The Lake of Dreams - Kim Edwards [60]
“Some thought, yes. Not real serious thought, mind you. Just the late-night thinking after a bad day.”
“If you quit, we’d both be unemployed,” I observed.
Yoshi must have heard the flare of panic in my voice, because he smiled into the computer, across ten thousand miles. “I’m just frustrated, that’s all. Let’s change the subject. What’s been happening with you? Is it pouring? I’ve been checking your weather.”
“It is.” I glanced out the window. The sky was beginning to lighten at the horizon, a pearly gray-white line above the green, and I hoped it would clear. “I’ve been making fascinating discoveries about my ancestors,” I said, and told him about the windows I’d discovered and the trip I planned to Rochester to visit the Westrum House. Yoshi was interested, though he was having a hard time following all the various relationships.
“She’s your great-grandmother, this Rose?”
“No. My great-grandfather’s sister. I guess that would make her my great-great-aunt? We never heard about her. I think there was a scandal.”
“Sure you want to know?”
I considered this because it echoed so clearly my own apprehension, my initial sense that the past might have been covered up for very good reasons. “You know, I really do. I’m not sure I can explain exactly why. Just that it feels like an important piece is missing from my family. I mean, if the scandal had to do with Rose being a suffrage leader, then that’s remarkable. We could use some more heroic women in the family.” As I said this I thought of my own struggles all these decades later, pale in comparison and yet real enough, especially for a woman in science. Times when I’d been interrupted in the middle of a presentation, or given all the paperwork to finish, a kind of corporate housekeeping, or had been excluded in a routine way from important conversations outside of work.
We talked for a little longer about his travel plans, and then Yoshi said he had to go. There were reports he had to look over before he could relax. He took a long drink, looking tired, I thought, sapped.
“You should get some sleep.”
“I will. Once these reports are done, I’m going to crash in front of the TV. Mrs. Fujimoro asked after you, by the way. She noticed you were gone.”
I remembered the press of her hand, the earth trembling beneath our feet.
“How is she? How are the earthquakes?”
“There was a biggish one yesterday. When I came home the bookcase had fallen over, and the rest of the plants in the kitchen.”
“I can’t say I miss the earthquakes,” I said. “I miss you, though.” And I did, thinking of the long June dusks there, the walks we’d take sometimes in the evening, by the sea.
“I wish you were here,” Yoshi said, his voice wistful.
“Soon,” I said. “Love you.”
“Likewise,” he said, and before I could give him a hard time about his lack of romantic impulses, he’d switched off Skype, and the screen went dark.
Downstairs, I had a quick breakfast with my mother, then drove her into town. We were a little formal with each other, guarded. She said Blake had seemed glad to talk about the baby, though he’d asked her to keep it quiet because Avery had been planning to announce it more formally.
“Does he know I told you?” I asked as I dropped her off at the bank.
She winced a little. “Well, maybe. I didn’t say so, but maybe he guessed. He seemed a little taken aback at first that I already knew. But Lucy, I really don’t think it will be a problem.”
I watched her hurry up the steps in the rain, clenching a plastic coat around her to protect her cast.
From there I drove to Rochester, first on local roads, winding through the countryside, cows grazing in the fields like black-and-white clouds, the new corn trembling in the steady rain. Route 20 connects the northern tips of all the lakes, roughly following the route of the old Erie Canal. It travels through the nineteenth-century towns strung like beads along the tips of the lakes, so beautiful and faded, having grown and prospered a hundred years ago when the streets were unpaved and full of horses, barges