The Lake of Dreams - Kim Edwards [101]
“It’s just a few more days. How’s everything?”
“Not looking forward to the meetings. Otherwise, okay. Look, I have to go, but I’ve got a break in three hours. Can you give me a call? We can Skype, and I’ll fill you in on what’s happening.”
“Good,” I said, “that sounds great. About noon your time, I’ll call.”
“Are you okay?” he asked. “You sound a little off.”
“Just distracted,” I said. “It’s the letters. That’s all.”
When I hung up I saw that Zoe had left me three messages, but I was so eager to get back to the letters that I tossed the phone into my bag without calling her and picked up the fallen pages from the dusty floor. I scanned the last paragraphs I’d already read—the comet night, when the whole world changed, the way he’d pursued her all summer long, the way she’d blamed herself although she’d had no real choice—and came to the place where I’d stopped.
It ended when he went on holiday. I stood in the fields as the Silver Ghost passed by. My friends, weeding, said I was pale. They made me sit down to rest, they brought me clusters of red grapes. So sweet, they stained my fingers. The blood of grapes, I kept thinking, those verses from Isaiah, that cry against injustice. The blood of grapes.
It was Joseph I finally told. The Wyndhams had returned by then. Grim, he went up to the manor house.
I waited outside. I waited for Geoffrey. I’d been inside the manor house just once, the ceilings so tall and the furniture all beautiful, and the servants scrubbing floors or making food and serving it on silver trays. Soon I would know how it was to live there, to drink lemonade or chocolate all day long.
I was so young. I see that now. Yet he had promised to marry me. I felt so sure that I could hardly understand what Joseph was saying when he came out alone, an envelope in his hand, talking about the new life we would have, both of us. How we could travel to America and start again. How no one would ever have to know. We would help each other—a whole new life.
He had piles of money. Passage to America. I touched it, then pulled away.
“But he said he’d marry me”.
“Don’t be daft. Be glad he gave this money to start your life again”.
“Start my life again?”
“A new beginning, yes”.
I remembered the silver auto flashing in the trees, and the scattered stones of the ruins, and the comet.
“But he said he would marry me. He promised”.
“I went to him like a beggar”, Joseph said. “You might at least be grateful”.
And then I remembered. In the plaster wall behind his bed, Joseph had hidden the few coins he’d gathered, saving for his dream. I’d seen him pull them out, holding them like small silver moons in his palm. I’d seen his longing.
“So. Now you have your dream”, I said.
He was silent for a long time.
“You can’t go to America alone”, he said at last.
“I don’t want to go to America at all”.
Maybe it was in this moment, as my words drifted off into the dusk, that I came to understand how small I was. The manor house across the fields was like a great ship, and somewhere inside, in a beautiful room full of light, Geoffrey was laughing, shaking loose his napkin and sitting down to have his dinner.
“I’ll go to him myself”, I said. “I’ll go right now. I’ll walk right up the front steps, and I’ll wait until he sees me”.
Joseph’s next words were low and hard, like rocks.
“He said he doesn’t even know you, Rose. That’s what he’ll say again”.
“He gave you the money, didn’t he? That’s proof, I’d say”.
Joseph caught my arms and made me look straight at him then.
“Who would believe you? Your word against his?”
“It’s true!”
“It doesn’t matter”.
“You’d lose your chance if I spoke out”.
“Yes, I would. But Rose, don’t you see? So would you”.
And so I followed him home.
I went about my days in a kind of disbelief, watching myself scrub and sew as if I were outside my own body. I did not see your father again. We heard he had gone to India. They prayed for him in church.
The night before we left I slipped from