Lost Lake

by Sarah Addison Allen

  This was the right decision. It had to be.

  A small beautiful woman in her sixties came to stand beside Eby in the doorway of the main house—a two-story clapboard structure with a roof that leaked, hallways that led nowhere, and stairways that narrowed into tight squeezes as you reached the top, like in a child’s playhouse. The old house and the rental cabins had come with the lake, and one of the main reasons Eby and George had bought the place was because there had been so much to do. It had been a fitting metaphor at the time—repairing, rebuilding, reinventing.

  Eby could feel Lisette’s anger like a burst of heat. The force of it made the fine silver hair around Eby’s face move, as if by wind. Eby sighed. Lisette had to have known this was going to happen sooner or later, but Eby could tell she was going to be difficult about it anyway.

  Lisette opened the small notebook she had on a length of butcher’s twine around her neck. She wrote something, then showed it to Eby: You should have consulted me about this! How long have you been planning to sell? Why did you not confide in me?

  “You can’t be that surprised, Lisette. Not after the winter we had. And I’ve been thinking of traveling again. You know that,” Eby said. She had been dreaming of Europe lately, of Paris and its dark streets. In her dreams, she had lost George but was following a large orange one-eyed cat to him. He was waiting around the next corner for her. Always just around the next corner. “How about we go back to Paris? Wouldn’t that be nice?” Eby asked, trying to make her decision sound like an adventure. “Your mother is almost ninety. You should see her again. Mend that fence.”

  Lisette was, and always had been, as combustible as an unlit match. Eby usually knew how to work around her tirades, to soothe her before she had time to get riled up. But mentioning Lisette’s mother, Eby realized belatedly, had been a bad idea.

  I do not want to travel. And I do NOT want to go back to Paris. Lisette underlined the word NOT twice. I want to stay. Does that not matter?

  “Of course it matters,” Eby said calmly. She felt that flutter under her skin again and wanted to touch it, but she didn’t dare, not in front of Lisette. “Maybe the new development will have a club house with a restaurant. Maybe you can be in charge of the kitchen there. Or maybe you can buy a house on the lake, when they’re built.”

  Lisette stared at her for a few long moments before writing, You will not be here?

  “No.”

  But you do not want to leave the lake any more than I do! This is our home!

  Eby stepped back and closed the front door before any more cold, air-conditioned air could escape. The electric bill was high enough already. The door frame was swollen, and she had to push the door shut with her shoulder. “Of course I don’t want to leave. But I can’t just watch this place disappear, like almost everyone who used to come here has disappeared. It’s falling apart, and I can’t save it. It’s best to leave now, before we lose everything and we’re forced out. It’s best to go when there’s a choice.”

  Your choice. Not mine, Lisette wrote. After she showed Eby, she angrily ripped the notes out of the pad and put the small pieces of paper in her pocket. Later she would undoubtedly burn them on the stove or tear them up and toss them into the lake. Written words were considered dangerous things by Lisette.

  Lisette was born without the ability to speak, but she’d been brazen with written words as a child, substituting a sharp tongue for a poison pen. She blamed herself for the suicide of a paramour when she was just sixteen, after she had slipped him a note during a romantic dinner, telling him she was too good for him and would never love him. The next day she’d learned he’d hung himself in his parents’ apartment. Shocked by her own power, which hitherto had only been to hurt feelings, not end lives, Lisette’s guilt had sent her to the Bridge of the Untrue in Paris that fateful night fifty years ago, where she had intended to kill herself. She’d thought it was the only way to snuff out this monstrous power she had. For stubborn souls like Lisette, death was easier than the courage it took to actually change your life.

  When Eby had seen Lisette jump from the bridge, some great force had pushed Eby into action. She could remember racing to the end of the bridge and sliding down the bank into the cold water, yelling for Lisette to say something, anything that would let Eby know where she was in the fog. The current had swept them up in the darkness, and there had been a sickening sensation of floating in gelatin as Eby scrambled for some purchase, her hand miraculously finding Lisette’s long hair, like a tangle of cold seaweed. She’d grabbed it and pulled her head above water, where Lisette had sputtered and clawed at Eby, obviously not knowing what was happening. Eby had held her and wouldn’t let her go, but they had both been helpless to the current. Eby remembered thinking all they had to do was hold on to each other. Everything would be okay if they just held on to each other.

  Sure enough, out of nowhere, two large arms had grabbed them and pulled, pulled so hard there was actually a sucking sound. The water hadn’t wanted to let them go and had resisted. But George had won. He’d pulled them to the bank and stood over them, dripping, incredulous.

  People on the street that night in Paris had heard the commotion and had come to their aid, leading George, Eby, and Lisette to the restaurant they had passed earlier, where they’d been given threadbare blankets and glasses of port. They had known Lisette there—she was the owner’s daughter—and this kind of behavior apparently had not been unusual. In fact, no one had seemed particularly concerned. Some customers hadn’t even looked up from their late meals.

  Eby had been too exhausted to argue with George when he’d insisted they go back to their hotel, promising they would check in on the girl the next day. It turned out, there had been no need. Lisette had followed them and slept on the hotel’s front steps that night. She’d followed them everywhere after that, as quiet and thin as a shadow, getting a room at their hotel, even later following them to Amsterdam, then finally back to America.

  Lisette had turned out to be the best friend Eby had ever had, that thing she’d never known she’d needed, when all she thought she’d needed was George. They had saved each other so many times over the years now that they’d eventually lost count.

  Eby turned. “I need to cancel the summer reservations. All three of them.”

  Lisette followed Eby to the check-in desk in the foyer, furiously scribbling something on her notepad as she walked. Eby sat behind the desk, and Lisette tore out the note and slapped it on the desk surface. Eby picked it up and read it.

  I am not going. I will chain myself to a tree. They will not make me leave. You go. Do what you want. Leave me here to get flattened by a bulldozer. Leave me here to die.

  Eby pushed the note back to Lisette. “Flattened by a bulldozer? How unromantic. You’ll have to come up with something better than that. You jumped off a bridge in the middle of Paris. It’s going to be hard to top that one.”

  Lisette snatched the note and stomped to the kitchen.

  “Everything is going to be okay,” Eby called to her. She heard the smack of Lisette’s palm against the swinging door. “I promise.”

  Eby worried about Lisette. Too much, probably. But Lisette had no one else to worry about her. The one true difference between them was that Eby had her memory of George, a memory that would always remind her that she was worthy of love. But Lisette only had the memory of a sixteen-year-old boy who committed suicide because of her. Lisette had pushed everyone in her life away except Eby. She had no one else real in her life, past or present, who had steadfastly loved her no matter what, and that was why the thought of losing this place scared her so. The memory of everyone who had ever loved Lisette was here.

  That’s when it suddenly occurred to Eby.

  Jack.

  Aha.

  Eby picked up the phone with hope.

  She knew what she was doing. She was focusing on Lisette instead of dwelling on this tremendous, life-altering decision she’d just made. But she was okay with that.
She was good at being needed. It had been years since she’d felt really useful.

  And if she just kept busy enough, maybe she could ignore the strange, anxious fluttering under her skin and the tingling in her fingers from where she’d shaken hands with the man.

  Then all this would all be over before she knew it.

  * * *

  The next day, Eby thought she’d be productive and begin the process of going through the things that needed to be packed. She had great plans for finding her clipboard and cataloging everything. Maybe even taking photos. But she quickly became overwhelmed when she realized just how much stuff there was. Forget cataloging it. Where was she going to put it? She started by looking up nearby storage units in the town of Suley’s thin phone book. But then she wondered who was going to move all these things, things she couldn’t possibly part with, many of them bought on her honeymoon. So she switched gears and looked up movers. Then she wondered, if she was hiring movers, why didn’t she just buy a house to move into and avoid having to move everything twice? But the only place nearby that was big enough to store everything she had—a house and thirteen cabins’ worth of memories—was the old Rue-McRae Homestead in town, which had been turned into a visitor center years ago. It detailed the history of the town’s settlers for anyone who was interested, of a rough-and-tumble group of people from the swamp, mostly displaced from Okefenokee over the past several hundred years. The Rue-McRae Homestead aside, it would take several normal-size houses to put all this furniture in. And she couldn’t afford to buy several houses. Selling the lake acreage would pay off her first and second mortgages. But then, buying even a single house would leave her with no money to travel.

  That made her think of Lisette, who had been banging around the kitchen for the past twenty-four hours. Currently, the scent of rising dough and hot berries was being sucked through the old air-conditioning unit and spread throughout the main house. This was Lisette’s rebellion. She was cooking for guests who weren’t coming. It was as if nothing bad could happen if she just kept going. Like a wheel in motion, she seemed to think no one could stop her, or make her leave, once she started.

  Eby gave up trying to plan her departure for now and sat behind the front desk with a crossword puzzle. She couldn’t do this alone. Lisette was going to have to help her. Eby would just wait for this hissy fit to pass.

  The air conditioner turned off. The house ticked and settled. Eby sighed and set the crossword aside, then scooted her chair to the very edge of the desk, where she could lean back and see a corner of the window in the sitting room. She often did this, to watch a quiet corner of the lake. There were even scratch marks on the floor from years of pulling the chair to her daydream spot.

  She was going to miss her daydream spot.

  Giving up the money George had inherited fifty years ago had been the best thing she and George had ever done. But, as young and idealistic as they’d been, Eby still wished they’d squirreled a little money away, for times like this.

  Times like this? She shook her head. She’d never in her wildest dreams imaged herself at seventy-six, forced to sell Lost Lake.

  Seventy-six.

  Good Lord, how did that happen? Yesterday, she was twenty-four making love under a bridge in Paris.

  Suddenly, the front door flew open and two older women walked in in a gust of rose lotion and liniment oil. Eby gave a start and the front legs of her chair dropped to the floor.

  “See? It’s still here,” said the woman with bright red hair. Makeup was caked into the fine wrinkles around her eyes, and she was wearing a cherry-print dress and four-inch red heels. She was helping a tiny old woman through the door. “She said she was selling it, not that it was gone. Can we go now?”

  “No,” the elderly woman said.

  The redheaded woman closed the door behind them and stopped to wave her hand in front of her face, as if to cool off. “Okay, what’s your plan?”

  “I haven’t figured that out yet,” the old woman said. “All I know is that we didn’t know last summer was going to be our last summer, so we didn’t make it anything special. We’ve got to make this ending special.”

  Eby stood. “Selma, Bulahdeen—you came!” Eby had called them just yesterday to cancel their reservations. They were two of the three summer faithfuls she had left, the old-timers who came back year after year. Eby watched the door, waiting for Jack, the third, to come in. But he didn’t.

  “Bulahdeen called me after you canceled our reservations. She demanded I pick her up and drive her here,” Selma said.

  “I couldn’t drive myself,” Bulahdeen told Eby. “They took away my license last year.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” Eby said. In her eighties, Bulahdeen Ward was the oldest of all Eby’s guests. She was stooping like a fiddlehead fern now, curling into herself, making her appear that she was charging at life headfirst. She and her husband, Charlie, both former professors, used to come together to the lake until a few years ago. Charlie developed Alzheimer’s and was now in a nursing home. Since then, Bulahdeen had been coming alone. She was a quiet force of nature, the peculiar southern lilt to her voice as old as low-country sand. Selma, tall and painted and standoffish, was Bulahdeen’s every opposite. They were an odd pair. Bulahdeen had somehow, somewhere along the way, decided that Selma was one of her best friends. Selma vehemently disagreed. Bulahdeen didn’t care.

  “And you don’t have to make such a big deal of it,” Bulahdeen turned to Selma and said, pointing a bone-knobby finger at her. “It was on your way.”

  “I live in Meridian. Mississippi. You live in Spartanburg. South Carolina. That is not on my way.”

  “Don’t give me that. You had nothing better to do.”

  “Speak for yourself, old woman. I’ve got another husband to catch.” Selma was sixty-five but told everyone she was fifty, and she claimed to be an expert on men, though having seven husbands might mean to some that she was an expert on getting it wrong. Selma had a reputation for flirting with all the men who stayed here in the summers, in an offhand way, second nature, like the way a bird naturally flaps its wings when it falls. Thirty years ago, she’d visited Lost Lake with her third husband. She soon divorced him, like all the others, but then she kept coming back. No one understood why. She never seemed to enjoy herself.

  “We stopped by town for some supplies before we came here,” Bulahdeen said as she walked to the check-in desk.

  “Supplies meaning Bulahdeen bought six bottles of wine,” Selma said.

  Bulahdeen hoisted her purse onto the desk, then leaned against it with a deep breath. “When I mentioned to some folks about you selling this place, they seemed surprised.”

  “Oh,” Eby said. “Well, that’s because I haven’t told anyone yet.”

  Bulahdeen looked at her curiously. Her eyes were as cloudy as crystal balls. “Is it a secret?”

  “Not anymore,” Selma said dryly, still standing at the door, ready to make an escape.

  “No, it’s not a secret,” Eby said. “It just happened so fast. And, really, there’s no one in town I think would care. About the lake, I mean. Not anymore. The water park is now the biggest part of the town’s income. Lost Lake isn’t doing anyone any good anymore. Developing it will probably benefit Suley.”

  “What are you going to do?” Bulahdeen asked.

  “Inventory. Then figure out where to move and where to put all this stuff. Then travel, maybe. George and I always wanted to go back to Europe.”

  Bulahdeen snorted. “I can guess Lisette’s reaction to that.”

  “She doesn’t want to leave.” Eby’s eyes shifted to the front door again, as if waiting for someone else to come through.

  “Jack’s not with us, if that’s who you’re looking for,” Bulahdeen said.

  “Now he I would have picked up,” Selma said.

  Eby turned to the wall of key hooks behind her. She hadn’t realized until that moment how much she’d been counting on Jack coming. She’d dropped
hints. But Jack, for all his wonderful qualities, did not always grasp subtleties. Eby should have been clearer. This was his last chance. She grabbed two keys with heavy brass fobs attached. “Here are the keys to your regular cabins. I’ll grab some linens and bring them to you. I haven’t cleaned the cabins. Just giving you fair warning.”

  Selma walked over and took her key from Eby. “Yes, our last summer here is certainly going to be special.”

  Bulahdeen took her cabin key and picked up her purse. “Selma, has anyone ever told you that you complain too much?”

  “No.”

  “Liar.”

  “So this is how I’m going to spend my summer?” Selma said, opening the front door and waiting for Bulahdeen. “Being insulted by the likes of you?”

  “By the likes of me? Look who thinks she’s so high and mighty.”

  “Watch out, old woman, or I’m going to leave you here.”

  “No, you’re not.” Bulahdeen reached into her purse and brought out a set of keys and shook them. “I’ve got your car keys.”

  “What are you doing with those?”

  Bulahdeen cackled as she walked out the door.

  “Bulahdeen, if you try to drive my car, I’ll have you arrested!”

  Eby walked to the kitchen with a smile. She was glad they came.

  When she entered the kitchen, which she had to pass through to get to the laundry room, Lisette was standing in front of an empty chair beside the refrigerator, her hands on her hips. She often did that—stare at that chair.

  “Well, you’ll be glad to know that Selma and Bulahdeen came anyway. All this food won’t go to waste.” Eby gestured to the colorful array of enamel-covered cast-iron pots on the stove in the remarkable kitchen, Lisette’s domain. The appliances were cobalt blue, and the walls were stainless steel. Bright white lights shone overhead.

  Lisette’s father had passed away a few years after Lisette left Paris. He’d obviously forgotten to change his will, or he thought Lisette would finally come back. Or maybe he didn’t even think of her at all, which was a strong possibility, given what Lisette had told Eby of him. Either way, Lisette had inherited half of her father’s modest fortune. Her mother, the other half. Lisette’s money explained the lovely kitchen in the otherwise shabby main house, and how Eby never had to worry about the cost of food. Lisette took care of all of that. To be happy, all she needed was a roof over her head and someone to cook for, which George and Eby had always given her.