The Lake of Dreams - Kim Edwards [136]
People, brisk or languorous or weary, began to stream down the escalator. Yoshi was among the last, looking a little dazed, a bag slung over his shoulder. He was wearing cargo shorts and a blue T-shirt and his hair was short. He was tan and so good-looking that I felt stilled for a moment as I watched him riding down the escalator, considering all that had happened in this brief time, how close I had come, in my pursuit of the past, to canceling this moment altogether. And perhaps Yoshi had considered ending things between us, too; I still didn’t know if this was the end of the beginning or the beginning of the end. I felt suddenly shy. When he saw me he smiled, held up one hand to wave. I wove through the current of other passengers and put my arm around him, kissed him quickly.
“You’re here,” I said.
“I made it,” he agreed.
We got his bag and walked out of the terminal, talking too quickly about the most mundane things: his trip, the weather, the history of my father’s golden car. I drove out of the city and back over the familiar roads, pointing out landmarks; Yoshi remarked on the wideness of the car seats and the expansive countryside, fields and farms in every direction. The dark green highway signs for one town after another flashed by: Watkins Glen, Corning, Elmira. I told Yoshi about the George East-man House, which housed the International Museum of Photography and Film, and about Mark Twain, who’d lived in Elmira, his octagonal study with its fireplace and many windows, like a freestanding cupola, now on the campus of Elmira College.
“What do you think?” I asked when we got close to the exit for The Lake of Dreams. “Are you tired? I could take you to the house and you could sleep. Or we could stop and walk around the village for a while.”
“I’m tired, but I know I won’t sleep,” Yoshi said. “Show me around. I’ll just walk until I can’t anymore.”
So I parked. We strolled through the village and stopped at the bank, which was open on Saturday mornings. My mother looked up from the papers on her desk and stood, smiling, to shake Yoshi’s hand. She liked him right away, I could tell by the way she lingered in the conversation. She promised to be home early from work. Then we got ice-cream cones and sat in the park, watching sailboats skim across the lake, and Yoshi told me more about his trip to the island, pulling photos up on his camera, carefully skirting the issue of work, of the fact that we were both as adrift in the world as those boats were on the water. Skirting, too, the gaps that had opened up between us in these past two weeks. Yoshi lay back on the grass and dozed a little, and I walked along the seawall. The house Rose had first lived in was across the street, a narrow Victorian with lacy trim. Iris had been born in that house; there was the garden where she’d made her dolls of hollyhocks. I glanced at Yoshi, dozing in the sun with his arms clasped behind his head, so familiar, and yet containing a universe of history and perceptions that I could never know.
When Yoshi woke up, we walked down to the pier, but though the Fearful Symmetry was tethered and bobbing on the water, neither Blake nor Avery were there, and so we walked on. I pointed out Dream Master rising from the edge of the outlet, imposing. For me it had always been a symbol of my family history, and even though its cracked cornices and need of tuckpointing were clearly visible, seeing things through Yoshi’s eyes did what even my years away had not been able to accomplish: it was a building, nothing more.
“Your grandfather built it?” he asked.
“Great-grandfather. He was Rose’s brother. They came to this country together.”
“Ah. That must have been hard.”
“I think it was. It was hard for Rose, anyway.”
Yoshi nodded. “My mother talks about the loneliness she felt when she first moved to California. It wasn’t that she didn’t like the United States. Just that no matter how long she stayed here, it never truly felt like home. Maybe that