The Lake of Dreams - Kim Edwards [68]
“So where were you?” I asked in the awkward silence that followed, nodding at the vase of glads. “On the night of the moon landing, I mean?”
He looked startled at this, and my mother cast me an irritated glance, but after a moment he cleared his throat and laughed.
“Well, I was right there, actually,” he said. “In Cape Canaveral, I mean. I went down for the liftoff with a bunch of college buddies. We were all in our midtwenties. We all had jobs, some of us had families. But it was a great moment in history, so we went. It was astounding, I have to say. We went out on the beach the night after they’d landed, took our telescopes and imagined we could see them there, walking in the Sea of Tranquility. You know, this town was named after a place on the moon, at least in part. The Iroquois called this the place of dreams, and when the settlers came, they altered the name based on the lakes of the moon. I’m sure you know all this,” he added. “The Lake of Dreams. Just down the road from The Bay of Rainbows and The Sea of Ingenuity.”
I’d studied Blake’s posters often enough to know all the names on the moon, fearful as well as beautiful. I thought it would put a damper on the evening to bring this up, but then I did it anyway. “The Ocean of Storms, The Marshes of Decay, The Lake of Death,” I said. “Not exactly cheery.”
Andy just chuckled. “I guess you know your lunar geography,” he said mildly.
“I was fifteen that year,” my mother said, ignoring my comment. “We went outside, too, out into the fields. We’d been watching the moon landing all day. We took our blankets out and stayed there all night, drinking diet soda and gazing at the moon. We were low-tech—no telescopes. Nothing seemed changed, yet we knew that it was.”
“I wonder where Dad was that night,” I mused, because I didn’t know and couldn’t ask him. It wasn’t until the words left my mouth that I realized how they’d sounded, how maybe I’d even meant them, without consciously deciding to do it—as an intrusion, and interruption, a reminder of the life my mother had once led.
“I don’t know,” she said. “That’s one thing we never talked about.”
Andy took her hand, and she smiled.
I stayed a few minutes longer. They invited me to dinner, but I declined, saying I was tired, which was true. Andy’s Prius hybrid was as different from my father’s car as it was possible to be. I waved as they drove away, then went inside and made myself a peanut butter sandwich in the deepening dusk, without turning on any lights. I ate at the counter, drank a glass of milk, washed my few dishes. It was dark by the time I finished, but I went outside anyway, leaving the unlit house, walking barefoot through the wet grass. I wanted to swim, though I didn’t have the energy to go back up to the house and change. After wavering for a minute, I shed all my clothes on the dock and dived into the water. The lake was cold and frothy, still stirred up from the storm. I was shivering a little by the time I climbed onto the raft, but I sat there for a long time, glad to be in a place where no one would find me, adrift in the water and adrift in the air, sorting through the unexpected events of my day. To the south were the marshes and the miles of darkened depot land where a village had once been, where the chapel still stood, unused for decades, the windows boarded up. I needed to go there, to understand how Rose was connected to the windows. In all fairness, I felt I needed to warn the Reverend Dr. Suzi about the charming and disarming Oliver Parrott before he showed up with his stories and his checkbook and his persuasive manner.
For the moment, though, my questions were simpler: who was Rose Jarrett exactly, and if she had come to this country with my great-grandfather Joseph, why had I never heard her story?