The Lake and the Library (11 page)

By the time I got home, I had four missed calls and two voicemails. I had forgotten my cell was even with me. I deleted them immediately, unprepared for the guilt they'd surely leave me with. I had missed dinner — but then again, I usually did, since Mum was on a string of night shifts and I was too busy revelling in the freedom of her absence to care. I had left the iPod behind for Li to play with, but the drawing stayed in my keeping. I tucked it into the corner of my mirror, smoothing it out and getting lost in his eyes. I'd work on it later.

I went to my canvas treasure trove and hid more reclaimed Polaroids behind it. They were my windows into dream memories, the ones I could capture, at least, and even though they were right in front of me, I wondered if they'd happened at all. The photos helped me breathe a little easier, even though both Li and I were dealing in borrowed time. I knew that I wouldn't be able to escape for long, that there was soon to be a crater where the library now stood, and that one day we would both be locked out of our den of dreams.

And what would happen to Li once I left? My chest lurched. No matter what happened to the library, I actually had a time bomb strapped to me, a definite end point I couldn't control. I knew I would have to tell him soon; his haunted eyes when I had been
late
were bad enough, but the way the library itself had reacted was even worse. What would happen if I had never come back? I felt like Treade had spun a web and caught me in it just as I was set on my getaway. I thought that the only way I could survive and build a true dream was to get out. But it was here all along, and I couldn't leave it behind.

I stumbled to conceal my photographic menagerie as suddenly, rudely, a knock came on my open door. Paul.

“Surprise!” He straightened out of his exaggerated pose.

I was quickly getting tired of these surprises. “How did you get in here?” I accused immediately, leaving no room to even pretend I was happy to see him.

He stiffened, raising an eyebrow. “Your mom let me in.”

It was my turn to frown. “No, she didn't. The house is empty.”

“Ash,” he said, pronouncing every syllable as if I couldn't understand him. “She's just downstairs.”

I darted my head into the hall. Sure enough, a plume of smoke was dangling over her head, and she smiled at me from her chair. “Sweetie, I've been calling you and calling you. Didn't you hear me?”

I felt a wave of cold ebb over me. She hadn't been there. The house had been so quiet that my ears were ringing. But she was there. And so was Paul. I had forgotten, for that second, that he was there, too. I was forgetting a lot of things.

“Oh. Well . . .” I went back into my room, feeling like I was emerging from a catatonic state.

Paul floated in behind me. “I know it goes without saying, but you've been acting weirder than usual, Ash.”

In the intervening seconds as an excuse became lodged in my throat, Paul touched the drawings and book excerpts I had pasted to the wall, pausing to read one of the poems I'd rewritten there in Sharpie. There was a time when I thought maybe Paul and I could date — it seemed like the next logical step after so long, even though we dreamed in separate directions. But he wasn't my sterling knight, my curly haired, silent bard, my bird-making magician man, and no one would be able to live up to that, least of all Paul. My chest tightened, the shattered shards of my sentimental thoughts of Paul worrying into the corners of my patience.

“I tried calling but your phone was off again,” he explained, not bothering to justify the accusation in his voice as he turned to face me. “We haven't seen you in a while, and you've been acting really off. We were wondering what was up.”

I realized my fists were coiled at my side like pressurized hearts. It took a conscious effort to release them, lifting them heavily to rest on my canvas, protectively.
We
were wondering.
We
noticed. They were ganging up on me, slowly, quietly.

“Nothing's up,” I said. The words were heavy and clipped.

Paul shuffled his feet. Luckily for me, he wasn't the type to talk about feelings. He folded his arms. “Are you sure? Tabitha and I—”

“—are worried. I know. I get it.” The brush-off jumped out of me, propelled by that dark, insidious thing that had taken root beneath my bones. “I'm fine. I'm just busy. You guys don't have to check up on me.”

My eyes felt heavy all of a sudden, and I could see Paul's mouth working around his last attempt at concern, but all I could hear was a rushing sound, like water spilling down a wall . . .

“Ash?”

I snapped to. Paul had moved to my mirror and was sliding the drawing out of its place for a closer look.

“This new?”

I grabbed for it, but he held fast to an end. It was mine and no one else's, all of it, and I wouldn't let him wreck it. I snatched hard, and a good half of it ripped away.

“Paul!”

The paper ripping stabbed at me like grindstone-fresh pins. I clenched the pieces close to my chest, and tears of hatred struck. The water in my eyes turned the world into an aquarium, and past the tears I could see he was sorry, but I blocked it out.

“How could you do that? What's wrong with you?”

“I'm . . . I'm sorry, Ash. You can fix it, can't you?”

“You don't get it, do you?” I unveiled a hissing sneer that I had no idea I was capable of.
“It won't be the same.”

I stormed to my night table drawer, slamming the remains of my beautiful Li into the dark.

Paul tried to cool the sharp air suspended between us. “Who was that? In the . . . drawing, I mean.”

“I'm tired,” I snapped. “I'll call you tomorrow, okay?”

“But . . . Ash, I'm—”

I prickled deeper. “Just go,” the thing inside of me seethed.

He backed into the doorway, but he didn't trust my conviction. I turned and gave him a Medusa glare, tears instantly dried. I cracked a smile, but it wasn't mine.

“I promise,” I heard myself saying. “I'm fine. The move is just stressing me out more than I thought it would. Don't worry about me, okay? I'll see you guys soon.”

That pacified him. Even though his smile was weak, he accepted it.

“Well, okay,” he shuffled his feet again. “I'll text you. And . . . I'm sorry about the picture.”

“Don't worry about me,” I repeated.

I could hear him pick his way down the stairs, happy to leave me to brood in the lake of lies pooling quickly at my feet. I could hear Mum having a brief word with him, her racking cough echoing over the conversation as she asked Paul how his mom was. At least I thought that's what they were saying; the water sound was rising again, and I tuned them out as I slid my night table drawer open. The paper-thin moment that Li and I had built sat rumpled and ruined, right down the middle.

It's only paper
,
the ghost of my reason whispered.

But I'd drawn blood with it, anyway.

Everything is going along too smoothly and she is convinced it will go wrong very soon, but she pushes that miserable thought as far back as it can go.

“Wow, they sure got it up in a hurry, didn't they?” her son breathes in wonder, helping her out of the car to marvel at their work. She leans carefully against his shoulder and, shielding her eyes, joins him in gazing.

“The most enthusiastic contractors come out of Treade, darling, since they seldom get to work on anything quite like this.”

The building itself hadn't been the issue from inception onwards; it was securing the small tract of Hoban Wilson's land on the outskirts of his coveted woods that had been the true test. Wilson claimed that there was something about this forest, something ancient and precious presiding here that would only take being tainted so far. “My family has been custodians of these trees for going on seventy years now, before this town was a town.” He had stomped his cane for emphasis at that. “These woods keep their own counsel, and they'd be damned to keep yours, too.”
He went on to swear up and down that if her intentions hadn't been at least
partway
noble, he would never have given her the half acre he so graciously let go of. She was fairly certain it was less her intentions and more her money that had whittled him down, in the end. Forest custodian or no, Hoban Wilson was still human. She remained confident that before the decade was out, he'd be selling these trees hand over fist, what with a war brewing overseas and the economy turning.

They cross the grounds, her on his arm, him leading her like the gentleman he is close to becoming. She beams up at him, pulling at the fringe of his curls. “It's so soft; it feels like your baby hair.”

He purses his lips, grinning. “Now, now, Mother. I'll cut it when I take the big business mantle. Until then, I get to keep the curls. The girls like 'em.” He winks and she nudges him playfully.

The tang of sawdust and the bitter scent of pine enrobe them as they confer with the project manager. The building will be done by week's end, the door having arrived from Vancouver just last night, covered, as it is, in the intricate tapestry of mythological bodies swimming upstream against their own stories. It was commissioned by an artist on the West Coast, the entire composition of the door reclaimed driftwood, moulded and shaped by the sea.

“The wall shelves are being installed as we speak, but the standing cases won't be ready for another week — we've had some trouble with the supplier in Winnipeg. Care to take a look inside and see how it's coming?”

She raises her hands, feinting back a step before the threshold. “Old family superstition,” she explains. “Can't go in until the door has been properly put on. Something about crossing over into the veil of another world. My Baba and her Ukrainian paranoia ran deep.”

Her son claps the contractor encouragingly on the shoulder. “We trust it will be splendid. And we can't wait to share it with the rest of the town.”

After the last brief bit of news — looking over the individual petal panes that would make up the facing vestibule window — she relaxes under a nearby tree, taking the proffered sandwich from the basket he had brought with them. Reclining, they watch the sun climb.

“I didn't think it would come together so seamlessly,” he admits with partial sheepishness. “The entire thing is like a dream.”

She sighs, absorbing the splendour of the very air. “One thing I can give credence to about the sordid things that brought us here,” and she shifts her tired face to his, “is that we could make something of it.”

He chews thoughtfully on a cracker. “Now
this
is the kind of legacy a man can be proud of. The kind Father ought to have had. The factories, all the backdoor deals. He was in the business of feeding a country; it was a noble work, but he lost sight of what he was doing. It devoured him.”

“And while your father fed grain to western Canada, you will feed them stories?” she asks, and he taps his nose.

“Stories were the original manna,” and now he's waxing poetical, which he knows gets a rise out of her.

“My son, the dizzy dreamer. Girls want to marry doctors and businessmen, not tellers of tales.”

He shakes a finger at her, chiding. “Now we both know Father hooked you with a poem. The dreaming is sadly hereditary.”

It is a good day, so far. She can feel her breath rattling less, feel the ripples in her ventricles as a hum and less a clatter. Maybe she can live through this after all; here, in the last of the summer sun, watching their endeavour rise up from nothing, she is convinced that anything can be possible. For a price.

She pulls up a clump of grass, testing the waters. “About your birthday, darling . . .”

He sighs through his nose. “We really don't have to go to the trouble you're planning for it. A soiree, all those narrow-minded socialites from the city—”

“Watch yourself,” she warns, “you're speaking to a girl who made her living at being a socialite.”

He scowls. “You and I both know that you don't compare to those preening busybodies. And I don't know that it's doing your health any good to be getting this worked up about martinis and swanning around in a place that has no use for either.” His slender fingers push back his sunlight-kissed hair. “I don't want Jovan Grain, Mother. Running this business has never been for me, even my father knew that. There are other men who can have it grow in their hands.”

“Lesser men,” she scoffs, but at first she doesn't retaliate. It is not in his temperament to be shut up in an office, in the same way she never did well being a kept woman. He longs to walk along the lake on the other side of town, to write his musings in the sand and let them wash away. He has wanderlust in his soul, just like she once did, before the entire affair got away from her. Before her body abandoned her and her soulmate drowned himself in his work.

“Perhaps you're right. We should give it over to someone else, someday,” and she stretches back, shutting her eyes. “In the meantime, we need a means to keep our dreams alive, my dear. Sometimes we must sacrifice a bit of ourselves to earn those moments that make us incandescent.”

Quiet now, pulling her silk, tasselled shawl back up to her shoulders, he simply murmurs, “Who's the teller of tales now, Mama?”

She laughs. They spend the rest of the daylight revelling, for at their feet, their legacy rises out of the woods.