The Lake of Dreams - Kim Edwards [169]
“Beats me,” Blake said. He sat back and clasped his hands behind his head. “Lucy made it sound like life or death, though.”
“Lucy?” my mother said. “What is it? Are you okay?”
“I’m okay,” I said, and finished pouring coffee for us all. It steadied me, doing that ordinary thing. I put the pot down and held the warm cup in my hands. Gray clouds scuttled across the edges of sky, threatening, but still far away.
Then I told them what Art had said in the office at Dream Master. I watched them both as I talked, speaking out of some calm that went so deep it seemed as if I contained a bottomless spring from which it welled up.
They listened. My mother made a teepee of her fingers and pressed them against her lips. I didn’t leave anything out. When I got to the part where Art pushed my father, my mother closed her eyes. She didn’t move, but tears slid down her face. Blake looked away, gazing out to the lake, choppy and gray in the early morning light.
“Why are you doing this?” he said at last, turning to me, his face unsettled by anger. “Damn it, Lucy, why can’t you just leave things alone. You blast in here and you think you know everything. Well, I don’t believe for a minute that any of this is true.”
My mother wiped her fingertips across her eyes and looked at me.
“Is it?” she said. “Lucy, is it true?”
“It’s what Art told me,” I said, too stunned to reply to Blake. Whatever I’d expected, it hadn’t been their disbelief. I’d never thought to question what Art had said, because his suffering had seemed so real. “Why would I make it up?”
“Big mystery there,” Blake said. “Because you don’t want to see the land developed. This serves your interests.”
“Well, it serves yours to ignore what’s right in front of you.”
Blake’s face tightened, but he didn’t reply. I forced myself to take a deep breath, because now I was angry, too, and yet I kept thinking of Rose’s words: Do not act out of anger. Act from love, or not at all.
“You saw the will,” I said to my mother. “You saw the will and asked me not to mention it, I don’t know why. But when I did mention it to Art, this is what happened.”
I handed the envelope containing the will to Blake, who opened it and read. For several minutes the waves rushing against the shore made the only sound.
“I just wanted to think about it,” my mother said. “About what it might mean. Lucy—you don’t imagine I knew anything about this?”
She got up and went into the house and came back a moment later with a file.
“Mom,” Blake said, looking up from the will. “What are you doing? Look, we still don’t know all the facts. We haven’t heard anything from Art himself. We only have Lucy’s version. Maybe she misheard.”
“I did not mishear.”
My mother held up her hand to quiet us. She opened the folder.
“This is the contract,” she said, pulling out a document. “Art and I have been talking back and forth for years about this house, the land. I’ve known that he’s wanted this, and I’ve known why. At first I was pretty resistant to the idea, but over the years it came to make more sense to me. I guess as the weight of the house grew and got heavier I started thinking about what it might be like to live in town and not have to listen to its complaints all the time. Then, too, Art has been kind all these years. A real help. I’ve come to rely on him. Whatever he’s done, that’s all true.”
She flipped to the last page, and I saw that she had signed the contract, and dated it June 25, the day after we’d gone to see the Westrum archives and stopped at Joan Lowry’s packed and lonely apartment. Now she ripped this page off and tore it in half, and then again, until it was in tiny pieces. When she opened her hand, the shreds flew across the lawn, some catching against the bushes, others swept by the breeze to the shore, where they were caught and carried off by waves.
“Mom,” Blake said.
“I believe Lucy,” she said. “Because I remember how things were, and I remember things the two of you will never know. I can see it happening. What Art described—I