The Lake of Dreams - Kim Edwards [141]
I took a breath, thinking of my mother’s concerns. Who knew, really, who these people were? “Yes, hello. My name is Lucy Jarrett.”
“That’s what my mother said. She wasn’t quite clear, though, on what you wanted.”
“Oh—well, I don’t want anything, really. I’ve found some information about Rose Jarrett, about your mother’s family. Some letters that were written to your mother. So I was calling to see if she could shed some light on them. And to tell her they exist.”
He cleared his throat. I tried to imagine how old he might be. If Iris was ninety-five, he could be well into his sixties.
“I have to tell you, my mother was quite upset about your call. Unnerved is a better word. She left home when she was quite young, and it wasn’t a happy situation, though I don’t know the details. My mother hasn’t had a particularly easy life. I don’t want her to be unsettled at the end of her years by whatever you think you have to tell her. And frankly, I’m sorry to have to say this, but calling out of the blue like this, with such strange news—it makes me wonder about your intentions, if you don’t mind my saying so.”
“I understand,” I said. “I’ll do whatever I can to ease your mind.” I repeated the story then, my father and grandfather and great-grandfather, the letters, finding Iris. I did the genealogy in my head, even as I spoke. Ned Stone would be my father’s second cousin. When he didn’t reply right away, I went on—the church records, the windows, Frank Westrum, the letters I’d discovered in the dusty box of the Lafayette Historical Society. “It’s just that we never had this part of the story in our family, we never knew Rose or your mother even existed. I was so excited to find her. Plus, I thought she might want to see these letters.”
There was a pause then, and I tried to imagine the man on the other end of the line, who sounded careful and tailored and very precise, the sort of person who would have a home office with thick, sound-absorbing carpet and framed diplomas hanging on the wall.
“You’ve read them?”
“I have.”
“Would you find them upsetting if you were my mother?”
I hesitated. The last days had been very exciting, but they had been unsettling, too. The old story, the story I’d learned by heart all my years of growing up, had held a certain comfort, had given the world a weight and stability, and the discoveries I’d made had shaken my sense of who I was even as it altered my understanding of the world. Would I trade this knowledge? No. In fact, I wanted more, I wanted it all. Yet it hadn’t been easy knowledge, and I didn’t know how it might feel to have your world turned over when you were ninety-five years old.
“Actually, I think they might be upsetting,” I said, sitting down on the sofa, looking out the windows at the dark lake. “I guess it would depend on if you wanted to know the truth, or at least another facet of the story, or if you wanted to keep the story you’ve always believed.”
He hesitated.
“All right,” he said, finally. “Tell me what you think you know.”
So I told him that Rose was his grandmother, that his mother hadn’t known her.
There was a long silence.
“That’s very shocking,” he said. “If I believe you, that’s hard to absorb.”
“The letters are very beautiful. They tell the story better than I can.”
“Why don’t you send them?” he suggested at last. “Send copies of the letters to me. I’ll have a look, and then I’ll get back to you about this.”
“I’ll scan the first two and send them right now,” I offered, groping in my purse for a pen. I wrote his e-mail address on the back of a grocery receipt.
After I sent the letters off with a short note, I drank a glass of wine on the patio with my mother, lingering in the deepening dusk, the night. I wondered if I’d done the right thing and my mother shrugged.
“No taking it back now,” she said. “You’ll just have to wait and see.”
I didn’t have to wait long, as it turned out. Within two hours, just before midnight, he called me back.
“All right,” he said. “My mother is ninety-five