He looked at her. She felt it.
His silence compelled her to say more. “I wouldn’t say I have dreams now. It’s enough that nothing like that—like Ryan dying the way he did—has to happen in my life again. I mean, that’s a dream right there. There is no horrible thing that categorically can’t happen to us.”
Socrates seemed uninterested in the rat. It was a safe change of subject. “Will he wait until night to eat?” she asked.
“Maybe. But probably not.”
“How will he catch the rat if he can’t fly?”
“Mosi thinks he can fly well enough to catch a rat in the mews.”
Lily remembered a piece of rhyme about dreams dying. Without them, life was “a broken-wing bird that cannot fly.”
Her wings weren’t broken, except in her mind.
When she’d gone to live with her grandparents in Chicago, the stated reason was so she could dance, and so she had danced. She’d gone to a performing arts high school and had danced every single day. But while her classmates were ambitious, anything resembling ambition in herself had made her feel vaguely ill.
Her teachers were initially puzzled by her lack of fire, lack of engagement. Until, undoubtedly, someone mentioned that Ryan had drowned because of her.
“What was your wife like?”
He turned from the mews and didn’t answer at once.
“Smart,” he said finally.
Lily waited.
Nothing.
“She was a veterinarian,” he said next.
“What did you do in Utah?”
“I had a business. I designed some shoes for boatmen to wear on the river. Colorado River Toed. They were popular.”
So that was how he’d financed the Aerie—and bought the land. “You sold it? Or you still own it?”
“Sold it.”
“Did you blame yourself—for what happened to your wife? Besides what you said—that you thought it was a karmic debt?”
He considered, then shook his head. “Sometimes I blame her. It was pouring, she was walking in a wash. She knew better.”
“Well, you owe no karmic debt for Ryan’s death,” Lily told him. “That was my fault. He’d be thirty-three now. He might have married. He might have had children of his own.”
“I don’t think that alternate reality exists,” Colin responded, “except in our imaginations.”
“Believe me, it exists in my parents’ imagination.”
He said, “Want to walk down to the old dock?”
“Why?”
His eyes flickered. “Why not?”
“I just wondered if you had some reason for wanting to repeat the past,” she replied.
“Well, since you’re no longer a fifteen-year-old virgin and I’m no longer a sixteen-year-old one, we can’t, in fact, repeat the past—any part of it.”
What did that mean? “I don’t mind looking at the water,” she said.
“Luke, we’re going down to the lake,” Colin called to his son.
“Okay,” Luke shouted back and ran down the aisle toward them.
Her shoes seemed especially silly on the walk to the lakeshore, and she took them off and carried them. The feel of the bare earth reminded her of the moment she’d found Socrates. And of older events.
Mosquitoes whined around them and began biting before they reached the water. Twenty-four hours on Swan Lake, and Lily’s arms and legs were dotted with red bumps.
At the water, Lily asked, “Is this the same ice-fishing shack that was here back then?”
“I think so. But I’m not sure. We use it.”
“I’m going up in the tree house,” said Luke.
“Okay,” Colin answered.
“Is that safe?” Lily squinted up at the structure overhanging the lake.
Colin’s expression as he studied the tree house made her wonder if the question had ever crossed his mind before.
Luke had already disappeared into the undergrowth between them and the tree house tree.
“How can you just let him do things like that? Carry around raptors that you’ve told me could tear out my muscles. Climb in tree houses that look like they’re about to fall down. Aren’t you at all concerned? Accidents happen. You know they do. And you told me you’re not a fatalist.”
He tipped back his head, and she thought he had the profile of an Odysseus. A man a woman would wait for, wait twenty years for, or maybe more.
“If I tell you,” he said suddenly, “you need to understand that I’ve never told anyone else.”
Everything about his saying this surprised her, most of all that it was an admission from a man she didn’t know—and yet knew better than any other. He knew her in a way no one else did. Simply because of the crime they shared.
She nodded.
His voice lowered beneath the whine of the mosquitoes. The scent of the raptors was still in her nostrils. The owl stank like a skunk, which Colin said was its favorite food in the wild. But Colin’s earthiness, his son’s wild hair and bare feet, enticed her, seemed comfortable. “I believe,” he said, “with absolute certainty that Luke will not be injured and will not be taken from me. It’s kind of about the odds, and it’s kind of superstition. Maybe you’d call it fatalistic.”
“I call it silly,” she said without hesitation. “And untrue. I think it’s far more likely that you’re scared to death he’ll die as your wife did, as Ryan did, so you can’t even acknowledge it by trying to protect him in any normal way.”
The green eyes stared.
She felt his hand as it caught hers.
“I’m going! Watch, Lily!”
She started as the small body hurtled down from the tree house on the rope as it swung out over the lake, and Luke splashed in, perhaps six feet from the dock, perhaps sixty feet from where they’d found Ryan.
She couldn’t stand it and ran barefoot onto the dock and sat down on the edge as Luke, so terribly small with his sleek wet head, the blond hair now looking light brown, stroked toward the dock.
He clasped the dock and said to her, “Lift me out.”
She reached down and lifted the very small boy onto the dock beside her. It was hot, and the water felt good on her feet and ankles. “Luke,” she said earnestly. “Be very careful. Please don’t go swimming without your dad or someone watching you.”
“That’s the rule,” he said. “Because I can get a cramp. Have you ever gotten a cramp? I saw you swim by yourself today.”
“My parents knew I was going. They were watching.”
Though she swam alone in the ocean without a lifeguard. She shared Colin’s logic, she thought. She swam alone because Ryan had drowned and so she could not.
“I’m going back to the house. You want to come see my room?” asked Luke.
“Yes. Thank you.”
He jumped up and ran down the dock and past his dad. “I’m going to show Lily my room.”
“We’ll be there in a minute,” Colin said.
Lily knew. She knew before she stepped off the dock and over to the ice house, to the spot where Socrates had sprung from the ground, the broken-wing bird that could not fly, the death that would never leave by its own power.
His voice was very quiet. “May I kiss you?”
It bore no resemblance to what had happened when they were teenagers, and that fact was cleansing, saving. He was a man.
“Yes.”
It started as a simple kiss, lips against lips, warm and interesting. She liked his scent, touched the cotton of his shirt.
It went no further.
Just a kiss.
Looking into each other’s eyes.
“Two weeks,” he said.
She could not answer. She could not say, Yes. Just two weeks.
She wanted to say, Forever.
She had no idea where the tears came from or why. She picked up her shoes, which she’d dropped when Luke swung down from the tree house.
She put them on and followed Colin’s son back toward the h
ouse, each step uncertain.
CHAPTER FOUR
HER COUSIN, Helen, had what Lily instantly decided was one of the ugliest haircuts she’d ever seen. She disliked her own pettiness, and she disliked Helen for turning her into a person she disliked.
Lily couldn’t stop thinking about Colin and Luke. Luke’s showing her his bedroom, his Harry Potter Lego sets, then perhaps the biggest surprise. These are my dad’s poetry books. He writes poems about the raptors and we sell them to make money for the Aerie. Lily had started reading the poems, when Luke rambled on. I usually sleep with my dad in his room. Come see. Colin’s room. She had sat on the bed, and Colin had come in and sat on the bed, and Luke had bounced on the bed, which had a quilt in a plaid flannel cover.
Colin and I have business on that bed.
She felt the future looming, massive and definite, and hadn’t even gritted her teeth when her mother had said, You were gone long enough. Helen’s been looking forward to seeing you.
Helen had looked her up and down and said, “Cute outfit. Santa Barbara?”
“Yes.” I’m projecting. I’m projecting onto her and Bert and my parents that everyone is assessing how much money I spend on every little thing.
It seemed to Lily that Helen spent more time with Lily’s parents than with her own, who lived in Florida and liked to play bingo, but maybe it was just that Helen’s parents couldn’t stand her, either.
Bert, tall and mustached, with that slight belly hanging over his belt but still managing to look fit, stood with Lily’s father, discussing the cheapest price on tires.
“I’m sorry to hear about your engagement,” Helen said. “Oh, Marie. Can I help with dinner? Too bad it didn’t work out, Lily.”
She wandered from the big front room into the adjoining kitchen, where Marie was taking a loaf of bread out of the oven.
No bread machines for the Morans, reflected Lily. “Don’t be sorry,” she told Helen.
Colin. Colin, Colin, Colin. She had never felt for Drake what she felt now, in this brief time, for Colin. One kiss. And it wasn’t just Colin. She felt bound to him and Luke.
She felt that a winter in the North Woods wouldn’t be so bad.
She could go ice fishing.
“Lily, you could start on the salad,” Marie said, ignoring Helen’s offer of help. “What’s wrong, Lily? Are you all right? Did something happen over there? Did he say something horrible?”
Why not? Why not say it here, while her father and Bert wandered into the kitchen, now discussing Bert’s inexpensive car insurance? “No.” Lily moved closer to her mother. A stain on the floor that turned out to be a knot in the wood leaped up at her. She made herself meet Marie’s gaze and thought how she had inherited her mother’s long thin nose with the beaklike bump at the bridge. “He was very nice. And I like his son. I’m having dinner there tomorrow night.”
Her mother peered under the lid of the pot on the stove—one of her soups, the smell filling the house, gorgeous as morning. Like the bread. And unlike the cloud of hatred billowing in her black eyes—dark, dark brown—the eyes she’d given Lily. Now Lily wondered if she was going to look like her mother, sharp-faced and angry, when she was older. If she was beginning to look that way already.
Marie said nothing.
Nothing.
The lid banged back down.
Lily’s mother opened the refrigerator door, began taking out vegetables.
Lily swiftly grabbed the cutting board.
“I’ll do it,” Marie said.
“I can help,” Helen chimed in, touching Marie’s back, soothing.
Lily ground her teeth and thought of receding gums and didn’t care. She wanted to scream at Helen, Get out of this house. It wasn’t your tragedy. That’s my mother, and we need to sort this out!
But she couldn’t.
And Marie touched Helen’s arm, motherly, sisterly.
Marie said, haltingly, to the organic celery she’d pulled from a plastic bag she had reused and would use again, “If you’re not busy—we’re going—to scatter Ryan—we’ve planned the ceremony for Saturday.”
Two days away, and her mother had shed a tear, and Helen put an arm around her shoulders.
Lily stepped forward, ignored Helen, tried not to touch her or smell her generic soap and shampoo, and embraced her mother, who seemed thin and who turned, not to her niece, but to her daughter.
Lily looked into her mother’s face, and the dark eyes looked at her. Marie’s skin hung loose on her bones, aging, autumnal. “I forgive you, Lily. I have never blamed you. But I don’t understand you. How can you repeat the very thing that lost us Ryan?”
SO HER PARENTS KNEW. Well, it wasn’t rocket science, Lily reflected again as she drove up the Aerie’s road the next afternoon. It wasn’t hard to figure out why sixteen-year-old Colin and fifteen-year-old Lily had been so remiss that day.
How can you repeat the very thing that lost us Ryan?
Lily had spent her life, since her brother’s death, being attentive to safety, determined not to create another situation like that, not to preside over another accident that needn’t happen.
This was not repeating what had happened before.
It wasn’t the same at all, or she wouldn’t do it.
Winky greeted her at the door of the cabin. Inside, she found Mosi and Luke lying on the faded Navajo rugs on the living room floor, engrossed in a game of chess. Colin came out of the bedroom. He had recently showered, his hair still wet, pulling on a T-shirt over the chest that had filled out and sprouted curly dark hair.
“We’re having homemade pizza,” he said, walking into the kitchen. The pizzas were on the counter, and the oven was hot; he put them in and set a timer. “Feel like a walk?”
Luke sat up. “Are you going to show her the blue tree house? Can I come?”
“I’ll save that for you,” said Colin. “You finish your game. Someone has to beat Mosi.”
THEY CLIMBED UP into the tree house that Luke had swung from the day before and stared down on the lake.
Lily felt freer than she had since Ryan’s death. She had lost childhood that day, lost the paddling of canoes and the climbing of trees and bare feet on damp spongy ground beneath spruce and maple and birch. Sitting beside Colin, she told him what had occurred the night before. She concluded, “She forgives me, I suppose, but she doesn’t forgive the act. And she shouldn’t, in some way. I was thinking about something I wanted at that moment, and I neglected a sacred trust.”
“Lily, if they hadn’t believed I was levelheaded, they would’ve made you stay home to watch Ryan.”
“Yes, right. Maybe my mother even forgives you. She just hates the idea of my being in your company.” She chose the last words carefully, words that wouldn’t assume too much.
“It’s not the same.”
“No,” Lily agreed. “How long were you married?”
“Four years.”
Lily gazed across Swan Lake at her parents’ place. His aunt and uncle had always rented the cabin next door to the Morans’. Now her parents owned that property in addition to their old house. It had become part of Camp Boreal. She gazed down at toenails painted pale pink. Her mother had commented on it the night before and asked if she’d “paid someone” to do that. “It was such a freak thing,” Lily said, “the way he died.”
“I’ll never forgive myself.”
Lily frowned. “It wasn’t your fault.”
He didn’t answer.
“I was the one babysitting. My mom said, ‘Take your brother, Lily,’ and she told him to mind me, though I doubt she remembers that.” A breeze blew one of Colin’s wavy locks of hair. Did he really blame himself? But he would. Of course, he would. She muttered, “I was so sick of the little twerp.” She fell into one of Ryan’s Yoda impressions. “The dark side of the Force is Lily. Ugly she is. Kiss her no one will.’”
A genuine grin cracked Colin’s face, erasing the troubled expression he’d worn moments before. “That’s what
I remember most about him. And that once he told me that if I gave him money, he’d arrange for me to see you naked.”
Lily’s jaw dropped. She was tempted to say it was good the little pimp had perished, but it didn’t come out, because her annoying pest of a brother had drowned and it had been her fault, and the money-making scheme he’d tried on Colin was so profoundly Ryan. She had a sudden image of him practicing his violin. Condemned to oddity by her parents—but possessed of genius. No one had ever doubted his brilliance. She told Colin about the plan to scatter Ryan’s ashes. “You should be there,” she said.
“Your parents should determine who’s there. Anyway, it wouldn’t make a difference.”
“To what?” The wind gusted over her ankles. She’d actually worn denim overalls to this dinner, with a white tank top underneath. Swimming kept her arms in good shape. She was, she thought, a young forty. She tucked her feet up against her, clasped her arms around her knees.
Colin didn’t answer. Not at first. He looked at her, his expression surprisingly earnest. “Have you forgiven yourself?”
She shrugged. “In a sense. I’m still guilty. But I’ve determined not to make that kind of mistake again. That’s why it frightened me so much seeing Luke swinging in the trees.”
He scooted back, resting his spine against the trunk of the tree. “I’ll never forgive myself. And that’s a choice. But I don’t have the kind of peace you have with it. Marisa—I had nothing to do with that. I wish I could go back in time and stop her going after that bird. But it wasn’t my fault. Ryan’s dying was. I was a lifeguard. What your mother said was true. You let him take off his lifejacket, and one of us should’ve been watching him, and my choice, my leading you away—allowed it to happen. It’s my fault.”
My parents should hear him say that. Would it make a difference to them? Or to Colin?
He was easy to talk to. Near him now, she felt as though she’d been waiting lifetimes to finish a conversation with him. This is the one. Every time their eyes met, she knew—and knew that he knew, as well.
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