The Lake of Dreams - Kim Edwards [155]
“It does.” He sighed. “Of course it does, it’s interesting. But honestly—it’s not life-or-death interesting. It’s not wake-me-up-in-the-middle-of-the-night interesting. Lucy, don’t you think maybe you’re dwelling on this a little too much? Why not just relax and enjoy showing Yoshi around. Maybe if you weren’t between jobs and here on vacation, this might not seem quite as important as it does right now.”
Despite what I’d told Yoshi earlier, Blake’s comment touched a nerve. Maybe this was one of the reasons I’d never let myself be between jobs before, had never paused, going from scholarship to scholarship, good jobs to better ones, so I could always come back and run into Art or Joey or even Zoe and think to myself: So there.
“What do you mean? It changes everything.”
“They’re, like, third cousins once removed. It doesn’t change anything at all.”
“Blake, the story changes everything.”
He laughed, exasperated. “Okay, okay. I’m not going to argue with you at one o’clock in the morning, Lucy. I’ll see you tomorrow at the party. Meanwhile, good night, okay?”
Then the phone went dead.
I sat on the patio for a few minutes longer. There were bats here, too. Winged shadows, I had always liked them, their small intelligent eyes, their fondness for insects and the night. There were caves on the depot land and perhaps the bats lived there, clustered silently along the walls, aware of the voice of the land, the susurrations of the water and the swift growing of the plants, listening to the strange new sounds of metal against rock as the bulldozers scraped away the earth.
If my grandfather had found this will, had he looked for Rose and Iris and never found them? It was possible. I’d had a hard time tracking Iris down, even with the letters from Rose and a great deal of luck. Or perhaps he’d never looked for her—that was possible, too. I tried to imagine how it must have felt for my grandfather to read that will—if indeed he had seen it—his father’s words, so harsh, like blows: To amend for the things I denied her. To remind my son that the world does not owe him a living by any reckoning. Bitter words, and perhaps the writing of them had been enough; perhaps my great-grandfather had put this will into the wall so no one would ever see it, the flashing anger of a moment.
Or, if my grandfather had read this will in the silence of the house after Joseph Arthur Jarrett died, he might have shoved the papers in the wall and smoothed the plaster over with even strokes, as if to erase those words, though his father’s disappointment was already engraved forever on his heart.
I thought of my father and Art, growing up in this house, those words buried in the wall, all that bitterness sealed away but present, shaping everything that followed, like water shaping rock. Like it or not, it had shaped me, too.
Lights flashed across the lawn and over the surface of the lake, then went off abruptly; gravel crunched in the driveway, and my mother’s laughter carried through the night, and voices, softer, floated through the darkness. Then silence, the thud of the car door falling shut and more laughter, and the flash of lights again as the car backed out. My mother came in through the porch. I called out hello.
“Lucy?” she asked, coming to the screen door, then pushing it open and stepping out onto the patio. She was dressed in white and silver, like one of the flowers in her discarded night garden, her perfume drifting through the air. “What are you doing up? Where’s Yoshi?”
“Oh, he’s sleeping. I couldn’t. How was the movie?”
She smiled, but it was a private smile, and despite the jam-filled jars and Andy’s kindness and my own best intentions, I felt a surge of anger at everything she was leaving so willingly behind. So easily, too, it seemed from outside, though I knew that wasn’t fair. Maybe it was because I had been thinking so much about my father, about his last restless days. Or maybe it was the scent of strawberries still lingering in the house. “It was terrible,