The Lake of Dreams - Kim Edwards [164]
As the last one fell, a car drove down the street perpendicular to the store, lights flashing in the plate-glass windows. I froze, holding still until the car had turned and driven away. But the moment was broken. I didn’t have the will to destroy anything else. Instead, I picked my way through the ruins and went down to the office, turned on the light.
There, I went through the files, pulling them out and stacking them on the floor. I don’t know what I was looking for exactly, and I didn’t find anything of much interest. Receipts and records of sales and shipments, going back decades. Maybe because of the flames on the beaches all around the lake, maybe because of the painful leaping in my heart, I had fire in my mind as I searched. I kept thinking how easily these papers would ignite, how they’d go up in smoke, how the flames would lick at the walls until they caught on the rafters hidden beneath and traveled upward into the attic, dry as kindling, where nothing would stop them. There was an old gas tank buried beneath the parking lot, and I thought of that, too, how a spark might travel there and ignite a vast explosion.
I went so far as to take a sheaf of old invoices and light the corner, letting them burn out over the metal trash can. Ash formed and fell. My fingers were stained black.
Would I have set fire to this building, imagined by my great-grandfather, created from his industry and imagination, so full of the artifacts of the past? I don’t know. It was possible, alive in my mind, that I might do so. I opened the cupboards where we used to hide as children and started pulling papers out of there, too, letting them fall into a heap on the floor, the heap that could become a bonfire. The pile grew to my ankles, my calves, my knees. One match, I kept thinking. There was lighter fluid on the shelves, and paint thinner. One match and the place could go up in smoke, and fire, and ash.
Then I saw the handwriting. My father’s, neat and slanted to the left, different from Rose’s script, the letters long but more rounded, more fluid, unmistakably his. They spelled out the date January 1972 on a pale blue ledger with a cardboard cover. That was the year he met my mother. The year he was sent to Vietnam. I sat down at the desk and ran my fingers across the rough paper cover, imagining my father sitting at this same desk, reaching for a pen. January, snow as high as the windows, maybe falling through the cones of the streetlights in the early dusk, maybe swirling in eddies across the drifts in pale late afternoon light. And my father, so young, so full of dreams for his life, standing on the cusp of change, though he did not know it. It could break your heart to think of it too closely, to imagine all that might have happened, to know all that did.
I sat at the wide desk where a long line of ancestors had sat before me, and I opened the ledger. There were my father’s careful notes on the neatly ruled pages, with their pale blue and red lines and the columns, all the numbers my father had written down so precisely. I was taken back then, to the Sunday evenings when he sat doing the accounts at the dining room table, a pencil tucked over his ear and his fingers flying over the adding machine. I ran my fingers over the numbers, flipped the pages. Number after number in his neat handwriting. Numbers and dates and more numbers, tallied