The Lake and the Lost Girl

by Jacquelyn Vincenta

  “I am bringing you gifts, Robert, because…” Her heart pounded so heavily it felt it would interrupt her speech. “I am bringing you gifts because there are…things that make me feel lost. In my own life. To be frank, I believe that you have a character that opposes those things. I have found it to be unwise to act on inclinations born of fear, but this is just the opposite. You make me feel a kind of hope, so I have sought a reason…to be around you. To be welcomed by you. Just…that.”

  Robert Kenilworth’s eyes widened slightly. “I see. Just that.”

  He gave a small laugh and walked to the stove, using a stick to push around several palm-sized stones that lay on top of it. “Please…come in for a moment. You have a cold walk back, I think. Please don’t start it off with a chill.”

  “No. Thank you.” She eyed the gold flames with longing. “I have interrupted you longer than I intended to. I hope you will enjoy the maple syrup.”

  “Mary.” Robert absentmindedly brushed splinters of wood and threads of netting from his denim pants. “I think you shouldn’t bring gifts like this anymore. I think…this is wonderful”—he gestured toward the syrup—“but more than enough.”

  “I understand.” She took a step backward, tightening her scarf.

  “Please…wait.”

  She wanted to disappear.

  “You have a serious injury there.” He nodded toward her hand. “And a long walk from your home to this place. Wouldn’t it be more appropriate for you to bring something easier to carry?”

  She looked up.

  “You’ve told me you are a poet.”

  “I am.”

  “It seems to me a poem weighs almost nothing.”

  They looked steadily into each other’s eyes for several seconds, constructing an agreement that neither one of them consciously understood.

  “You could even read a gift like that to me while I work on these.” He nudged a fishing net with his foot.

  “Yes, I could do that,” she said quietly, joy flickering in her heart. “Thank you.”

  Robert picked up a rag, wrapped it around one of the hot stones from the stovetop, and crossed the rough shanty floorboards to Mary.

  “Where’s your pocket?” he asked in a low voice that she could feel in her spine, and when she pulled the black wool coat pocket up to his hand, he bent near her and dropped the stone in. One side of his mouth lifted in a smile. “Safe passage, Mary Walker. Hurry home.”

  20

  White Hill, Michigan—April 1999

  The anguish of the world is on my tongue.

  My bowl is filled to the brim with it; there is more than I can eat.

  Happy are the toothless old and toothless young,

  That cannot rend this meat.

  ~ Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892–1950), “The Anguish”

  As she left Jack’s workshop, Lydia’s mind clung to imaginings of an escape on Lake Michigan in a sailboat, and she felt a swell of wistfulness followed by guilt. Her life was a good life that she had built over many years. It just needed some adjustments—and the courage to enact them.

  It wasn’t yet noon when she rolled up the driveway, where there were no signs that Frank was up. His truck was parked as it had been, the barn door was open as she’d left it, and she didn’t see any lights on in the house. She got out of the Jeep and headed into the dark barn to gather the torn seats into a pile. As she searched around for them, she wondered what Dolly would charge her. If she could fix them at all, the work was likely to be extensive and tedious.

  Lydia tried not to let her eyes rest too long on the pieces of wood from the furniture, tried not to determine just now if they were un-repairable. She could do that later tonight. She had just spotted another seat leaning against the new armoire when she felt the air in the barn change. She saw the sunlight dimmed by his body before she heard Frank speak.

  “What are you doing?” His voice was flat.

  Lydia whipped around to see him silhouetted in the doorway, his arms crossed.

  “You lied to me, Frank,” she said, matching his emotionless tone.

  “You aren’t someone I can be honest with anymore, Lydia.”

  “Oh. Oh, I see.” She emitted a hard laugh. “By what code of behavior would it be okay for anyone to spend half of their family’s savings on a dining room set so they could tear it apart looking for scraps of paper?”

  “It’s obvious we don’t share the same values anymore,” he said heavily.

  “You’ve got that right, Frank. Marriage and common decency require that such choices are discussed beforehand.”

  She turned back to the furniture, heart pounding, and picked up the seat, willing herself to be calm. Holding it in her hands, she walked toward him, intending to pass to her Jeep. He blocked the opening and didn’t move.

  “Excuse me,” she said.

  “What are you doing?” he asked, and when she stood without speaking, he said, “I asked a simple question, Lydia. What are you doing?”

  “What do you think I’m doing, Frank? I’m taking these seats to be repaired. Let me by.”

  Still he remained where he was, so she forced herself to look into his face. It was not angry, as she’d expected, but held an expression of poisonous, patronizing amusement.

  “Oh, I see,” he said, nodding, smiling. “You’re doing the right thing. Getting everything back to normal. Nobody around to interfere with the task. You thought.”

  His words so closely echoed her actual thoughts that she searched his eyes for a shard of genuine understanding.

  “We can’t leave things like this.” She waved her free hand back toward the dining set parts behind her.

  “No, I guess we can’t,” he said. “We have an investment to take care of, don’t we? Can’t sell it back to the old biddy like this.”

  “Right,” Lydia said. The caustic note in his voice and the loose attempt to mimic her attitude were the same tactics he had used in countless such exchanges of the past, and they rattled her as they always did. Just like that. “Well, Frank, are you going to tell me you don’t agree? That you have some better plan?”

  “You know…I don’t recall that you were really part of this project, Lydia,” he said, reaching down to take the seat from her, but she held on tightly. “You going to wrestle me for it?”

  “Frank.” Lydia stepped back from him, holding the seat with both hands. “This has gone far enough. You lied, you spent half of our savings, then you tore up the furniture. You don’t see what’s wrong in all of that?” She stared at him. “It’s insane.”

  “I don’t know, Lydia. You’re leaving out so many of the facts.” Frank’s voice was light and chiding as he pasted contrived concern on his face and shook his head. “Where should I begin to discuss all you’ve violated…in just this one morning?” He followed this with a loud exhale of disappointed astonishment and the slap of his left hand to the door’s frame.

  His face appeared hideous to Lydia in that moment, not the face of the man she knew in real life, but a mask molded by a long, artificial drama. She gave a brief laugh of horror.

  “Do you seriously believe that this was a rational thing to do? Buying this on a whim and tearing it all up like this? Look at it, Frank!”

  “I looked at it all night, my dear. I’m through looking at it. Let’s look at you for a minute. You’re half-crazed with your money lust.”

  “I’m half-crazed? Money lust? If I look half-crazed, it’s because I don’t know what to think anymore: about you, about our marriage, about our lives.”

  Feeling as if the ground were shifting, Lydia fleetingly wished she could grab Frank for stability, and that his intelligence would force him to admit to the obvious. But staring at his body set to block her from leaving the barn, she knew without a doubt that such support from him was not an option anymore. Maybe it never had been.<
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  “I stayed up all night trying to find what I believed, for good reason, I would find,” Frank said in a measured tone, his hands linked before him as if he were lecturing a class. “Once again, I was endeavoring to uncover a document that would change our lives. And here you are, the morning after, running around like a scavenger, snatching, peering, picking”—his features contorted in disgust as he hunched forward, matching his words with rapacious gestures—“trying to put together pieces you can sell. Did you even give me enough respect to ask about the search before you proceeded here? Of course you didn’t.”

  “Should I? Look at the rest of this shit just sitting around abandoned while you slept off your hangover.”

  “Then I woke up,” he went on, ignoring her, “to a phone call from Cal Stringman at the college. He was wondering why I wasn’t there this morning and didn’t call. ‘Not acceptable, Frank,’ he said.”

  Lydia’s stomach clenched. After calling the college that morning and getting the administration answering machine, she’d completely forgotten to call again. Frank’s head tilted to the side, his gaze directed at the ceiling, as if he were remembering. He removed his glasses to wipe the lenses.

  “I told him that you called, but he said no. No one had called.”

  “I tried—”

  “And now here you are, the person who said she would call to protect my reputation—”

  “Oh, do you really think a call would manage that at this point?”

  “—fishing around in this most important work of mine without knowing a goddamn thing about it. So I want to know, Lydia Milliken…” He paused, put on his glasses, and took a few steps toward her. “What else are you doing to my life? Huh? Where are you taking these seats? Are you telling everyone in town that you have to clean up after your crazy old man? Are you fucking around with our money now, too, trying to make sure you can enforce spending rules? Huh? What else is going on behind my back?”

  His voice was harsh and edging out of control. He jabbed several fingers against Lydia’s breastbone so hard she was thrust back half a foot. She scrambled sideways, and he continued to step toward her.

  “Nothing is going on!” Her voice rose with alarm. “Nothing except my efforts to try to recoup some of the funds you threw away. Can’t you see that I am trying to make things right? Pick up after your destruction? You ought to be grateful.” Her heart beat so hard she could feel it in her throat.

  “So tell me just what you’ve been doing this morning in your determination to make things right. Where were you off to with the chair seats, for instance?”

  “I was taking them to an upholsterer,” she cried. “What do you think? What the hell else could I do?”

  “What else?” He laughed, then quickly scowled. “You could leave me and everything in my private life alone!” He bit his lower lip and nodded. “That is an excellent plan, and right this minute would be an excellent time to start.”

  “Your life. What about Nicholas? Me?” she asked, anger rising. “You think this is just your life you’re affecting? Does it help you to pretend we don’t matter? Do you erase us from your thoughts because you can’t handle the mess you’ve made”—she slid to a chair frame and kicked it—“of your life”—she kicked it again—“and all this garbage?”

  She swung around, breathing hard, to find him smirking at her.

  “Go ahead, Lydia, Throw your little temper tantrum. Always got you what you wanted with Daddy, didn’t it? And next come the tears.”

  “Who are you?” she screamed at his face, tears pressing out.

  “Who am I? Oh! How thoughtful of you to ask. I’m the man you married because we both believed in something. We believed in the transcendence of art, its power—not, as you have apparently interpreted it, as a source of tainted income. I don’t know what you believe in anymore. But I don’t tell foolish lies for cash. No, I have continued along the path we chose in the beginning.”

  “I see, I see. Your pursuits aren’t a lie, huh? This elaborate daydream you tell yourself about a dead woman, a minor poet you want to save from obscurity so you can be the hero. Can’t do anything original, nothing on your own, can’t even support yourself, much less a family, so you feed off this dream that Mary Stone Walker was the saint of poetry and womanhood. She’s the unacknowledged goddess of the written word, and you’re going to raise her from the dead. Do you even realize that’s what’s going on? You’re sacrificing real life for a daydream, Frank. I would not have imagined you had that in you, and I certainly never signed on for it.”

  Frank raised his hands as if to crush her, then froze. They glared at each other.

  “So. That’s how you feel about it all,” Frank said with venomous control, eyes glittering with fury.

  “No, that’s not how I feel about it all. It’s how I feel about your choice to allow this search you’ve been on for almost twenty years to interfere with every other aspect of your life. A search funded almost entirely by my ‘foolish lies,’ as you describe my career.” Lydia’s tears were gone, and she stared into his face with the closest feeling to hatred that she’d ever felt for anyone. “Do you know how your son watches you, watches us, and suffers?”

  “That’s right, play the Nicholas card.”

  “It’s not a fucking card, Frank, and he’s not just a prop on your stage. He’s a real, live boy. Part of a living reality far bigger than you are. Wake up.”

  The hardness in Frank’s face fractured momentarily. He took a few steps away from her, deeper into the barn, shoved his hands into the pockets of his pants, his head bent toward the floor.

  “But we are not powerless,” Lydia said passionately, hoping to reach him through what she perceived to be a crack in his rage. “We can choose to build our lives back. It’s gotten crazy, but it doesn’t have to stay that way.”

  He stood motionless, and in the silence and stillness that went on for minutes, Lydia believed that Frank was considering what she’d said.

  “I’ll help you with this. I will.” She walked toward him, her hands extended. “We can move on, get back to the way things once were…if we try.”

  She was about to touch his arms when he leaned down, picked up a chair, and turned his face toward her.

  “Do you think so?” he said quietly.

  “Yes.”

  Frank gave her a smile that made her lower her hands in fear.

  “And you’re in charge,” he said. “You know how to fix everything.”

  “No. But I know… I think I know where to begin.”

  “Well, how…” He hurled the chair ferociously against the fallen table, and two of its legs shattered off. “How do we fix that?” He took long steps to another chair, jerked it up as if it were made of balsa wood, and hurled it the same way. It hit and shattered with explosive finality. “And that?”

  “Frank.” She rushed to him, grabbed his arms, and tried to get him to look at her. “Stop! You’re making everything worse!”

  He threw her off and pushed her in the direction of the door. “Get out!” he cried, stepping around broken chair parts toward his old armchair. “Get out, I’m warning you, Lydia!” He pressed his face into his hands.

  Lydia gripped his shirtsleeve. “Listen to me.”

  He knocked her hand away.

  “My God, what has happened to you?” she cried.

  He tilted his face down toward hers. “You don’t get it, do you, Lydia? Don’t get it at all.”

  She took a few steps away from him, shaking.

  “I’m alone,” he said, shaking his head as his eyes roved the barn. “I am alone in all I care about. You can’t even see it.” He laughed softly, disbelievingly. “Even as I try to hold on to your better self for your own sake. I’m alone in my beliefs.” He sat in his chair, removed his glasses, and pinched the bridge of his nose with his fingers. “Maybe you’ll come to see your
mistakes, maybe you won’t. My dream is not a dream… It’s a reality not yet uncovered. You just gave up on such things, Lydia. You gave up on the elusive. Genuine romance. Poetic thought. Fine art.”

  He nodded, eyes roving blankly toward her. It felt to her at that moment as if she could have been anyone to him. “I can’t give up, though. And you… Well, you’ll learn in time. Or not.”

  “What nerve you have—”

  “Go, Lydia. Don’t try to respond. Get out of here. Your childish words, the sight of you… They bring me nothing but disgust. You sicken me.” He lowered his forehead onto the heel of one hand as if his head hurt and, with the other hand, waved her away. “Go.”

  Too furious to speak, Lydia stalked off, picking up two more seats on her way out of the barn. She hurled them into the back of the Jeep with the others, locked the doors, and went in the house, where she paced in the kitchen, slamming the counter with her fist and kicking the floorboard. She ran the water, filled a plastic cup, and bit the rim as she tried to swallow. Water ran around the edges and down her chin. Frank did not emerge from the barn.

  If sitting in there with the debris around him did not eventually awaken some of the same horror she had had at the sight of it all, then there was nothing she could do. There was no way to resolve anything between them. Not yet…not in the state they were both in.

  But it came to her that this was not merely another argument, not just a horrible fight. No. Something fundamental had slipped. Frank was sick. He was mentally ill. Fear shot through Lydia’s body.

  Okay. She paced. Okay, get a grip. She pulled out a cookbook and flipped to a familiar bread recipe. She had to do something simple that was good. She had to keep things normal somehow. Nicholas would be home before long. Yeast. Molasses. Corn meal. Flour. She slammed them all onto the counter and pulled out her measuring spoons and cups. Impatiently, with trembling hands, she ripped open the yeast packages and measured warm water. It would smell good in here. It would smell healthy and happy in the kitchen when Nicholas entered.

  After sprinkling the yeast on the warm water to let it begin growing, Lydia went to the closet and pulled out a paper grocery bag, placing one after another of her most essential cooking tools into it. Then another bag—she flapped it open and wrapped several coffee mugs and plates in newspaper pages, filling it. She took the two bags to the back of her Jeep and came back for a pot, a frying pan, and a hot plate from twenty years before when she had sometimes lived in places without an adequate kitchen. She would take these things to Jack’s and store them in case she and Nicholas had to flee soon to a hotel. The part of her that was an animal, that had instincts, knew the danger and moved without consideration of her emotions. She would pack more essentials tomorrow, just in case.