The Lake Of Dreams Part 20

Chapter 14.

ON THE PATIO THAT EVENING, ANDY WAS POURING WINE FOR my mother-it was my mother, though it took me a second to recognize her, her hair so short, silvery gray and feathery, the emerald silk top with a mandarin collar resting so elegantly against her neck. She was wearing white slacks and gold sandals, and though she smiled when she saw me and stood up to hug me, her arm free of its cast and warm against my back, I was disconcerted, as if I'd stumbled into an intimate dinner party between strangers.

"Have a seat, Lucy," Andy said, reaching for the extra gla.s.s they'd placed on the table and pouring me some wine. He was dressed up, too, wearing a tie. "We're having a drink to celebrate your mother's losing that cast, and then we're headed off to Skaneateles. Your mother, I discovered, has never had the pleasure of dinner at Doug's, which is without question the best fish fry I've ever had. So we're going to do that, and then I have tickets to a violin concert in a church by the lake. You're welcome to join us." He glanced at my mother, who smiled her agreement. "I'm sure we could pick up another ticket when we get there."

I thanked him and declined, truly regretful, because Skaneateles was always beautiful on a summer evening, the lake a clear turquoise blue, the village carefully preserved in all its charming late-nineteenth-century splendor. "Sounds like a nice evening, though," I added, making a mental note about Doug's Fish Fry, which sounded like a good place to take Yoshi when-or if-he ever got here.

"Are you going out again?" my mother asked.

"Maybe," I said vaguely, though I was. Keegan had called an hour earlier and invited me on a boat ride because it was supposed to be such a nice evening. I said I'd like that, and he said okay, I'll pick you up, and I said no, I'll meet you at the gla.s.sworks around eight o'clock. Beneath this conversation, so mundane on the surface, ran the powerful currents of our walk through the forest and our kiss in the stream, and beneath even that were the deeper currents of our history, all the evenings we'd spent as teenagers driving wild through the countryside or drifting on the lake.

I'd spent the day swimming and floating on the raft, filled with the images from the chapel, which lingered so powerfully, and the letters Rose had written. From time to time, I'd come inside, the kitchen dim after the brightness of the sun on the lake, to get a gla.s.s of iced tea and check my e-mail. There had been a brief, not very satisfying message from Yoshi, giving me his updated itinerary and not much more; I didn't know how his meetings had gone or exactly when he planned to leave for the island. I was torn between feeling concerned and feeling relieved. That kiss with Keegan in the stream had left me unsettled, unsure of what I was doing or what I wanted, distrustful of even my own motivations. It was better, it seemed, not to talk to Yoshi across all those vast miles until I'd come to terms with whatever was going on in my own heart.

Each time I closed the computer, I noted my feelings of both disappointment and relief. I went back outside and read pa.s.sages from Rose's letters over again, trying to imagine myself into her story, into her dreams and struggles. She must have felt so angry and abandoned, standing alone in the church, the chalice heavy in her hands, so alone and frightened that she betrayed the one part of her life she'd held most dear, slipping the silver cup between the folds of her skirt, slipping away.

They had given up so much to make this journey-friends and family, everything they'd known. They'd come seeking prosperity, a chance to remake their lives, but as logical as that vision sounded from my place in history, it seemed that, for those early years at least, she and Joseph had been little more than servants. It was easy to imagine Rose sitting on the periphery of a meeting or a tea, the talk of equal rights stirring her heart even as she kept her head bent over the mending and the hemming. Perhaps she'd stayed awake late into the night to read, the pamphlets and magazines she'd collected both shocking and alluring, drawing her back again and again, until it all welled up within her that morning of the march, when she left her gloves on the bushes and joined that crowd of women without measuring the cost, knowing only that this was a chance for her voice to matter in the world.

"Here's to your mother," Andy said, putting the bottle down and raising his gla.s.s. "To being cast-free!" My mother laughed and shook her head, raising her gla.s.s with the arm that had healed, and we drank.

"Well, I'm glad to have it off," she said, her fingers lingering on the delicate stem of the gla.s.s. Nets of light reflected from the water made patterns on the table. "But you know, Andy, if it weren't for the accident, we wouldn't have met, would we? So I can't regret it completely."

They shared a private smile. I took a long swallow of wine.

"Sweetheart," my mother went on, turning to me. "Are you sure you don't want to join us? It'll be fun. Plus, I feel like I've hardly seen you, even though you've been here over a week. Before you know it, Yoshi will be here. I can't wait to meet him, but then you'll be gone again. When does he get in?"

"He's supposed to come Sat.u.r.day," I said, deciding not to mention that Yoshi had been vacillating about this the last time we spoke. I'd been avoiding thinking about our last conversation, which had all the early marks of so many of my breakups, the way I allowed distance to bloom up until I could justify leaving for good. Still, this was Yoshi, and I'd imagined a different life with him. The time we'd shared together in Jakarta, the languorous romance and our lives in the river house, calm and interwoven, was the closest I'd ever come to being completely happy, even if things hadn't been so tranquil in j.a.pan. He said once that I was always running away from things, and maybe it was true. Since I'd been here, I'd certainly boxed up all my feelings about Yoshi, plunging into the distractions of Rose's fascinating history and the unfolding drama of the land. And then there was Keegan, and where was I going with that? Moving on, maybe? I'd done it often enough before. Yet now that Yoshi was hesitating about coming to visit, I was surprised by the depth of my sadness.

Andy urged me again to join them and I declined, though I didn't mention my plans for the evening, as if I were still seventeen.

They weren't in a hurry to leave-it was still early. Andy asked what the chapel had been like, and I went inside to get the pictures I'd printed. The rooms were cool, dim after the bright patio; the screen door slammed and the murmur of their voices followed me. The life I remembered in this house was gone, pure and simple, and had been for years.

Back on the patio, I spread the images of the windows across the gla.s.s-topped table. While they didn't come close to capturing the splendor of the chapel, they were beautiful nonetheless. Andy and my mother pa.s.sed them back and forth, commenting on the colors, the artistry, and the remarkable nature of this find. Andy said they ought to open it up for tours, and my mother agreed.

"I suppose it will depend on who ends up with that land," she said pensively, still studying the images. "But maybe even a developer would see the value and keep it intact. Kind of like a centerpiece. I can imagine Art doing something like that, can't you? Is it still a functioning church?"

"It was deconsecrated," I said. The idea of the chapel surrounded by sprawling high-end homes filled me with a kind of helpless rage. It wasn't proprietary, as I'd felt with Oliver, but rather a deep sense that the windows should be set apart, valued for something beyond their monetary worth. "That's what Suzi said, anyway. There's special liturgy, I guess. But apparently a church can be reconsecrated, too. I get the impression the church officials are trying to get it back. I hope they do. Because no, actually, I can't see Art valuing these windows at all. Not in the way they should be valued."

"Well, of course the church wants them back-beauty aside, the land must be worth a fortune," Andy said, ignoring my comment about Art, and missing my point altogether.

"It must," my mother agreed. "The land alone is worth a mint."

My concerns about her plans for the house flared again. I hoped my mother wouldn't use the chapel to justify selling Art the land. I wanted to say something, but with Andy there, I really couldn't. And maybe I couldn't anyway: it wasn't my business, as both she and Blake had so clearly pointed out.

They finished their wine and invited me once more to join them. I waved from the porch as they pulled out. I collected my clothes from the dryer and carried them upstairs, where I spent half an hour putting things in order, lining the note cards about Rose up on the desk like a school project. Then I left, slipping on my jeans and a long-forgotten pair of heeled sandals that I'd found in the back of my closet, glad to get away from the house, the empty e-mail. I rolled the Impala windows down all the way, the rushing air tangling my hair. As I reached the village I had to slow down because the traffic was so thick. I parked behind Dream Master and crossed through the gravel lot to the dock.

Keegan was waiting for me, standing with his hands in the pockets of his cargo shorts, looking down the outlet to the place where it curved and disappeared into the trees. The outlet was calm and clear, the turbulent waters after the rain having receded. I shook off the memory of Max by the foaming water. From this distance, Keegan hardly looked older than he had in high school, though he'd traded his motorcycle for a van with side airbags, and his leather jacket for a windbreaker. I waved, smiling as if I were a teenager again. First with the arguments at the house and then with that kiss on the sh.o.r.e, I'd fallen in, been swept headlong into the dynamics of the past, which I thought I'd left behind. Keegan gave me his hand to help me into the boat. He sat behind the wheel, engaged the motor, and chugged slowly through the outlet to the lake. People were strolling, holding hands, eating ice cream; some of them waved from the sidewalk. We pa.s.sed under the bridge and then traveled past the marina. Blake was on the deck of his boat, and I waved as we glided out into the open water, feeling contrite because I'd leaked his secret. I'd been angry with him about the land, angry with my mother, too, and I'd spoken without thinking. He waved back, and Keegan pressed the throttle hard. We took off, bouncing over the waves. He was relaxed, comfortable with the lake and the speed, like athletes so born to their sport that they seem to become other creatures when they swim or leap or run. Keegan in a boat had always been that way.

It was twilight when we started, the wealthy homes and the scars on the land all faded into the same dusk. The sky had deepened into darkness by the time Keegan finally slowed down in the middle of the lake. It was a clear night, the stars vivid, and even out this deep the water was smooth and calm.

"You thirsty?" he asked, opening the cooler stashed at his feet and pulling out a bottle of wine.

"Sounds nice, thanks. It's a pretty night."

"Doesn't get any better," he agreed. He opened the wine and poured some into plastic gla.s.ses, and we floated, not speaking, comfortable in the silence, the night growing deeper around us. On a boat, On a boat, Rose had written, Rose had written, you are no place at all. you are no place at all.

Maybe it was the darkness, or the quiet, but I found myself telling Keegan about my dreams, the things I'd lost in the foliage and the trees and could never piece together once I finally found them, the wallet that had been lost and held for me for so many years, my ident.i.ty sealed inside.

"I had dreams like those once," he said. "A kind of series, not exactly the same. It was during the time when I was wandering around a lot, after I got out of art school, before I came back here. I was on a ship to Mexico. I'd got on it in California. It was a freighter, and they gave me work, and though I could speak enough Spanish at that point to get the jobs done and even joke around a little with the rest of the crew, I couldn't really join in when they got together in the evening for a drink. There were a couple of other foreigners on the crew, but they didn't speak much English, either. So I was alone a lot. Alone at sea. Not much to do but read the couple of paperbacks I'd thought to bring. Read and think. Work and sleep and dream.

"I started having this recurring dream around that time. It was in a forest, too, like yours, except I was always following a path, the trees getting thicker and denser and the trail more faint, and there was always a moment when I looked down and realized I wasn't human anymore-I'd transformed into some sort of animal, a different one each night. A lynx, a wolf, a panther-something fierce and seeking."

"And what happened? How did they end?"

"We got to Mexico. I got off the boat. There was a bus, and the name of the company was Linea de Los Lobos-Line of the Wolves. So it seemed kind of like a sign, and I got on. I took it to the last stop, which was a beautiful village in the highlands. I stayed there for a year. Fell in love, learned to speak the language. Then I got word that my mother was sick, so I came back."

I nodded, drank a little more. I wondered who Keegan had been in love with. The patterns of his life were largely unknown to me, no matter how familiar he seemed.

"You came back," I repeated. "And how was that, at first?"

Waves lapped at the boat. Keegan finished his wine before he answered.

"Truthfully? I didn't think about it. I didn't think about it as I was coming back. It was just something I was doing for the time being. Then I met Beth. Even then, I kept telling her I wasn't planning to stick around, I didn't want to get serious." He gave a short laugh. "She's a good person, Beth. She didn't deserve a lot of the things I did. Out of sadness, when my mother died. Out of a feeling that I'd taken a wrong turn somewhere and ended up in a life I hadn't really intended to lead. Talk about dreams-toward the end, after Max was born, I kept dreaming that I walked out the front door and found myself transformed into a lynx again, wandering in a city I didn't know."

"So you think they're important, then? Dreams?"

"Oh, yeah. You know, the Iroquois take dreams very seriously. They see them as the secret wishes of the soul-the heart's desire, so to speak. Not all dreams, maybe, but the important ones. And when they recur, I tend to think they're important. I kept dreaming of the lynx when I was in the village, too. Then I'd be rushing through a jungle or swimming a river at night in a dream. This was during a time when I'd stopped doing any creative work, and the lynx kept taking me to fields where things were growing, or rivers where fish were leaping out and piling on the sh.o.r.e. So I knew I had to get back to a creative life again, a life of making things. It wasn't just the bus, the outward journey. It was where it was taking me inwardly, as well. And that was true later, too."

We were drifting near the middle of the lake. Below the water the land fell three hundred, four hundred, five hundred feet deep, a point where even at the height of day no light traveled through to reach the depths. For a second I felt breathless, imagining the vast water below and the vast air above, and myself so small, floating in the midst of all that s.p.a.ce. I thought about all my dreams of lost spheres falling into pieces.

"I don't know. My dreams don't make a lot of sense."

"Maybe you haven't dreamed enough," he suggested.

"Maybe not."

I was thinking of j.a.pan then, the faces of all those people floating just beneath the surface of the water, the jolting earth, the way I jerked out of sleep, paralyzed by the responsibility I felt to fix whatever had gone wrong. We drifted for a time, lost in our own thoughts.

"I've never told those dreams to anyone else," Keegan said after a while.

"I guess I haven't, either." This was true. Yoshi had never asked to know what the dreams were about, but had simply turned and held me whenever I woke up from one.

"That's good. You should be careful, sharing dreams."

I thought of Rose, revealing her life's dream in the ruins of the monastery, and of Joseph, his dreams like a net to snare the future.

"You know," Keegan said, "after your father died I used to take the boat out and float in the water near your house, watching people move through the lighted rooms inside, hoping for a glimpse of you."

"You did?"

His face wasn't visible in the darkness, so I couldn't tell what he might be feeling, though I remembered the numbed sense of loss and guilt that spread over everything and made it impossible for me to feel anything else during that time. I thought of the letters, Rose writing of that moment before she stole the chalice from the church, that night I was so heartsick I could feel nothing else. that night I was so heartsick I could feel nothing else. Looking back, I'd been that way, too, for years and years, shutting myself off, pressing sadness and loss down beneath my adventurous and busy days so I wouldn't feel overwhelmed. Now grief engulfed me, as if I'd been walking on a thin crust that had formed on its surface and had broken through, falling suddenly and deeply into its darkness. Looking back, I'd been that way, too, for years and years, shutting myself off, pressing sadness and loss down beneath my adventurous and busy days so I wouldn't feel overwhelmed. Now grief engulfed me, as if I'd been walking on a thin crust that had formed on its surface and had broken through, falling suddenly and deeply into its darkness.

"I did. Not forever. Just for a couple of weeks."

"I'm so sorry."

"Are you crying? Look, Lucy, I'm not trying to guilt you. I just wanted you to know that I was thinking about you, even then."

"I know," I said, wiping my eyes. "I'm not really crying."

"You really are."

"It's old stuff, that's all. It's still hard to remember that night, what might have happened, and what did. He was in the garden when you dropped me off. That was the last time I ever saw him."

"Lucy." Keegan took my hand then. He didn't say anything else.

After a minute I pulled myself together and wiped my eyes. "I found out all this stuff about Rose," I said, to change the subject.

We talked a little bit about the chapel then, and the windows, luminous and mysterious, how forcefully they'd stayed with us both. We talked about Suzi and Oliver and what might happen with the land. I told him more about Rose, her dreams, how I'd been trying to understand her life, to reconstruct how her story had ended up woven into the story of this chapel full of windows.

"I'm going back to Seneca Falls on Friday," I said. "I don't know what else I'll find. Maybe nothing. But I'm hoping for the end of the story, or at least to find another piece of it."

"And then what?" Keegan asked. "How long will you stay?"

"Well, then Yoshi comes. And then-I don't know."

Water lapped lightly at the edges of the boat. We were sitting in the back, near the diving platform, and I was vividly aware of Keegan next to me, the faint heat of his body in the evening air.

He slid his hand up my arm, let it rest on my shoulder. I was so tempted then to give in to the powerful currents of desire, to slip back into that familiar way of being, that time before, when Keegan and I were still carefree, driving off into the lake-scented darkness as if we'd live that way forever. That was impossible, though. So much time had pa.s.sed, so many things had happened. And he had his life here, while I did not.

"Let's swim," I said, pulling back, slipping my shirt over my head. I was wearing a bathing suit underneath; I pushed off my shorts. Before he could answer I was poised on the edge of the boat, and then I dived, cutting deep and clean, the water closing over me. I went down and down, feeling the depth by coldness because there was no light.

I wondered what I would find at the bottom if I could dive far enough, what wreckage I would discover scattered along the landscape beneath the weight of water. Boulders and mud and moss, and the swift movement of dark fish brushing my skin, and maybe the long-lost dinner boat that had caught fire before it sank, and maybe the plates and the forks and the gla.s.ses those people had been holding in their hands when they saw the flames and leaped. Maybe their crinolines and corsets, their shoes and boots, discarded as they tried to swim to sh.o.r.e. Maybe my father's lost tackle box or the plane that had gone down fifty years ago, knifing through the clear water just after takeoff, the bodies floating upward, drifting with the currents, miles away. Or maybe I'd find ice picks and axes scattered by the midwinter crew that was out cutting thick blocks for the ice houses when the frozen lake began to tremble and crack under the weight of their sleighs and they fell into the icy water, the men in their thick coats, the horses with their harnesses, the sleigh plummeting until it reached the muddy bottom, dragging everyone along.

My lungs began to spark and I caught myself in all that darkness, the world just the same whether my eyes were closed or open. Threads of panic ran through me. I had to force myself not to move, to let myself float for a second to gain my sense of direction, for there was no light to guide me. I kicked harder, rising, I hoped, rising and not falling, my panic growing because I could not see, could not tell how long until I could breathe, and then I was bursting through the surface, tipping my head back to inhale the beautiful clear night air.

"d.a.m.n, Lucy," Keegan said. He was in the water, too, and he took several strokes to reach me, pushing an inner tube into my hands. The rubber was still warm from its day in the sun. "You were down so long. I was beginning to think I'd lost you."

"Thanks," I said, breathing more evenly now.

"Hey." He was treading water next to me and he put one hand on the tube, brought his face close to mine. "You sure you're okay?"

"I will be. It was so dark. Hard to know where the surface was."

Kicking, his foot grazed my calf, the fabric of his shorts drifting along my leg.

"Sorry," he said. He was setting off little currents in the water that rippled all around me. I remembered what Yoshi had said, how he felt I was always trying to keep such a tight rein on everything and then closing down when I couldn't. But from what was I running now? From the bloom of the past, from the life Keegan had made, so rich, so solid, so rooted in this place? Or was I running from Yoshi, or even from myself?

"You're swimming in your clothes," was what I said.

"I am. It seemed like an emergency situation."

Sometimes loneliness, I thought, and remembered Yoshi again, his kindness and long patience with the grief I'd been pressing down and carrying around for so long, I thought, and remembered Yoshi again, his kindness and long patience with the grief I'd been pressing down and carrying around for so long, Keegan's foot again, this time running lightly along the length of my leg. His eyes were bright with laughter.

"I'm not not sorry," he said. "Not that time." sorry," he said. "Not that time."

I didn't want to think anymore, I just wanted to go back to that time before everything had changed, and so I turned the inner tube to kiss him the way we used to kiss, in the dark fields, on the dark lake, except that now the water was between us, was around us, and every touch set off currents, his hand stroking my arm, my leg, and the little waves moving between us in reply. It wasn't as if we had never done this, back in the days when we used to slip away at every chance. This was a game we'd played on long summer nights, to see how long we could stay below, every touch amplified because we could not see.

I put an arm around his neck and he had an arm around my waist. He let go of the tube and then I did, and we slipped gently beneath the surface, still kissing, drifting slowly down through the darkness. We weren't falling, we weren't floating, we simply were, warm against each other in the dark night lake, his touch as gentle as the touch of water. My thoughts traveled past the sleighs and sunken ships, the detritus of shattered lives, through the images of the women in the windows, the things they carried, the stories they told. They settled on the image of Max, standing so calmly on the edge of the roiling water, a step away from falling. They flitted away and came finally to my father, standing in his boat, barely visible against the dawn, like a silhouette or a figure in a negative print, and then he fell, he struck his head and went down and down through this same water, he had fallen and fallen and never come back.

All my nightmares were at the bottom of this lake, everything I'd ever lost was there. I pulled away from Keegan and swam back to the surface, breaking through, gasping again in the clear night air. This must have been how it felt to be born into the world, to open my mouth and feel the rush of air for the very first time.

Keegan came up a second later, shaking water from his hair.

"Lucy," he said.

And I said, "I can't, Keegan, I can't."

I swam to the edge of the boat and climbed up the narrow metal ladder. Keegan followed and sat across from me, so close our knees touched.

"Are you sure?" he asked.

I nodded. For the first time in years, I was clear. "I didn't want it to end," I said, meaning both that last kiss in the dark lake and all the time we'd spent together being young and wild, thinking we could go on that way forever. "But I think it had to."

"Do you?" He took my hands in his. His shorts and shirt were clinging to his skin. He was still wearing his shoes. He must have been frightened, to dive in after me like that. "Because I have always wondered, if your father hadn't died, if we might have-look, I just always thought we'd end up together."

"I know. I used to think so, too, I really did. But I was leaving, Keegan. That whole spring, I was. If my father hadn't died, I still would have gone."

I remembered the urgent restlessness I'd felt that final spring, when I was riding wild with Keegan and yet heading every moment to a future I knew would not include him, how I'd chosen a college three thousand miles away.

"You have made such a good life," I said, feeling the truth of those words, thinking of the growing gla.s.s, the fire, the clean lines of his apartment, built in a s.p.a.ce once deserted, full of debris.

He smiled, a little sadly. "It is a good life. A very good life."

"And Max-he is such a wonderful boy. You wouldn't have Max if we'd ended up together."

He nodded. After a minute he slipped his hands from mine and rested them on his thighs.

"No. That's true."

We were silent for a moment, waves lapping against the side of the boat.

"When is he coming?" Keegan asked. "Your boyfriend from j.a.pan."