The Lake of Dreams - Kim Edwards [9]
That was the story, anyway. As I checked in for my flight, I wondered how he’d felt, pinning his dreams on such a faraway unknown—no telephones back then, no e-mails, and no going back. For me, nearly a century later, there was such a careless ease about distance. At almost the same time as our takeoff from Tokyo the day before, we landed at JFK, its corridors bustling with amazing human diversity. After another hour in the air, the lakes came into view, long, narrow, and deep, deep blue—pressed into the low green hills like the slender fingers of a hand. North-flowing rivers once, they had been deepened and widened by the slow work of glaciers. I studied them until they disappeared beneath the silver wing of the plane, remembering the cold, clear shock of the water, the layers of deepening cold and deepening color, the shallows of the shores giving way to the blueness of the depths, turquoise and indigo and finally midnight blue.
I’d e-mailed my brother that I was coming, and as I rode down the escalator to baggage claim I saw Blake waiting, studying the descending people, his hands shoved into the pockets of his jeans. His face opened in a smile when he saw me, and he waved. In some ways Blake had been hit hardest by our father’s sudden death. He’d done well at the Maritime College, and he’d taken some good jobs on big boats in the Great Lakes, but he kept circling back to The Lake of Dreams for summers, a kind of holding pattern he couldn’t seem to break.
“Hey, Sis,” he said, wrapping one arm around me in a hug. He’s six foot four, and even as tall as I am, I had to stand on my toes to hug him back. “Mom’s at the doctor, or she’d be here, too.”
“She’s doing okay?”
“She’s doing fine. It turned out to be a sprain, after all. She’ll have to wear an Aircast for a couple of weeks.”
My bag circled by on the belt and I pulled it off, remembering the moment, just a day before, when the luggage service had picked it up from my tiny patio in Japan. A world away, it seemed already. I started toward the car rental area, but Blake caught my arm.
“You can use Dad’s old car while you’re here,” he said. “No need to bother with a rental.”
“Really? The Impala?” I asked, as we made our way out the automatic doors to the parking lot. “Has Mom actually started that thing up? It’s been sitting in the barn for years.”
“I know, but it still runs. Mom had it checked out a couple of months ago, thinking she might sell it, I guess. It’s all tuned up and in good shape.”
“I’m surprised she’d think of selling it.”
Blake glanced at me, his eyes—the family eyes, a changeable blue flecked with green, with long dark lashes—both serious and amused. “Things move on, Luce. You’ll see. Lots of changes this time.” He tossed my bag into the back of his truck. “How about you? How’s your life these days? Do you miss Indonesia at all? I think about my trip there all the time. Especially that park we went to—the one with wild-looking trees, and the volcanoes.”
Blake had come to visit me just after I’d met Yoshi, and we’d gone snorkeling on the coral reefs, hiked through the lowland rain forests. It had been Yoshi’s idea, actually. He’d gone with some friends a few weeks earlier and thought Blake and I would enjoy it.
“We had a good time, didn’t we?”
“We sure did. It was steamy hot, though. What’s Japan like? And how’s my good friend Yoshi these days? Things okay? I like him, you know.”
“I know.” They’d hit it off, Yoshi and Blake, drawn together by a love of sailing and all things nautical, as well as by a kind of carefree approach to life that sometimes drove me crazy. They’d both been enamored of rambutans, the hairy red fruits piled high on roadside stands like shaggy Ping-Pong balls, and had pulled over five or six times to buy baskets full,