The Lake of Dreams - Kim Edwards [96]
There is more, but it must wait.
This letter was not signed, but ended with a penciled drawing of a rose.
I ran my fingertips along its upper edge. This is how it began, then, a year before the comet. So much for my great-grandfather’s luminous dream, which we believed had started everything. So much for the family history, drawn in a straight line from one generation to the next—history that did not even mention Rose. I felt as I’d so often felt in Japan, waking to earthquakes in the middle of a summer night, as if the world were an unsteady place, about to split wide open. I thought of the beautiful cloth with its row of vine-encrusted moons trembling with the breeze from the lake.
My mother had found that cloth wrapped in plain paper, hidden in the lining of my great-grandfather’s trunk, with the handwritten note inside. Whatever answers these letters provided, the questions they raised were even greater. For now I could imagine Rose sitting in a cold parlor in the middle of the night, weaving, her breath visible, her fingers growing numb. I could imagine all this, but not why she had left, or how the blanket had passed through the years, unopened, ignored. As much as I wondered what had happened to Rose, I wondered also what had happened to her child.
I glanced at my watch. It was already after five. I’d been sitting in the car reading these letters for almost an hour. There were more, but I felt I’d taken in as much as I could for the moment. I slipped the pages back into their plain envelopes and the envelopes back into the binder, which I left on the seat beside me. Then I turned the key in the ignition and drove out of town, traveling on the local roads again, my windows open to the breeze, trying to sort through everything I’d learned, to refocus my lens on the world.
When I reached The Lake of Dreams there was a regatta and the streets were crowded with cars and tourists. There was a detour away from the lake, and on an impulse I turned down the outlet street. The Green Bean was full, people standing on the sidewalk with buzzers in their hands, waiting for a table; clouds of laughter and voices poured from the patio by the water and drifted across the road to me. The glassworks was busy, too.
I parked in the gravel lot behind Dream Master, ignoring all the NO TRESPASSING signs. It was closed for the day, and a kind of stillness had settled around it. I slid the binder beneath the seat and locked the car, pushing down the chrome buttons and checking twice to make sure I still had the keys. The gravel was rough under my feet, and heat rose from all the tiny stones. I thought of going to see Keegan, but I’d see him Wednesday, after all, when we went to view the windows in the chapel. He’d be busy now, either with work or with Max, and if he wasn’t he’d be stretched out on the sofa or his open bed, a fan clicking in the high ceiling. As I imagined that, I imagined myself there with him, how he might turn to me in that space, as he had so long ago, learning about each other amid the ruined machines as the light faded from the windows. It shocked me, the strength of the image, the desire I had to see if it might happen this way—though I couldn’t tell if it was really desire in the present or left over from the unfinished past. Not just the past with Keegan, and a desire to know what might have happened between us if I’d stayed, but the more uncomfortable past where I kept on leaving—countries, jobs, people I loved. I kicked at the gravel and walked to the back of Dream Master instead.
There was a loading dock there. It used to seem so high, we used to jump from it on a dare. There was the old Coke machine, too, empty now, its long vertical door ajar. I climbed up the steps to the back door. The locks here hadn’t been changed since Art had sold the lock-making business decades ago. The wire I always carried was in the bottom of my bag and it took me only a minute or two to