As Arden ran, she recalled how fascinated she had been with this influx of status into the long-overlooked lake that sat miles from the money of downtown and the Lake Michigan coast.
Arden remembered watching from her bedroom window during high school as construction workers descended onto Lost Land—earthmovers replacing herons—and transformed tiny log cabins on the opposite side of the lake into Ralph Lauren–chic estates. The wives followed, decorating and running, running and decorating. They would meet in their yards, which fronted the lake, stretching, doing this thing called “yoga,” before dashing off—Zoom!—an angry army of hornets in pink.
Arden had followed. She not only began to run, she began to want clothes and shoes that Lolly and Les just couldn’t afford. Arden began to yearn for a life in the city she had never known.
“They aren’t real. You can’t live your life wanting to be a projection of someone else,” Lolly would repeatedly say to her shy daughter. “You have to be you, Arden. And they wear tennis bracelets, not charm bracelets. They don’t know who they are or where they came from anymore.”
Lolly had fought to preserve the original seven cabins along Lost Lake and had come out victorious. She knew these women didn’t like her, but she hadn’t expected her daughter to envy them.
“They aren’t happy, Arden,” Lolly told her daughter. “They are never content enough to enjoy their lives.”
Arden picked up her pace, trying to outrun her thoughts, and sprinted along the trail, shadowed and cool under a canopy of birch and sugar maples. She breathed deeply as she ran, her lungs filling with an ease she rarely experienced in the city.
Arden approached a tiny stream—a “crick” as her mother called it—that ran into Lost Land, and decided to jump it like a show horse. She picked up steam and …
Whap! Splash!
Arden’s left foot caught on a tree root, and she yelped, her glasses flying from her face, her body falling hard and coming to land directly in the water. Arden’s heart raced, and she scrambled up to assess the damage.
Face?
Palms?
Back?
Knees?
Arden exhaled and looked up toward the sky.
No damage, she thought, relieved.
Arden reached for her glasses and found them sitting on the edge of the bank she’d never reached. She rubbed the dirt off her lenses with her shirt and, as she placed the glasses on her face, the world came back into focus. Arden gasped.
In front of her stood a tiny forest of gnarled sassafras, their trunks dark, knotted and bent, like witches’ fingers. The weight of the scene forced Arden to take a seat on the damp embankment, her feet resting on a stone in the stream.
This is it! Our “secret spot,” she realized, amazed.
Arden tried to catch her breath, but memories came rushing back.
“Meet me by the sassafras grove,” read the notes that Clem used to shove into her locker, Arden recalled.
Clem Watkins, a quiet farm boy who raised cattle and showed goats, had appeared as suddenly into Arden’s life as her father had left it.
Clem and Arden had never talked much in school, outside of the occasional hello in the hall, but he came to the cabin after her father’s sudden death from a heart attack, with a casserole from his mother and a rose for Arden. No other classmates had come to visit, so when Clem asked Arden to go for a walk, she agreed. She had no one else, it seemed. They ended up sitting for hours in this sassafras grove, Arden crying until she could cry no longer, Clem patiently holding her until her tears subsided.
“How will I move on?” Arden had gasped. “What will my mother do? I can’t imagine living alone with her. She’s already crazy enough.”
“Your mother is not crazy. She’s unique. That’s a wonderful trait. Can you imagine what she is going through, too? Arden, you need to take all the time you need to mourn the death of your father,” Clem had said in the quiet of the woods.
His words had stunned Arden. They were not only more mature than anything she expected a boy his age to utter and more heartfelt than any she had ever read in any of her beloved books, but they also echoed her mother’s.
She began to tell Clem about her father’s and grandfather’s work as fishing guides, their love of the lake, the land, Lolly and Arden, Fred and Ethel.
“They mate forever,” Arden said to him of the loons. “And they always return home. Forever. Do you think my dad will ever come back to visit?”
“He never left you,” Clem had whispered. “He’s right here … in every leaf and in every wave of the lake.”
For the first time since her father had died, Arden felt a sense of peace.
From that moment on, they met whenever they could.