The Probable Future (42 page)

Stella had insisted that her grandmother would live until winter, she had envisioned snow, but Brock Stewart knew there were no guarantees. He’d seen it with his own eyes: people he thought would survive lasted only days. Those he believed hadn’t a chance to see morning went on for years. He knew that Elinor was growing weaker, that was a fact, too weak to wait for winter. Some days she dozed in the garden until it was nearly dark, the pearly milk light of May falling down on them.

There were evenings when the doctor had to carry her back to the house; soon enough, he had to carry her both ways, to the garden and back, wrapped in a blanket, even though the weather was fine. The doctor thought of his old horse in the field whom he missed more than he ever would have thought possible. He thought of Liza Hull kissing her baby good-bye, and of his grandson in his hospital bed, and of all the people he’d seen enter this world and those he’d helped leave it behind. He was a lucky man to be sitting beside Elinor in the garden in the last green days of May. He had loved her for so many years, he would just go on doing it, with or without her.

He knew that attachments were for the living, and so he did the honorable thing. He let her go. He leaned close so she would hear him say it was all right for her to leave him. They knew it was now; they could feel something shift the way it always did. Even Argus, who’d been whimpering, grew quiet. It was not a dream, but something more. She breathed out, and inside that one breath was every word that had been spoken, every step she had taken, everyone she had ever loved.

Above the stone wall, there stood one of the wild peach trees, possibly descended from one that had been set adrift long ago in the shipwreck, so close to shore. Or perhaps this tree had grown from a love token, tossed aside when it was no longer needed. The air itself
smelled of peaches, here and all over Unity; when the breeze came up, petals fell like snow. If a person didn’t move, if she was completely still, the petals streamed over her, catching in the hem of her clothes, in the strands of her hair, white as snow, quiet as snow, silent and fleeting and drifting down from above to cover her and carry her home.

III.

T
HE SERVICE FOR
E
LINOR
S
PARROW
took place at the old meetinghouse on Chestnut Street in the last week of May, the season when gardeners are told to plant their tomatoes and corn, when children beg to stay up late now that the evening was bright, when the lion appeared on the western horizon in the nighttime sky and the lamb was nowhere to be seen. The family meant to leave Argus home when they went to the service, but he followed as far as Lockhart Avenue, at a surprisingly rapid pace for a dog as old as he. There was little choice but to stop the Jeep at the corner; Matt and Will got out and hoisted the wolfhound inside. The faithful deserve something, on this everyone agreed: kindness, at least, consideration, naturally; most of all, the right to their grief.

It was a large crowd who awaited them at the meetinghouse, nearly two hundred people, many of whom came back to Cake House for lunch afterward, traversing the rutted driveway for the first time in their lives. Many of the folks who had always been spooked by the notion of snapping turtles and drownings came to hang their jackets into the hall closet and meander around the parlor where Liza Hull had set the long trestle table with the good silver and several huge platters of sandwiches and cakes.

People spoke in whispers at first, then grew braver. Sissy Elliot, helped in by her daughters, roosted on one of the couches in the
parlor, calling for fruit salad and tea. A few local children balanced their glasses of punch on the arrowhead case, then chased each other around the occasional table until their mothers told them to mind their manners. Hap Elliot, who was progressing nicely with his physical therapy, still used a wheelchair when he was in a crowd; today, he was nearly overwhelmed by good wishes. Juliet Aronson had taken the train in and was staying with Liza; at the luncheon she barely left Hap’s side. She’d been right about his best feature, after all. Hap told her that he wouldn’t blame her if she’d rather be with someone else, someone taller, for instance, someone who walked without a limp. Integrity, exactly as Juliet had foretold. As it turned out, height meant nothing. Precisely as she had suspected: everything that mattered was within.

Cynthia Elliot had volunteered to pour tea and collect stray plates, and due to the unexpected crowd, she was needed in the kitchen as well, to fix extra cucumber and salmon sandwiches. A guest book was left out on the dining room table, and signed by one and all: Eddie Baldwin, the plumber, had brought his entire family. The Fosters had come, and the Quimbys, including Marian, who looked at Will with moon eyes, just as she always had, even though she was a grown woman and a practicing attorney with three children of her own. She tried her best to flirt with him, but he just talked about Liza, endlessly, it seemed. There were so many neighbors that people who hadn’t seen each other in five or six years now sat down over tea and discussed the intricacies of their lives. When someone left, someone else took his or her place. Cynthia Elliot had the good sense to commandeer her brother, Jimmy, who’d never made a sandwich in his life, and before he could complain, she set him to work spreading cream cheese on toasted rounds of bread.

Jimmy Elliot had become a hero of sorts, heralded for ignoring his community service and failing to chop down the last branch of the oak on Lockhart Avenue. He’d been invited to come talk to the third-grade class, whose students had protested the felling of the
oak, and had, for one entire afternoon, held hands and pranced around the trunk singing.

Sometimes, you’re smarter not to take orders
, Jimmy told the rapt students when he visited their classroom, much to the dismay of Mrs. Cole, who’d been Jimmy’s third-grade teacher as well and remembered him climbing to the top shelf of the coat closet and refusing to come down.

Doesn’t anyone in this town see what’s right in front of them? They’re all terrible judges of character
, Jimmy had said to Stella afterward.
I guess they’ll figure out who I am soon enough. I might as well enjoy it while I can.

They know who you are
, Stella had told him.
So do I.

Will Avery had also been put to use on the afternoon of Elinor’s memorial service. He had helped Liza transport the large coffee urns, and was later sent off with a platter of tiny brioche to offer to the most elderly of the visitors, the ones who, once they were situated in a love seat or couch, only got up again for one thing: to leave. Jenny was the one who didn’t seem to know what to do with herself; she stood in the front hall, as though ready to leave. But where would she go? She couldn’t bring herself to abandon the hall closet, where Elinor’s ashes were stored in a metal canister. She tried to walk toward the kitchen to help Liza, and found she couldn’t take a single step.

“How are you holding up?” Matt Avery had brought over a strong cup of black tea.

“Absolutely fine.” But, in fact, Jenny felt as though she was glued to the floor. She, who had found it so very easy to run away, now found she couldn’t move an inch. “Terribly,” she amended.

“Him, too.”

There was the doctor, looking through one of the windows beside the front door. He could see into the garden, but it was a vision that was cloudy and green. What was he seeing? Elinor’s last breath, broken into a thousand molecules? Was that what he was breathing?
Her essence, her self, the person he would miss every day, his worst patient, his nastiest neighbor, his most treasured friend.

“Stella’s out there,” he said when Jenny came to stand alongside him. When she looked, Jenny thought she saw her mother in the garden. She thought she saw Elinor crouched down, the way she’d been when she was grieving for everything she’d lost all those years ago. But it was Stella who was out there now, in the sweet, humid air. Stella who had seen snow, when instead there were only petals drifting down from the peach trees, who had seen time, when in fact there was none.

It was then Jenny found she could walk out the door. One minute she was standing there paralyzed, unable to go forward, the next she was on the porch. The wisteria was blooming, a twisted vine that scented the air. Bees droned, lazy, hypnotized by the wine-purple sugar. Argus was on the step, looking out toward the road, as though he expected his mistress to arrive any time. Jenny patted the old dog’s head, then went across the lawn. On her way, she could hear the dog padding after her. She could hear the chatter of their neighbors’ voices rising from within the house and the call of a cardinal in the woods. The bees had moved on from the wisteria to the laurel.

People used to believe that a spot of sugar placed in a baby’s mouth would bring about a sweet life, but some children couldn’t be force-fed; they had to make their own luck. These were the children who were forced to eat acorns and lily roots rather than sweets, they were fed by wild birds and had to be satisfied with liberty tea, made from loosestrife, or hyperion tea made from raspberry leaves. They had to make due with what they had.

Stella came over directly when she saw the metal canister that her mother carried. The garden gate shut behind her and she could hear the lock click shut. She had combed her hair back and a line of her natural color showed through. Star light, star bright. She had
cried all night, so much so that her eyes hurt. Jimmy Elliot had sat beside her out by the monument.
This is what loving someone does
, Stella had told him.
Run away
, she’d advised. But the milk moon was above them, the one that made everything grow, like it or not, and Jimmy Elliot had remained where he was.

Later, when he walked Stella home, she had found a peach stone, left behind by a blackbird, right there on the road. She snatched it up, and once the stone was in her pocket, she felt some comfort. It was not every day you found something worth keeping, a token that could remind a person of what she had and what she’d lost and what was yet to come. Stella slept with the peach stone under her pillow. She dreamed it had fallen from a tree that was washed ashore when the old ship the
Good Duck
went down in the harbor, the day when the whole town smelled of peaches. She dreamed a girl in love had thrown it on the road after all her wishes had come true and a hundred trees had grown from that single stone. She dreamed her grandmother looked up and saw falling peach snow, so quiet it was nothing like a storm, so fragrant it could make a grown man cry.

Elinor had left Stella everything she had, enough for college, and for medical school if that was her choice. But the house, she had left to her daughter. Jenny. Henry Elliot had handed Jenny the deed to Cake House on the evening of her mother’s death, made out and witnessed the year that Jenny had run away. The house had been hers all along. It was a house she didn’t want, one she despised, the model of which was now being used as a dollhouse by a little girl in Medford, Massachusetts, who thought it to be the most beautiful house she had ever seen. House of windows and of wedding cakes, of pain that was never felt and of sleepless nights, of bird’s-nest puddings, of invisible ink, of arrowheads, of laurel that was taller than any other in the Commonwealth, of bees that would never sting.

Jenny had thought they would scatter Elinor’s ashes in the rose
garden, but at the last moment, that had seemed wrong. Instead, they went into the woods. Argus followed them through the hedges as they went toward the Table and Chairs, past the lilacs, past the washing shed where Rebecca’s portrait was still hidden behind the bricks. It was the time of year when the yellow warblers returned, when Baltimore orioles appeared once more, when one creature after another returned to Massachusetts, no matter how dark the woods might be. The spring azure butterflies, the dragonflies and damselflies, the wood thrush, the hummingbirds, tiny, but so territorial they would fight to the death to keep their home safe from trespass. Matt had arranged to have Rebecca’s memorial bell on the common sounded, for the first time, and on this afternoon the pealing rose above the village, the way wind rises and then fans out, over houses and steeples, farms and shopping centers. The ringing reached farther than anyone would have imagined, all the way to North Arthur and Monroe, to Essex and Peabody. There were people walking down Beacon Street in Boston who swore they heard the sound of a bell on that day. In the Public Garden, children on the swan boats reached out as if to catch fireflies, although there was nothing but an echo which flew about in the air.

Jenny and Stella stepped carefully over the lady’s slipper orchids that grew up through the pine bark and mulch. They walked past pitcher plants and trout lilies until they came to the place of the woods where it was always dark, where people in this part of the Commonwealth vowed there were wild roses, the sort that disappeared if viewed by the human eye. They followed the dog, who seemed intent on a particular path. It was not an easy route, but it wasn’t impossible. Here, where there were thorn apples and water hemlock, was the very spot where Rebecca Sparrow was said to have appeared, beyond the rock formation of the Table and Chairs. Years from now local people would tell anyone willing to listen that blue flowers bloomed in this area year-round. They would insist
that bees could be heard droning even on days when there was snow and ice. Close your eyes and listen, such people advised, then walk twenty paces farther than you thought necessary. Just when you’re certain you’ve lost your way completely, you’ll be there. Open your eyes.