The Lake of Dreams - Kim Edwards [163]
“I tried to find him,” Art said. “I looked and I couldn’t see him. It was so dark. It seemed like such a long time I was there, after he fell. But I don’t know. I wanted to get help. I remember thinking I would get help. So I left. I left him.”
I still didn’t speak, remembering the voices traveling across the lawn in the beautiful dawn, my father lifeless on the stones, his skin swollen and iridescent, like a fish, the way my mother knelt beside him and touched his cheek so gently, and how he did not turn to kiss her palm.
“It wouldn’t have made any difference,” Art said. He was looking at his hands now, speaking to them. “It wouldn’t have mattered, by the time I got to shore. Even by the time I left, nothing would have made a difference.”
He wasn’t looking at me, but I knew what he wanted, what he was waiting for in that dusty room with its fluorescent lights—he wanted me not just to hear him but to agree with him. To say it was okay, what he’d done, reasonable under the circumstances, and thus to become complicit in my father’s death. Art looked so old now, sitting behind the desk, as if the telling had deflated him, leaving his skin to sag and cling more closely to his bones.
“Lucy,” he insisted, meeting my eye at last, pleading now. “Talk to me, please. It would not have mattered one bit if I had stayed.”
I stood up without a word, shaking, and walked out into the night.
He followed me, a shadow in the darkened door of the building. “Lucy,” he called after me, speaking softly, his voice carrying across the grass. “Don’t forget that you and your brother have a great deal at stake in this, too.”
I stopped at the edge of the outlet, so filled up with pain and rage and outrage that I could barely breathe. Art stayed on the stoop outside Dream Master for a moment longer, the building dark behind him, looking in my direction. Then he turned and went inside, the door falling shut behind him, clicking as it locked.
How long I stood there, I couldn’t say. The evening was mild and the streets were still full of tourists. Bursts of laughter floated out over the water from The Green Bean, and people strolled along the path, holding hands, eating ice cream, passing me, sometimes stepping around me, as if I were a pillar or a bench or a statue. I stood that still, caught in the airless, breathless pain of that long ago morning when they carried my father from the lake.
The windows above the glassworks were all dark—maybe Keegan was already asleep, Max breathing lightly, the rooms filled up with calm. I started walking hard and fast along the outlet into town, my thoughts so wild and scattered. It was a beautiful night, clear and warm, and so many people were lingering outside restaurants or strolling along the lake. Twice, people passing cast odd glances in my direction, and I realized I’d spoken out loud—a word, a phrase, agitated, nonsensical.
I walked in that state for a long time, past all the cozy homes with their lights on, people moving inside, reading or watching television or washing the dishes. Doing ordinary, untroubled things. They couldn’t see me striding past their houses, tears flowing down my face at some moments, possessed by an anger so fierce I was almost doubled up at others. I walked to the edge of town and then back, past the church with its arched red doors. I thought of the Reverend Suzi, but it was too late to call her. The streets were quieter by the time I found myself in the parking lot again, standing with one hand on my father’s Impala, the car he had loved so much, the place he had hidden his last secret.
The papers were still inside—I’d put them back in the tackle box because it seemed the safest place—reminding me of why I’d gone to see Art in the first place: to tell him about Iris, to talk with him about the ownership of the land. Not to hear this confession, words like lightning, transforming my known world like sand melting into glass.
Dream Master was dark. I went inside through the back door, which, oddly, was unlocked, as if