*
After dinner, no one was in any particular hurry to leave. The evening held them down the quiet way a mother puts her hand on her infant’s chest to lull it to sleep. At least half an hour passed in silence, and they all remained seated, staring off into the distance.
But then Devin got up when she saw a frog. And Jack got up to show her how to feed it dead moths. Eby and Bulahdeen started cleaning and clearing. Kate had told Wes about “accidentally” throwing her phone in the lake, and he asked her to walk down to the dock to show him. Maybe he could retrieve it. Only Selma remained motionless, nursing the last of her drink, ignoring everyone, as she was wont to do. But Kate could feel her eyes on them, curious, as they disappeared into the darkness.
When they reached the dock, the blackness of the water made it look like silk, billowing as if pulled from a bolt.
“It’s out there in the middle of the lake, near the ghost ladies,” Kate said, pointing in the general direction she remembered throwing it. “I don’t think it’s retrievable.”
“I don’t know. We dove for a lot of treasure back then. The lake isn’t that deep.”
“It’s not worth it. Besides, according to Devin, there are alligators to think about.” Kate paused. “You know, when Devin mentioned earlier that her imaginary alligator talked about you, it startled me a little. I know she misses her dad, but she dealt with the transition so well, better than any of us. She always seemed to have him with her emotionally. I just … Why would her alligator talk about you and not him?”
Wes shook his head gently. “She’s not going to forget him, if that’s what you’re worried about. If Devin’s obsession with alligators is anything like my brother’s, then it’s harmless. It was just his way of dealing with things.”
“What sort of things?” she asked as they walked back to the lawn.
“Our father, mostly. Alligators are powerful, and Billy was powerless. I think it helped him to imagine a way of being in control, when our childhood was full of such chaos.”
They got to the lawn in time to see Selma floating down the path toward her cabin. The light from the lawn touched her red dress, making it glow with strange images, like a slide show as she moved.
They stopped and watched for a moment. “So, are you ever going to tell me what was in that letter you sent me?” Kate asked, thinking for just a moment how her life might have changed if they’d kept in touch, how his might have.
“It was a long time ago,” he said. Kate waited until he finally shook his head and smiled. “Great plots and schemes from the mind of a twelve-year-old boy. I wanted to move to Atlanta.”
“Really? What happened?”
“The fire happened.”
There was no going back after that. There was nothing to do but let those words sweep them through the years and land them solidly back in the present, older, wiser, different.
Kate finally said, “Don’t you wish you could take a single childhood memory and blow it up into a bubble and live inside it forever?”
He shook his head. “You can’t live on a single memory,” he said as he walked away, toward his van.
“Wes,” Kate called. “You haven’t said anything about my offer to help Eby. What do you think?”
“I think it’s very generous,” he said. He got to his van and stopped. “But you can’t save everything, Kate. Sometimes it’s best to just move on.”