The Lake Of Dreams Part 25

"It wasn't your fault," Ned said. "It was was an accident. And he wasn't hurt." an accident. And he wasn't hurt."

"No. He was laughing. He was so little he didn't understand danger."

I was thinking of Max, standing over the rus.h.i.+ng water, turning back to smile at me as if nothing were the matter at all.

"What did you do?" Yos.h.i.+ asked. "After you left, what did you do? Where did you go? It must have been hard, you were so young."

"Yes. It was hard. Though when you're young you don't think about that so much. You don't realize you're setting a pattern for your life. They found me-I was staying with a friend-and when I said I didn't want to come back to the house, they sent me here, to Elmira, to a Mrs. Stokley, who needed a boarder. So I went. I took a job in one of the gla.s.s factories. I wanted to be a teacher, but of course I didn't have the training. When I was twenty-one, I met John Stone at a company picnic. He was an engineer, like Ned. He was flying a kite that day."

"My father," Ned said. "They were married for fifty-seven years."

"And you never saw Joseph again? Neither your uncle or your cousin?"

She shook her head. "My cousin, no. My uncle did come to visit. Just once. It must have been near the end of his life, goodness knows-I was in my fifties. He brought a photo from his childhood, and he took me to lunch, and he indicated that I'd be remembered when he died. I didn't put much faith in it, of course. And of course, since I never heard another thing about it, I knew I'd been right."

While we'd been talking, the door in the foyer had opened and shut again, softly, and a young woman dressed in shorts and a white tank top had taken a seat on the step down into the living room, resting her chin on her hand and listening intently. She had long hair pulled back in a ponytail. As the conversation paused, Carol introduced her as Julie, their youngest daughter.

Julie smiled and said h.e.l.lo. I replied, taking her in. Since Ned and my father were second cousins, Julie and I must be third cousins, if there were such a thing. Even if there were, did it matter? That was the sort of cousin you might not know about even if you grew up in the same town. She was tall, not quite as tall as me, but nearly so. I stood and she shook my hand.

"So you're a hydrologist," she said. "That's so interesting."

"I like it."

"And you work in j.a.pan?"

"Well, not exactly." I glanced at Yos.h.i.+. "We were living in j.a.pan, but we're on leave right now. Thinking about the next thing, whatever it might be."

"I know what you mean. I've done my share of that."

"Julie is a teacher," her father said. "But she has a pa.s.sion for animals. She rescues them. That's her real love."

I didn't know what to say-in this way we were not at all alike. I wondered if her apartment was full of stray cats.

"Exotics," Julie said, as if reading my mind. "I rescue exotic animals whose owners didn't know what they were getting into and finally abandoned them. So far I've adopted a boa constrictor, two monkeys, and three iguanas. The monkeys aren't at home, of course-there's a great facility in Kentucky that takes them."

"Julie," Carol said. "Grandma Iris asked to get the papers out of the house safe earlier. The old photos and so forth? But we couldn't seem to get it open. Your father has forgotten the combination, and we can't find the place where we wrote it down. I wonder, do you think you could help?"

"I can try."

Julie opened a door in the built-in cabinets and sat down at the safe, her ear pressed to the metal, her fingers resting on the dial. She closed her eyes, and my own heart quickened. The patterns of the internal mechanism flashed into my mind like a vision, the pins moving in their quiet patterns. Slowly, slowly, she turned the dial, listening to the voice of the metal. I knew how smooth and hard the safe felt against her cheek, how softly the tumblers s.h.i.+fted and clicked, each one like a breath released. She held herself still, listening, and then her face relaxed, breaking open with satisfaction. The feeling of success, of completion, welled up in me, too. She opened the little metal door and reached inside.

"Look at that," Ned said, chuckling.

"It's a gift," Carol agreed. "She's been able to do that since she was five years old. I don't know where she gets it."

"My uncle used to do that," Iris said, her voice far away, her eyes not quite focused on the here and now, as if she were seeing the world through the dual lenses of the present and the past-like trying to navigate the world in 3-D gla.s.ses.

"Me, too," I said, spreading my fingers. "I can do it, too."

They looked at me, my outstretched hands, in surprise. Then Julie pulled out a stack of papers and handed them to her father, who sorted through what looked like bonds and wills and deeds until he came to a single yellowed photograph, which my great-grandfather had given Iris on his single visit. It was a family portrait, dated August 22, 1909-the year Geoffrey Wyndham drove into the village in his Silver Ghost, a year before the comet. There were notes in pencil on the back. Rose was in the center, wearing a dark dress with a pale collar and cuffs. The other family members, also dressed in formal black, flanked her: a stern patriarch with his white beard, the older brother and three older girls who might have been cousins, their faces serious in the presence of the photographer. Rose's mother and an aunt and a grandmother sat stiffly on chairs in front of the others.

"What was the occasion?" I wondered.

"No one knows," Ned said. "A wedding, or a funeral, or maybe just a photographer pa.s.sing through the village."

"Here's Joseph," Iris added, her finger tapping beneath the boy standing next to Rose, squinting into the camera as if trying to discern the future. She paused, her voice softer. "And that girl must be Rose, I suppose. My mother."

I looked more closely, thinking of Rose's letters, the girl who had stood at the s.h.i.+p railing watching her country recede into mist. She was so young in this photograph, just fourteen, her hair still down, falling around her shoulders. She wore a ribbon around her neck and she was half-smiling, as if about to turn and make a joke; she alone of all the family-the serious older girls, standing in a row, and the careworn parents and aunts, and the grandmother, as old in the photograph as Iris was now, wearing a black bonnet and a visage like a withered plum-Rose alone looked happy.

What was she was thinking in that moment? What did she dream, and how did she imagine her life? On a summer morning, surrounded by her family, she turned, about to laugh, unaware of Edmund Halley or his comet, a chunk of ice traveling through the coldness of s.p.a.ce, whose arrival would cast such a strange light across her life. She did not know that a door was about to open in the world and she would walk through it, terrified and hopeful, into a future she could never have imagined.

"I'm tired," Iris said. She'd put the folder full of letters on the sofa, and her hands were resting on the blanket in her lap, her fingers working the edge of the silky fabric. "I'd like to have a rest, I think."

Ned was on his feet at once, reaching down to help Iris stand. She took his arm. I stood, too, and clasped her hand for a second. Her fingers were cold. I told her that I had something I'd like to show her, once she'd had a chance to read the letters and digest them. I explained about Frank Westrum and the windows and Rose, though I wasn't sure how much she was taking in. Ned was interested, though, and he paused with Iris in the hallway.

"You say there's a whole museum, full of stained-gla.s.s windows."

"Yes. Rose helped design them. She knew the artist. They were very close, in fact. She modeled for him."

"I see. Well, I think we'd all be very interested in knowing more, when my mother feels up to it."

"Yes," Iris said, and they started moving slowly back down the hallway to her room. "I would like to see them." Yos.h.i.+ and I stood for a few minutes longer, talking with Carol and Julie. I gave them the brochure I'd brought about the Westrum House, along with a description of the chapel.

"It's just overwhelming, I think," Carol said, as she opened the door. "I know I'm overwhelmed, so I can only imagine how Iris feels. She has to reconsider her whole life."

She walked with us to the car, admired the Impala's sleek golden lines, and promised they would be in touch. From the end of the long driveway, she watched us disappear into the leaves.

"I'm worn out, too," I told Yos.h.i.+ as we drove. "I'm emotionally wiped out. How about you?"

"Not so much. It's not my family, so it's just interesting from afar. Though, you know, my mother's family is from southwest England, near Bristol, I think. So maybe we're related, too."

"Oh, don't start."

He laughed. "It's incredible, though. The whole story is. And that you found her, after all these decades."

"It really is."

We talked about this as I drove, leaving Elmira for the blooming fields, daylilies running through the ditches like fire, the fields alive with b.u.t.terflies and insects, the lakes deep blue and s.h.i.+mmering as we drove along their sh.o.r.es.

Halfway back we'd settled into a companionable sort of silence when the car began to shake and fill with a steady thump-thump-thump. I eased the Impala onto the side of the road and checked-sure enough, the front pa.s.senger tire was completely flat. Yos.h.i.+ rummaged in the trunk-there was no spare-while I called my mother to see if she had a road service. She did, and I put in a call for help.

We were on the edge of a field high between the lakes, water visible in the distance. It was warm, and I was so worn out that I walked a few feet into the field and lay down, trying to ignore the buzz of insects, the cloud of dragonflies that lifted, translucent, from the edge of a nearby puddle and flew away. After a minute Yos.h.i.+ came and sat down beside me; I s.h.i.+fted so that my head was resting on his leg. He stroked my hair, letting his fingers linger on the soft skin below my ear. Beneath me the earth felt alive, rich with growing things, and beneath his touch I felt alive as well, alive and sleepy and nearly content. I ran my hand along Yos.h.i.+'s calf, hard and muscled, thinking how good it was to be here in this sunny field with him, the deep blue lake set like a bowl into the green fields of the earth. Then we heard the truck arrive, the door slam, and we both stood up, shaking seeds and bits of gra.s.s from our clothes.

A man in a white cap had left his tow truck and was rummaging in the Impala's huge trunk, which Yos.h.i.+ had left ajar. He'd pulled out an empty red plastic gas can, a bag of tools, a folded blanket, and my father's tackle box, and placed them carefully on the gravel shoulder. "They don't make trunks this big anymore," he said, looking up and smiling at us when we drew near. "Just thought I'd take a look-see, maybe there's a compartment for the spare." Yos.h.i.+ stood close to me, his hand warm on the small of my back, as the man searched and came up empty. He cheerfully and deftly unbolted the Impala's whitewall, leaned it against the b.u.mper, and replaced it with a temporary spare. The lake in the distance was blue, sheened with silver. He put everything back inside the trunk and slammed it shut, and we drove off once more.

Chapter 18.

WHEN WE GOT HOME IT WAS EARLY EVENING AND THE kitchen counters were covered with green cardboard quart containers filled with just-picked strawberries. My mother and Andy were standing side by side near the sink, their silver heads bent over the task, working and laughing. A pile of discarded stems grew high between them, and several earthenware bowls were mounded with wet berries. The air was thick with the scent of strawberries and sugar; by the stove, placed carefully on a dish towel, eight jars of jam, ruby red, were resting. One of the lids sealed with a click as Yos.h.i.+ and I came inside. My mother turned, smiling and holding up one hand to quiet us. Her hair was damp, clinging to her scalp, and her cheeks were flushed with heat. There was a streak of red below her elbow and her fingers were stained red, too. We stood still, and a second later another jar clicked, and then a third. My mother laughed and let her hand fall.

"There-I've been counting the seals, and now they're all done. Aren't they beautiful? I always love this part, the jars like jewels on the counter. We'll be so happy to have these when the snow is six feet high."

"They look good right now," Yos.h.i.+ said, slipping off his shoes at the door.

"Sorry we're so late. The road service took a while."

I crossed the room and took a strawberry from a bowl, biting through the red to its soft white heart, and offered one to Yos.h.i.+. We'd gone out early in the morning so many times when I was little, picking strawberries from their low bushes, or cherries from the trees, Blake and I eating as many as we picked. We'd come home with a car full of fruit, the kitchen growing warm and full of sweetness as the day unfolded and the jars of plump gold or red spheres or the pale sliced moons of pears lined up in rows, filling all the counters.

"Have a taste," Andy said. He wiped his hands on a towel and offered us a bowl of dark red jam, swirled with foam. "We got some of that fresh bread of Avery's, and some of her organic b.u.t.ter, too, and let me tell you, it's out of this world."

Yos.h.i.+ and I sat down at the table, suddenly ravenous, and ate, telling the story of our day in Elmira: the beautiful drive, Yos.h.i.+'s conversations in j.a.panese, Julie's familiar gift with the combination safe, and Iris's amazing story. My mother looked up from her work, her hands resting on the berry-stained counter, when I started describing Iris, how temperamental she'd been, how deeply it had affected her to learn the truth.

"It was very moving and very sad," I finished. "That's what I've been thinking about all the way home. Ninety-five years old, and she still felt abandoned. I hope it helps her to know what really happened."

"I hope so, too," my mother said. "I have to tell you, I'm relieved it went well. I mean, she could have been crazy, or mean, or dishonest, couldn't she? Or just someone you'd rather not know."

"It's true. You can't choose your relatives, can you? Your mother's been kind of worried all day," Andy said. He stepped past her, carrying a bowl of smashed berries to the pot, and kissed her cheek as he pa.s.sed. My mother glanced up at him and smiled.

"Everything was fine," I said. "We were fine."

While my mother and Andy finished preparing the berries, Yos.h.i.+ and I made a salad and rice. We grilled salmon on the patio. It was late when we all sat down to dinner, the sky darkening to pale blue, then indigo, as we pa.s.sed the food and poured wine. Distantly, boats hummed on the lake. Yos.h.i.+ rested his hand on my thigh as we finished, and it seemed to contain all the heat of the field where we'd waited for the road service to arrive, the suns.h.i.+ne and the buzz of insects, and the scent of earth and sweat. We carried the plates back inside, admired once more the gleaming ruby jars. Then my mother and Andy left for a late movie. We watched their headlights recede, Yos.h.i.+ standing behind me, pus.h.i.+ng my hair aside, kissing my neck. He took my hand when I turned, as if we were dancing, and when we climbed up to the cupola it was like walking underwater, slow and graceful, full of forceful currents.

When I woke up hours later, I'd been dreaming. From the floor of the cupola the night sky was visible in all directions, struck with stars, as if the sky were a dark canvas flecked with holes, beyond which shone some clear white light. It was easy to understand how ancient people had imagined another world beyond, the myths of trees that would somehow grow past the limits of the sky and take them there. Easy to understand why they had not wished to name such power, too. I thought of the Wisdom window, all the people growing from the earth, being filled with breath and life, and of the Iroquois creation story Keegan had told me, how a woman, pregnant with the breath of a G.o.d, fell through a hole at the root of a great tree into the night, fell far to the sea below, where a turtle rose to catch her and the animals dived to the depths to bring back bits of mud and to make the world. You live here, You live here, the stories all said, the stories all said, but you are filled with the breath of the Divine but you are filled with the breath of the Divine, and the world in your care is full of amazements and the world in your care is full of amazements.

Yos.h.i.+ slept. I turned to look at him. His mouth was slightly open and his breath faintly stale, his chest rising and falling in such a steady, gentle rhythm. I ran my hand along his arm and he twitched, then turned in his sleep and reached for me, his arm slipping around my waist. I curved against him, and we lay there at the top of the house, floating together in the night.

My dream, the one that had woken me, gradually surfaced again-not frightening, but intense, full of seeking and a sadness that lingered. I'd been fis.h.i.+ng with my father, floating in the hour before dawn. It was still dark and he was hardly visible next to me. We cast our lines and floated, cast again. We needed better lures, he said, and I pulled the tackle box from beneath the seat and opened it. Gray-green metal, it caught the faint moonlight. Opened, it revealed rows of lures, each in their own compartment. Iridescent, made of greens and blues and deep oranges that seemed to have been drawn from the depth of a prism, richly hued, yet also somehow luminous. They were like gemstones, smooth and spherical and trailing feathers, streamers, bits of lace. Some were tiny perfect images of the earth, blue-green and wondrous, each turning slowly in a mist of white. I wanted so much to hold them, yet when I touched them they broke into pieces, and the dream energy turned urgent and frustrating as I struggled to hold the broken halves and fragments together, to wrap the beautiful lures in twine or thread them on tiny metal dowels. Something was wrong, terribly wrong, and then my father showed me another box with lures that were whole, smooth and gleaming, and I despaired at those in my hands, so make-s.h.i.+ft, seamed, and broken, held desperately together by thread and metal rods and wis.h.i.+ng.

I stared up at the stars, concentrated on my breath and Yos.h.i.+'s in the little room. Surely this dream was connected with the windows full of women and with finding Iris, the piece of the family story that had been broken away a century ago, broken away and obscured. Yet it was connected also to the dreams I'd been having since the night I arrived, dreams that seemed to go deeper than the ripples on the surface of life, deeper even than memory. Dreams born out of the restless searching I'd been doing since I left this place so many years ago. I thought about those dreams, all the seeking of round things, hidden in leaves, spilling like mercury, and now here, spheres falling into pieces, caught in a metal box. Yos.h.i.+'s hand brushed my thigh, and I thought of how we'd sat at the edge of the sunny field while we waited for the road service, the pulse of his thigh beneath my cheek. I wanted to be there again, in the sunny field with Yos.h.i.+, the deep blue lake set like a bowl into the green fields of the earth, wanted that moment of peace before we heard the truck arrive, the door slam, and we sat up.

We had walked through the gra.s.s to meet the man in the white cap. The trunk of the Impala was still open and he pulled out a bag full of tools, an empty red plastic gas can, a folded blanket, and my father's tackle box, placing them carefully on the gravel shoulder, looking in vain for a spare. "They don't make trunks this big anymore," he'd said. Yos.h.i.+ stood close to me, his hand warm on the small of my back. We watched him work. The lake in the distance was blue, silvery, and the fields were alive with dragonflies. He put my father's things back inside the trunk and closed it.

I sat up, the bright, broken lures of my dream spilling their pieces everywhere. The air was cool and still, and the stars hadn't moved. After my father drowned, the searchers had gone out, diving for hours, bringing back a lake-filled boot, his sodden hat, his fis.h.i.+ng pole.

His tackle box, however, they'd never found.

His tackle box, hidden all this time in the trunk of his car.

I knew as surely as I knew my name or the rush of breath in my lungs that my father hadn't been going out to fish the night he died. He'd gone out onto the lake to think, to float on the water in the darkness and grapple with whatever had woken him or kept him from sleep, whatever had weighed so heavily on his mind.

I slipped from beneath the sheet, careful not to wake Yos.h.i.+, and pulled my shorts and T-s.h.i.+rt from the tangle of clothes on the floor. We'd carried the heat of that field with us all day, brus.h.i.+ng against each other like sun against gra.s.s, like stems pus.h.i.+ng through the soil, and the clothes we'd discarded so quickly as we'd kissed at the top of the cupola stairs still held something of that warmth and suns.h.i.+ne. I went down the stairs gingerly, trying to stay at the edges so the steps wouldn't creak, and stopped in the kitchen to collect the car keys from inside the cupboard door. Then I went out through the porch and across the lawn and driveway to the barn.

I was barefoot, the gra.s.s wet and the gravel harsh against the soles of my feet. The barn doors swung open quietly. The Impala was a shadow in the dim light. After my eyes adjusted, I groped my way to my father's workshop, stumbling against the lawn mower and knocking over a rake with a clatter. The flashlight hanging on the wall didn't work, the batteries long dead, but the old lantern still had an inch of kerosene at the bottom, and the matches were where they had always been, to the right of the jars of nails, above the shelf of planes. I lit the wick, and the gla.s.s globe filled up with light, casting objects back into their shapes, their shadows.

The car trunk opened easily, swinging upward. I moved the lantern forward, light flickering into the darkened s.p.a.ces. The tackle box, dull green, was pushed far back in the corner, and I had to put the lamp down before I could lift it out all the way. It was locked. I found a wire on the workbench and then I sat down right on the floor, the concrete cold and gritty against my legs. The wire was thin and warm in my hand. The night fell softly around my shoulders and I still felt halfway in a dream, as if my father were present, watching me slip the wire into the keyhole and press my ear against the box, listening, listening, with an ear that knew how to hear.

Silence, and then the subtle rush of metal on metal. The click, soft, almost imperceptible, when one of the pins fell into place. One, and then another, and then the final sound in the sequence, one, two, and then three three. I sat up. The lid was ajar, and I opened it.

The lures were as they always had been, dull, feathered with wire, plastic worms, each one different than all the others, none of them luminous, none of them a sphere. No little moons and planets, floating in their own misty atmospheres, filled the compartments. I'd seen these lures hundreds of times as a child, had helped my father make them, spreading the wires and bits of plastic or s.h.i.+ning metal on his workbench, coaxing them into shapes we imagined fish might dream of, and strike. I was filled with nostalgia, remembering the sharp, final sound of scissors on metal, the hiss of wire, the laughter of my father as he held the lure up, bright or dull, spinning or trailing, so we could admire our imaginations, our handiwork, the artifacts of pleasure.

I lifted out the insert with its bounty of lures. Everything was so ordinary, so much as it had always been, that I half expected to see the s.p.a.ce below filled with rolls of wire and twine, small pliers, extra fis.h.i.+ng line. Maybe my father had simply forgotten the tackle box, left it in the car after a trip to another lake, and found himself out that night on the still, dark waters with his pole and no lures. It was possible. However, when I saw the bottom, I knew my intuition had been right. The s.p.a.ce, usually orderly but cluttered with equipment, was empty except for a bundle of papers, several sheets together, folded in thirds, bound with a dark red rubber band that disintegrated when I tried to slip it off.

The page on top was unlined, with a single sentence in my father's handwriting: Found in kitchen, west wall Found in kitchen, west wall.

I closed my eyes and focused on my breathing, in and out, a pulse like the sea, waiting until I calmed down. Remembering the night I'd come in from the gorge, rushed with wind and guilt and anger, to find my father standing in the garden, smoking and thinking. Remembering that last spring, the kitchen torn apart for several weeks, walls stripped down to their studs, the air tasting of dust and metal, the new appliances sitting in their boxes on the porch, my father in his work clothes, pulling a bandana from his pocket to wipe the gritty sweat from his forehead and glancing through the broken plaster and dust to find these pages. I opened them, as he must have done, slowly, because I both wanted to know and did not want to know, and my hands trembled as I moved the cover page to the back and started reading.

It was a formal doc.u.ment, the last will and testament of my great-grandfather, Joseph Arthur Jarrett. The boy with his comet dreams had grown into a man who built a lock factory and restored this house, and who wrote, at the end of his life, in a firm, slanted script not so different from his sister's. I moved closer to the quivering golden light of the lantern, its faint hiss, the scent of kerosene, everything falling away into shadows except this paper, these words. There was a tribute to Cora, and a memorial bequest to the flower guild she had enjoyed. There were several other small bequests, to the library, to the church, to the hardware a.s.sociation. The bulk of his estate, however, was to be divided between his son, Joseph Arthur Jarrett Jr., and his niece, Iris Jarrett Wyndham Stone, who had last resided in Elmira.

To amend for the things I denied her. To remind my son that the world does not owe him a living by any reckoning.

It was dated May 1972, about six months before he died.

There were bats in the barn; one swooped low as I sat back, the papers in my hand, trying to a.s.similate all the dates, all that these pages meant and implied. In 1972 Rose had been dead for thirty years and Cora for more than a decade, so when my great-grandfather died there had been no one left alive in the family who remembered Rose directly or knew her story, no one to testify to the envelopes that had arrived every month in the early years, money that was spent on Iris, yes, for the new dresses and shoes or the books and tea sets, but that may have gone for other purposes as well-to help pay the expenses on the new business, to buy the grand falling-apart house on the lake and ensure its restoration. It was impossible, from this distance in time, or maybe ever, to separate good intentions and mistakes from calculated moves, impossible to know exactly what had transpired all those years ago, but it was vividly clear from this will that he'd carried regret with him always. At the end of his life, he had wanted to make amends, and it seemed he died believing he had done so.

Another bat swooped low and floated back into the rafters. The concrete was cold, but still I sat for a long time with the will in my hands, watching the pattern of flickering light and shadows on the ceiling and the wall, thinking of Rose, whom I had never known but had nonetheless come to love. Finally I stood up, brus.h.i.+ng dust and grit from the backs of my legs. I put the tackle box back in the trunk and closed it, extinguished the flame on the lantern and returned it to the workbench. Then I went outside and stood in the driveway, looking at the house, its eaves and porches, the cupola where Yos.h.i.+ slept, the peeling paint, the unkempt garden, overgrown and heavy with wild roses. We'd grown up here, Blake and I, running across the lawn, diving off the dock into the lake, believing that the world had a certain order, an inevitable pattern, as fixed as constellations in the sky. And all the time these papers saying otherwise had been sealed up in the kitchen wall.

The air smelled of roses, and waves shushed against the invisible sh.o.r.e. I tried to imagine my father's thoughts on that last night, as he smoked one cigarette, then two, then walked across the lawn and took the boat out, grabbing his pole but not his tackle box. Had he even known who Iris was? Had he been trying to find the story of her life in those weeks before he died? And who had sealed these papers away in the kitchen wall all those decades ago? Sealed them but not burned them, hidden them where they might never be found, or would surface only after so much time had pa.s.sed that any memories of Rose and Iris would have faded into dust. It might have been Joseph Arthur Jarrett himself, having changed his mind. Or it might have been my grandfather, who must have felt blistered with the anger radiating from these pages if he'd read them.

On the patio, the iron chairs were cold and damp with night condensation. I sat down, so agitated I wasn't thinking clearly, and pressed Blake's number on my speed dial. It rang ten times, twelve, fifteen, but finally he picked up, his voice gravelly with sleep.

"What is it?" he wanted to know.

"You were asleep. I'm sorry. Is Avery there?"

"Yeah, trying to sleep. Look, Lucy, what the heck's going on? What difference does it make if Avery's here?"

I stood up and walked to the edge of the patio, looking out across the lawn to the lake, the soft shuffling of shale beneath its waves against the beach.

"It's about Rose. I didn't want to wake you both."

"Well, thanks for that." I heard his footsteps, and then a s.p.a.ce opened up around his voice as he stepped out on the deck.

"Lucy, this is all ancient history, okay? Whoever this Rose person was, whatever sort of scandal she caused a hundred years ago, it just doesn't matter anymore. Can't you let it go? Get some sleep, and let me get some, too."

"Look, that's just it, I found her daughter," I said. "I found Rose's daughter, Iris. Yos.h.i.+ and I met her today. She's ninety-five, and she lives in Elmira. We met her family, too."

There was a silence, a rustling, and I imagined Blake sitting down on one of the deck chairs, looking up at the very same sky.

"Okay," he said, finally. "Tell me why it's so important. Why you're calling now, at one o'clock in the morning. You didn't just get back?"

I thought of the trip home through the blooming fields, daylilies running through the ditches like fire, the fields alive with b.u.t.terflies and insects, the lakes vivid blue as we drove on the ridges between them, how after that meeting I'd seen the world the way you do when you've been a long time under water, everything luminous and vibrant, strange and new, charged with life. I couldn't tell Blake about any of this, or about the dream of lures that had woken me, brought me to the barn and the tackle box and finally to this moment. And suddenly, remembering the rolls of drafting paper at Dream Master, their penciled plans-secret plans, unshared-I hesitated to tell Blake about the will.