The Lake of Dreams - Kim Edwards [120]
“So you think they’re important, then? Dreams?”
“Oh, yeah. You know, the Iroquois take dreams very seriously. They see them as the secret wishes of the soul—the heart’s desire, so to speak. Not all dreams, maybe, but the important ones. And when they recur, I tend to think they’re important. I kept dreaming of the lynx when I was in the village, too. Then I’d be rushing through a jungle or swimming a river at night in a dream. This was during a time when I’d stopped doing any creative work, and the lynx kept taking me to fields where things were growing, or rivers where fish were leaping out and piling on the shore. So I knew I had to get back to a creative life again, a life of making things. It wasn’t just the bus, the outward journey. It was where it was taking me inwardly, as well. And that was true later, too.”
We were drifting near the middle of the lake. Below the water the land fell three hundred, four hundred, five hundred feet deep, a point where even at the height of day no light traveled through to reach the depths. For a second I felt breathless, imagining the vast water below and the vast air above, and myself so small, floating in the midst of all that space. I thought about all my dreams of lost spheres falling into pieces.
“I don’t know. My dreams don’t make a lot of sense.”
“Maybe you haven’t dreamed enough,” he suggested.
“Maybe not.”
I was thinking of Japan then, the faces of all those people floating just beneath the surface of the water, the jolting earth, the way I jerked out of sleep, paralyzed by the responsibility I felt to fix whatever had gone wrong. We drifted for a time, lost in our own thoughts.
“I’ve never told those dreams to anyone else,” Keegan said after a while.
“I guess I haven’t, either.” This was true. Yoshi had never asked to know what the dreams were about, but had simply turned and held me whenever I woke up from one.
“That’s good. You should be careful, sharing dreams.”
I thought of Rose, revealing her life’s dream in the ruins of the monastery, and of Joseph, his dreams like a net to snare the future.
“You know,” Keegan said, “after your father died I used to take the boat out and float in the water near your house, watching people move through the lighted rooms inside, hoping for a glimpse of you.”
“You did?”
His face wasn’t visible in the darkness, so I couldn’t tell what he might be feeling, though I remembered the numbed sense of loss and guilt that spread over everything and made it impossible for me to feel anything else during that time. I thought of the letters, Rose writing of that moment before she stole the chalice from the church, that night I was so heartsick I could feel nothing else. Looking back, I’d been that way, too, for years and years, shutting myself off, pressing sadness and loss down beneath my adventurous and busy days so I wouldn’t feel overwhelmed. Now grief engulfed me, as if I’d been walking on a thin crust that had formed on its surface and had broken through, falling suddenly and deeply into its darkness.
“I did. Not forever. Just for a couple of weeks.”
“I’m so sorry.”
“Are you crying? Look, Lucy, I’m not trying to guilt you. I just wanted you to know that I was thinking about you, even then.”
“I know,” I said, wiping my eyes. “I’m not really crying.”
“You really are.”
“It’s old stuff, that’s all. It’s still hard to remember that night, what might have happened, and what did. He was in the garden when you dropped me off. That was the last time I ever saw him.”
“Lucy.” Keegan took my hand then. He didn’t say anything else.
After a minute I pulled myself together and wiped my eyes. “I found out all this stuff about Rose,” I said, to change the subject.
We talked a little bit about the chapel then, and the windows, luminous and mysterious, how forcefully they’d stayed with us both. We talked about Suzi and Oliver and what might