The Cloisters(86)

Her graduate classes started soon, and although she had offered me her place in New York, I hadn’t told her yet that I’d already signed a lease in Inwood that started September first. It was easier that way. Rachel had begun to ask plaintive questions every day, things like, You’ll come visit me, won’t you? And, We’ll talk on the phone during the week, right? This morning over coffee she had said sharply, Don’t forget me, okay? If only I could.

As I packed my bags for the weekend, I realized there was still time for me to leave. The lease on my sublet wasn’t up for four more days; I could always choose not to go to Long Lake. But as the floatplane tilted precipitously in the twilight before touching down on the dark water of the lake, I knew it wasn’t a choice. It was my fate. Audentes fortuna juvat, Fortune favors the bold. And the city and The Cloisters had made me into someone who could be bold.

There was no one to greet us as there had been the last time, and the house was dark. Only the line of lights along the dock showed the way. By the time we made our way up the lawn and to the front door, I could already hear the plane’s engine as it pulled away from the lake, leaving us alone, together, in the gathering darkness.

“No Margaret?” I asked Rachel.

“Oh, they have off through Labor Day,” she said. “Usually there are people here, so there’s less caretaking to do.” She flicked on a switch that illuminated the living room, the honey-colored wood warm and glossy.

I had come to Long Lake so that Rachel couldn’t escape the truth, so she couldn’t hide behind Aruna or Michelle de Forte, or her attorneys. So she couldn’t lose herself in the crowds of the city. But I hadn’t anticipated Margaret and her husband being gone. They were supposed to be the backstop, the safety in case things with Rachel went off the rails, but perhaps it was better this way. She would have wanted it to be just the two of us anyway.

For days I had played out the conversation I needed to have in my mind, putting words in Rachel’s mouth, letting others tumble out of my own. But the rest of the weekend I was leaving up to intuition. It would unfold, I knew, in the way it was meant to, and I didn’t want the cards to tell me what to expect. Not yet. I watched Rachel pull open the refrigerator and survey the contents. The freezer, too, was mostly empty.

“We can go into town for dinner,” said Rachel, opening and closing a handful of cupboards.

We carried our bags up to the rooms we had stayed in during our last trip. I walked to the window and let my fingers rest on the sill. It wasn’t that The Cloisters had changed me, I realized; it was that it had sharpened me down to the slim little point of a person I had always been. New York didn’t show me what I was capable of, it had left me no choice but to be that capable—the completion of a hard education begun with my father’s death.

And it wasn’t just the city, either. Rachel and Leo had shown me a different way of living, and for that, I had fallen in love with both of them. Standing at the edge of the window, looking across the lake, I was caught between the desire to destroy it all and hold on to it forever. The impulses were, I thought, the same.

When Rachel knocked on the door, I couldn’t help but jump.

“I didn’t mean to scare you,” she said, walking into the room, holding a sweater in one hand and a set of keys in the other.

“You didn’t.”

We piled into a truck that Rachel backed out of an open garage and down a long, graded dirt driveway overhung with thickly leafed elms and oaks. After about a mile of hardwoods and marsh, we passed through an unassuming metal gate and turned left onto a two-lane highway. It only took ten or fifteen minutes until the main street of a simple, seasonal town came into focus: stands of sunglasses and little jittery coin rides for children, signs that advertised cold drinks and ice cream.

Despite the amount of time I had spent in the city that summer, some of my sharpest memories feature the main street of that downtown. It reminded me of Walla Walla and the intimacy of walking sidewalks crowded with summer tourists, weaving between parked cars, shops whose windows were full to bursting with toys and mementos—displays that hadn’t changed in years—designed to entice the passerby.

“We’ll eat. Then we’ll get supplies,” said Rachel, walking down the street in the direction of a restaurant that featured red-and-white umbrellas opened over wooden picnic tables. “I hope you like burgers because that’s all we have here. The pizza place closed a year ago. It was probably for the best. It was terrible pizza, pretty shocking actually for New York.”

There were only a handful of empty tables, and Rachel threw her sweater down on one before we joined the line, full of retirees and young families, a handful of teenagers who had escaped their parents’ supervision for the night. We ordered from a pair of girls who stood behind windows that barely opened far enough for them to hear. They kept having to bend down, their ears almost on the counter to catch our order.

Rachel dithered about her order, but no one seemed to mind. Since Leo’s arrest, her demeanor had shifted imperceptibly—she was lighter, more playful, as if any remaining concern had been lifted off her shoulders. I wondered how she justified it, because I was certain she had. What did one say to a friend who has committed murder? How was it possible to pass the time until you simply couldn’t avoid the truth any longer?

Our order arrived. My burger was full of gristle and salt.