The Lake of Dreams - Kim Edwards [114]
“Not really. I’m trying to find out,” I said. I was remembering my dream, the figures stepping out of the windows into the room. I had the sense that it could happen; these women with their bowls of fruit and bushels of grain and alabaster jars were so vividly present. Perhaps this was exactly what Rose and Cornelia and Vivian and Frank had hoped the chapel would do. I was stirred by the windows and I didn’t want to leave.
It seemed none of us did. Zoe stood and went to look more closely, but Suzi and I sat for a time in silence. Finally, I leaned forward and said, “It’s so beautiful. Compelling, too. But it makes no logical sense, any of it.”
Suzi nodded, her gaze still on the windows. “No, it doesn’t. But I don’t think logic has much to do with it. I love that beautiful line from Ezekiel, about replacing a heart of stone with a heart of flesh. That makes no literal sense either, though we understand it in metaphor. For me, that’s the power of the stories—that you can’t quantify them. That they keep opening up and revealing something new.”
I didn’t know what to say to that. I almost told her about what happened the night my father died, how I’d run into him in the garden and he’d asked me to go fishing, how maybe it would have changed everything if I had.
Instead, I talked about Rose. “You know,” I said. “She made mistakes, yes, but she was so young. She was just trying to find her way. It seems so unfair that she lost everything she loved.”
“Do you know how her life ended?” Suzi asked.
“No, I don’t. I’m afraid it might have been tragic.”
“I don’t know about that. You may be right, but I look around at these windows, and what I see is beauty, and joy, and a kind of deep awareness of these stories. A kind of creative, generative peace, as well. To me it seems she wasn’t stuck in loss. She grew. She turned at least some of what she lost, and what she suffered, into beauty.”
I didn’t say anything, and we sat for a few minutes longer, until Suzi stood, saying she needed to get back for a meeting. We walked from the chapel into the bright clear light of the day. Keegan and Oliver were already outside, and the photographer had gone. A breeze from the lake moved through the tall grass, filling it with waves, like a sea, fluttering the tops of the distant trees. Our little group began to disperse, Suzi and Oliver making their way, deep in conversation, through the grass to where the cars were parked at the entrance. Zoe stood uncertainly at the entrance, then reached into her purse and flipped open her phone. I thought of all the moments in my own life when such a gesture would have been a nice hedge against awkwardness, and I thought of Rose, alone in the train station, trying not to attract attention, pulling out her pen to write a letter. I asked Zoe if she needed a ride, but she shook her head, and when she snapped the phone closed she said that her mother was on her way. Then she started back through the fields, her long legs disappearing in the grass. I lingered for a moment, thinking how young she looked.
Keegan had been talking to the archaeologists; now he came over and touched my arm. “Hey,” he said. “Pretty amazing in there.”
I nodded, still filled up with the images of all those women in the windows. “It was. It was totally spectacular.”
“Suzi’s pretty cool, isn’t she? She lets me come in and just sit in the sanctuary sometimes, when I’m not working. I like that. I guess I like the silence. It seems real somehow, not like that angry shouting kind of religion you get on the news.” He laughed a little, shook his head. “I’ve got this cousin Becky. I don’t think you ever met her. She lives in Orlando and she came to visit once—before my mother died. And my mother made her this beautiful