The Lake of Dreams - Kim Edwards [122]
“You’re swimming in your clothes,” was what I said.
“I am. It seemed like an emergency situation.”
Sometimes loneliness, I thought, and remembered Yoshi again, his kindness and long patience with the grief I’d been pressing down and carrying around for so long,
Keegan’s foot again, this time running lightly along the length of my leg. His eyes were bright with laughter.
“I’m not sorry,” he said. “Not that time.”
I didn’t want to think anymore, I just wanted to go back to that time before everything had changed, and so I turned the inner tube to kiss him the way we used to kiss, in the dark fields, on the dark lake, except that now the water was between us, was around us, and every touch set off currents, his hand stroking my arm, my leg, and the little waves moving between us in reply. It wasn’t as if we had never done this, back in the days when we used to slip away at every chance. This was a game we’d played on long summer nights, to see how long we could stay below, every touch amplified because we could not see.
I put an arm around his neck and he had an arm around my waist. He let go of the tube and then I did, and we slipped gently beneath the surface, still kissing, drifting slowly down through the darkness. We weren’t falling, we weren’t floating, we simply were, warm against each other in the dark night lake, his touch as gentle as the touch of water. My thoughts traveled past the sleighs and sunken ships, the detritus of shattered lives, through the images of the women in the windows, the things they carried, the stories they told. They settled on the image of Max, standing so calmly on the edge of the roiling water, a step away from falling. They flitted away and came finally to my father, standing in his boat, barely visible against the dawn, like a silhouette or a figure in a negative print, and then he fell, he struck his head and went down and down through this same water, he had fallen and fallen and never come back.
All my nightmares were at the bottom of this lake, everything I’d ever lost was there. I pulled away from Keegan and swam back to the surface, breaking through, gasping again in the clear night air. This must have been how it felt to be born into the world, to open my mouth and feel the rush of air for the very first time.
Keegan came up a second later, shaking water from his hair.
“Lucy,” he said.
And I said, “I can’t, Keegan, I can’t.”
I swam to the edge of the boat and climbed up the narrow metal ladder. Keegan followed and sat across from me, so close our knees touched.
“Are you sure?” he asked.
I nodded. For the first time in years, I was clear. “I didn’t want it to end,” I said, meaning both that last kiss in the dark lake and all the time we’d spent together being young and wild, thinking we could go on that way forever. “But I think it had to.”
“Do you?” He took my hands in his. His shorts and shirt were clinging to his skin. He was still wearing his shoes. He must have been frightened, to dive in after me like that. “Because I have always wondered, if your father hadn’t died, if we might have—look, I just always thought we’d end up together.”
“I know. I used to think so, too, I really did. But I was leaving, Keegan. That whole spring, I was. If my father hadn’t died, I still would have gone.”
I remembered the urgent restlessness I’d felt that final spring, when I was riding wild with Keegan and yet heading every moment to a future I knew would not include him, how I’d chosen a college three thousand miles away.
“You have made such a good life,” I said, feeling the truth of those words, thinking of the growing glass, the fire, the clean lines of his apartment, built in a space once deserted, full of debris.
He smiled, a little sadly. “It is a good life. A very good life.”
“And Max—he is such a wonderful boy. You wouldn’t have Max if we’d ended up together.”
He nodded. After a minute he slipped his hands from mine and rested them on his thighs.
“No. That’s true.”
We were silent for a moment, waves lapping against