The Lake and the Library (2 page)

T
he summer had not been much of one, the overcast sky showing little remorse for several days. Instead of being inspired by the sky, we had to make do with the clouds we were given.

The park near my house contained a wooden play structure we had romped on when we were younger, which was the time when climbing and scraping and yowling “I'm the king of the castle”
was most important. It was in the process of being dismantled now, like so much of Treade. Wood wasn't safe, apparently, and no one would risk a broken crown, even though the risk itself had prepared us for the real world.

We had spent the afternoon lying companionably in the park considering these lofty jungle-gym philosophies, head to head amongst empty pop bottles and balled-up Saran Wrap. We'd just had our way with Cokes and Nutella sandwiches, and having exhausted the argument about the merits of glam rock (Tabitha) vs. string theory (Paul) vs. Coleridge (me), we contented ourselves in the silence, trying to claw our way through the tightly knit grey above us. Every day, every conversation, every laugh or petty musing that passed was fraught with the reality we were trying to deny: I was leaving. And that this adventure, that trek, or this picnic could be the last one. The
Summer of Lasts, we called it.

And then I sat up like a bolt when the conversation lulled, trying not to give the others any kind of chance to start grieving in their heads. I slapped the grass off my knees, and was already wheeling towards the chain-link fence at the end of the baseball diamond, beckoning over my shoulder. “Let's go!”

Paul and Tabs flanked me as we reached the cut in the fence that led into Wilson's Woods. Beyond was a little beaten path littered with bottles in the brush and rabbit crap at the edge, but we sidestepped all of it and kept going, the sun — wherever it was — at our backs. Boys brought girls here in an attempt to buy romance with a badly rolled joint or a beer stolen from their dads' fridges. We didn't bother with such trifles. We had another agenda.

“I think the last time we were here was the time Tabs nearly died.” Paul grinned crookedly, pushing his glasses up. Tabitha gave him a shove.

“I still say there was someone or something in there that day. We should have sacrificed your scrawny body to it.”

I laughed at the way they joked, playful, easy. I was usually the one opening up the day with some witty retort, and it made the three of us fit. And soon it'd only be two. At least they had each other.

As we walked, my mind was racing elsewhere, sketching out the possibilities on the blank canvas that lay at the end of that horizon of mine. It was a bad habit, projecting myself away from them when we had so little time left, but I couldn't help it. I currently had this preoccupation with all the things that being in Treade had robbed me of. Right now, love stood on the top of the list. The love I'd dug into through countless books, stories, myths. The love that poets sought to snatch from the air in front of them, the kind of love that sang to sing, and so on, and so on. Staring at the ground ahead, catching flashes of foil condom wrappers discarded in the grass, I could vaguely remember the trials of those petty crushes, and I was glad they didn't lead me here. There were football boys, farm boys, weird out-of-towners that never stayed. I never gave them much thought, never sized them up for much, because I knew that what I wanted from them couldn't happen here in Treade. And I knew that
that
kind of love, the kind whose residue was the only thing left in Wilson's Woods, would be as insignificant as Treade itself.

I would go somewhere else where it
could
happen. The butterflies that the thought raised were more like anxious bees in my stomach. I wanted love and all it entailed, and I was convinced that I was ready for it. I'd be away from the suffocating grasp of a self-pitying, withered town. I'd have freedom, and there'd be hope for love yet. My Coleridge soul and Neruda-spurned pulse couldn't be wrong.

Forget about this place
,
my heart told me as we came up the steepest hill in Wilson's Woods and danced down it into the hard-packed earth.
There's so much for you in the world, and it isn't in this dust-speck town by a false sea that won't take you out unless you throw yourself in
.

The sea. What squatted in the west side of Treade was a pretender to bodies of water everywhere. It was really a large Precambrian lake, one that could have been worthy of the classification, except for all the neglect. Lake Jovan was punctuated by a muggy beach at the end of town, the way to the water hidden by rocks, gnarled trees, dirty hillside, and craggy overgrowth crawling in the sweaty sand. Legend had it that the beach had celebrated a spectacular heyday . . . until the sixties, when Treade lost interest in it. Forty-five years later it had devolved back to the swamp it once was. Strangers in business suits or four-door sedans could remember the long-lost days of hanging there, sleeping there,
loving
there under the buttery sun. They didn't stay to relive these days, though. They turned their cars around, driving back to Winnipeg or Brandon as quickly as they could, Treade disappearing behind them until it was more faded than a memory. I'm sure even the beach had forgotten those days.

Its best feature was the hundred-foot rocky hill overlooking the water like a grim forehead. We were never allowed to go there by ourselves as kids, but we risked the parental reproach for the sake of adventure. It was the most dramatic place in town, and we coveted it as the stage to all our ne'er-do-welling. We used to stand on the edge, pretending we were victims of an evil bandit's tyranny, or that we were criminals ourselves, and this was where we stashed the booty. We staged crusades and battles there — we
grew up
there. Instead of ourselves, we threw bottles and breakables from the edge, too, watching their bodies separate into tiny blinking shards as they struck the stones below. Having gone there recently, we saw that the tradition had been maintained, but not in such a sophisticated way; car parts, beer cans, and discarded shoes marred the old playground now.

When we all started at Treade Collegiate in kindergarten, the three of us gravitated towards each other with our own special kind of longing, each of us dreaming of something we'd find and grow in each other. Tabitha found me over a fresh serving of Crayolas, the
Labyrinth
soundtrack playing in the background. We shared secrets, popped dandelion heads, made our own set of rules, and stood up to the snotty boys who defied us. It was at their mercy that we found Paul, picking up the ruined remnants of his glasses as the other boys scattered, and we took him into the fold. He was just like us — we would all rather dream than live by the rules of anyone else. We fit.

And here we were, beyond all of our dreams, wading across the field of waist-high grass just beyond Wilson's Woods. We'd been lost in silence for the last few minutes, all the jokes and light teasing dried up. Those adventures were long gone and spent, and walking through that grass, we were united in the tangle of our longing. Change was washing away the breakables from the rocks and forcing us to grow up, and unlike the teenagers that had come before us, we didn't like it very much. I wanted so desperately to discover the rest of the world, and for once in my life, I didn't want Tabitha or Paul there with me. I would never, ever say it, but somehow I think they knew it just the same.

And all of a sudden we were there. Our place.

What the bad fence, the scraggly beard of Wilson's Woods, and the waist-high grass sea have been hemming in since who knows when was a building. Barred, boarded up. It had always been this way, ever since we had happened upon it one fateful summer day after Paul stole Tabitha's retainer for “scientific experimentation,”
and we had chased him all the way there. To us, it was haunting, but to Paul, it had always been a “beaut.” At least three storeys high and crawling with Virginia creeper, it looked too small to be a house, but too big to be a shack or a garage. There was just too much
intention
here. It had art nouveau curls and curves, a rose window, and heavy doors like a mouth, with chains for teeth. The windows looked like they had never been kissed by light; the doors hadn't been crossed in years. There was even a front porch, which was where we had decided to stake out, overnight, on Tabitha's sixteenth birthday. She swore she could hear something walking around on the other side of the wall, and when she realized it wasn't Paul trying to freak her out, she bolted. I remembered how, the night after, I dreamed of the place, dreamed I could see inside the windows, but it was dark and filled with water, and there were black shapes floating everywhere.

But this was our palace. True, other kids had found it, hucked rocks at it, probably made out on the porch. But somehow, no one had ever tried to bust or pry their way in. Because there was no way in. It was a one-door fortress, enchanted by a lonely sadness that made anyone think abusing it was like hurting something alive. We respected it. And maybe the building knew that.

Paul stood by, scratching his clean-cut head behind the ear he dreamed of piercing, but never would. “Well, there she is, ladies. Ain't she a beaut?”

Tabitha rolled her eyes. “You always have to Vanna White it, don't you?”

Paul turned up his nose, mock-snoot. “At least
Ash
appreciates me.” He looked at me for approval, but he could tell I was looking past both of them. “Ash?”

I pointed. “That wasn't there the last time.”

Stuck in the ashen grounds at various stages of decomposition were the usual
NO TRESPASSING
warnings,
HAZARDOUS PREMISES
threats, and the promise of
CONDEMNED BUILDING AHEAD
. The signs were as faded as their original intentions. This building was as much a part of our fellowship as I was, and they weren't about to stop us. But this new sign might.

These premises are protected by the landowner tenets of Treade Proper on behalf of Gillespie REIT. Private property. Trespassing is expressly prohibited.

“They're going to take it down,” Paul breathed in reverent regret. “They're buying up the land and building more houses.”

It was enough that I was leaving, but this? I scoffed. Another one of Treade's classic jokes. The only carefully curated enterprise in this town was the sloppy erasing of town artefacts. But I didn't blame the new owners, faceless as they were to us. It was only a matter of time, I guess. Former values of beauty were worthless in a coffin, and this place was always one step away. There might have been gardens and life here a long time ago, lovers on a porch swing, a casual secret. But none of that had survived. There was a disappointing gravity in that moment: mortality was real after all. Even the oldest of us didn't last forever.

We took to the porch, trying to peer through the narrow spaces between the decayed wooden slats. Nothing but darkness wheeling in the abyss. Whatever prospector had claimed this land hadn't given half a care to take a look inside, and they weren't about to give us the chance either.

“And another age comes to an end,” Paul postulated in his best philosopher voice, feeling the walls.

“Don't say that,” I said, zipping my hoodie up higher as the wind came rustling through the grass sea. I put a hand to the chained-up door, which was covered in ornate, leaping carvings that had lost their sharpness, but would never erode. The Fable Door,
I had called it. It wouldn't be telling any stories now. The mournful bay of a train engine in the distance reminded us that we were near the tracks, and nearly outside of Treade. It had always felt like another world out here.

Tabitha thrust her hands into her pockets, the sun still cloaked and choked behind an encroaching evening cloud cover. “Garret said he'd really gotten in there, you know. Through some kind of opening in the back.”

That woke me up a little. I had forgotten all about that, even though Tabs had told me only a couple of days ago. Maybe I was too far off in “The Life I Was Going to Have” to have paid attention.

We went to check it out. Around the back of the building was a twenty-by-twenty square of a backyard, overgrown, ugly, a dump site for old car shells, railway ties, or the odd tire pit where kids congregated to misbehave. It was hemmed in with trees from Wilson's Woods that the original builders hadn't cleared, maybe for the posterity of the view, or because the owners wanted the privacy. But the owners . . . who were they? Who had brought this place up out of nothing and planted it here? And why? We begged the answers out of every grown-up whose shirt we could tug, but they all parted their hands and said “who knows
.
”

Most of the uncleared trees in the yard had long since fallen over or broken into each other, and when we checked if there was a breach in the building, the walls were sound, the boarded back window untouched. But all of the boards, the bars, the chains, they never stopped us from trying, hoping, that we could get in someday. It probably hadn't stopped generations before us, either, if they were adventuresome enough. But as far as I was concerned, the only people who belonged in there were the three of us.