The Lake of Dreams (47 page)

“Oh, honey,” she said. She came and put her arms around me. “Is that what you think? What you’ve thought all these years? Oh, honey, no. No. What happened to your father was not your fault, or anyone’s fault, and you can’t fix it.”

“If I’d gone fishing with him,” I insisted, “everything would be different now.”

“Yes, maybe. And if he hadn’t gone fishing at all everything would be different, too. If it had been raining, if and if and if. You can’t do this, Lucy. You just can’t. Believe me, I tortured myself for a long time, too. Your father had had something on his mind for days. After the accident—and at first I wasn’t even sure it was an accident—I couldn’t stop wondering: why hadn’t I pressed him harder to find out what was wrong? I woke up when he got out of bed that night. I caught his hand as he was leaving the room and asked him what was wrong and he said nothing. He kissed me, and he said not to worry. Those were his last words to me. I couldn’t sleep, though, so I went up to the cupola. I heard you come in, Lucy. I heard the motorcycle come and go, I heard you talking in the garden with your father. It was fine, everything you said. It was not your fault, what happened.”

I didn’t speak for a moment. Bats rushed above us, like leaves drifting, like scraps breaking free from the sky. The relief I felt at having told her was physical.

“I know that. It’s just—”

“Your father is gone, honey. He’s been gone a long time. He would want you to live your life.”

“I know. I know that. But Mom, you said he was preoccupied. Do you happen to know why? What was on his mind?”

She sat down, shaking her head. “Oh, Lucy, do we have to? I don’t want to talk about the past anymore. You’ve found Iris, right? So your quest is over. The past is the past, Lucy,” she added gently. “It doesn’t help you to dwell there. You miss too much of what’s going on right in front of you. Believe me, I speak from experience on this. Don’t get stuck.”

The will, those pages with their slanted handwriting, was burning in my hands. I imagined telling her about it, but as with Blake, something held me back. This will left half of everything to Iris, and all these decades later, I had found her. Would the will still be valid? Would Iris even care? Would my mother? I didn’t know, and that was just the trouble. I felt like I was walking on sand.

She looked at me—puzzled, irritated, concerned. I knew she wanted more than anything to walk away and go to bed, to drift into sleep, the scent of pine and strawberries permeating everything, the memory of Andy’s laugh, the touch of his large, capable hands, all of this easing her into pleasure, sleep, dreams. Still, after a moment she sighed and pulled her chair closer to the table. I thought of the morning we’d sat here looking at Rose Jarrett’s cryptic notes—just over two weeks ago, though it seemed a lifetime away. I turned the pages in my hands.

“I don’t know,” my mother said. “I don’t know the answer to your question. As I said, I thought about it night and day for months after your father died. Trying to understand what had happened. We weren’t old, you know—your father only forty-five that summer, and I was forty-three, and for a long time after, I’d wake up in the morning believing it hadn’t happened. I think that’s why I closed off the rooms. I wanted a wall between then and now, between what we’d dreamed for our lives and what had really happened.

“Anyway, all I can tell you is that he had something on his mind. He was preoccupied. Not worried so much as distracted. It was like he was listening to music I couldn’t hear. Sometimes I’d have to ask him a question three or four times to get an answer. He was finishing the kitchen renovation, and he kept having problems with the subcontractors. I didn’t want to add to his stress. I figured he’d tell me eventually, once he’d had time to work it out, whatever it was.”

She stared at the table, then looked up and spoke again. Her eyes were dry, but her words were rough with emotion.

“Does it matter, Lucy? Because I think we’re still in different places with all this. In the beginning I kept searching for reasons, too. I tortured myself with the idea that I might have changed the outcome. If I’d only done this, or said that, a different set of events would have followed. Maybe so. But
this
is what happened, and nothing changes that. It was an accident, and over the years it’s become a comfort for me to think of it that way.”

We’d never spoken so directly of my father’s death before; we’d driven grief underground, like water pressed beneath shale, threatening to emerge without warning. I didn’t want to cause her any further pain, but I put the will, those angry pages, on the table. I explained what it was and how I’d found it. I told her what it said.

She sat back in the chair, then picked up the papers and shuffled through them, though it was too dark to see.

“Really? He left half of everything to Iris?”

“He did. If he meant for this will to be seen, that is. He might have put it in the wall himself. Changed his mind, sealed it away instead of burning it.”

She nodded slowly. “Either that, or someone else did. Your grandfather or grandmother. It’s hard for me to imagine it was your grandfather, though. Do you remember him at all?”

“Not really, no.”

“He was genial, he liked the good life and was happy to float along on what his father had accomplished. Art’s a lot like that, when you get down to it. He feels entitled to everything, somehow. He was the sort of person who went along to get along—though, who knows, he might have bottled up enough anger to do this. Your grandmother, though—especially after your grandfather had that stroke—was very protective of her boys, especially of Arthur. I can see her doing this. Of course, I never knew your great-grandfather, so I can’t really say what he might have done.”

“Well, someone didn’t want it to be found.”

“Yes.”

“That seems awfully mercenary, if it was all about the money.”

“It might have been money. Or it might have been anger or embarrassment. They were very proper, both of your grandparents. Very concerned with appearances, with the family name. It’s a small town, and word would have gotten around. It might have been a sense of shame as much as anything, if either one of them did this.

“That’s your father’s handwriting,” she said, picking up the first page and reading it again.
Found in kitchen, west wall.
“He must have come across it during the renovation that last spring.” She sighed. “He never mentioned it. He wouldn’t have, though. Still, I knew something was off.”

“So maybe this was what was on his mind.”

“Yes,” she said slowly. “I can see that. It might have been.”

“If it’s true, it could change everything.”

In the silence we listened to the soft voice of the lake, whispering and whispering to the stony shore where they had pulled my father from the water.

“Well, not everything,” she said.

She stood up and slid the papers back across the table. The radiant happiness that had surrounded her when she’d come in had disappeared.

“Let’s just think about this,” she said. “Let’s not mention it to anyone. We can talk to lawyers and so forth, but for the time being, I don’t see the need to discuss it with others.”

“It’s been such a strange day,” I said, because I didn’t want to consider too deeply why she might wish to keep this quiet.

My mother reached over and put her arm around my shoulders. She smelled unfamiliar, of strawberries and sweat.

“Go to bed, Lucy,” she said. “Get some sleep.”

I went upstairs, climbed into the room at the top of the house where Yoshi was sleeping in the middle of the futon. He moved away as I slipped in beside him. I lay there for a long time, the events of the day and discoveries of the night coming around and around, as if circling on a conveyor belt I could not switch off. I tried relaxation exercises and reciting lines of poetry and, remembering how I had felt in the chapel, for the first time in years I even tried self-consciously to pray, but the cupola was filling with the grainy gray light of sunrise before I finally slipped into a fitful, dreamless sleep.

Chapter 19

WHEN THE LAND AROUND THE LAKES WAS HOME TO THE Iroquois, they celebrated each harvest season by setting bonfires along the shore to make a ring of fire. This tradition was still celebrated every autumn after the leaves had scattered across the surface of the lake and the fields were stripped bare of their splendor, brown and dormant. Over the years people had begun to light a ring of fire on the Fourth of July as well. Boy Scouts sold flares and people plunged them into their lawns or deep into the pebbles of their beaches; Yoshi and I bought four from a stand outside the grocery store, and I explained what would happen: as the post-solstice twilight faded into darkness, the flames and flares would be lit up along the shore, making a necklace of light.

This was what we were waiting for when we gathered in the park by the marina. Blake had docked in the slip closest to the shore, and he and Avery had set up coolers of drinks, along with baskets full of delicate turkey and watercress sandwiches from The Green Bean. Family and friends sat with drinks on the edge of the seawall, or gathered in groups on the boat or the dock or the lawn. There was a band concert going on in the gazebo and children ran out to dance barefoot in the grass, parents chasing after them when they ran too close to the water. I found Avery on the boat deck, wearing a close-fitting T-shirt that made her pregnancy clearly visible.

“I’m so sorry,” I said. “It was my fault completely.”

She met my gaze. “Not entirely,” she said. “Blake didn’t have to tell.”

“I was giving him a hard time,” I said. “About sticking around here and taking a job at Dream Master. He was just giving me a context, that’s all. I’m the one who let it slip for no reason.”

She sighed, looked off over the lake, sipped at her sparkling water.

“All right,” she said at last, and looked back at me again.

“We’re good, then?”

She shrugged. “Not exactly. Not quite yet. But there’s no undoing it, so we might as well move on.”

I nodded. That seemed a little harsh, but fair enough. Honest, anyway.

“Besides,” she said, relenting a little, “we’re telling everyone tonight. No formal announcement, we’re just telling people one by one.”

“Okay. Congratulations, by the way. I’m really glad for you both.”

At this she smiled a little, and gave a quick nod, and then one of her friends was coming over, hugging her, and I stepped aside and took my drink back to the park, where Yoshi was waiting. I slipped my arm through his, resting my head for a second on his shoulder, and he glanced at me, smiling, before he went back to the conversation. He was talking to Joey, who was with the same long-limbed, long-haired woman I’d seen him with at Dream Master. Zoe and Austen were there, too, standing on the boat with Art. Across the expanse of lawn I glimpsed Max, dancing with wild abandon to a Sousa march, and Keegan, dancing with him for a few beats, before he laughed and swooped down, lifting Max and putting him up on his shoulders. I felt a pang of affection and the slightest bit of regret, but it was gone as quickly as it came, and I turned my attention back to the conversation.

They were talking about The Landing. They had the land and a zoning change was making its slow way through committees and would be announced within a day or so; Joey was optimistic that they’d get permission to build. I thought of the beautiful chapel, which stood in the center of the parcel they wanted, and of my mother, telling me not to mention the will I’d found, and felt a rush of paranoia: why
not
say anything? Was she planning to sell her property to Art, after all? Was she changing her mind about Dream Master? I wondered suddenly, too, what had been happening with Oliver and Suzi and the chapel.

“You’re pretty far from building anything, though,” I said, sipping at my wine.

Joey shrugged, nonchalant, full of the smug, unearned confidence that had always driven me crazy. “Yes and no. We’re almost good to go. I’ve already had calls from a dozen people interested in owning a piece of this. It could potentially be the biggest thing we’ve done.”

I thought of the marshes, and the herons rising when I disturbed their reedy home, rising and floating high, huge and graceful, above the trees. I looked across the water at Blake, standing on the boat and laughing with Andy and Art and two other people I didn’t know, and my mother, talking with Avery now, who was looking very happy. “New Year’s Eve,” I heard her say. “We’re getting married New Year’s Eve.”

The band played, and finished, the last notes floating out over the water. We ate and drank and talked as the sun went down and the darkness deepened. Fires began to appear, first just a few and then more and more, flaring here and there around the rim of the lake. It was such a lovely, familiar evening, the air as soft and warm as breath, but the secret of the will was like a transparent wall between me and everything else. I kept moving from group to group, drifting in and out of conversations.

Finally, Yoshi and I sat by ourselves on the seawall, dangling our legs into the lake. I told him about the will and all it implied.