She would pack clothes. She must pack a lot of clothes for both of them and take her computer. She thought that she might have half an hour left before Frank returned from the police station. In her effort to prepare for a temporary escape to a hotel room, she had already carried a box of Nicholas’s clothing to Jack’s barn during the previous week, along with three other carloads of belongings. But there were some critical things left to gather.
Roused to this singular focus, Lydia felt like she was moving faster than she ever had before. Within thirty minutes, her Jeep was ready to go. For a few moments she stood beside it, regarding the quiet house. Her family’s home. A crime scene now.
While another woman might have seen the truth of things earlier and grown outraged and protective of her child—and herself—long before such extreme events, Lydia had continued to believe in Frank’s best self as she remembered or imagined it, and in the resilience of them all. Or maybe it was just denial that had dragged her forward, on and on. Belief. Denial. Where was the line between the two?
There was one more thing to do. As some habituated part of herself protested, she reentered the house and picked up the phone. The number for the White Hill Police was taped to the wall with other emergency numbers, and she dialed it.
“This is Lydia Carroll. I’m calling about my husband, Frank Carroll.” Even now, it wasn’t too late. She could corroborate Frank’s tale, say she was worried about him because there had been an intruder at the house and he was nowhere to be found. But she heard herself say, “He has threatened my son and me and damaged our home. And now he’s gone.”
She looked at the hunching barn where more evidence of Frank’s physical violence lay in pieces on the dirty, damp floor. “No, he isn’t armed. We don’t own a gun. No, my son and I weren’t physically harmed. The threats were… Well, I’m concerned because… How do I say this? He was not in his right mind. He was violent against the house.
“Yes,” she responded. “A danger to himself and others; yes, both. Mostly us, not strangers. I just want someone to know. It’s our house at 1322 Thirty-First Street. I appreciate that. I will. In a few hours. I have to take care of my son right now. Thank you.”
She hung up and stared at the plastic phone in terror. The deed was done. It was irreversible. He would never forgive her, never. She had no idea what he would do.
What he would do? What he would forgive?
What would she be willing to forgive?
She hurried from the house and locked herself in her Jeep. And as she drove away from the house and left the paved roads to head toward Jack’s home, a wind swept down from the sky, hurling a rain so heavy that her windshield wipers flapped feebly to no effect, and her headlights illuminated only water. She slowed down and kept her vision pinned to the blurred windshield where at last appeared the murky smear of a light shining from one of Jack’s windows.
36
White Hill, Michigan—April 1999
Imperfect dream
we pull the grass,
we slash the wind, before us
is the winter.
~ Mary Stone Walker (born December 1913), “The Shore House”
A violent wind slammed the front door of Jack’s house behind Nicholas and Jack as they returned from the Carroll home.
“How about if I make something warm to drink?” Jack turned to Nicholas, who was standing just a few steps inside the front door, his hands shoved into the pockets of his jeans. Jack gestured toward the living room couch. “Go ahead and sit down. In fact, go ahead and lie down if you feel like it, Nick… Rest.”
Still the boy didn’t move from the foyer, but Jack went ahead to the kitchen, started water boiling, and pulled a rectangle of cheddar cheese, a knife, and a box of crackers out, setting them on the round oak table that had dwelled in his grandparents’ home for decades. This whole mess was criminal, in his opinion: treating a son and a wife the way Frank Carroll had tonight. He himself wouldn’t know where to begin to fix the situation, or what punishment for the man would possibly be adequate.
“What do you think will happen, Jack?”
Nicholas had slipped silently into the kitchen, and his voice startled Jack from his thoughts.
“Ah, well, I think you and your mother will stay here for a night or two. Or as long as you need to. Let everyone calm down.”
“I mean, do you think we’ll all still be able to live together in our house?”
Nicholas’s expression was difficult for Jack to read, but he had crossed his arms stiffly over his ribs and seemed to still be shivering slightly.
“I don’t know your parents well enough to guess how this will all play out. But worse things have happened in families and they’ve stayed together.” He gave Nicholas a brief smile.
They sat down together at the table with cocoa too hot to drink, silently nibbling at crackers, while Jack sliced cheese that neither of them ate.
“Maybe you’d like to watch some television,” Jack said after a while.
For a moment Nicholas was silent, and then he said, “There’s something I don’t get.”
“And what’s that?”
He hesitated. “Why you never told my father about Mary Stone Walker being dead. If you were so sure.”
Jack eyed the boy whose face reminded him so much of his mother, a face that was that of a stranger just a few months ago, and one which was, at this moment, Jack thought, slightly hardened with blame. He’s just a kid, Jack reminded himself. A scared kid so desperate about his father’s and mother’s unhappiness that he had created an extravagant, volatile lie.
“I tried to, Nicholas. Several times. Do you remember I mentioned to you that I’d met him a few times?”
Nicholas nodded, fingering a slice of cheese and folding it in half.
“Well, those times were when I tried. Years ago. He didn’t want to hear anything at all from me.”
“But…why didn’t you just tell him anyway? I mean, what were you waiting for him to say?” Hints of anger roughened Nicholas’s voice in a way that Jack suspected he did not allow himself when he had similarly difficult questions for his father.
“I don’t think there’s anything right about sharing something with a man who treats you like dirt, Nicholas. That’s advice you may want to remember as you go through life.”
Jack stood up with some agitation and went to the window to check for Lydia. It had been nearly an hour since they’d left her behind at the Carrolls’ house.
“I wasn’t going to plead with your father to listen to me. And I had to be thoughtful with the information I had. There are times when you have to protect the dead from gossip in this world, because they surely can’t protect themselves. And these were people whose reputations were left in my care.”
As he stared into the black night and the threatening wind, Jack’s chest filled suddenly with a familiar anger, amplified by the tension of the night’s events. He didn’t need this, any of it. He should forget about the Carrolls and their problems. Their fantasies, their troubled personalities, and their games. Their issues were not his. And really, at this point, neither were those of his grandfather or Mary Walker, left behind by them for him to keep safe. Protecting the dead… What the hell did that even mean? No one in the world was worth sacrificing his own peace for, nor ever had been. He could see it clearly now—in Lydia’s life, in Nicholas’s, and in his own: one person’s lie becomes another innocent person’s mean little hell to endure.
He could fix nothing for anyone involved. Yes, maybe at some point in the past if he had shared his information and documents with some other scholar after Frank refused them, something might be different now. And a part of him certainly wished that he’d done just that, and that Lydia and Nicholas had been set free long ago from the painful side effects of Frank’s delusion.
“It seems to me, Nicholas, that you are a good p
erson caught in a very difficult situation—and you believed that you could help your parents in their struggle to be happy.”
Nicholas looked down at his hands and squeezed the cheese flat between two fingers.
“That’s what a good-hearted person who loves someone else tries to do. Right?”
Nicholas shrugged. “It didn’t work,” he said after a few moments.
“It didn’t work the way you hoped it would. That doesn’t mean it won’t shake things up and bring the best outcome in the long run.”
“Bad things are bad things. Everything that happened tonight was bad,” Nicholas said darkly. “Where are my mother and I supposed to even live now? Out in the barn with all the other junk Dad doesn’t want anymore? He hates us.”
“Of course he doesn’t hate you.” Jack tried for a dismissive chuckle, looking again at the clock. Now it had been well over an hour. Should he leave Nicholas here, locked safely in his house, and go out and find Lydia? Would she still attempt to reason with that lunatic if he showed up while she was at the house? Is that what was going on?
“No, he hates us.” Nicholas’s voice was certain, and he looked directly into Jack’s eyes. “And I hate him.”
“Nick, listen. It’s been a very long, horrible night, and your father was at his worst. From here, the three of you will have to move forward, away from this stuff, because underneath those feelings of anger, you love each other. It might take time, but things will work out somehow. They won’t just stay this way.”
“You don’t know that,” Nicholas said quietly.
And it was true. Things certainly could continue to deteriorate. Look at Mary Walker. The reckless events of her life had led to misery and disasters, and then she died. In fact, the disastrous episodes of that young woman’s life were still manifesting misery in White Hill this very night. Sixty years later. It was enough to make a man start to really wonder.
White light beamed suddenly from headlights on his driveway, reeling into the room, across the walls, and pulling Jack to the window. When he saw Lydia’s figure rise from her Jeep into the rain, he closed his eyes and exhaled slowly. Then he opened them, alarmed. The unwanted thing had happened: the hope within him that he might know her well, without boundaries—this troubled, married woman—had intensified into an almost tangible animal, a force he had no other word for but love.
37
White Hill, Michigan—October 1939
Bethink thee of oaths that were lightly spoken,
Bethink thee of vows that were lightly broken,
Bethink thee of all that is dear to thee,
For thou art alone on the raging sea…
~ Elizabeth Oakes Smith (1806–1893), “The Drowned Mariner”
The fog was so thick as Mary ran through it that it weighted her clothing like ice. Winter was coming… It was closing in around her even now.
She knew where to find Robert. He would have gone out on the Fata Morgana before dawn to catch fish and would return early because of the fog rolling in, but he would not be at the docks for long. When she’d visited him last, he had spoken to her as if she were a child, telling her that she needed to take care of her problems without his interference, and that he, likewise, needed to tend to his own. He had stupidly suggested that Bernard might grow into a good father for this unwanted child if she could bring herself to help him try. Robert had withheld his touch, his warmth, and she had privately vowed never, ever to seek his company again, but then she had realized that his love for her was what had altered him. He was afraid.
And if he had such love for her that he was afraid of it, then she could persuade him of almost anything, she knew. They were no longer two completely separate people; they had become intertwined.
The milky-gray air dissolved all light and form as she approached the fishing docks, but she could tell she was close because the Shuttle Point foghorn that sounded with forlorn regularity was louder, and she perceived the white pulse of lighthouse beams pressing into the fog. Beneath the rumble and hiss of the surf, she could hear the clank of invisible sailboat rigging and eerie snippets of male voices as she approached. She slowed down as the sand beneath her feet hardened to dock boards.
“Robert!” She tried her voice in the fog as panic flashed through her from sudden disorientation. She was not even sure where the dock stopped and the water began. It might be impossible to find the way back to land if one were to fall into the water in such weather. She shivered, and her hand tingled with physical memory of her disastrous plunge into this powerful lake years before.
“Kenilworth!” a strange male voice called. “Someone’s looking for you.”
How would he find her? This was ludicrous! He was probably no more than fifty feet away, but how would she find him?
“I hear,” Robert answered. Then there was nothing more but the low slaps of boats on water, the foghorn, the short calls of a lone gull.
“Where are you?” his disembodied voice called, and Mary could picture his expression. “God help us, I can’t see a thing!”
“I’m… I don’t know!” She tried to return his greeting with a laugh. “At the edge of the sand.”
“Oh! Mary?” His voice grew quieter. And then he was visible, just five feet away, his wool-clad form woven with the mist as if he were already a ghost.
She cringed at the chill in his tone. He didn’t want her there. She took a long step toward him, hesitated, then wrapped her arms around his neck and clung to him. He smelled of fish blood, diesel fuel, and cigarette smoke. After a few seconds, she felt his arms come around her body, at first as lightly as a cloak, but then protectively. She exhaled heavily, smiled on his shoulder, and cried with relief. To anyone farther than five feet away, their images were completely erased.
“Oh, Robert,” she whispered into his skin. “Without you I would have no hope at all.”
“That isn’t true, Mary,” he whispered back. He pulled away from her. “Come with me, come here.”
With care, he led her from the docks, his hand gripping hers, and they took slow, blind steps down the fogbound October beach. Occasionally a froth of the water’s edge emerged from the milky nothingness, then a scattering of stones or a floating log. In the shelter of sand hillocks pinned with dune grass they sat down, bodies huddled together. Robert turned to face her, closing both of his hands around hers, and after a minute he spoke.
“Mary. I can’t…” His voice was strong, but as he met her eyes, it faltered.
“Robert, please don’t pretend.” She watched his jaw set. “Don’t lie to yourself.”
“It isn’t a matter of lying to anyone, Mary. I have my life—”
“And you have me. You have my heart. I have never felt as I do when I am near you, or even when I think of you. I feel hope—”
“Stop.” His voice was firm. “This is not a story, Mary. This isn’t a fairy tale. I have a wife and child. You have a husband, and you will have a child.”
“Oh, you’re wrong. I will not have a husband and a child in this way. No, not in this life here. I will not, I cannot. You have to trust what I know of myself. Please… I am begging you now… Please take me to Chicago. Secretly. On your fishing boat. That’s the only way I can get there without anyone knowing, and the only way I can think of that I can be allowed to have a life without Bernard. And if I don’t escape…I just can’t say what will happen.” She watched his gaze sharpen and take on a certain shrewdness, and she grasped at what she thought he might be realizing—that his life would be simplified if she, and all the questions she brought to his life, were gone. “Then you will be free of me. Whatever exists between us can’t harm you.”
They stared at each other, emotions chaotic. Robert took his hands away and clasped them fiercely together. A cold wind pulled an opening in the fog over the lake as Mary studied the face of this man whom she had originally sought specific
ally as a lifeline. Green eyes capable of warm understanding and cold analysis within the same conversation. Angles in his face that suggested strength of character capable of guiding his heart. Yes. She would marry such a man, it occurred to her suddenly; she could believe in someone like Robert Kenilworth. She was a different woman than the girl who’d chosen Bernard Evans.
“You could join me there someday.” The idea rose like a star in her mind, yet she was horrified to hear herself speak it out loud. She felt him stiffen. “Later, Robert. When Gregory is older. Sometime maybe, just if things change…for you. We could be together in the city. Share a different life entirely!” Her mind filled with bright, enticing visions that had never entered the realm of possibility for her before, and she spoke them out loud, relieved as she watched Robert listen and think, even though he did not take his eyes off the lake. “I will make my name as a poet. I’ll teach. I will work so hard… You know that I will. And I can stay with my mother’s relatives. They can help me raise the child. Robert, say you will take me away, please. I will be destroyed here!”
He turned toward her, eyes stormy with pain.
“You are the only one who can save me!” This, she knew as she spoke it, was almost true. This was her life. She was the only one who could save herself, but without him, she would have to do that right here in White Hill.
A long time passed, it seemed to Mary, before Robert spoke, and in those minutes, her imagination flew from vision to vision. She was imprisoned beside the woodstove in Bernard’s home, rocking a child under her husband’s fierce domination. She was reading poetry to a large, appreciative audience in Chicago. She was reuniting with Robert Kenilworth at Union Station, and he was joyfully embracing her. In that hour of fear and hope in the October fog, she did not envision a single thing that would actually come to pass.
“All right then,” Robert said without looking at her. “I will take you to Chicago. Tomorrow I will meet you again right here at sunrise to devise a plan. If we are crossing the lake, we must go as soon as possible, Mary. It will be November and the weather is turning. It’s almost too late.”
The Lake and the Lost Girl Page 31