The Lake of Dreams - Kim Edwards [154]
Another bat swooped low and floated back into the rafters. The concrete was cold, but still I sat for a long time with the will in my hands, watching the pattern of flickering light and shadows on the ceiling and the wall, thinking of Rose, whom I had never known but had nonetheless come to love. Finally I stood up, brushing dust and grit from the backs of my legs. I put the tackle box back in the trunk and closed it, extinguished the flame on the lantern and returned it to the workbench. Then I went outside and stood in the driveway, looking at the house, its eaves and porches, the cupola where Yoshi slept, the peeling paint, the unkempt garden, overgrown and heavy with wild roses. We’d grown up here, Blake and I, running across the lawn, diving off the dock into the lake, believing that the world had a certain order, an inevitable pattern, as fixed as constellations in the sky. And all the time these papers saying otherwise had been sealed up in the kitchen wall.
The air smelled of roses, and waves shushed against the invisible shore. I tried to imagine my father’s thoughts on that last night, as he smoked one cigarette, then two, then walked across the lawn and took the boat out, grabbing his pole but not his tackle box. Had he even known who Iris was? Had he been trying to find the story of her life in those weeks before he died? And who had sealed these papers away in the kitchen wall all those decades ago? Sealed them but not burned them, hidden them where they might never be found, or would surface only after so much time had passed that any memories of Rose and Iris would have faded into dust. It might have been Joseph Arthur Jarrett himself, having changed his mind. Or it might have been my grandfather, who must have felt blistered with the anger radiating from these pages if he’d read them.
On the patio, the iron chairs were cold and damp with night condensation. I sat down, so agitated I wasn’t thinking clearly, and pressed Blake’s number on my speed dial. It rang ten times, twelve, fifteen, but finally he picked up, his voice gravelly with sleep.
“What is it?” he wanted to know.
“You were asleep. I’m sorry. Is Avery there?”
“Yeah, trying to sleep. Look, Lucy, what the heck’s going on? What difference does it make if Avery’s here?”
I stood up and walked to the edge of the patio, looking out across the lawn to the lake, the soft shuffling of shale beneath its waves against the beach.
“It’s about Rose. I didn’t want to wake you both.”
“Well, thanks for that.” I heard his footsteps, and then a space opened up around his voice as he stepped out on the deck.
“Lucy, this is all ancient history, okay? Whoever this Rose person was, whatever sort of scandal she caused a hundred years ago, it just doesn’t matter anymore. Can’t you let it go? Get some sleep, and let me get some, too.”
“Look, that’s just it, I found her daughter,” I said. “I found Rose’s daughter, Iris. Yoshi and I met her today. She’s ninety-five, and she lives in Elmira. We met her family, too.”
There was a silence, a rustling, and I imagined Blake sitting down on one of the deck chairs, looking up at the very same sky.
“Okay,” he said, finally. “Tell me why it’s so important. Why you’re calling now, at one o’clock in the morning. You didn’t just get back?”
I thought of the trip home through the blooming fields, daylilies running through the ditches like fire, the fields alive with butterflies and insects, the lakes vivid blue as we drove on the ridges between them, how after that meeting I’d seen the world the way you do when you’ve been a long time under water, everything luminous and vibrant, strange and new, charged with life. I couldn’t tell Blake about any of this, or about the dream of lures that had woken me, brought me to the barn and the tackle box and finally to this moment. And suddenly, remembering the rolls of drafting paper at Dream Master, their penciled plans—secret plans, unshared—I hesitated to tell Blake about the will.
“I know it’s late. I’m sorry, I couldn’t sleep. But doesn’t it seem astonishing to you