FICTION

Evening by the Lake

By Lauren D. Woods     VOLUME 57 No. 3

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When my little sister, Ruby, won’t stop screaming, Mom grabs her around the waist, hoists her up on one hip, and tells Dad, “I’m taking her for a walk.” Ruby is screaming because she wants to go swimming, but it’s December. She’s nearly four years old now and ought to know better. Dad will work on fixing the bed while we’re out. He has a wooden plank on the kitchen table, hooked up to a metal clamp to hold it steady while he drills a hole. This is supposed to replace the boards that split when Ruby jumped on her bed and broke through, sending the mattress sagging to the floor. Ruby is more trouble than I ever was, but she and Mom are the true bond of the family—Mom and Ruby going on errands together, Ruby practically glued to Mom’s hip at every moment. But this time, I grab Mom’s hand and insist I’m coming along too, and it’s only after Dad sides with me that Mom relents.

Mom and I hold hands, even though I’m twelve now and too old for it, with Ruby—too old for this too—wailing on Mom’s hip. We leave our townhome, all the way out to the Oldsmobile parked a block away, while the cars on the nearby highway whoosh by. People rush around us, clutching their long coats in the wind, waiting at crossing lights in the dark between the trucks and big rigs. The sun is just down, and the winter sky is darkening. In the older parts of Alexandria, Virginia, the streets are cobblestone and the lights are strung for Christmas, but this is a newer, and I already know, poorer, part of the city. It’s not dangerous, just ugly. Dad moved here first, after he lost his job years ago, when he stopped talking to anyone at all, even to Mom and me, and he and Mom split for over two years before getting back together.

The skies are dark once the sun sets, and highways crisscross everywhere. On either side of one highway, which we can see from our townhome, are tall apartment complexes, lit with windows of light, many ringed with tiny blinking Christmas lights. We pass them as we leave our neighborhood and join the cars on the main roads around us.

As the highway rumbles beneath us, we pass rows of warehouses, a bus depot, which give way to the emptiness of the night, green highway signs flashing, an old amusement park where my parents met as children, now shuttered. Ruby has quieted now and is staring through the black windows.

In the decades to come, the amusement park will finally come down to accommodate more highway, but this is the early nineties, seared into my memory as a series of long drives with my mother, with few questions and little to break up the monotony. A theme park, a golf course, all to be replaced, memories that aren’t mine already on their way out before my arrival. An entire city of deconstruction. These years are filled with highways and my mother’s bangs waving in the wind when she rolls the window down a crack—round and round with the knob—and remembers something inaccessible to me. And large plastic glasses, and her talking quietly sometimes to herself. And Ruby and me, sitting in the back of the Oldsmobile, which is holding barely above whatever temperature it is outside.

We drive down the long highway, for thirty minutes or more, so long I decide Mom would’ve told Dad we were driving this far if she’d wanted him to know, but since she didn’t say, it must be a secret. “Where are we going?” Ruby finally asks, and I know enough to know to say, “Quiet, Ruby. We’re just driving to calm you down.”

Except a little after that, we do stop, in a long, dark parking lot that gives me a funny feeling in my stomach, and then Mom takes us both by the hands, and we get out and start walking. All the way across a black parking lot, to a sidewalk, and then I see around us a townhome community like ours, except quieter, darker, and lonelier. There is a little mailbox and tangle of homes and sidewalks, and then on the other side, a black lake.

Ruby squeals as we approach the lake. Somehow, she already seems to know where we’re headed. There are geese pecking at the edges of the water. The great adventure, the entire point of this trek, for Ruby, is satisfied in the black-and-white creatures. Then I see Mom watching me, and I don’t see why I’m the one she’s watching when Ruby is the one flapping her hands and squealing, and getting way too close to the geese, who are not one bit afraid of us.

I follow Mom’s eyes then to a little bridge over part of the pond, and a clearing where a man and boy are walking together, and an image rushes into my mind. The geese, some bread crusts, a hand reaching down, another man whose face escapes me.

I say, “Have we been here before?” But Mom doesn’t answer.

Instead, Ruby does. She says, “Mommy and I feed the geese here.” I never knew that. And it strikes me that I’ve begun already my departure into adulthood, while Ruby alone occupies that special place as Mom’s second and only baby left.

And then in a moment, another person approaches: a blonde, heavy woman in a long-sleeved plaid shirt, under an open coat, who stretches her arms out to my mother, calling her Ellie, though everyone else calls my mother by her proper name, Helen.

She smiles down at Ruby and then turns sharply to my mother and gasps. “Oh my Lord, if it isn’t Jane it’s her identical twin,” she says, pointing at me. And now I’m baffled, staring between my mother and the woman, who seems to have been expecting us.

“Well Jane,” she says looking to me, no introduction. “Do you want some birdseed for the geese? But come in first.” She calls the last part over her shoulder as we’re already following her down a sidewalk and up a set of concrete stairs, away from the lake. Mom has to drag Ruby, who is interested only in the geese.

When I see the steps going up, and the little row home, I exclaim, “Oh!” Because I recognize the row home, except it’s different now. The American flag outside is gone. And now I remember the face I was trying to place earlier on the lake. Merry blue eyes with creases around their edges. Red hair. A man. Another home. This one. A place we lived years ago, maybe the first place I remember at all.

When we enter the home and the light flips on, I see the woman has the same blue eyes and a similar face as the man Mom and I lived with for two years before Ruby was born—a memory so vague I sometimes question whether it really happened. But inside, it rushes back to me. The same striped rug, a voluminous, brown couch. Pepper. I hear the jingles of his collar, and Pepper runs to me, diving into me so hard he knocks me into the couch, paws on me, whining with joy, tail wagging so hard I think it’s going to come off and take flight. Pepper is pawing me into the folds of the couch, Ruby is laughing, and the blonde woman is alternately yelling at the dog and saying, “Oh Gawd, Ellie, I’m going to cry.”

Then she turns to me and says, “How old are you now, Jane? Thirteen? Fourteen?”

“Twelve,” my mother says. “But she’s an old soul.” Mom says that about me, but the odd thing is, so do the teachers at school. I imagine a tattered soul stirring within me, frayed at the edges, worn down already. I don’t like the term. But I do like being mistaken for fourteen.

“I know you must remember Pepper, Jane. Do you remember me too?” And when I shake my head, she says, “I was Justin’s sister. Am. Well.” She turns to my mother. “She remembers?”

“You remember Justin?” my mother asks. The word Justin gives me a shock, the way it always does. It’s a word my mother speaks only when we’re alone, only on one of her long drives, and Dad is far away, and my mother mumbles to herself under her breath, holding conversations with someone who isn’t Ruby or me. My mother’s tone is plaintive, almost desperate for me to say yes.

The memories are vague. I used to ask Mom to show me pictures of him, which she keeps in an envelope in her bedroom closet under her shoes, and I’m not sure whether it’s the pictures or the man I remember.

But when I hear the question--do I remember—I walk without answering to the Christmas tree in the corner, to an ornament from Shenandoah where we hiked together that last year. I come right up to it and trace my fingers along the black bear’s face, above the lettering, HAVE A BEARY MERRY CHRISTMAS. And Mom and the woman exchange a look because they know I do remember something, and my mother’s face is suffused with relief.

It was Christmastime like now when we hung that ornament. There was a tree in the window like this one. We opened the door to a pack of carolers. Mom and Justin were fighting, as they sometimes did, but they had to pause long enough for the carolers to get through their set, and I stood behind them and watched, grateful for the strangers’ voices and the magic that had caused them to quiet Mom and Justin. And when they’d gone, the magic held, the fight was over, and Justin had opened his arms, and how quickly Mom had gone into them.

Afterward, Justin opened a box of chocolates, which we shared, and Mom got angry at us for leaving the wrappers all over the couch. And we watched Christmas movies, like Mom’s favorite, Meet Me in St. Louis, and sang along. I jumped on the coffee table, where I was never allowed to stand at any other moment, and the whole living room was bright and merry. Then I felt guilty that I loved Justin so much that I’d forgotten about my own very serious father celebrating Christmas alone somewhere far away in Alexandria, and guilty that in my secret heart, I’d wished Justin were my father instead.

Dad, my sweet dad, so hardworking and solemn, but with such strict rules and an unbending sense of order brought from the countryside where he’d grown up. Justin was fun-loving and told terrible jokes, and now I think of him, that face, that irrepressible smile, and him, cold and buried in the ground, and I can’t bear it.

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LAUREN D. WOODS lives and writes in Washington, DC. Her debut short story collection, The Great Grownup Game of Make Believe, won the Autumn House Fiction Prize and is forthcoming in 2025. Her work appears as one of ten spotlighted stories in Best Small Fictions 2024, and has been in The Antioch Review, The Normal School, Passages North, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Red Rock Review, and other journals. Her work was cited as notable in The Best American Essays 2023, and she has also been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net.


VOLUME 57 No. 3