The Lake of Dreams by Kim Edwards Read Free Book Online Page A

bad.”
    “Hey. Did you turn off the gas?”
    He laughed. “Yes,” he said. “Yes. I turned off the gas. Look, I’m almost at the station now, I have to go.”
    “Okay. Call me tonight?”
    “I will. Send me an e-mail if you can, okay?”
    “I will.”
    “Love you.”
    He really must miss me, I thought, startled—Yoshi wasn’t much for endearments, especially on the phone. “Love you, too,” I said.
    I pressed the button and there was only space, all the miles between us filling up with darkness. I put the phone on the bedside table without opening my eyes, remembering the little concrete house we’d shared in Indonesia, its garden filled with mango trees and lush, swiftly growing plants I couldn’t name. We always met there when we got home from work, and shared a drink as the moon rose, listening to the rustling sounds of lizards in the tall grass. I wanted to reach out now and catch Yoshi’s hand in mine, to walk with him back into that tranquil life. But he was in the middle of a day and ten thousand miles away. I pulled the blankets up and fell asleep to the sounds and scent of water.
    The dream began as a long and wearying journey in the rain, full of airports and frustrations, missed connections and clocks ticking, perilous deadlines. I was being followed, through corridors, first, and then through a forest. My suitcase, old-fashioned and made of leather, hit a tree and broke open, spilling everything. In panic, I started crawling through the foliage, the earth damp and loamy. I searched wildly through the velvet leaves of cyclamen, blossoms flaring around me like birds in startled flight. What I’d lost was important, somehow vital to me, life or death, and even though footsteps and voices were approaching, growing louder and more menacing, I couldn’t stop, pushing leaves away and digging in the earth with my hands, until the voices were upon me.
    I woke, so frightened and disoriented I could not move.
    Gradually, slowly, I remembered where I was. Still, I had to take several deep breaths before I could swing my legs over the edge of the bed and stand up. In the glaring light of the bathroom I splashed water on my face, studying my pale reflection in the mirror. My eyes, like Blake’s, were large and blue, but shadowed with fatigue.
    The house was still, the closed doors in the hallway like blank faces. I unlocked them all. Everything was caught in time, as if the world had stopped the summer after my father died. In my parents’ room, the bed was neatly made. Blake’s room still had its posters of the moon and the earth, our luminous blue-green planet floating in the interstellar space of his walls. In the guest room, packed boxes were stacked high against one wall, so perhaps my mother had been up here after all, starting to go through the old things. When I opened the door to the cupola, stale, hot air spilled down the narrow steps, as if nothing had stirred in it for decades. It was like a tower in a fairy tale, where the princess pricked her finger, or spun straw into gold, or lowered her thick hair to her lover below.
    No breath in that tiny rooftop room. Here, too, I opened all the windows, sweeping away the dead flies that had collected in the sills. When the room was full of the lapping sounds of the lake, full of wind, I sat on one of the window seats, breathing in the fresh air. The lake was calm and smooth, almost opalescent. I watched dawn come, the sun catching on the ring of keys I’d left splayed out against the painted seat: new keys and ancient keys, formed for locks that no longer existed, kept because they were beautifully fashioned, or because no one could remember what they opened and thought they might be needed someday.
    My father’s lock-picking tools hung from the ring, too, folded like a Swiss Army knife into a compact metal case. They were a kind of inheritance, passed down from my great-grandfather, Joseph Arthur Jarrett. I opened them, wondering when my father had