The Lake and the Library (17 page)

I climbed the stairs to my bedroom and quietly shut the door behind me. The light from the grain elevator flooded over my bed, and over my rumpled bag that I had left there. I lifted it to my chest and clung to it, hugged it hard, and tried to will it to become a part of me. I missed him. I missed what we had made. He must have left the bag for me, which meant he touched it last. He must have known I'd come back, and he must have been ashamed. This was the only truth I was willing to accept; otherwise, none of it had been real, none of it had been ours. None of it, including Li himself.

I felt a horrible knot expand in my chest. It was confusion and disappointment and anger. I pitched my bag across the room, watching it smack and topple my Polaroid Princess canvas and the easel I'd left her on. Polaroids fluttered and danced in the air like anxious moths. The contents of the bag scattered, and something big tumbled towards me.

A book.

The silver book.

Its cover winked at me, and there was nothing to stop me from picking it up now, from finding out why it had been following me all this time. The Polaroids came to rest on the carpet, and I reached past them for the book — but out of the corner of my eye, I saw a wet mark spreading towards me from the other side of the room, behind the toppled canvas. I looked up and saw her standing there. I tripped back, slamming into my closed bedroom door.

“No,” I hissed. “How can you be here?”

The woman bent down and picked up the book, crossing into the grain elevator's floodlight and dripping all over my things. She was so thin that her bones threatened to tear her threadbare skin, punch holes through her nightgown. She was grey and ruined, but her milky-white eyes were steady on me. If she was still here, then there was something left of the library in this world, there had to be. I flattened as far as I could against the door as she drew closer, and closer, until she was just an arm's length away. Maybe she was here to drag me back and drown me properly, here on Li's behalf. I steeled myself for the blow.

I could smell water rot as she leaned in close, fastening something wet and cold around my neck. She pulled back and I opened my eyes as she lifted the medallion in her palm, admiring it. Her face seemed to change, seemed to relax into a sadness I hadn't noticed earlier. Then she let the medallion drop, and in the gulf between us, she offered up the book, spread the pages, and showed me. They were blank.

I stared. “I don't—”

She pushed it into my hands, insistent. She was so close now that I could see every wilted hair on her arms, each birthmark on her hands . . . and something else, something white, scratched into her skin. The longer I looked at the scratches, the clearer they became. They were words, written in a wispy cursive. They started rippling on the surface of her skin, travelling down her arms and onto the pages, which bled with the words, with dates, with a signature. It was a journal. Hers.

“
Read
,” she whispered in her familiar, watery dulcet.

I cleared my throat. I read the first entry. And I went back, back . . . until my bedroom was gone, and I was somewhere else.

“You had rheumatic fever when you were a girl, didn't you?”

The cold metal of the stethoscope chest piece sends a chill into her bones. She replies between obedient breaths, “That's right. Mother prayed and drew the fever out of me after a week. It was very saint-like of her.”

He pauses for a while to listen intently to her heart. “And you've had chronic strep infections, I do know that.” He is quiet again.

She does not like where this is going. She nods. “Yes.”

“I wish we didn't have to see each other under these circumstances,” sighs the doctor, getting to his feet and pulling his stethoscope out of his ears. She waves him off, trying to smile.

“You know me, coming up with excuses just to get you to come for tea,” she coughs, even a joke coming as an effort.

He marks something down on his chart, coming to her side while she relaxes on the red velvet chaise by the window. “You've been feeling poorly for a while now, haven't you, Moira?”

Her smile falters as her attention wanders around the grand room. They had lived in this house on Wellington Crescent for so long now, but in the daze of having collapsed earlier, it seems foreign, untouchable. Empty. “I wouldn't say a while,” she replies, hesitant. This only draws a sigh from the weary doctor, a man who has known her and her history longer than anyone else in Winnipeg. He had even delivered her son, seen the deepest parts of her physical body. She cannot hide a lie from him.

“It's just stress, Erik,” she reassures him, patting his arm weakly. “There's been so much of it going around, I was liable to catch it eventually.”

Erik's gaze falls to her hand, and he puts his own hand over it in turn. “I'm sorry about your loss, Moira. David's passing was so sudden.”

Eyes sharpening, she draws her hand away and folds her arms against her chest, turning so that she might look out at the terrace. “Sudden. No. Not really.”

In the midst of packing up his things, Erik hesitates. “It was a heart attack at his offices, wasn't it?”

Her smile is cruel as she breaks his question in half. “That's an apt euphemism for alcohol poisoning, don't you agree?” Her face flushes and her neck grows hot, eyes filling as she watches the gardener outside mill back and forth between her flower beds.

Erik stays quiet as she carries on. “I was advised to make his death as sympathetic as possible. For the company's sake, you see — the papers and the investors, both, want a martyr.
He was always working late at his offices, said many of his colleagues
, even though it really should have read,
he was always obsessed with his work, and drinking made the disappointment of his family easier to bear.
”

“Moira . . .”

She pricks the tears away on a fingernail and turns back to him, dry eyed and stiff. “I expect this to remain in doctor-patient confidence.” She gives him a pallid grin, as if her mouth is looking for the humour in the truth.

“The confidence of a
friend
,” he corrects. He takes off his glasses, smiling at her with the all the pleasantness of a reaper.

“What's the verdict?” she finally asks, staring back out the window, even though she already knows.

He puffs out his cheeks and exhales. “Your blood pressure is incredibly low, Moira. You're weak and you've been experiencing episodes of syncope or fainting, shortness of breath, chronic fatigue. I see it in a lot of my patients with a history of rheumatic fever or related infection. The after-effects are degenerative, usually rising in severity after a few years due to the weakened heart, but your body has held out for over twenty-five years, which is remarkable . . .”

Her chest rattles as the tears spring and spill afresh. “Please, Erik. Don't sugar-coat it for my sake.”

He sighs, looking straight at her. “I'm sorry, Moira. It's only going to get worse from here.”

She knows her heart hasn't failed her yet, because she's still able to draw breath. “How long?”

The hardwood floor creaks as he rocks on the balls of his feet. “You're a strong woman, and it's hard to tell. Six months. A year. Longer. But not . . . very long.”

Her eyes score the room, looking anywhere but at him. Then they fall to the occupied piano stool on the other side of the room.

“There's nothing you can administer?” comes the third voice from the piano. The doctor turns to it, eyebrows raised.

“I can certainly prescribe something to ease the pain, to make the days a bit better for her.” He pens a prescription, leaves it on a nearby side table, and crosses the room to the door. “Unfortunately, there's no procedure that could repair her weakened cardiac valves. I'm sorry.”

Moira buries her face in her hands, trying to wipe away the shame of her outburst, of her fear. She pats her cheeks. “We were going on a trip to our cottage next week. To get away from the city, from all the people. Can we still do that?”

Erik hesitates at the door. “Your cottage is in . . . Treade, correct? That town just outside of Brandon?”

She nods, face splotchy with emotion but with all the expectation of a child about to be denied a rare gift. He nods. “Yes, but I wouldn't advise you taking too many trips back and forth between your cottage and the city. The extra stress won't do you any favours at this stage.”

The occupant of the piano stool gets to his feet and settles on the edge of the chaise, next to Moira. “Maybe we can stay there for a few months? The lake air would do you some good. You have always loved that lake.”

The doctor nods, giving them one more sad smile. “Sounds like a fine idea.” And he leaves them alone.

Moira looks at her son, levelling him with worried eyes that she reserves for him. “Lionel. You can't afford to go to Treade with me, let alone spend months away from the city. You have . . . responsibilities to Jovan Grain now. Responsibilities you have to fulfil.”

He takes her hand and cups it to his heart. “Responsibilities,” he repeats. “You are my responsibility, Mama. Always have been.” He smiles through his own tears. “I'm going with you. As long as it takes. I won't let you go that easily.”

I
stood in a wide, beautiful parlour whose decor sang of a thousand yesterdays. The sun peeled in through the open window, and there was a terrace and beautiful gardens beyond it. There was a woman sitting on our familiar library sofa, a dying woman, but she was not quite at death's door — her pallor was that of someone too determined to let go. The woman on the sofa was not the ruined grey spectre that haunted me, bidding me to read her story out loud — but I knew she would become her, and that I'd soon find out how.

In the scene with the not-yet-spectred woman, her son was at her side, whispering her a promise. Holding her hand to his chest. I clenched the silver diary so hard I feared my fingers would break.
Lionel
, she had called him.

But to me, he was always
Li.

The drowned Moira standing watchful and sad beside me leaned in and turned the page. And the dates sped on. May, June, July, 1929.

I travelled down, down, down into the darkling cavern of her memory, her life with him in a Treade I had never suspected could exist. It startled my eyes with the sepia grain of an old photograph, and the crystal clarity of the truth, all at once. I saw him again at her bedside, and I glanced over his shoulder to unwind the meaning of the drawings in his hands — of the journal that had been the incubator for the library all along. Saw the heartache and misery that drove them from the suffocating city to find some peace, so they might forget all their miseries and build their world anew. I passed through days and nights, saw the library rise from the forest like a Titan, unchanged. Li was a poet, a dreamer like me, but he dreamed his way to this place — not out of it. He wrote his name in the sand at Lake Jovan, watched it wash away, and felt a part of this place. He was so close to me, but I could not shape this story, Moira's story, in the way we had shaped all the countless others that came before. I could only stand around, helplessly watching it unfold in front of me. I reached out to touch him, but then the page turned, and we were at a gorgeous party, replete with flapper dresses and swell gentlemen. Li was about to make a choice that would change his life — that would punctuate what dreams he had left. He would have nothing of it, and so I followed him out of there.

He had been drinking, and he kept drinking. He had a mickey on him that he had been hesitant to fill, but he had wanted it just in case he lost his nerve that night. He walked. And he walked. He was tall and strong and I had to hurry to keep up with him. “Where are you going?” I whispered. He looked over his shoulder for a second, as if he had heard me. But he kept walking.

The page turned. We had arrived at the rocky hill above Lake Jovan, even though Li usually favoured going down to the beach. He stood on the cliff that Tabitha, Paul, and I had come to, throwing treasures into the rocks below, pretending that this was our battleground, marking it as ours. But it had been his first.

It was dark, the sky a bruised purple as the sun set totally. Li sat down on the edge, one knee up, the other leg dangling, and he sat there a long time, thinking, squinting into the distance, trying to puzzle out how he had come to this point. He took out his flask one more time, and when I thought he was going to take another drink, he hurled it into the water. He was taking a last look at the life of dreaming he was going to have to give up for the sake of the business he hated, but he would not make the mistakes of his father. He would do this for his mother, and he would build a beautiful life for himself, for her. Until the bitter end.

After a while, after preparing himself, he got to his feet. But he got up too quickly, the spirits he'd been drinking all night going to his head. He pivoted and his ankle bent, and he tripped backwards, arms wheeling.

He disappeared over the edge before I could reach out and pull him back.

“No!” I screamed, diving to the ground. I watched the lake swirl up to meet him, and he was gone. Swallowed.

“
No
,” I whispered under my breath, burying my face in my arms. I had lost him all over again.

“It looks so easy, doesn't it?”

I looked up. A page had turned in the midst of my grief. Moira was standing beside me, hand extended, eyes trained on the water. Her flesh had resolved into a pink liveliness, her hair set in curls so blonde they made sunlight envious. She was beautiful, even though her bones still looked like a fragile bird's — but this was a Moira I hadn't seen yet, one that wasn't plagued by dying, or death.

I stood up, looking at the water along with her, crossing my arms and pushing them into my chest. The biting wind off the lake was merciless in this half-memory world, but Moira felt none of it.

“He's been alone all this time,” she said, “waiting to be pulled out of the dark.”

The surface of the water was being sliced by the wind, growing darker the longer we stood there. “You tried to go down there, to find him,” I said.

She pulled her arm back to herself, taking a step forwards. “I tried, yes. But we died in separate directions. He fell through a door, trapped in the sanctuary I had built to keep him safe, keep him happy. But when I jumped, the door was closed, and I couldn't reach him.” She finally looked at me, her eyes exactly
his
eyes, like two glinting chips of untouchable ice. “Until you went in, until you reached him. It was like the door opened a crack. And I thought
I
could reach him through
you
.”

I shivered, still unsure as to what part I had to play in this. “I can't reach him,” I quivered. “I don't know what makes me so special now, what made me see him at all.”

“There are lines drawn between us that I could not cross,” she went on. “He still had half a foot in this world, and I was a shadow on it. But you,” her bright, cold eyes softened, “you found your way to him. You heard his heart calling. I think you always did.”

I remembered the years of visiting the library before knowing what it was, of lingering and hanging back to look over my shoulder at it, feeling like it needed me.

Moira tapped me out of my memories. “But this last door is sealing up quickly, and neither of us have managed to pull him back out again. There isn't much time left.”

“So this . . .” I caught a glimpse of the water, saw it undulating in a slow circle, a quiet maelstrom brewing.
This was the last way back to him
.

“We are lost without our names, without the stories that we scratched into the surface of our hearts. His story is trapped in the water. I tried to use the lake as a means of getting through to him, but his grief twisted it, summoned it when he was desperate, and he tried to use it against you. But without his name or his story, he cannot break from it.”

She took me by the hand. She was so warm, and she smiled. “Moira. That was
my
name.” We stood over the water, and once again she grasped the medallion around my neck, and she turned it over, the name
Lionel
burning red and new out of the sea of scratches and scuffs. “But once upon a time, Moira had a boy. He needs his story back. Wherever it went. And you need to tell it, just as you told me mine.”

I kicked a loose stone from the edge of the hill. It tumbled end over end and, before it could hit the water, the lake rose up to take it.

“Is this just another dream?” I sighed. “Or will I die, too?”

Moira laughed and clenched my hand tighter. Together, we stood at the edge like it was a diving board. “It's all just a dream, Ashleigh. This life.” I bent at the knees, ready to spring, and she finally let go of my hand. “We all wake up from it, eventually.”

I dove.

End over end. The rushing air ripped at my hair, at my skin. The water climbed up and up and up, and in its mighty fist, it towed me down. And I thought of Li instantly, felt like I could see his fall for myself as I experienced my own: it was such a long way down from the rock hill into Lake Jovan. How he must have smashed headlong into it. How the water must have embraced him as it dragged him down, drawing him into a world where he would have to drown again and again, his story scarred underneath his flesh and known by no one. It took him to a place where he would forget the world, and it would forget him, too.

Then I felt him well up in my blood. Felt his story scar my own skin as I kept swimming deeper and deeper and deeper, until the bottom of the lake came into view . . . but it wasn't the bottom at all. It was, at first, a darkness, but it rippled into shape — it was the library, as though I was coming at it through the ceiling. It rippled back and forth, first the darkness, then the library, unable to decide if it should resolve itself as I pressed against the membrane of those fragile planes. I was diving right back into it, and I reached, until I heard someone call out in my head like a rushing, desperate wave. His voice. His beautiful, frightened voice that, even though I had only heard it through Moira's memories, was weaving through my heart now. I shut my eyes and told the story over his words as I crossed over the threshold of his life.

Once upon a time there had been a boy named Lionel. He dreamed, and he dreamed
. . .

And I listened.

Wet, wet. Woke up wet. Don't know how. A fever? I'm dreaming. Must be dreaming. Do I know this place?

It is a womb of darkness. He floats through it at first, until he lands on solid ground. He races around, arms outstretched, trying to feel for walls. He runs for years. Finally the walls assert shapes, forms. They climb out of his nearest memories, and the darkness pulls back, little by little.

Somewhere I've been before, somewhere that's important to me and someone else. Library. It's a library.

He comes upon crates and crates of books and shelves. The shelves are empty. He leafs through the books, reads them. Reads them all to pass the time. But no one comes. His thoughts dance around in my head, and I follow them, follow him, as he passes his time in the library. I'm
his
ghost now.

Hit my head, maybe, so confused. I'm sure I've fallen. Almost a haze in front of my face. Can't see things clearly. There are books everywhere. No one else here, still. Summer, it was summer. Feels like it is a distant dream. Tried leaving this place once or twice. Doors are locked from the outside. How did I get in here? People will be coming soon, I'm sure of it. Hearing trains passing by every now and again. Am I lost? Head isn't any better than before. Don't feel as though I slept last night. Went downstairs and realized that all of the crates were gone, the shelves filled with books. When did that happen? Must've fallen hard. Can't make sense of anything. Only logic is in the books. Find myself stopping when I'm holding them. Feeling like I've gone through them before. Heard them from someone, maybe. Maybe. Maybe I'm here to wait for who showed me the books. I know I should keep waiting. Will stay and wait. Yes. Can be patient. Got a lot to keep me busy. As long as I can read, I'll be fine. It's cold. So cold. Cold. Help, please help. There is a drip in the ceiling, in the walls. Can't find the source, can't hear rain outside. Water. So much water.

I swim in the wake of his thoughts as they tremble in and out of him, one after another. I still feel the water pressing on me on all sides, and soon it starts to become
too
heavy. But I have to let the story wash over me, too. And people did come to the library. Eventually. I watched and waited with him, tried to offer some comfort, but gave none.

Workmen. Didn't come inside, only outside. Boarded up the windows, chained the door. Shut out the sunlight. It's dark. Hammers are in my head. Closing up, making it leave, gone, gone. Why? Varnish smell is still strong on the glossy wood of the banisters and tables, clock is still ticking on the farthest wall. Glass is new in the windows clear and new as crystal. Got up, called out, waved my arms, but they did not turn or see. Gone so fast. Run to the upstairs, to the attic. There is one window here I won't let them board up. Watched them speeding away. Started to talk to myself, read out loud. It comforts. Eases. Yes.