The Lake of Dreams (51 page)

She flipped to the last page, and I saw that she had signed the contract, and dated it June 25, the day after we’d gone to see the Westrum archives and stopped at Joan Lowry’s packed and lonely apartment. Now she ripped this page off and tore it in half, and then again, until it was in tiny pieces. When she opened her hand, the shreds flew across the lawn, some catching against the bushes, others swept by the breeze to the shore, where they were caught and carried off by waves.

“Mom,” Blake said.

“I believe Lucy,” she said. “Because I remember how things were, and I remember things the two of you will never know. I can see it happening. What Art described—I can see it all. Your father meant to come home that night. He’d had something on his mind for days and he couldn’t sleep. The last thing he did was kiss me and say he’d be back soon, and not to worry. But I did.”

“What if I don’t believe it?” Blake asked.

“Well,” my mother said. “You’re a grown man. Believe what you like, Blake.”

“The will is real,” I pointed out. “Even if you don’t believe the rest, the will in your hands is real.”

“Why don’t you talk to Art yourself,” my mother suggested. “See what he says.”

“He’ll just deny it,” I said, certain suddenly that this was true. And what proof did I have of all he’d said—nothing but his words in the silence of Dream Master late at night. Nothing at all.

“Maybe.”

“Or he’ll just say it was an accident.”

“If the story is true, it had to be an accident,” Blake countered. “Art has his flaws, like anyone, but he’s not cold-blooded.”

I thought of Yoshi saying,
It’s a moral problem, not a legal one.

“I’m going to tell Iris,” I said, folding the will and putting it back into its yellowed envelope. “You do what you have to, but that’s what I need to do.”

“She’ll have to know,” my mother agreed.

Blake sat back in the chair and gazed out across the water toward his boat, a muscle working in his cheek.

“This is unbelievable,” he said, finally. “Sell or don’t sell, Mom. Sell it to Art or to someone else. But this business with the will is just crazy. It’s probably invalid, being so old and stuck in a wall, but if it’s not, why bring it up? Why should a bunch of strangers end up with the things we’ve worked for all our lives?”

I left my mother and Blake on the patio. Yoshi was in the kitchen, reading an article on strip-mining in a copy of
Harper’s
that he’d bought at the airport, a cup of coffee on the counter.

“How’s it going out there?”

“It’s okay.”

“Really?”

“No, actually. It’s terribly tense.”

Yoshi nodded. “I’m sorry. Can I help?”

“Not really.”

“Okay. Then can I change the subject?”

“Please.”

He pulled the laptop across the counter and flipped it open.

“I sent out a bunch of inquiries after we talked about jobs. A few people sent listings in reply. Mostly I don’t think they’re very interesting, but there are a couple that caught my eye. One in Papua New Guinea, and one in Cambodia.”

I scanned through the job descriptions, which were with aid agencies and NGOs.

“They sound interesting,” I said. “Hard, but good.”

“Different than we’re used to. The pay is okay, but they don’t have the same benefits, not by a long shot.”

“Right now we don’t have any benefits at all,” I pointed out.

After a second, Yoshi laughed. “True enough,” he said. “I wrote back, asking for more information, asking if there were other positions that might be interesting for you.”

“Okay. That’s good. I’ll send some queries, too.”

On the patio, my mother and Blake were still deep in conversation. I sighed, and found my phone, not sure if I was doing the right thing but knowing I was doing the only thing I could. Ned answered on the second ring, and seemed surprised to hear from me.

“Is your mother okay?” I asked.

“I think so, yes. She’s been absorbed by the letters. We haven’t really spoken of them in much detail. She hasn’t let anyone else read them, either.”

“I wanted to invite her to see the Westrum collection. When she’s ready. To invite all of you. And there is a chapel full of windows she ought to see as well.”

“Yes. Didn’t we discuss all that?”

“We did. I just wanted to confirm.” I hesitated. “And something else has come up since,” I went on, touching the envelope that held the will. And then I told him, carefully and concisely, everything I knew.

Chapter 21

IN THE TRANQUIL LIGHT OF THE WESTRUM HOUSE, IRIS looked less pale than she had at home, her eyes quick and vibrant. She was wearing a pale blue suit with a dark scarf tucked around her throat, and little pearl clip-on earrings. Her hair had been carefully styled. Ned hovered, helping her down the sidewalk and up the steps, but when we were inside she stepped away from him and went to speak with Oliver, who offered his arm to her in a way that seemed courtly, allowing her to accept his help without feeling dependent. It was thoughtful, and I admired his gesture from across the room. Iris curved her fingers around his elbow as they moved from one window to another, Oliver telling her all about Frank Westrum and the history of the house, his voice booming, using his free hand to gesture. Iris listened, studying the windows. Stuart Minter stood behind the desk; he’d flashed a smile and waved when he saw me come inside, and I took Yoshi over to say hello.

When my mother arrived with Andy a few minutes later, Yoshi and I introduced them to Ned and Carol, and then we stood together in a friendly but uneasy cluster. I’d sent a copy of the will to Ned, who’d told me he intended to consult a lawyer to see what they might do. I’d gone with my mother to a lawyer, too, a friend of Andy’s who did estate work and who’d suggested things could potentially be complicated. Still, it wasn’t clear what would happen, and we hadn’t spoken of the matter to the Stones since I’d made that initial call.

When we finished touring the first floor of the Westrum House, admiring all the windows, Oliver led the way to the stairwell, where the woman in her golden-green dress stood with her arms full of flowers. I hadn’t seen the window since I’d discovered the letters Rose had written, since I’d entered into her story and understood my connection to her, and I’d forgotten how captivating the window was, six feet high, the cascading irises in her arms life-sized and vibrant. I stood staring at her image, her familiar eyes. I imagined her posing in a light-filled studio, Frank Westrum sketching the curve of her ear, the elegant line of her neck, pausing for a moment as he was swept through with his love for her, which he could never translate exactly onto paper, or into glass.

“It’s beautiful, is it not?” Oliver said when we paused on the landing to admire it. I’d given him copies of some of Rose’s letters, finally, and he’d shared some correspondence from Frank to Cornelia that he’d found in his archives. “
She
is beautiful. Mrs. Stone, I think your mother was the model for this portrait. Look at her eyes. And look at what she’s holding in her arms—they are irises, Mrs. Stone.”

Iris didn’t speak, and though we all looked at her, it was impossible to read her expression. She didn’t take her gaze from the window for a long time. Finally, she released Oliver’s arm and sat down right on the stairs, in the middle of the third step from the bottom.

“Mom?” Ned said.

“I’m all right.” She pushed back the sleeve of her suit jacket and held up her wrist. “Ned, Carol. Look at that pendant she’s wearing. It matches this bracelet. Ned, you gave this to me a few years ago, do you remember? You told me you’d found it. Where?”

“In the boxes I was going through. I didn’t tell you exactly, because they were in a box of things that had been sent to you from Rose when she died. From Frank Westrum, actually, that name is on some of the envelopes, though of course it never meant anything to us, not until now. Dad showed me where it all was. He said you’d wanted to throw it out, but he’d put it away because he thought it might be important someday. You know how he was.”

“Yes,” she said. “That’s the way he was. Did you save the rest?”

Ned nodded. “There are some drawings. There’s a piece of stained glass, a field full of blue irises.”

“Ned,” she said, after a long moment. “Mr. Parrott. I wonder if I could sit here for a while, just by myself. I’d like to do that, if the rest of you don’t mind.”

So we left her, following Oliver upstairs to a corner room with tall windows on two walls. Oliver had gathered all the stained-glass windows he’d had in storage that contained images related to Rose, and these hung against the clear glass.

The first window I’d seen, the window that had started me on this whole adventurous search, was hanging on the closest wall, backlit. It had been cleaned since I’d seen it in Keegan’s studio, then still coated in grime from its years sitting uncovered in the closed-off chapel. It hadn’t been included in the original receipt to the church, I’d realized, and I could only conjecture that Frank had made it for Rose, or perhaps at her request, and then couldn’t bear to keep it when she’d become so ill. Now its colors were so deep and true and dazzling; the image of the chalice in the bag of grain, the crowded figures of the men and women in the background, were all infused with light.

The interwoven spheres and vines ran along the bottom. I’d done some research, and I’d found this motif everywhere. These overlapping circles were ancient, tracing back to Pythagorean geometry—geometry, a measure of the world. In more mystical terms, the shape had always evoked the place where worlds overlap: dreaming with waking, death with life, the visible with the unseen. Rose had probably glimpsed this pattern in a medieval church and woven it into the blanket for her child.

“What are you thinking about so seriously?” Yoshi asked. He’d gone around the room from window to window, and now he came and stood close.

“Rose,” I said. “My great-grandfather’s dream. It was always his dream we knew about and not hers, and that’s the problem. I think that’s what she’s saying somehow, in this window. I mean, in a personal sense, not as an interpretation of the text. But in this story, Joseph always has these dreams, right? I looked it up. That’s what puts a wall up between him and his brothers to begin with. His arrogance, their envy; that’s why they throw him in the pit and sell him into slavery. This cup in the grain, it’s the cup he uses later for divination. For dreams. And it’s not until he sends that cup off with his brothers—even though it’s a trick to get them to come back—that balance is finally restored.”

“Maybe,” Yoshi said. “It sounds plausible enough to me.”

I thought of Rose, packing the soft blanket to send to a daughter who would never know her, and the chalice slipped beneath her skirt and carried through the night. I looked again at the women in the crowd around the sack of grain. This cup, buried in the grain as surely as Rose’s story had been buried in the family narrative, spoke to me.

“There was some good news earlier,” Yoshi said after a few minutes, when he judged that I’d finished looking at the windows. “Want to come and see?”

We retreated back down the stairs to the lobby, where we sat side by side on a low bench, going through the e-mails that had come in that morning. Yoshi’s contacts in both Papua New Guinea and Cambodia were cautiously optimistic about finding a position for me; they were talking with other agencies to see what was available. I’d sent out queries of my own, and as we waited I checked, shading the screen of my phone against the flickering light that fell in through the trees.

“My friend Alice thinks there might be a position opening in Mali, but it sounds a little too corporate. She gave me the contact name, though.”

“That’s good. Worth looking into.”

“It is. I’ll write when we get back.”

“I guess we just have to keep looking hard. It may take a while to find what we want.”

We sat for half an hour longer, talking quietly about what we hoped would happen, how we might see to the closing up of our place in Japan. I kept thinking of a line from a Mary Oliver poem I’d read: “What is it you plan to do / With your one wild and precious life?” What indeed?

I hadn’t seen Iris leave the stairs and go to view the windows upstairs, but she must have, because eventually she came down with Ned, trailed by Oliver and Carol, and my mother and Andy.

“They’re going home,” my mother said, coming up to talk while Iris paused at the desk to sign the book Stuart was holding out to her. “I think she’s very tired. It must just be emotionally exhausting to take all this in.”

“It must. Have they said anything about the will?”

My mother glanced across the room. “Actually, yes. They were very nice. They suggest a meeting tomorrow afternoon, in The Lake of Dreams. Their lawyer, my lawyer, Art, and his lawyer. Apparently, secretaries are calling each other even as we speak. They want to move quickly, before the town board meets to issue any zoning changes. I don’t know what to expect at all. But it seems they have something to propose.” She glanced at her watch, and sighed. “I really need to get back to the bank before lunch. They’ve been so good to me, I don’t want to push my luck.”