The Lake and the Lost Girl by Jacquelyn Vincenta

Author:Jacquelyn Vincenta
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sourcebooks
Published: 2017-03-31T04:00:00+00:00

20

White Hill, Michigan—April 1999

The anguish of the world is on my tongue.

My bowl is filled to the brim with it; there is more than I can eat.

Happy are the toothless old and toothless young,

That cannot rend this meat.

~ Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892–1950), “The Anguish”

As she left Jack’s workshop, Lydia’s mind clung to imaginings of an escape on Lake Michigan in a sailboat, and she felt a swell of wistfulness followed by guilt. Her life was a good life that she had built over many years. It just needed some adjustments—and the courage to enact them.

It wasn’t yet noon when she rolled up the driveway, where there were no signs that Frank was up. His truck was parked as it had been, the barn door was open as she’d left it, and she didn’t see any lights on in the house. She got out of the Jeep and headed into the dark barn to gather the torn seats into a pile. As she searched around for them, she wondered what Dolly would charge her. If she could fix them at all, the work was likely to be extensive and tedious.

Lydia tried not to let her eyes rest too long on the pieces of wood from the furniture, tried not to determine just now if they were un-repairable. She could do that later tonight. She had just spotted another seat leaning against the new armoire when she felt the air in the barn change. She saw the sunlight dimmed by his body before she heard Frank speak.

“What are you doing?” His voice was flat.

Lydia whipped around to see him silhouetted in the doorway, his arms crossed.

“You lied to me, Frank,” she said, matching his emotionless tone.

“You aren’t someone I can be honest with anymore, Lydia.”

“Oh. Oh, I see.” She emitted a hard laugh. “By what code of behavior would it be okay for anyone to spend half of their family’s savings on a dining room set so they could tear it apart looking for scraps of paper?”

“It’s obvious we don’t share the same values anymore,” he said heavily.

“You’ve got that right, Frank. Marriage and common decency require that such choices are discussed beforehand.”

She turned back to the furniture, heart pounding, and picked up the seat, willing herself to be calm. Holding it in her hands, she walked toward him, intending to pass to her Jeep. He blocked the opening and didn’t move.

“Excuse me,” she said.

“What are you doing?” he asked, and when she stood without speaking, he said, “I asked a simple question, Lydia. What are you doing?”

“What do you think I’m doing, Frank? I’m taking these seats to be repaired. Let me by.”

Still he remained where he was, so she forced herself to look into his face. It was not angry, as she’d expected, but held an expression of poisonous, patronizing amusement.

“Oh, I see,” he said, nodding, smiling. “You’re doing the right thing. Getting everything back to normal. Nobody around to interfere with the task. You thought.”

His words so closely echoed her actual thoughts that she searched his eyes for a shard of genuine understanding.

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