The Lake of Dreams - Kim Edwards [97]
The door to Art’s office was open and I walked in, as I had walked in so often as a child, freely, as if the building were our playground. Once I’d hidden in these cupboards, which had been in my father’s office, during a game of hide-and-seek. I’d been crouched in the dark, listening to distant voices calling my name, when the office door opened and my father came in with Art. Their voices were sharp; I closed my eyes and imagined the words as knives slashing at the air, and when I opened them again, the darkness was still present. I was afraid, huddled in that small dark space, too scared to move even after the argument ended and Art’s footsteps receded. Blake was crying somewhere and my father swore and left to help, the door falling shut behind him. I crawled out then, blinded by the light in the room, my hands tingling, numb.
Now I opened a cupboard door—the shelves were full of papers, files, ledgers—and let it fall shut again. On the easels by the window were the plans for The Landing; on Art’s desk was a folder with estimates of costs. I picked this up, let it fall, too. The office was so silent, sun slanting in and making rectangles on the desk, and I wasn’t sure if the feelings of apprehension and betrayal, so stirred up within me by the memory of that lost afternoon, had their source in the present or the past—or if it was even possible to draw a line between them.
I left the offices and went to the stairway at the back of the building, climbing up into the factory spaces on the second and third floors, which were empty now, the high paned windows dusty, all the machines long gone. Once, workers had streamed into this place day after day, pressing keys, and more keys, forming the components of the locks, their secret lives going on within them, their actions so familiar that they didn’t have to think. In 1919, the year Dream Master was established, my great-grandfather sat below in the same office Art used now, overseeing everything. It was nearly five years after Rose left. Four years before they bought the house on the lake. Six years before my grandfather was born and Iris went away.
I walked over to the window that overlooked the village. The masts of the boats anchored at the pier bobbed in the distance. The air in the old factory was hot and still. I wrote my initials in the dust of a windowpane, then rubbed them out. The Impala sat in the parking lot, a bright bird from another era. I stayed for quite a while, moving from window to window, watching people come and go from the renovated buildings across the street, laughing, careless, as if no other time existed or ever would, oblivious to all the other lives that had been lived over the generations on this very same spot.
The heat gathered; sweat trickled down my neck. I went back downstairs quickly, thinking about Rose and her letters locked in the car, about all the layers of the past. On the landing, I nearly ran into Joey. I gasped in surprise, hands flying to my chest, and he stopped dead, too, looking as shocked as I was. He was dressed in cutoffs and flip-flops, carrying a six-pack of beer, his blond hair already going lighter from the sun. A young woman stood behind him.
“What are you doing here?” he asked.
“Looking for Blake,” I said, which was partly true. “The door was unlocked.”
Joey touched the handle. “That’s weird. It’s Sunday, right? We closed at five o’clock.”
“Right. Look, I’m sorry. I just thought Blake might still be here. And then, you know, I kept remembering things from when we were kids. When we used to play hide-and-seek here, remember that? I went upstairs to look around. What are you doing here?” I asked, bolder now that I’d recovered a little. “Who is this?”
“Yeah, I remember those