by Edwards, Kim
“And then what?” Keegan asked. “How long will you stay?”
“Well, then Yoshi comes. And then—I don’t know.”
Water lapped lightly at the edges of the boat. We were sitting in the back, near the diving platform, and I was vividly aware of Keegan next to me, the faint heat of his body in the evening air.
He slid his hand up my arm, let it rest on my shoulder. I was so tempted then to give in to the powerful currents of desire, to slip back into that familiar way of being, that time before, when Keegan and I were still carefree, driving off into the lake-scented darkness as if we’d live that way forever. That was impossible, though. So much time had passed, so many things had happened. And he had his life here, while I did not.
“Let’s swim,” I said, pulling back, slipping my shirt over my head. I was wearing a bathing suit underneath; I pushed off my shorts. Before he could answer I was poised on the edge of the boat, and then I dived, cutting deep and clean, the water closing over me. I went down and down, feeling the depth by coldness because there was no light.
I wondered what I would find at the bottom if I could dive far enough, what wreckage I would discover scattered along the landscape beneath the weight of water. Boulders and mud and moss, and the swift movement of dark fish brushing my skin, and maybe the long-lost dinner boat that had caught fire before it sank, and maybe the plates and the forks and the glasses those people had been holding in their hands when they saw the flames and leaped. Maybe their crinolines and corsets, their shoes and boots, discarded as they tried to swim to shore. Maybe my father’s lost tackle box or the plane that had gone down fifty years ago, knifing through the clear water just after takeoff, the bodies floating upward, drifting with the currents, miles away. Or maybe I’d find ice picks and axes scattered by the midwinter crew that was out cutting thick blocks for the ice houses when the frozen lake began to tremble and crack under the weight of their sleighs and they fell into the icy water, the men in their thick coats, the horses with their harnesses, the sleigh plummeting until it reached the muddy bottom, dragging everyone along.
My lungs began to spark and I caught myself in all that darkness, the world just the same whether my eyes were closed or open. Threads of panic ran through me. I had to force myself not to move, to let myself float for a second to gain my sense of direction, for there was no light to guide me. I kicked harder, rising, I hoped, rising and not falling, my panic growing because I could not see, could not tell how long until I could breathe, and then I was bursting through the surface, tipping my head back to inhale the beautiful clear night air.
“Damn, Lucy,” Keegan said. He was in the water, too, and he took several strokes to reach me, pushing an inner tube into my hands. The rubber was still warm from its day in the sun. “You were down so long. I was beginning to think I’d lost you.”
“Thanks,” I said, breathing more evenly now.
“Hey.” He was treading water next to me and he put one hand on the tube, brought his face close to mine. “You sure you’re okay?”
“I will be. It was so dark. Hard to know where the surface was.”
Kicking, his foot grazed my calf, the fabric of his shorts drifting along my leg.
“Sorry,” he said. He was setting off little currents in the water that rippled all around me. I remembered what Yoshi had said, how he felt I was always trying to keep such a tight rein on everything and then closing down when I couldn’t. But from what was I running now? From the bloom of the past, from the life Keegan had made, so rich, so solid, so rooted in this place? Or was I running from Yoshi, or even from myself?
“You’re swimming in your clothes,” was what I said.
“I am. It seemed like an emergency situation.”
Sometimes loneliness, I thought, and remembered Yoshi again, his kindness and long patience with the grief I’d been pressing down and carrying around for so long,
Keegan’s foot again, this time running lightly along the length of my leg. His eyes were bright with laughter.
“I’m not sorry,” he said. “Not that time.”
I didn’t want to think anymore, I just wanted to go back to that time before everything had changed, and so I turned the inner tube to kiss him the way we used to kiss, in the dark fields, on the dark lake, except that now the water was between us, was around us, and every touch set off currents, his hand stroking my arm, my leg, and the little waves moving between us in reply. It wasn’t as if we had never done this, back in the days when we used to slip away at every chance. This was a game we’d played on long summer nights, to see how long we could stay below, every touch amplified because we could not see.
I put an arm around his neck and he had an arm around my waist. He let go of the tube and then I did, and we slipped gently beneath the surface, still kissing, drifting slowly down through the darkness. We weren’t falling, we weren’t floating, we simply were, warm against each other in the dark night lake, his touch as gentle as the touch of water. My thoughts traveled past the sleighs and sunken ships, the detritus of shattered lives, through the images of the women in the windows, the things they carried, the stories they told. They settled on the image of Max, standing so calmly on the edge of the roiling water, a step away from falling. They flitted away and came finally to my father, standing in his boat, barely visible against the dawn, like a silhouette or a figure in a negative print, and then he fell, he struck his head and went down and down through this same water, he had fallen and fallen and never come back.
All my nightmares were at the bottom of this lake, everything I’d ever lost was there. I pulled away from Keegan and swam back to the surface, breaking through, gasping again in the clear night air. This must have been how it felt to be born into the world, to open my mouth and feel the rush of air for the very first time.
Keegan came up a second later, shaking water from his hair.
“Lucy,” he said.
And I said, “I can’t, Keegan, I can’t.”
I swam to the edge of the boat and climbed up the narrow metal ladder. Keegan followed and sat across from me, so close our knees touched.
“Are you sure?” he asked.
I nodded. For the first time in years, I was clear. “I didn’t want it to end,” I said, meaning both that last kiss in the dark lake and all the time we’d spent together being young and wild, thinking we could go on that way forever. “But I think it had to.”
“Do you?” He took my hands in his. His shorts and shirt were clinging to his skin. He was still wearing his shoes. He must have been frightened, to dive in after me like that. “Because I have always wondered, if your father hadn’t died, if we might have—look, I just always thought we’d end up together.”
“I know. I used to think so, too, I really did. But I was leaving, Keegan. That whole spring, I was. If my father hadn’t died, I still would have gone.”
I remembered the urgent restlessness I’d felt that final spring, when I was riding wild with Keegan and yet heading every moment to a future I knew would not include him, how I’d chosen a college three thousand miles away.
“You have made such a good life,” I said, feeling the truth of those words, thinking of the growing glass, the fire, the clean lines of his apartment, built in a space once deserted, full of debris.
He smiled, a little sadly. “It is a good life. A very good life.”
“And Max—he is such a wonderful boy. You wouldn’t have Max if we’d ended up together.”
He nodded. After a minute he slipped his hands from mine and rested them on his thighs.
“No. That’s true.”
We were silent for a moment, waves lapping against the side of the boat.
“When is he coming?” Keegan asked. “Your boyfriend from Japan.”
“Yoshi. He gets here on Saturday.”
“All right.” He nodded, gazed past me at the dark lake. “Don’t bring him by the glassworks, okay?”
“Okay,” I said, though my heart hurt at the
thought of how many doors had just swung shut, how many possibilities had just fallen away forever. At the thought of Yoshi, who might or might not come now that I’d traveled so far away, who had not called or sent me anything but that brief e-mail in the last two days.
“Okay.” Keegan shifted his gaze back to me, then reached up and touched my cheek lightly with the palm of his hand. “Okay, Lucy in the sky. I suppose we ought to get back to shore.”
We didn’t speak on that long trip. At the dock, Keegan helped me out, and I hugged him, quickly and awkwardly, filled with regret even though I knew I’d done the right things. He turned his attention to the boat and I walked away, past the glassworks, past Dream Master, which rose up against the starry night sky, shadowing everything even in the dark, and slipped into the Impala.
When I got home, I found a note from my mother on the counter. Yoshi called, it said. Call back.
There was a message on my phone, too, but I didn’t listen. Whatever it was would keep until the morning. I was just too drained to call him back. My lungs still ached. I went upstairs instead without turning on the lights, and got into bed without taking off my still-damp clothes, and lay there suspended in the darkness as if in water, drifting until I finally fell asleep.
Chapter 15
I WOKE UP WITH THE SUN FULL IN MY FACE, AND PUSHED OFF the blankets. I’d been dreaming about Rose, and in my dream she’d been walking around wearing the same clear colors of the windows, her hands pale, translucent. The events of the evening before came flooding back as I showered and dressed, leaving me feeling strangely empty, as if I’d finally shed something I’d been carrying with me all these years, in all my travels. I went back into the bedroom and called Yoshi, who picked up on the second ring. I lay back on the narrow bed and closed my eyes, filled with a surprising sense of relief to hear his voice, to remember the sure weave of our days, the sound of his even breathing in the room at night, even when the earth was so unsteady.
“Hi,” I said. “What’s up? Where have you been?”
“I’m back in the hotel,” he said. “I’ve got an early flight out. Didn’t you get my message?”
“I was out. Also, my phone was dead.” This was true, but it was also true that I’d been avoiding the Internet and hadn’t bothered to charge my phone.
“Ah. I’ve been on the island. No Internet. Kind of nice. And it was beautiful, let me tell you. Neil and Julie send their best.”
“I wish I could have been there,” I said. The water in that sea was so clear. Vivid fish darted through the gardens of coral, and the world was silent except for the rush of air in the tanks. I’d learned to dive in college, and I’d convinced Yoshi to come with me when we first met. He didn’t think he’d like it, but after that first dive he was hooked. “I’ll pick you up tomorrow. At noon, right?”
“That’s right. I transit in Tokyo. Then New York. Then Rochester. Is it warm there? Because I didn’t bring much, and I packed for the tropics.”
“It’s not that warm,” I said. “But I think you’ll be okay. We have stores here, you know.”
He laughed, a low, familiar sound, and I laughed, too, though my eyes teared up because I was so glad to be talking to him again.
“I’m glad you’re coming,” I told him. “I thought you might not. I’m sorry I’ve been so distracted.” I’d have to tell him about Keegan, but I wanted to do it in person.
He was quiet for a minute. “I’m glad I’m coming, too,” he said. “I’m ready for a change.”
“Right—what’s your news?” I asked. “Anything happen in your meetings?”
“Yeah, it’s work stuff,” he said.
“Did you negotiate the bridge?”
“Well, yes. The bridge is going through. This is what I’ve heard, anyway.”
I waited.
“Well, I was going to tell you in person. But I guess I’ll tell you now. I quit, Lucy. I turned in my resignation letter yesterday.”
“Really?” I was too stunned to say more.
“Yes. It seemed like the only thing to do. I couldn’t support the decision on the bridge. And it was pretty clear that if I kept making waves, I’d eventually be fired.”
“But how could they fire you? You’re so good.”
“I’m good, true, but I disagreed. Which is to say I was disagreeable, at least in the view of management. I was not a team player. I heard this from three different people, who all said I needed to consider my future as I went into these Jakarta discussions. So after I talked with you the last time, I did. I went for a long walk the night before, you know, down that street where the night market is? I walked and I thought, and I couldn’t see a future where I had to keep silent all the time about things that really matter to me. In the meeting I spoke up in favor of rerouting the bridge, and after the meeting I offered my resignation letter. I thought they might not accept it, but they did, so I packed my stuff and went snorkeling with Julie and Neil.”
“So you’re unemployed,” I said, feeling the same admiration I’d felt for Yoshi as when we had worked in the orphanage, but also as if I were free-falling through space. “We’re both unemployed.”
“Well, needless to say, the Indonesians really like me,” he said, trying to joke. “I might apply for a position with them.”
“Jakarta was a good place for us,” I agreed, a little giddy with how quickly everything was changing.
“Don’t worry, Lucy,” he said. “This is freedom.”
“If you say so.”
He was so quiet I thought the connection had been lost.
“Come on,” he finally said. “I felt I had no choice, Lucy. So I’m trying to be positive. I shouldn’t have told you until I saw you face-to-face.”
“It’s okay,” I said, as much to myself as to Yoshi. “It’s only a job, right? And soon we’ll see each other, face-to-face.” I tried to make my voice calm, but I still felt like I was falling through the sky, no earth in sight. If this was freedom, it was also more than a little terrifying. Yoshi’s tone was light, but he took his work seriously, and this job in a country he’d felt was his own had mattered to him more than others. He’d kept such long hours and worked so hard, and I knew this must be difficult for him. “Yoshi, I’m really sorry about the job.”
“Don’t worry. I have some ideas.”
“All right. Wow—well. So, I guess I’ll see you Saturday.”
“Yes. I’ll dream my away over the Arctic.”
After we hung up, I stood in the patch of sunlight on the floor, the room around me just the same as it had been seconds before, though everything else was shifting, changing. I thought about practical things, wondering if we’d have health insurance, enough savings to finish off the three months on our lease.
The beautiful piece of glass I’d made with Keegan was sitting on the white dresser. A thin shaft of sunlight radiated through it, making the colors glow. I picked it up and held it, warm and heavy in my hand, thinking of Rose a hundred years ago, writing, I do not know what will become of me.
I spent the day sitting by the lake, listening to the shifting shale, the steady waves, rereading all of Rose’s letters until I nearly knew them by heart. I thought about her life, and compared it with my own, which I’d always thought of as greatly adventurous, but which had in fact been much easier and safer than hers. She’d gone off to a new country with no money and barely the promise of a job, expecting a child. No health insurance for her, no social network, no family except her brother. It must have been terrifying. Yet she was strong and independent, and she had never given up, even though the circumstances and social mores of her time had left her at a great disadvantage. It was inspiring, really, to consider what she’d faced, and with what spirit she’d faced it, and I longed to know more. Taking the kayak out, I looked back at the house, so far away and small and insubstantial from this distance, and wished I could have known her, or known about her, growing up.
On Friday morning I got up before my mother was awake. I l
eft her a note on the counter and drove straight to Seneca Falls. My curator was back, wearing a cotton dress in a dark orange print. She was tan, and had changed all her earrings into citrus-colored studs, bright seeds. She smiled when she saw me, but her eyes were red behind her glasses and she cleared her throat before she spoke.
“Hi. Thought you’d be back today. Just sign in. The boxes are out and ready for you, on the table upstairs. I kept the letter, because the director is coming this afternoon and I think she needs to see it—in case it’s important historically, you know.”
I nodded, relieved, mostly; I’d been afraid the boxes would already have been locked away, out of bounds. I felt no guilt at all over the letters I had taken, sitting at home in the manila folder marked “Rose.”
“Thanks. Can I see that letter, at least? Just for a minute? I did some research over the weekend and I’d like to cross-check it with what I found.”
“I made you a copy, actually. I could tell you were serious. Here.”
She handed me the pages, Rose Jarrett’s sharp handwriting cast into shadowy tones of black and white and gray.
“Thanks.” I started to leave, eager to get upstairs, but hesitated, turned back. “You okay?”
She gave a short laugh and waved her hand. “Yeah, I’m fine, I’ll be fine. Big fight with the boyfriend, that’s all.”
“I’m sorry. Hey—at least you got a great tan.”
“A great tan and about three thousand mosquito bites. I forgot the bug spray. Mea culpa, to be sure. But would you break up with someone over that?”
“I might not be the best person to ask,” I told her, because I had, in fact, over the years broken up with people for reasons every bit as trivial, determined not to assume any complications or emotional baggage, determined—though I could not see it then—not to let anyone too close. That’s what I’d finally realized out on the lake with Keegan. It had been easy enough, living the global life I’d led, to keep myself free of any attachments, even to feel noble in my pursuit of the next great job. I hadn’t often paused to consider the people—or the possibilities—I’d left behind. I thought of them now, though, all the romantic partners I’d kept at arm’s length. Whatever ended up happening with Yoshi, at least I hadn’t run away. Though I’d come close.