change the subject.

We talked a little bit about the chapel then, and the windows, luminous and mysterious, how forcefully they’d stayed with us both. We talked about Suzi and Oliver and what might happen with the land. I told him more about Rose, her dreams, how I’d been trying to understand her life, to reconstruct how her story had ended up woven into the story of this chapel full of windows.

“I’m going back to Seneca Falls on Friday,” I said. “I don’t know what else I’ll find. Maybe nothing. But I’m hoping for the end of the story, or at least to find another piece of it.”

“And then what?” Keegan asked. “How long will you stay?”

“Well, then Yoshi comes. And then—I don’t know.”

Water lapped lightly at the edges of the boat. We were sitting in the back, near the diving platform, and I was vividly aware of Keegan next to me, the faint heat of his body in the evening air.

He slid his hand up my arm, let it rest on my shoulder. I was so tempted then to give in to the powerful currents of desire, to slip back into that familiar way of being, that time before, when Keegan and I were still carefree, driving off into the lake-scented darkness as if we’d live that way forever. That was impossible, though. So much time had passed, so many things had happened. And he had his life here, while I did not.

“Let’s swim,” I said, pulling back, slipping my shirt over my head. I was wearing a bathing suit underneath; I pushed off my shorts. Before he could answer I was poised on the edge of the boat, and then I dived, cutting deep and clean, the water closing over me. I went down and down, feeling the depth by coldness because there was no light.

I wondered what I would find at the bottom if I could dive far enough, what wreckage I would discover scattered along the landscape beneath the weight of water. Boulders and mud and moss, and the swift movement of dark fish brushing my skin, and maybe the long-lost dinner boat that had caught fire before it sank, and maybe the plates and the forks and the glasses those people had been holding in their hands when they saw the flames and leaped. Maybe their crinolines and corsets, their shoes and boots, discarded as they tried to swim to shore. Maybe my father’s lost tackle box or the plane that had gone down fifty years ago, knifing through the clear water just after takeoff, the bodies floating upward, drifting with the currents, miles away. Or maybe I’d find ice picks and axes scattered by the midwinter crew that was out cutting thick blocks for the ice houses when the frozen lake began to tremble and crack under the weight of their sleighs and they fell into the icy water, the men in their thick coats, the horses with their harnesses, the sleigh plummeting until it reached the muddy bottom, dragging everyone along.

My lungs began to spark and I caught myself in all that darkness, the world just the same whether my eyes were closed or open. Threads of panic ran through me. I had to force myself not to move, to let myself float for a second to gain my sense of direction, for there was no light to guide me. I kicked harder, rising, I hoped, rising and not falling, my panic growing because I could not see, could not tell how long until I could breathe, and then I was bursting through the surface, tipping my head back to inhale the beautiful clear night air.

“Damn, Lucy,” Keegan said. He was in the water, too, and he took several strokes to reach me, pushing an inner tube into my hands. The rubber was still warm from its day in the sun. “You were down so long. I was beginning to think I’d lost you.”

“Thanks,” I said, breathing more evenly now.

“Hey.” He was treading water next to me and he put one hand on the tube, brought his face close to mine. “You sure you’re okay?”

“I will be. It was so dark. Hard to know where the surface was.”

Kicking, his foot grazed my calf, the fabric of his shorts drifting along my leg.

“Sorry,” he said. He was setting off little currents in the water that rippled all around me. I remembered what Yoshi had said, how he felt I was always trying to keep such a tight rein on everything and then closing down when I couldn’t. But from what was I running now? From the bloom of the past, from the life Keegan had made, so rich, so solid, so rooted in this place? Or was I running from Yoshi, or even from myself?

“You’re swimming in your clothes,” was what I said.

“I am. It seemed like an emergency situation.”

Sometimes loneliness,
I thought, and remembered Yoshi again, his kindness and long patience with the grief I’d been pressing down and carrying around for so long,