The tracks are close to the river, a muddy silver blue. There was a river near our village, too, it flooded almost every spring. For a few strange days and miraculous days we could catch fish in the streets and set the withy baskets in the fields for eels.
I must finish my story. I was walking along this river with a basket of eggs when Geoffrey Wyndham drove over the rise. Joseph was beside him.
“Rose Jarrett!” Geoffrey called, stopping the vehicle beside me. He laughed, sunlight falling through his straw hat and making patterns on his face. He invited me to have a ride. I nodded yes and climbed into the back of the silver machine.
“Hold on to your hats”, Geoffrey said, though Joseph and I weren’t wearing any hats. Then we drove.
The speed! We flew, the landscape blurring into long smears of gold and green and blue. I gripped the seat, black leather, wind pulling my hair loose, making my eyes water. I had never gone so fast, or imagined it possible.
At last Geoffrey stopped next to a broken stone fence, woven with weeds and tumbling out of its shape. He turned around, one arm on the back of the seat, smiling.
“Scared?”
I nodded, I still couldn’t speak. Geoffrey laughed and got out of the car, reaching to give me his hand. I took it and stepped down out of the silver car like a girl in a story.
“I wasn’t scared”, Joseph said. “It was like flying”.
“Flying—yes. Just so. Do you see that?” Geoffrey asked, pointing to ruins in the midst of the shimmering green fields. “It used to be a monastery, long ago. Henry VIII had it sacked. They built it here because when the floods come during the summer sea the place becomes an island, sometimes for weeks. I wanted to see it”.
He started off. Joseph went with him and I followed. The sun was hot. Twice, we disturbed dragonflies in the tall grass, they rose up in great clouds and drifted away.
The abbey made us quiet. The roof was gone, but some walls were still standing. Geoffrey slipped between the wire fences and disappeared into a corridor. Joseph hurried after him. I followed more slowly. The stones beneath my feet were dusty and smooth. Rain had streaked the stone walls. Old leaves littered the floor.
The page ended, and there wasn’t another one in the envelope. I pulled the other letters from my purse, worried that the second page might still be in the box, or lost altogether. I was avaricious for the story by now, half here in the hot Impala, half in the Silver Ghost of a hundred years ago, bumping over dirt roads to the ruins of the abbey. It must have felt so astonishing to ride in a car for the very first time, though they were probably going only ten or fifteen miles an hour. Whatever sadness was to come, Rose wouldn’t have known it in this moment of exhilaration, this sunny day filling up with an adventure. I sorted through the letters as if they were playing cards. Toward the middle of the stack a page matching the page in my lap jutted out of another envelope. I pulled it out and opened it, sighing with relief to find it continued the story.
We turned a corner. Stairs rose, ending in the blue sky. Through gaps in the wall we glimpsed the grassy fields, moving in the wind. We reached a large room with a vast fireplace. Geoffrey stood in the middle, looking around. His cheeks had reddened in the sun. “I can almost imagine the monks”, he said. “Can’t you?”
“This place is too quiet”, Joseph said.
“That’s because it has a secret. My uncle told me. He says everyone who comes here has to tell their secrets, too”.
“What’s your secret, then?” I asked. Though I could hardly speak before, in this place I was free, as if all the invisible lines between us had fallen away. I could say anything.
Geoffrey spoke up slowly, a faraway look in his eyes. “I want to go to India”, he said. “I’m to go to Cambridge next year, then work here with my father, but I don’t want that life. I want to see the world. I’m joining the Royal Navy as an officer instead. That’s my secret”.
Joseph began to speak almost before Geoffrey finished. “I’m going to America. I have a cousin there, and when I raise ten pounds, he’ll sponsor me”.
I was startled. I knew who he meant. Once a year our mother’s cousin sent us a bundle of knickknacks and candy, sometimes coins. She kept his brief letters in the kitchen drawer.
“Is it true?” I asked.
Joseph looked at me. “If you tell, Rose, I’ll make you sorry”.
“Rose won’t tell”, Geoffrey said. He tossed a pebble into a corner. “She won’t, because she’ll share a secret, too. What is it that you dream of, Rose? Tell us. Do you want to be a princess?”
I don’t know what made me answer as I did. Perhaps it was the silence, the layers of the past that seemed to well up from the stones, the years of prayers that had been spoken here.
“A priest”, I said, without even thinking, but as I said the words I knew they were true. “I would like to stand up in the church and say the words, and be a priest”.
A long silence followed, wind moving in the sunny air.
Then they laughed.
“A priest!” Joseph repeated, scornful. “Don’t be daft”.
“Girls can’t be priests”, Geoffrey agreed, though more kindly.
My cheeks flamed and I didn’t speak. I hadn’t known how deep this longing was until I spoke it. Though I had always understood that it was beyond rules or even words, how I felt when I walked into the silent church to mend the robes or repair the altar cloths—more alive, more listening, than I ever felt in other places.
I paused in the reading and looked out the window, watching two young men on bicycles travel down the quiet street and disappear around the corner. What Rose had put into words was something I’d felt, too, something I’d been thinking about since I’d seen the Wisdom window with its beautiful rendition of creation. Now I was more convinced than ever that Rose was connected to those windows, remembering their vivid colors, the swirl of wind, the sense of divine life and motion in the world: ruah, breath, spirit.
“All right”, Geoffrey said. He leaned against the stone wall. “I’ll tell you another story. Once there was a beautiful woman from a noble family. She fell in love with a man who had no prospects and was sent away. A few years later she visited this very monastery and was shocked to find her beloved had become a monk. They started to meet in secret”. He paused here, lowered his voice. “When they were discovered, she was sealed up in a wall right here, alive”.
Now Joseph was as quiet as me. He was staring at Geoffrey Wyndham’s soft leather boots. I knew just what he was thinking—not about the horror of the story, which I didn’t believe, but about the noble girl, the man who had no prospects, the ruin of it all. My shame deepened, for our boots, Joseph’s and my own, were old work boots, cracked and muddy. We had no prospects either.
We listened to the wind move in the grass.
“I’m leaving”, Joseph said. He walked past the broken stairs and disappeared into the corridor. When I went to follow him, Geoffrey caught my arm. There were dry leaves under my feet and the sky opening above.
“Don’t be angry”, he said. “I think you’re too pretty to be a priest, that’s all”. Then he leaned down swiftly and kissed me. I was startled by the feeling, like flowers opening to the sun, and I did not pull away.
“That’s my real secret”, he whispered, his breath in my ear, his cheek against mine. “A secret only for you, Rose Jarrett”.
This is how it began, then, a year before the comet.
It is nearly noon. My accountant has gone. He gathered up his things and bowed slightly in my direction before he disappeared into the crowd. He slept so soundly, his head resting on my shoulder. I feel a little sad to think that I will never see him again, or know what happens to him or probably, once I leave this train, ever think of him again.
There is more, but it must wait.
This letter was not signed, but ended with a penciled drawing of a rose.
I ran my fingertips along its upper edge. This is how it began, then, a year before the com
et. So much for my great-grandfather’s luminous dream, which we believed had started everything. So much for the family history, drawn in a straight line from one generation to the next—history that did not even mention Rose. I felt as I’d so often felt in Japan, waking to earthquakes in the middle of a summer night, as if the world were an unsteady place, about to split wide open. I thought of the beautiful cloth with its row of vine-encrusted moons trembling with the breeze from the lake.
My mother had found that cloth wrapped in plain paper, hidden in the lining of my great-grandfather’s trunk, with the handwritten note inside. Whatever answers these letters provided, the questions they raised were even greater. For now I could imagine Rose sitting in a cold parlor in the middle of the night, weaving, her breath visible, her fingers growing numb. I could imagine all this, but not why she had left, or how the blanket had passed through the years, unopened, ignored. As much as I wondered what had happened to Rose, I wondered also what had happened to her child.
I glanced at my watch. It was already after five. I’d been sitting in the car reading these letters for almost an hour. There were more, but I felt I’d taken in as much as I could for the moment. I slipped the pages back into their plain envelopes and the envelopes back into the binder, which I left on the seat beside me. Then I turned the key in the ignition and drove out of town, traveling on the local roads again, my windows open to the breeze, trying to sort through everything I’d learned, to refocus my lens on the world.
When I reached The Lake of Dreams there was a regatta and the streets were crowded with cars and tourists. There was a detour away from the lake, and on an impulse I turned down the outlet street. The Green Bean was full, people standing on the sidewalk with buzzers in their hands, waiting for a table; clouds of laughter and voices poured from the patio by the water and drifted across the road to me. The glassworks was busy, too.
I parked in the gravel lot behind Dream Master, ignoring all the NO TRESPASSING signs. It was closed for the day, and a kind of stillness had settled around it. I slid the binder beneath the seat and locked the car, pushing down the chrome buttons and checking twice to make sure I still had the keys. The gravel was rough under my feet, and heat rose from all the tiny stones. I thought of going to see Keegan, but I’d see him Wednesday, after all, when we went to view the windows in the chapel. He’d be busy now, either with work or with Max, and if he wasn’t he’d be stretched out on the sofa or his open bed, a fan clicking in the high ceiling. As I imagined that, I imagined myself there with him, how he might turn to me in that space, as he had so long ago, learning about each other amid the ruined machines as the light faded from the windows. It shocked me, the strength of the image, the desire I had to see if it might happen this way—though I couldn’t tell if it was really desire in the present or left over from the unfinished past. Not just the past with Keegan, and a desire to know what might have happened between us if I’d stayed, but the more uncomfortable past where I kept on leaving—countries, jobs, people I loved. I kicked at the gravel and walked to the back of Dream Master instead.
There was a loading dock there. It used to seem so high, we used to jump from it on a dare. There was the old Coke machine, too, empty now, its long vertical door ajar. I climbed up the steps to the back door. The locks here hadn’t been changed since Art had sold the lock-making business decades ago. The wire I always carried was in the bottom of my bag and it took me only a minute or two to work the mechanism inside. There was nothing fancy here, nothing tricky. The door swung open into the warehouse room. Boxes were stacked on the shelves and light flowed in through the paned windows and a skylight far above. I let the door fall shut behind me; the aisles were wide enough for forklifts, my footsteps echoing against the walls.
The door to Art’s office was open and I walked in, as I had walked in so often as a child, freely, as if the building were our playground. Once I’d hidden in these cupboards, which had been in my father’s office, during a game of hide-and-seek. I’d been crouched in the dark, listening to distant voices calling my name, when the office door opened and my father came in with Art. Their voices were sharp; I closed my eyes and imagined the words as knives slashing at the air, and when I opened them again, the darkness was still present. I was afraid, huddled in that small dark space, too scared to move even after the argument ended and Art’s footsteps receded. Blake was crying somewhere and my father swore and left to help, the door falling shut behind him. I crawled out then, blinded by the light in the room, my hands tingling, numb.
Now I opened a cupboard door—the shelves were full of papers, files, ledgers—and let it fall shut again. On the easels by the window were the plans for The Landing; on Art’s desk was a folder with estimates of costs. I picked this up, let it fall, too. The office was so silent, sun slanting in and making rectangles on the desk, and I wasn’t sure if the feelings of apprehension and betrayal, so stirred up within me by the memory of that lost afternoon, had their source in the present or the past—or if it was even possible to draw a line between them.
I left the offices and went to the stairway at the back of the building, climbing up into the factory spaces on the second and third floors, which were empty now, the high paned windows dusty, all the machines long gone. Once, workers had streamed into this place day after day, pressing keys, and more keys, forming the components of the locks, their secret lives going on within them, their actions so familiar that they didn’t have to think. In 1919, the year Dream Master was established, my great-grandfather sat below in the same office Art used now, overseeing everything. It was nearly five years after Rose left. Four years before they bought the house on the lake. Six years before my grandfather was born and Iris went away.
I walked over to the window that overlooked the village. The masts of the boats anchored at the pier bobbed in the distance. The air in the old factory was hot and still. I wrote my initials in the dust of a windowpane, then rubbed them out. The Impala sat in the parking lot, a bright bird from another era. I stayed for quite a while, moving from window to window, watching people come and go from the renovated buildings across the street, laughing, careless, as if no other time existed or ever would, oblivious to all the other lives that had been lived over the generations on this very same spot.
The heat gathered; sweat trickled down my neck. I went back downstairs quickly, thinking about Rose and her letters locked in the car, about all the layers of the past. On the landing, I nearly ran into Joey. I gasped in surprise, hands flying to my chest, and he stopped dead, too, looking as shocked as I was. He was dressed in cutoffs and flip-flops, carrying a six-pack of beer, his blond hair already going lighter from the sun. A young woman stood behind him.
“What are you doing here?” he asked.
“Looking for Blake,” I said, which was partly true. “The door was unlocked.”
Joey touched the handle. “That’s weird. It’s Sunday, right? We closed at five o’clock.”
“Right. Look, I’m sorry. I just thought Blake might still be here. And then, you know, I kept remembering things from when we were kids. When we used to play hide-and-seek here, remember that? I went upstairs to look around. What are you doing here?” I asked, bolder now that I’d recovered a little. “Who is this?”
“Yeah, I remember those days,” Joey said, ignoring my questions. “Hide-and-seek. Seems a long time ago.”
“It was.”
“Well, don’t let me keep you, Lucy. I’ll check the lock when you go.”
And then I was standing on the loading dock in the full glare of the late-afternoon sun, the door clicking shut behind me.
Chapter 12
THE HOUSE WAS EMPTY, HOT FROM THE LATE AFTERNOON sun. I was so hungry I ate out of the refrigerator, tearing off pieces of bagel and dipping them into vanilla yogurt; there was nothing else but wilted-looking carrots and an unopened pound of butter. I ate quickly and without really tasting anything, and drank three glasses of water. Then I gathered all my things, with the r
ust-colored binder full of letters on top, and made my way upstairs to the cupola. The papers, piled on the window seat facing the lake, fluttered in the light breeze when I pushed open the windows. I’d searched this room carefully for more documents and had found nothing but two stray white buttons and a pair of small metal scissors. Still, I wanted to read these letters in a place where at least some trace of Rose had existed.
There were seven envelopes of different colors and sizes; some had been mailed and others had only Iris’s name across the front in Rose Jarrett’s now familiar handwriting. The one on top was addressed to Rose in New York City, the postmark too blurry to read. The letter itself was written on thick white paper, one side faintly shiny, the other porous, so that the ink spread out, blurring some of the letters, which had been written in a heavy, rather awkward hand. When I unfolded the single page, a lock of pale brown hair, tied with a piece of string, fell into my lap.
17 October 1914
Dear Rose,
I was on the farm all week. When I came into town your letter was in the silver tray. No one spoke of you, your name is never mentioned. I am happy to know you are safe.
You will be happy to know that Iris is fine. This is a piece of her hair I cut for you. She was playing on the porch, lining up pebbles from the lake from small to large. There were letters made from pebbles, also: R, I, S. I think Cora has been teaching her to spell, she is smart. I hope smart gets her further in life than it has gotten you, that’s all.
I am glad you found the money. I will send more if I can. Please send news. Mrs. Elliot goes on here as if nothing ever happened. I do not think she is your friend.