Lake People (24 page)

By then I knew the name, Malcolm Wickholm, and was fairly certain he would be my uncle, but I said nothing of it, not yet. Instead I talked of how I missed the days on the island, and how it would be a dream if one day we actually did winter out there. This made Simon shine. Hours later, when we arrived back at my door, I invited him in. We drank wine and ate bread and we did not tire of each other’s company, not then or any moment since. Rose wants desperately to know when we will marry, but I will not cast out such a dream future, not to her or Simon or even to myself. For such loneliness I had known, such heartbreak, and then finally my quiet solitude worked its way in with warm bread and a library, an old, peaceful cemetery and nights alone in Kettleborough. Now here this love stands with me, breathless and awake, to fill me up. I will not say what is to become of us. But it would be a lie to say I do not want it, will not take it.

I don’t hold it against Simon, the fact that he knew, all that time, where it was I had come from. He is not the sort to offer information that is not asked for, and though he knows I love him, he believes he ought not to walk uninvited into my private affairs. So he was delicate and uninformative the first time that I brought up the subject. About a week later, after I had gone to the courthouse and looked at documents that merely said that I had been adopted, but did not say who it was who gave me up, I was exhausted of the search and I told Simon so.

“I wish someone would just tell me,” I said to him.

“Okay,” Simon said.

“Sorry?”

“I can tell you if you want me to,” he said.

“You can’t.”

“I can,” he said. “I suspect that librarian of yours can tell you, too.” He had picked up a fork from the table and now he tapped it nervously against his leg.

“I suppose anyone in this town can tell me,” I said viciously.

“No,” he said.

“But you can.” He did not answer, so I went on. “And my librarian.” I was humiliated.

“Only reason I know is Malcolm,” he said.

“And the others?”

He shrugged.

“How many people know? Does everyone in this town know? Is that what people talk about as I walk by?”

“No,” he said. He had begun to tap the fork against the table instead of his leg. It was late afternoon, the sun had already set, and outside the trees looked like dark shadows of themselves. Simon stood up and without a word walked out my door. I stood there terrified, shocked that I should make this kind man leave me. I considered chasing him out but a minute later he returned
with an arm’s load of wood. He opened the woodstove and I saw that the fire had gone out. As he began to poke at the coals I sat down at the table and then I stood and put a kettle on for tea, and then I sat back down again, and finally I told him to please go ahead and tell me what he knew.

Now, there is a way that I can let the fact that I was found at the shore of the water comfort me. I can let myself believe that not only was I deposited on the lake but I was also born there, which means that sometimes, on dark or rainy days, when the sky and the lake seem to grow forth from each other with no line to say where one ends and the other begins, I can see myself as a child of that water, and not the unwanted infant that I truly was.

So I already knew by the time Sophie mustered the courage to slip the letter under my door. Though she had delivered it a week earlier, it was Christmas Eve when I finally found the strength to open the envelope and read what she had written. My father was due over for dinner, and I had a fish pie in the oven. It would be only the two of us, and neither of us would have a word to say. But so it had been for a lifetime, and though we could not speak easily, the only constant we had ever known was each other. Yet this night would be different, for I intended to tell my father all I knew.

With Sophie’s letter in my hands, I suddenly smelled smoke. I checked the woodstove in the kitchen to be sure its door was properly latched. After that I went outside to see that smoke flowed unhindered from the chimney. When I returned inside the smell was gone and I thought I must have imagined it. I checked the pie in the oven—it still had at least an hour to go—and then I sat down in the living room chair. Simon had gone south to see family, Rose had not appeared in days, and the
library was closed, so by now it had been about a week since I had spoken to anyone. I felt oddly strong and vacant, and found myself repeating my own name aloud. Next I went to the hall closet and pulled on my boots. I put on a coat, hat, scarf, and mittens as though it was a ritual, and without thought I went out.

Dusk, the sky a spread of pink. I walked to the pier and held my hands on the icy wooden banister, then tucked myself under and slid down the snow-covered steps. At shore there was a great mound of snow, but upon the open spread of ice there was only a dusting, for the harsh wind of winter had kept the snow from piling on the lake. I crawled over the bank and when I descended onto the ice it was as though I had been released.

Once I stood on the ice, I immediately saw that flicker of light at the tip of Bear Island. I had spent my life looking for it, and as a teenager I had made myself believe I had seen it. Now here I stood, a woman who knew that was no star reflected on the surface of the lake. The light was for me alone and as I stepped toward it I saw the being for the first time. I am not good with distances, I cannot say how many yards away it was, but perhaps the distance between that figure and my body was roughly two lengths of my own little house. By now the pink evening had been covered with a layer of dusk’s blue. This being was a cutout of black, and it moved slowly, like a sad, heavy beast, back and forth across the ice. I removed my mittens and put my pointer fingers to the corners of my mouth and whistled, and it was then that that strange loon call split the air between us and traveled into me, a soft, lilting song. I began to trail after the hunched space of darkness.

There had been one surprise in Sophie’s letter, and I thought of it out there on the ice:
You come from a long line of girls who have been left motherless, and from people who have a tendency to follow, no matter the consequence, any signal that might lead to beauty, even an
ounce
. I understood those words as a warning, but I did not heed them. Instead, as I chased a shadow of a being through the night, I felt sharply that out there on the dark, frozen lake, some pure and ancient thread had woven itself through my ancestors, and finally sewn itself into me.

It was not an easy journey. Darkness fell quickly. At one point I looked back to see that Kettleborough had become a drop of light in the distance, and when I turned back toward where that figure had been, I could not find it. My heart began to pound in its cold cage and all the comfort I had known just minutes ago vanished. Never before had I felt so exquisitely alone. Suddenly I worried that the lake would open its mouth and claim me as its own. I began to run, and when I fell I believed, for a moment, that I saw a man floating there beneath the ice, a window held before him. I pounded and kicked desperately. That call, thankfully, interrupted me. I stood once more. I could see that I was headed to the island, and by the time I arrived I saw the figure once more. Up and down the shore she—as I would soon learn—walked, trailing a canoe at her side. Behind her my cabin looked so small and white in winter. I climbed over the bank of snow and went straight to it, thankful to be home. On the porch I let myself fall back in the snow, and I opened my scarf and let the breath of winter cover me. All the stars were lit now, and they lit up the lake, and that vision of the night sky across the water was so similar to what I had watched in summer that for a moment I was able to squint my eyes and see the mail boat pass by on its slow path to the docks. In seconds, I dreamed, I would put my sneakers on and run across the island and gather a letter from my dear Simon. Just then the woman in bearskin came up the bank of snow with her canoe, which reminded me that whatever world I was now in was not one I had ever before inhabited.

“I’ll just make some dinner,” I told her, as though that was the
typical thing to do. She went to the door of my cabin and lifted the padlock and twisted the numbers into place and then with her arms spread wide she gathered great heaps of snow to clear a path to the door. She pushed that heavy door open and waited for me to go in, and then she followed.

There is a woodstove in there, thankfully there is, though the walls of the place are not insulated. Still, if you stay in close to the fire you can be warm enough.

“I’m all wet,” she said as she held her hands over the stove.

I touched her then; she was real. The fur she wore was sopping.

“They’re all in the Witches,” she said, so I went to the map on the wall—we had lit candles by now—and held my finger to the spot where that great collection of rocks is marked.

When I turned back she had taken her bearskin off and hung it over the rafter. She wore wool beneath, and I put my hand to her shoulder and I said, “There, not so wet at all.”

I set her before the fire. She seemed like a child, the way she stared into those flames with wonder. I went to the kitchen and took out cans, beans and corn and peas and cream of mushroom soup, and I poured them all into a pot. I felt wonderfully efficient, and fancied myself the nurse for some castaway. I took another pot and reached outside and swept it full of snow, which I put on the fire to melt.

There were sounds as we ate—I can hear them still. Slurps and chews, swallows, the sounds of her survival and the sounds of mine. We laid blankets down before the fire and beneath a great mound of wool we fell asleep.

I awoke when a cloud of stillness had been set down, when the stars were in their place and the wind had silenced. She was just slipping out the door. I knew where she would be headed. I pulled my boots on and I trailed behind her. I heard that loon call as I traveled, and I cupped my hands around my mouth to call back to it.

We went along the ice, and it took less time than I would have expected to reach the tip of the island. There those rocks the Witches rose up before us. Never had I entered them—never had any living person, so far as I knew—but now with her I did not fear life or death. I simply walked after her, through the edge of the rocks and into the forest that rose up in all directions around us. From the outside, those slick black rocks look like nothing more than a contained cluster. Yet from within that forest, those rocks stretch in all directions across the entirety of the earth. There is no sense of how to emerge. There is only a sense of how to go deeper, how to reach that oldest and tallest rock. I went there. The ice grew more and more thin. I knew it would. When the largest of the Witches stretched up before me I looked down to see the boys I had heard stories of, the ones whose hands are braided into each other’s, whose bodies spin slowly to form a net. Into their arms I fell, into the cold water. I closed my eyes and in this dream state I knew that whoever that woman had been, she had draped her cloak of bearskin upon my slowly spinning body.

I do not know what became of me in that water. I do not know how I returned home. The fish pie was not burned and I was not wet. My father came to dinner. I did not tell him what I knew of my origins. I told him only that it was a Merry Christmas. I gave him the hat that I had knit for him and with terrific boldness I gave him a hug. He has been an imperfect and good enough father; he has stayed around; there still is time to love. We spoke of the lake in a way we probably both had longed for years to do, saying how lovely it was, how strong and impossible. After dinner I asked him if he might like to walk down to the pier, which he said he supposed he would. We stood there together and looked out. It was quiet but our awkwardness of each other was not resting upon our shoulders in the way it typically did.
And standing there silently with my father, looking out upon our frozen lake toward the island that I felt certain I had just traveled to, I understood that I could believe in the nothingness of my mother. The one who bore me, the one who took me in as her own for a short time—it didn’t matter which. I could believe in the nothingness of her, and of my father, all fathers, even then of myself. I could believe that all of us, and the journey I had just taken, had never existed and would always exist.

But our lake—with it we were home. I was home. Home was this lake that stretched through us and down to the depths of the earth; it always had, and when we and all things were gone that home would still surge. This I knew. That never could I believe in the nothingness of our lake.

I am honored to have had so much help while writing this book. Thank you to my writing friends, Beth McHugh, Debra Magpie Earling, and my brother Jon Keller, for inspiration and encouragement. Thank you to Deirdre McNamer for gracefully guiding me as I made my way through these characters. Thank you to my mother, Lucinda Hope, for steadfast support, and to my father, Richard Keller, for passing down a love of stories. Thank you to Lorna Wakefield for offering a name for both the town and the book. Thank you to my agent, Eleanor Jackson, for putting her faith in me, and to my editor, Jennifer Jackson, for steady encouragement and wise, insightful readings. I am ever grateful to the Possum Hoppers of New Hampshire, who always give me a place to come home to and write about. Finally, thank you to my husband, Jacob Maxwell, for always believing so fully in this book.