by Kim Edwards
“Does it matter, Lucy? Because I think we’re still in different places with all this. In the beginning I kept searching for reasons, too. I tortured myself with the idea that I might have changed the outcome. If I’d only done this, or said that, a different set of events would have followed. Maybe so. But this is what happened, and nothing changes that. It was an accident, and over the years it’s become a comfort for me to think of it that way.”
We’d never spoken so directly of my father’s death before; we’d driven grief underground, like water pressed beneath shale, threatening to emerge without warning. I didn’t want to cause her any further pain, but I put the will, those angry pages, on the table. I explained what it was and how I’d found it. I told her what it said.
She sat back in the chair, then picked up the papers and shuffled through them, though it was too dark to see.
“Really? He left half of everything to Iris?”
“He did. If he meant for this will to be seen, that is. He might have put it in the wall himself. Changed his mind, sealed it away instead of burning it.”
She nodded slowly. “Either that, or someone else did. Your grandfather or grandmother. It’s hard for me to imagine it was your grandfather, though. Do you remember him at all?”
“Not really, no.”
“He was genial, he liked the good life and was happy to float along on what his father had accomplished. Art’s a lot like that, when you get down to it. He feels entitled to everything, somehow. He was the sort of person who went along to get along—though, who knows, he might have bottled up enough anger to do this. Your grandmother, though—especially after your grandfather had that stroke—was very protective of her boys, especially of Arthur. I can see her doing this. Of course, I never knew your great-grandfather, so I can’t really say what he might have done.”
“Well, someone didn’t want it to be found.”
“Yes.”
“That seems awfully mercenary, if it was all about the money.”
“It might have been money. Or it might have been anger or embarrassment. They were very proper, both of your grandparents. Very concerned with appearances, with the family name. It’s a small town, and word would have gotten around. It might have been a sense of shame as much as anything, if either one of them did this.
“That’s your father’s handwriting,” she said, picking up the first page and reading it again. Found in kitchen, west wall. “He must have come across it during the renovation that last spring.” She sighed. “He never mentioned it. He wouldn’t have, though. Still, I knew something was off.”
“So maybe this was what was on his mind.”
“Yes,” she said slowly. “I can see that. It might have been.”
“If it’s true, it could change everything.”
In the silence we listened to the soft voice of the lake, whispering and whispering to the stony shore where they had pulled my father from the water.
“Well, not everything,” she said.
She stood up and slid the papers back across the table. The radiant happiness that had surrounded her when she’d come in had disappeared.
“Let’s just think about this,” she said. “Let’s not mention it to anyone. We can talk to lawyers and so forth, but for the time being, I don’t see the need to discuss it with others.”
“It’s been such a strange day,” I said, because I didn’t want to consider too deeply why she might wish to keep this quiet.
My mother reached over and put her arm around my shoulders. She smelled unfamiliar, of strawberries and sweat.
“Go to bed, Lucy,” she said. “Get some sleep.”
I went upstairs, climbed into the room at the top of the house where Yoshi was sleeping in the middle of the futon. He moved away as I slipped in beside him. I lay there for a long time, the events of the day and discoveries of the night coming around and around, as if circling on a conveyor belt I could not switch off. I tried relaxation exercises and reciting lines of poetry and, remembering how I had felt in the chapel, for the first time in years I even tried self-consciously to pray, but the cupola was filling with the grainy gray light of sunrise before I finally slipped into a fitful, dreamless sleep.
Chapter 19
WHEN THE LAND AROUND THE LAKES WAS HOME TO THE Iroquois, they celebrated each harvest season by setting bonfires along the shore to make a ring of fire. This tradition was still celebrated every autumn after the leaves had scattered across the surface of the lake and the fields were stripped bare of their splendor, brown and dormant. Over the years people had begun to light a ring of fire on the Fourth of July as well. Boy Scouts sold flares and people plunged them into their lawns or deep into the pebbles of their beaches; Yoshi and I bought four from a stand outside the grocery store, and I explained what would happen: as the post-solstice twilight faded into darkness, the flames and flares would be lit up along the shore, making a necklace of light.
This was what we were waiting for when we gathered in the park by the marina. Blake had docked in the slip closest to the shore, and he and Avery had set up coolers of drinks, along with baskets full of delicate turkey and watercress sandwiches from The Green Bean. Family and friends sat with drinks on the edge of the seawall, or gathered in groups on the boat or the dock or the lawn. There was a band concert going on in the gazebo and children ran out to dance barefoot in the grass, parents chasing after them when they ran too close to the water. I found Avery on the boat deck, wearing a close-fitting T-shirt that made her pregnancy clearly visible.
“I’m so sorry,” I said. “It was my fault completely.”
She met my gaze. “Not entirely,” she said. “Blake didn’t have to tell.”
“I was giving him a hard time,” I said. “About sticking around here and taking a job at Dream Master. He was just giving me a context, that’s all. I’m the one who let it slip for no reason.”
She sighed, looked off over the lake, sipped at her sparkling water.
“All right,” she said at last, and looked back at me again.
“We’re good, then?”
She shrugged. “Not exactly. Not quite yet. But there’s no undoing it, so we might as well move on.”
I nodded. That seemed a little harsh, but fair enough. Honest, anyway.
“Besides,” she said, relenting a little, “we’re telling everyone tonight. No formal announcement, we’re just telling people one by one.”
“Okay. Congratulations, by the way. I’m really glad for you both.”
At this she smiled a little, and gave a quick nod, and then one of her friends was coming over, hugging her, and I stepped aside and took my drink back to the park, where Yoshi was waiting. I slipped my arm through his, resting my head for a second on his shoulder, and he glanced at me, smiling, before he went back to the conversation. He was talking to Joey, who was with the same long-limbed, long-haired woman I’d seen him with at Dream Master. Zoe and Austen were there, too, standing on the boat with Art. Across the expanse of lawn I glimpsed Max, dancing with wild abandon to a Sousa march, and Keegan, dancing with him for a few beats, before he laughed and swooped down, lifting Max and putting him up on his shoulders. I felt a pang of affection and the slightest bit of regret, but it was gone as quickly as it came, and I turned my attention back to the conversation.
They were talking about The Landing. They had the land and a zoning change was making its slow way through committees and would be announced within a day or so; Joey was optimistic that they’d get permission to build. I thought of the beautiful chapel, which stood in the center of the parcel they wanted, and of my mother, telling me not to mention the will I’d found, and felt a rush of paranoia: why not say anything? Was she planning to sell her property to Art, after all? Was she changing her mind about Dream Master? I wondered suddenly, too, what had been happening with Oliver and Suzi and the chapel.
“You’re pretty far from building anything, though,” I said, sipping at my wine.
Joey shrugged, no
nchalant, full of the smug, unearned confidence that had always driven me crazy. “Yes and no. We’re almost good to go. I’ve already had calls from a dozen people interested in owning a piece of this. It could potentially be the biggest thing we’ve done.”
I thought of the marshes, and the herons rising when I disturbed their reedy home, rising and floating high, huge and graceful, above the trees. I looked across the water at Blake, standing on the boat and laughing with Andy and Art and two other people I didn’t know, and my mother, talking with Avery now, who was looking very happy. “New Year’s Eve,” I heard her say. “We’re getting married New Year’s Eve.”
The band played, and finished, the last notes floating out over the water. We ate and drank and talked as the sun went down and the darkness deepened. Fires began to appear, first just a few and then more and more, flaring here and there around the rim of the lake. It was such a lovely, familiar evening, the air as soft and warm as breath, but the secret of the will was like a transparent wall between me and everything else. I kept moving from group to group, drifting in and out of conversations.
Finally, Yoshi and I sat by ourselves on the seawall, dangling our legs into the lake. I told him about the will and all it implied.
“Well, it’s not necessarily sinister. Maybe your mother just doesn’t want to take any dramatic action until she knows what it means,” he suggested. The lake had turned a misty gray that blurred into the deepening sky. “After all, the will may not be valid. And if it is, then it would probably be pretty complicated to figure out who got what all these years later.”
“You think I’m overreacting?”
“A little bit,” he said, nodding.
“Maybe I am,” I said, remembering my conversation with my mother about Oliver’s intentions. She’d been completely right. “It’s always like this after a few days here. I start to lose my bearings. The surface is one way, but then there are all these other things going on, sometimes going back decades, swirling undercurrents that I just don’t understand.”
“This time is different, though,” he said. “You have Rose’s story now, which must put a new light on everything.”
It was true, I did. Her story, and the radiant windows of the chapel and the Westrum House, had stretched and changed the way I saw the world. Everything was connected in a way I had not understood before. Her dreams, as well as my great-grandfather’s, had brought us to this dusky evening, to this moment in time when everything might shift and change again.
Blake walked down the dock, his boat shoes echoing faintly against the wooden slats. He’d strung tiny white lights on the railings.
“Hey there, you two,” he said. “I’m going to run Mom up to the house. Want to come and check out the fires along the way?”
“Sounds nice,” I said, splashing my foot in the water, “but I’ve got the Impala. So I can’t.”
“Yoshi? Want to come?”
“You should,” I said, knowing how Yoshi loved to sail, realizing this might be his only chance, given how busy Blake always was, how our time here was already beginning to dwindle.
“You wouldn’t mind?” Yoshi wanted to know.
“I wouldn’t, really. I’ll meet you at the house. I might take a walk first.”
I waited until everyone had boarded and the boat had glided out onto the dark water, becoming nothing more visible than a net of moving lights. Then I finished my glass of wine and walked through the park, through the streets crowded with summer tourists.
I’d left the car behind Dream Master, where I knew I wouldn’t get towed. As I walked along the outlet, the building turned a dark, blank-eyed, and impassive face to the world, but when I cut around to the parking lot, a light was visible in Art’s window. He had left the party before I had a chance to say hello. I wondered if he was inside at his desk, or if he’d just left the light on. I wondered what, if anything, he knew about Iris, or the will, or Rose. So I went in.
I walked through those corridors where I had played as a child, running over the dusty linoleum, thrilled with the scents of metal and sawdust. This place had defined so many generations, and it looked caught in time. A row of safes for sale stood against the wall, made by some other company now, their little doors ajar. I walked up and down the aisles, studying the displays of locks and the bins of nails, the racks of paint chips and brushes.
When I finally made it to the door of Art’s office, I found him staring at a computer screen. An old-fashioned adding machine sat on the desk, cascading paper onto the dusty tile floor.
He didn’t hear me right away, and so there was a moment when I stood and watched him, concentrating hard, traces of my father in the shape of his hands and forearms, in the way his sideburns tapered into his graying hair. When he glanced up and saw me he was startled, and his face opened and went slightly slack with surprise; then he laughed, relaxing back into the chair.
“Lucy,” he said. “What a surprise.”
“Big leap?” I asked. “From hardware to software, I mean?”
He chuckled. “Sure is. You any good with spreadsheets?”
“I am, actually.”
“Ah. Want to have a look?”
“No, not really.”
He looked at me then, taking me in for the first time, and the uneasy expression that moved across his face echoed his look when he’d first seen me.
“No?” He folded his arms across his chest. “Then, what can I do for you?”
I felt sorry for him then, because he suddenly looked old and vulnerable behind that desk.
“I was just passing by and saw the light was on,” I said, gesturing to the window. “I parked here and went to the party. I saw you, but didn’t get to say hello.”
“I stopped in. It was fun. I always like the ring of fire, and the concert—I like that, too. Your father and I used to light flares as kids. It doesn’t seem that long ago.”
“I’ve been driving his car,” I said. “You know, the one he fixed up?”
“I know. I went out to look at it earlier. He sure loved that car.”
“Yes, he did. My mother hasn’t had the heart to touch it all these years, so it’s mostly just been sitting in the barn.”
He nodded and looked out the window at the gravel parking lot, where the Impala sat at the edge of light from the streetlamp, the silver arrows glinting.
“He’d be glad, I think.” Art said. “Glad to know you were enjoying it, Lucy.”
I leaned against the chair. “I am enjoying it. Though it drives like a boat. And the other day I had a flat tire, coming back from Elmira. I had to call the car service, you know, and the guy who came pulled everything out of the trunk. You’ll never guess what I found.”
“I can’t imagine—a tire iron?”
“Yes, actually. And my father’s tackle box.”
Art sat up straighter then, leaning a little forward. He folded his hands carefully on the desk.
“Yes? Are you sure? We looked and looked for that the night he died.”
“I know. He used to take me fishing. All the lures I remember were there.”
“I see.”
“Did you fish with him a lot when you were younger?” I asked, sliding into the chair, its leather smooth against the backs of my legs.
“Yes, as a matter of fact. We did. Summers, we were out on the water every morning. Me and Marty. We’d catch a whole string of fish sometimes. Other times we’d come back empty-handed.”
I nodded, thinking with nostalgia of all the mornings I’d spent with my father in just this same way.
“It’s funny, though,” I said. “The lures were in the tackle box, just like you’d expect, but none of his tools were in the bottom. No tools, no wire, nothing. It made me sad, somehow, all that empty space. Then I found the papers.”
“Really?” Art said. “What papers were those?”
“A will. Your grandfather’s will, in fact.”
Briefly then, without pausing to weigh the possible consequence
s, I told the story—Rose and her daughter, and the will written by my great-grandfather, which included Iris.
His expression didn’t change. After a minute, he sighed and leaned back in his chair, clasping his hands behind his head.
“So, do you have this will?” he asked. “Could I see it?”
I’d left it in the Impala, locked back in the tackle box.
“It’s at the house,” I said. “My mother put it away somewhere, I’m not sure where.”
He nodded.
“Not that it matters,” he said. “Such a will would hardly be valid, all these years later. Rose is long gone, and probably her daughter, too. What difference could any of it make?”
He had no idea, I realized. Not about the chapel or the windows, the fascinating life Rose had led, the other branch of the family, living not very far away.
“Well, actually, she’s still alive. Iris, I mean. I met her recently. She has two grown sons, and grandchildren about my age.”
“Are you serious? You say you met her?”
“Yes. It was really kind of amazing. She’s ninety-five years old. Very together. She has the family eyes.”
“Does she know about the will?”
I thought this was a strange first question to ask. “Not yet,” I said. “I found it after I met her. But I think she should know, don’t you? I mean, it might not be valid, but emotionally it might matter to her. To know she wasn’t excluded.”
Art’s voice got lower then, not warm exactly, but inviting me to hear a confidence. I thought of Iris, and of Rose, of all the things I knew about the family that he did not know, and leaned a little forward, so I could listen. Listen, gather more, collect another piece of the puzzle that might let all the others fall into place.
“Lucy,” he said softly. “Surely you understand that the marshland is worth a great deal of money at this moment. It hasn’t always been valuable, and it may not be again. This is a golden moment, is what I’m saying. Probably this will you’re talking about is null and void. I’m not all that concerned about it. But even so, if you contact this person, this long-lost relative, you open up the door to competing claims, even litigation. And I warn you, the moment will pass, and anything you might have had—anything your family might have had—will be gone.”
