by Kim Edwards
“It isn’t about money,” I said, but even I could hear the uncertainty in my voice. I was thinking of Blake, and the falling-apart house, even as I was remembering floating in the marshes with my father.
“It’s always about money,” Art said. “Make no mistake, Lucy.”
Art waited a moment. When he spoke again, his voice was wistful. “I loved your father,” he said. “He was always such a sunny kid, the one everyone was drawn to, growing up. That was hard, and I did some things I regret, and so did he, but I loved him. I like to think that if he’d lived, we’d eventually have made things right between us.”
I took a deep breath, the air full of the scent of cut wood and iron. “It seems to me you had plenty of chances to make that happen.”
He shook his head, gazing beyond me to the doorway, to some distant point in the past. “Your father was a very stubborn man. He had his ways. He wouldn’t listen.”
There was something in his tone, so nostalgic, yet so laced with sorrow and regret. And I didn’t think that sounded true about my father, who had the gift of listening, who had taught it to me. I held still, feeling the quality of the air change in the room. I even blinked slowly, as if Art were a wild animal I didn’t want to frighten away.
“When?” I asked softly. “When didn’t he listen to what you had to say?”
Art didn’t look at me or even seem to hear me.
“I tried everything,” he said. “Everything I could to get him to listen to reason.”
“And he wouldn’t?”
He shook his head, passed his hand over his eyes as if wiping away sleep.
“No. He would not. I tried three, four, five times. He wouldn’t even speak to me by the end. When I found him that night he just kept casting his line into the water as if I wasn’t even there. That’s how it always was with Marty. Like I wasn’t even there.”
Now I could hardly breathe. “He was casting out his line,” I murmured.
“Yes. Into the reeds.”
“The night he died.”
“Yes.”
He looked across the desk then and we stared at each other, not speaking, as if his words had torn open the very air and all the oxygen was fading from the room.
“I was trying to do the right thing,” he said, as if I would surely see the reasoning and understand this. “I was trying to help him. Help you all.”
I closed my eyes for a second. “And he wouldn’t listen.”
“No.” He looked away again, out the window this time, into the back parking lot, where the gravel was a dim gray beneath the streetlamp. “Marty would never listen to me. He’d showed me those same papers. The ones you found, I bet. Showed them to me and told me what he was going to do, didn’t want to hear anything I had to say about it. And it was his land, sure, like he said.” Art made a gesture of frustration, a swift cut of his hand, as if reliving the argument with my father. “His to throw away if he wanted. Foolish. Not my business, though. But this was. Dream Master was my business. And I told him, again and again, if he found this person, if she laid claim to one piece, then what was to keep her from getting it all? Your father, he didn’t know what he was opening up, what he was getting into.”
Or maybe he did, I thought. Maybe he’d been enjoying a quiet kind of revenge. I didn’t say this, though. I only nodded. I’d gone very still as Arthur talked, anchored by a strange calm, as if I’d stepped outside myself and was watching the conversation unfold from far away. In the silence, Art spoke again.
“I couldn’t sleep for thinking about what he might do with those papers. Days, this went on. Then I woke up one night in the middle of the night. Was rudely awakened, I should say. Joey was always on the wild side, but usually he had the good sense to sneak in when he broke curfew. That night, though, he came home spitting mad. He was throwing things around, a car was waiting for him in the driveway. Before I could get up and ask what was going on, he’d found what he needed and left again, slamming the door hard on his way out. Damned if I could get back to sleep. Beautiful clear night it was, the kind we used to wait for as boys. I had a feeling Marty would be out there. In the marsh, where he always went—I had a hunch he’d be there. It’s where we always used to go. So I drove to the lake and took the boat out. I just wanted to talk to him if he was there. And he was. He wasn’t hard to find. It was a very still night.”
I nodded, remembering how I’d stood talking with my father in my mother’s moon garden on that same night, surrounded by such quiet it seemed I could hear the flowers in their delicate unfurling.
“He must have heard me coming, but he didn’t even look up. I pulled the boat up near him, cut the motor. Then we just drifted. He kept casting his line, reeling it in. Wouldn’t speak. We drifted, two boats, dark fish swimming beneath us.”
Dark fish swimming everywhere, I thought.
“Finally, I grabbed hold of his boat. The metal was cold, and I was so frustrated; I told him he was being a fool. He turned around, maybe he only meant to knock my hand away, but his hand hit me in the face. I stood up, and he did, too. I don’t think I hit him first, but maybe I did. Who knows, I might have. I just kept saying Marty, stop it, damn it, stop, but he wouldn’t, and so I pushed him away. Hard. Hard as I could. He lost his balance, fell. I did, too, on the recoil. I fell into the bottom of my boat, almost capsized it. Went skidding away, careening. It was dark. I didn’t see anything as much I felt it, heard it. It was a terrible sound, his head cracking against the side of the boat. It must have been his head. He didn’t cry out, shout, anything.”
Art paused and looked at me and it was all anguish on his face. I couldn’t speak, caught in that still place, that airless vacuum, the dark fish swimming all around.
“I tried to find him,” Art said. “I looked and I couldn’t see him. It was so dark. It seemed like such a long time I was there, after he fell. But I don’t know. I wanted to get help. I remember thinking I would get help. So I left. I left him.”
I still didn’t speak, remembering the voices traveling across the lawn in the beautiful dawn, my father lifeless on the stones, his skin swollen and iridescent, like a fish, the way my mother knelt beside him and touched his cheek so gently, and how he did not turn to kiss her palm.
“It wouldn’t have made any difference,” Art said. He was looking at his hands now, speaking to them. “It wouldn’t have mattered, by the time I got to shore. Even by the time I left, nothing would have made a difference.”
He wasn’t looking at me, but I knew what he wanted, what he was waiting for in that dusty room with its fluorescent lights—he wanted me not just to hear him but to agree with him. To say it was okay, what he’d done, reasonable under the circumstances, and thus to become complicit in my father’s death. Art looked so old now, sitting behind the desk, as if the telling had deflated him, leaving his skin to sag and cling more closely to his bones.
“Lucy,” he insisted, meeting my eye at last, pleading now. “Talk to me, please. It would not have mattered one bit if I had stayed.”
I stood up without a word, shaking, and walked out into the night.
He followed me, a shadow in the darkened door of the building. “Lucy,” he called after me, speaking softly, his voice carrying across the grass. “Don’t forget that you and your brother have a great deal at stake in this, too.”
I stopped at the edge of the outlet, so filled up with pain and rage and outrage that I could barely breathe. Art stayed on the stoop outside Dream Master for a moment longer, the building dark behind him, looking in my direction. Then he turned and went inside, the door falling shut behind him, clicking as it locked.
How long I stood there, I couldn’t say. The evening was mild and the streets were still full of tourists. Bursts of laughter floated out over the water from The Green Bean, and people strolled along the path, holding hands, eating ice cream, passing me, sometimes stepping around me, as if I were a pillar or a bench or a statue. I stood that still, caught in the airless, breathless pa
in of that long ago morning when they carried my father from the lake.
The windows above the glassworks were all dark—maybe Keegan was already asleep, Max breathing lightly, the rooms filled up with calm. I started walking hard and fast along the outlet into town, my thoughts so wild and scattered. It was a beautiful night, clear and warm, and so many people were lingering outside restaurants or strolling along the lake. Twice, people passing cast odd glances in my direction, and I realized I’d spoken out loud—a word, a phrase, agitated, nonsensical.
I walked in that state for a long time, past all the cozy homes with their lights on, people moving inside, reading or watching television or washing the dishes. Doing ordinary, untroubled things. They couldn’t see me striding past their houses, tears flowing down my face at some moments, possessed by an anger so fierce I was almost doubled up at others. I walked to the edge of town and then back, past the church with its arched red doors. I thought of the Reverend Suzi, but it was too late to call her. The streets were quieter by the time I found myself in the parking lot again, standing with one hand on my father’s Impala, the car he had loved so much, the place he had hidden his last secret.
The papers were still inside—I’d put them back in the tackle box because it seemed the safest place—reminding me of why I’d gone to see Art in the first place: to tell him about Iris, to talk with him about the ownership of the land. Not to hear this confession, words like lightning, transforming my known world like sand melting into glass.
Dream Master was dark. I went inside through the back door, which, oddly, was unlocked, as if Art had left in a hurry. I went into the storefront and, without deciding to do it, started pulling things off the shelves: gallons and quarts of paint crashing onto the linoleum, bucket after bucket of nails, a whole shelf full of doorknobs. I tipped the barrel full of marbles and they bounced and scattered across the store, shards of light glinting through the window onto their moving edges. It felt so good to hear things crash, to see the display of light fixtures teeter and go down. I made my way down one aisle, then another, the floor beneath my feet growing sticky with spilled paint, treacherous with marbles. The safes crashed one by one, each making a satisfying thud against the floor.
As the last one fell, a car drove down the street perpendicular to the store, lights flashing in the plate-glass windows. I froze, holding still until the car had turned and driven away. But the moment was broken. I didn’t have the will to destroy anything else. Instead, I picked my way through the ruins and went down to the office, turned on the light.
There, I went through the files, pulling them out and stacking them on the floor. I don’t know what I was looking for exactly, and I didn’t find anything of much interest. Receipts and records of sales and shipments, going back decades. Maybe because of the flames on the beaches all around the lake, maybe because of the painful leaping in my heart, I had fire in my mind as I searched. I kept thinking how easily these papers would ignite, how they’d go up in smoke, how the flames would lick at the walls until they caught on the rafters hidden beneath and traveled upward into the attic, dry as kindling, where nothing would stop them. There was an old gas tank buried beneath the parking lot, and I thought of that, too, how a spark might travel there and ignite a vast explosion.
I went so far as to take a sheaf of old invoices and light the corner, letting them burn out over the metal trash can. Ash formed and fell. My fingers were stained black.
Would I have set fire to this building, imagined by my great-grandfather, created from his industry and imagination, so full of the artifacts of the past? I don’t know. It was possible, alive in my mind, that I might do so. I opened the cupboards where we used to hide as children and started pulling papers out of there, too, letting them fall into a heap on the floor, the heap that could become a bonfire. The pile grew to my ankles, my calves, my knees. One match, I kept thinking. There was lighter fluid on the shelves, and paint thinner. One match and the place could go up in smoke, and fire, and ash.
Then I saw the handwriting. My father’s, neat and slanted to the left, different from Rose’s script, the letters long but more rounded, more fluid, unmistakably his. They spelled out the date January 1972 on a pale blue ledger with a cardboard cover. That was the year he met my mother. The year he was sent to Vietnam. I sat down at the desk and ran my fingers across the rough paper cover, imagining my father sitting at this same desk, reaching for a pen. January, snow as high as the windows, maybe falling through the cones of the streetlights in the early dusk, maybe swirling in eddies across the drifts in pale late afternoon light. And my father, so young, so full of dreams for his life, standing on the cusp of change, though he did not know it. It could break your heart to think of it too closely, to imagine all that might have happened, to know all that did.
I sat at the wide desk where a long line of ancestors had sat before me, and I opened the ledger. There were my father’s careful notes on the neatly ruled pages, with their pale blue and red lines and the columns, all the numbers my father had written down so precisely. I was taken back then, to the Sunday evenings when he sat doing the accounts at the dining room table, a pencil tucked over his ear and his fingers flying over the adding machine. I ran my fingers over the numbers, flipped the pages. Number after number in his neat handwriting. Numbers and dates and more numbers, tallied into precise columns at the bottom of each page. There was such a precision to this work, such an order, that even looking at it brought me a deep sense of comfort. All the pages were full. At some point the dates switched to February, and then to March, and then they ended.
When I looked up again, all the wild anger that had driven me had drained away. I was left with only a weariness so strong I felt I might not be able to get up. But eventually, I did. I skirted the pile of papers and turned out the light, making my way through the hall and back out into the empty parking lot. The door had been unlocked; anyone could have caused the damage. That’s what I told myself anyway as I drove up the lake road. The house was all lit up, and when I came in, my mother and Yoshi and Andy were gathered in the kitchen by the phone.
“There you are,” my mother said.
Yoshi put his arm around me.
“Where were you?” my mother asked. “Why didn’t you answer your phone?”
“I was just walking.”
“For four hours? Lucy, it’s after midnight.”
“No, it’s not!”
“Look.”
I squinted at the clock on the stove. It was.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I walked for a while and sat by the lake, and I just lost track of time. I’m so sorry you were worried.”
“Are you sure you’re okay?”
“I’m fine.” I took Yoshi’s hand, laced my fingers through his. “I’m fine, just tired.” I kissed him on the cheek in a showy way, eager to get away. “Come on,” I said. “Let’s go upstairs. I’m beat.”
Chapter 20
WHEN WE REACHED THE CUPOLA I WALKED ACROSS TO THE futon with its rumpled sheets and sat down on the window seat overlooking the lake and the wild garden where I’d last spoken to my father. All the time he’d been holding this secret so close that even my mother hadn’t known.
Yoshi sat down next to me and took both my hands in his. He waited, steady, until I could take a deep breath and tell him the story. I remembered how comforting it had always been, in the midst of the unsettled earth beneath us, to have Yoshi there. Once I started talking, there was a relief in the telling that I hadn’t expected, and some of the pressure in my chest began to ease.
“He really said that?” Yoshi asked, his voice low and even. “He actually admitted that to you?”
I pressed my lips together for a second, then took a breath.
“He did. He said it was an accident. But that’s not the thing—the thing is that he left my father there. He couldn’t find him, and he just left. And he never said a word.”
Yoshi kept holding my hands. He left the silence open so I could
speak.
“He came to the funeral,” I said, remembering. “And all these years he’s been so damned nice to everyone, helping my mother, giving Blake a job, trying to hire me—all so we’d think he was wonderful, when all this time he did this, and he knew.”
“He said it was an accident?”
“He did.”
“Well, maybe it was. Maybe he was trying to make amends, Lucy. This must have been eating him alive,” Yoshi observed.
I pulled my hands away, pressed them against my cheeks. “Don’t defend him. It’s not defensible, what he’s done.”
“Hey,” Yoshi said. “Is it me you’re mad at here?”
“No.” I took another deep breath. “No, I’m sorry. It’s not.”
“All right.”
“Right.” I closed my eyes for a second. “All right. I don’t know what to do. I certainly can’t tell my mother.”
Yoshi shook his head and gave a little disbelieving laugh. “Why not?”
I considered that. His family wasn’t geographically close, but they were open in a way my family had never been. Why couldn’t I say anything? Because I didn’t know how my mother felt about Art and about the land; I didn’t know what she was planning to do. And because I wanted to protect her from this knowledge.
“That’s not your job,” Yoshi pointed out when I tried to explain. “Lucy, you can’t carry this with you, not saying a word. It will eat you alive, too, if you do.”
“And then there’s Blake,” I went on, aware that I was not really responding to Yoshi. “Blake is right in the middle of this. Even if he doesn’t know what happened, he’s been woven into everything. Art is right, he has a deep stake in what happens.”
“So do you.”
“No, I don’t.”
“I’m not talking about money, or property, or this house.”
I couldn’t see Yoshi well in the darkness, but his voice was a little heated. I tried to search his face in the shadows, but his eyes were as dark as the night, unreadable. “What I mean, Lucy, is that you have a stake in the truth. It’s not like anyone is going to put your uncle in handcuffs. He says it was an accident, and it probably was. It’s a moral problem, not a legal one.”
