Part 25 (2/2)

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.

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