The Lake of Dreams

by Edwards, Kim

  It was late evening by the time I got back, the sun half behind the opposite shore, the west side of the house cast in reddish gold. I found my mother sitting on the patio, glass of wine on the table, the bottle in a silver ice bucket on the floor, in easy reach. She had been reading a novel, and when I came in she put the paperback facedown on the arm of her chair; I glimpsed an ethereal baby dress against a background of black and thought of Iris. My mother was wearing a white T-shirt and chunky silver and turquoise jewelry that looked beautiful with her hair.

  “Good book?”

  “I just started, but it’s compelling so far. Andy gave me a copy of that new book Cell, but I just couldn’t get into it.”

  “The kind of book you want to throw across the room?”

  “Not even that. I couldn’t work up any interest at all.” She leaned down to the bucket where another glass stood on the patio and handed it to me. “Before I forget, Keegan called. Something about the windows, he asked you to call him back. He’s doing very well, isn’t he?”

  “He is. It’s great. Do you know his son, Max?”

  She smiled. “Sometimes Keegan brings him into the bank. Sweet boy. Lively, like his dad. He’s a good father.”

  “I thought so, too. You sound very fond of Keegan these days.”

  “I always liked Keegan. I just thought you were too young. You were.”

  “I was.”

  “And now?” she asked, giving me an assessing look.

  “Now I’m waiting for Yoshi to come,” I said, not wanting to go any closer to the complex feelings that seeing Keegan again had evoked.

  She handed me the wine and I poured myself a glass—a Chardonnay, from local grapes. It tasted faintly of pear and raspberries.

  “Very nice.”

  “Isn’t it? Andy brought it by. He should be back any second—I sent him out fix the slats in the fence by the shed. He made the mistake of volunteering, poor guy.”

  “Really? He’s here?”

  “You sound disappointed. I thought you wanted to meet him?”

  “I did. I do. I’ve had a very exciting day, that’s all.”

  “Rose Jarrett?”

  “Yes. Rose, here and there and everywhere.” Quickly, I sketched out my day, my trip to the Westrum House in Rochester. I’d just begun to tell her about the woman in the window on the landing and my drink with Oliver Parrott when she smiled past me and waved. I turned to see Andy, a tall man, broad but lean, dressed just as I’d imagined he would be, in jeans and a cotton sweatshirt, coming up the lawn from the lake. His hair was cut short, glinting silver-gray in the late afternoon light. He was carrying a hammer and a sack of nails. I stood as my mother introduced us. He had a firm grip, a quick, engaging smile, and he asked about Japan with genuine interest. I had no reason to dislike him, yet I found myself feeling cautious, wary, reserved.

  “Let me get another glass,” my mother said.

  “I’ll get it,” I told her, realizing suddenly that I was the intruder in the evening. The glass she’d had waiting by the wine hadn’t been for me at all.

  I sat with them for half an hour or so. My mother kept telling me and Andy things about each other—my work in hydrology, his pilot’s license, my travels, his travels—to keep the conversation going. He’d grown up in the area and had left young, living up and down the East Coast as an air traffic controller. He had three grown children; his wife had died of a heart attack two years before. My mother touched his hand when he said this, and he flashed her a quick smile.

  “So where were you?” I asked in the awkward silence that followed, nodding at the vase of glads. “On the night of the moon landing, I mean?”

  He looked startled at this, and my mother cast me an irritated glance, but after a moment he cleared his throat and laughed.

  “Well, I was right there, actually,” he said. “In Cape Canaveral, I mean. I went down for the liftoff with a bunch of college buddies. We were all in our midtwenties. We all had jobs, some of us had families. But it was a great moment in history, so we went. It was astounding, I have to say. We went out on the beach the night after they’d landed, took our telescopes and imagined we could see them there, walking in the Sea of Tranquility. You know, this town was named after a place on the moon, at least in part. The Iroquois called this the place of dreams, and when the settlers came, they altered the name based on the lakes of the moon. I’m sure you know all this,” he added. “The Lake of Dreams. Just down the road from The Bay of Rainbows and The Sea of Ingenuity.”

  I’d studied Blake’s posters often enough to know all the names on the moon, fearful as well as beautiful. I thought it would put a damper on the evening to bring this up, but then I did it anyway. “The Ocean of Storms, The Marshes of Decay, The Lake of Death,” I said. “Not exactly cheery.”

  Andy just chuckled. “I guess you know your lunar geography,” he said mildly.

  “I was fifteen that year,” my mother said, ignoring my comment. “We went outside, too, out into the fields. We’d been watching the moon landing all day. We took our blankets out and stayed there all night, drinking diet soda and gazing at the moon. We were low-tech—no telescopes. Nothing seemed changed, yet we knew that it was.”

  “I wonder where Dad was that night,” I mused, because I didn’t know and couldn’t ask him. It wasn’t until the words left my mouth that I realized how they’d sounded, how maybe I’d even meant them, without consciously deciding to do it—as an intrusion, and interruption, a reminder of the life my mother had once led.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “That’s one thing we never talked about.”

  Andy took her hand, and she smiled.

  I stayed a few minutes longer. They invited me to dinner, but I declined, saying I was tired, which was true. Andy’s Prius hybrid was as different from my father’s car as it was possible to be. I waved as they drove away, then went inside and made myself a peanut butter sandwich in the deepening dusk, without turning on any lights. I ate at the counter, drank a glass of milk, washed my few dishes. It was dark by the time I finished, but I went outside anyway, leaving the unlit house, walking barefoot through the wet grass. I wanted to swim, though I didn’t have the energy to go back up to the house and change. After wavering for a minute, I shed all my clothes on the dock and dived into the water. The lake was cold and frothy, still stirred up from the storm. I was shivering a little by the time I climbed onto the raft, but I sat there for a long time, glad to be in a place where no one would find me, adrift in the water and adrift in the air, sorting through the unexpected events of my day. To the south were the marshes and the miles of darkened depot land where a village had once been, where the chapel still stood, unused for decades, the windows boarded up. I needed to go there, to understand how Rose was connected to the windows. In all fairness, I felt I needed to warn the Reverend Dr. Suzi about the charming and disarming Oliver Parrott before he showed up with his stories and his checkbook and his persuasive manner.

  For the moment, though, my questions were simpler: who was Rose Jarrett exactly, and if she had come to this country with my great-grandfather Joseph, why had I never heard her story? Why had the delicately woven blanket been hidden away? Oliver Parrott could think what he liked, but the woman in the windows was familiar, connected to me like someone I’d known in another life, in a dream, and I wondered if tracing this story to its source might be a way to settle the restlessness that had been with me since the night my father died.

  The raft moved gently, soothingly, on the waves. The moon, almost full, cast the sprawling old house in mild light. I was cold, but I didn’t want to leave. I lay there for a long time, watching the sky clear and the stars emerge, taking their places in the night.

  Chapter 9

  MAYBE IT WAS THE NIGHT SWIM OR THE FACT THAT MY JET lag had finally eased, but I slept very well that night and woke feeling like myself again. I checked my e-mail before I even got out of bed, wondering what Yoshi had decided about his travel plans. My mailbo
x was almost full, because he had forwarded me photos from our friends Neil and Julie, sitting on a white sand beach, the azure ocean stretching to the horizon. There were underwater photos, too, of fish in neon colors—yellow and bright blue—swimming amid the swaying coral. They’d gone snorkeling near an island about three miles from the Indonesian coast, and they had liked it so much that they’d invited Yoshi to go with them while he was there. He wanted to know if there was any reason for him not to do it—he’d arrive two days late if he did.

  There wasn’t really, and if the situation were reversed I knew I’d want to see Neil and Julie, to visit that beautiful beach. I wrote back that it was fine with me, but in truth I felt for the first time how very far away he was, and I was filled with a desire to be there with him, diving into water as warm as breath. To try to ease the distance I called him, and we spoke for a few minutes. He was waiting for a train and it was noisy, so I didn’t tell him much about what I’d discovered in Rochester, though I did promise to e-mail him the images of Frank Westrum’s windows and said we’d go see them when he was here.

  All the time I was talking, my mother had been moving downstairs. I heard the shower go on and then off, the closet doors opening, the tap of her heels. It was chilly, the floor cold against my bare feet, so I poked around in the drawers where some of my old clothes were still stored. I hadn’t brought enough sweaters; in Japan the heat was already dense, and I’d forgotten about the chill that lingered in the lake air long into the summer. I found an old sweatshirt, dark blue, with the words Night Riders in orange across the front. That was the team name for The Lake of Dreams High School. Dreamers didn’t have much punch, and Nightmares had been decreed too negative, so we were the Night Riders, a name Keegan and I had taken literally often enough in that final year, traveling out on his motorcycle, or slipping the canoe into the midnight lake and climbing in, riding the slow waves, the pulse of the night, out into the water.

  My mother was already dressed when I came downstairs, standing at the counter eating leftover bean dip on wheat crackers, drinking a glass of milk. The recipe card Andrew had left was on the counter, too, and a silk scarf, in a beautiful rhubarb shade, was pooled beside it. She was lost in her own thoughts, though after an instant she looked up and smiled.

  “Morning,” she said, wiping off her fingertips and reaching for the glass.

  “How was dinner?”

  “Very nice. We didn’t go far, just downtown. We ate at that new place, the one that juts over the water? It was good. I wish you’d come with us.”

  “It just didn’t feel right,” I said. “So much romantic tension in the air.” I was trying to joke, but the words sounded flat and wrong even as I said them.

  She looked at me for a long moment, maybe remembering our argument. “Oh, nonsense,” she said finally, lightly. “Really. I hardly know him.”

  “You seem to like him.”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “So. Well. That’s good. Anyway, I was tired last night, and I had a lot to think about. The windows are so stunning, Mom. You’ll have to see them.” I poured myself some coffee. “It’s chilly this morning, isn’t it? I had to dig this old sweatshirt out of the bottom drawer.”

  “Are your drawers still full? How ridiculous is that, after all these years? You know, I was just thinking we could start going through some of this stuff while you’re here. There are decades of clothes and bric-a-brac and old papers, generations of it. I haven’t had the heart or energy to tackle that project, but it really needs to get done.”

  So she could sell the house and the land, I thought, but didn’t say.

  “I guess we could do that. This weekend, maybe? Before Yoshi gets here. He’s been delayed a couple of days, so once he gets here I won’t want to spend time organizing.”

  “That’s too bad he’s delayed. Everything okay?”

  “Everything’s fine.”

  “Okay. I don’t mean to pry. Just thinking that we could clean out a room for him, too, while we’re at it.”

  I looked at her.

  “What?”

  “Mom, we’ve been living together for two years.”

  “I know. And you can arrange things however you want. But it’s still my house, and I’m setting up a room for him.”

  I laughed, and then she did. “Oh, Mom. Whatever.”

  It was misty as we drove into town, the fog collecting in the dips of the road so that we drove through clouds, the hood of the Impala the color of egg yolks amid the viscous white until we emerged on the tops of the hills and it took its place with all the other colors—the deep green of the corn, the flashing red of barns, the blue patches of sky that were trying to break through. My mother and I didn’t speak much, though she reached over and squeezed my hand when I dropped her off. I parked in the same place in the lot, far away from everything, and then walked down the street to Avery’s for a cup of coffee. She wasn’t there, so I couldn’t apologize for having slipped up and told my mother about the baby. As always, the air in the restaurant was fragrant with butter and honey, yeast and coffee, and this morning the inside tables were full of people talking quietly over the food, wet umbrellas folded at their feet. When I stepped outside, Dream Master rose stark against the gray sky, the brick darkened with rain.

  The glassworks was closed to tours on Friday mornings in order to catch up on special orders and give everyone a chance to get ready for the waves of weekend tourists. The gift shop was open, though, the door ajar and a display of new bowls in the window—bright ruby, sapphire, and amethyst—but I didn’t want to go in. Instead, I walked a few feet to stand outside the plate-glass windows, where I could watch the artisans plunging their pipes into the furnace and pulling out the molten glass, forming it with their breath, the vessels taking slow shape, one by one: a vase, a wine goblet, a clear glass bowl. I rang the bell twice, but if they heard it they ignored me; they didn’t even glance up. Keegan wasn’t working—at least I couldn’t see him—but I wanted to tell him about my trip to Rochester and meeting Oliver Parrott. I wanted to tell him about Rose. After a minute of standing in the drizzle, I remembered that he’d had given me his cell number when we were at the church. I fished around in my purse until I found it, punched the numbers in. He answered on the fourth ring, and when I told him I was downstairs, he buzzed me in.

  The glassblowing room was hot, despite the high windows open all along the canal and the huge fans moving constantly. Courtney, the assistant, glanced up and nodded, turning her attention almost immediately back to the shape emerging from her blowpipe, the swelling glass a deep iridescent green, like a mallard’s neck. I paused for a moment, watching her fluid, expert motions, the glass that shifted and grew as if alive, before I crossed the room and went upstairs.

  Keegan was sitting on a beanbag chair, his long legs extended and crossed at the ankles. Max was sitting next to him, caught in the curve of his father’s arm, while Keegan read out loud. It wasn’t a board book, or even an early reader, but rather a collection of Greek myths. They were reading the story of Demeter and Persephone, the girl’s sudden vanishing and the mother’s desperate search, the way she’d stopped the world from growing until someone told her what had happened to her daughter. When Persephone returned, the pomegranate seed was already on her tongue; the moment she bit it she was destined to spend half the year in darkness. It seemed a little complex for a boy as young as Max, but he was riveted. Keegan glanced up and smiled as I came in, without interrupting the story. I leaned against one of the steel supporting beams and listened to his voice, so animated and soothing. Max listened, too, avidly attentive, and now and then he glanced up at Keegan with a satisfied and adoring expression.

  When the story was done, Keegan closed the book and stood up, stretching.

  “Read another one, Dad,” Max said. “I didn’t get enough stories.”

  Keegan laughed. “Not enough stories? You never have enough stories, Max. I could read to you all day and all night and you’d still
want more.”

  Max laughed and shouted, “More!”

  “How about you watch cartoons for fifteen minutes while I talk to Lucy?”

  Max cast a level and assessing gaze at me before he reached for the remote. Keegan came over and kissed me on the cheek, a friendly kiss, nothing more, but one that took me back in time anyway. I felt the warm press of his lips, smelled his familiar scents of soap and sweat and now of fire.

  “Nice sweatshirt,” he said.

  “Thanks. I found it at the bottom of a drawer. We missed you at the solstice party,” I added, remembering how the night had been woven with the glittering possibility that he might come. Did I sound too disappointed? I touched my cheek where he had kissed me.

  “Your mother was just being nice,” he said. “Besides, it got busy here at the end of the day. A special order, place settings for a bridal shower.”

  “She likes you,” I said. “She wasn’t just being nice. It was a good party.”

  “I’m sure it was. Well, maybe next year. Need some more coffee?” he asked, nodding at my cup as he walked toward the kitchen.

  “Love some.” I followed him to the counter—he moved so fluidly, with the same athletic grace he had while working the glass—and sat down, pulled the plastic lid off the cup so he could fill it. “My mother said you left a message?”

  “I did, actually. Good news. I got permission to take you to the chapel. Not until Wednesday, unfortunately, but they’ll have the boards off the rest of the windows by then. I’m eager to see what they’ve got there, and I thought you would be, too.”

  “That’s fantastic. I didn’t get to tell you the details, but I found out who made the windows, and I think I found the connection with my family, too. I have this ancestor I’ve never heard of before. Her name is Rose. She had a daughter, too, born in 1911. And then she seems to have disappeared. They both did. Though I think I found some clues,” I added, remembering the woman with her arms full of irises.