Chapter Two
Lucy
I carried the fallen place cards inside against my chest like an armful of laundry, and Margot Kline caught me in front of the masonry heater.
“Lucy.” She put her arms around me, cards and all. She smelled like cedar and some kind of citrus that probably cost more than my first car. Her cheek touched mine, cool, and she held on one beat longer than people usually do. “Great party, Lucy.”
“Thank you.”
“Honestly. The lanterns? Summit Ridge’s people are obsessed. One of the partners asked me who we used.”
We. I shifted the cards against my ribs. “What did you tell him?”
“That we keep our vendors close.” She smiled her even, patient smile, the one that has made a lot of conference rooms regret underestimating her. “Where did you get them, actually? I’ll need them for the fall.”
“A shop in San Francisco. I’ll send you the link.”
“You’re a doll.” She glanced down at the cards in my arms, the crushed corners, the one with a footprint across a violet lake. “Oh, no. What happened to these?”
“The wind.”
“You know, you could’ve had them printed. It would’ve saved you weeks.”
“I didn’t want to save weeks.”
“No.” She patted my arm. “You never do.”
“Congratulations, by the way,” I said.
She tilted her head. “For what?”
“The toast.”
“Oh, God. That.” She laughed and rolled her eyes toward the ceiling beams, which I’d had milled from a single stand of salvaged Douglas fir. “He gets sentimental after two glasses. You know how he is.”
Then she was gone, sliding toward the terrace doors with his phone still in her hand, and I stood there with an armful of paintings pressed against my heart and thought, I do know how he is. I’m the one who’s supposed to know.
I set the cards down on the hearth. Somebody would throw them away later. I didn’t want to be there when they did.
The great room was full and loud and golden, strangers talking to strangers because I’d arranged the chairs so they couldn’t help it.
Rhys came through the crowd sideways, one hand on a shoulder, one hand shaking another hand, and when he passed me he caught my fingers and squeezed them.
“Luce! Best party we’ve ever thrown.”
“We?”
“You and me, babe!” he called back over somebody’s shoulder. “Dream team!” And he was already three people away, laughing, pointing at somebody across the room, and my fingers were still warm from his hand, and I didn’t know what to do with them.
* * *
The powder room off the great room has two hundred and twelve tiles.
I know because I sat on the closed lid of the toilet in my silk dress and counted them.
They’re hand-glazed, the green of lichen on granite, from a little kiln outside Grass Valley.
I sent back the first batch because the glaze was too even.
I wanted every tile to have its own opinion about the color.
The kiln owner called me difficult, then fired a second batch, then called back to apologize.
Nobody who washes their hands in this room thinks about any of that. That’s how it should be. I just wanted to be somewhere I’d chosen every inch of, for five minutes, with the door locked.
Somebody knocked.
“Anyone in there?”
“Just a minute.”
“Sorry! No rush. It’s just—it’s the only one on this side, and I’ve had so much champagne.” A pause. Then, through the door, cheerfully: “Isn’t this the best party? Did you hear the toast?”
“I heard it.”
“Wasn’t it sweet? I wish my husband talked about me like that.”
I looked at the two hundred and twelve tiles. I thought about which one to be.
“He didn’t,” I said. “Talk about his wife like that.”
There was a short, confused silence on the other side of the door.
I opened it and smiled at her, a woman in gold sequins I’d never met, and said, “All yours,” and walked out through the side hall to the lawn.
* * *
The boathouse has a stone bench on its lake side where nobody ever sits, because you can’t see the party from it. You can only see the dock.
I sat there with my shoes in my hand. The lanterns were still swinging over the water, and the floating dock rocked a little under them, and for one second it wasn’t a floating dock at all.
It was the old fishing dock, gray and splintered, with a borrowed arch of pine boughs at the end of it and forty folding chairs on the grass.
June 12, 2016. There was no lodge. There was a meadow and a bank loan and a man in a rented suit who couldn’t stop talking about a room that didn’t exist yet.
A fireplace you can walk into. A room where people who don’t know each other end up talking.
I took a cocktail napkin and the caterer’s pen and drew it for him while he talked. The great room. The hearth. The windows that frame the lake like a painting. He stopped talking in the middle of a sentence and stared at the napkin, and then at me, and said, That. How did you do that? That’s it.
The napkin is taped inside the front cover of my first Moleskine. Number one. I dated it in the corner in pen. There’s a faint ring on it from his champagne glass.
“Found you.”
Jonah came around the side of the boathouse holding two s’mores on a paper plate, the copper-bowl marshmallows, charred black on one side the way he likes them. He held the plate out.
“I’m not hungry.”
“Nobody eats a s’more because they’re hungry.” He sat down on the other end of the bench and put the plate between us. “Hiding?”
“Supervising the boathouse.”
“It’s doing great. Very structurally sound.” He tore a s’more in half and didn’t eat it. “For the record, my brother is an idiot.”
“He’s your brother.”
“Those aren’t mutually exclusive, Luce. I’ve got thirty-nine years of data.”
I almost laughed. It came up in my throat and turned into something else halfway, and I pressed the back of my wrist to my mouth until it passed.
Jonah didn’t say anything. He spends his winters at the top of the bunny hill with terrified eight-year-olds, and he knows most people get down on their own if you stand next to them and keep quiet.
“Everybody thought it was sweet,” I said, when I could.
“Everybody’s had four drinks.”
“A man at the bottom of the terrace steps said Margot did the look. All the rooms.”
Jonah turned his head and looked at me for a long time.
“Who said that?”
“A tan. A tan in a quarter-zip.”
“Lucy.” He said it quietly. “I’ve watched you draw on every flat surface in this lodge. Napkins. Receipts. My ski school invoices. You drew the boot room on the back of my liability waiver, and I still have it, because it’s better than the boot room.”
I looked at the dock.
“He didn’t even know what the place cards were,” I said. “‘The little cards.’ In front of everyone.”
“I know. I was standing next to him.” He set the s’more down. “You want me to go get him?”
“No.”
“You want me to push him in the lake? Because I can make it look like an accident. He’s been drinking, it’s dark, the dock moves—”
“Jonah.”
“I’m just laying out options.”
I stood up. My feet were bare on the cold grass. I didn’t know I’d decided until I was standing, and then I knew exactly, the way you know which line is right on a drawing before you’ve finished putting it down.
“I’m going to Truckee.”
He didn’t ask why. He looked at my dress, and my bare feet, and my shoes hanging from two fingers.
“Tonight? In that?”
“In this.”
“You okay to drive?”
“I had one sip.”
He nodded slowly. “He’s going to look for you, you know. In an hour or so. Once the Summit guys leave and he doesn’t have anybody left to sell to.”
“Let him look.”
“Okay. And what do you want me to tell him?”
“Whatever’s true.”
“Huh.” He picked the s’more back up and finally took a bite. “That’s kind of my specialty.”
“I know. That’s why I’m asking you and not anybody else.”
He looked up at me with Rhys’s eyes, in Rhys’s face, set a little more honestly. “Watch for deer on Brockway,” he said. “They like the curve past the summit.”
* * *
At midnight the owner’s house was dark, and Juniper was waiting just inside the door, her whole back end wagging, gray around the muzzle and delighted to see me, the way she’d been delighted to see me every day of her life.
“Hi, baby. Hi, Juni. Want to go for a ride?”
She did. She always does.
I didn’t change. I didn’t pack. I took her leash off the hook and my keys out of the bowl, and on the way back through the kitchen I stopped at my painting table.
The old notebooks were still stacked there, six of them, black and soft at the corners.
I’d pulled them down from the shelf in May to paint the place cards from, because the early Glenbrook drawings had the lake in them before anyone else had seen it.
Number one was on top, with the napkin inside the cover.
I picked up all six and held them against my chest.
“Come on, Juni,” I said. “Leave the light on. Let him find it.”
Juniper rode shotgun with her chin on the console.
I drove north along the shore with the heater on my bare feet, through Incline, past the Sterling offices sitting dark on the hill with the name lit up in brushed steel.
Up over Brockway, slowly, watching for deer at the curve past the summit.
There weren’t any. Just me and the dog and the headlights on the pines, and every mile felt like breathing out.
“We’re okay,” I told Juniper, somewhere past the summit. She thumped her tail against the door. She believed me. One of us should.
Owen’s woodshop was dark when I pulled in. The loft above it was darker.
The outside stairs creak on the fourth step and the ninth. I’d forgotten that. My feet hadn’t. Juniper went up ahead of me one old hip at a time and sat at the top with her nose against the door, as if she remembered too.
The key had been on my ring for nine years, between the house key and the lodge’s back office, and I’d paid six hundred dollars a month the whole time for the door it opened. Just in case. I’d never said just in case of what.
The lock stuck. I put my shoulder into it, the way I used to, and the door gave.
Cold. Sawdust. Cedar, drifting up through the floorboards from the shop below. Moonlight came in through the tall north window, and everything in the room was a pale draped shape under dust sheets, like furniture in a house where someone had gone away for a very long time.
I found the one in the middle of the room by feel. I took the corner of the sheet in my fist and pulled, and the dust came up silver in the moonlight, and there it was.
My old drafting table. The parallel bar. The little tray along the bottom edge.
There was still a pencil in it.