The Lake of Dreams - Kim Edwards [151]
When I woke up hours later, I’d been dreaming. From the floor of the cupola the night sky was visible in all directions, struck with stars, as if the sky were a dark canvas flecked with holes, beyond which shone some clear white light. It was easy to understand how ancient people had imagined another world beyond, the myths of trees that would somehow grow past the limits of the sky and take them there. Easy to understand why they had not wished to name such power, too. I thought of the Wisdom window, all the people growing from the earth, being filled with breath and life, and of the Iroquois creation story Keegan had told me, how a woman, pregnant with the breath of a god, fell through a hole at the root of a great tree into the night, fell far to the sea below, where a turtle rose to catch her and the animals dived to the depths to bring back bits of mud and to make the world. You live here, the stories all said, but you are filled with the breath of the Divine, and the world in your care is full of amazements.
Yoshi slept. I turned to look at him. His mouth was slightly open and his breath faintly stale, his chest rising and falling in such a steady, gentle rhythm. I ran my hand along his arm and he twitched, then turned in his sleep and reached for me, his arm slipping around my waist. I curved against him, and we lay there at the top of the house, floating together in the night.
My dream, the one that had woken me, gradually surfaced again—not frightening, but intense, full of seeking and a sadness that lingered. I’d been fishing with my father, floating in the hour before dawn. It was still dark and he was hardly visible next to me. We cast our lines and floated, cast again. We needed better lures, he said, and I pulled the tackle box from beneath the seat and opened it. Gray-green metal, it caught the faint moonlight. Opened, it revealed rows of lures, each in their own compartment. Iridescent, made of greens and blues and deep oranges that seemed to have been drawn from the depth of a prism, richly hued, yet also somehow luminous. They were like gemstones, smooth and spherical and trailing feathers, streamers, bits of lace. Some were tiny perfect images of the earth, blue-green and wondrous, each turning slowly in a mist of white. I wanted so much to hold them, yet when I touched them they broke into pieces, and the dream energy turned urgent and frustrating as I struggled to hold the broken halves and fragments together, to wrap the beautiful lures in twine or thread them on tiny metal dowels. Something was wrong, terribly wrong, and then my father showed me another box with lures that were whole, smooth and gleaming, and I despaired at those in my hands, so make-shift, seamed, and broken, held desperately together by thread and metal rods and wishing.
I stared up at the stars, concentrated on my breath and Yoshi’s in the little room. Surely this dream was connected with the windows full of women and with finding Iris, the piece of the family story that had been broken away a century ago, broken away and obscured. Yet it was connected also to the dreams I’d been having since the night I arrived, dreams that seemed to go deeper than the ripples on the surface of life, deeper even than memory. Dreams born out of the restless searching I’d been doing since I left this place so many years ago. I thought about those dreams, all the seeking of round things, hidden in leaves, spilling like mercury, and now here, spheres falling into pieces, caught in a metal box. Yoshi’s hand brushed my thigh, and I thought of how we’d sat at the edge of the sunny field while we waited for the road service, the pulse of his thigh beneath my cheek. I wanted to be there again, in the sunny field with Yoshi, the deep blue