4. The Lake
Chapter four
The Lake
Julie did not dream often.
This was something she had accepted about herself a long time ago, the way she had accepted other things about her particular makeup, her preference for quiet, her ability to compartmentalize, her tendency to be more comfortable with the dead than the living at parties.
Most nights she was asleep within minutes of her head hitting the pillow and awake again at five-thirty without an alarm, and the hours in between were simply dark and still and empty in a way she found restful rather than troubling.
Her mind, which ran hard all day, apparently needed the break.
When she did dream it was usually something mundane and forgettable.
A conversation that went sideways. A room she couldn't find her way out of.
The low-grade anxiety dreams of a person who carried a lot of responsibility and occasionally let it follow her into sleep.
She rarely remembered them clearly by morning and rarely tried to.
She did not dream about Mark.
She had thought, in the early years after he died, that she would.
That he would come to her in sleep the way people sometimes described, vivid and present, a visitation of sorts that offered something the waking world couldn't. It had not worked that way for her.
Mark stayed quiet in her dreams the same way he had sometimes gone quiet in life, steady and undemanding, content to let her have the space she needed.
She had loved that about him. She had also, in the weeks after his death, found herself irrationally angry at it, wanting him to show up somewhere she could reach him and finding only the same dark stillness she always found.
So when she dreamed about him on the night of Adam and Hannah's wedding, it surprised her even inside the dream.
They were at Horseshoe Lake.
She knew it was Horseshoe Lake the way you knew things in dreams, not from any single detail but from the whole feeling of it, the particular curve of the shoreline and the way the water looked in the afternoon light and the smell of it, sunscreen and lake water and the faint diesel of the small motor on the old aluminum boat that Mark's father had left them when he passed.
They had spent a lot of summers on that lake.
It had been their place, the thing they did when the season allowed and the funeral home was quiet enough, which was never as often as either of them would have liked but often enough that the lake felt like theirs.
She was sitting in the front of the boat and Mark was in the back running the motor, the way they always did it, and the afternoon was warm and unhurried and the water was flat and green and perfect.
She trailed her hand over the side and felt the cold of it against her fingers and thought that this was exactly right, this was exactly what a summer afternoon was supposed to feel like, and she was happy in the simple and uncomplicated way that only happened in dreams or in very rare moments of grace.
She turned to say something to Mark.
It was a small thing, whatever it was, something about the light on the water or the loons she could hear somewhere on the far shore, the kind of thing you said to someone you had been sitting in comfortable silence with for twenty minutes and were ready to talk to again.
She turned the way she had turned a thousand times in that boat, easy and natural, and the person sitting in the back running the motor was not Mark.
It was Ethan.
He was looking out at the water the way he had looked out at the parking lot last night, with that particular quality of attention he brought to things, like he was actually seeing what was in front of him rather than just looking at it.
He had one hand on the motor and one arm resting along the side of the boat and the afternoon light was doing something unreasonable to the angles of his face and he had not noticed her yet.
Julie sat very still.
This was a dream, she thought, with the strange double awareness that sometimes came in the deepest part of sleep, when some small rational part of your brain surfaced just long enough to observe what was happening before going back under.
This is a dream and that is not Mark and I should probably wake up now.
She did not wake up.
Ethan turned and looked at her, and his expression was the same one he'd had outside the Grange Hall last night, open and careful at the same time, like a man who had things to say and was still deciding how many of them to actually say.
He did not seem surprised to find her there.
He did not seem surprised to be there himself.
It was a dream and in dreams people accepted things that waking life would never allow.
He said her name.
She woke up.
The bedroom was grey with early morning light, the particular flat light of a Sunday in August before the sun had fully committed to the day.
She was in her own bed in her own room, the room she had slept in since she and Mark bought this house twenty years ago, the room she had slept in alone for the last five years, and the dream was already beginning to dissolve at the edges the way dreams did, the details softening and going uncertain even as she reached for them.
She lay still and looked at the ceiling and let it dissolve.
Horseshoe Lake she kept. The afternoon light on the water, the smell of it, the cold of it against her trailing hand.
Those stayed clear. Mark in the back of the boat, steady and familiar and exactly himself.
That stayed too, and she held it for a moment with the particular gratitude she felt on the rare occasions he came to her in sleep, a quiet thank you to whatever part of her brain had decided to give her that.
And then Ethan. Sitting where Mark had been. Looking at her with that expression.
She closed her eyes and breathed out slowly.
She was not a person who put a lot of stock in the significance of dreams. She had read enough, over the years, to know that the brain did strange and arbitrary things in sleep, that it processed and sorted and combined things in ways that had more to do with the previous day's experiences than with any deeper truth.
She had spent an evening sitting across a room from Ethan Walker and exchanging ten minutes of careful conversation with him in the August dark.
Of course he had shown up in her sleep. That was not meaningful. That was just how brains worked.
She told herself that clearly and firmly and then lay there for a while longer not entirely believing it.
The funeral home did not have anything on the books for today.
Sunday was hers, theoretically, the one day she tried to keep for herself, though tried was doing a lot of work in that sentence.
There was always something. Paperwork or supply orders or the quiet administrative work of running a small business that never entirely stopped regardless of the day of the week.
She was usually at her desk by seven regardless.
This morning she stayed in bed until six-fifteen, which for her was practically indulgent.
She thought about Mark. Not the dream version, not the soft afternoon light version, but the real version, the actual man she had been married to for sixteen years.
He had been practical and kind and quietly funny in the way of people who didn't need an audience for it.
He had understood the funeral home the way you understood a thing that had always been part of the landscape, without needing to examine it or question it.
He had never once made her feel that her work was strange or her hours unreasonable or her attachment to the business something that needed to be managed.
He had loved her the way she was and she had loved him back and when he died she had understood, for the first time, what her clients meant when they said they did not know how to be a person anymore.
She had figured it out. That was what you did. You figured it out and you kept going and you built the days back up one at a time until they felt like days again and eventually they did. Five years out they mostly did.
She did not think she was still grieving Mark, not the way she had in the beginning.
What she had now was more like a permanent awareness of his absence, a space in the shape of him that she had learned to move around without thinking about it most of the time.
It was only on certain days, certain mornings, that she noticed the shape of it clearly.
This was one of those mornings.
She got up at six-fifteen and put on coffee and stood at her kitchen window looking out at the Anderson Funeral Home sign the way she had stood there two weeks ago when she came home from Hannah's with the wedding program.
The sign was the same as it had always been.
The morning was quiet. Somewhere down the block a dog was barking at something and then stopped.
Ethan Walker was going to be living above the Pine Hollow Herald for the rest of the summer.
She had known that since last night and she had not let herself think about it directly, the way you didn't look directly at something too bright.
But it was morning now and the dream was fading and she was a forty-one year old woman who had survived harder things than an old feeling she had no intention of acting on, and she could think about it directly.
He was going to be here. In Pine Hollow. For the rest of the summer. Five minutes from where she stood every morning drinking her coffee and looking at her grandfather's sign.
She poured her coffee and drank it standing up, which was how she always drank it, and looked at the sign, and thought about Horseshoe Lake and the way the afternoon light had looked on the water and the cold of it against her hand, and she did not let herself think about who had been sitting in the back of the boat at the end.
She had work to do. She always had work to do. That was the thing about her life, the thing she had built and chosen and did not regret. There was always something that needed her, always someone whose worst day required her steadiness and her competence and her willingness to show up.
She rinsed her cup and went to get dressed.
Whatever her brain had decided to do last night was its own business. She had a funeral home to run and a Sunday to get through and absolutely no intention of reading anything into a dream about a lake.
She was fine. She was always fine.
She just wished, standing in her closet reaching for the clothes she would put on and the day she would walk through, that fine felt like more than it did this morning.