Chapter Thirty-Eight
Lucy
I texted him at eleven Saturday night, after I’d already turned out the lamp and then turned it back on again.
Not Donner tomorrow. The dock.
Three dots appeared, and disappeared, and appeared. I watched them do it four times. I pictured him in the owner’s house at Glenbrook, sitting on the edge of the bed with the phone in both hands, writing a paragraph and deleting it, writing another one.
What came through was: Which dock?
I laughed out loud, alone in the loft, and Juniper lifted her head off her bed and looked at me like I’d lost my mind.
“Don’t,” I told her. “Don’t look at me like that.”
You know which dock.
Ok. 5:30.
* * *
The lake was still asleep when I got there.
Early June, five twenty-five in the morning, thirty-eight degrees.
The water was flat as poured glass from the shore to the far mountains, and so clear I could see the granite boulders on the bottom twenty feet down, pale and rounded like the backs of sleeping animals.
There was frost on the railing of the gangway.
The lodge behind me was dark except for the kitchen, where somebody was starting the bread.
He was already there. Of course he was. He was standing at the far end of the floating dock with his hands in the pockets of his canvas jacket, and under his arm, where it always was on Sunday mornings, the black notebook with No. 32 on its first page in my handwriting.
I walked down the gangway. The dock moved under my feet, that slow give that it has, like the lake breathing. I’d forgotten. I’d walked on this dock a hundred times in the last ten years to get to a meeting or away from one, and I’d forgotten that it moved.
“Hi,” he said.
“Hi.”
“You brought coffee.”
“I brought coffee.” I held out the thermos. “Don’t get excited. It’s Owen’s. It tastes like a table saw.”
He took it and poured two cups into the lid and the spare, and handed me one, and we stood at the end of the dock and drank Owen’s terrible coffee and watched the light come.
It came from behind the Carson Range, the way it always does on this side of the lake.
First the sky went the color of weak tea.
Then the snow on the far peaks across the water caught pink, then gold, one peak at a time, like somebody was going down a row of lanterns with a match.
The steam started lifting off the water in thin white threads.
Eleven years ago next Saturday, I stood right here in a white dress, with a napkin in my pocket that had a great room drawn on it, and promised him everything. I hadn’t known yet how much of everything he’d take without noticing.
“Rhys.”
He turned. He’d been waiting. I could see that he’d been waiting since Monday night, since my hand on his hand at the drafting table, and that he had decided, with enormous effort, not to rush me.
“I’m going to say some things,” I said. “And I need you not to answer until I’m done. Not to fix any of it. Not to make it better. Can you do that?”
“Yes.”
“Really?”
“I’m going to try really hard.”
“Okay.” I put the cup down on the dock. My hands were cold and I shoved them in my sleeves.
“I’m choosing you. I want to say that first, and I want to say it out loud, because the last time something this important happened on this dock, it was a toast, and the wrong name got said, and I stood there and let it.
So. For the record. Lucy Hart is choosing Rhys Sterling. On purpose. With her eyes open.”
He didn’t move. His face did something complicated and he held it very still, like a man holding a full glass on a moving boat.
“That’s not the end,” I said. “There’s more. There are conditions.”
He nodded once.
“I keep the studio. Not just in case anymore. On purpose. I work there. Weekdays in Truckee, weekends here. Maybe that changes someday, and if it does, I’ll be the one who says so.”
“Okay.”
“You’re not supposed to answer yet.”
“Sorry.”
“The terms don’t expire. All eight. Not when it’s good. Especially not when it’s good. That’s when we got lazy last time.”
He pressed his lips together and didn’t answer, and I almost laughed.
“We keep driving to Sacramento. The fern lady. Even when it’s good.
And if I stop drawing—” I stopped, because my voice had started to go.
I took a breath of the cold air, and it helped.
“You already wrote that one. You said if I stop drawing, I tell you. I’m changing it.
If I stop signing, you ask me why. Because that’s where it started last time.
I just stopped putting my name on things, one drawing at a time, and nobody noticed. I didn’t even notice.”
The steam was coming off the lake in earnest now, whole curtains of it, pink in the new light. I could hear a loon somewhere out past the point.
“Now the part I’m scared of,” I said. “Because I promised the fern lady I’d say it out loud, and I promised myself I’d say it here.”
He was so quiet I could hear the dock creak.
“I’m scared I’ll disappear. Not leave. I know how to leave; I did it in a party dress.
I mean disappear. That I’ll come back to this house and I’ll be happy and I’ll be busy and one day I’ll wake up and it’ll be 2035 and I’ll be a nice lady who throws a hell of a party.
” I watched that land on him. I didn’t soften it. “That’s the first thing.”
“And the second thing,” I said, and this one was harder, and I made myself look at him for it, “is the babies. I want to try again. I think I want to try again. And I’m scared that we will, and it’ll happen again, and you’ll get in the truck and drive to Incline and I’ll go sit at a drafting table, and we’ll be in two different buildings grieving the same thing, the way we were last time. And we’ll never come back out.”
There it was. On the dock, in the pink light, in front of the lake. I’d never said it to him. I’d barely said it to myself.
“Okay,” I said. My face was wet and I didn’t wipe it. “I’m done. You can talk.”
He put his coffee down next to mine on the dock very carefully, as if it were the most important thing in the world not to spill it. Then he straightened up and looked at me, and I saw that his eyes were wet too, and that he wasn’t going to do anything about it.
“I don’t have a card,” he said.
“I know.”
“I don’t have anything. I’ve been standing here since five trying to think of what I’d say, and every time I thought of something good, I threw it out, because it was good.
” He swallowed. “So I’m just going to say yes.
Yes to all of it. Yes to the studio and yes to Sacramento and yes to reading every stupid page.
And if you disappear, I’ll notice, because I’m going to be looking.
I’m going to be looking all the time now. That’s the whole job.”
“Rhys.”
“And if it happens again.” His voice broke.
“If we lose another one. I’m not getting in the truck.
I’m going to sit on the floor of whatever building you’re in, and if you don’t want me in the room I’ll sit in the hall.
But I’m not going to Incline. I went to Incline twice. I’m never going to Incline again.”
I laughed, a wet, surprised sound, and it went out across the water.
“You have to go to Incline. It’s your office.”
“You know what I mean.”
“I know what you mean.”
We stood there. The dock moved under us. Across the lake, the last peak caught gold.
“Can I—” he started.
“Ask me.”
“Can I kiss you?”
It had been a year. Fifty-one weeks, if you counted from the night of the toast, and I had. I’d stopped letting him touch me the minute he raised that glass, and I’d kept count of the days without meaning to, the way you keep count of anything that hurts.
“Yes,” I said.
He took my face in his cold hands like it was a drawing he was afraid of smudging. He kissed me the way you’d kiss someone at the end of a very long walk. Slowly. Like he had time. Like, for once in his life, he wasn’t already thinking about the next room.
When it was over I kept my forehead against his chin for a while and listened to him breathe.
“Hi,” he said into my hair.
“Hi.”
* * *
The sun was fully up by six-fifteen. We sat on the edge of the dock with our legs hanging over the water, the way we’d sat there at twenty-six and thirty-two with our shoes off and our whole lives in front of us, except that now I was wearing wool socks and he had a bad knee.
He held out #32 without being asked. That was his job on Sundays. He carried it and handed it over and didn’t say anything while I drew.
I opened it past the folded sheet of terms tucked inside the front cover, past two Sundays of shoreline and one very bad drawing of a Steller’s jay.
I found a clean page and drew what was in front of me.
The dock running out into the water. The steam.
The far mountains. Two coffee cups on the planks.
The edge of a man’s boot at the side of the page, because he was in the way, and I let him stay in the way.
It took twenty minutes. He didn’t talk once. When I looked up he was watching me, and not the page.
I finished the line of the far shore. Then, in the lower right-hand corner of the page, small, the way I’d signed every drawing since December, I wrote L.H.
I looked at the two letters for a moment.
For seven years that corner had been empty, and for six months it had held only me.
My hand was steady. Then I kept going, right there beside them in the same small capitals, and I heard him breathe in beside me, and when I was done I turned the notebook so he could read it.
L.H. & R.S. (holds the tape)