In the echo of her poem being read as if it were Mary Stone Walker’s creation, Lydia’s mind struggled with the disorienting sense that truth was malleable. She sought grounding in the image of herself in the mirror, but as reality shape-shifted, even that face looked like an illusion. Was she somehow misremembering some part of this piece of history? She paced. Her brow was damp. No, there was no imagining such a poem, one’s own creation. But why had she never run across it in all these years? Where had Frank kept it? She had forgotten about it, although it was one of the most difficult things she had ever written. She smacked the wall with her fists. How could he stand there and claim he’d never read it before?
She could remember the night she’d asked him to respond to those lines, when they spoke on the phone a few days after he received the poem in the mail, and he had been tense. She had asked him if he understood the emotions she was explaining, and how important the issue of bringing the child to term and giving birth was to her, especially in light of her mother’s psychotic abandonment. She needed his support, she’d said, to do right by this unborn human being and herself throughout the child’s life.
“Do you understand that?” she had pleaded from a thousand miles away, staring onto the light-speckled darkness of Boston Common from her apartment window. The phone receiver had grown slippery in her hand from nervous perspiration, she suddenly remembered as memories unwound in her White Hill bedroom. And to all of her questions but one, Frank had said they should not try to talk about the issues on the phone. And that one: was he at least moved by the poem enough to hear its plea? To which he’d responded, simply, that it was not among her best.
It was a horrible memory, and no wonder that she’d shoved it deeply out of view for all of these years. That night, she had cried until she fell asleep, certain that she’d alienated Frank even further with her well-intended lines of poetry and afraid that he was not the man she’d believed him to be. At last, he’d said that he felt it would be best if they left the subject of her pregnancy alone for a while to give them both a chance to come to terms with it on their own. He’d never mentioned the poem again.
So, did Frank think that because nearly sixteen years had passed, she would not remember her own thoughts? Had he so diminished her value as a human being and an artist over the years that he believed she did not even own her own experiences? Her own words?
She rushed to her desk, jerked open the top drawer, and collected everything she could find related to their bank accounts. At some point, enough was simply enough. She needed to be ready to separate from him. She left her study and went to her bedroom with the feeling that she was being watched, that someone stood staring from the shadows. She locked the door.
Opening the closet, she reached inside to wrestle a gym bag from the back corner and rifled through her bureau drawers, pulling out socks, underwear, and T-shirts, enough for several days, to stuff into the bag. She tucked the bank statements and checkbooks securely under the clothes, then went to the closet for two pairs of clean pants, pushed them on top of the other things, and zipped the bag closed.
After changing from the dress she’d worn to the dessert party into a pair of jeans, a T-shirt, her warmest sweatshirt, and her hiking boots, she groped around beneath her side of the bed for the flashlight she kept there. She snapped it on. The beam was bright. She stood at the edge of the king-size bed she’d shared with Frank until he had begun sleeping most nights in the guest room a few months ago. On his bedside table a half-empty glass of amber liquid stood next to a magazine, some papers, and a book set open, facedown. Tennyson’s In Memoriam. On her bedside table there were an alarm clock her father had owned and a water glass. Everything else was intentionally out of view, a habit she had developed when Frank had begun making comments about many of the things that she bought or read.
Through every degrading fight, every fresh indignity and insult, she had always looked for reasons to believe that the situation would improve. This was her habit of mind. But it was time to face the fact that her life with Frank was a lie that she had been telling herself for a long time, and leave. She didn’t know where she was going right now, but the sense that this was the prelude to a permanent departure flickered ominously in her mind. She hoisted her purse onto her shoulder, then the gym bag.
She was downstairs at the back door, unnoticed, when she remembered that Frank had her Jeep keys in his pocket. God! Had he intended to submerge her in this humiliation, unable to escape? She began to feel nauseated from the racing questions about her husband.
He couldn’t have forged that poem. He just couldn’t have willfully pulled off the details of a trick like that. He would have needed to be able to pretend he wasn’t involved. Her thoughts turned frantically to other possible candidates. Drew? She seemed incapable of such deception or such artistry. No, she seemed too genuinely thrilled by the “discovery.” Who else was close enough? Nicholas? He was capable with a pen; that was certain. It occurred to Lydia that he had even had access to her poetry—but not that poem. No one knew about that poem but Frank. And how could young Nicholas have even conceived of such a scheme, especially knowing how much it would hurt her? Impossible. Perhaps it was someone else connected to the university—a student or someone else? Someone who would show up later wanting credit or money to remain silent.
Her heart beat wildly with a dozen emotions. Frank had filled the house with people toasting his victorious discovery, while she was forced to slink away like an unwanted pest. How much farther down was she going to let herself sink?
She twisted the door handle carefully and pulled it shut silently behind her. She would walk to Kathy’s in town, or Veronica’s, and one of them would drive her to a hotel. Or something. Although to let either of them and their husbands and children see her like this was unthinkable. Within a day, the whole town would know that something had happened.
Lydia walked blindly down her driveway and onto the street, quickly crossing to a narrow dirt road where she imagined she could think clearly. Nicholas. Of course she couldn’t leave Nicholas to simply wander back unknowingly tomorrow to the emotional swamp of their home. And Nicholas, she could protect. So that’s where she went—to Jack Kenilworth’s home.
Through the darkness, she walked so rapidly that the overstuffed bag and her purse banged painfully against her hip, but she was too removed from her body to care. She followed the lakeshore. When at last she neared the parkland that adjoined Jack’s property, she climbed up through saplings, wild grass, shrubs, and sand, tossing both the gym bag and her purse up the hill ahead of her a few feet where the hill was steepest, then picking them up to toss them ahead again. On the top of the hill, she stood at a weary angle and stared at the lake, which was visible only as streaks of moonlit ink through the pines and oaks. She could barely catch her breath.
Had it been this way for her, for Mary Walker? Had she, too, been scrambling away from some man, only to end up separated forever from life itself?
• • •
A few hours earlier, in Jack’s workshop, Nicholas and Jack had laughed over a series of mistakes Nicholas had made in calculations for a new set of boat lines. Mistakes so problematic that they would have led to the construction of a massive ship with ridiculous features, but Nicholas had caught them himself, just before Jack did. He told Jack that he was distracted, and Jack had said that was obvious, but that his distraction seemed to be one avenue to creativity. About then, Jack decided it was time for a break and made ham sandwiches that they ate as they sat at his kitchen table. When he opened two beers, Nicholas glanced up at him, flattered.
“Well, you aren’t going home tonight, I figure,” Jack said. “It’ll help you sleep on that foldout bed.”
“I’ve never had a beer before. It’ll probably be easier to sleep here no matter what I’m sleeping on,” Nicholas said, then bit into his sandwich.
Jack gave him time to say more if he wan
ted to, then asked, “Your mom doing okay?”
“I think she’s happy. Yeah.”
“Oh?” Jack studied the teen’s face, but Nicholas didn’t raise his eyes. “Well. That’s good.”
“Yeah.”
“And your dad?”
“He’s happy, too.”
“Hmm.” Jack felt his heart speed up. His curiosity was insistent; he felt an unpleasant flash of jealousy and found himself reluctant to let the subject drop. Had they already made up over the pulverized antiques? “What’re they up to these days?”
Nicholas shrugged, taking a careful sip of his beer. “Well, right now, probably celebrating.”
“Oh?”
“Dad found a poem written by Mary Walker. Finally.” Nicholas flashed a smile at Jack.
“You’re kidding. Where?”
“I guess she wrote it into some old book she owned. On the last page.”
Jack sat back and took a long breath to collect himself. “Well, that beats all. And it’s signed by Mary Walker? It’s authentic?”
“Signed by Mary Walker. Yep.”
“What exactly does the inscription say?”
“Umm. Mary S. Walker. 1940.”
“Nineteen forty?”
“Yeah.” Nicholas nodded. “That’s what Dad said.”
Jack dropped the front legs of his chair to the floor. “Nicholas, Mary Walker left Michigan in October of 1939. She was never seen again. She didn’t write anything in 1940.”
“That’s what people thought. But apparently that’s not the case.” Nicholas took another bite of his sandwich.
“Has your mother or anyone else seen it? Is this a big deal at home?”
“Heck, yeah. Huge deal. Lots of people have seen it,” he said, taking his glasses off to rub his eyes. “They think it’s really hers. So.”
“What does your mom say?” Jack asked.
“She’s really happy,” Nicholas said. “She hasn’t seen it yet, though. I don’t think. I haven’t either, actually.”
“Listen, Nick, I hate to be the voice of gloom, but…it cannot be true,” Jack said, trying to remain calm.
“Why not?”
Jack shifted and looked at his watch, wondering if he could give Lydia a call. It would be strange, and it would be unwelcome, but this whole thing was going too far.
“Because Mary Walker wasn’t alive in 1940,” Jack said sternly. “I know this.”
Nicholas’s eyes met his. “How do you know?”
Jack gazed at him. He felt furious at Frank Carroll for persuading his own kid that his self-serving charade was so vitally important. Jack didn’t want to be the one to burst everyone’s bubble. But Christ almighty. A silly theory was one thing, but forgery and outright lies were quite another. “Are your parents at home tonight, Nick?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know. Probably not. Like I said, I think they were going out someplace special.”
“I think I should call your mother. I need to talk to her.”
“Why?” Nicholas asked, emptying his hands and brushing off crumbs.
“Because there is information she should know. I tried to talk to your father a long time ago about these things. More than once. He wasn’t interested because he’s very specific about the kind of story he wants to find for Mary Stone Walker. It didn’t matter then. But now it’s gone too far.”
“You mean because now my dad found what he wanted?” Nicholas’s voice had an edge to it.
“No, of course not. Because it isn’t reality. It isn’t… I could explain the whole thing, but…”
Jack shook his head, sorry for Nicholas. He weighed the bulk of what he knew about the woman in question with what he ought to say to this boy who, in his opinion, should not even be involved in this drama.
“Well, how do you know anything?”
Jack locked his fingers together on the table and sorted his thoughts. He needed to be careful.
“It’s very simple,” Jack said. “I know she died. In 1939. I…know someone who knew her.”
“That still doesn’t mean anything,” Nicholas said quickly. “It’s all just speculation if you haven’t seen her dead body.”
Jack nodded. That was Frank’s line. “I’ll just talk to your mother. It’s not too late.”
“I don’t think she’ll be there,” Nicholas insisted.
“Then I’ll leave a message.” Jack stood up, tossed his napkin onto his plate, and carried it to the sink.
“But…” Nicholas said, eyes wide.
“What?” Jack asked.
“I don’t think Dad would like it if you were calling Mom,” Nicholas said.
“I don’t care if he likes it,” Jack said with an irritated smile. “He doesn’t get to write the whole story of everything that happens in your house. Does he?”
“But…he just hates you,” Nicholas said, then looked alarmed at his own words.
“I don’t actually care if he hates me, Nicholas,” Jack said firmly but, he hoped, kindly enough to make Nicholas understand that nothing he said was going to make Jack flip out. “There are more important issues here. It really doesn’t matter what he thinks or doesn’t think about me or about Mary Stone Walker. There’s a reality that is independent of his stories—or anyone else’s, for that matter. Do you know what I’m saying?”
“Yes, I know what you’re saying,” Nicholas said rapidly. “But you don’t know how he is. He’ll be mean to Mom.”
“Okay. You call her then, Nicholas,” Jack said quietly. “Ask her to call you here. Then I’ll talk to her. Is that fair?”
“In the morning,” Nicholas countered.
Jack spread his arms, shaking his head. “All right. First thing tomorrow, you call your mother. You leave a message if no one answers. Because, Nicholas…”
“What?”
Jack waited for the boy to look up at him. When Nicholas lifted his eyes to Jack’s, they were distinctly frightened.
“Being honest about all of this is going to make things better,” Jack said sincerely. “I promise. Maybe not in the first five minutes. But it will. In the end, it will.”
30
White Hill, Michigan—April 1999
Sweet Burning gave the red side, and the white
Is Meadow Milk.
Eat it, and you will taste more than the fruit:
The blossom, too,
The sun, the air, the darkness at the root,
The rain, the dew,
The earth we came to, and the time we flee
~ Louise Bogan (1897–1970), “The Crossed Apple”
A thread line of bloody red rode the western horizon, and Jack stared into it as intensely as if he expected that lingering seam of water and sky to give birth to something he needed. From a certain perspective, it could be said that this whole dilemma was his fault. He thought of how much he despised Frank Carroll for his marathon of foolishness. No, this wasn’t Jack’s fault, but he might have stopped it. His thumb flicked at the matchbook in his right hand. He shook his head, eyes narrowed toward the swelling darkness.
“Fuck.” He kicked one foot against the blanket of pine needles underfoot and pulled a pack of cigarettes from his shirt pocket. He’d been relieved to find the stupid things in his coat closet. He’d thought there were some there, but then he’d tried to forget. It was always crazy people that drove him back to smoking.
The night was clear. It was cold. He lit a cigarette and paced very slowly. After ten minutes or so, he heard a shuffling, thumping sound. He jerked his gaze up toward the dune ridge trail and saw nothing. He glanced back at his house where the kitchen light was still the only one glowing. It didn’t look like Nicholas was up.
The question now was exactly what to say to Lydia, who was already pressing him for what he knew about the past. There was no n
eed to dump all the gory details out, no need for him to harm the memory of anyone. But he’d never been skilled at carving half-truths from his knowledge. Silence he could handle, and that was usually his choice.
Thumping and shuffling again countered the rhythmical shush of water below, this time accompanied by the faint note of a voice. He heard his name, and then from behind a line of trees and moon shadows, Lydia appeared.
“Jack?” she said again, sounding uncertain. What was she carrying?
“Lydia?” He walked toward her, his arm out for the bag that seemed to be pulling her over. He lifted it from her, tossed his cigarette down, and tried to see her face. “What are you doing here? Did you walk?”
She coughed as she nodded.
“I had to. Frank has my car keys. But I couldn’t stay there with him another minute. He’s…” She was panting for breath. “He’s gone too far this time. He’s lost his mind.”
He let her walk in silence, leading her toward the barn, and when they reached the open room, he strode to his worktable and set down her bag. He was about to turn on the overhead shop lights but thought the better of it and felt around the shelf beneath the worktable for his kerosene lantern. He lit the wick and looked at Lydia, whose features were distorted by something he didn’t have time to interpret before she covered her face with her hands and shook with weeping.
Instinctively, he reached his arms around her body to hold her. In the presence of her pain, his mind groped the darkness for what to say, what to do. He couldn’t have said how much time passed in this way or when she finally began to slump away from her brittle tension and let her hands fall from her face. When at last she exhaled with a shudder of distress, he pulled back from her.
“Come on, sit down,” he said, and they walked to a couch, where she sank into the green tweed cushions.
“I’m sorry to come here, Jack. I didn’t know what else to do. I wanted to be near Nicholas. And also you, I admit.”
“I’m glad,” he said quietly. After a couple of minutes, he stood up. “I’ll be right back.”
The Lake and the Lost Girl Page 25