The Big Dark Sky (72)
Wyatt used the remote control to raise the garage door as they approached along the driveway, but Joanna said, “No. Park here and come with me.”
“Where?”
“The lake.”
“It’s about to rain.”
“Let it.”
She opened her door and got out into the blustery night, which was cool and humid and scented by the fecund earth. The willows didn’t merely rustle, but thrashed with a roar like cascades of water spilling over a high cataract.
She believed that she was in mortal danger and knew her fear was justified. A grizzly bear could live as long as thirty-five years in the wild. The beast that had fed on her father might still be alive, but if it was dead, surely others were out there in the higher foothills, near enough to come if called by the master of nature and of Jimmy Two Eyes.
When Wyatt caught up with her, halfway across the expansive lawn, his presence didn’t diminish her fear, although she felt less alone, which was blessing enough. In addition to the other solemn epiphanies of this eventful day, Joanna realized that, in spite of Auntie Kat, she had felt alone most of her life. Having lost both her mother and her father, having left behind Hector and Annalisa and Jimmy, having been taken from the ranch that had nurtured her and seemed so safe, she had thereafter believed that no one and nothing could be counted on to last. Throughout the rest of her childhood and adolescence, she had expected Auntie Kat to die and leave her desperately alone. As a consequence, she had never given her heart entirely to that generous woman. For the same reason, she had been unable to trust that any man in her life would be there for her tomorrow if she dared to commit herself to him.
“Why the lake?” Wyatt asked as they reached the dock, their footfalls drumming on the planks, the scent of wet wood rising, and the fainter scent of creosote under it.
“This morning, on the flight out of Santa Fe, a memory of Jimmy suddenly came back to me. Just one. Not like other memories from childhood. Strangely vivid after all these years, so detailed. Jimmy and I were in lawn chairs, sitting right here, watching the sunset, crimson and purple, the water full of the sky’s colors. He said something . . . something curious.”
She led Wyatt to the end of the dock. The attached boathouse loomed to their left. The black lake lay before them, worked by the wind but still as glossy as a mirror. The shrouded, slowly roiling sky loomed less dark than the lake, just vaguely revealed by the ghastly light of the drowned moon lost in its depths. The shapes of the faintly limed clouds were dimly reflected on the wind-feathered water, but they seemed to be malevolent creatures swimming a few feet below the surface, metamorphizing from one lethal form to another.
Joanna suddenly felt that the lake was the locus of—the answer to—the mystery of Rustling Willows. Not because her mother had died in these waters. Not solely because of Wyatt Rider’s story about the invader of the boathouse, the thing that slammed repeatedly into the electric Duffy. Hour by hour, since being welcomed by the elk, she’d become increasingly sensitive to the unsettling truth that the ranch was haunted by something other than a ghost. Some Presence resided here, unseen but ever observant, in sunlight and in shadow, no door or wall an obstruction to it. And now as she stood staring into the dark fathoms, where the storm seemed to be building as surely as it gathered power in the heavens, she knew the lake was the answer, if only she could form the right questions with which to begin to seine its secrets from its waters.
She had fallen silent too long. Wyatt said, “Joanna? What was it, what he said that you found curious?”
“It was the night before my eighth birthday,” she recalled, “and I was very excited. I talked about how, when I was sixteen and had a license to drive, I’d take Jimmy far away, where no one ever said anything stupid about him or was mean. It hurt me when people called him Jimmy Two Eyes. Only halfway to sixteen, I complained about how long we’d have to wait. Jimmy said eight years wasn’t so long. I said, well, he was eleven, three years closer to sixteen than I was, so it wasn’t as long for him. That’s when he said he was a lot older, said he was more than four thousand years old.”
“You thought it was Jimmy saying that.”
“That’s all I knew then—–that he was Jimmy. I told him he was being silly, and he said, ‘Maybe.’ Today, he told me he’d been here when American Indian tribes warred with each other, saw the Sioux torturing and killing the Crow, the Crow torturing and killing the Sioux, the Blackfoot slaughtering the Salish, European settlers killing the tribes in turn. He thinks humanity has earned a reckoning.”
“That was . . . two hundred years ago, a hundred fifty? No one lives four thousand years. Who does he claim to be—Methuselah?”
“He hasn’t claimed to be anyone. Maybe because . . . in a way, he isn’t anyone, not any one of us.”
“What do you mean?”
Joanna felt watched, heard, hated.
A fragment of memory surfaced, a moment in the apple orchard from long ago, Jimmy saying, If I had found someone like you sooner, Jojo, I might have begun the awakening. She strained to recall the context of that, but it eluded her.
“A reckoning,” she repeated.
The darkness and the wind, the land and the water, the past and the future gathered here in the still point of the present, the past unredeemable, the future nothing but the past waiting to happen.