by Edwards, Kim
“Hey there,” I said.
“Ah, Lucy.”
“I’m at a party,” I told him, lying back on the dock. “I’m looking at a sky full of stars. It’s the longest night of the year, you know.”
“Not here, unfortunately.” His voice was soft. “Look, I can’t talk right now. Can you Skype this evening? That would be what—tomorrow morning your time?”
“Sure. Is everything okay?”
He sighed. “Yes. Yes and no. The trip to Indonesia is getting complicated, that’s all. I can’t really talk about it now. You okay?”
“It’s a beautiful night,” I told him, searching for the Big Dipper. In Indonesia we’d had a screened balcony off our bedroom where we used to sleep on the hottest nights, under these same stars. “I miss you.”
“Believe me, I wish I was there.”
“Soon.”
“Yes, soon.”
He was gone then. I closed the phone but didn’t stand up right away, gazing at the night sky, wondering what office politics had distressed Yoshi; he was usually so calm.
By the time I started back to the patio, people had begun to drift away. From a distance it was such a happy scene: candles glowed, and the tables were strewn with paper plates and crumpled napkins. Georgia bustled around picking up before she left, too; Austen took Zoe home to study for a final exam. I lingered in the wild remains of my mother’s moon garden, where a few roses straggled out of the greenery, fragrant and pale. A few moonflowers, too; the sprawling lavender released its piney scent when I passed it. I was thinking of my father and our last conversation here, when the garden was still orderly in its wildness, wondering what he would have made of this party, this night, the direction my life had taken. Stilled by sadness, I paused amid the fragrant ruins. The group dwindled until it was only Art and Joey, along with my mother, Blake, and Avery, gathered on the patio around the fire pit, where the embers still glowed. The conversation meandered. Blake had discovered a photo of the founding of Dream Master in an old filing cabinet at the store, our great-grandfather digging a shovel into the earth by the outlet in a groundbreaking ceremony, and they talked about that for a while, passing the photo around. My mother excused herself and went inside, the screen door slapping shut behind her. The answering machine beeped and voices murmured faintly as she paused in the dark house to listen to her messages. I thought of Andy’s voice, and imagined her smiling to hear it. On the patio, the conversation stalled. Then Art raised his glass and made a toast.
“To the new venture,” he said. “To The Landing.”
I’d been about to join them, now that I’d composed myself, but I paused at his words, watching as Joey and Blake and Avery raised their glasses and clinked them together. I thought of the rolled papers between Art and Joey on the table at The Green Bean, and the easel full of drawings for their development in the corner of Art’s office. Plans, I’d imagined, plans in their early stages, but this sounded like more, and I waited.
“Isn’t it too early to celebrate?” Blake asked, sounding a little self-conscious and ingratiating; I felt a surge of anger that he was trying so hard to be a part of this. “Plenty of things could still fall through.”
“No, now that we’ve got the initial land and the financing is set up, it’s just a matter of time,” Art said. “Of course, we’ll have to navigate the obstacle course of those injunctions, but they’ll never hold. As for stage two, I feel quite sure your mother will want to sell eventually, Blake. We’ve had several conversations.”
“Really? I’m not so sure,” Avery said. “Not about Blake’s mom, but the rest.” She repeated the story she’d told me on the boat about the various conservation groups meeting over lunch. “There’s that meeting tomorrow. And Keegan Fall has been really active doing grassroots work.”
Blake made a dismissive sound. “No one wants the land to go back to the Iroquois,” he said. “That’s a political dead end. His business may be thriving, but he doesn’t have a lot of clout.”
“New businesses come and go in this town,” Joey noted from his place deep in the low chair. “We’ll see if Keegan Fall has what it takes.”
“He’s doing himself no favors,” Art noted. “Lining up with the tree huggers and the land grab. He’s going to end up on the wrong side of history if he doesn’t watch out. People here have long memories.”
“He’s already on the wrong side of history,” Joey observed, taking a long drink from his beer. “He’s just choosing to stay there.”
Stung, I touched the lavender again, its fresh scent rising. Keegan was a year older than I was but ended up in my grade because his mother took him away and traveled for a year. When Keegan came back to fifth grade the next fall, thinner, his jeans a bit too short, he sat by himself near the window. He got teased on the playground, mostly by my cousin Joey, who was tall and strong but lacked kindness. He taunted Keegan every day, calling him a dirty Indian and asking him why he had only two shirts to wear. Keegan didn’t respond, just kept his distance, his face like a mask, even his dark eyes veiled and far away.
One day I sat on the swing next to his, digging my toes into the scuffed-hard dirt. We’d been to a museum in Syracuse where we’d seen the wide round stones the Iroquois had once used for crushing corn. I told Keegan I thought this was interesting and asked him if he really was an Iroquois.
He glanced at me to see if I was planning to make fun of him, but this happened after the split in my family, so I think he knew I wasn’t on Joey’s side in this or any other matter. We watched boys in the near distance kicking a soccer ball along the edge of the field. The school was at the top of a hill, and though we couldn’t see the lake for all the houses and trees in the way, we knew it was there.
“My mother’s grandmother grew up in the Seneca Nation,” Keegan said, finally. “You know all that land where the depot is now? That used to be their land.”
“Maybe one of your ancestors was a chief,” I ventured, thinking of the beads we’d also seen, round and smooth and colorful, which I’d longed to touch.
“Maybe,” Keegan said.
We’d been too absorbed to watch our backs, and Joey had crept up behind us. He heard me say this and shouted, “Me Big Chief!” pounding on his chest. The boys behind him hooted with laughter and the mask fell across Keegan’s face once more.
“Why don’t you hit him?” I asked, softly. “You ought to hit him in the face.”
Keegan didn’t say anything, didn’t even look my way as the bell rang and we filed in from recess. Nothing happened that afternoon, but the next day when Joey started riffing about smoke signals, Keegan turned around, swift as the wind, and punched him in the face.
Both Keegan and Joey got pulled out of school, and when Keegan came back the next day, he sat in his usual place by the window, though a couple of boys were talking to him, asking about the fight and what the principal had said. When they left I went over quietly and sat next to Keegan and slipped him a piece of gum. He took it and looked up, studying me with the same intent expression he’d had the day before, just before he punched Joey, and then a smile lit up his face, though it was so swiftly gone that I was hardly sure I’d seen it.
After that, we were friends. We never talked much and we didn’t hang out at lunch, but we sat next to each other in class and took to giving each other things—a pencil, the prize from a box of Cracker Jack, a funny picture. A secret friendship, so we wouldn’t get teased.
So there was that history between us, that connection. We talked about it when we met up again years later, sitting next to each other at a basketball game. Keegan was with his friends and I was with mine, and halfway through the game he looked down the row with that funny half-smile he had and passed a note down, hand to hand, until it reached me.
Hey there, Lucy Jarrett. How have you been all these years?
“Damned right on that,” Art said, his face shadowed by the faint light from the dying fire. “He’s had good luck, but he counts on the summer to
get him through, just like the rest of us. Steve Peterson called today, by the way. He’s interested in signing on for the first stage, too.”
“First stage of what?” I asked, stepping out of the shadows.
There was a silence.
“She might as well know,” Art said, finally. “I don’t suppose it makes any difference at this point.”
“We made a bid on the depot land,” Joey said. “On two parcels of land. The first is toward the village, and that’s the one we’ve pretty much got nailed down. The other is adjacent to your mother’s property, just over the tree line.”
“We’ve got plans for it,” Blake put in, and the muted excitement in his voice made me worry for him. No matter what Art said, I didn’t trust him to treat Blake with any fairness. “A housing development called The Landing. This area used to be a stopping point for steamboats. It’s historical. Maybe you saw the designs down at Dream Master.”
“I saw them. But half of that is marshland,” I said, thinking of the beds of reeds and cattails, the swift, graceful shadows of the fish beneath the water.
“So, we drain it.” Art’s voice was terse, wary. “That’s what’s got the environmentalists all in a tizzy. But they’ll come round eventually.”
“It’s really about jobs, Lucy,” Avery said. She’d been so quiet I’d nearly forgotten she was there. “I’m sure it feels really altruistic and noble to worry about the environment, but we’ve been hard hit with the depot closing, and things weren’t great before that. Maybe it doesn’t seem different to you because of all the money on the lakes, but we all know there are two economies here, and one of them is hurting.”
“You can join us anytime,” Art said. “If that’s what’s really on your mind. I’m serious, Lucy. That’s what I meant when we were talking the other day. No one’s keeping you out if you want in.”
I didn’t say anything. The door creaked open and my mother came back outside, carrying a stack of plastic glasses and another bottle of wine.
“What?” she asked, stepping into the uneasy silence, pausing as she sensed the tension. “What’s going on?” Her voice was light, conversational, but because I knew her so well I could hear the wariness in it, too. Or maybe I was the one who was wary, cautious suddenly in the wake of this new information. Did Andy know, I wondered? And how far had these discussions gone?
“Just filling Lucy in,” Art said. “Telling her about our ongoing discussion.”
“Were you?” My mother’s tone hardened a little, and I could tell from her voice that Art had crossed a line. “I hope you told her also that I’m far from making up my mind.” She turned to me. “Lucy? Did he tell you that?”
“Not exactly.”
“Ah. I was getting to it,” Art said. “No pressure, then, Evie. Guess I was just hoping you’d decided,” Art said. “Blake and I were both hoping, I should say.”
“Well. I haven’t. One way or the other. The land is still mine.”
In the quiet that followed she went around distributing plastic cups. I was unnerved, and yet it struck me that she was enjoying herself. As long as she didn’t make a decision, she had a certain power over Art and everyone else who wanted this land so badly. It was a new side to my mother, and one I wouldn’t have imagined, one I wasn’t sure I liked. I wondered what she really wanted—what, in the end, she’d decide to do.
“I’m going to pass this wine around,” she said, holding up a bottle. “So you can all have a look before we open it. If I’d known this was going to be such an uneasy moment, I might have waited. But here we are, so I guess we’ll go on. I found this in the basement when I finally started tackling that maze in the back room. It was stuffed away in a box, wrapped up in a quilt that fell to pieces when I pulled it out. Take a look. And then, I suggest we have a toast.”
The bottle passed from hand to hand. When it reached me I held it so it caught a wedge of light. The label was written in dark ink, a slanted handwriting that didn’t belong to Rose.
COMET WINE
Langport, England
1910
Art cleared his throat, getting serious, the way people in the family always did when they talked about Joseph Arthur Jarrett and his comet dreams. “My grandfather used to talk about this wine,” he said. “I was just a boy, but I remember him telling the story. They went out that fall and picked the grapes that had grown beneath that comet sky. They made the wine themselves, and when he emigrated he brought three or four bottles with him. It’s supposed to be special, wine from grapes grown under a comet sky. My, my. I thought it was all long gone.”
I imagined my great-grandfather lifting his face, the light from the comet falling all around him as he dreamed of a new life. Like everyone else, I’d always found this story, passed down through the generations, very moving and important. But now I wondered: where was Rose?
“This bottle must have been forgotten, then,” my mother said. “Packed away for safekeeping, maybe, and then forgotten. Let’s see if they were right about the vintage.”
“Evie. I say we save it.”
My mother looked steadily across the fire pit at Art.
“It’s my wine,” she said lightly, though the hardness in her voice was audible now. “I found it in my house, after all. And I want to know how it tastes.” She took a corkscrew from her skirt pocket and asked Blake to open it. After a second’s hesitation, he did. The cork, nearly a hundred years old, squeaked as it turned against the glass.
My mother took the bottle from him and poured us each an inch of the wine, such a dark red it looked like a piece of the night. I had a childhood memory of when the comet had returned in 1986, of staying up late in the cupola to search the dark sky, our disappointment when we finally located the comet, so faint and far away. That’s what I remembered, but maybe the disappointment came from other events at that time; it had been the turning point, the comet and the celebration, the day my father packed his things up at Dream Master and left for good.
“To the solstice,” my mother declared. We lifted our glasses, and drank.
The wine tasted dark and sweet. It was okay, rather sharp, edging toward vinegar, not magical. Once we finished people sat talking until Art stood up to leave.
“Evie,” he said, and paused. He seemed about to say something more, but then he waved his hand with a laugh. “You sure throw a good solstice party,” he said. “Come on, Joey. Let’s get going.”
Blake and Avery stayed a few minutes longer to help clean up. Then they walked across the lawn, hand in hand, and climbed back into the boat. The sail caught the moonlight like a wing.
“Great party, Mom,” I told her as we stacked the leftover trays of hummus and vegetables and dip in the refrigerator. “It was good to see everyone.”
“It was nice,” she agreed. She met my gaze as the door fell shut. “Lucy, I meant what I said out there. I haven’t made up my mind to sell this place, and even if I do, I haven’t decided to sell to Art, not by a long shot.”
“But you’re thinking about it,” I said, leaning against the counter. “I suppose that’s all right. It’s not like it’s got anything to do with me anymore.”
“Well, that’s been your choice, hasn’t it?”
“It’s been the way things have worked out, that’s all.”
“You didn’t have to go to school on the opposite coast, Lucy. You didn’t have to take jobs on the other side of the world. You made those choices.”
I stared at her in disbelief. “I went to the best programs,” I said, finally. “I took the best, most exciting jobs. You told me to go. That summer after Dad died. You gave me your blessing.”
My mother ran her hands over her face, down her neck, and sighed.
“Yes. Yes, I did. You’re right. I wanted you to live your life. I still want that. I worry about you, so far away, it’s true. It’s hard. You don’t realize it, Lucy, but after that tsunami, for instance, when I couldn’t reach you, it was terrible.”
“I wasn’t even
in Indonesia then.”
“But you see, I didn’t know that. I didn’t know where you were. For all I knew, you were on one of those devastated beaches.”
I’d been in New Zealand when it happened, hiking with Yoshi and some friends, and we hadn’t heard about the tsunami for several days. When we got back to Jakarta, Yoshi and I volunteered at the orphanage where we’d worked the year before, where children who had lost their families were being sent. We did what we could, whatever they needed, though we still felt helpless in the face of all that loss.
“Okay,” I said. “I’m sorry. I’ll try to do a better job being in touch.”
My mother shook her head. “You’re a grown-up, Lucy. I trust you to know what you want. But it goes both ways, don’t you see? I have a life, too. Maybe you’d feel happier if I rattled around in this old house forever, and spent every waking hour trying to keep it up, but I will not do that. I’m telling you. Will I sell this place to Art? I don’t know. I might. I might sell to someone else. Or I might wait another year, or two, before I do anything at all. I won’t be pressured, that is one thing I do know. Not by you, or Art, or anyone.”
The air was so charged. “All right, then. But what about Andy?” I asked, surprising even myself.
She held up her hands. “What about him?”
“Does he know about all this?”
“No. Not that it’s any of your business, either, Lucy. But the fact is, I just met Andy. It’s fun, going out, that’s all. I’m having fun. Why is that a problem?”
“It’s not. I didn’t mean that.”
“Then, what did you mean?”
I took a deep breath, listening to the hum of the refrigerator, the distant lapping of waves against the shore. I’d spoken without thinking, and I didn’t really know why I was so upset. It had to do with the land, yes, and all the intricate and difficult family history. It had to do with Blake so willing to go along with Art, and even with Avery being pregnant. The dark taste of the comet wine was still in my mouth. I’d never told my mother about meeting my father on the night he died. I’d never told her that he’d asked me to go fishing. In some alternate universe there was the day we might have had if I’d said yes, a day when we came back at dawn with a line full of fish, an easy day of sunshine and grilling trout and dinner on the patio—a day that would have led us somewhere else, not here.