The Lake of Dreams - Kim Edwards [145]
She paused, and Ned reached over and put a reassuring hand on her arm before she went on.
“It wasn’t until you and your brother were born, Ned, that I started to remember and wonder what had happened. You were my children and I was her child, and so of course I wondered. But by then it was too late. I remember the house in town, where we lived before she went away. There was linoleum on the kitchen floor and a woodstove there, and we heated the other rooms by the fireplace. It was very cold in the winter, and my room faced the northwest, so sometimes I woke up to find the light all strange, dim, and I’d realize that the drifts had gone right up over the windows. They said she had done something wrong, but I always felt I must have caused it somehow. That I must have been bad enough to make her leave.”
“Oh, no. No,” I said, while Iris wiped her eyes. “It wasn’t your fault at all. Your mother was sent away because she marched for the right to vote. And got arrested. There was a huge suffrage march in Washington in 1913; others happened all across the country in response, and Rose, your mother, joined the one that happened in The Lake of Dreams. She was warned against it, but she was moved to do it anyway when the parade passed the house. She went to jail, and then they wouldn’t take her back. Cora and her first husband, I mean. Your uncle, my great-grandfather, tried to help, but he didn’t have much to give then, either. Leaving you was not her choice.”
Iris nodded, but still didn’t speak. I gestured to the letters on her lap. “She came back for you,” I added. “You’ll read what happened. She came back a year or so later and met you in the garden of the house in town, and you talked. She wrote about this, in one of her letters.” I paused here, because I didn’t want to tell Iris that she hadn’t recognized her own mother. “You can read them,” I said. “There’s so much more. She loved you so much.”
There was silence before Iris finally spoke, her voice soft and a little tremulous. “It is very hard for me to accept it,” she said. “Very hard. I can understand it, now that I am older. I can see that perhaps she had to do it. Sometimes there are circumstances we can’t control. And yet. She left. I grew up without her.”
I started to speak, but Ned held up his hand to silence me. For a few moments we all sat quietly. Iris’s lips trembled, but she didn’t cry.
“Not entirely without her,” Carol said finally. “You knew Rose Westrum, didn’t you? So you see, she came back, even if you didn’t know it was her. Probably she thought it best, by then. It seems she watched over you all her life.”
Sunlight poured in through the wall of windows and fell through Iris’s thin white hair, the wisps like scraps of mist against her pale scalp. Her eyes were just like mine, like Blake’s, that vivid blue. The skin was stretched thin over the bones of her hands.
“Yes. I knew Rose Westrum. She was a friend of the people who took me in. She sent me a note just after I was married, saying she had known my family. I never answered her. Why would I? Why would I dredge up all that past?
“I’d run away, you see, when I was fourteen. That’s the year that your grandfather was born. My mother—Cora—was not young. She must have been in her forties by then. She must have given up the idea of having children. I remember the kind of surprised silence that settled over the house when we knew she was pregnant. Still, I wasn’t paying very much attention. I’d come home from school and bring her tea on a tray, and I had to do the shopping. Everything was quite still and suspenseful all autumn long. But the baby was born healthy. He was a very sweet and docile baby, and I liked taking care of him.
“Cora was a very gentle mother to him. Very loving. She’d been the same to me when I was a child—indulgent, really—but as I grew older we fought. She said I was willful, a blunderer. It’s true that I was clumsy, and larger than she liked, and that I outgrew