The Lake of Dreams - Kim Edwards [5]
“Next week, next month, you can still look for jobs.”
I glanced out the kitchen window at the wall of the house next door.
“No, Yoshi. I really don’t want to put it off. All this free time is making me a little crazy, I think.”
“Well,” Yoshi said cheerfully, sitting at the table. “I can’t argue with that.”
“I’ve looked hard,” I told him tersely. “You have no idea.”
Yoshi was peeling a mandarin orange in a skillful way that left the skin almost intact, like an empty lantern, and he didn’t look up.
“Well, what about that consultancy—the one on the Chinese dam project on the Mekong? Did you follow through on that?”
“Not yet. It’s on my list.”
“Your list—Lucy, how long can it be?”
Now I took a deep breath before I answered. We’d been looking forward to this hike in the mountains for weeks, and I didn’t want to argue. “I’ve been researching that firm,” I said, finally, trying to remember that just hours ago we’d been dancing in this same room, the air around us dark and fragrant.
Yoshi offered me a segment of his orange. These little oranges, mikans, grew on the trees in the nearby hills and looked like bright ornaments when they ripened. We’d seen them when we visited last fall, back when Yoshi had just been offered this job and everything still seemed full of possibilities.
“Lucy, why not take a break and go see your mother? I could meet you there, too, after this business trip to Jakarta. I’d like to do that. I’d like to meet her.”
“But it’s such a long way.”
“Not unless you’re planning to walk.”
I laughed, but Yoshi was serious. His eyes, the color of onyx, as dark as the bottom of a lake, were fixed on me. I caught my breath, remembering the night before, how he’d held my gaze without blinking while his fingers moved so lightly across my skin. Yoshi traveled often for his job—an engineer, he designed bridges for a company that had branches in several countries—and this trip had seemed like just one more absence to add to all the others. How ironic if now his job became a way for us to reconnect.
“Don’t you ever want me to meet her?” he pressed.
“It’s not that,” I said, and it really wasn’t. I picked up the empty orange skin, light in my palm. “It’s just the timing. Besides, my mother’s condition isn’t serious. It’s not exactly an emergency situation.”
Yoshi shrugged, taking another orange from the cobalt bowl. “Sometimes loneliness is an emergency situation, Lucy.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean that lately you seem like a very sad and lonely person, that’s all.”
I looked away, blinking in surprise as my eyes, inexplicably, filled with tears.
“Hey.” He touched my hand; his fingertips were sticky. “Look, Lucy, I’m sorry, okay? Let’s not worry about this. Let’s just go up to the mountains, like we planned.”
So we did. It was muggy near the sea but grew into a high, bright, sunny day as the train switchbacked up the mountain. In early spring, plum trees and cherry trees had blossomed against this landscape, blanketing the ground with white petals, and my vocabulary lessons then had been like poems: tree, flowers, falling, petals, snow. Now it was late enough in the season that rice had risen from the watery land near the sea, but in the mountains, spring lingered. The hydrangeas were just beginning to bloom, their clusters of petals faintly green, bleeding into lavender and blue, pressing densely against the windows of the train.
We hiked to an open-air museum beneath a canopy of cedar trees and ate in a mountain village built on the rim of a dormant volcano, and our talk was easy, relaxed, and happy, like our best times together. It was nearly dusk by the time we reached the rotemboro, an outdoor hot springs, and parted at the door. The changing room was all clear pine and running water, tranquil, soothing, and almost empty. I scrubbed carefully from head to toe, sluicing warm water to rinse, walking naked to the rock-lined pool. The air was cool, and the moon was rising in the indigo sky. Two other women were lounging against