The Probable Future (39 page)

Now, stepping into the woods again, he felt at home. He kept going until he reached the Table and Chairs; amazed by the rock formation, fascinated by the many shapes nature invented, he took from his backpack the newspaper he’d swiped from Laurie Frost’s doorway and the lunch he’d brought with him, a ham sandwich fixed by the maid at the motel in Medford where he’d stayed last night. In exchange for the sandwich, and a free room, he’d left the model of Cake House behind; it had been a gift for the four-year-old daughter the maid had no choice but to bring to work with her in the mornings, since she hadn’t the money for a baby-sitter. Why shouldn’t he leave it for the child? He didn’t need the thing anymore; he had it committed to memory by now, every brick, every stone, every bit of glass.

When he was done with his lunch, he tidied up so that he wouldn’t leave a trace. He always left the woods the way he’d found them; he liked the way things looked when there hadn’t been human intervention. Frankly, he stayed away from human things. It was sheer luck that he stumbled upon the shell of the old laundry shed, the one Will had all but destroyed so many years ago. Still, the huge core of the chimney remained, and the fireplace would give him shelter. He stood inside of it and immediately felt at home. Seeing one of the bricks was missing, he put his hand inside and drew out a small portrait. There’d been a photograph in the hallway he’d noticed the day Will let him in. Her hair had been blond then but this was the girl he wanted to get rid of. He was sure of it. Once he dispatched this meddler who had seen what he was about to do before it happened, there’d be no one to connect him to the crime, not that his ex-girlfriend hadn’t deserved it, not that they all hadn’t got what was coming to them, not that he’d had a single restless night of sleep since she’d said her last words to him:
How can you do it? How could your love have come to this?

THE KNOT

I.

I
T WAS A BEAUTIFUL SATURDAY MORNING
when it happened, so bright Will had woken at the very first light. He was off running earlier than usual, at a little after 5:00 A.M., when the town was still sleeping and only the birds were available to keep him company. At 5:30, the garbage trucks began to lumber through town, stopping first at Hull’s Tea House, where the new kitchen helper had set out the trash neatly in barrels the evening before. Liza was awake, of course, baking blueberry scones, watching out the window for Will to run by at some point on his route, as he did every day, sometimes leaving a newspaper on her back step, sometimes a handful of violets in a paper cup, sometimes a note with a single word:
You
.

Elinor Sparrow was always awake at this hour. She didn’t have much time to waste, and her sleep came in fitful periods of napping. Now, when she managed a few hours of restless sleep, she always dreamed of snow. Jenny, bombarded by her mother’s
dreams, had a whole series of snow paintings set out on her dresser and window seat. In the past few days she had gone through so many tubes of titanium white that Mavis Strickland, who stocked the pharmacy’s small art supplies section, suggested Jenny order directly from the distributor.

But Jenny needed more than white. Snow could be blue, she had realized, or violet, or the palest pink. It could be an integral part of one’s life: her love for Matt was like a snowstorm, sudden, insistent, leaving her breathless. Stella’s hair when it was cut had most surely fallen like snow all over Liza’s bathroom floor, in an endless blinding whirl. Snow was the flour in the kitchen at the tea house as it was sifted into a bowl or the laundry flakes when Jenny washed her mother’s sheets; it was the rice pudding Jenny brought upstairs on a silver-plated tray, one of the few foods Elinor could still keep down. Stars like snow dusted the black night. Snow in the dust motes as rays of sun streamed in through the library window. Snow in the rattle of the last dead arm attached to the oak tree on the corner of Lockhart and East Main, a huge, rotten branch, still uncut, the paper-thin leaves shaking like the air before a storm, before the utter quiet, before whatever came to pass. Snow gathered in the petals of the peach trees, which bloomed throughout town all at once, pink-white flower-ice that smelled of the summer that would soon arrive. Little wonder there were so many words for snow in some languages, the way there was a litany of possible expressions for love or sorrow, or the many varieties of rain Elinor had named.

There were endless sorts of lies, as well, and Stella Sparrow Avery told one more. A last little lie that wouldn’t hurt anyone. Poor Liza had actually brought some oatmeal cookies and a glass of milk to Stella’s room, for she had come to have a heart-to-heart. Upon hearing footsteps on the stairs, Stella had drawn the covers up to her neck, hoping to be left in peace, but Liza could not be dissuaded and Stella lay there, trapped, as Liza asked her questions about her feelings.
Did Stella mind if Liza was involved with her father? Should they wait? Or perhaps they should see a therapist in North Arthur together and discuss the new configurations in their life?

“I’m fine with it,” Stella was quick to say. If this wasn’t a white lie, then at least it was pink, a love-tinged fib told to protect Liza. No, Stella wasn’t happy that both her parents were dating. Weren’t they supposed to be the ones who were old and sensible and she the one who went wild? But even if Stella wanted to resent Liza, it would have been difficult; Liza was simply the kind of person it was difficult to hate. But not difficult to lie to, so Stella smiled and said goodnight and thanked Liza for the cookies and watched her go out and close the door behind her.

Lie of omission, lie of a teenaged girl, lie of good-night before I climb out the window, lie of I’ll explain it all to you in the morning if you find out I haven’t slept in my bed, but of course if you never find out, then you really don’t need to know. White lie, pink lie, black-and-blue lie. It wasn’t Jimmy Stella was going to meet, but Hap Stewart, and it wasn’t all fun and games either. Hap was angry at her, annoyed that their joint science project was late because Stella had been spending so much time with Jimmy. True enough, she had taken to meeting Jimmy at the Table and Chairs up in the woods after supper, where they kissed for hours even though Stella had a hundred more pressing things to do. She called him late at night at a prescheduled time just to hear his voice. He couldn’t even pass a simple high school class—he was taking earth science for the third time, for goodness’ sakes—but each time Stella saw him standing out on the road with a handful of pebbles to throw at her window and that confused expression, as though he’d been drawn to her without reason or forethought, she thought it would be perfectly fine if Jimmy Elliot were the only person in the world, and if all she saw was his face, nothing more.

To assuage Hap, ignored and now in danger of failing science
himself due to their late project, Stella had come up with a plan. They needed one more water sample, something no one else in the class had, for them to make up for their lateness with the project. Hap had been the one to suggest Hourglass Lake, then Stella had said they should sleep out there and take the sample early in the morning, first thing. She brought along her backpack and a sleeping bag flung over her good shoulder and she climbed out the window of the tea house, down the trellis that would be covered with clematis in June. She also brought along six peanut butter sandwiches to sustain them, several glass sampling vials, and a flashlight. Hap, who met her at the corner where the oak stood, contributed a tent that smelled like a damp cellar, where it had been stored for fifteen years. The night was warm and humid and mosquitoes were hatching everywhere.

“That dead horse legend is such a load of crap,” Hap said when they turned down the lane where the horse was supposed to have first spooked, carrying Charles Hathaway to his final destination. “But I heard a group of kids in the playground behind the school swearing it was true.”

“It’s total crap,” Stella agreed.

They both laughed, recalling this had been their first conversation: their agreement of what was crap.

“Fear not,” Hap said.

“I don’t intend to,” Stella told him.

One night, at dinner, Stella’s father had told her and Liza about the night he and his brother had spent at the lake when they were boys, waiting for the dead horse to rise. Matt had fallen asleep like a log, Will had said, leaving him to shiver and watch the dark water alone.
Charles Hathaway
, he’d announced to the murky water.
I’m not afraid of you or your horse
.

“People made that up in the old days,” Stella said, “when everyone was still afraid of stupid things.”

“Right.” Hap was thinking of Sooner, dead in the field, and the look on his grandfather’s face. Now whenever Hap went past the field where Sooner had been for so long, he ran, spooked by the breeze or by the clouds or by the rustling of leaves. He’d been growing a lot in the past few months and he towered over Stella. He thought she’d seem like a stranger with her hair cut short and dyed, but she was still the same.

“Sometimes when you get rid of your best feature, you find out it really wasn’t anything. Sometimes it turns out your true best feature is something else entirely.”

Stella stared at him, surprised. “Have you been talking to Juliet?”

“Juliet?” Hap said. In fact, he’d been talking to her nearly every night, late when everyone else in his household was asleep. The universe had been made out of only two things at such times: the darkness and Juliet’s voice. They hadn’t meant to keep their conversations secret from Stella, but that’s what had happened. Now, Hap was embarrassed, for reasons he couldn’t quite comprehend. He was thankful that he was slow in answering, for the time for an answer seemed to pass; they had to concentrate now so as not to stumble in the ruts.

The air smelled like sap and mud and violets. It was the waning of the full moon, the milk moon, which had always told gardeners when to plant. They set up their campsite at the far end of Hourglass Lake. From here they could tell why it had been named so: in the middle, at the deepest point, the shoreline was equally indented, creating a narrow passageway that could fit two rowboats at most, such as the two that were hidden in the tall grass. Hap had tripped over one of the boats, then he leaned down to flatten the weeds. The boats hadn’t been used for decades, not since Jenny went out fishing with her father, who called her little Pearl on these occasions, and who taught her that sitting quietly was more important than how many fish were actually caught.

“We’ll go out into the dead center,” Stella said. “We’ll get our water samples from a location no one’s ever been to before. Mr. Grillo will be so impressed he won’t mind that we’re a little late.”

“We’re already two weeks late, Stella. I thought we were waiting until morning.” Hap stood there holding two oars he had found, chewed up by field mice and time, but still serviceable. All the same, he hadn’t planned on night fishing. It was dark, in spite of the milk moon. And there was the dead horse to consider, after all, the one he wasn’t worried about.

Stella began to drag one of the boats out of the grass.
Little Pearl
, it was called. “I wonder who little Pearl was.”

Stella, of course, had no idea that her mother had been a girl who liked to go fishing and swimming with her father and who had once counted ninety-two water lilies among the weeds. The bullfrogs were croaking, and the sound of the water was soft as the rowboat was pulled into the shallows. Stella got in.

“Come on,” she urged, and Hap lurched into the boat awkwardly, holding on to the glass sample vials;
Little Pearl
tipped with his weight and Stella laughed at her friend.

The reeds were tall and feathery, black in the night, like the strands of Rebecca Sparrow’s hair when they chopped off her braid. They drifted a bit and could spy the wedding cake house as they neared the center of the lake. There was a light on in the kitchen. Someone couldn’t sleep. Elinor, perhaps, was ailing; someone was most likely fixing tea. Still Stella and Hap were fairly certain they would go unnoticed. They both had the feeling that their friendship was about to change, not unwind, exactly, but shift. It had done so already, because of Jimmy Elliot, and now there seemed to be Juliet. Stella wasn’t a fool; she sensed her two best friends were becoming closer to each other than they were to her. People were coming between Stella and Hap, mattering, if not more, than certainly differently.

Perhaps that was why they were out on the lake, steering toward
the center where a good number of lily pads were sucked into the current created by the movement of their oars. Soon, the yellow water lilies would open, but now they looked like a mass of frogs, the pads greenish black and leathery.

There was a plashing sound and Stella stiffened. It was a moment when she suddenly felt they had no business being out here at this hour.

“Bullfrog,” Hap whispered.

Stella, comforted, leaned back and looked up at the swirl of stars up above. “‘I wish I may, I wish I might,’” she whispered now. Unbidden, Jimmy Elliot came to mind.

A bullfrog hopped from one lily pad to another, scaring them for a moment.

“Jesus,” Hap said.

The boat rocked back and forth, and Stella and Hap held on to the sides and laughed.

“Jeremiah.” Stella recalled an old song her father sometimes played. The notion of a bullfrog with a name like Jeremiah set them to laughing again, although they tried their best to muffle the sound. For that instant they concentrated completely on not being caught, all they heard was the sound of each other’s mirth, the laughter gulped down. They didn’t hear anything else in the water until the second boat knocked into theirs. It was the boat they’d left behind in the grass,
The Seahorse
. Stella felt a wave of anger, thinking it was Jimmy following her, but Jimmy had been tossing rocks at her window and was only just turning down Lockhart on his way toward home, disappointed by her absence.