Lost Lake

  Jack opened the door. He was wearing khaki pants and a pink polo shirt with the name of a symphony on it. On anyone else, it would have looked prissy or pretentious. On Jack it just seemed sincere. She had not seen him jog around the lawn that morning, so she had decided to bring him breakfast. “Lisette? Is this for me? Come in.”

  She walked in. She had been in this cabin many times, just never when Jack had been occupying it. Sometimes, when he left for the season, she would help Eby clean the cabin, and she would always look for things he left behind. But he was so meticulous that he never forgot anything. There were signs of his life that drew her eye now, making her curious. There was a photo of him and his three brothers on the kitchen counter, next to several bottles of vitamins. An iPhone was on the coffee table, with a ladies handkerchief next to it.

  “That’s Selma’s,” Jack said, when he noticed Lisette looking at it. “Everyone ate in my cabin last night.”

  Lisette nodded as she set the tray down on the table. Jack walked over to her, limping slightly. “Thank you for this, but it wasn’t necessary. I could have walked to the main house. I decided to forgo my morning jog, though.”

  Lisette’s eyes went to his wrapped ankle.

  “It’s fine,” he said. “Just a mild sprain. Trust me. I spend a great deal of time with feet.”

  She felt uncomfortable, like she had just revealed more about her feelings than she had wanted to, like last night, when she had run back into the house. She had gone back to her room and then realized her bra could be seen through her buttonholes. She had touched those buttonholes worriedly, wondering if anyone had seen.

  “Will you sit with me?” Jack asked, pulling out a chair for her.

  She nodded and sat, though she did not know why. She had not intended to stay.

  Jack sat beside her and poured coffee. He did not feel the need to fill her silence with talk. She had always liked that about him. Her silence made most people nervous, but it seemed to comfort him. Perhaps that was why she liked him so much. She had never been a comfort to anyone but Eby. And that had been a long time ago.

  The first time she had set eyes on Jack, he had been in his late twenties and he had been sitting in the dining room with an older couple. The camp had been full in the summers back then, and she and Eby had had to replenish the breakfast buffet several times every morning. At one point, they had even had to hire a waitress to help. Lisette remembered that morning in vivid detail. Her hair had still been long, and it had been braided. Her dress had been yellow. She had been carrying a plate of chive biscuits. She had entered the dining room and had been walking to the buffet table when she had seen him. Startled, she had stopped. For one fleeting moment, she had thought it was Luc. He had the same hair, the same nose. Only he’d been dressed in different clothing. It had made her smile, thinking Luc had moved out of the kitchen, that he had changed clothes and had decided to join the living. But then Jack had looked up at her, and she had seen the differences. He was not Luc. For some reason, the realization had been devastating. It had been at a time in her life when she had begun to feel like she had wanted to move forward. She had not missed breaking hearts, but she had missed feeling loved by a man, the weight of his body, the smell of his skin. And every time she had seen children at the camp, she had felt her heart squeeze a little, telling her it was still there, that it was possible to love again.

  But it was not to be. She had walked back into the kitchen and had seen Luc there in his chair, looking at her with such sympathy. He was not going to move on until she let go of him, of her guilt. And that was one thing she could not do. If she lost that, she would lose the thread that had sewn her new life together. She would become that careless, cruel person she had been before.

  The feeling of wanting to move on had not lasted long anyway. She had still been young. The older she got, the less she wanted it.

  Still, she looked forward to seeing Jack every summer. She liked seeing him grow older. She kept waiting for him to bring a wife. For there to be children. Grandchildren. But he remained single, and she grew close to him. She had not wanted to, but it had happened anyway. Had she been kinder to Luc, he would have grown into a Jack. He would have been quiet and kind and successful.

  “What will you do when Eby sells?” Jack suddenly asked, as if he had been carrying on a conversation with her in his head and he was now letting her in on it. “Where will you go?”

  Lisette lifted the notebook from around her neck and wrote, Nowhere. I will stay here.

  He read that and nodded, as if it was the answer he had been expecting. He sat back and looked into his coffee, as if there were secrets there. More silence.

  Lisette pointed to the eggs on the plate and mouthed the word Eat.

  “Oh, right. Of course.” He set his cup aside so quickly that the coffee sloshed over the rim onto the table.

  With a smile, she handed him his fork, then picked up his napkin and cleaned up the coffee while he ate.

  He kept sneaking glances at her. Finally, his eyes on his plate, he asked so sincerely that it felt like a lullaby, “Will you have dinner with me one night? Maybe after the party? I know you have a lot of work to do.”

  He had his fork suspended in midair, waiting for her reply. She paused, then wrote something on her pad. She reached over and showed it to him. I will break your heart.

  He put down his fork and made a face. “Oh, that’s right. I forgot. Never dinner.” He turned to her and said, “How about lunch?”

  There was a sense of tightness in the room now, filling the space. Attraction was like that. It filled. It poured into you like batter into a pan, sticking to the sides. Lisette stood abruptly.

  “Lisette?” Jack called as she ran out, knowing he could not chase her. She tripped and fell on her hands just as she reached the end of the path.

  She got up quickly and went to the kitchen through the back of the house so no one would see the great spectacle she was making of herself, running away from the sweetest man on the planet because she thought her presence might poison him somehow, like it had done with Luc. Luc was leaning back in the chair when she entered. He watched with great interest as she angrily scrubbed her hands at the sink. He was smiling at her, as if he knew what had just happened. Smiling as if it made him happy.

  * * *

  She had said no, of course. Jack was embarrassed. Not that he’d asked her out, but that he’d asked her to dinner first. He knew her better than that. He knocked himself lightly on the head with his hand. Stupid, stupid, stupid. She never ate dinner. In all the years he’d been coming to Lost Lake, Lisette had never come out to the lawn at night for barbecue and cocktails. When the sun set, she was always in her room, the single light from her window like a wink. Most of the summer faithfuls knew how Eby had saved Lisette, how she’d been sixteen and about to commit suicide because, over dinner, she’d broken the heart of a boy who had loved her. There was part of Jack, a part tucked back behind everything he treated so logically, that understood why the boy had taken his own life, because he understood how powerful an attraction to her could be. She was enchanting. He loved the notes she wrote in her pretty handwriting, the way she smelled, like oranges and dough, the savage blackness of her hair.

  It suddenly occurred to him.

  Was that what he was supposed to tell her? Was that what Eby meant?

  It seemed so simple. He thought she knew.

  But what if she didn’t? What if she didn’t know he loved her?

  He frowned at another possibility. He felt fear heat his ears, the same fear he felt when he had to go to a place he’d never been to before or speak in front of people. It made him want to run, to avoid the embarrassment altogether.

  What if she did know, and it didn’t matter?

  What if she didn’t love him back?

  * * *

  “Wes!” Devin said, and Kate watched her run up to him.

  The sun was setting behind the trees, streaking over the water. The hea
t had gone from boiling to a soft, wet simmer. Devin had been sitting on a picnic table since Wes had arrived, elbows on her knees, chin resting on her hands, waiting, waiting, waiting for him to finally stop working. She watched as he first put up the canopy Kate had mended last night, then fixed the barbecue grills. Kate was sure that he could feel her daughter’s impatience as surely as if she’d thrown it and hit him with it.

  “I want to ask you something,” Devin said, almost sliding to a stop. “Did you and your brother live someplace close by?”

  “Yes, we did,” Wes said. “About a half mile from here. Through the woods.” Wes pointed to the east side of the lake. “But the house is gone now. It burned down.”

  Devin turned and squinted in that direction. She put her hand to her good eye and covered it, something she often did when she was looking for something. She’d been doing it most all her life. She saw that Kate was watching, and lowered her hand. “Is there, like, a trail or something?”

  “There used to be. My brother and I walked it here every day.”

  “Will you take me there?” Devin asked, turning back to him.

  That caught him off guard. “Take you there?”

  “Yes. Can we go on a hike through the woods?”

  “Devin, you can’t ask him to do that,” Kate said, walking over to them. Her hands were stained green and brown from pulling up weeds in Eby’s neglected planters in front of the main house.

  “But I’m not asking,” Devin said. “The alligator wants him to.”

  “That sounds ominous,” Wes said, taking off his tool belt.

  Devin looked over her shoulder at Kate. “What does that mean?”

  “It means it sounds like the alligator wants to eat him,” Kate clarified for her.

  “No!” Devin said immediately. “It’s not like that. He’s friendly. And he really, really likes you, Wes. Out of everyone here, he talks about you the most.”

  Kate’s brows dropped in confusion. “He talks about Wes?”

  “All the time.”

  “Okay, let’s do it,” Wes said.

  “Really?” Devin said.

  “Never argue with an alligator,” Wes said.

  Devin nodded at him seriously. “Exactly.”

  So the three of them headed off to the lake. “We’ll be back before dark,” Wes called to the others. “I’m going to show them the path to the cabin.”

  “Be careful,” Eby said. She’d been waiting for Wes to finish with the grills before she started dinner for the guests. She was now lighting charcoal in one. “Do you have your phones with you?”

  “Mine, um, accidentally fell into the lake,” Kate said.

  Wes took his out of his pocket and held it up. “I have mine.”

  Once they reached the path around the lake, Wes ducked into the woods and soon found the trail. After a few minutes of walking, Kate began to notice some markers on the trees. “What are all these plastic tags?” she asked Wes, reaching out to touch one of the small bright ties that were deliberately attached to some low-hanging limbs.

  “They look like survey markers,” he said. “Did Eby have her land surveyed recently?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  The trees began to thin the farther they walked, becoming more uniform, more evenly spaced, as if they’d been deliberately planted years ago. Kate realized that they were all pine trees, and all of them had identical scars on them, reaching high into their trunks. The bark of the trees seemed to peel away in a V shape, like a curtain parting, and inside were even, whispery lines that looked like they were made by ax cuts. There was something magical about this place, about the uniformity of the trees, like they were dancers in costumes, frozen the moment before their first step.

  “What are these marks on all these trees?” Kate asked.

  “They’re called catfaces,” Wes said, walking at a brisk pace, like he was passing through the bad side of town. “That’s how I always knew we’d crossed from Eby’s property onto ours.”

  “I don’t remember us ever exploring this part of the woods,” Kate said. “I think I would have remembered this.”

  “I kept us on Eby’s property to avoid my dad. I think I knew her land better than my own.”

  “Why are they called catfaces?” Devin asked.

  Wes talked while he walked, so Kate and Devin couldn’t linger. Instead, they walked while looking up, periodically tripping over branches and roots. “Because those scars where the bark is peeled away look like cat whiskers. Generations of my family were turpentiners. They tapped these trees for resin. The catfaces are the hacks they made to get to the veins of the trees. Turpentining used to be a huge industry in this area. When the industry dried up, there wasn’t much to do with this land.”

  A short time later, they broke through some brush and suddenly found themselves in the curve of an old dirt road. Kate was out of breath.

  “The road leads to the highway, that way,” Wes said, pointing left, not stopping. “This way leads to what remains of the old cabin.”

  They walked a short distance up the road to where there was a grassy bare spot containing an old stone chimney, looking as if it was standing inside an invisible house.

  “And here we are,” Wes said.

  Devin ran to the clearing. Wes stayed at the very edge, as far back as he could get without disappearing into the trees.

  Kate walked over to him, pushing her sunglasses to the top of her head. She was the one who was winded, yet he was the one who looked like he was about to pass out. “Are you okay?”

  He managed a smile that didn’t quite reach his blue eyes. “It’s been a long time since I’ve been here.”

  “Oh, God. Wes, I didn’t realize. Is this the first time since the fire?”

  “No,” he said, lowering himself to the ground and leaning against a tree. For a big man, he moved easily, deliberately, aware of his body and its proximity to those around him. He brushed some dirt off his hands. “The last time was when I was nineteen. I said good-bye to a lot of bad memories.”

  He still didn’t want to be here. She could tell. He’d done this just for Devin. And knowing that he’d done this for her daughter, at a cost to himself, made her stomach feel strange, trembling slightly the way it did those last days at the lake all those years ago. Sometimes she thought she’d forgotten what selflessness looked like, until she ended up here again.

  She sat beside him, stretching her legs out and leaning back on her hands, trying to cool the places where sweat collected, in the crooks of her elbows and the bends of her knees. “Who owns this property now?” she asked.

  “I do.”

  “You kept it all these years? Why?”

  “I don’t know.” They watched as Devin kicked around in the dirt and looked under rocks. “Is Devin looking for something specific?”

  “Your guess is as good as mine. She’s not talking to me about it.” Kate stared at her daughter for a few more moments, then turned back to Wes. “Thank you for bringing her here.”

  “The trail wasn’t as hard to find as I thought it would be. Some guests from the lake probably found it and walked it over the years. Not lately, though.”

  Kate frowned. “When did the camp start going downhill? When did people stop coming?”

  He shrugged. “The hotel by the water park was built about fifteen years ago. That, combined with the economy, Eby’s aging guests, and the fact that Eby doesn’t advertise, just started taking its toll, I guess. I hadn’t been out to the lake in a while, so I didn’t know how bad it had gotten. If I had known, I could’ve helped. Repair work is what I do. When George was alive, he used to take care of all that.”

  “What was he like?”

  “George?” Wes smiled. “He wasn’t tall, but he was big shouldered. You could hear his laugh across the lake. He liked steaks and liquor. He loved entertaining. And he loved Eby. He would pull her into his lap when he was sitting at a picnic table, and she would kiss him before insisting he let her
pass. He called it a toll.”

  “Why do you think Eby didn’t sell after he died?” Kate asked.

  “I don’t know. She was devastated when it happened. But there were a lot of people around her during that time. It kept her busy. She liked that. She’s always liked that. She and George were very social.”

  “When was the last time she left Lost Lake? I mean for a trip or a vacation?”

  “It’s been years.” Wes raised an eyebrow. “Why?”

  “I think Eby wants to leave. But the more I think about, the more I’m convinced she doesn’t want to sell.” There. She said it out loud, and it didn’t sound as outlandish as she thought. There was something more going on with her great-aunt. Eby’s decision to sell wasn’t as straightforward as she was letting on.

  Wes shook his head. “I think it’s too late.”

  “She hasn’t signed anything. She told me.”

  “What I mean is, it’s not just a matter of wanting to stay. There’s a matter of capital, too,” Wes said tactfully.

  “Oh. I see.” She sat up and pulled her knees to her chest. It never occurred to her that Eby couldn’t afford to stay.

  Several quiet minutes passed. The thought had been immediate. She kept pushing it away, but it kept rolling back to her. Could she? Would she? Was it possible? Would Eby even let her?

  “I know that look. You always got that look on your face before you jumped out of a tree or poked a snake and ran. What are you going to do now?” Wes asked suspiciously.

  That made her laugh—that he knew her on such a level. “I’m thinking, what if I offer to buy Lost Lake, or at least buy into it? That way Eby won’t lose it. She can come back to it. Everyone can come back to it.” She turned to him and asked earnestly, “Does that sound crazy?”

  “Yes,” he said without hesitation.

  That made her laugh again. “Good. Because if it made sense, I’m not sure she would agree to it.”

  “Kate…”

  “I haven’t said anything about it to her,” she said quickly. “Maybe I won’t. I don’t know. When I think about it, it makes me happy. That’s a good sign, right?”