The Lake and the Library (14 page)

The sound raked up and down my ears, and suddenly I felt the buzz of being awake, eyes snapping into focus like someone who had just fallen out of bed. I looked down at Mum, crouched on the floor, coughing and coughing, and I froze. The coughing turned to desperate gasping as she pressed her hands down on her chest and her face darkened in the shadows of the hallway.

I flew down beside her, unable to calm her. Her body suddenly went slack and still. “Mum?
Mum
?”

I dialled 9-1-1 frantically. In the intervening minutes as I waited numbly for the ambulance, the wave pulled back from the shore. Like it had never been there at all.

Unable to sleep, she watches the patterns of light cast onto the ceiling by the sun and trees dancing there. Her journal lays open on top of her weak legs, but she cannot bring herself to sit up and scrawl in it, despite doctor's orders. She has managed to write
bad day
across the page in wilted script, pen abandoned at her side. Her breathing is shallow, each intake and exhale a trial, and she swears she can feel her heart valves failing beneath her chest. She berates herself for this insidious weakness, for every single moment it has stolen from the life she wanted to lead. She nearly lost her son because of it (birth had been made difficult enough by her constant illness), and she has lost so much more in spite of surviving even that ordeal. On days like these, delirious from the combination of dizziness and the large measures of digoxin she has been administered, she is certain that the dim outline of her husband sits at her bedside, watching her with hooded eyes and disappointment. She was supposed to live for both of them, but she can't even do this for herself.

“Don't look at me like that,” she hisses at the ghost.

“. . . in her room,” someone says in the hallway, her hearing swinging in and out of focus, unsure if she really heard the front door slamming, or footsteps pattering closer.

The effort it takes her to turn her head is like parting a sea. The ghost of her husband has moved, inhabiting the haunted, drawn face of her son in the doorway.

“Mama,” he says, pulling up a chair at her bedside and clasping her swollen hand in his, warm with life. “You just couldn't wait to collapse until
after
I came back from Winnipeg, could you?”

She cracks her first smile in hours, finding relief just in reaching up and touching his face. “Sorry about that. I was getting impatient.”

As a racking cough takes her over, Ruth floats through the door, bearing a basin with cool water and a washcloth. “It happened just as she was getting up, no real warning,” she croons in her French-Canadian patois. “The doctor has been and gone, says she needs at least a week's rest to recover from the episode.”

From beneath the cough, the patient finds a laugh. “A week's rest is what will kill me, not this failing heart of mine.”

Her son helps her to sit up, despite Ruth's protestations to rest and recover. He politely bids her to leave the basin, and the two of them, alone.

Removing his jacket and rolling up his sleeves, he dips the washcloth in the basin, wrings it out, and rests it against her forehead. She shuts her eyes, refreshing coolness washing over her. “How are you feeling now?” he asks.

She drags her eyelids open and sighs. “Like a foolish child. I should be the one taking care of you.”

“You take well enough care of me; just work on yourself for a change.” He takes his seat again and reaches for her journal, leafing through it and smiling approvingly. “I see your journal entries are deviating from the purely medical ones the doctor prescribed.”

“Don't you know it's rude to read a lady's diary?” She turns to him. “Besides, the way I approach this new life of ours is tantamount to my recovery. Writing ‘good day because I had a bowel movement' doesn't really make it a good day. Doctor Buren thinks far too linearly for his own good or mine.”

He has stopped on a particular page, brow furrowed as he dissects a drawing she had made last week. He flips it over so she can see. “And what's this?”

Her heavy eyes fall down upon it. “Don't you recognize it? It's your library idea.”

It is a crude sketch of a three-storey building, followed by a floor plan and various ideas scribbled in the margins. Flipping the pages, he scans the notes and blinks up at her. “I wouldn't have thought you'd take that idea so seriously.”

She reaches up to dab the washcloth beneath her jaw and down her neck, spirits improving, little by little. “I thought it could be a project we might oversee together. Make us feel a little more at home here. Keep us . . . distracted.”

He exhales through his mouth, placing the silver-plated journal on her nightstand. His face is slack and exhausted. “I'd rather you just focus on getting better. We can think about it next spring.”

“Next spring . . .” she trails off. She does not think she will last until then. “I don't want to wait, Nel. This will do us some good. It will do this town some good, in return for all it has done for us. Besides, the locals could use a decent library. Something to distract them from their common rural activities.”

He pats her head. “Such a romantic.” Fishing around in his coat pocket, he produces his beaten copy of Coleridge. “Would you like me to read to you a little, or would you like to sleep?”

“
I'm
the romantic?” she evades, pointing at the book. “You weren't at a Grain Exchange summit at all, I bet. You were out wooing, again.” It was his common practice to carry poetry, and being caught reading it in his spare time had drawn many a lady into the web of his charm, from both the city and Treade. The son of a business tycoon as the paragon of the wandering dreamer magnetised any girl in the province, but he had always been particular, and she never intervened in his affairs of the heart, for she understood it as sacred ground.

He flushes, ruffling his hair and turning the pages of his anthology. “I don't know if I'll ever find my Genevieve.” He stares into the distance, beyond the book. “Or have a great love, like you did.”

She regards her son sadly. He does not often speak with compliment on the subject of his father, so she takes this as an opportunity to underscore it with something encouraging. “It doesn't take great people to create great love,” she takes his hand. “Love is fleeting and it comes at a cost, and it often ends so quickly you don't have the time to recognize it when it's in your hands.” She shuts her eyes, thinking of all the arguments she and David had before the end, how deeply his work furrowed into his soul and replaced his family, even his love for her. But beneath it, she knew all of it had been for them, his intentions and his love sorely skewed but still just at the surface. She thinks of how she felt in his arms, how, to her soul, she trusted him while he encircled her.

“I loved your father,” she blurts, reeling herself back in. “Don't you ever believe that I didn't.”

He is stunned. “Mother, I—”

“I loved him more than my body could bear, that's how it feels sometimes, when I get like this.” She looks at her son with an intensity that surpasses her exhaustion, and silences any more of his protests. “He did not make it easy to love him, sometimes. But any kind of love, even the kind that hurts you, is a miracle. And you, my love?
You
will love so greatly that it will change the fabric of the world around you. Your love will not be a miracle. It will
make
miracles.”

She eases back into her pillows, sighing and closing her eyes, relief washing over her. “And I wish with what little heart I have left that I get to be there when it happens for you.”

His grey eyes shine. “Don't give up on me yet,” he whispers. “This story isn't over.”

No, not yet
,
she thinks. Because when that happens she will be able to rest, really rest. And dream again.

M
y hearing kept swinging in and out. I could almost feel my eardrums dilating wide when the doctor said she'd be all right, then feel them closing up again as soon as words like
severe emphysema
,
chronic pneumonia
,
or
possible lung transplant
came anywhere near me. All sounds were suspended in the rushing water long before they could hurt me.

The doctor leaned in to ascertain if I was listening, his glasses flashing in the antiseptic fluorescents of Treade General. “We're going to keep her overnight, okay? We need to do a full ultrasound in the morning to determine how extensive her condition is, and she'll be put on oxygen and low-level bronchodilators for most of the night.” His words were far away. I looked up at him, just for a second, in case it might help me understand. It wasn't just my hearing that was going, it seemed. It was my eyes, too; his features were swimming around on his skull, flesh rippling and blurring like a churned lake, until he really didn't have a face at all. None of them did, not the nurses who were checking Mum's IV drip, not the orderlies passing by in the hall. So I just looked at Mum and nodded at everything he said, whatever it was he was saying, willing him to go away like you would a nightmare.

I tensed as his hand found my shoulder. “You should go home and get some rest,” he said.
Nod nod.
He finally left us alone and I breathed a little easier.

I couldn't stop staring at Mum. She looked so small, like her skin was too tight on her bones. Why hadn't I noticed that before? And there were lines on her eyes and mouth that hadn't been there. Even sleeping she looked sad and frustrated, forehead creased as she tried to work through the riddle of the poison in her lungs. Or the riddle of me. Of how I could be fading away from her into some other place so quickly and so willingly.

She swam in and out of focus, and I had a hard time pinpointing her on the hospital bed in front of me. There was something else going on here. I couldn't see reality in the same way anymore, couldn't experience it like everyone else. My perception had been cut open and altered, and it wasn't just happening in the library now. It was inside me, a briar patch of thorns tangled around my insides and clenching, and whatever it was, it wouldn't let me stay here in the real world. This parasite could only survive inside the dream, and it was looking to me to save it. So it was doing the only natural thing it could: it was calling me back to the one place I could feel safe. And I was willing to follow it.

The lights flickered so hard they became strobes. I couldn't take my eyes off Mum's still body, couldn't stop experiencing a gut-wrenching squall of guilt and the hunger to run. But then her face started to blend on itself, started to become an unrecognizable slate, and I knew that this was it. I started backing away into the hall. Nurses blurred past me, faceless. I couldn't handle this place, this harsh, frail landscape where nothing could be controlled, where I couldn't will it to assert itself into a new shape, a new dream. My mother was my last anchor to the world, and she was too weak to keep it pinned down anymore.

So even if it was just for a moment, a few seconds, I needed my dream; I was feverish for it. The briar patch inside me stretched, sending thorny tendrils down my nerve endings and up my spine. They made me walk out of the hospital, climb onto a bus, and ride away from there, and I let their barbs do their work so long as it would get me back to where I belonged. They made me get off the bus and walked me in a trance, letting go of my puppet strings once I reached Wilson's Woods. In the distance, silhouetted against the prairie night, was the library.

My phone went off, but instead of the usual ring tone, all I could hear was a horrible screeching, underpinned by a high-frequency pinging. I cried out, throwing myself to the ground and covering my ears. They had become so used to hearing everything on a submerged, low volume that this sound, breaking through the water, made them feel like they were bleeding. I tore through my bag to find my phone, find the screaming beacon that would call me back to Treade and keep me from what I wanted.

Tabitha calling.

I smashed it against a rock, shattering the teeth-grinding sound and the glass display without a second thought. Blissful silence prevailed. Nothing or no one would stop me now. I got up, shaking, and with a renewed calm at what seemed like a small victory, I picked up the pace towards sanctuary.

There was music wafting out of my porthole, and light. Soft, remarkable light. I squeezed through and stood up, listening.
Moon river
. . .
It carried me, this beautiful song, past our infinite shelves, past our aurora portals that crossed into other worlds, until I stood beneath our brilliant paper sky. The result of our chandelier supernova hung as twinkling shards in the air, and it felt like I was walking through a garden of stars. The library was awash in its usual orange glow, the kind that tried to convince us it was sunlight, but this was the only light I needed. Would ever need. I stood in the centre of the room, shut my eyes, and waited.

The shelves moved back, receding and becoming part of the shifting walls. The tables, the chairs, the chandeliers, the deer clock. It all faded back and away. The ground undulated under me, but I rode it like a breaker and kept my balance. I held my breath. And when I opened my eyes, there was only night, and cavern walls, and so many stars, and Li.

And Xanadu.

The thorns around me loosened. Now they would bow to my will, just as this place had. I breathed, free, and Li touched my face, eyes dancing, fingers finding my pulse and resting there, drinking it in. He put his arms around me and we swayed, my skin coming alive in the shard-dotted darkness, my soul flexing and taking flight past sinuous rills, sunny domes, caves of ice. Paradise. The last thought I had before giving my entire self up to it was of my mother, receding in her hospital bed into the shadow of a world I wasn't a part of anymore. And I started crying, even as I forgot her and everything else that used to be important to me.

Li's hands clenched me close, flattening me against him as we swayed to the sound of a dulcimer being plucked in the distance. I was sobbing, but his hands soothed me.
You're home now
, they said, patting my hair and sighing.

“I know,” I replied.

He gently moved my body away from his, lake eyes pooling with whorls and tendrils of fog. A phantom smile passed his mouth, and the veins of his dragonfly wings flickered into view. They were no longer made of paper; they shone like translucent holographic foil and buzzed hypnotically against the dark. As though I were one of his paper birds, he plucked me from the floor, and we lifted into the air, climbing out of the underground cavern and into our sea of stars, until we were enveloped by green. An ancient garden that stretched to infinity on either side greeted us, just at the brink of twilight. This dream of a poem was our dream now. And we climbed higher and higher over it, the music and the river Alph meandering in our wake.

We were in our Terrarium Room. Even though it looked nothing like it had when I first saw it, devoid now of the sofa, the giant fireplace aviary, the hardwood, the walls. There was none of that now; only a patch of green interspersed with saplings, water trickling nearby. It was our secluded place, where we could be quiet and be at peace and really take in one another.

Li placed me tenderly on the ground. Night fell in full around us, pinpricked only by firefly stars. We stood side by side, enraptured by the glory of what we could make just by shutting our eyes, kicking our hearts into gear, and imagining. We could stay here forever. We could disappear here.

His arms encircled my waist, hands brushing like gentle hummingbirds against my rib cage. I craned my neck to look up at him, just to see his eyes before it all happened. I begged whatever power we had to let him speak, let him say the words, let what I felt be real without just having to trust that his intentions are pure. He kissed me, fully, gently, then his lips trailed down to my neck and pulled me towards him, pulled me down, and his hands had stopped feeling comforting, had stopped saying,
you're home.

Now they said,
you're mine.

There was just the dream now.

Time passed in currents. I couldn't tell if it had been ten minutes or ten days, and at first, I revelled in it. What else was there to do but trounce from story to story, dream to dream, Li close at hand? Had there ever been anything besides this? I felt like the words on the pages were being tattooed under my skin, rising to the surface when I called them. And I could call them whenever I so wished. We were nearing godhood, and this was our incubus. We could do anything, we could shape words and worlds and shape ourselves, too.

And I revelled in it. For a time.

After countless masquerades, night flights to Venus, trips to the halls of Odin and back again, I could feel something shifting in me. It started as a sort of insistence, as an itch. Sometimes I would catch myself staring off into the distance of wherever we were, whether it was Lilliput or Mount Olympus, and I would feel it. A hair in my eye, a stitch in my side, a tickle in my throat. A half sneeze. I ignored it, telling my body to simply adjust to whatever was growing in the pit of my stomach. And sometimes, out of the blue, I would feel a chill, infiltrating my pores even when we stood in the desert of Arabia or under the Caribbean sun. That was how it started.

Then these feelings went away, and for a while I felt like I had finally grown into my own in this world, that I was accepted into the fold. But the feelings hadn't gone away, they were just changing tack. The stitches in my side or the hair in my eye became someone tapping me on the shoulder, someone whispering in my ear. At moments like this I would turn to Li and see him watching me expectantly, his forehead furrowed. I asked him if he had heard anything, but he only smiled, coming close and touching the medallion that still hung around my neck, growing heavier every moment.
I'll protect you
, said the gesture. I had become adept at reading him without having to guess what he was thinking, or to speak as often as before. We could read each other without words, something he was pleased I could do, and I knew for certain that his next smile said,
you're imagining things
and
stop worrying and enjoy yourself
.
So I ignored it, ignored the feeling that there was something I was missing, something I had forgotten.

But the whispering, the tugging . . . it grew. My brow would furrow like I was trying to remember a certain word on the tip of my tongue, trying to puzzle out what I was hearing. Trying to remember words.

I stopped in the middle of climbing a great hill made out of viney tendrils, and when Li realized I wasn't following him, he looked down at me, confused.

“Don't you hear it?” I said, looking off into the distance, way-pointing every detail of the jungle we were picnicking in. “There's something I'm . . . forgetting . . .”

The confines of this world, this story, shifted, the sky and the trees rippling like I was seeing them through the inside of an aquarium. For a second I thought I saw the library on the other side. I kept my eyes on it . . .

Li's cold grip on my wrist snapped me out of my daze, and the jungle reasserted its solidity. When our eyes met, I was shocked by the firm discontent in his stare. He shook his head and dragged me along.

I didn't sleep. I didn't eat. I didn't need to, just like Li. We were being fed, in a way, and we would shut our eyes for a time, retreat to the library for a change of scenery only, but these moments were few and far between. Getting a moment to myself was impossible, because Li was my shadow, always watching, always in the wake of my steps. And while I was distracted in some adventure we had concocted, Li was changing the library behind my back. The window in our Terrarium Room had been swallowed, and for the longest time I couldn't tell if I had imagined it even being there in the first place. The petals of the rose window were just a painting, now. It was just walls and books and stories and shadows. And I was fine with that. As soon as it was changed, I only smiled, assuming it had always been that way. There was just the library. It kept us safe.