Lake People (22 page)

“Well,” Valerie said. “I got to get myself going on my errands.”

The letters in Rose’s backpack made her feel as if she had a secret strength. When she had to read aloud to the class her voice did not tremble. When she went to the chalkboard to subtract a three-digit number from a four-digit number, she got it right even though she had to stand there in front of everyone, Justin Green included, while she counted backward with her fingers. It was at recess that the problem started.

“Why you got to bring your backpack out with you?”

“Hush up,” Rose said.

“No one else brings a bag out.”

Rose shrugged and pulled at a clump of her own hair, then put it right in her mouth and chewed.

“Gross as I always thought you was.” This was Justin Green. His first words to her since that day.

“Open your bag and show us what you got,” he said.

Rose spit the hair from her mouth, and the wet clump of it stuck there against her cheek. The fence that went around the school playground had one opening in it, there at the back by the willow tree. She could crawl through that and go home. The day was gray and it made the whole world look dirty. She crossed her arms in front of her chest and she said, “Maybe I got a secret mission in this world.”

“Maybe you got yourself girl troubles,” he said. “Because you’re disgusting like I always thought.”

The others heard that, and when the bell rang and they all went in no one would walk next to Rose, believing that she
indeed had girl troubles—something they only vaguely understood but certainly thought of as dirty. Rose kept her bag in her lap and throughout the rest of the day she prayed silently to Alice Thorton and Simon Wentworth to save her from her misery.

The worst part was when the trains went by. The rumble made the floor of the school vibrate in a way Rose had never realized before. It sent that same looseness to her teeth that she’d felt out there on the track in the summer with Justin Green. What they’d done out there felt nothing like what Alice Thorton would ever feel with Simon Wentworth. The thought of it made her stomach hurt. And then after, the way he’d held her down with his teeth clenched and her shoulders on the iron track. A train had been coming, getting closer all the time, and he wouldn’t let her up and he just kept saying it,
You’re disgusting, you’re disgusting and now I’m going to make you die
. The taste of his tongue had still been in her mouth and Rose had spit it in his face, she hadn’t been afraid.

Rose’s brother walked home ahead of her, he always did, so Rose was alone and speaking a little to herself as she walked. Alice Thorton, she was saying, I understand the longing that you feel, left foot, right foot, don’t step on a crack, I, too, long for the lake and to feel at home with another human being. She didn’t know she was being followed, and when she felt a tug at her backpack she thought a strap had let loose so she stopped, and before she had turned around Justin Green had thrown her into the bush at the side of the road, which was alongside a steep hill. Dirt in Rose’s hair, her backpack crushed in the dirt beneath her.

“What is it?” he demanded. “What’s so secret?”

Rose kicked but she did not scream; she didn’t want any single
person to find her here in the bushes with Justin Green. He pulled her hair and turned her over, gritting his teeth all the while, and he dug her face into the dirt. Months ago, after Justin Green stopped being her friend and became the worst person in the world, Rose had borrowed her brother’s jackknife and with it sharpened the tip of a piece of wood. She had planned to use it for protection—she had had the sense that she would need to and now she knew she had been right. Rose pulled that piece of wood out of her pocket and she jammed it into Justin Green’s body as hard as she could. In it went, right into his stomach. He screamed and whimpered and Rose Hughes picked up her backpack and ran down the street without looking back.

One night, long ago, Rose had sat with her brother at the top of the hill by the factory, looking down on sleeping Kettleborough. That time, Rose had looked at the houses and received from them the distinct feeling that she could understand the lives of the people inside. Like the world and all the people within it made sense to her. Now when she looked down on that small place and the dark lake that rose up behind it, Rose bit her lip harder and pulled at her hair and then released and began to pound her open hands against the sides of her head. Love didn’t exist, not anything like it. Goodness neither. Rose had killed—she believed she had—and now she and all the world were doomed.

Now to the factory Rose had brought matches, a blanket, and a jackknife, which she borrowed from her grandfather’s top drawer. Food she had not bothered with because she had not been sure how long she intended to survive. Water, though—she had taken an empty milk jug from the trashcan and filled it in the sink. The letters, too, of course she had those. And a
flashlight. Darkness fell early and when it did Rose was already in the corner of the factory, a blanket wrapped around her. She bit her lip until it bled. She shook, too, from fear or cold or both. When she heard a creak she held her breath and imagined that a criminal had been lurking in the woods, waiting for her, had watched her enter the building. She imagined him now coming upon her and stabbing her to death. As she had done to Justin Green. Rose held the jackknife open, tight in her fist. In this way she passed what felt like half the night, though in truth it was scarcely an hour. By eight o’clock the moon had risen over the crest of the hill, and it was near full, and it sent light into the building—enough to illuminate the quick swoop and dart of hundreds of bats. No more could she bear it. Rose gathered her things and crawled across the floor, back to the boarded window she had entered through.

When she lit the fire, it was after she had worn herself out with tears and cold and with the work of gathering sticks and carrying them back up the hill. In that terrible night the moon had spread a light upon the hill that looked beautiful—there was that, Rose had the sense to recognize it. As she walked back and forth up the hill and down she imagined herself as a girl sitting upon the moon and watching this Rose toil. She would remember that—that image of herself as a small being working dutifully upon the land.

It had only been to warm herself, but then she had opened her backpack and thrown those letters in and watched them burn one by one. Ain’t no love exists in the world, she had said to herself. When she threw the last letter in Rose lay back and looked up at the moon. The grass was high, there had been no rain for weeks, and she understood this. She had made a fire ring of rocks. And she had the milk jug of water there, which she intended, once she sat up, to pour over the flames.

“Go out there,” Gerald’s grandmother told him. “Just go up and down the street and call her name.” When he’d begun to put on his boots she’d said, “That Tasha. Go down the street and see if Rose isn’t with her.”

Gerald began to call her name before he was even outside. He wasn’t worried, Rose often disappeared, but it felt good to yell anyway. He picked up a stick and a rock and as he yelled her name he nailed the rock with the stick and looked up in the moonlight to see where the rock flew and when he did he saw that hillside lit up like a forest of sunflowers in full bloom.

By the time Gerald and his family got to the edge of the fire, no one had yet found the little girl. The fire department was already there, along with nearly the whole of Kettleborough. Kenneth was there, and Simon, too. In silence the two watched the flames, and something about the hillside burning gave Kenneth the sense that it was time, that this little life would not last forever and that he ought to confess his sin of being a criminal of a postman by stealing all of those letters. The heat from the flames made him sweat and he unzipped his jacket and looked around. Across the way he saw his Tash, standing in close to Sophie Wickholm.

“Well,” Kenneth said to Simon. He meant to go on, to say that he himself had broken the law, that Alice had loved Simon and that he had the proof, he’d hidden it right there not twenty yards away, just there in the northwest corner of the factory where he and Tash used to go with blankets and candles when they were teenagers and in love. He cleared his throat and looked once more at Tasha, lit up by the light of the flames, and she looked at
him, too, and he knew then that she was remembering the very same thing. “Simon,” Kenneth said, but just then the firemen pushed through, splitting Simon and Kenneth apart from each other, carrying that little girl.

Up on the hill, with Kettleborough residents together in the glow of the fire, Simon scanned the crowd for the woman he imagined to be Alice. Patty Jean out on the island had told him she had moved to town. “Love letters?” Patty Jean had said. “You never once met the girl?” She had laughed and Simon had smiled as though he, too, was entertained by the notion, but in truth the fact of it kept him up through the night with no one but his own dog to talk to. A hundred times he could have met her but instead he had chosen to be a coward. Now he believed that by love he would know her when he saw her. Everybody was here—why wouldn’t she be? He would be brave. Like a crazed man he pushed through that crowd, searching.

Sophie could have told him that the girl whose face shone so clearly of her own dead Karl’s was not up there on the hill. Malcolm, too, for though he was drunk and though he was silent he certainly had the clarity to know his own brother’s daughter when he saw her. And in fact he had seen her—tonight when Malcolm left his shop downtown and headed up the hill he’d seen that girl whom in those weeks after his brother had died he had held and rocked and loved so dearly. Grown now, she had been standing on the pier, watching the lake so intently that she had not even noticed the fire, lit by her own love letters, that raged on the hill behind her, or the sirens that passed by, rushing that burned little girl to the doctor.

But Rose would heal. In the hospital she would learn that Justin Green had required stitches but had lived, and that she herself had been cursed with a scar that ran from the tip of her toe up the entire surface of her leg and then stretched like the branch of a maple across her midsection, with one limb extending up her neck and brushing against her ear. That seemed all right to her. With her scar as remembrance of the pain she had caused, it seemed to Rose that the world and all that was in it might perhaps contain a trace—and only a trace—of order.

WHEN I CAME
off the island, I was lucky to find this small house to rent, and luckier still to find that the store needed a baker. Now, while the rest of Kettleborough sleeps, I plunge my hands into living, breathing yeast. The solitude of it suits me; my days on the island prepared me for such a quiet life. I enter the store around midnight, and it doesn’t open until six a.m. By seven I am on my way home to sleep. When I wake, in the afternoon, I walk through town and the woods, and often I find myself in the old cemetery at the end of Main Street. The stones there are the oldest I have ever seen. Many are small and thin, some have crumbled right apart under the weight of the years, and others
have long ago lost their names and dates. The ones that lie flat in the ground are the ones I like the best. Moss and grass push up around their edges, reminding me that the earth is slowly taking them in.

A line of old maple trees forms a perfect square around the cemetery, and when the trees are heavy with leaves it makes that small place seem like a room cut off from the rest of the world. When the leaves drop, the stone wall that runs just in front of the trees becomes more visible, so even without the leaves the cemetery remains set off from the land around it, and to stand outside the wall is quite a different experience than to stand within it. This year, as the leaves dropped, I took care to keep them off the graves. Once, after I discovered his name, I read all the stones, looking for it, Karl Wickholm, but it’s not there.

On one of these evenings in the cemetery, when the leaves had just fallen and the bare maple arms cast shadows that made it seem that I was in the palm of a great and glowing hand, a skinny little girl came in repeating a name.