The Lake and the Library (18 page)

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s emotions wash over me, his suffering, his loneliness. I can feel his thoughts more than hear them. As time passes, seasons shifting, the town beyond growing and changing, the library decays. The idea of it falls into ruin, all around him, and he barely sees it. Darkness flickers in. I try gathering him in my arms. He feels none of it.

So cold. Can't count the days. Don't sleep. Stop. Quiet. Tighten. Shut your eyes, stare into dark space. Dream of something comforting, flashes of something I'm sure I know but can't prove in front of me. Orange sunshine filtering through trees, a garden and a swing, a woman in white. She's smiling and holding her arms out, then gone. She looks so happy. Open my eyes reaching out for her in the emptiness. There is no one. Only she, the vision woman, woman in white, would be right here.

Time goes on. He talks to himself, tries to get the thoughts out. But after a while, the words don't come anymore. He loses them, loses parts of himself. He soon comes to terms with the fact that maybe he no longer inhabits the world as he once did, so the conventions of that place fall away. His voice fails. His words die. Watching this . . . no, absorbing it into myself. It's more difficult to bear than the feeling that I have come so deep that I won't ever breach the surface again.

Hard to speak anymore. No one to talk to anyway. At least thinking is possible still. Wrench. Glare. Squint hard enough. There. Something in my heart jumps. Think I'm about to remember something. Names. Where do they come from? Have one? I have one. Do. Have to. Everyone has. Something around my neck. Name. A medallion. Saint marked. Name on the back. Lionel. St. Anthony on the front. Lost things. Need a name to find the lost things. Keep it close, so close, closest. Can keep waiting if I have it. Only give it to her, the one I'm waiting for. Only for her. Who?

He forgets his life. Forgets what it feels like. His loneliness and despair shape him into a creature that barely inhabits thought. I try to whisper in his ear the memories that Moira showed me, tell him that he was happy once, that he was real and breathed in the same world I came from. I keep swimming further and further into this with him, one day, twenty years,
seventy
years later. My lungs are ready to burst, and I can feel my head going under, but I want to ride this out with him. Need to. I try to curl up next to him, but he is still so far away, and getting farther as I take on every shuddering thread of this part of his story into my drowning body. His thoughts, his desperation, spill out freely, start setting a grainy buzz into my head. His thoughts overlap so many times that they meld into a horrible, pinging frequency. I swim as deep as I can, the pressure of the never-ending memories crushing me. He has nearly lost what little there is left of him. He can barely keep his thoughts strung together, anymore. They start spinning in an endless caterwauling carousel, and I cling to it desperately, shutting my eyes as the carnival ride speeds up.

Lionel. Lionel. Lionel. Lionel. I am Lionel. Dizzy. Wish I could sleep when is she coming the name on the medallion, it's faded, getting colder hands freezing still can't get dry, i miss her whoever she is no one here and wish there was but know there won't be for a long time tried reading but that started hurting tried getting out today but they barred the doors doors yes windows too maybe nothing was supposed to get in or out. trapped i'm alone no one's looking for me no one will need to cry but it's hard. Always been this way yes never different if this is hell, then this is the most clever of punishments reading is harder than it was starting to lose whatever i had left when i got to this place i think ive always been here. cant stop waiting for her even if ive always been here forgotten most things but not about her. her face is blurry and hard to remember. Her eyes, eyes, so full and yes, those eyes but i know shes coming back for me. eyes are watering, wanting so bad to shut but cant looked out the window today, tiny, tiny window. saw children that are made blurry by the years they stare up at the library, at the window, searching, talking my voice was nothing, so i hit the glass, hit it hit it hard but they didn't look, didn't hear, two of them left one stayed behind staring. wonder if she could hear could see. keep seeing the three they're eager to get in, like some of the others but i know they cant they can try but won't get in. they look different, changed, older. didn't i just see them? banged and banged the girl turned her head hung back then she was gone. so weak. my name my name my name is my name is my name my name is lio li li li li li li li has to be it. got to keep it with me on a piece of paper. its gone. ive lost it the paper my name i am nothing without a name

The carousel stops suddenly. I wince my eyes open. It is the night of the storm, the storm that brought me here in the first place. Li is drowning as the library fills up with his sadness, the water overcoming him as he settles, limp, devastated. The water is rising, but he refuses to move against it, to rally. I try to shake him, but he is resigned to his fate. He wants this as he lies soaked, head to toe, in his own misery.

The rain. I can hear it pattering, the torrent raging outside, and something old and splintered snaps like internalized lightning. Li's eyes snap open. I can't hear his thoughts anymore because they have calmed, have settled. The water recedes, ebbs away, as he leaps to his feet. I only have enough left in me to careen in Li's steps as he registers the scream echoing through the library, my familiar, terrified cry making him bolt. I see him on the landing, diving, diving, sliding for the space between the banisters. His hand plunges into empty air, and just as I feel like my body can't take it anymore, can't tell this story to the end, my eyes are going black, black—

—and he grabs my wrist in the past and the present.

And he pulls me out of the water.

M
y insides uncoiled, my heart contracted, valves pumping. Life. Air. Things I took for granted, but they were working their way through my body, kneading the light back into me. I opened my eyes — I was being dragged up onto a plinth that was sticking out of the water. No, not a plinth. A toppled bookshelf. I blinked and rolled my head to look around; the water was draining away into an unseen hole in the earth — no. In the library floor. Because that's where I was, the library, only . . . the walls were crumbling, quietly, and without ceremony. The rose window came free of the brick and plaster that had held it aloft, and it dissipated into grains of crystal. The walls became clots of sand, blowing away on a lake wind, and shelves that had been swept up in the storm were now firmly planted in the ground, the trees that they were made of coming back to roost, in a way.

When the walls were gone, I realized there was someone next to me, strong hands on my shoulders, trying to shake me out of the daze. With a massive
ping,
my hearing swung back, and I could hear his voice.

“Are you all right?” he said. “Are you . . .”

The shadows finally let him go, let me see his face, his cloudy-grey eyes soft and relieved. Supporting me with an arm, Li got me to sit up as he rubbed my back.

“I was afraid I'd lost you,” he chided. “I've never pulled anyone out of a lake before. Couldn't be sure that I was doing it right. How'd you get down here, anyway?”

I was so happy to see him, so breathless and bursting to be in his arms, but before I could answer him, his next question took the wind straight out of me, again.

“What's your name?”

My face fell as I searched his in earnest. He didn't know me.

“I'm . . .” I swallowed, throat thick. “I'm Ash.”

“
Ash
,” he repeated, rolling my name on his tongue like a gumball. He smiled. “Sounds like something out of a fairy tale.”

I tried to smile, but it didn't last. “Yeah” was all I could say. I had been waiting so long to really talk to him, to hear him say my name and feel it course through me. But this was painful. I looked away from him and saw that we were on the beach of Lake Jovan, back when it had been clean and beautiful and loved. Jovan. His lake. The water was so calm that it looked like green glass. I pulled myself together and managed to climb off the bookshelf, the sand supple beneath my bare feet. Li followed me.

“Do you know
your
name?” I asked, suddenly whirling on him. That caught him off guard, and he hesitated, and in that moment I thought I had failed, but something glinted at his throat. My hand shot to my neck, but it was bare. Absently he fingered the medallion dangling at his chest, eyes faraway before he blinked, shook his head, and held out his hand.

“Of course I do. I'm Lionel.” He shook my hand gently, warmly, clasping it in both of his. “I had honestly begun to think I was the only one who came down here.” He surveyed the lake, full of pride. “My mother and father and I used to walk here when I was a little kid. I'd fill my pockets with smooth stones, and we'd skip them 'til the sun went down.” His brow furrowed, and he toed the sand. “It's funny. I've been trying to get back here for some time. I only just found it when I saw you in the water.”

I flushed, tucking a stray hair behind my ear and leaning down to scoop up a stone. It felt so real. “Glad I could help,” I muttered, turning the stone over in my hand. He leaned down and took it from me, and in an expert flick of his wrist, it skipped across the lake ten times and vanished.

“I think I'm dreaming,” he decided, eyes still trained on the lake, on the horizon.

I crossed my arms and considered it, feeling a bit slighted. “Who said it was
your
dream? I think it might be mine.”

He laughed at that. His laugh was so full of light. I wished he had laughed more, in life. I wished that he could remember the laughter we shared in our brief one. “That's what people usually say in dreams. I guess we'll just have to go with it, until one of us wakes up and we know for sure.”

I think I startled him as my hand wound its way into his and held tight. His face wavered in the screen of my tears. But this was important. “You were so alone,” I said, “and I know you didn't mean to hurt me.” I clasped tighter. “I forgive you, all right?”

He shut his eyes and took my other hand, pulling me close and looking down at our hands as though they were the only real thing about any of this. “You know,” he murmured, “I haven't had a dream in a very, very long time.” His eyes found mine as he released my hand and chafed a knuckle under my chin. “But I'm glad you're in this one.”

“Me, too,” I said. I could feel the warmth growing between us, and his hands getting looser. We both looked out at the lake. There was someone on the far shore, waving. Li nodded, but he didn't move. He didn't know what to do.

I sighed. “She's been waiting a while.”

He looked between the two of us — the waving woman on the shore and me. I was fading, but I smiled, and it filled me up.

“Don't worry about me,” I said. “We'll see each other again.”

He smiled. “Will we?”

“Sure.” I shrugged. And he let go, turning away from me and taking one tentative step, then the next, until he was past the shore and the tide of the water pulled back and back and back, until there was no more lake to impede his path to the opposite shore.

“In another dream, maybe?” he called over his shoulder.

“Yeah,” I assured him.

In another dream.

In all of them.

And then the lake tide crept back in, like he had never walked across it at all.

M
oving day came as fast as summer lightning, and it felt like I was watching it go by through a prism. Tabitha and Paul helped me load the boxes into the U-Haul, and Mum passed me one last box that had been left in my room. Before I pulled the door down, something caught my eye — a pile of Polaroids kept together by a rubber band. I scooped them up, pocketed them, and hopped down to the ground.

“That's the last of it,” Mum called, coughing a little before taking a puff on her inhaler. I had told her just to stick to the sidelines on this, but she had wanted to be involved — as if she hadn't just come home from the hospital. I still looked at her with relief and worry, like she was going to slip through my fingers like a bit of smoke and disappear. But not today. And not for a long time, either.

I wished there had been more to pack away, but that was the last of it. Packing had taken less effort than I anticipated. Emptying rooms and making them fresh for new lives and new stories seemed as right as leaving always had. Wherever we were going, someone else was doing the same for us.

There were a hundred goodbyes stuck in my throat as Paul and Tabitha drew me into their arms. We stayed like this for a long time, muttering regrets and hopes and promises into this fragile triangle of our three lives. It wasn't as though we wouldn't see each other again after this, but change was sweeping us up, and we were dreaming in three different directions, as we always sort of did.

We separated, drying each other's tears. It was time. Time that finally ran its course, the hands meeting on the clock as it was rewound, about to be set into motion again. The weeks, the last days, had slipped past me like so many breezes and balled-up cellophane . . . but then again, so had the years. But we'd endure. We always did.

Mum popped open the driver's side — she would drive half the way, and I would bring us home on the last leg. This was how we wanted it to be; we wanted this leaving, this beginning to be in both of our hands. I climbed into the passenger seat.

Our car pulled out slowly, the world I had known ebbing away on the periphery. Paul and Tabitha stood there, like receding beacons on open water, waving and waving. I waved until my arm hurt, until they were pinpricks. Then we turned, and they and our house — just a house, now — were gone.

The road stretched before us, the sun climbing behind. My mother and I were two sunflowers, turning our heads towards the light, and I felt it ripple underneath my ribs as I dug in my pocket and pulled out the Polaroids.

“What are those?” Mum asked, pulling up to a stop sign.

I slipped the rubber band off. “Oh, just some pictures I took this summer.”

I turned them over, readying for an onslaught of that final reverie of sadness, of memory. But nothing came. The pictures were blank. They had always been blank. Except one of them.

The library looked beautiful, that first picture I had of it, but its outline was a lot dimmer now, faded and worn. The car stopped again at the railroad tracks as the barrier went down and the warning signal blinked. I looked up, and Wilson's Woods was on the other side of the car. If I squinted hard enough, I could see workmen and their big machines milling around in there, the front ends of their rigs and cranes plunging into the walls as the library came down around them. The train flew by in a torrent. The barrier lifted. And we were on our way, again.

Li and I had passed through and into so many stories, and we had spun our own world out of the threads of the ones we tried so hard to escape. So many stories. But this one, the one that began with him and ended with me, was ours. And however fleeting or imagined, it remained solid, written in tight cursive on the undersides of our hearts and set free into the water. There it could thrive and pass through the membrane that separated this life and the other. It was there, in the depths, that there was a light.

“We're leaving,” Mum had said.

Just for now
, I thought.