The Lake of Dreams - Kim Edwards [166]
“So do you.”
“No, I don’t.”
“I’m not talking about money, or property, or this house.”
I couldn’t see Yoshi well in the darkness, but his voice was a little heated. I tried to search his face in the shadows, but his eyes were as dark as the night, unreadable. “What I mean, Lucy, is that you have a stake in the truth. It’s not like anyone is going to put your uncle in handcuffs. He says it was an accident, and it probably was. It’s a moral problem, not a legal one.”
“If what he says about it being an accident is true.”
“What? Do you think he’s lying?”
“I don’t know what I think. Maybe. He asked where I put the papers. I mean, I think he’s genuinely unnerved by the will.”
“Where are they?”
“In the car. I didn’t tell him.”
But then I thought of what I had told Art about the papers—that I had given them to my mother, that she had put them somewhere in this house. It wasn’t rational, but I was seized with an urgent sense of panic, as if I might glance out the window and find Art striding across the lawn to search the house.
I sighed. “I guess you’re right. I guess I have to tell her,” I said.
We sat quietly for a while, side by side, the night air soft around us. Yoshi reached over and slipped his hand into my hair, gently massaging my scalp.
“You’re so tense,” he said. “Lie down for a minute.” And so I did, sliding down to the futon and stretching out on my stomach. Yoshi ran his hands lightly over my back, drawing faint lines across my skin. “Relax,” he said, and then his hands were on my shoulders, pressing away the tension I hadn’t known I was carrying. My shoulders, arms, back, all relaxed, releasing anxiety like water. Waves lapped in the near distance, splashed against the dock, and I concentrated on that steady sound, imagining I was floating on water, being carried gently away.
Yoshi lay down next to me, resting one hand on the small of my back. I drifted, and drifted, his breath and my breath mingling with the sound of the waves, until at last I fell asleep.
When I woke it was still dark. I checked the time, but only an hour had passed. It was the deep middle of the night, hours before dawn. Next to me Yoshi slept, and below me, in another layer of the house, my mother slept, too. I stood up carefully, so Yoshi wouldn’t wake, and made my way downstairs. I got a glass of water and stood on the porch steps, too restless to sit, too tired to swim or walk. Out here, the voices of the frogs were loud and low, floating through the trees from the direction of the marshland, and I thought of the herons sleeping there amid the rustling weeds, or standing on their reedy legs. I thought of the silence of the forest I’d walked through with Keegan, the sense of enchantment I’d had in that wild place, as if we’d stepped outside of time. I thought of all the people who had walked this land, and the traces they’d left, the stone grinding bowls and shards of pottery, the remnants of houses and barns, the patterns of underground bunkers. I thought of Iris, who had spent the last summer of her childhood in this house, had perhaps even stood in this same spot on a night not unlike this one, listening to the voices of the water and the frogs, searching the sky for a sliver of moon. And I thought of Rose, the traces she had left, even though she had never, to my knowledge, stepped foot in this house, or even in the beautiful chapel she herself had helped design.
So then I knew what I wanted to do. I went back and slipped the car keys off the hook. I got into the Impala, and I drove.
It wasn’t far, less than five miles away. I pulled off the road onto the wide grassy shoulder and walked to the chain-link gates. Now that it was no longer officially a base, now that there was no equipment stored inside and no weapons were buried in the earth, the security, which had been so intense when I was growing up, was almost nonexistent. The single padlock on the gate opened beneath my hands; I slipped inside. Behind me, streetlights glared into the darkness. Where I stood, however, the night was complete, covering everything