The Lake of Dreams - Kim Edwards [139]
“Not really, no. I started to fade awhile ago, but I think I’ve got a second wind. I’m good for a few hours.”
“There’s a place I’d like to take you. A place I love. If you’re up for it.”
He didn’t answer right away, and all my fears rushed into the silence.
“I think I could handle it,” he said, finally. “I think it would be okay.”
The place I had in mind was the gorge, where I’d spent so much time in my last year of high school, a place I hadn’t been since the night my father died. Yet as we were driving by the church a car pulled out of a parking place just in front of the door, and on an impulse I pulled in. I’d heard there were plans to move the Wisdom window back to its place in the chapel in the next few days—Oliver had insisted on this, arguing for the integrity of the complete collection—and I wanted Yoshi to see it.
We went in the side door and I waved to Joanna, the secretary. Then I led Yoshi through the maze of corridors. They had hung the window in the fellowship hall, and it was even more striking than I remembered. Early afternoon light poured intensely through the colors, through the patterns whose style had grown so familiar, the stems and flowers, the interlocking moons making the repeated shape of the vesica piscis, an ancient sacred geometry, the hands of the people all upraised, turning into leaves, into words, rising up.
“In the Japanese creation story there’s a moment like this,” Yoshi said. “The story tells of a time when the earth was floating on the water, and then a pair of immortals sprouted up from the earth like reeds. Some parallels, anyway—everything interwoven.”
“I like that—sprouting up like reeds. I’ll take you kayaking in the marshes while you’re here. Now that the depot is closed, we can follow the shore for miles.”
We paused outside the offices so Yoshi could use the restroom across the hall. As I waited, Suzi hurried out of the office, carrying a briefcase.
“Lucy,” she said, pausing. “What brings you here?”
“I was showing the Wisdom window to Yoshi. He just got in from Japan. Thanks, by the way. For whatever you said to Oliver Parrott. He sent me information that helped me find Iris. She’s ninety-five. She lives in Elmira.”
“That’s amazing that she’s still alive. Have you talked with her?”
“A little. Not really. She’s supposed to call me back. I’ve learned so much more about Rose. I’ll have to stop in sometime and bring you up to speed.”
“Anytime—just give me a call. I’ve got to rush off to a meeting right now.”
“Right. And Yoshi’s here.”
“Yes. You know, Lucy, I was thinking about our last conversation, your concern about Rose. Forgiveness is at the heart of the church, God’s forgiveness and love, and whatever mistakes she made—whatever mistakes we all make—they don’t cut us off from life, or from a spiritual life, unless we choose to let them.”
I felt myself flush, because it seemed that maybe she’d read through my concern about Rose to the story I’d almost told her about the night my father died, the sense that I could have made a different decision and changed everything.
“Well, thanks,” I said, sounding flip, I knew, and I was sorry about this even as I spoke. “That’s good to know.”
She nodded, smiled, started down the stairs. “Okay, then. Be well.”
By the time Yoshi emerged, she was gone.
Back in the car, driving along the road that hugged the lake, Yoshi and I didn’t speak much. I worried; his silence could hold almost anything. As we neared the end of the lake I left the main highway and drove down the narrow, curving gravel road to the parking area. It had changed over these last years, become less wild. There was now a neat signboard displaying posters of the various sorts of ferns and fossils to be found, along with warnings not to pick anything, and gravel on the path that we followed as it wove and narrowed and finally ended in the stream below the falls.
Water was pouring over the stony riverbed. I waded out into the center, up to my knees, and let it rush past, so clear my bare