The Lake and the Lost Girl

by Jacquelyn Vincenta

  “Nicholas, come sit with me for a minute. Would you please?”

  With obvious reluctance, he walked to the couch and sat next to Lydia, not meeting her eyes.

  “You know the poem Dad found, Nicholas?”

  He nodded, still avoiding her face.

  “Well. The truth is…Mary Stone Walker didn’t write it. Jack knows that she died in 1939. His grandfather knew her.”

  Nicholas clenched his hands, and his breathing grew audible.

  “I know it’s disappointing, Nicholas,” she said anxiously, reaching for his hand, but Nicholas pulled away.

  Nicholas’s gaze turned up toward the ceiling of the loft. Lydia thought she saw tears in his eyes. His voice was small. “I don’t understand how you can know that.”

  Jack spoke. “It’s a long story, Nicholas, but Mary was a troubled person who needed help, and my grandfather was a friend to her. In White Hill, he was her closest friend, and he knew what happened to her at the end.”

  “But how could she die?” Nicholas said with frustration. “She was young.”

  “Sixty years ago, more people died young than they do today,” Jack said quickly.

  “But what difference does your grandfather’s story make? It still doesn’t mean anything,” Nicholas said, his jaw set.

  “Nicky, of course it means something,” Lydia said with alarm. “Sometimes there are facts. Testimonies. Documents.” She searched his eyes. “If she died in 1939, then the poem in Dad’s book isn’t really hers.”

  “How do you know for sure?” Nicholas’s voice rose. “Jack’s stuff might be fake. Or maybe the date on the poem is wrong. You know, if she was sick, maybe she didn’t know what she was writing.”

  “That’s not very likely,” Lydia said firmly.

  “But it’s possible,” Nicholas said stubbornly. She stared into the face that did not remind her of her husband, even though his denial did.

  “No, it really isn’t,” Lydia said.

  “In the end she wasn’t well, Nicholas. She wasn’t writing much of anything,” Jack said.

  “You don’t know!” Nicholas said angrily. “How would you know? That was sixty years ago! You weren’t even born.”

  “Nicholas, you’re sounding as close-minded about this as your dad.” Lydia tried not to sound bitter.

  “So what? I am his son,” Nicholas said. “I don’t understand why you came here. I don’t see why you had to find this out. Why?”

  She gazed into his eyes, confused and riled by his anger. “Why? You mean you think we should just pretend that she didn’t die, like we have been all along, even though we know differently now?”

  “I don’t see why this had to happen,” Nicholas said desperately, his voice breaking at the end of his sentence.

  Jack gazed at him.

  “It’s okay, you know, Nicholas,” Jack said. “The truth is a good thing in the long run. Things will be all right. Even though it doesn’t feel like they will be right now.”

  “No, they won’t,” Nicholas said certainly, shaking his head. He glared at Lydia. “You didn’t want Dad to find a poem. I thought you did, but you didn’t. Otherwise, you wouldn’t have come here tonight. You would have just been happy with the way things were going.”

  “I came here tonight, Nicholas,” Lydia said, “because the poem in that Sara Teasdale book is mine. I wrote it.”

  Nicholas shook his head.

  “Do you hear me, Nick?” She pulled his arm.

  He mumbled something.

  “Nicholas, do you hear—”

  “Yes! I hear you!” He whipped his face up toward her, his eyes bright with tears and something she didn’t recognize.

  “Do you know what this means?”

  “What does it mean?” he said belligerently.

  “Well! It means it… It’s obvious. It means it couldn’t be Mary Walker’s poem, of course. It means it’s a forgery.”

  Nicholas turned away.

  “It means that we have to bring the truth out.” Lydia felt flustered. “I told your dad—”

  “You told him it’s your poem?” Nicholas faced her. “What did he say?”

  “Well, he wants to believe it’s hers. He claims he has never read it before.”

  “Maybe he hasn’t,” Nicholas said, as if this proved something important.

  “But that doesn’t change the fact that it is mine and not hers.” Lydia glanced at Jack, whose gaze remained fixed on Nicholas.

  “Why don’t you just let him have it?” Nicholas said flatly. He was rigid, his hands locked together between his knees. “It’ll make things better.”

  Lydia stared at him. She felt as if he’d slapped her.

  “What’s the worst that could happen?” he asked, his voice strange.

  “You must be kidding. It’s a lie. The worst that could happen? If I just went along with his delusion? Nicholas, people can’t live like that without suffering negative consequences. That’s what’s been eating at this family for years. Your father’s delusion, his worship of a dead woman, a story that he cares about more than real life. A story that it turns out isn’t even true!”

  “But no one would know but us. Right?” Nicholas voice sounded cold, and his face, when he looked at her, seemed hard and unreasonably determined.

  She stood up, the whiskey and emotion making her vision swim.

  “Lydia,” Jack said, walking toward them. “Let me talk to Nicholas for a minute. Okay?”

  Shaking, she strode silently a few feet away and crossed her arms, staring blindly into the barn’s old rafters. It wasn’t possible. Nicholas could not have been so thoroughly brainwashed that he, too, cared more about the myth than reality. Had Frank made Mary’s life so huge, so glamorous, and so critical to their lives that her own son was ready to believe that they should do whatever was necessary to keep that fabulous story alive?

  Through search after search, Nicholas had been by his father’s side, hoping, and the woman’s poems had been read in the house like Bible verses. Frank had established Mary Stone Walker’s ghost in their family with a vitality that the rest of them had never been allowed to attain. Lydia gouged her fingers into her arms. It was absurd, but it was true. She was the only one who could have stopped it, and she had let it happen.

  “We have a tricky situation here, Nicholas,” she heard Jack say. She glanced back at them. He was seated cross-legged on the floor in front of Nicholas, who was staring at his hands. “Forgery is a crime. So someone has committed a crime by copying that poem into the book and signing Mary Walker’s name to it.”

  A silence followed.

  “Now, lots of times the forger is never discovered, as you probably know.” Jack cleared his throat. “But it’s a crime for a good reason. Because pretending that a document is a real piece of the past is like…like claiming that something happened that never did. And if we treat history like fiction or a game where we can move around the pieces, then we have no genuine history at all. No real sense of who we have been. Who we are.”

  Lydia wondered why he didn’t just tell Nicholas the details, make him understand that his grandfather was a witness to the woman’s death in 1939. Was he worried about Nicholas’s feelings for Frank?

  “A forged document could also be a lie in another way. It could suggest that something didn’t happen when it really did. Think about it. In this case, your mother wrote a poem. Now that poem is being presented as someone else’s. So for all time, that poem would have another woman’s name on it, and your mother would never, ever get the credit. Like she didn’t live the life and do all the work to create it. You’re an artist. Imagine what that would be like. I know that if someone claimed a boat I built was their own, it would really hurt. Piss me off royally, as a matter of fact, no matter what their reason was. You know?”

  Lydia heard nothing fro
m Nicholas.

  “So here’s a poem your mother wrote when she was a young woman. And I guess you’ve gathered from your father that every poem—like every drawing or every boat—is a work that matters, whether the person who created it is alive or dead. Whether or not they are a professor, a poet, a novelist, a fisherman, or a child. See what I mean? It’s a product of someone’s life, their time on earth.”

  After a few moments, Nicholas said, “So what do they do about forgery?”

  “You mean as a crime? What’s the punishment?” Jack’s voice was still mild.

  Lydia turned around slowly. Nicholas shrugged at Jack, then gave a nod, his eyes still cast down.

  “Well, nothing if it’s never analyzed. Which, of course, it never would be if the document were destroyed. Otherwise, I don’t know exactly. But even more important than any legal consequences would be…” He paused and looked off to the side as if he thinking. “Well, you know, the sadness of the whole thing. The lie. Hard to live with a lie like that. Over time. Especially if it hurts someone you love. Better to have it out.”

  Nicholas inhaled deeply and seemed to hold his breath, his face stiff. Lydia’s heart began to race. For a long time no one spoke. Nicholas glanced up at Lydia, then lowered his face to his hands.

  “But what will happen to us—to all of us—if Dad never finds what he’s been looking for?” he said plaintively. “I mean…everyone’s so…miserable.” He lowered his face again and his shoulders shook.

  Lydia felt frozen, but she heard herself speak. “Nicholas…”

  He continued to weep; she could hear him struggling against it. She rushed over and stooped down beside him.

  “How? You couldn’t have!” But disparate pieces of reality locked quickly together into the logic of Nicholas’s forgery.

  “No one would ever know, Mom!” He lifted his red, tear-streaked face and wiped his sleeve across his nose. “I thought you’d be happy. Happy to fool Dad with your poem. It’s as good as her stuff. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. But I really thought that after all this time, it just had to be done…”

  “Oh, Nicholas!” Lydia cried without thinking. “My God! Where in the world did you even find that poem?”

  He didn’t answer. She stooped down and tugged his arm away from his face. His eyes met hers, and they looked utterly crushed. It was a sight that pulled her own heart lower, and she sat down to think, but saw nothing in her mind but fog.

  “That was a poem I wrote for your father. Did he put you up to this?”

  “No! No, I…” His voice faltered.

  “You what? How did you get your hands on that poem, Nicholas? It was his. I sent it to him before you were born, and he must have—”

  “I found it,” Nicholas blurted out. “It was in the attic in a box of his stuff. It was in an envelope. From you. I could tell it was from you.”

  “That poem meant a great deal to me,” Lydia said faintly. “I was pregnant with you when I wrote it. He knew it meant a lot to me.”

  “No.”

  “What do you mean, no?”

  “He never opened it.” His voice was barely more than a whisper. “It was sealed shut. With sealing wax.”

  “What do you mean, he never opened it? He must have! We talked about it. Back then. He said—”

  “It was sealed shut with sealing wax. I opened it, Mom.”

  “But…are you sure?”

  He nodded. She had almost forgotten Jack was there. She glanced at him, but his face was turned away.

  “I don’t know what to think. He just pretended? All this time?” She shook her head and gazed blankly around. “I don’t know what to think about any of this.”

  Then it occurred to her that a major part of her horror at his disregard earlier in the evening was unwarranted: Frank had not known the poem was hers. Now he could be told that Nicholas had done this, and he would finally see, not only that the poem was just what she’d said it was, but also that their son had been so agitated by the state of their marriage and family life that he had come up with this elaborate solution. A weird sense of relief ran through her. Frank would see that what she’d said was true and that she had not just been trying to destroy his dream. Some order and connection to him might be restored after all.

  “Nicholas,” she said firmly. “We’re going to go home and explain everything to Dad. It will make things better.”

  He looked up, his face full of despair.

  “Come on, Nick,” she said with energy, trying to take his hand. “We’ll go there right now, and when he sees what you have tried to do—for him, for all of us—he’ll start to understand. Understand everything you’ve been going through.”

  “No, Mom! He won’t!” Nicholas looked afraid. “He’ll kill me!”

  “Of course he won’t. You are his son. It’s the right thing.” She tried to fill her voice with encouragement. “He doesn’t want to lie. He just thought the poem was real. Truly. Now come on. If he gets mad at anyone, it will be me. Try not to worry. I will help you explain.”

  She stood and found that Jack was staring at her. “Lydia, maybe it would be better to wait on this. Wait until morning.”

  But Lydia couldn’t bear to wait; she had to straighten everything out immediately. No, she couldn’t let Frank’s anger build one minute longer than necessary. She knew how he was once he got started on an idea. By tomorrow he would be unreachable.

  “I don’t think so, Jack. This is one of those situations that has to be addressed immediately. Would you be able to drive us to the house?”

  “Yeah. Of course, but…” He stood up slowly. “But I can’t just drop you off, okay? I’ll wait down the street.”

  “No, no, really—”

  “No, I mean it. It’s okay. If it all works out, fine. I’ll drive on home.” He sighed, lifting his coat from the back of a chair. “If not, you know I’ll be there.”

  “But, Jack.” She didn’t want to admit that Frank would become even angrier if he detected Jack’s presence. “I’ll get my keys and I’ll have my Jeep, remember. I can leave quickly if I have to. It isn’t as if I’ve never dealt with his anger before.”

  Lydia glanced at Nicholas, who stood with his arms drawn in straight and tight against his body, hands in his pockets. He looked cold and nervous as he passed her and walked out of the barn.

  “Just drop us off, if you don’t mind,” she said, hurrying to follow Nicholas to the pickup truck. “We’ll be fine.”

  Jack pulled out his keys and gazed at her, unsmiling. He didn’t agree, and she didn’t wait for him to, hurrying through the damp night air with the urgency of prey seeking cover.

  33

  White Hill, Michigan—April 1999

  Time for the pretty clay,

  Time for the straw, the wood.

  The playthings of the young

  Get broken in the play,

  Get broken, as they should.

  ~ Louise Bogan (1897–1970), “Kept”

  A heavy silence in the truck persisted until they reached a corner two blocks from the house where Jack had to make the last turn. He stopped at the intersection and stayed there.

  “Lydia,” Jack said at last.

  “Yes.”

  “We could still turn around and come back after a few hours of sleep.”

  “Yes, Mom.” Nicholas came to life. “I really don’t know what I’m going to say.”

  “You’re going to tell Dad the simple truth, Nicholas. It isn’t complicated. Hard, yes. I know. But you can just stick to facts, and I will be there at your side. Okay? Honesty is the shortest route to understanding, even if it’s uncomfortable.”

  “Mom, he won’t understand at all, ever,” Nicholas stated, his teeth chattering.

  “But it won’t be any better in the morning,” she said. “He’ll brood about things, get more stubbo
rn… No, it won’t be any better if we wait. And he does have to know.”

  Nicholas turned his face toward the window again. Jack pressed the accelerator, and they slowly rounded the corner, inching along until the house came into view. They rolled past it and out of sight of its windows. Jack turned the truck off, and they all sat there without speaking.

  “Okay,” Jack said. “I’m going to wait here for an hour or so. Just in case…I don’t know. Just in case.”

  “Open the door, Nicholas.” Lydia’s voice was not as calm now. “Thanks, Jack. Thank you so much for everything. As soon as we can, we’ll let you know how it goes. The door, Nicholas.”

  Nicholas moved haltingly, as if the seat were sticky. The two of them walked through the darkness of the road, then onto the front lawn where the grass was long and damp, its spring growth not mown yet. She reached for the front doorknob and turned it. It was locked.

  “Damn it,” she whispered. “Okay, wait a minute, there’s a key under here.” She stepped down to the garden and turned a turtle-shaped pot over, retrieving a key. Nicholas stood behind her, shivering. “You wait in the living room, and I’ll get Dad.”

  They walked inside, where the familiar smells of the house’s furniture, books, and food wrapped around them like old friends.

  “Oh, Mom, this isn’t going to work,” Nicholas whispered.

  “Be brave, Nick.”

  She stood at the bottom of the stairs, hand gripping the banister, and called Frank’s name. When he didn’t answer, she called again. After a minute or two, they heard his weight on the upstairs floor, then he appeared at the top of the stairs.

  “Oh, for God’s sake, Lydia, what now? I hope you’re here to apologize.”

  “I’m sorry, Dad,” Nicholas said.

  Frank gave a short laugh and began down the stairs. “Okay. One down.”

  “Nicholas has something important to explain. This is hard for him, so please try to open your mind and just listen.”