The Lake of Dreams - Kim Edwards [167]
Opening the chapel door was easy. The lock was old-fashioned and gave way quickly. I stepped inside and stood still for a few minutes, letting my eyes adjust to the darkness. Gradually, shapes began to emerge: the rows of empty pews, the pulpit and the lectern, the altar behind the communion rail, where empty candleholders glinted faintly in the scarce light. I slipped off my sandals, a habit from Asia, and walked to the front of the church, the tiles gritty against my bare feet. The Wisdom window had been returned to its place. The other windows would be removed soon for cleaning and restoration, but for now the chapel was intact, as it had been originally designed, and if I couldn’t see any of the images, I knew from the glimpses of pale glass, of lead lines, that they were there. The vine-laced moons stood in pale relief across the bottom of each one. Rose, a century ago, had seen this pattern and carried it with her through love and disappointment, across the wide ocean and into the lonely winter nights. She had fashioned it into a blanket for her child and, years later, into the borders for these windows. This was the trace she’d left in the world, a piece of her story that had lodged itself in my imagination all these decades later.
I slid into a wooden pew, the wood smooth, the silence and the darkness sifting down. I sat still; moment by moment, my breathing grew calmer. I made myself inhale deeply, relax. Ruah, breath. Spirit. Wisdom. I imagined the Wisdom window, the clear glass indicating the rush of the Divine presence, creating and shaping everything. Not pictured, never named, but the source of all. I sat still in this place where so many had sat before me, trying to listen past my grief and confusion, thinking of Rose Jarrett a century before, in another country and another church, listening, too.
When, I wondered, had this story really begun? Was it in the moment when Rose, having lost everything she’d loved, had slipped the heavy silver chalice into her pocket? Or had it begun much earlier, when Geoffrey Wyndham laughed in the ruins, dismissing her dreams, or later, on the dark staircase, when he forced her to make a choice she didn’t really have? Had it begun with the comet, that strange light, or had it begun long before, in events and social structures that caught my ancestors like a net the moment they were born?
Whatever its beginning, the story had unfolded, one event leading to the next, beauty and loss surfacing in every generation, until I sat here, a hundred years away from that comet, woven into the story in ways no one could ever have imagined.
In the darkness of the silent church I finally felt safe enough to let myself imagine the lake at the quiet hour before dawn; my father in his soft blue fishing hat, floating on the tranquil water, wondering what to do with knowledge he had not sought but could not discard. The sound of an approaching boat was faint at first, like a shadow in the mist, a shadow in his heart. In the gray, grainy light of almost dawn, Art’s voice floated to my father, and he answered, and at first their argument was civil, reasonable, calm. But then the voices were less reasonable, rising like smoke in an angry upward spiral, until they were both standing, shouting, truly fighting, and both were falling, Arthur into the bed of his boat, ricocheting into the reeds, and my father slamming his head against the metal edge and slipping into the cold, clear darkness of the lake, too stunned to move.
I pressed my face into my hands.
Something about that night was still loose, untethered, flitting through my thoughts. In this stillness I could sense it, like the brush of air from a wing.
Around me the beautiful windows, connecting me to other lives and other times, to things done and also deliberately left undone, stood dark. Rose,