The Probable Future (12 page)

“Her gift,” Jenny said in a clipped tone, “is to be a normal thirteen-year-old girl who has no family nonsense to ruin her future.”

“I meant the model of Cake House I sent.”

“And that’s another thing, you may have sent it, but that house was mine. It wasn’t yours to give.”

“Well, if she did get anything else, some family trait, I hope it was something better than knowing other people’s dreams. That didn’t work out too well for you.”

Elinor could tell right away, the remark had stung. Jenny glared at her with those same dark eyes Elinor remembered so well, always reproaching her for one thing or another. Well, she might as well give Jenny something to be angry about, hadn’t she? She might as well tell the truth.

“Like knowing who’s a liar and judging them for the rest of their lives based on one or two mistakes? Would you say that’s a preferable talent, Mother?”

Stella pulled open the back door and climbed into the backseat.

“Fighting?”

Immediately, Elinor and Jenny fell silent. One was the lion, one the lamb, but which was which, it was impossible to tell.

“I’ve got a great idea,” Stella announced. “Let’s all go out to lunch together.”

“We can’t,” Jenny was quick to respond. “I want to get you settled and get back here to catch the three o’clock train to Boston.”

“I can settle myself. What I need is food. Gran?”

Two against one, Jenny could see that well enough. They clearly planned to gang up on her whenever possible. There was no choice but to stop at Hull’s Tea House, where they ordered Lapsang souchong tea, egg salad sandwiches, and scones with cream and jam. Their waitress was a high school girl named Cynthia Elliot, who worked weekends and after school. Cynthia was Elinor’s neighbor and the great-granddaughter of Sissy Elliot, that imperious old lady who thought nothing of holding up an entire trainful of people so that she could get onboard and make herself comfortable. Elinor, however, didn’t seem to recognize their young waitress.

“Hey, Mrs. Sparrow, I’m Cynthia.” Cynthia Elliot had on black nail polish and her hair had been braided into dozens of tiny red braids. “I live next door to you.”

“How nice for you,” Elinor said, cleaning a spoon that was smudged, not in the least bit interested.

“Hey,” Cynthia said to Stella, sensing the possibility of a kindred spirit.

“Hey,” Stella said uncertainly.

“Do not pal around with that girl,” Jenny said when Cynthia went to place their order. Cynthia was clearly a few years older, and several years more experienced. “Do you hear me?”

“Just because I hear you doesn’t mean I’m listening to you.” Stella turned to gaze out the window which overlooked Main Street. The linden trees were greening and the warblers were calling. Everything looked hazy and sweet and ready to bloom. The tea house lawn was filled with snowdrops, a field of what had once been sorrow.

“I love this town,” Stella said. “It’s perfect.”

Jenny was so startled by this announcement, and so very uncomfortable with the notion, that she shifted in her chair, and the table, perched on the uneven floorboards, was shaken. The water in Jenny’s tumbler spilled and her knife fell onto the floor with a clatter. Elinor couldn’t help but recall what her great-grandmother, Coral, had always proclaimed:
Drop a knife and a woman will visit. Drop it twice, and she’s bound to stay
.

“Well, don’t get too comfortable here,” Jenny advised her daughter. “You’re only in Unity until things get straightened out with your father.”

“Do you expect that to happen any time soon?” Elinor asked.

“You’ll be here through the end of the school term at most,” Jenny went on, ignoring her mother, as she had hundreds of times before. “Don’t forget to tell your teachers that. This isn’t permanent. You’re just a visiting student.”

They had their lunch without much conversation, then were waylaid by dessert.

“Oh, look at that!” Stella had her eye on a tray of tiny iced cakes
and tarts the proprietor, Liza Hull, was bringing over. “They’re so pretty.”

“Jenny Sparrow,” Liza Hull said as she delivered the complimentary tray. “I can’t believe it! I never expected to see you back in this town. I guess all birds really do come home to roost.”

Liza and Jenny had been in the same year at school, but they’d never been great friends, and there seemed no point in pretending to be so now. “I’m just here for the day. My daughter, Stella, will be staying a little longer.”

“I love this place,” Stella declared for a second time, but now with even more conviction. “I love this town. I love this tea house. I love these cakes. Did you bake these?” she asked Liza, sneaking a bite of a petit four.

“I’ll bake you more any time you’d like them.” Liza had been such a plain girl no one noticed her, but as it turned out, she had a lovely smile; she seemed far more comfortable in her own skin now. “I see your daughter has Will’s coloring and his yellow eyes. Lucky girl.” A smile played at Liza’s lips. “He used to stop by now and then when his mom was so ill. He always ordered apple pie.”

“Did he?” Without ever once mentioning any such visits to Jenny, naturally.

“Oh, sure. Will Avery’s a hometown boy even if he did go to Harvard and marry you.” Liza turned to Stella. “Glad you’re going to be around for a while. Want to see the kitchen?”

“Sounds like Will was sneaking around here even while his mother was dying,” Elinor said when Stella had gone off for her tour of the bakery. “I told you he’d be nothing but trouble. He was a liar from day one.”

“Look, Mother, I don’t have to listen to your opinion anymore. I appreciate the fact that you’re taking Stella in, but, believe me, I wouldn’t have asked if there were any other alternatives.”

“Oh, I know that,” Elinor said. “You’d rather have her living with lions in the zoo.”

“Why should I trust you to take good care of her? You never took care of me. You’re right, I’m not thrilled about her being here, any more than I was to learn about the phone calls you made to her. I want Stella to have more than I did.”

“I see.” Elinor put down her teacup. She felt quite hot, really. Absolutely feverish, which wasn’t uncommon for some people at this time of year. “But you’ve been the perfect mother?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“Good. Because Stella doesn’t say it either.”

This always happened; it went too far too quickly: sticks and stones, needles and pins, words too painful to remove, like a splinter, like thorns, like slivers of glass.

“At least I tried.”

“And of course you were the only one who did.”

Stella had been given a bag of scones by the ever-generous Liza Hull, and she now turned to their table and waved. Stella looked happy, even Jenny could see that. Clearly, she’d been hoodwinked by Unity; she’d been taken in by the birdsong, the pale green spring, the forsythia beginning to open, those branches of undiluted light right outside the window.

The tea house, Stella had been informed on her tour, was the only building other than Cake House to withstand the fire of 1785, when the rest of the town had burned to ashes. Leonie Sparrow had worked at the bakery then, a lucky happenstance, for Leonie was the one who toted leather buckets of water from Hourglass Lake to pour over the roof of the tea house, thereby protecting the shingles and straw from bursting into flames. Leonie enlisted the aid of half a dozen customers, creating a brigade, then went home to Cake House, where she continued to battle the fire long after anyone else would have been overwhelmed by smoke. In doing so, Liza announced, Leonie started the Unity volunteer fire department.

“They call the fire truck
Leonie
,” Liza told Stella. “They’re about to get a second truck they plan to name
Leonie Two
.”

“Are you coming up to the house?” Elinor asked Jenny, as she paid the bill.

“I don’t think there’s time.” It was nearly two. Time to go, time to find her way out of town before she, too, was drawn in by the green light and the forsythia. “I think I’ll just go on back to the station. And, Mother,” she added, in a tone that made it seem as though she were about to swallow poison, “do you think it’s possible for us to stop fighting while Stella’s staying with you? For her sake?”

“Of course it’s possible.” It was possible for people to walk on glass, after all, to go without sleep, to judge a liar, to find what had been lost, to dream what they never could have imagined in their waking life.

“Then it’s also possible for you to keep her away from anything to do with Rebecca Sparrow while she’s here. I don’t want her hearing all those ridiculous stories.”

Jenny got up from the table, in a hurry to leave. If she missed the train, she’d be trapped. If she missed it, she’d have to walk up Lockhart Avenue to Cake House, making the turn by the big oak tree that some people swore was the oldest in the Commonwealth. She grabbed for her purse and her raincoat. That was when the second knife fell to the floor. Hearing it bang against the hardwood, Elinor felt her heart lift.

Drop it twice and she’s bound to stay.

Let Jenny do her best to avoid the path where Rebecca Sparrow pulled the arrows from her side. Let her kiss her daughter good-bye and hurry to the train station, ignoring the trill of the peepers, avoiding the snowdrops on the lawn. Let her run down Main Street, if she must, to catch the three o’clock train to Boston. Let her try to stay away, but it was clear enough now that she couldn’t run fast enough. It was absolutely certain. Birds always did come home to roost. Before too long, Jenny Sparrow would be back once more.

II.

T
HE WEEK BEGAN
with warm weather, too warm for the wool sweater Stella had chosen to wear for her first day at Unity High School. For the first time Stella wished she hadn’t skipped a grade. Perhaps if she were enrolling in the Hathaway Elementary School, grades K–8, fear would not be rising in her mouth as it was now, a black stone she couldn’t seem to spit out as she walked along the lane. This was the same route her mother had taken when she was in high school. Stella wondered if there had been blue jays swooping across the lane back then; if there had been the scent of bay laurel, planted by the colonists to protect against lightning, growing wild ever since.

Today, there were huge cumulus clouds in the hazy sky, and Stella felt the sultry dampness in the air; it was already frizzing her hair. Everything at Cake House was faintly wet, the blankets and the carpeting. All night long, Stella had heard the peepers on the shore and the whisper of reeds. She’d remembered that her science teacher at the Rabbit School had told the class that a cloud was a floating lake. Just think of it: all that water contained above rooftops and trees, a lake above our heads. Stella had lain in her bed, with its sodden bedsheets, trying her best to sleep in her new room. She had not been given her mother’s bedroom, but instead she slept in an alcove on the second floor, dusty, closed off for years, but with a pretty view of the lake. Still, with all those peepers calling, it had been impossible to doze off. At a little after midnight, Stella had gone downstairs, to the phone in the parlor, where she’d called Juliet Aronson.

“I can’t believe I’m here,” Stella had whispered to her friend. She was curled up on a musty love seat; the upholstery was so damp, the grosgrain fabric had turned green.

“I can’t believe you left without telling me.” Juliet had abandonment issues on a good day; she was very up front about that. “I was in a panic looking for you the next morning. How could you leave like that?”

“It wasn’t exactly my idea. It was my mother’s. What does she think she’s protecting me from?”

“Life,” Juliet had murmured.

This indeed was the reason that Jenny had directed Elinor Sparrow to rid the house of any current newspapers. Poor Stella hadn’t a clue as to what was happening in regard to the murder case. So it was Juliet who now read aloud from the articles in the
Boston Herald
and the
Boston Globe
. Both referred to Will Avery as a suspect. Stella didn’t like the way those words made her feel, as if anything might happen next. As though she might lose her father and not get him back. Such things happened, even in the most stable of lives. Stella’s mother had been three years younger than Stella was right now when she’d lost her father, hadn’t she? She might have been in this very room when she heard the news. She might have been looking out the same window, listening to the twittering of the peepers, unable to sleep. From where she sat on the love seat, Stella could see the branches of the forsythia outside, glowing in the dark. Beyond that it was pitch, nothing but shadows and trees.

“Are people at school talking about me?”

“You can’t think about that kind of stuff. But, trust me, there are a lot of words that rhyme with jail. They’re all idiots at school, Stella. You know that.”

“Right.” Stella was relieved she didn’t have to deal with her classmates. Maybe in Unity people would be kinder. In fact, they might not know about her father’s current situation; they might treat her as though she were an ordinary girl, an unremarkable individual who lived down the lane with her grandmother. An average ninth-grader who had troubles with math but loved science; a loyal friend,
a good listener, whose best feature was her long blond hair. “If I wasn’t worrying so much about my father, I’d actually be glad to be here. Away from my mother. Away from all the Hillary Endicotts of the world. Free.”

“Free to do what?” Juliet had asked. She was a city girl, through and through. “Wander through the woods?”

“There’s a town, Juliet. This isn’t the outback. We have stores.”

“Is there a shoe store?”

“Not that I’ve seen,” Stella admitted.

“In my opinion, any location without a shoe store is not a town. It’s the countryside. Yuck.”

N
OW
, on her way to school, Stella was traversing the muddy lane, a thoroughfare so narrow the branches of hawthorns and lindens met overhead to create a dark tunnel. She admitted to herself that Juliet was right, yet again. It was the countryside, no horns honking, no traffic, no one else on the road. It was desolate, really, for a girl used to Beacon Street and Commonwealth Avenue. Stella shook the bell on her birthday bracelet; she tried whistling a tune, but she didn’t feel any more secure. Starting a new school was never easy, and she actually had the chills when she reached the end of the lane, where it turned onto the paved road of Lockhart Avenue. She noticed a wooden post on the corner onto which someone had nailed a hand-printed sign, black paint scrawled on the wood:
DEAD HORSE LANE.
Oh, lovely. A countryside filled with deceased animals.