Part 30 (1/2)

”Not exactly,” Avery said. ”Tell the rest.”

”Well, I'm starting a new venture,” he said. He gestured across the water to where the cruise boat was docked, people filing on for the early afternoon tour of the lake. ”I've been having these conversations off and on for years with Mike Simms-you know he owns that business, right? He's wanted me to come in as a partner, with the thought of buying him out eventually, and I haven't wanted to do it. Didn't want to be tied down at first; didn't want the daily ha.s.sles, either. But after I quit at Dream Master, I went to talk to him again. I think we've worked out a deal. It's not just going to be tour cruises anymore. We're going to expand and add a lunch and dinner cruise as well. They do that on some of the other lakes, and it's a good seasonal business. Avery's doing the food,” he added, and smiled.

”I needed something a little less twenty-four-seven,” she said, ignoring his compliment. ”With the baby coming, I've hired a manager for The Green Bean, and another chef, but I didn't want to stop cooking altogether. This seemed like it could work.”

Yos.h.i.+ and I helped them for a while, carrying several boxes down the dock to Blake's truck, driving over to see the new place. It was small and ramshackle, with a 1950s kitchen, but very charming, too, with a wide front porch. When we were done, we walked back downtown to pick up the car and drive back along the lake road.

”Well,” Yos.h.i.+ said, stretching his arms out across the wide front seat. ”We have six days left before our flight back to j.a.pan. We have no jobs and limited savings-nothing but our dreams.”

”That's right,” I said. ”Whatever else, we're free.”

Epilogue.

ON THE NIGHT BEFORE YOs.h.i.+ AND I LEFT THE LAKE OF Dreams, our last night in the airy darkness of the cupola, I lay awake for a very long time, searching for constellations. Scorpio and Sagittarius were visible; I traced the lines between the stars and wondered, as I often had before, how these intricately imagined characters had ever been a.s.signed to such sketchy patterns in the sky. I wondered how these same stars might look from another perspective-say, from the moon. Next to me, Yos.h.i.+ slept, his hair dark against the sheets, his breathing steady, and a comfort, like the sound of the waves against the sh.o.r.e. We'd woken weeks ago to the uneasy s.h.i.+fting of the earth, and now we were here, our known universe having altered in ways we never could have imagined.

I watched the stars, fixed and burning in the night.

Was it a dream, what happened next, or a kind of waking vision? Did I sleep? The same patterns of stars were visible, the same curved edge of the moon, but I was standing in the shallow water on the sh.o.r.e, my feet sunk deep into the smooth shale beach, waves splas.h.i.+ng my knees and small fish swimming around my ankles. My toes dug deep into the stones, flowing out like roots, and my arms reached like branches to embrace the sky with its scuttling clouds, its beautiful pale round moon. My fingers, far above, fluttered into leaves.

I sat up, exhilarated. The air was soft, and Yos.h.i.+'s legs were tangled with mine; I eased myself free and climbed across the futon to the window. There was the moon, full and tranquil in the sky, making a path of light across the black expanse of water.

The wind stirred softly. I thought of Rose, of the chalice she'd taken, lost from her things or stolen again or sold and melted for the silver, of her stained-gla.s.s windows, her rows of vine-woven moons, and of the people in the Wisdom window, their arms lifted to the sky. I remembered my mother's tulips, radiant, emerging from their leaves, delicate cups swaying on their stems. The singing bowls by my bed in j.a.pan, and a goblet forming, flowerlike, at the end of a fragile gla.s.s stem.

I lifted my arms like the people in the window, my legs and torso like a stem, my arms a crescent curve. Male or female, it didn't matter. Then or now, no difference.

I was a tulip, a cup, a calyx.

I was, in that moonlight pouring down, a chalice.

My dream stayed with me in the weeks and months that followed, but I didn't share it with anyone except Yos.h.i.+. It seemed best left in metaphor, akin to the herons rising at the edge of the pond. Best left unnamed. I didn't want anyone to laugh at me or raise their skeptical eyebrows or to simply not pay attention. I thought about it, though, every time I saw a flower blooming, a person dancing, or hands cupped to lift water.

Yos.h.i.+ and I flew back to j.a.pan, taking one train and then another and finally walking down the cobblestone street to our apartment, which was just as we had left it so many weeks before. We cleaned it out entirely, selling our appliances and giving away everything we couldn't s.h.i.+p to our next life in Cambodia. For those were the jobs, finally, that had appealed to us, the jobs we'd been offered and had taken. My father had fought in Vietnam and he'd written about Cambodia in the letters my mother had saved, bound together with a piece of green ribbon. My mother had a photo of him standing in front of the Royal Palace. I didn't know much more than that, but the connection, however tenuous, made the decision to go there feel right. So we packed and cleaned. The earthquakes had eased-the underwater island had finally formed. On our last day there, Mrs. Fujimoro gave me a beautiful silk scarf, and in return I gave her a kaleidoscope made of bra.s.s with hundreds of s.h.i.+fting pieces of gla.s.s. We bowed to each other in the street.

By mid-October, we'd returned to The Lake of Dreams for a final visit. We sat on the patio, the leaves edged with gold or orange or flaming red against the vivid blue sky, while I unwrapped a box that had arrived, searching through the thick layers of tissue paper to find two small stemmed gla.s.ses made of delicate green gla.s.s, the sides paper-thin, translucent. Inside the box, a card said, simply: For Your Wedding, from Keegan and Max For Your Wedding, from Keegan and Max. I handed one to Yos.h.i.+, imagining how it had taken form, the gla.s.s growing liquid and the cup emerging on the green gla.s.s stem-its delicate, human shape.

When Yos.h.i.+ and I were married, we exchanged these cups in the j.a.panese tradition. We had the ceremony in the Wisdom chapel, with the Reverend Suzi Wells presiding, our friends and family filling the pews, and the women in the windows all around us, Rose and Frank somehow present, too. Ned read from the Song of Songs, and I asked Zoe, who was staying with my mother while her parents were on a cruise, to read a poem she'd written for us. Zoe had cut her hair short and gotten a tattoo of a little b.u.t.terfly on her collarbone, all of which made her look younger and more vulnerable than she would ever have intended. Yos.h.i.+'s parents flew in from Helsinki, and sat next to my mother and Andy. Iris came with Carol and Ned, and Julie brought her boyfriend. Oliver came with his wife, and Stuart Minter brought his partner, Alex. Blake and Avery were there, too, though they sat at the back and didn't stay for the reception; their son had been born just the week before and they were still dazed, still tired, reluctant to leave him. They named him Martin, after our father.

Art and Austen sent a gift-a set of white plates-which I gave to Goodwill, unopened.

After the wedding we lingered outside, the leaves vibrant reds and yellows against the blue autumn sky.