A Map of Glass - Jane Urquhart [54]
This was the scene she had stared at while Andrew slept after their lovemaking, while Andrew slept and late-afternoon light entered the cottage. Her first landscape after love. Afterwards she would step outside the door of the cottage, walk past the foundations of the house that had once stood on the hill, and, before climbing into the car, would look into the far distance. The long arm of the peninsula where she lived would be visible, and the pale blemishes at the southern end of it which were the dunes. Sometimes she could see the small white finger of a lighthouse on the lakeshore. And then, under the surface of the lake, she would sense the presence of wrecked schooners—some of them launched a hundred and fifty years ago at Timber Island.
Sylvia removed the two journals. She turned to Jerome. “Perhaps,” she said quietly, “you might be interested in these.”
Jerome looked at the notebooks in Sylvia’s slightly trembling hands. “What are they?” he asked.
“A record,” Sylvia said, “a story. Everything that Andrew wrote about Timber Island, the story of his family. But, you may not be interested, you may not have time, or …” She hesitated, was worried suddenly that the stories that had engaged her, the sentences that had so affected her, might not be understood by this young man, might not be understandable.
Jerome reached forward to accept the notebooks from her.
Once, she had included Timber Island on a map she had made for Julia when her friend was going to visit the famous Thousand Islands scattered throughout the river downstream from Kingston, the same islands that the Woodman timber rafts would have sailed by on their journey to Quebec. Technically Timber Island need not have been on the map at all, but it had given her private pleasure to include it. “This is where the river begins,” she said to her friend, drawing her hand toward the spot on the map, “right here where this small island is situated.” She had made Timber Island from a piece of fabric quite different than that which she used for the vast anthology of islands downriver in the same way that she had used cotton for the lake and then linen for the river. “Will I be near this small island?” Julia had asked, and when Sylvia had replied in the negative Julia had added “then you must have put it here for some other reason altogether. Maybe someday you will tell me why.”
She stared at the notebooks resting now on the crate that Jerome used for a coffee table. How odd, Sylvia thought, to see them here, in this place, a place that neither she nor Andrew could have ever imagined.
Later, as she walked out of the alley and down the street toward the hotel, her anxiety lifted somewhat. She could not lose the writing, really: she could recall, almost exactly, every word Andrew had used. In the beginning, it hadn’t occurred to her that she would want the young man who found him to read Andrew’s words. But later, after the idea of the trip to the city had taken hold of her, she had become aware of the hope that this would happen. It was the body, she supposed, the physical fact of Andrew’s anatomy, so carefully learned by her, and now presented to this young person in such a shocking, unforgettable way that made this, to her mind, something she needed to do. She wanted Jerome to know Andrew, the man he had been.
As this thought entered her, she was rocked by a wave of grief so intense it caused her to stop walking, to stand quite still on the sidewalk, with a river of strangers passing swiftly on either side of her.
Timber Island is situated at the spot where the Great Lake Ontario begins