Lake People (23 page)

“Eliza Plimpton, Eliza Plimpton!” she said breathlessly.

“Here,” I told her, for though that name meant nothing to me, I had seen the grave, and I led her to it.

That girl was astonished; she put her hand to her head and let her jaw drop and after a moment she looked slowly around the cemetery and then she held out her hand and asked me to pinch her, which I did, gently, and she said, “So it’s true, this is real life?”

I assured her it was. She told me that some weeks ago the name had come to her, dropped down into her mind like a ray of light, and since that time she had been certain—though her brother mocked her—that this woman surely had existed. She ran her hands over the gravestone. I told her about tracing graves with a sheet of paper and a pencil, which she said she would certainly
do. I went right along with her; I acted as though I, too, was astonished that the name had come to her and had turned out to be a real name of a real Kettleborough woman. In truth I suspected that she had heard this name before, in school or in the walls of her own house, where it could be that this very woman had lived, or on a field trip to one of the old mills around, or maybe even in the cemetery itself. But like I said, I went along with the girl, amazed at the sheer magic of it.

It wasn’t until a few weeks after the fire on the hillside that I saw that little girl again. I entered the cemetery and there she lay, so still, her head resting upon Eliza Plimpton’s grave. Because of the dried leaves my entrance made noise, but the girl did not even look up. I went to her and said something, I don’t remember what—“Excuse me?” or “Are you all right?”—and she didn’t respond. Finally I reached out and touched her upon the head. At this point she let out the sigh of an adult upon whose shoulders an incomprehensible weight has been placed.

“All the world,” she said heavily. She was utterly worn out.

By this time I had kneeled down beside her. When I asked her what the trouble was she finally looked up, surprised, I think, that anyone should bother to ask. And there was her face; I knew it right away. She had been in the papers—the little girl who had started the fire. Rose Hughes, and now with those wide and glistening eyes I saw that my old friend Gerald Hughes was indeed her father, and I was astonished that I had not realized that the first time I met her. Still, I pretended I had heard nothing of the fire, and instead asked her once more what the trouble was.

She moved from the grave and lay down in the leaves, her arms spread out wide. Here she breathed loudly for a few minutes, and then she lifted her shirt and showed me her scar—I had heard she had scarred severely—and she said, “I have my mark. The world is a fair place.”

“I don’t know about that,” I said.

Rose lifted her legs straight up and then let them drop to the ground.

“I have ruined the only true love I ever knew,” she told me.

“You were in love?” I asked her.

“Oh,” she said. “Oh, to be in love.”

“I know,” I told her.

Just then the church bell rang; it was five o’clock. Rose jumped up and ran out of the cemetery.

In the afternoons I also spend hours at the library. There’s a wonderful old woman there who worked for years as the head librarian but retired at least two decades ago. She’s ninety-seven now. “All my friends are dead,” she says frequently. Her husband, too, and though she has children, “good ones,” they have gone off to live their own lives. Now she spends her days as I imagine she did when she worked, and by now she must have read every book in that library. She’s still sharp, too—in fact, I took her mind for granted when I first met her. For she says things—on that first day I met her she said, “I should think you would come around,” and then on another day, “Don’t you look like your grandmother.” Shamefully, I took these things for the remarks of an old woman who had gotten confused.

On that first visit to the library, I told the old librarian that I wanted to find out about the history of the lake. She gave me a pile of ancient, fragile books. Their covers were cloth or leather, black or green or dark blue, and their pages had yellowed to the color of firewood. There were books about the boats of the lake; books about the islands and the Indians who first settled them; books that describe the geology in a grand, celebratory way; and there was one book that documented the legends people have
told of the lake. Typically, these books were not allowed to be taken out of the library, but the old librarian slipped each one into a plastic cover and sent me home with them, saying I had two weeks. In just three days I had already been through all of them, but I kept them for the allotted time. They revealed nothing for me, but with them in my hands I had the strange feeling that some part of myself had been described.

When, after two weeks, I replaced the books in their plastic covers and walked them back to the library, the old librarian put her hand on mine and said, “You just take them out any old time.” After that she led me to the microfiche, where she taught me how to flip through old editions of the
Kettleborough News
. “When were you born?” she asked me, and suggested I start looking there, and in the days and weeks that surrounded that day.

At that point, I had not yet told her that I was truly on a search for my own history. Yet as I looked through the papers that she had led me to, almost immediately I came upon a name I had wanted to find: Wickholm. This was Karl Wickholm. His crashed Ford was pictured right there on the front page of the evening paper. I can only hope their family was spared that evening’s edition. It wasn’t too many issues later until I discovered myself, announced as the new child of Clara and Paul Thorton.

When I left the library that day, the librarian didn’t say a word. She just put her hand on my shoulder and walked me to the door, and even opened the door for me. The sun was bright, blinding, and it was clear to me that though I was still unsure about just where I had come from, she certainly knew. Now, as I walk through this town, I wonder just how many people know my story, and how it is possible that in all these years, no one has ever thought to tell it to me.

It was around this time that a woman appeared at the back counter of the store and rang that bell one solid time. I had never heard anyone ring it before, for usually I am gone before the first customer arrives. I was startled when I heard it ring, and jumped. I came out to the counter in my white coat and hat and immediately I recognized her. I had not seen her in years, but I would have known her anywhere—the woman who would stand outside the school fence while we children played hopscotch or four-square at recess. Then, as now, she wore a fitted skirt and suit jacket, held her hands clasped neatly at her waist, and did not let one piece of her tightly permed hair ever fall out of place. Of course I always assumed that she was someone else’s grandmother.

Over the years, I saw her on the pier, too, looking toward Bear Island with that same urgency that I have learned to look toward that place with. Once, when I was a child, I saw her at a ski race of mine. And what about the day when I was fourteen years old, running home from the Hughes’s railcar after I had been scolded and mocked? I was so depleted on that day, and when I tripped on the sidewalk and landed on my hands and knees, her small feet were there in front of me. I remember noticing that her laces were tied so neatly, each loop the same size as the other, and all of it centered perfectly on her stiff shoes. She kneeled down and helped me up, and took my hands into her soft ones. The time she dared, I can now say. She looked into my eyes and said without doubt, “You are accepted.”

These days, I find myself wondering if she could have known, back then, that those words would mean something to me. Her gentle blue eyes, her soft hands—I believed that she held some grace far beyond this world that allowed her to see right into me. How very different those words would have been had I known they came from a grandmother who had failed to take me in.

“Alice,” she said as she stood at the counter.

“Yes?”

“Sophie Wickholm,” she said, and held out her hand.

I have Hill hands. When I was young and paired with Martha Hill for a school project, I noticed, all those years before she became my dear friend, that she and I had the same awkwardly angled pointer fingers that push inward, toward the next finger in line. The same long, straight thumbs, too, and the same blunt nails that will never be shaped into something delicate and beautiful, as Sophie’s are.

I took her hand, shook, and returned to my work.

On the night that the hillside burned, I heard the call of a loon. The water was so cold, and that poor creature should have long since fled for the south. When the call would not quit I ducked beneath the pier’s railing and there I found an old canoe tied to a solitary pine tree at shore. I untied the boat and climbed in and paddled until I was an equal distance from mainland and Bear Island. It was not something I had ever done before, and it was not my boat, but the night was so lovely, and I wanted to be nearer to that loon. When I looked back toward home, I saw its hill flicker and shine. It took me a moment to realize it was burning.
Go to sleep
, I bade the loon, who called so urgently, as though she believed it was her job to save Kettleborough. Yet she would not quit; her call rang out until the fire calmed, so together for hours we floated as the ash of our town drifted down upon us like snow.

I told the old librarian about that. She wears bright, colorful clothes such as I have never seen in Kettleborough, and she speaks so unabashedly about my life. “You’re a strange one,” she likes to say to me, and “Get married and have your babies fast.” I’m not sure if she was always this way, or if her boldness has
come with age, but either way it is an inspiration for me. “Why are you shy?” she demands. When I told her about the loon she took my hands in her soft, trembling ones. “You be careful with that call,” she said.

Her warning was so serious, so firm, but this only made me curious, so as the weather grew colder I listened more intently. Twice I believed I heard it. I was at work each time, and immediately I lifted my hands from the dough and ran to the front of the store and pushed the door open with my hip, my hands dripping with water and flour, and crossed the street to the pier. By then the call was gone, and I doubted that I had ever heard it.

And then one time, in the cemetery, I was sure I heard it, but I did not chase it. That was when Rose reappeared.

“I’m Alice,” I told her, and she swooned, she actually did; she put her arm to her forehead and she tipped back and exhaled, and then the little girl tipped right over.

“Rose!” I called, and kneeled down at her side. I tapped her cheeks and said her name again.

“Pinch me,” she said, so I did, gently, for the second time. Again she asked me whether or not this was real, true life, and again I told her it was.

“So you’re psychic?” she asked.

“No,” I said. “Are you?”

With the palm of her hand she hit herself in the head; she was demonstrating her stupidity, trying to say that of course she held no such power. I reached out for her and helped her up, and she stood for just one moment and then sat back down, her legs crossed, and she asked me to sit with her. She wanted to know if she could trust me, and I assured her she could, and then she spit into the palm of her hand and held it out. I shrugged and did the same; already I loved this wild girl. We shook.

“Now tell me one of your secrets or fears.” This, she said,
would seal our handshake. I already knew she dreamed of love so I told her that I had fallen in love out on an island, but that the man had not loved me back.

“Simon!” Rose shouted.

“Yes,” I said, taken aback.

Immediately she began to quote the letters that I had sent to Simon, and others that she said he had meant to send to me. She told me she had found them, she told me she had burned them, and then she lay back and spread her arms and threw dead leaves up so they would fall down upon her and she kicked her legs and she yelled, “All the world for Alice Thorton and Simon Wentworth!”

She wanted to know where I lived. She said she would find Simon; she would enlist her best friend, Tasha Stevenson, as she had known she should have done weeks ago. I said that she was to do no such thing. For only now had I begun to pull myself back up from the depths, steady and alone. I told her I did not want to meet him. Yet I knew my pleas would be meaningless, for here was a child who had done wrong, and now here was a great world offering up a chance for her to mend what she had broken. I have never been offered such a chance, and I was not going to steal this one from a girl who so desperately wanted to believe in the order and fairness of creation.

Just three days later Rose had succeeded in her plan; I looked out the window to see that small girl tugging a man at least four times her size up the walkway to my door. When she had arranged him at the front door she knocked and then tucked herself behind his body.

I opened the door and he said my name. I could see his shirt tighten; Rose was pulling at it from behind. I told her to go
along and immediately she did, winking suggestively as she left, walking backward and stumbling on her own feet. When she was gone I welcomed Simon in. It was a strange occasion but by then we both understood how fleeting and breakable our love could be; we understood to take care. I asked him if he might like to go for a walk. He spoke of his work and I spoke of mine, we spoke of Kettleborough, and finally we came around to the lake. He said his father had died when he was a boy, and that though his mother had taken care of him she had not made the time for him, not really, and this had left him with days upon days of nothing to do but go out on the water. That’s how he met Malcolm—as a boy he’d had some trouble with a boat and Malcolm had helped him out with it, and after that had given him a job at the ice cream shop. Malcolm, Simon said, had become something like a father to him.