Melanie didn’t know how she would go on, how she would be able to affix a pad to her underwear, button her pants, wash her hands, and leave the restroom as though her world hadn’t been dashed into pieces. She didn’t know how she would be able to walk calmly to her office, turn off her computer, say goodbye to her colleagues, and sit in rush-hour traffic. She didn’t know how she would face Ben.
She couldn’t fathom how women who had carried a baby for months and months only to miscarry could endure it, how mothers who birthed stillborn babies or had babies born with health problems and died shortly thereafter didn’t just stop breathing from the tremendous pain. It had been only eight weeks, and she had been head over heels in love—eight weeks, and now her heart didn’t want to keep pumping blood if it was only for her, if it wasn’t for both of them. The glowing candle inside of her had been extinguished.
If she hadn’t been in a campus bathroom, where anyone could come upon her, she would have lain down on the dirty tile floor at that moment and prayed for it all to end. Because even worse than her pain was the pain of having to tell Ben. She couldn’t bear the thought of her husband falling to his knees again—only that time not out of joy but out of grief.
Chapter Five
A note from Kelsey was on the entryway table when Melanie got back to the lake house. Flood Repair Pros are great, very knowledgeable and reasonably priced! Will start next Mon. Underneath was a barebones, sloppily written estimate for the job on a flimsy yellow carbon copy, nothing like the tidy, line-by-line description of services and prices from Basement Restoration. What does Kelsey mean by “Will start next Mon”? She didn’t offer the guy the job without consulting me first, did she? Melanie tried calling her sister immediately, but Kelsey’s phone went straight to voicemail. She left a message.
Melanie knew she should dive into one of her many projects—painting the living room, cleaning out the fireplace, or walking around outdoors and drawing up plans for what flowers to plant where—before her heart could sink too far down into her chest, like an anchor, making her heavy and immobile. Not succumbing to the inertia of grief was a daily battle for her, and the only solution she had found was to keep her mind and body constantly occupied. But the insensitive receptionist and painful blood draw had stirred up some of her darkest memories, and she doubted the simple act of cleaning or painting would be enough to distract her.
She needed something totally immersive and exhausting, like a swim or another row across the lake—though her blistered hands were still pretty sore. Or maybe she should confront something disconcerting that she had been avoiding for the past twenty-four hours: the Tree of Life tapestry and what it might or might not be concealing.
When she’d woken up on Sunday morning after having the dream of her mom as a little girl, Melanie had been bizarrely still inside the dream. As she lay motionless in bed, she took stock of the satiny pale-pink comforter and the white teddy bear with the gold heart embroidered on his chest. Through the open window, she could hear the delighted cries and splashes of children playing in the lake. No two ways about it: she was in a dream within a dream, and no matter how hard she pinched herself or how tightly she squeezed her eyes shut then reopened them, she was still in the 1960s, in her mother’s childhood bedroom at the lake house.
That was when she had had the idea to try to walk through the door behind the tapestry again. It was how the peculiar Alice in Wonderland dream had started. Maybe it was how the dream was supposed to end too. So she’d slipped behind the wall hanging, yanked open the silver latch, and stepped inside the secret room. She sat down for a moment, counted to ten, and thought about clicking her heels like Dorothy but then dismissed the thought as childish—and anyway, she was barefoot, and she was pretty sure the ruby slippers were an important ingredient in that magical formula.
When she’d opened the door and pushed the tapestry away, she was relieved to see the room was dimly lit, the windowpanes glazed with rain, and the bed covered by the musty patchwork quilt she’d pulled from the linen closet earlier. She nearly stumbled over her suitcase, which was spread wide-open in the middle of the floor. She reached for her cell phone on the nightstand: six o’clock on the proper date. Thank God. She was so grateful to be back in the correct era that she didn’t question why she hadn’t woken up in her own bed and why she’d needed to go through a closet to get there.
But that night, she had lain awake, unable to fall asleep, consumed by speculations about her strange dream. As she stared at the tapestry, the scarlet-and-gold-embroidered birds almost seemed to glow in the moonlight. All it would have taken to dismiss her belief in the secret door as pure imagination would have been one little peek, one little lift of the wall hanging. But something had stopped her—fear, most likely, but also reluctance to unravel an enigma. So she’d rolled over onto her side, facing the other direction, and repressed the thought of the hidden room, thereby keeping it a fantastic, far-off possibility but a possibility nonetheless.
Melanie took the steps two at a time to her old bedroom. The afternoon sunlight washed out the midnight-blue tapestry, fading it to a dusky blue gray. She sat cross-legged on the hardwood floor in front of it, poring over the complex woven pattern as if for clues. She leaned closer and traced her pointer finger lightly over the chain of flowers—scarlet, violet, yellow, and turquoise, with frilly, curvaceous petals like those of hibiscus. The four birds roosting on different branches seemed to be two pairs of mates, the males more vividly colorful, with longer tail feathers, and the females smaller and more monochromatic.
She was stalling. Her pulse quickened as she reached out to draw the bottom right-hand corner of the tapestry away from the wall. The long, thin crack was still there—the edge of the door. She stood up, still holding on to the heavy woven fabric. Her hands were shaking. Just because the hidden door existed as it had in her dream didn’t mean it was somehow supernatural, she chided herself. It was just an unused closet, nothing special about it. She was wide-awake and not under the influence of any alcohol. Nothing extraordinary was about to take place. She would be disappointed by her ordinary discovery.
The flat, square door handle was right where it had been in her dream, at waist height. It turned easily with a click. That time, she knew to reach up for the dangling piece of string to turn on the light. Her mom’s cream-colored sweater was still on the bench as well as the cigarettes and books. She pulled the door closed gently behind her and waited. For what, she didn’t know.
When what felt like a sufficient amount of time had passed, she opened the door. She nudged the tapestry an inch or two outward and froze. People were in the bedroom—two girls, to be exact. Melanie resisted the urge to slam the door shut. She began trembling from head to toe as she leaned forward, trying to make out what the girls were saying. Oh, why didn’t I decide to paint the living room this afternoon instead? Melanie wasn’t the daring type. She didn’t think her wimpy nerves could handle it.
“I’m pretty sure he’s making it up,” one of the girls said. “Why would there be a sunken ship in the middle of the lake? How would it even get there?”
Melanie couldn’t tell if it was her mother’s voice. The girl sounded older than the eight-year-old version of her that she had seen.
“That’s part of the mystery,” the other girl said with a mouth full of bubble gum, which she was chewing ferociously. “I heard that it was a merchant vessel carrying all kinds of exotic fabrics, spices, and jewels. And the captain of the ship had just gotten married, and he had his beautiful bride on board. But the ship capsized in a terrible storm and everyone drowned. The captain and his bride never got to celebrate their wedding night. Some people say that she’s still down there, mourning her husband and the life she didn’t get to have. They say she comes out and haunts the lake every year on the anniversary of her death.”
“Why was the ship carrying jewels and spices? Where was it carrying them to? Where had it carried them from? The Mediterranean all the way to Wisconsin
? Via the Great Lakes, perhaps?” the first girl scoffed. “My dad says this is a spring-fed lake. That means it gets its water supply from groundwater beneath the lake. It’s not like there’s a river connected to it, and even if there was, it wouldn’t be big enough for a ship to—”
“Gosh, Christine! Why do you have to be so scientific about everything? It’s a ghost ship we’re talking about, and the thing you have a problem with is how it got here? Maybe it floated down from the sky. Happy now?”
They paused, then suddenly both the girls broke into a fit of giggles.
Melanie used that opportunity to press the door open another few inches. The weight of the tapestry made it difficult, but she had a clearer view of the girls. One of them, definitely her mom—she could tell even from the back, with her mom’s characteristic curly light-brown hair and erect posture—was sitting at a small desk that hadn’t been there before. The other—a pretty redhead who looked somehow familiar—was sprawled across the pink-comforter-clad bed, all long, loose limbs and shiny hair. The dolls and stuffed animals were gone. The girls looked to be about twelve or thirteen. What year is it now? The late sixties, maybe early seventies? She struggled to remember what year her mom had been born and quickly do the math, but her frazzled brain flat-out refused. Neither of the girls seemed to notice that the hidden closet door was cracked open and a woman was spying on them.
“One day, I’d love to explore a real shipwreck,” her mom said with a wistful sigh. “Go diving in the Great Lakes or the ocean and recover all kinds of lost artifacts.” She turned around in her desk chair to face the other girl, and all at once, her youthful beauty overcame Melanie again—the softness of her face and her creamy, unmarked complexion, as if life hadn’t stamped its hardships and sorrows on her yet, and the way she was somehow both Melanie’s mom and not her mom at the same time. The effect was uncanny.
“You will! You’ll be the great Rachel Carson of our generation. Maybe you’ll even write a book about it one day,” the redhead said. She was hanging upside down off the bed, her sheet of coppery hair nearly touching the floor.
“You’re sweet, even if you don’t know what you’re talking about!” Melanie’s mom said, standing up. She lay down beside her friend and hung her head over the edge too. Her fat curls hung like sausage links, and her face turned pink. “Rachel Carson was a marine biologist and conservationist. I want to be a marine archeologist and limnologist studying lakes. You should know that by now, Vinnie.”
Vinnie? The redhead was Mrs. Lavinia Fletcher, or Vinnie, as all her friends called her, their old next-door neighbor—Jilly, Beau, and Stephen’s mom. Melanie had thought the girl looked familiar. She’d known that Mrs. Fletcher and her mom had been old friends, but she hadn’t realized quite how old, just like she’d never realized her mom had been such a science enthusiast as an adolescent. She wanted to know more about that brave, funny girl with aspirations of diving and exploring sunken ships—that girl who grew up to be an elementary school reading specialist who refused to swim.
“I really don’t need another lesson on the subject, please. Now, are we going to go diving or not? Shipwreck or no shipwreck, I bet there are still some neat things at the bottom of the lake.”
“Yeah, like probably your brother’s swim trunks from last week. That was so gross!”
“Actually, I think those would float.”
“Double gross!” Melanie’s mom jostled her shoulder against Vinnie’s. “You know I have to ask my mom first. It’s getting close to dinner, and she’ll need my help.”
Vinnie sighed, and the girls exchanged a significant look. Then without another word, they righted themselves and hopped off the bed. Their faces were cheerful and flushed as they scurried out of Melanie’s view, and she could hear footsteps pounding down the stairs in unison.
She took a deep breath—the first, it seemed, since she’d touched the secret door’s handle. Her body had stopped trembling, but she still felt unsteady, like a boat passenger who first touched land again. She wanted to sit down but was too scared to step farther into the room and rest on the bed the girls had just occupied in case they came back. But if she stepped back into the closet behind the tapestry and perched on the bench, who knew where it would take her next? Will it take me back to my bedroom in the present? Or elsewhere? She was pretty sure she had just discovered a portal into the past.
KELSEY CLIPPED LEASHES to the two corgis’ collars. “Come on, Duchess. Let’s go, Zeus. Do you want to go outside?” The dogs’ nails scrabbled on the tiled hallway floor as she led them to the back door.
It was a beautiful day, the warmth and strong sunshine heralding that summer was not far away. Josh was already outside with two labs, one yellow, one chocolate, and a border collie mix. He raised his hand in greeting and lobbed a tennis ball across the fenced-in play area for the dogs to retrieve.
“How’s it going?” she called, bending down to unfasten the corgis’ leashes. Zeus immediately darted away to join the three bigger dogs. Duchess stayed where she was and squatted to pee.
“Can’t complain. On days like these, I can’t believe I actually get paid to do this.” Josh pried the ball from the chocolate lab’s slobbery mouth and tossed it again. “But I guess it all evens out because, most of the time, I feel like I’m not getting paid nearly enough to put up with this crap. Literal crap, as you know.” He gave her a slightly lopsided grin.
“Aha. Yes.”
“How are you doing, K. K.? Any progress on your parents’ house?”
The breeze ruffled her hair, and she brushed it out of her eyes. “Kind of. Melanie and I have been cleaning it nonstop, which makes a big difference, and we just hired a contractor to fix the water damage in the basement.” She tried not to blush at the thought of Everett. Already, she was planning what to wear on Monday—her short green jersey-knit dress and gladiator sandals—and trying to come up with excuses for hanging around him in the basement so he’d pick up the hint and ask her out.
“Expensive?” Josh asked.
“Not too bad.” She set the leashes down on the picnic table and walked toward him. “Melanie thinks we’ll be able to get our initial investment back once we sell the house.”
“And you two haven’t killed each other yet?”
She laughed. “I’m still here, right?”
Before her sister’s arrival, she’d confided in Josh about Melanie’s demanding nature. As the youngest of four boys—his three older brothers were all smart, athletic overachievers, as he told it—he’d been sympathetic. But she was reluctant to tell him about their latest spat, if she could even call it that since Kelsey had simply been refusing to engage. Melanie’s first voicemail had clearly shown her irritation that Kelsey had hired someone without her permission. But Kelsey—immaturely, she knew—hoped that the more time that passed, the harder it would be for Melanie to cancel their work order with Everett and give the job to Bill instead. It wouldn’t be good etiquette. So she didn’t pick up the phone whenever her sister’s name flashed across her screen, and she replied only once to Melanie’s frequent text requests to call her. Can’t talk now. Busy at work.
Josh leaned against the fence. His black-framed glasses winked in the sun. “I’m glad. Hopefully you can work together just long enough to get the house on the market and find a buyer for it.”
“Me too,” Kelsey said, although she wasn’t sure that selling it was what she really wanted. The thought of the old Victorian still standing there on the banks of Lake Indigo but no longer accessible to them, owned by some other family, made her stomach ache.
After returning Duchess and Zeus to their cages, she dashed to the front desk, where the phone was ringing off the hook. She wondered where the heck Taylor, the receptionist, was. Kelsey answered a few phone calls, booking appointments, jotting down special instructions for one of their current high-maintenance guests in residence, and quoting prices on their various services. She needed to get back to the kennels to finish taking out the Pooch P
lace dogs, but she still saw no sign of Taylor, and she couldn’t leave the front desk unattended.
A tall girl with short black hair streaked through with green plunked a red plaid handbag on the desk in front of Kelsey. The purse had about a hundred zippers and a diamond-studded skull decal. The girl was Leona, Beth’s teenage daughter.
“Is my mom here?” she demanded.
“Nope. Not until five, I think.” Kelsey consulted the schedule on the bulletin board. “Yep, her shift starts at five.”
“Bitch,” Leona murmured.
“Excuse me?”
“Not you.” The girl glared at her, her unnatural lavender contacts making her expression eerie. “My mom. She’s such a bitch, always forgetting about me.”
Kelsey had a hard time believing that her boss, who was even more responsible and organized than Melanie, for Pete’s sake, had forgotten about a meeting with Leona. It was more likely that Leona had misunderstood her mom or just decided to show up because the time suited her. Beth was constantly worrying about her sixteen-year-old daughter, fretting that she wouldn’t finish high school, that she was getting involved with drugs, and that she was dating a boy much too old for her. She had even cried a few times in Kelsey’s presence, lamenting all the ways she had tried to make Leona feel like opening up to her—a weekly mother-daughter breakfast at a restaurant of Leona’s choosing, trips to the mall, and dropping everything to answer her texts and phone calls no matter how busy Beth was. And still, Leona had the gall to refer to her mom as a bitch.
Kelsey bit her lip. “Why don’t you call her? Maybe you can meet her at home.”
Leona snatched up her handbag. “Right. And play into her trap? I don’t think so. If you see her, tell her I’m hanging out at Dave’s, okay?”
Dave was the much-too-old boyfriend—twenty, if Kelsey remembered correctly. Sympathy for her boss overwhelmed her as well as jealousy for the selfish girl who didn’t realize how good she had it: a loving mother who would do just about anything for her.
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