The Last Light at the Lake

The road to the lake had not changed, which felt almost rude. Nora had changed her hair, her city, her job twice and her mind more times than she could count, yet the gravel still crunched in the same places and the maples still leaned over the last bend as if they were waiting to see who was coming.

She parked where her father used to park, crooked, half on the grass. The engine ticked as it cooled. Across the water, mist was lifting off the lake in slow, careful sheets, and the sun was sinking into the far trees like a coin into a pocket.

Twelve years. She had told herself she would come back the summer after university, and then the summer after that, and then she had simply stopped telling herself anything at all. The cabin had become a photograph she didn't look at. Her father had kept it alone, mending the dock, writing her short letters about loons and early frosts, never once asking when she'd visit.

Now the letters had stopped, and the lawyer had sent a key.

She expected the cabin to be dark. Instead, as she walked down to the dock, she saw a small amber glow in the front window — the kitchen lamp, the one with the chipped green shade. Her stomach tightened. For one foolish second she was nine years old again, running up from the water in a wet swimsuit, and he was standing in that window, waving a wooden spoon.

The door was unlocked. Inside it smelled of woodsmoke and cedar and something faintly sweet. The lamp was on a timer; she found the little plastic dial plugged into the wall, set to switch on at dusk. Beside it, on the table, lay an envelope with her name in his tilted handwriting.

She didn't open it right away. She put the kettle on, because that was what you did in this kitchen, and while the water muttered to itself she wandered the rooms. Her old rain boots were still by the back door. The bookshelf held every paperback she'd left behind, spines softened, some with new bookmarks in them, as if he had read her abandoned books to keep her company.

When the tea was ready she sat by the window and opened the letter.

"Nora," it began. "I set the lamp so you wouldn't come home to a dark house. I know it's been a while. I never minded. A lake is patient, and so was I. I only wanted you to have somewhere that remembers you exactly as you are."

There was more — instructions about the stubborn stove, a note that the third dock board from the end was loose, a recipe for the apple cake he used to make every October, written out with uncharacteristic care. At the bottom he had added: "Go and watch the last light. It's better than any of my letters."

She carried her mug down to the dock and stepped carefully over the third board from the end. The sky had turned the color of embers. Across the water, the cabin window glowed back at her, doubled in the still lake, one light above and one below.

She sat with her feet hanging over the edge, the way she used to, and let the cold creep through her jeans. A loon called somewhere in the mist, long and low. The last band of gold slipped behind the pines, and the lake went silver, then grey, then soft blue-black.

Nora didn't cry, exactly. She just stayed there, long after the light was gone, until the stars came out one by one over the water.

In the morning she fixed the loose board. In the afternoon she made the apple cake, badly, and ate half of it anyway. And that evening, at dusk, the green lamp clicked on in the window, and this time she was inside to see it.