The Lake of Dreams - Kim Edwards [159]
“You’re pretty far from building anything, though,” I said, sipping at my wine.
Joey shrugged, nonchalant, full of the smug, unearned confidence that had always driven me crazy. “Yes and no. We’re almost good to go. I’ve already had calls from a dozen people interested in owning a piece of this. It could potentially be the biggest thing we’ve done.”
I thought of the marshes, and the herons rising when I disturbed their reedy home, rising and floating high, huge and graceful, above the trees. I looked across the water at Blake, standing on the boat and laughing with Andy and Art and two other people I didn’t know, and my mother, talking with Avery now, who was looking very happy. “New Year’s Eve,” I heard her say. “We’re getting married New Year’s Eve.”
The band played, and finished, the last notes floating out over the water. We ate and drank and talked as the sun went down and the darkness deepened. Fires began to appear, first just a few and then more and more, flaring here and there around the rim of the lake. It was such a lovely, familiar evening, the air as soft and warm as breath, but the secret of the will was like a transparent wall between me and everything else. I kept moving from group to group, drifting in and out of conversations.
Finally, Yoshi and I sat by ourselves on the seawall, dangling our legs into the lake. I told him about the will and all it implied.
“Well, it’s not necessarily sinister. Maybe your mother just doesn’t want to take any dramatic action until she knows what it means,” he suggested. The lake had turned a misty gray that blurred into the deepening sky. “After all, the will may not be valid. And if it is, then it would probably be pretty complicated to figure out who got what all these years later.”
“You think I’m overreacting?”
“A little bit,” he said, nodding.
“Maybe I am,” I said, remembering my conversation with my mother about Oliver’s intentions. She’d been completely right. “It’s always like this after a few days here. I start to lose my bearings. The surface is one way, but then there are all these other things going on, sometimes going back decades, swirling undercurrents that I just don’t understand.”
“This time is different, though,” he said. “You have Rose’s story now, which must put a new light on everything.”
It was true, I did. Her story, and the radiant windows of the chapel and the Westrum House, had stretched and changed the way I saw the world. Everything was connected in a way I had not understood before. Her dreams, as well as my great-grandfather’s, had brought us to this dusky evening, to this moment in time when everything might shift and change again.
Blake walked down the dock, his boat shoes echoing faintly against the wooden slats. He’d strung tiny white lights on the railings.
“Hey there, you two,” he said. “I’m going to run Mom up to the house. Want to come and check out the fires along the way?”
“Sounds nice,” I said, splashing my foot in the water, “but I’ve got the Impala. So I can’t.”
“Yoshi? Want to come?”
“You should,” I said, knowing how Yoshi loved to sail, realizing this might be his only chance, given how busy Blake always was, how our time here was already beginning to dwindle.
“You wouldn’t mind?” Yoshi wanted to know.
“I wouldn’t, really. I’ll meet you at the house. I might take a walk first.”
I waited until everyone had boarded and the boat had glided out onto the dark water, becoming nothing more visible than a net of moving lights. Then I finished my glass of wine and walked