by Kim Edwards
The car trunk opened easily, swinging upward. I moved the lantern forward, light flickering into the darkened spaces. 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. 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 shining 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 space below filled with rolls of wire and twine, small pliers, extra fishing 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 space, 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.
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 document, 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 association. 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 assimilate 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, brushing 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 Yoshi 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 shore. 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 passed 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 space 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. Yoshi 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 B
lake 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 butterflies 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.
“I know it’s late. I’m sorry, I couldn’t sleep. But doesn’t it seem astonishing to you that there’s this whole branch of the family we’ve never known existed?”
“It does.” He sighed. “Of course it does, it’s interesting. But honestly—it’s not life-or-death interesting. It’s not wake-me-up-in-the-middle-of-the-night interesting. Lucy, don’t you think maybe you’re dwelling on this a little too much? Why not just relax and enjoy showing Yoshi around. Maybe if you weren’t between jobs and here on vacation, this might not seem quite as important as it does right now.”
Despite what I’d told Yoshi earlier, Blake’s comment touched a nerve. Maybe this was one of the reasons I’d never let myself be between jobs before, had never paused, going from scholarship to scholarship, good jobs to better ones, so I could always come back and run into Art or Joey or even Zoe and think to myself: So there.
“What do you mean? It changes everything.”
“They’re, like, third cousins once removed. It doesn’t change anything at all.”
“Blake, the story changes everything.”
He laughed, exasperated. “Okay, okay. I’m not going to argue with you at one o’clock in the morning, Lucy. I’ll see you tomorrow at the party. Meanwhile, good night, okay?”
Then the phone went dead.
I sat on the patio for a few minutes longer. There were bats here, too. Winged shadows, I had always liked them, their small intelligent eyes, their fondness for insects and the night. There were caves on the depot land and perhaps the bats lived there, clustered silently along the walls, aware of the voice of the land, the susurrations of the water and the swift growing of the plants, listening to the strange new sounds of metal against rock as the bulldozers scraped away the earth.
If my grandfather had found this will, had he looked for Rose and Iris and never found them? It was possible. I’d had a hard time tracking Iris down, even with the letters from Rose and a great deal of luck. Or perhaps he’d never looked for her—that was possible, too. I tried to imagine how it must have felt for my grandfather to read that will—if indeed he had seen it—his father’s words, so harsh, like blows: To amend for the things I denied her. To remind my son that the world does not owe him a living by any reckoning. Bitter words, and perhaps the writing of them had been enough; perhaps my great-grandfather had put this will into the wall so no one would ever see it, the flashing anger of a moment.
Or, if my grandfather had read this will in the silence of the house after Joseph Arthur Jarrett died, he might have shoved the papers in the wall and smoothed the plaster over with even strokes, as if to erase those words, though his father’s disappointment was already engraved forever on his heart.
I thought of my father and Art, growing up in this house, those words buried in the wall, all that bitterness sealed away but present, shaping everything that followed, like water shaping rock. Like it or not, it had shaped me, too.
Lights flashed across the lawn and over the surface of the lake, then went off abruptly; gravel crunched in the driveway, and my mother’s laughter carried through the night, and voices, softer, floated through the darkness. Then silence, the thud of the car door falling shut and more laughter, and the flash of lights again as the car backed out. My mother came in through the porch. I called out hello.
“Lucy?” she asked, coming to the screen door, then pushing it open and stepping out onto the patio. She was dressed in white and silver, like one of the flowers in her discarded night garden, her perfume drifting through the air. “What are you doing up? Where’s Yoshi?”
“Oh, he’s sleeping. I couldn’t. How was the movie?”
She smiled, but it was a private smile, and despite the jam-filled jars and Andy’s kindness and my own best intentions, I felt a surge of anger at everything she was leaving so willingly behind. So easily, too, it seemed from outside, though I knew that wasn’t fair. Maybe it was because I had been thinking so much about my father, about his last restless days. Or maybe it was the scent of strawberries still lingering in the house. “It was terrible, actually, but we had fun. You know, it’s been years since I laughed so much with anyone. We stopped at his place for pie when it was over.”
“He’s quite the cook.”
If she heard my tone, she ignored it. “Yes, he really is. The pie was incredible, deep-dish, with clotted cream. He says he finds it relaxing to cook.”
“Well, that’s lovely.”
“Lucy. Honey. Just be happy for me. For heaven’s sake, just be happy, period.”
“You know,” I said, not deciding to tell her, the words just coming out in a rush. “The night Dad died, I ran into him here, in your garden. In the middle of the night, before he went fishing. He asked me to go with him. And I said no.”
My mother seemed startled. “The night he drowned?” she asked slowly.
“Yes. That night. I mean, if I’d gone, everything would be different. He’d probably still be alive, and everything, everything, would be different.”
“Oh, honey,” she said. She came and put her arms around me. “Is that what you think? What you’ve thought all these years? Oh, honey, no. No. What happened to your father was not your fault, or anyone’s fault, and you can’t fix it.”
“If I’d gone fishing with him,” I insisted, “everything would be different now.”
“Yes, maybe. And if he hadn’t gone fishing at all everything would be different, too. If it had been raining, if and if and if. You can’t do this, Lucy. You just can’t. Believe me, I tortured myself for a long time, too. Your father had had something on his mind for days. After the accident—and at first I wasn’t even sure it was an accident—I couldn’t stop wondering: why hadn’t I pressed him harder to find out what was wrong? I woke up when he got out of bed that night. I caught his hand as he was leaving the room and asked him what was wrong and he said nothing. He kissed me, and he said not to worry. Those were his last words to me. I couldn’t sleep, though, so I went up to the cupola. I heard you come in, Lucy. I heard the motorcycle come and go, I heard you talking in the garden with your father. It was fine, everything you said. It was not your fault, what happened.”
I didn’t speak for a moment. Bats rushed above us, like leaves drifting, like scraps breaking free from the sky. The relief I felt at having told her was physical.
“I know that. It’s just—”
“Your father is gone, honey. He’s been gone a long time. He would want you to live your life.”
“I know. I know that. But Mom, you said he was preoccupied. Do you happen to know why? What was on his mind?”
She sat down, shaking her head. “Oh, Lucy, do we have to? I don’t want to talk about the past anymore. You’ve found Iris, right? So your quest is over. The past is the past, Lucy,” she added gently. “It doesn’t help you to dwell there. You miss too much of what’s going on right in front of you. Believe me, I speak from experience on this. Don’t get stuck.”
The will, those pages with their slanted handwriting, was burning in my hands. I imagined telling her about it, but as with Blake, something held me back. This will left half
of everything to Iris, and all these decades later, I had found her. Would the will still be valid? Would Iris even care? Would my mother? I didn’t know, and that was just the trouble. I felt like I was walking on sand.
She looked at me—puzzled, irritated, concerned. I knew she wanted more than anything to walk away and go to bed, to drift into sleep, the scent of pine and strawberries permeating everything, the memory of Andy’s laugh, the touch of his large, capable hands, all of this easing her into pleasure, sleep, dreams. Still, after a moment she sighed and pulled her chair closer to the table. I thought of the morning we’d sat here looking at Rose Jarrett’s cryptic notes—just over two weeks ago, though it seemed a lifetime away. I turned the pages in my hands.
“I don’t know,” my mother said. “I don’t know the answer to your question. As I said, I thought about it night and day for months after your father died. Trying to understand what had happened. We weren’t old, you know—your father only forty-five that summer, and I was forty-three, and for a long time after, I’d wake up in the morning believing it hadn’t happened. I think that’s why I closed off the rooms. I wanted a wall between then and now, between what we’d dreamed for our lives and what had really happened.
“Anyway, all I can tell you is that he had something on his mind. He was preoccupied. Not worried so much as distracted. It was like he was listening to music I couldn’t hear. Sometimes I’d have to ask him a question three or four times to get an answer. He was finishing the kitchen renovation, and he kept having problems with the subcontractors. I didn’t want to add to his stress. I figured he’d tell me eventually, once he’d had time to work it out, whatever it was.”
She stared at the table, then looked up and spoke again. Her eyes were dry, but her words were rough with emotion.
