The Lake of Dreams - Kim Edwards [172]
The interwoven spheres and vines ran along the bottom. I’d done some research, and I’d found this motif everywhere. These overlapping circles were ancient, tracing back to Pythagorean geometry—geometry, a measure of the world. In more mystical terms, the shape had always evoked the place where worlds overlap: dreaming with waking, death with life, the visible with the unseen. Rose had probably glimpsed this pattern in a medieval church and woven it into the blanket for her child.
“What are you thinking about so seriously?” Yoshi asked. He’d gone around the room from window to window, and now he came and stood close.
“Rose,” I said. “My great-grandfather’s dream. It was always his dream we knew about and not hers, and that’s the problem. I think that’s what she’s saying somehow, in this window. I mean, in a personal sense, not as an interpretation of the text. But in this story, Joseph always has these dreams, right? I looked it up. That’s what puts a wall up between him and his brothers to begin with. His arrogance, their envy; that’s why they throw him in the pit and sell him into slavery. This cup in the grain, it’s the cup he uses later for divination. For dreams. And it’s not until he sends that cup off with his brothers—even though it’s a trick to get them to come back—that balance is finally restored.”
“Maybe,” Yoshi said. “It sounds plausible enough to me.”
I thought of Rose, packing the soft blanket to send to a daughter who would never know her, and the chalice slipped beneath her skirt and carried through the night. I looked again at the women in the crowd around the sack of grain. This cup, buried in the grain as surely as Rose’s story had been buried in the family narrative, spoke to me.
“There was some good news earlier,” Yoshi said after a few minutes, when he judged that I’d finished looking at the windows. “Want to come and see?”
We retreated back down the stairs to the lobby, where we sat side by side on a low bench, going through the e-mails that had come in that morning. Yoshi’s contacts in both Papua New Guinea and Cambodia were cautiously optimistic about finding a position for me; they were talking with other agencies to see what was available. I’d sent out queries of my own, and as we waited I checked, shading the screen of my phone against the flickering light that fell in through the trees.
“My friend Alice thinks there might be a position opening in Mali, but it sounds a little too corporate. She gave me the contact name, though.”
“That’s good. Worth looking into.”
“It is. I’ll write when we get back.”
“I guess we just have to keep looking hard. It may take a while to find what we want.”
We sat for half an hour longer, talking quietly about what we hoped would happen, how we might see to the closing up of our place in Japan. I kept thinking of a line from a Mary Oliver poem I’d read: “What is it you plan to do / With your one wild and precious life?” What indeed?
I hadn’t seen Iris leave the stairs and go to view the windows upstairs, but she must have, because eventually she came down with Ned, trailed by Oliver and Carol, and my mother and Andy.
“They’re going home,” my mother said, coming up to talk while Iris paused at the desk to sign the book Stuart was holding out to her. “I think she’s very tired. It must just be emotionally exhausting to take all this in.”
“It must. Have they said anything about the will?”
My mother glanced across the room. “Actually, yes. They were very nice. They suggest a meeting tomorrow afternoon, in The Lake of Dreams. Their lawyer, my lawyer, Art, and his lawyer. Apparently, secretaries are calling each other even as we speak.