The Lake of Dreams - Kim Edwards [148]
“Julie,” Carol said. “Grandma Iris asked to get the papers out of the house safe earlier. The old photos and so forth? But we couldn’t seem to get it open. Your father has forgotten the combination, and we can’t find the place where we wrote it down. I wonder, do you think you could help?”
“I can try.”
Julie opened a door in the built-in cabinets and sat down at the safe, her ear pressed to the metal, her fingers resting on the dial. She closed her eyes, and my own heart quickened. The patterns of the internal mechanism flashed into my mind like a vision, the pins moving in their quiet patterns. Slowly, slowly, she turned the dial, listening to the voice of the metal. I knew how smooth and hard the safe felt against her cheek, how softly the tumblers shifted and clicked, each one like a breath released. She held herself still, listening, and then her face relaxed, breaking open with satisfaction. The feeling of success, of completion, welled up in me, too. She opened the little metal door and reached inside.
“Look at that,” Ned said, chuckling.
“It’s a gift,” Carol agreed. “She’s been able to do that since she was five years old. I don’t know where she gets it.”
“My uncle used to do that,” Iris said, her voice far away, her eyes not quite focused on the here and now, as if she were seeing the world through the dual lenses of the present and the past—like trying to navigate the world in 3-D glasses.
“Me, too,” I said, spreading my fingers. “I can do it, too.”
They looked at me, my outstretched hands, in surprise. Then Julie pulled out a stack of papers and handed them to her father, who sorted through what looked like bonds and wills and deeds until he came to a single yellowed photograph, which my great-grandfather had given Iris on his single visit. It was a family portrait, dated August 22, 1909—the year Geoffrey Wyndham drove into the village in his Silver Ghost, a year before the comet. There were notes in pencil on the back. Rose was in the center, wearing a dark dress with a pale collar and cuffs. The other family members, also dressed in formal black, flanked her: a stern patriarch with his white beard, the older brother and three older girls who might have been cousins, their faces serious in the presence of the photographer. Rose’s mother and an aunt and a grandmother sat stiffly on chairs in front of the others.
“What was the occasion?” I wondered.
“No one knows,” Ned said. “A wedding, or a funeral, or maybe just a photographer passing through the village.”
“Here’s Joseph,” Iris added, her finger tapping beneath the boy standing next to Rose, squinting into the camera as if trying to discern the future. She paused, her voice softer. “And that girl must be Rose, I suppose. My mother.”
I looked more closely, thinking of Rose’s letters, the girl who had stood at the ship railing watching her country recede into mist. She was so young in this photograph, just fourteen, her hair still down, falling around her shoulders. She wore a ribbon around her neck and she was half-smiling, as if about to turn and make a joke; she alone of all the family—the serious older girls, standing in a row, and the careworn parents and aunts, and the grandmother, as old in the photograph as Iris was now, wearing a black bonnet and a visage like a withered plum—Rose alone looked happy.
What was she was thinking in that moment? What did she dream, and how did she imagine her life? On a summer morning, surrounded by her family, she turned, about to laugh, unaware of Edmund Halley or his comet, a chunk of ice traveling through the coldness of space, whose arrival would cast such a strange light across her life. She did not know that a door was about to open in the world and she would walk through it, terrified and hopeful, into a future she could never have imagined.
“I’m tired,” Iris said. She