The Lake of Dreams - Kim Edwards [152]
We had walked through the grass to meet the man in the white cap. The trunk of the Impala was still open and he pulled out a bag full of tools, an empty red plastic gas can, a folded blanket, and my father’s tackle box, placing them carefully on the gravel shoulder, looking in vain for a spare. “They don’t make trunks this big anymore,” he’d said. Yoshi stood close to me, his hand warm on the small of my back. We watched him work. The lake in the distance was blue, silvery, and the fields were alive with dragonflies. He put my father’s things back inside the trunk and closed it.
I sat up, the bright, broken lures of my dream spilling their pieces everywhere. The air was cool and still, and the stars hadn’t moved. After my father drowned, the searchers had gone out, diving for hours, bringing back a lake-filled boot, his sodden hat, his fishing pole.
His tackle box, however, they’d never found.
His tackle box, hidden all this time in the trunk of his car.
I knew as surely as I knew my name or the rush of breath in my lungs that my father hadn’t been going out to fish the night he died. He’d gone out onto the lake to think, to float on the water in the darkness and grapple with whatever had woken him or kept him from sleep, whatever had weighed so heavily on his mind.
I slipped from beneath the sheet, careful not to wake Yoshi, and pulled my shorts and T-shirt from the tangle of clothes on the floor. We’d carried the heat of that field with us all day, brushing against each other like sun against grass, like stems pushing through the soil, and the clothes we’d discarded so quickly as we’d kissed at the top of the cupola stairs still held something of that warmth and sunshine. I went down the stairs gingerly, trying to stay at the edges so the steps wouldn’t creak, and stopped in the kitchen to collect the car keys from inside the cupboard door. Then I went out through the porch and across the lawn and driveway to the barn.
I was barefoot, the grass wet and the gravel harsh against the soles of my feet. The barn doors swung open quietly. The Impala was a shadow in the dim light. After my eyes adjusted, I groped my way to my father’s workshop, stumbling against the lawn mower and knocking over a rake with a clatter. The flashlight hanging on the wall didn’t work, the batteries long dead, but the old lantern still had an inch of kerosene at the bottom, and the matches were where they had always been, to the right of the jars of nails, above the shelf of planes. I lit the wick, and the glass globe filled up with light, casting objects back into their shapes, their shadows.
The car trunk opened easily, swinging upward. I moved the lantern forward, light flickering into the darkened spaces. The tackle box, dull green, was pushed far back in the corner, and I had to put the lamp down before I could lift it out all the way. It was locked. I found a wire on the workbench and then I sat down right on the floor, the concrete cold and gritty against my legs. The wire was thin and warm in my hand. The night fell softly around my shoulders and I still felt halfway in a dream, as if my father were present, watching me slip the wire into the keyhole and press my ear against the box, listening, listening, with an ear that knew how to hear.
Silence, and then the subtle rush of metal on metal. The click, soft, almost imperceptible, when one of the pins fell into place. One, and then another, and then the final sound in the sequence, one, two, and then three. I sat up. The lid was ajar, and I opened it.
The lures were as they always had been, dull, feathered with wire, plastic worms, each one different than all the others, none of them luminous, none of them a sphere. No little moons and planets, floating in their own misty atmospheres, filled the compartments. I’d seen these lures hundreds of times as a child, had helped my father make them, spreading the wires and bits of plastic or shining