Daughters of the Lake(42)

Neither Jess nor Addie was completely honest in their letters, and neither could detect the other’s dishonesty. Jess did not tell Addie about the women he had courted and, indeed, loved. Instead, he wrote about his roommate and the plans they were making for the future. They were becoming involved with a company owned by a local businessman, Jess told her, working part-time during the school year and full-time in the summers, laying the foundation for excellent jobs once they graduated. Jess’s life in the city seemed to be falling into place—a college degree, a job awaiting him. Friends. Addie wondered where she fit into the plans, and although she did not know it for sure, she had good reason to wonder. As graduation neared, Jess wrote incessantly about the future, but it had been years since he had mentioned their future together.

Jess did not tell Addie that he had long ago dropped the childish notion that the two of them would marry. If college had taught him one thing, it was to look to the future to choose his bride, not to the past. When he married, it would be to the most suitable woman he could find, a woman who could help him in business and in life. A sophisticated, educated woman, much like the ones he had been courting with great voracity these past four years. Someone like that delightful, if vacuous, Sally Reade, who could effortlessly host the kinds of dinner parties and soirees that were so necessary to get ahead in the world of business, who would laugh blithely and flirt with the older men in the firm whom Jess was trying to impress, who would inspire jealousy and envy and cast Jess, as her future husband, in a good light.

All these thoughts were the direct influence of his roommate, who, like Jess, had begun his life as the son of a poor man and was determined, with a passion brushing against zealotry, to rise up from those humble and indeed squalid beginnings, no matter the cost. Jess saw the wisdom in this, shuddering when he thought of a life alongside his father, toiling from dawn to dusk on that smelly, disgusting fishing boat. Jess detested fish. Just the sight of one of those slithery, slippery creatures on a dinner plate brought back the nausea he felt as a child during his first time out on the boat with his father. He had spent the entire day retching over the side. That was enough of that.

His new life in the city was far more appealing. By virtue of their good looks and cultivated charm, Jess and his roommate had begun to move—by design—in the circles of the wealthiest girls shortly after arriving there, girls with ties to the most successful families in the state.

On the strength of a recommendation from their part-time employer, the owner of Canby Lines, they were admitted to a fraternity. The pair of them moved into the fraternity house and began attending the kinds of parties that Jess hadn’t even imagined during his former life in Great Bay. Handsome young men in coats and ties (at first, Jess borrowed these accouterments until he had saved up enough money to purchase his own), glittering young women in party dresses, all of them drinking cocktails and touching his shoulder as they laughed about nothing at all. Jess was dazzled by this different breed of woman. He had never seen their like before—finely dressed, made up, sophisticated. They were a world away from the hard-working, sensible women of Great Bay. A world away from Addie, the child he had left behind. Just thirteen years old when Jess had left for college. That was really what Addie was. A child. Jess could see that now.

Still, that old sense of obligation continued to tie Jess to young Addie. All of their lives, Jess felt that he was responsible for Addie Cassatt. She did not have the sort of flighty, flirty nature of the women he was meeting; she was serious and deep and thought about things like the earth and the lake and nature, and how they all related to each other. They talked about these and other important things, connecting through their souls. As his college years wore on, Jess wondered if he would be able to keep his friendship with Addie that he so enjoyed while being married to another woman. Anything was possible, he told himself.

At the same time, Addie was wondering things as well. Like Jess, she had secrets of her own that her letters did not reveal. But they did not involve other boys, or thoughts that they would not share the future they had imagined. On the contrary, she still believed very much in their shared life together. Her secrets involved her dreams, which continued to plague her as the years passed. Disturbing, garbled images—Jess with other women, someone in danger at knifepoint, unseen babies crying, fog surrounding it all. Warnings from the past. In her darkest thoughts, Addie knew full well what these dreams meant to her, but those thoughts rarely made it to the surface of her young, naive mind. Teenaged girls have a way of holding fast to their illusions, even as those illusions are dissipating into the air. Denial of unpleasant reality is as powerful as the reality itself.

Addie was unconvinced of the truth of the story her mother had shown her on the morning after she’d had the first of the dreams. It seemed too fanciful, too much like a legend, to be true. And yet, didn’t legends start with at least a grain of truth? And she couldn’t deny her rather special relationship with the lake, could she? And there was certainly no denying her great-grandmother’s horrible fate.

Addie imagined that Grand-mère would sit at the edge of her bed, hold her hands, and whisper kind words of consolation when the young girl awoke in the middle of the night, afraid of the images swirling around in her head. She did not know that her great-grandmother was watching all that transpired, that she was indeed sitting on the edge of her bed, whispering words into Addie’s ear. But they were not words of consolation. She was saying, as forcefully as she could muster, “Take heed, girl.”