The Lake of Dreams (52 page)

They were all crossing the room now, Ned on one side of Iris and Carol on the other. When they reached us they paused to say good-bye. Iris touched my hand.

“Thank you,” she said. “For finding her. And me.”

Since the afternoon was so fine, Yoshi and I didn’t go directly back to The Lake of Dreams. I was acutely aware that our days here were beginning to dwindle, and that most of his vacation had been spent dealing with my family issues, past and present, or trying to find another job. Yoshi wasn’t the sort of person to complain, or inflict his stress on other people, but I could tell from the way he was sometimes distant and reflective that he had a lot on his mind. So instead of going back to the house, we picked up some sandwiches and drove to a state park near Ithaca that I’d always loved. We hiked along a cascading stream through the gorge, then swam in the pool at its base. It was too cold to swim for long, but we jumped in for as long as we could stand it, then sat on the rocks by the water in the sun.

When we got back to the house that evening, my mother was just getting home from work. Blake was there, too. We saw his truck first, parked at an odd angle in the gravel driveway. I expected to find him in the kitchen, but he wasn’t there, and after we called to him a few times, he answered from upstairs, his voice muffled, floating down from his old room, where he was standing amid the dark blue walls with a pile of books in his hands, looking at his posters of the moon, of the beautiful image of the earth from space.

“It’s like a cave in here,” he noted. “What was I thinking?”

Our mother, walking up behind me, laughed. “You were a teenager,” she said. “That’s where your mind was. Growing into some new state of being. Look at Zoe. That should remind you.”

He shook his head. “I was growing in the dark, I guess. How was the trip?” he asked, putting his books on the desk—even as a teenager, he’d been reading about boats.

“Good,” I said.

My mother added, “Yes. It was moving.”

Blake nodded but didn’t comment. At first I worried that he was still upset about the decision to tell the Stones what we’d discovered, but when he spoke again, he changed the subject. “Well, I stopped by because I have some news.”

We went downstairs to the dining room and sat at the big round oak table. I’d polished the wood with lemon oil before Yoshi came, so it gleamed softly in the light from the two high leaded windows.

“So,” Blake said. “I talked to Art. It was pretty tense. He didn’t confirm or deny, at the end of the day. But I’ve had some time to think about things. I want you to know that I quit. I left this morning. I cleaned out my desk and left.”

“He let you go?” my mother asked. “Just like that?”

“He tried to talk me out of it, but his heart wasn’t in it. There was some vandalism on the Fourth of July. I don’t know if you heard that. Some damage, things knocked off the shelves, mostly just a dumping of papers. He’s still trying to put things in order.” Yoshi had discreetly taken a seat in the living room, where he was looking at a magazine; he glanced up at this, our eyes met, and he gave a slight shrug. Blake continued. “He’s been going through a lot of old papers and things as a result. I think he’s been pretty weighed down by the past, and by worry over how this Landing business is going to turn out. Long story short, no—he didn’t have much to say.”

“Well, I don’t know whether to laugh or cry,” my mother, said, holding up her hands. “Both of my grown children are now unemployed.”

“What about Avery?” I asked. “Is she okay with this?”

Blake laughed. “Yeah, she’s much more okay than I am, actually. She’s always been a risk taker, and she figures things will work out. Anyway, I still have my pilot’s job,” he added. “You know, running the cruises.”

“I think Avery’s right,” I said. Though Yoshi and I were no closer to jobs and had no idea where we’d end up living next, I’d started seeing that the change could be a good one for us both. Plus, not looking to the future so much had made the present moment all the more vivid.

“Glad you’ve got such a great attitude,” Blake said.

I smiled. “Well, both Yoshi and I are unemployed, so to keep myself sane I’ve decided that worry is a waste of energy. Yoshi’s going to make curried noodles for dinner. Want to stay?”

“Sounds good.”

We pulled out the Chinese checkers and played until the sun began to set.

The meeting with the lawyers had been set for four o’clock the next afternoon. It didn’t end until close to six. My mother pulled into the driveway, gravel popping under her tires. I met her on the back steps.

“Well?” I said. “Blake must have called three times already. What happened?”

“Let’s go sit on the patio,” she said.

So we did. Yoshi stayed upstairs, working on the job search, while my mother explained what had happened. It seemed the will was valid, and Iris did indeed have a claim on the estate. But so much time had passed that her claim could be challenged, and though the will had been properly signed and notarized, no one knew for certain how it had ended up in the wall. If my grandfather had put it there, it was fraud. If my great-grandfather had done it, it was a change of heart. Iris was aware of all of this. Ned had also done enough research to understand the complexities of what was going on with the depot land, and with Art’s desire to buy my mother out and annex this property to lots along the marsh with his upscale development in mind. He knew about the temporary stays on the sales initiated by the Iroquois and by the conservation groups.

“So they came up with a rather amazing plan,” my mother said. “They asked that the land remain ours, but that a legal document be drawn up so that it can never be developed. Something like the Forever Farms program—have you heard of that? Their whole family has been involved for years with the Nature Conservancy, and so they know all about this process. If everyone agrees, I can keep this land and this house as long as I want, and then sell it to the conservancy if I ever desire to leave. But I can’t sell to anyone else, and I can’t develop it myself. Art would have to agree to contribute the adjacent acres he’s purchased as well. Essentially, what they’re suggesting would preserve the marshes. Your father would have loved that. The white deer would be protected, and all the wildlife, because this would involve quite a lot of acreage. Plus, this plan would allow for Oliver and the church to keep the chapel intact, which they’ve been lobbying hard to do. The idea is that it would be used for services and weddings and so forth again. It would be preserved and maintained as an artistic heritage site under the auspices of the Westrum Foundation, but independent of both the Westrum House and the conservancy.”

“So—that’s quite a plan. What’s not to like?”

She shook her head. “I don’t know. It seems like there must be a catch, but I can’t see one, and neither could the lawyer. We’re all going to think it over. But I think this deal was offered in goodwill. I think they have no desire to end up in court.”

“But why would they do this? I mean, the land is worth a lot of money. I just don’t understand why they’d let it go.”

My mother shook her head. “I don’t know, of course. But Iris is ninety-five years old. She doesn’t need the money. Her sons have done very well, and they’re both pushing seventy. And after that it starts to become a lot of arguing in court about money that’s going to people who have almost no connection to the events that set all this in motion. They’d have made a different decision fifty years ago, I’m sure. But now—now they’d rather have this land given in their name, and ours. It’s a beautiful thing to do, if it’s real.”

It was real, it turned out, and in the end they hammered out a deal. Art was the last to agree, but knowing that he’d lost my mother’s land changed his sense of urgency about the remaining lots along the marshes. Plus, though he never acknowledged what he’d told me about the night my father died, I remembered his expression as I left, and I knew it must haunt him still. Perhaps his desire to develop that land in the first place had been an attempt to erase what had happened there. Though he never spoke of it again, I will always believe he signed the papers to assuage his sense of guilt.

In any case, they made the deal. My mother negotiated a sale of her house and land that would allow her a final year to clear things out. The conservancy started talking about converting the house into a nature center. My mother started talking about buying a condo in town.

As for Art and Joey, they made a bid on some of the other, smaller parcels along the lake. I watched, expecting, I suppose, that something would break, and change. That Art would show up one day full of remorse and confess what he’d done. That some kind of great justice would have to prevail, with Dream Master suffering a reversal of fortune, going out of business, or bursting into flames from spontaneous combustion.

None of this happened, of course. Instead, Art started the zoning process right away. His artist’s renditions were scaled down and posted on a billboard near the gravel entrance to The Landing. Over the summer, lots sold swiftly for his asking price. By October, his garish machines were stripping topsoil from the earth, tearing out the groves of trees by the shore—oaks and pine, maples and elms, all falling, strewn across the land like the bones of dinosaurs. I glimpsed Art overseeing the construction, his baseball cap pushed back on his head, his large hands planted on his hips, as if nothing had ever happened or gotten in his way.

Other things changed, too. Restorers came and took the stained-glass windows from the chapel for cleaning and repair. We saw the trucks parked in the field, and we went to watch. It was such a delicate operation to remove the windows, which turned out to have been installed in panels. The crew stood on ladders, tapping with their chisels and hammers at the seals between the glass and stone. It made me hold my breath to watch, but they were very good, and one by one the windows came out and were packed carefully away. Oliver estimated that they’d be gone for three months, long enough for him to do enough fund-raising for the grand opening he planned to have. He showed us the mock-up of his brochure, which featured the Wisdom window on the front and included descriptions of all the other windows, too. He’d added a biography of Rose, and he told us that he’d changed all the literature at the Westrum House to reflect her contributions as well.

The day before we were to leave The Lake of Dreams, Yoshi and I went downtown for one final stroll, and we walked down to the
Fearful Symmetry,
which was docked at the very last slot in the pier. Avery came up right away when I called hello, holding on to the railing with one hand to keep herself steady, carrying a bag full of books in the other. She looked just the same, slender and fit, except for the round swell of the baby.

“Hi there,” she said, offering the bag as she reached the deck. “Want any of these? We’re cleaning out. Clearing out. I can’t wait.”

“You’re moving?”

“We are. It’s so exciting. We just signed a lease for a little house on Orchard Street. It has two bedrooms and a bathroom with retro pink and black tile. It has a little garden in the back. Best of all, it doesn’t sway!” She laughed.

“What about the boat?”

“Sold. Signed, sealed, and to be delivered this afternoon. Blake!” she added, turning to shout down the stairs. “Blake, your sister’s here. With Yoshi.” She waited until he appeared and then looked back at us. “He should tell you himself.”

“Tell us what?” I asked, as Blake emerged from the stairwell. “Tell us what?”

“It’s sold,” he affirmed, running his hand along a railing in a way that let me know the decision hadn’t come easily. “We’ll be all off-loaded in a couple of hours. Landlubbers,” he added, and tried to smile.

“Not exactly,” Avery said. “Tell the rest.”

“Well, I’m starting a new venture,” he said. He gestured across the water to where the cruise boat was docked, people filing on for the early afternoon tour of the lake. “I’ve been having these conversations off and on for years with Mike Simms—you know he owns that business, right? He’s wanted me to come in as a partner, with the thought of buying him out eventually, and I haven’t wanted to do it. Didn’t want to be tied down at first; didn’t want the daily hassles, either. But after I quit at Dream Master, I went to talk to him again. I think we’ve worked out a deal. It’s not just going to be tour cruises anymore. We’re going to expand and add a lunch and dinner cruise as well. They do that on some of the other lakes, and it’s a good seasonal business. Avery’s doing the food,” he added, and smiled.

“I needed something a little less twenty-four-seven,” she said, ignoring his compliment. “With the baby coming, I’ve hired a manager for The Green Bean, and another chef, but I didn’t want to stop cooking altogether. This seemed like it could work.”

Yoshi and I helped them for a while, carrying several boxes down the dock to Blake’s truck, driving over to see the new place. It was small and ramshackle, with a 1950s kitchen, but very charming, too, with a wide front porch. When we were done, we walked back downtown to pick up the car and drive back along the lake road.

“Well,” Yoshi said, stretching his arms out across the wide front seat. “We have six days left before our flight back to Japan. We have no jobs and limited savings—nothing but our dreams.”

“That’s right,” I said. “Whatever else, we’re free.”