Chapter Thirty-Three
Rhys
It was harder than it sounds. I’d talked my way out of a trailer, into a lift shack, into four lodges and, for a while, into believing I was a good husband. Now I sat in the dark and said nothing for twenty-six minutes. It felt like holding a plank.
I’d asked her three weeks after San Francisco.
Not in person. I didn’t trust myself in person.
Owen had let it slip, carrying a load of cedar past my truck one Saturday, that she walked the lake every Sunday at dawn with a sketchbook, and he’d looked instantly like he wanted to put the words back in his mouth with a nail gun.
I’d written the text eleven times. The one I sent said: Owen says you walk Donner on Sundays. Could I come and carry the sketchbook? I won’t talk unless you do. I won’t fix anything. Not even the tripod. If the answer’s no, you don’t have to answer.
She’d answered four hours later. 5:40. West end, by the public dock. Bring coffee. Not the fancy kind.
At 5:38 her car came around the curve with its headlights still on.
She parked two spaces away, not next to me, got out, and lifted Juniper down from the back seat with an arm under her chest. The old dog saw me and forgot her hips entirely.
She came across the gravel in a sort of rolling gallop and leaned her whole weight against my shins, groaning, and I crouched down and put my face in her neck and stayed there longer than a grown man should.
“She thinks you’ve been at the store,” Lucy said. “For four months.”
“Hi, Juni.” My voice wasn’t right. “Hi, old girl.”
Lucy held out her hand. For a second I thought she meant to shake mine. Then I understood, and I gave her the coffee.
“Rules,” she said.
“I carry the book. I don’t talk unless you talk. I don’t fix.”
“And you walk on the lake side, because Juniper walks on the road side, and she likes to see the water.”
“Lake side.”
She handed me a canvas bag. “Sketchbook, pencils, eraser, stool,” she said. “Biscuits. The biscuits are for her, not you.”
“Understood.”
It weighed almost nothing. I carried it like it was full of eggs.
* * *
We walked east along the north shore on the old highway, with the lake on our right going from black to pewter to a pale, flat silver, and the snow on Donner Peak behind us turning pink as the sun came up over the far end.
The only sounds were our boots, and the dog’s tags, and, once, a truck with a boat trailer rattling past toward the launch.
She stopped where she wanted to stop. No warning. She’d just stop, and turn, and hold her hand out behind her without looking, and I’d put the sketchbook in it. Then she’d stand there, or sit on the stool if I was quick enough to unfold it, and draw.
I’d forgotten what it looked like.
No. That’s the easy version. I’d never really looked.
For ten years I’d seen the drawings finished, and never once stood still for the twenty minutes that made one.
She drew fast and then slow. She drew with her whole arm first, loose, great gray sweeps across the page, and then she brought it in to the wrist and then to the fingertips, and her mouth went tight at the corner, and she stopped blinking.
She was drawing a pier. Just an old wooden pier on pilings, half of its boards gone, with the mist lying on the water behind it.
Under her pencil it became the loneliest, most beautiful thing on the lake.
“That pier’s been falling down since I was eight,” she said, to the page, not to me. “Mom used to bring me out here in the summers to draw it. I drew it every year until I left for Berkeley. It loses a board or two every winter.”
“Why draw it again?”
“Because it’s different every time.” Her pencil didn’t stop. “That’s the whole trick. Nothing’s the same thing twice, if you actually look at it. People just stop looking.”
I didn’t answer. I didn’t have to. We both heard it.
Her pencil snapped at the point.
I had my pocketknife out and half open before I heard myself. I stopped with my thumb on the blade.
She didn’t look up. “What are you doing?”
“Can I sharpen that?”
“That’s better.” She turned the blunt pencil in her fingers. “No. I like it blunt for fog.” And she went on drawing with it, and the mist on the page went softer, and I folded the knife and put it back in my pocket and felt like I’d passed a test I hadn’t known I was taking.
When she finished, she wrote the date in the top corner. Then, in the bottom corner, small, she wrote L.H.
I didn’t say anything about it. It was the hardest thing I did all day.
At the cars, she took the bag back from me and lifted Juniper into the back seat, and I heard myself say, “Same time next week?” and then heard what I’d done.
“Sorry,” I said. “That was a close.”
She looked at me over the roof of her car. “A what?”
“A close. You ask for the next meeting before they’re out the door. Before they’ve decided whether they liked the first one.”
“Do you do that with everything?”
“I’m starting to notice that I do.”
“Well.” She opened her door. “Stop noticing it and stop doing it.” She got in, and rolled the window down, and looked straight ahead through the windshield at the lake. “Same time next week.”
* * *
The second Sunday it rained, a thin cold spring rain that came sideways off the water, and I thought she’d cancel.
She didn’t. She showed up in a yellow slicker with the hood cinched so tight only her nose and the pencil showed, and she drew the boathouses on the south shore from under the eaves of a closed-up bait shop while I stood beside her holding the book half inside my jacket to keep the rain off it.
“Tell me something,” she said, without looking up. “Something you learned this week.”
There were a hundred things I could’ve said, lining up in my mouth in the right order to make me look good. I let them go by.
“The housekeepers at Glenbrook have a name for the low towel hooks,” I said. “I didn’t know until Thursday. I was in the linen room asking about something else.”
Her pencil paused. “What do they call them?”
“Lucy hooks.”
She stopped drawing entirely. Rain ticked on her hood.
“That’s not true.”
“You can ask them. I’m not—I didn’t tell them to. They’ve called them that since 2018. The head of housekeeping told me the new hires learn it the first day. ‘Hang the hand towels on the Lucy hooks.’” I looked at the water. “Ten years, and I didn’t know my own staff had your name on the walls.”
She was quiet for a while. Then she started drawing again, a little harder than before.
“What else,” she said.
“I went to see my mother. After you did.”
That made her look at me.
“She said you ate two grilled cheeses.”
Lucy made a sound that might have been a laugh. It came out of the yellow hood and went off across the water. “She cut the crusts off.”
“She does that when she thinks you need looking after.” I held the sketchbook tighter against my ribs. “She also told me she told you about the phone call. In 2020. From the parking lot.” My throat did something. “She didn’t ask me first. I would have said no. I’m glad she didn’t ask.”
Lucy didn’t answer that. She didn’t need to. She finished the boathouses in the rain, dated them, signed them, and on the walk back to the cars she let her shoulder bump mine once, on the narrow part of the path by the water, and didn’t move away right away.
* * *
By the third Sunday, I’d gotten better at the quiet. It had stopped feeling like a plank. It had started to feel like a room.
“What did you learn this week?” she asked in the parking lot. It had become the question.
“That I can’t do this at home,” I said. “Be quiet. I tried it Tuesday. Sat in the kitchen with no phone. I lasted six minutes before I put on a podcast about hotel financing.”
“Six minutes is a start.”
“You did twenty-two last Sunday without looking at me once.”
“I was drawing.”
“I know,” I said. “I was counting.”
We went all the way around to the east end that morning, to the beach by the state park where the creek comes in, and she drew the old dead snag that stands in the shallows there with its roots showing, silver as a coat hanger.
Juniper waded in up to her elbows and stood in the cold water, looking extremely pleased with herself.
A pair of ospreys went back and forth over the lake, carrying sticks.
“They’re building,” Lucy said, watching them.
“Every year?”
“Same nest. They just add to it.” She tipped her head. “Some years it blows down and they start over. Same spot.”
There was a whole speech in that, about nests and starting over and the same spot, and I could feel it trying to climb out of me. I held on to the canvas bag and kept my mouth shut, and when I looked back at her she was watching me, and not the ospreys.
“You were going to say something about the nest,” she said.
“Yes.”
“Was it going to be good?”
“It was going to be great,” I said. “That’s why I didn’t.”
She laughed. Really laughed, at something I’d said, for the first time in longer than I could remember, a short, surprised sound that made Juniper turn around in the water to look at her.
On the walk back she was quiet in a different way. Not closed. Thinking. At the cars she didn’t get into hers. She unzipped the front pocket of her jacket and took out something black and small and rectangular and held it for a moment, like she was deciding.
It was a Moleskine. Brand new. The paper band still around it, the elastic still tight.
She slid the band off and opened the cover. On the first page, in her upright hand, it said No. 32, and under that, the date. Tucked inside the front cover was a single sheet of paper folded in thirds, the edges lined up perfectly, the hotel way.
“Don’t read it now,” she said. “Next Sunday. Out loud. To me.”
I didn’t ask what it was. I knew what it was.
She held it out, and I took it with both hands.