The Lake of Dreams - Kim Edwards [173]
They were all crossing the room now, Ned on one side of Iris and Carol on the other. When they reached us they paused to say good-bye. Iris touched my hand.
“Thank you,” she said. “For finding her. And me.”
Since the afternoon was so fine, Yoshi and I didn’t go directly back to The Lake of Dreams. I was acutely aware that our days here were beginning to dwindle, and that most of his vacation had been spent dealing with my family issues, past and present, or trying to find another job. Yoshi wasn’t the sort of person to complain, or inflict his stress on other people, but I could tell from the way he was sometimes distant and reflective that he had a lot on his mind. So instead of going back to the house, we picked up some sandwiches and drove to a state park near Ithaca that I’d always loved. We hiked along a cascading stream through the gorge, then swam in the pool at its base. It was too cold to swim for long, but we jumped in for as long as we could stand it, then sat on the rocks by the water in the sun.
When we got back to the house that evening, my mother was just getting home from work. Blake was there, too. We saw his truck first, parked at an odd angle in the gravel driveway. I expected to find him in the kitchen, but he wasn’t there, and after we called to him a few times, he answered from upstairs, his voice muffled, floating down from his old room, where he was standing amid the dark blue walls with a pile of books in his hands, looking at his posters of the moon, of the beautiful image of the earth from space.
“It’s like a cave in here,” he noted. “What was I thinking?”
Our mother, walking up behind me, laughed. “You were a teenager,” she said. “That’s where your mind was. Growing into some new state of being. Look at Zoe. That should remind you.”
He shook his head. “I was growing in the dark, I guess. How was the trip?” he asked, putting his books on the desk—even as a teenager, he’d been reading about boats.
“Good,” I said.
My mother added, “Yes. It was moving.”
Blake nodded but didn’t comment. At first I worried that he was still upset about the decision to tell the Stones what we’d discovered, but when he spoke again, he changed the subject. “Well, I stopped by because I have some news.”
We went downstairs to the dining room and sat at the big round oak table. I’d polished the wood with lemon oil before Yoshi came, so it gleamed softly in the light from the two high leaded windows.
“So,” Blake said. “I talked to Art. It was pretty tense. He didn’t confirm or deny, at the end of the day. But I’ve had some time to think about things. I want you to know that I quit. I left this morning. I cleaned out my desk and left.”
“He let you go?” my mother asked. “Just like that?”
“He tried to talk me out of it, but his heart wasn’t in it. There was some vandalism on the Fourth of July. I don’t know if you heard that. Some damage, things knocked off the shelves, mostly just a dumping of papers. He’s still trying to put things in order.” Yoshi had discreetly taken a seat in the living room, where he was looking at a magazine; he glanced up at this, our eyes met, and he gave a slight shrug. Blake continued. “He’s been going through a lot of old papers and things as a result. I think he’s been pretty weighed down by the past, and by worry over how this Landing business is going to turn out. Long story short, no—he didn’t have much to say.”
“Well, I don’t know whether to laugh or cry,” my mother, said, holding up her hands. “Both of my grown children are now unemployed.”
“What about Avery?” I asked. “Is she okay with this?”
Blake laughed. “Yeah, she’s much more okay than I am, actually. She’s always been a risk taker, and she figures things will work out. Anyway, I still have my pilot’s job,” he