Free The Lake and the Library by S. M. Beiko Page B

dream they grasped for. She could not let him abandon that now. Not after all this time, when it’s already too late.
    She is smiling now, smiling as if someone has only just asked her,
Isn’t the night divine?
    â€œYou should prepare your toast, love,” she says, patting his face. “Everything will be fine.
I’m
fine. After tonight, we can talk about anything you like, all right? We will be set after the ghastly affair is done with. You’ll see.”
    Worn down, he gets to his feet. His whisky arrives, and he swallows that, too, in one mean gulp. He beckons the server to leave him the still-full bottle, and he refills his mickey. His eyes are growing darker and darker, but she feels just as feeble watching him drown in this way, as she had been with her husband so long ago. She looks from the champagne flute shards on the floor to her poor son, and feels whatever fight she has left in her drain away.
    â€œWould you like me to help you get some air?” he offers, but she waves him off.
    â€œDon’t worry about me. Go, enjoy the party. It’s your night.”
    Adjusting his jacket, he has not even the energy to fake a smile. She has hurt him with this, all of this. “I think
I
will get some air, then,” he says, bending down and kissing her on the cheek. His frustration is carved in his slumped shoulders, as he gets farther away from her, his gait an exaggerated attempt at keeping from stumbling.
    She whispers “Happy birthday,” but he is gone. This is the last time she will ever see him.

I n the dream, this time, I am down deep in the water. I know it is Lake Jovan, can tell by how green the water is, how murky, the lake weed choking the bottom like angry cilia, loose garbage stuck in an eternal tableau in the depths. Even in the dream I think this isn’t unusual.
    But there is something else, other shadows tumbling through the black surface of the lake above my head. I swim closer, twisting, reaching out. The shapes clarify; they are books, pages coming loose like soggy flesh in my hands. I let them sink behind me into nothing. I swim and I swim, and the farther I go, the thicker the water becomes with books. Pretty soon, with every stroke of my arms, I am hitting them on all sides. The water is being displaced, and I am being drowned by them.
    There is someone else with me. I know it before I see her. She is floating in the book mire, and I nearly crash straight into her. She isn’t moving, floating there as lifeless as the water, the lake weed, the books. She is as much a part of the lake as they are. And she has endless hair, white, milky, and it blurs her face from me. I stick my hand in and try parting it so I can see her, because I feel I’d know her, and I need to know for sure.
    Her eyes snap open as soon as I am able to get a good look at them. Then her hands go for my throat, and she drags me to the bottom.

    I woke up on the floor, tangled in my bedsheets. I’d knocked over one of the many stacks of books I had on the nearby floor and the bedside table, too. My neck was sore from having used a few of them as pillows during the night in my sleep. I had no idea how long I’d been down here. I had never fallen out of bed before.
    I tossed everything back in its place and looked out the window, pushing my dancing princess painting to the side. In the immediate distance was a grain elevator, an enormous J inside a diamond painted on the whitewashed brick. “J for Jerktown,”
Tabitha had said once, in one of her more bitter moments. The elevator had always been there, blocking out the sun as it set every single day for ten years of my life. When we first moved here, I had told Mum that it must be Rapunzel’s tower, and one day it would be mine, too. She just smiled and let me dream.
    Those elevators were sprinkled all over Manitoba, though, appearing on postcards and sometimes in our textbooks at school. The J itself had become a