Hollow Ground

No one vacations at Lake Hollow, but my Auntie Mikai never leaves. Her cabin nestles right against the shore, and this time of year the trees turn crimson and rusted, the crunchy leaves falling into the crystal water and sinking, slowly. I can almost see my breath in front of me.

Dad waves goodbye as he pulls out of the gravel driveway, but he’s not watching me. He’s going back to Cynthia in the hospital, a prison I am glad to escape. Hoisting my bag onto my shoulder, I turn and walk to the front porch. My auntie stands by the door, smiling that slow smile that makes her eyes bright and hard like glass. Neither of us says anything and she leads me inside where it’s warm.

My auntie keeps three guest rooms ready at her cabin, because my family is always staying for the night, dropping by with little warning. My auntie just smiles her brittle smile and endures us. Mom says Auntie enjoys our visits, but I’m not so sure. Mikai talks and cleans and laughs and cooks and drinks like everyone else, but sometimes she doesn’t smile when she thinks no one is watching and sometimes she stays in her study for hours. We knew better than to disturb her there. It’s where she leads me now.

It’s the largest room in the house, bigger even than the living room. I asked her why, once, when I was younger and she told me that she needed a lot of space to fill. When I told her I didn’t understand, she had smiled that slow smile. “Good,” she’d said. I never brought it up again.

The windows span from floor to ceiling, always bright and sunny, facing the lake. Watching the water, I absently toe off my shoes by the door and step gingerly onto the thick carpet; I’m afraid to stain it. I make myself comfortable on the oldest of the three armchairs in the room, putting my bag by the coffee table and tucking me feet under me. My auntie sits at her big mahogany desk, facing the windows and me, and she’s not smiling anymore. She doesn’t ask if I want to talk, and I don’t suggest it. Staring at the water and the firecracker trees, I listen as she tells me a story.

My auntie always has stories to tell. She doesn’t always have someone to talk to, though, and I imagine her walking around the lake, telling stories that no one but the birds will hear and that no one will remember. Sometimes, she writes them down but mostly she tells them and forgets them, like the birds. When I was young I began to write for her, remembering as best as I could as she talked and scribbling furiously for hours afterward, writing and rewriting until it was as close as I could make it. I would show it to her, and she would read it intently, smile brightly and tuck it into a special leather folder just for the stories that were mine and hers. But I haven’t written for my auntie in years, and her stories are shared, briefly, and then disappear.

Her voice takes the quality of what she’s describing, because that is the kind of storyteller she is. It crackles and hisses with the flames in the big stone fireplace on the wall, it smoothes and hums with the framed mirror above it. It becomes as soothing as the quiet jazz from the radio on her desk and pulls my senses inward until finally I realize that my grief is gone. The tears have been hovering, just behind my eyes, for so long that I had forgotten they were even there. Her voice took them away and now I am only tired, watching the lake shiver and ripple as the sun slowly sets behind the trees.

It’s only when my auntie shakes me awake, gently, that I realize I’ve fallen asleep on the chair and sit up guiltily. She smiles and hands me a cup. The fire is the only thing that lights up the room now that it’s dark outside, and as I take a drink of the juice my auntie asks if I want anything to eat. I shake my head and she sits down in the chair next to mine, extending bare feet towards the fire. Her silence invites me to tell a story, but it’s been so long I don’t remember how to start. It takes several tries, but my auntie is patient beyond her years and her eyes don’t move from the flames. She is listening to every word and as I begin I know that I cannot stop until the story is over.

I don’t have the gift of speaking that my auntie does, but I know the words that I have learned from her over the years and while I can’t whisper like the wind and crunch with the leaves, I can still paint a picture. This is when I should talk about myself, about Cynthia and the hospital and the tension and the fear—but I don’t. I can’t.

I tell my auntie of this room that we’re sitting in. The windows, I say, are fractured with tiny spider web cracks; they show all the things that never were. My aunt closes her eyes when I tell her that I see Uncle Alan in those huge windows, in this room, sitting in this chair and laughing. She opens them again when I tell her about the children, a girl and boy, that play in the lake outside. I show her what I see in those windows, that span from floor to ceiling, and I think that she might cry so I move on to the fireplace. There is no more fire, I tell her, there is no more heat. Ashes lie at the bottom of the fireplace, cold and lifeless and black. The framed mirror above the fireplace shows nothing at all, no reflection and no future. It shows the end of all things. The carpet under your feet, I say, is stained with agony; it’s crusted and salty with your tears. I can see the walls clawed in despair and the furniture broken, like hopes and dreams and bones in this room. I tell her that the juice in the glass has turned bitter and coppery. My aunt has surrounded this room in darkness, and now I can’t even see the lake; the wind wails outside and the trees shudder and murmur.

I show her what I see and I am almost done. She stares into the fire but she’s not crying. We are silent for several minutes before I speak again. I ask her why she has locked the door, why it’s barred with iron. Glancing over at the door where it stands propped open, she shrugs her shoulders and tells me that she doesn’t deserve to leave. I say that she’s wrong.

Adding logs as the fire dies, I sit and wait with my auntie until we both drift into blissful unconsciousness. There are no dreams.

The windows are bright again when we wake, and everything is clean and sparse the way it always is. There is autumn in the air, dry and crisp and somehow I think I can smell roses, faintly. Coals still glow in the fireplace.

My aunt tells another story as she packs a tiny bag, locks the door behind us and starts the car. As we pull out of the gravel driveway onto the dirt road, I glance back at Lake Hollow and the cabin. Maybe the birds won’t hear Auntie Mikai’s stories anymore. Maybe I’ll write them down for her, and they can be hers and mine again. Maybe I broke the locks on the door to her study. Maybe I fixed the cracks in her windows, or maybe they’ll mend by themselves one day.

The end