by Kim Edwards
“If what he says about it being an accident is true.”
“What? Do you think he’s lying?”
“I don’t know what I think. Maybe. He asked where I put the papers. I mean, I think he’s genuinely unnerved by the will.”
“Where are they?”
“In the car. I didn’t tell him.”
But then I thought of what I had told Art about the papers—that I had given them to my mother, that she had put them somewhere in this house. It wasn’t rational, but I was seized with an urgent sense of panic, as if I might glance out the window and find Art striding across the lawn to search the house.
I sighed. “I guess you’re right. I guess I have to tell her,” I said.
We sat quietly for a while, side by side, the night air soft around us. Yoshi reached over and slipped his hand into my hair, gently massaging my scalp.
“You’re so tense,” he said. “Lie down for a minute.” And so I did, sliding down to the futon and stretching out on my stomach. Yoshi ran his hands lightly over my back, drawing faint lines across my skin. “Relax,” he said, and then his hands were on my shoulders, pressing away the tension I hadn’t known I was carrying. My shoulders, arms, back, all relaxed, releasing anxiety like water. Waves lapped in the near distance, splashed against the dock, and I concentrated on that steady sound, imagining I was floating on water, being carried gently away.
Yoshi lay down next to me, resting one hand on the small of my back. I drifted, and drifted, his breath and my breath mingling with the sound of the waves, until at last I fell asleep.
When I woke it was still dark. I checked the time, but only an hour had passed. It was the deep middle of the night, hours before dawn. Next to me Yoshi slept, and below me, in another layer of the house, my mother slept, too. I stood up carefully, so Yoshi wouldn’t wake, and made my way downstairs. I got a glass of water and stood on the porch steps, too restless to sit, too tired to swim or walk. Out here, the voices of the frogs were loud and low, floating through the trees from the direction of the marshland, and I thought of the herons sleeping there amid the rustling weeds, or standing on their reedy legs. I thought of the silence of the forest I’d walked through with Keegan, the sense of enchantment I’d had in that wild place, as if we’d stepped outside of time. I thought of all the people who had walked this land, and the traces they’d left, the stone grinding bowls and shards of pottery, the remnants of houses and barns, the patterns of underground bunkers. I thought of Iris, who had spent the last summer of her childhood in this house, had perhaps even stood in this same spot on a night not unlike this one, listening to the voices of the water and the frogs, searching the sky for a sliver of moon. And I thought of Rose, the traces she had left, even though she had never, to my knowledge, stepped foot in this house, or even in the beautiful chapel she herself had helped design.
So then I knew what I wanted to do. I went back and slipped the car keys off the hook. I got into the Impala, and I drove.
It wasn’t far, less than five miles away. I pulled off the road onto the wide grassy shoulder and walked to the chain-link gates. Now that it was no longer officially a base, now that there was no equipment stored inside and no weapons were buried in the earth, the security, which had been so intense when I was growing up, was almost nonexistent. The single padlock on the gate opened beneath my hands; I slipped inside. Behind me, streetlights glared into the darkness. Where I stood, however, the night was complete, covering everything in its soft embrace. I started walking through the tall grass to the chapel as I had just a few days before. I didn’t understand time, how so much could have happened so very quickly, how I could have known so little the last time I was here.
Opening the chapel door was easy. The lock was old-fashioned and gave way quickly. I stepped inside and stood still for a few minutes, letting my eyes adjust to the darkness. Gradually, shapes began to emerge: the rows of empty pews, the pulpit and the lectern, the altar behind the communion rail, where empty candleholders glinted faintly in the scarce light. I slipped off my sandals, a habit from Asia, and walked to the front of the church, the tiles gritty against my bare feet. The Wisdom window had been returned to its place. The other windows would be removed soon for cleaning and restoration, but for now the chapel was intact, as it had been originally designed, and if I couldn’t see any of the images, I knew from the glimpses of pale glass, of lead lines, that they were there. The vine-laced moons stood in pale relief across the bottom of each one. Rose, a century ago, had seen this pattern and carried it with her through love and disappointment, across the wide ocean and into the lonely winter nights. She had fashioned it into a blanket for her child and, years later, into the borders for these windows. This was the trace she’d left in the world, a piece of her story that had lodged itself in my imagination all these decades later.
I slid into a wooden pew, the wood smooth, the silence and the darkness sifting down. I sat still; moment by moment, my breathing grew calmer. I made myself inhale deeply, relax. Ruah, breath. Spirit. Wisdom. I imagined the Wisdom window, the clear glass indicating the rush of the Divine presence, creating and shaping everything. Not pictured, never named, but the source of all. I sat still in this place where so many had sat before me, trying to listen past my grief and confusion, thinking of Rose Jarrett a century before, in another country and another church, listening, too.
When, I wondered, had this story really begun? Was it in the moment when Rose, having lost everything she’d loved, had slipped the heavy silver chalice into her pocket? Or had it begun much earlier, when Geoffrey Wyndham laughed in the ruins, dismissing her dreams, or later, on the dark staircase, when he forced her to make a choice she didn’t really have? Had it begun with the comet, that strange light, or had it begun long before, in events and social structures that caught my ancestors like a net the moment they were born?
Whatever its beginning, the story had unfolded, one event leading to the next, beauty and loss surfacing in every generation, until I sat here, a hundred years away from that comet, woven into the story in ways no one could ever have imagined.
In the darkness of the silent church I finally felt safe enough to let myself imagine the lake at the quiet hour before dawn; my father in his soft blue fishing hat, floating on the tranquil water, wondering what to do with knowledge he had not sought but could not discard. The sound of an approaching boat was faint at first, like a shadow in the mist, a shadow in his heart. In the gray, grainy light of almost dawn, Art’s voice floated to my father, and he answered, and at first their argument was civil, reasonable, calm. But then the voices were less reasonable, rising like smoke in an angry upward spiral, until they were both standing, shouting, truly fighting, and both were falling, Arthur into the bed of his boat, ricocheting into the reeds, and my father slamming his head against the metal edge and slipping into the cold, clear darkness of the lake, too stunned to move.
I pressed my face into my hands.
Something about that night was still loose, untethered, flitting through my thoughts. In this stillness I could sense it, like the brush of air from a wing.
Around me the beautiful windows, connecting me to other lives and other times, to things done and also deliberately left undone, stood dark. Rose, I was sure, had acted out of love, yet for Iris her mother’s absence had remained an unresolved sadness at the center of her life. I thought of what Rose had written about anger, about its power to corrupt, to make a space for evil. Maybe she was right. Maybe evil, that old-fashioned word, could be called other things, disharmony or dysfunction. Maybe Rose was right and evil wasn’t attached to an individual as much as it was a force in the world, a seeking force, one that worked like a self-replicating virus, seeking to entangle, to ensnare, to undo beauty.
The thing I needed to see had been flitting around and around in the darkness, like something winged, and now it settled.
All these years, I’d been asking the wrong question altogether. The question was not what might have h
appened if I’d gone out fishing with my father. The question was what might have happened if I’d never gone out that night at all.
That night, I’d flown on the back of Keegan’s motorcycle through the cool dark air to the gorge, where I’d run into Joey. He had taunted me my whole life long, the sort of contempt of indifference that wears a deeper scar every time it happens, and the anger of generations was coiled around my heart. So I had felt justified, even thrilled, stealing Joey’s clothes and casting them into the trees, throwing his keys so deeply into the bushes that they were most likely there still, rusting into the earth. My remorse for all that had come much later, and had never been great, a mild uneasiness at most. And yet, in the deep silence of the sanctuary, I heard Art say what I had not been able to take in before: Joey had come in that night making a lot of commotion, much more than usual. He had banged drawers, searching noisily in the dark for clothes, for another set of car keys. I imagined Art, woken from a sound sleep, swinging his legs over the side of the bed. Art, swearing under his breath and getting up, going downstairs to drink a glass of water, knowing he wouldn’t sleep again. The night had been mild, like the nights of his youth, and he found himself thinking of the fishing place, of taking the boat out for a little while. Why not? He put his glass in the sink and headed for the lake. My father was already there.
What had happened to my father was not my fault. I was not responsible for his death. I did not push him, or leave him alone in the water.
Yet it was not only others, in another country or on a dark lake, who had been ensnared in this pattern, repeating itself through the generations.
It was also me. I was woven into the story like everyone else.
I sat there for a long time, until the windows began to gather the light and distinguish themselves from the cold stone walls. The women in each frame began to emerge, carrying jars or bowls or stories, going about their lives. It gave me comfort to see them. The vibrant figures of the Wisdom window took shape, too, animals and plants and people with their arms uplifted, their hands becoming leaves, becoming words amid the healing rush and weave of Wisdom, encircling, creating, playful, and delighting. I thought of Rose, and all her letters. I thought of her sitting on the edge of the lake, struggling against anger, making the hardest decision of her life.
When the sun was fully up, I left. I took care to lock the church behind me and walked slowly back through the fields, the long weeds alive with wind. I wondered if I could call my experience in the chapel prayer—not a long list of asking, after all, or a rote string of words, but rather a kind of sacred listening. The Impala stood at the entrance, a remnant of a lost time. I drove it back to the house.
No one was up, so I made coffee. When it was late enough I called Blake and told him I needed to see him right away. He was groggy and puzzled and hardly pleased, but he agreed to come. In fact he arrived even before my mother came downstairs, tying her robe tightly at the waist.
“What’s going on?” she asked, joining us at the table on the patio. The breeze had picked up, but it was warm. I’d placed smooth stones on my folder of images and letters to hold them in place.
“Beats me,” Blake said. He sat back and clasped his hands behind his head. “Lucy made it sound like life or death, though.”
“Lucy?” my mother said. “What is it? Are you okay?”
“I’m okay,” I said, and finished pouring coffee for us all. It steadied me, doing that ordinary thing. I put the pot down and held the warm cup in my hands. Gray clouds scuttled across the edges of sky, threatening, but still far away.
Then I told them what Art had said in the office at Dream Master. I watched them both as I talked, speaking out of some calm that went so deep it seemed as if I contained a bottomless spring from which it welled up.
They listened. My mother made a teepee of her fingers and pressed them against her lips. I didn’t leave anything out. When I got to the part where Art pushed my father, my mother closed her eyes. She didn’t move, but tears slid down her face. Blake looked away, gazing out to the lake, choppy and gray in the early morning light.
“Why are you doing this?” he said at last, turning to me, his face unsettled by anger. “Damn it, Lucy, why can’t you just leave things alone. You blast in here and you think you know everything. Well, I don’t believe for a minute that any of this is true.”
My mother wiped her fingertips across her eyes and looked at me.
“Is it?” she said. “Lucy, is it true?”
“It’s what Art told me,” I said, too stunned to reply to Blake. Whatever I’d expected, it hadn’t been their disbelief. I’d never thought to question what Art had said, because his suffering had seemed so real. “Why would I make it up?”
“Big mystery there,” Blake said. “Because you don’t want to see the land developed. This serves your interests.”
“Well, it serves yours to ignore what’s right in front of you.”
Blake’s face tightened, but he didn’t reply. I forced myself to take a deep breath, because now I was angry, too, and yet I kept thinking of Rose’s words: Do not act out of anger. Act from love, or not at all.
“You saw the will,” I said to my mother. “You saw the will and asked me not to mention it, I don’t know why. But when I did mention it to Art, this is what happened.”
I handed the envelope containing the will to Blake, who opened it and read. For several minutes the waves rushing against the shore made the only sound.
“I just wanted to think about it,” my mother said. “About what it might mean. Lucy—you don’t imagine I knew anything about this?”
She got up and went into the house and came back a moment later with a file.
“Mom,” Blake said, looking up from the will. “What are you doing? Look, we still don’t know all the facts. We haven’t heard anything from Art himself. We only have Lucy’s version. Maybe she misheard.”
“I did not mishear.”
My mother held up her hand to quiet us. She opened the folder.
“This is the contract,” she said, pulling out a document. “Art and I have been talking back and forth for years about this house, the land. I’ve known that he’s wanted this, and I’ve known why. At first I was pretty resistant to the idea, but over the years it came to make more sense to me. I guess as the weight of the house grew and got heavier I started thinking about what it might be like to live in town and not have to listen to its complaints all the time. Then, too, Art has been kind all these years. A real help. I’ve come to rely on him. Whatever he’s done, that’s all true.”
She flipped to the last page, and I saw that she had signed the contract, and dated it June 25, the day after we’d gone to see the Westrum archives and stopped at Joan Lowry’s packed and lonely apartment. Now she ripped this page off and tore it in half, and then again, until it was in tiny pieces. When she opened her hand, the shreds flew across the lawn, some catching against the bushes, others swept by the breeze to the shore, where they were caught and carried off by waves.
“Mom,” Blake said.
“I believe Lucy,” she said. “Because I remember how things were, and I remember things the two of you will never know. I can see it happening. What Art described—I can see it all. Your father meant to come home that night. He’d had something on his mind for days and he couldn’t sleep. The last thing he did was kiss me and say he’d be back soon, and not to worry. But I did.”
“What if I don’t believe it?” Blake asked.
“Well,” my mother said. “You’re a grown man. Believe what you like, Blake.”
“The will is real,” I pointed out. “Even if you don’t believe the rest, the will in your hands is real.”
“Why don’t you talk to Art yourself,” my mother suggested. “See what he says.”
“He’ll just deny it,” I said, certain suddenly that this was true. And what proof did I have of all he’d said—nothing but his words in the silence of Dream Master late at night. Nothing at a
ll.
“Maybe.”
“Or he’ll just say it was an accident.”
“If the story is true, it had to be an accident,” Blake countered. “Art has his flaws, like anyone, but he’s not cold-blooded.”
I thought of Yoshi saying, It’s a moral problem, not a legal one.
“I’m going to tell Iris,” I said, folding the will and putting it back into its yellowed envelope. “You do what you have to, but that’s what I need to do.”
“She’ll have to know,” my mother agreed.
Blake sat back in the chair and gazed out across the water toward his boat, a muscle working in his cheek.
“This is unbelievable,” he said, finally. “Sell or don’t sell, Mom. Sell it to Art or to someone else. But this business with the will is just crazy. It’s probably invalid, being so old and stuck in a wall, but if it’s not, why bring it up? Why should a bunch of strangers end up with the things we’ve worked for all our lives?”
I left my mother and Blake on the patio. Yoshi was in the kitchen, reading an article on strip-mining in a copy of Harper’s that he’d bought at the airport, a cup of coffee on the counter.
“How’s it going out there?”
“It’s okay.”
“Really?”
“No, actually. It’s terribly tense.”
Yoshi nodded. “I’m sorry. Can I help?”
“Not really.”
“Okay. Then can I change the subject?”
“Please.”
He pulled the laptop across the counter and flipped it open.
“I sent out a bunch of inquiries after we talked about jobs. A few people sent listings in reply. Mostly I don’t think they’re very interesting, but there are a couple that caught my eye. One in Papua New Guinea, and one in Cambodia.”
