Lake Glass

Gideon started under the boathouse, because that was where the oldest wood was.

It was four o’clock on Wednesday and the first dry afternoon since he had come. The sky had cleared at noon. A cold wind came down the lake from the north and put a short chop on the water, and the light off it flickered across the underside of the boathouse floor.

The lower level was a single bay, open to the lake at one end, with a plank walkway round three sides. He went along it with a flashlight and a long screwdriver he had borrowed from the gardener. At each piling he crouched and pushed the screwdriver into the wood at the waterline, where rot began. A sound post would let the tip in no more than a quarter of an inch. He found two that took it to the handle and marked them with yellow chalk. The rest were hard.

He liked this work, and nobody in New York would have let him do it. On Madison Avenue he would have had an engineer’s report with photographs. Here he had wet knees and an answer he trusted.

At the back of the bay, above the reach of high water, something long and low lay on two sawhorses under a blue tarp. He had taken it for lumber. The tarp was tied down with cord, and he recognised the knots as his own. Six years of frost had shrunk them tight, and he had to pick them loose with the screwdriver.

He pulled the tarp back and stood looking at eight feet of white fibreglass, turned upside down, with a blunt square bow.

It was an Optimist, the same boat every child in the world learned to sail in. This one had a long scrape down the port side where a boy named Henry had put her onto the shale beach at full speed. On the transom, in black paint that had flaked a little, was the name BISCUIT.

He put his hand flat on the hull. It was cold and gritty with dust. He had spent eleven weeks standing waist-deep beside this boat, holding the gunwale and telling one small frightened person after another to look where they wanted to go and not at their feet. On the night he left he had turned her over on these sawhorses and tied her down in the dark, because a storm was forecast and he had not known who else would think of it. Then he had driven to New York, and his father had lived four more days.

Nobody had moved her since. The mast and the sprit were lashed along the rafters overhead, and the sail was rolled in its bag on a nail. He ran his thumb along the scrape. The hull was sound. She needed a wash, a new mainsheet and a child.

He covered her again, but he did not retie the knots.

The dock ran out from the boathouse wall, eighty feet of grey cedar on a double row of posts. He walked it from the shore end with the screwdriver, kneeling at every pair. The decking was better than he had feared. There were three soft boards near the middle and one cleat pulling out of its bolts. At the far end, where the water was deepest, the last pair of pilings had been sistered with new timber not long ago. Somebody had taken trouble over that end.

He was lying on his stomach with his head over the side, looking at the cross-bracing, when a voice spoke behind him.

“You’re not allowed to do that.”

He pulled his head up.

A child was standing on the dock, perhaps fifteen feet in from the shore. She was very small. She wore a purple coat with a life jacket buckled over it, the yellow one he had seen from the property line on Monday. She had red rubber boots on, and dark curls that the wind was pulling in every direction. She was looking at him with deep disapproval.

“I’m not allowed to look at the posts?” he said.

“You’re not allowed on the dock. Nobody is allowed on the dock without a life jacket. That’s Maman’s rule.”

He sat up. He had been told a great many things by a great many people since Monday, and none of them had been so sure of their ground.

“Does the rule say children, or does it say nobody?”

“It says nobody.”

“Then I’m breaking it. Wait there.”

“I am waiting there. I’m on the sixth board. I’m allowed to the sixth board.”

He walked back past her, keeping well to the other side, and went into the boat bay. The rack was still on the wall. He took down the largest of the old orange jackets, the kind that went over the head, and tied it across his chest. It smelled of mildew and it was meant for someone narrower.

When he came out she looked him over from the boots up.

“That one’s ugly,” she said.

“It is. Does it count?”

She considered. “It counts.”

“Thank you.” He looked up the lawn. There was nobody on it. At the top, sixty yards behind the inn, the door of the yellow cottage stood open. “Is somebody with you?”

“Mémé is finding my hat. She said one minute. A minute is sixty and I counted sixty, so I came to do my glass.” She pointed at the planks beside her boots. “You can’t step there.”

He looked. On the sixth board, and spreading onto the seventh, lay a few dozen pieces of lake glass, worn smooth and frosted by the water. She had taken them out of the pockets of the purple coat, which still bulged. They were set out in rows, with a careful gap between one row and the next.

He crouched down a yard away, so that he was not standing over her. He had learned that the first week he ever taught. He did not use a special voice either, having learned in the second week that children found it insulting.

“You’ve sorted them,” he said. “Green, then brown, then white.”

“That’s not white. That’s clear that went cloudy. White is different. White is from old dishes and I only have two.” She showed him two small chips of milky china, set apart at the end. “And that’s blue. I only have one blue.”

The blue lay by itself at the head of the rows. It was the size of a thumbnail and the colour of a medicine bottle.

“Blue’s the hardest to find on this lake,” he said. “I looked for a whole summer once and found three.”

“Where?”

“North of here, past the cedars, where the beach is flat stone. After a storm from the west.”

She gave him a long look, the way she might have looked at a coin she thought could be foreign. “That’s where I found mine,” she said. Then her mouth firmed. “You’re the New York person.”

“I am.”

“You’re not allowed to close the inn. Winnie said.”

“I’ve heard that Winnie said so.”

“So you can’t.”

He could have said something soothing. He looked at the rows of glass and the six counted boards, and he gave her a real answer.

“I haven’t decided anything yet. That’s why I’m lying on the dock looking at posts. I’m finding out what’s broken and what it would cost to mend. Some people I work with think the inn should be sold. I’m not sure they’re right. I have to tell them what I think on the twenty-sixth of June.”

“What day is that?”

“A Saturday.”

She nodded slowly, storing it. “That’s a long time to not know.”

“Yes, it is.”

“Are the posts broke?”

“Two under the boathouse are soft. The ones out here are good. Somebody fixed the end ones not long ago.”

“That’s because I fell in,” she said, as flatly as she had said everything else. “In August. Off the end. Arlo jumped in with his shoes on and got me. After that Winnie had the man come, and Maman made the rule about the jacket. I don’t go to the end now. I go to the sixth board, and when I’m ready I’ll go to the seventh.”

His stomach turned over. It was only a stranger’s child and an accident eight months old, with the child standing in front of him perfectly whole, and he could not have said why it hit him so hard. He knew how deep the water was at the end of this dock. He had measured it himself, with a lead line, for the insurance form.

“That’s a good way to do it,” he said, when he could. “One board at a time is how I’d teach it.”

“Teach what?”

“I used to teach children to sail. Off this dock, a long time ago.”

“In the little boat under the blue thing?”

“You know about her?”

“I looked. I didn’t touch.” She bent down and moved one brown piece into line with its neighbours. “Nobody uses it, and that’s a waste.”

“I think so too.”

She straightened up to say something else, and as she did the wind dropped. The sun, well over toward the Adirondacks by now, came level across the water and full into her face. She squinted and tipped her head, and then she opened her eyes wide to look at him properly.

They were grey, a light, clear grey that he had seen in a shaving mirror every morning of his life. At the bottom of the left one, exactly where his own was, sat a sharp little wedge of brown.

He stopped breathing.

His father had had that eye. The grandfather Gideon had never met was supposed to have had it too. Conrad Hallett had called it the family thumbprint. Once, when Gideon was small, he had held him up to a mirror so that the two of them could look at it side by side. Gideon had seen it on no other living face, and he knew of only one way anyone came by it.

The child was staring back at him. She had gone still, like a bird that has spotted something. She came a step closer, onto the fifth board, and looked from his left eye to his right and back again.

“Why is your eye broke the same as mine?” she said.

He heard the water slapping at the posts and a gull somewhere behind him. His mouth was dry, and when his voice came it was not quite his own.

“It isn’t broken,” he said. “I was born with it.” He had to stop there for a moment. “What’s your name?”

“Matilda Bouchard.” She said it as if she had been taught to say it clearly to policemen. “Tilly.”

So she was a Bouchard. His head had started working without him. He thought of the yellow cottage behind the kitchen with its door standing open, and the dark coat on the dock at dusk on Monday, hurrying a child up the lawn when the lamp came on. He thought of Camille with her back to him and her hand on the office door, saying that the dock was Winnie’s department.

“How old are you, Tilly?”

“I’m five. My birthday is March twenty-seventh.”

He had never been slow with figures. It was the one gift his father had granted him without an argument. He counted now, because there was nothing else his mind would do.

She was five in April of 2027, so she had been born on the twenty-seventh of March, 2022. He counted back nine months from the end of March, month by month, and came to the first days of July, 2021.

He remembered the Fourth of July that year.

The village had set its fireworks off from a barge out past the point. The whole staff had gone down to the lawn with blankets to watch. He and Camille had not gone. They had watched from the room over this boathouse, forty feet from where he was crouching now, with the window open and the lamp out. He remembered the red and gold light moving over the ceiling and across her bare shoulder. She had laughed against his neck every time one went off, because the noise made the iron bed ring. It had been the first time. There had been nearly six more weeks after that, and then the telephone call from New York.

Camille had not gone to Lyon. She had stayed here and had this child, and brought her up to count boards and say her name clearly. At some point she had picked up a burn the width of an oven rack. In all that time not one word had reached him.

He could not make sense of that. He could not make sense of any of it. He only knew, and it frightened him how sure he was, that he was looking at his own daughter, and that she was waiting for him to say something.

“That’s a good birthday,” he managed. “That’s nearly spring.”

“It snowed on it this year.” Tilly was still examining his eye. “Does yours hurt?”

“No.”

“Mine doesn’t either. A boy at school said it was broke. I told him it’s a wedge. Maman says it’s a wedge, like pie.” She frowned. “Who gave you yours?”

“My father.”

“Oh,” said Tilly. She looked down at her rows of glass for a moment, and then, quite calmly, back at him. “I don’t know who gave me mine. Maman doesn’t have it. I asked.”

Up at the top of the lawn someone shouted.

It was a woman’s voice, sharp with fear, calling the child’s whole name. Gideon looked up. A small figure in a navy fleece had come out of the cottage with a knitted hat in her hand. She saw the dock, the yellow jacket and the man crouched beside it. Then she was running straight down the wet grass, faster than a woman of her age should have been able to.

“That’s Mémé,” Tilly said. “She’s going to say it was more than a minute. It wasn’t. I counted.”

He stood up. He had never been introduced to Camille’s mother, but he did not need to be. She had the same dark eyes and the same set to her jaw. She came onto the dock without slowing and stopped two yards from him, breathing hard, with her hair blown loose from its clip.

She did not look at the orange life jacket or at his clothes. She looked at his face, and he had no way left to arrange it. He watched her read what was there. He saw the fear go out of her and something heavy and tired come in. She had expected this for a long time and had hoped to get one more week.

He opened his mouth and found he did not know what to ask.

She gave him no time. She bent and pulled the hat down over Tilly’s curls, and took the child’s hand firmly in her own. She did not say a word to him, and she did not need to.

“My glass,” Tilly said, twisting round. “Mémé, my glass isn’t finished.”

Her grandmother was already walking. Tilly went with her, because her hand was held, but she kept looking back over the yellow collar. She looked at the rows on the sixth board and then at him.

“Don’t step on it,” she called. “And don’t mix the colours.”

“I won’t,” Gideon said.

He watched them go up the long lawn, the navy fleece and the yellow jacket, as he had watched on Monday without understanding anything. This time the child looked back twice. The woman did not look back at all. They crossed the flagstones and went into the cottage, and the door closed.

He was still standing on the dock in a mildewed life jacket that did not fit him. At his feet lay the green and brown and clouded glass, with one blue piece set apart. The wind had come back. He knelt down and cupped his hands round the nearest row, so that nothing would be blown between the boards.

Then he lifted his head and looked up the lawn at the back of the inn, where there was a light on in the pastry kitchen window.
***