The Lake of Dreams - Kim Edwards [176]
“Not exactly,” Avery said. “Tell the rest.”
“Well, I’m starting a new venture,” he said. He gestured across the water to where the cruise boat was docked, people filing on for the early afternoon tour of the lake. “I’ve been having these conversations off and on for years with Mike Simms—you know he owns that business, right? He’s wanted me to come in as a partner, with the thought of buying him out eventually, and I haven’t wanted to do it. Didn’t want to be tied down at first; didn’t want the daily hassles, either. But after I quit at Dream Master, I went to talk to him again. I think we’ve worked out a deal. It’s not just going to be tour cruises anymore. We’re going to expand and add a lunch and dinner cruise as well. They do that on some of the other lakes, and it’s a good seasonal business. Avery’s doing the food,” he added, and smiled.
“I needed something a little less twenty-four-seven,” she said, ignoring his compliment. “With the baby coming, I’ve hired a manager for The Green Bean, and another chef, but I didn’t want to stop cooking altogether. This seemed like it could work.”
Yoshi and I helped them for a while, carrying several boxes down the dock to Blake’s truck, driving over to see the new place. It was small and ramshackle, with a 1950s kitchen, but very charming, too, with a wide front porch. When we were done, we walked back downtown to pick up the car and drive back along the lake road.
“Well,” Yoshi said, stretching his arms out across the wide front seat. “We have six days left before our flight back to Japan. We have no jobs and limited savings—nothing but our dreams.”
“That’s right,” I said. “Whatever else, we’re free.”
Epilogue
ON THE NIGHT BEFORE YOSHI AND I LEFT THE LAKE OF Dreams, our last night in the airy darkness of the cupola, I lay awake for a very long time, searching for constellations. Scorpio and Sagittarius were visible; I traced the lines between the stars and wondered, as I often had before, how these intricately imagined characters had ever been assigned to such sketchy patterns in the sky. I wondered how these same stars might look from another perspective—say, from the moon. Next to me, Yoshi slept, his hair dark against the sheets, his breathing steady, and a comfort, like the sound of the waves against the shore. We’d woken weeks ago to the uneasy shifting of the earth, and now we were here, our known universe having altered in ways we never could have imagined.
I watched the stars, fixed and burning in the night.
Was it a dream, what happened next, or a kind of waking vision? Did I sleep? The same patterns of stars were visible, the same curved edge of the moon, but I was standing in the shallow water on the shore, my feet sunk deep into the smooth shale beach, waves splashing my knees and small fish swimming around my ankles. My toes dug deep into the stones, flowing out like roots, and my arms reached like branches to embrace the sky with its scuttling clouds, its beautiful pale round moon. My fingers, far above, fluttered into leaves.
I sat up, exhilarated. The air was soft, and Yoshi’s legs were tangled with mine; I eased myself free and climbed across the futon to the window. There was the moon, full and tranquil in the sky, making a path of light across the black expanse of water.
The wind stirred softly. I thought of Rose, of the chalice she’d taken, lost from her things or stolen again or sold and melted for the silver, of her stained-glass windows, her rows of vine-woven moons, and of the people in the Wisdom window, their arms lifted to the sky. I remembered my mother’s tulips, radiant, emerging from their leaves, delicate cups swaying on their stems. The singing bowls by my bed in Japan, and a goblet forming, flowerlike, at the end of a fragile glass stem.
I lifted my arms like the people in the window, my legs and torso like a stem, my arms a crescent curve. Male or female, it didn’t matter. Then or now, no difference.
I was a tulip, a cup, a calyx.
I was, in that moonlight pouring