The Probable Future (30 page)

“This is truly one of the bumpkinest places I have ever been to,” Juliet decreed. She was looking down the road. Hap Stewart had said he would try to meet them, but he hadn’t showed up. “It wins the prize for most hicks contained within a square mile.”

They could hear the whistle of the train in the distance as they approached the station. Juliet fished her return ticket out of the bag. There was still no sign of Hap. For once, the sun was shining. The air was so clear it nearly hurt to breathe.

“I’ll bet good old Hap thought I was a freak,” Juliet said.

“No. He liked you. He told me so.”

“Yeah, sure.” People had started to congregate on the platform, and Eli Hathaway’s taxi pulled up to deliver Sissy Elliot and her daughters, Iris and Marlena, all headed for the ballet in Boston. “Actually, I am a freak,” Juliet said quietly.

“So what? Hap likes freaks. He once showed me an article about a man who could set fires with his breath,” Stella said. “Isn’t that crazy?”

“That’s one really bad case of indigestion.”

Juliet and Stella started to laugh.

“The worst ever recorded,” Stella gasped.

They laughed so hard people could hear them inside the station, but when Stella stopped, Juliet didn’t. In no time her ragged laughter turned into tears. Stella took a step backward. She hadn’t even been sure that Juliet could cry, and now here she was, sobbing.

“This isn’t about leaving, so don’t think it is.” Juliet wiped at her eyes; black eye pencil and mascara had begun to leak. She was tearing little chinks out of her train ticket. “I don’t even like this place. I’m a city girl.”

“I know. You are. Completely.”

“I’m happy to leave. I’d go nuts in a place like this.”

In all the time they’d known each other, Stella had only been to Juliet’s apartment once. It was a one-bedroom, so Juliet slept on the couch. Here, Liza Hull had made up a bed for her with clean white sheets scented with lavender. She’d slept till noon on Saturday and said she couldn’t remember sleeping so peacefully before.

Stella hugged her friend. “Maybe next time you can stay longer.”

“Don’t forget about me,” Juliet whispered, close, so that Stella could feel the heat of her breath.

Once she’d gotten on board, Juliet probably couldn’t see Stella out on the platform, waving, but Stella stayed anyway. She lingered until the train had pulled away, until the whistle was so far off it echoed past the corner of Lockhart and East Main. Juliet had confided that she had left her aunt’s apartment without so much as a note; she suspected that when she got back to Boston her aunt wouldn’t have noticed her absence.

It was the worst of fates, to be forgotten. On one hand there were those who became part of history, their birthdays celebrated, their lives remembered; on the other, there were those who had been erased. At dinner the other night, Matt had been talking about his thesis to Liza; Stella had overheard him say that the Sparrow women had written the town’s history in invisible ink. All he was doing down at the library was holding certain pages up to the light.

Hap was running toward the station, cutting across the common, a rain poncho flapping out behind him. He looked worried; he looked as though he’d been running for miles.

“What happened to you?” Stella asked, angry on Juliet’s behalf. “Where the hell were you?”

“It was the horse. He’s sick or something. I had to wait with my grandfather for Dr. Early, walking Sooner around in circles. I’ve got to go back and keep on walking him. I just came to say good-bye.”

“Well, you’re too late.”

“Shit.” Hap looked down the tracks.

Stella probably should have been jealous; instead she felt a wash of relief. “Does this mean you’re in love with Juliet?”

“Don’t be an ass.” Hap turned to leave. He didn’t want to talk about this. He didn’t want to talk at all. “I’ve got to go walk the horse so his stomach doesn’t clinch up.”

“Maybe it’s time for him to die.”

“You really have a morbid hatred of equines.”

Stella laughed and waved as Hap took off. “Just don’t ride him,” she called.

The rain had begun in earnest, sure to be fish rain, for it was already spilling over the rooftops. It was because of this torrent that Stella ran across the common and ducked into the library. By the time she entered the front vestibule, her shoes were soaked, so she slipped them off and left them under the coatrack. Outside, the whole world was wet, and the wind was moving across town in fits.

When Stella hesitated at the threshold, the librarian, Mrs. Gibson, signaled for her to come in.

“Looking for your uncle?”

It was very odd indeed to live in a town where most people knew your family history better than you yourself did. What Stella wouldn’t give to know more about her ancestors. She went where she was directed, past the stacks to the reading room. The glass door was marked UNITY HISTORICAL SOCIETY. It was here all town papers, diaries, newspapers, announcements, journals, medals, and trophies were stored, along with Anton Hathaway’s uniform, an ink-colored homespun that was dyed with a mixture culled from the indigo reeds that once grew beside Hourglass Lake.

Matt Avery was at the table inside, typing the last page of the last chapter of his thesis. Because Matt was a pet of Mrs. Gibson’s, he was allowed to eat an orange, which was set out in neat sections, along with a cup of tea Mrs. Gibson had fixed herself, black, no sugar, with a sliver of lemon affixed to the rim. The oak tree would have to wait another day before it was taken down. Most of Matt’s scheduled spring cleanups, the Elliots, the Quimbys, the Stewarts, the Frosts, would have to wait as well. Why, Matt was so set on his thesis, he hadn’t even begun the plantings on the town common; usually, at this time of year, he had put in most of the annual beds, dozens of marigolds and zinnias and petunias. He had the past on his mind, and it took up a great deal of space. He wore a set of headphones, he
liked to listen to Coltrane or Dylan as he worked—his musical taste being the single thing he had in common with his brother. He was so engaged in finishing, he hadn’t even bothered with his orange or his tea. If he hadn’t been imagining the last moments of Rebecca Sparrow’s life, he might have heard Stella open the door.

Stella herself had a strange cold feeling, the same sort of shivers she’d had whenever she and Juliet stole makeup or jewelry from Saks. Is this the way badness was formed? A cold pebble that begins as a tiny speck? An impulse that couldn’t be resisted? A desire that can’t be denied? Stella didn’t think, she didn’t plan; it was like reaching for the sparkly hoop earrings behind the counter, like holding her breath and diving underwater. One minute she was standing there watching her uncle type, and the next instant she was folding the thesis into her backpack.

She tiptoed out, closing the door carefully; she waved to Mrs. Gibson, then hurried to slip on the soaking pair of shoes she’d left beneath the coatrack. Doing something so bad made a person hot: a coal in the palm of her hand. An arrow set afire. All her life, people had been hiding things from Stella, but not anymore. The rain was slowing, fish rain good for nothing but the old catfish in Hourglass Lake, for when such a rain dissipated there would be clouds of mosquitoes and mayflies. As Stella jogged through puddles she thought about the cancerous growth she had seen on Mrs. Gibson’s lung; if Dr. Stewart was alerted, and treatment was given, perhaps Mrs. Gibson would die of old age rather than of cancer; she’d pass on while asleep in her bed, or surrounded by the books in the library.

Since the accident when the young man on the highway had survived liver damage, Stella had become far more hopeful, even though Dr. Stewart had told her that there was no cure for some ailments. Hope was a good thing in most cases, but when it came to Elinor Sparrow, hope was out of the question, no more likely than snow in May, and that in itself was a good thing, since that was what Stella had seen, a snowy blanket covering her grandmother, drift
after cloud-white drift. Thankfully it was too warm for anything like snow. The last of the rain sizzled when it hit the pavement. Stella darted inside when she reached the tea house. She hung up her jacket and kicked off her shoes, which were downright squishy. Her blond hair was drenched, like sleet falling down her back.

“You’ve been gone so long,” Liza called. “Did Juliet get off all right?”

“The train was late,” Stella lied. Perhaps she did take after her father, after all. Lies seemed to come easily. She’d been lying to the new handyman all weekend; he’d given Stella and Juliet the creeps. He lived in North Arthur and yesterday he’d offered the girls a ride to the North Arthur mall.

“Oh, yeah,” Juliet had said after Stella had demurred, with a polite lie, thanking the handyman for his offer, but assuring him there was plenty to keep them busy in town, activities such as dyeing everything in the closet black and fixing bird’s-nest pudding in Liza’s kitchen at 3:00 A.M. “Like there’d be anything in the North Arthur mall that would interest us. Doesn’t he realize we’re Saks girls? What a loser.”

“I liked Juliet,” Liza told Stella when she’d returned from the library and had come to fix herself some hot tea. “Tell her she’s welcome here anytime.”

Stella had her backpack slung over her bad shoulder, the one that had been broken at birth and which throbbed on rainy days. Stella’s father had told her a bedtime story when she was little, a tale about a girl who’d been born with one wing. After being repaired by the doctors, the only sign that she had ever been different was an aching shoulder. Anyone would think all Stella would remember were the many times her father had disappointed her, but that wasn’t the case. He always said,
Ssh. No flying away tonight
when the story was done and it was time for bed. Even now, what had happened wasn’t his fault. She should have never told him what she saw
in the restaurant on her birthday. She should have kept it to herself. It was her fault Will Avery was in trouble.

“Did my father tell you anything about that murder case in Boston? Has he heard anything at all?”

Will had told Liza that Henry Elliot had filed a motion to have all of the charges against him dropped, due to lack of evidence. But the charges weren’t what Will worried about. It was the little house that had been taken that kept him up nights; when he closed his eyes, all he saw were its white gables and its wedding-cake form, its satin flowers, the carved front door. It was his daughter’s safety he worried about most of all.

“Nothing yet. But don’t worry,” Liza said protectively to Stella. “Your father’s a good man, deep inside.”

No one had ever said such a thing about her father before, at least not in Stella’s presence, and as she went up to her room Stella wondered if perhaps Juliet Aronson was right. Perhaps Liza was in love with her father.

Stella took off her black jeans and her black T-shirt; they were so wet they leaked dye; Stella had to wring them out in the tub. She slipped on her black flannel bathrobe and flopped into bed. She was exhausted. All the same, she reached for her backpack; she didn’t bother to switch on the lamp or reach for the flashlight she kept in a night-table drawer. The greenish tinge of the last pitter-patter of fish rain was light enough to read by. She took Matt Avery’s thesis out, all of it there but the very last page that he’d been typing today, and opened it. The pages smelled like water, she noticed that right away, and something that reminded her of water lilies.

Invisible Ink, An Account of the Life and Death of Rebecca Sparrow.

The rain was coming down one lazy drop at a time, and Liza, still down in the kitchen, was listening to Sam Cooke, whose voice could take anyone’s troubles away.
Darling you send me
was the echo that filtered up the stairs.
Honest you do
.

Matt’s thesis began with the first lines of Charles Hathaway’s journal.

I was the man who was at fault, whose guilt was never known until these words were written. And even then, who will ever read these lines and know these words to be the truth?

It was cold in Stella’s room tonight, so she grabbed a blanket and tossed it over her shoulders. She had the bad habit of chewing on the ends of her hair when she was nervous, much the way her own mother bit her nails. Now, Stella had taken up her bad habit without thinking. She could no longer hear the rain or Sam Cooke or the cars on the street. She skipped over Matt’s introduction: the founding of the town by Hathaways and Hapgoods and Elliots, the encounters with native people, the bear that was killed in the middle of town beneath the old oak tree, the number of horses and cows and sheep that were owned, the shipments from England of spices and tea and mirrors and ink, and, on rare occasions, bolts of blue or crimson silk.

For so long Stella had wanted to know everything. Now she had a funny feeling in her stomach. Now the book was in her hands. She took a breath, the way a diver might, as though the pages and the print were deep water, deep as the lake beside her grandmother’s house, deep as all time.

I
N THE YEAR OF
1682 the winter was so cold the ice froze solid in Boston Harbor, and it stayed that way until the middle of March. On the morning when the ice finally melted, a fierce blue day when the wind toppled some newly constructed birds’ nests from the trees, a child of seven or eight years old walked out of the woods, up on the hill that overlooked Hourglass Lake, near the rock formations the settlers dubbed the Table and Chairs. This was the place where some people said invisible roses grew, the sort that disappeared in the blink
of an eye. No one was surprised that a person could just as easily appear, one who spoke a language no one understood.

She arrived on the day when the first snowdrops appeared, growing right through the melting ice, there to remind one and all of the gifts of the Angel of Sorrow. Who saw her first was a matter of debate, but it wasn’t long before the whole town knew that a child had wandered out of the wilderness, coming down from the north where there was far more ice than there were snowdrops. Before most people saw her, they already knew that the roses that withered when seen by the citizens of Unity were said to flower in her presence. It may have been Charles Hathaway who first reported that he had seen the child whistle and call the sparrows to her; these birds, people vowed, had brought her berries and sweet clover, and on this she had survived during her time in the woods. She spoke only gibberish, and she didn’t even know how to pray. Her black hair was tangled with brambles. In her possession she had three things, brought from whatever cold country from which she had appeared: A silver compass. A golden bell. A star on a chain. People looked at these things and whispered. They peered at the soles of her feet, turned green and tough as leather from walking so far, and they wondered who indeed she might be.