The Lake of Dreams - Kim Edwards [10]
“No joke? That’s great, Lucy. I’ll be glad to see him again.”
“Me, too.” I told Blake about my life then, about Yoshi and the geothermal springs, the incessant trembling of the earth, talking in a stream because I was so tired and so happy to see him and so disconcerted, as I always was, to be back in this place I’d known so well, where life had gone on quite steadily without me. Blake filled me in on the businesses that had opened or closed, the classmates who’d had babies or gotten married or divorced, all sorts of local gossip.
We’d left the main roads to climb the low rise between the lakes. The landscape was deeply and comfortingly familiar, the country roads following ancient trails through the lush green hills and fields, broken by white farmhouses, red barns, silos. The Iroquois had lived on this land once, and they had named the lakes: Long Lake, Beautiful Lake, Place of Blessing, Stony Place, Canoe-Landing Place, The Lake of Dreams. After the revolution, their villages were razed and burned to the ground—blue and gold historic signs marking General Sullivan’s brutal campaign were scattered every dozen miles or so. The land had then been allotted to the vanquishing soldiers, who carved farms from the forests, braving the long winters for the brief, exquisite months of summer. Along the shores, summer cottages and rough fishing camps had sprouted, and over the years these had been replaced by ever larger and more ostentatious commuter homes. Still, we drove primarily through farms; from the county line at the top of the rise, we followed the road down a long hill, through green fields that ended at the silvery blue edges of the lake.
“Your old friend Keegan is back, by the way.”
A pulse then, the familiar quickening I always used to feel.
“Is he? I haven’t seen him in years.” This was true, though it didn’t feel true.
“He is. He opened up a studio in the old Johnson glass insulator factory by the outlet. That whole building’s been renovated. Restaurants, galleries. Very trendy.” Blake glanced across the cab at me. “You remember Avery, right?”
“Your old friend.”
Blake smiled, nodded. “Right. We’re back together, you know. She’s a chef in a new vegetarian place in the Johnson building, too. Did I ever tell you that when we broke up the second time she went to culinary school? She’s really good.”
By then we had reached the intersection with the lake road, near the entrance to the depot. The lake was deep enough for battleship training, and during World War II hundreds of families had been relocated under eminent domain, their houses and barns razed like the Iroquois villages before them, airstrips and Quonset huts and weapons bunkers rising almost overnight out of the land amid the corn. Usually this stretch was deserted except for the dull green military vehicles that came and went on their mysterious errands, but now dozens of cars were parked on the grassy shoulders, and a small crowd had gathered at the open gates.
“What’s going on?”
“That’s the other big news,” Blake said. “See what happens when you stay away so long? The depot closed, just last week. It was announced three, four months ago.”
I was still thinking of Keegan, the way he used to speed his motorcycle flat out on this stretch, the wind tearing at our sleeves, so it took me a minute to process this news.
“Is that possible? I thought the depot was a fact of life.”
“Yeah, weird, isn’t it? The economy is lousy here anyway, and now it’ll only get worse. This place employed a lot of people.”
I looked south along the shore at the miles of undeveloped land behind the formidable fences. Our mother’s grandparents had been among those evicted when the land was taken and we’d heard stories of that loss all our lives. We’d grown up traveling along the depot’s miles-long fence with its barbed-wire summit, the world within a secret place we could never enter. Blake slowed to maneuver through the unexpected traffic, then stopped, waving