The Lake of Dreams - Kim Edwards [147]
“I don’t know what woke me up, or how much time had passed. I sat up, feeling groggy, and looked over at the blanket beneath the tree. It was empty. I kept looking at it, panic so great it froze me in place, but then I heard a sound and turned. He was ten months old and he’d figured out how to crawl. I didn’t know, I’d been away, working. I hadn’t been paying attention. While I’d slept he’d crawled to the edge of the water, crawled in. The waves were touching his chin. He was laughing, but then he slipped and fell face-first. I jumped up and ran to him. It was probably the longest minute of my life. He wasn’t crying or anything, just moving his hands in the water, floating, but his face was down. I swept him up in my arms, I was shaking.
“I didn’t see Cora right away. She was standing by the barn, shading her eyes, a terrible look on her face. She’d seen it all. So. That was the beginning of the end for me. She never forgave me, or believed it was an accident. Eventually, I ran away.”
“It wasn’t your fault,” Ned said. “It was an accident. And he wasn’t hurt.”
“No. He was laughing. He was so little he didn’t understand danger.”
I was thinking of Max, standing over the rushing water, turning back to smile at me as if nothing were the matter at all.
“What did you do?” Yoshi asked. “After you left, what did you do? Where did you go? It must have been hard, you were so young.”
“Yes. It was hard. Though when you’re young you don’t think about that so much. You don’t realize you’re setting a pattern for your life. They found me—I was staying with a friend—and when I said I didn’t want to come back to the house, they sent me here, to Elmira, to a Mrs. Stokley, who needed a boarder. So I went. I took a job in one of the glass factories. I wanted to be a teacher, but of course I didn’t have the training. When I was twenty-one, I met John Stone at a company picnic. He was an engineer, like Ned. He was flying a kite that day.”
“My father,” Ned said. “They were married for fifty-seven years.”
“And you never saw Joseph again? Neither your uncle or your cousin?”
She shook her head. “My cousin, no. My uncle did come to visit. Just once. It must have been near the end of his life, goodness knows—I was in my fifties. He brought a photo from his childhood, and he took me to lunch, and he indicated that I’d be remembered when he died. I didn’t put much faith in it, of course. And of course, since I never heard another thing about it, I knew I’d been right.”
While we’d been talking, the door in the foyer had opened and shut again, softly, and a young woman dressed in shorts and a white tank top had taken a seat on the step down into the living room, resting her chin on her hand and listening intently. She had long hair pulled back in a ponytail. As the conversation paused, Carol introduced her as Julie, their youngest daughter.
Julie smiled and said hello. I replied, taking her in. Since Ned and my father were second cousins, Julie and I must be third cousins, if there were such a thing. Even if there were, did it matter? That was the sort of cousin you might not know about even if you grew up in the same town. She was tall, not quite as tall as me, but nearly so. I stood and she shook my hand.
“So you’re a hydrologist,” she said. “That’s so interesting.”
“I like it.”
“And you work in Japan?”
“Well, not exactly.” I glanced at Yoshi. “We were living in Japan, but we’re on leave right now. Thinking about the next thing, whatever it might be.”
“I know what you mean. I’ve done my share of that.”
“Julie is a teacher,” her father said. “But she has a passion for animals. She rescues them. That’s her real love.”
I didn’t know what to say—in this way we were not at all alike. I wondered if her apartment was full of stray cats.
“Exotics,” Julie said, as if reading my mind. “I rescue exotic animals whose