The Why of Things: A Novel (14 page)

Saul stands. “Hey, Eloise!” he says.

Eloise slows as she approaches him, suddenly bashful, and looks over her shoulder toward her mother, who is following her across the lawn.

“Saul,” Joan says. She is glad to see him, as inevitably painful
as it is. Saul was the only boy that Sophie was ever involved with, and, as with everything Sophie was involved with, the involvement was thorough—four years at least, Joan thinks, and, knowing Sophie, it probably would have been forever. She forces a smile and gives Saul a hug. “It’s good to see you.” She means it.

“Hey, Mrs. Jacobs,” he says.

“How are you?”

Saul nods. “I’m doing okay. I hope you don’t mind me just dropping in. I bumped into Eve, and she said to stop by.” He gestures toward a large cooler he’s left on the porch. “I brought some lobsters,” he says.

“Lobsters! Saul!”

“I hauled them this morning.”

“Well you’ve got to let me pay you for them,” Joan insists.

“Nah, they’re for you. Really.”

Joan smiles. “Thank you, Saul. You’re too generous.”

“It’s no problem.”

“Look at what I found,” Eloise says. She solemnly extends her bag, holding it open so that Saul can see what’s inside. “A dead chipmunk.”

“Oh, no! What happened to it?”

Eloise shrugs. “I don’t know. I found it behind a shrub. I think it’s a baby. And this weekend I found a dead baby seagull.”

Joan puts her hand on Eloise’s head. “We seem to be starting a small animal graveyard.” She frowns and looks up at the sky. “And we should probably get that buried sooner rather than later, speaking of. It looks to me like it’s about to rain.”

Saul offers to get a shovel from the garage while Joan brings Eloise’s life jacket and the wine she’s bought from the liquor store into the house, and then the three of them together walk a short
distance into the trees behind the house, where the seagull’s grave is marked by a couple of sticks lashed together into the shape of a cross and stuck into the ground.

Saul thrusts the head of the shovel into the earth.

“It’s kind of rocky,” Eloise says. “This weekend Daddy had to try four places because rocks kept getting in the way.”

Saul heaves a shovelful of soggy leaves and dirt aside. “So far so good,” he says, ramming the shovel into the earth again. “So where’d you find the seagull?” he asks Eloise as he digs.

“The beach. It was all tangled up in fishing wire.”

“That’s sad.”

“I know. And you know what else?”

“What else?”

“A car drove into our quarry. And there was a body inside.”

Saul straightens and stands the shovel upright in the dirt. He draws the back of his arm across his brow. “Yes,” he says. “I heard that.” He glances at Joan, but he doesn’t ask what happened, and Joan is grateful. Saul nods at the grave he’s dug. “I think that should do it.”

Eloise kneels down and gently places the chipmunk into the ground. “Rest in peace, chipmunk,” she says. “I hope you had a very good life and died of natural causes and didn’t get attacked by a cat or something scary.” She looks up at Saul and nods. “Okay,” she says.

Saul dumps a shovelful of dirt on top of the creature, and another, and he has just about finished filling the grave when the same gray dog from earlier appears from out of the woods, its collar jingling as it trots along.

“A dog!” Eloise cries. The dog runs up to Eloise, who unreservedly lets it lick her face, the nub of its tail twitching with excitement.

The dog turns in circles and then goes to Saul. He squats down to say hello, prompting the thing to throw itself belly-up on the ground for a rub. Saul obliges. Gravity pulls away the skin around the dog’s mouth, exposing a jagged set of teeth.

“It’s smiling,” Eloise says. And then her face clouds over. “Do you think it’s lost?”

“Oh, I don’t think so,” Joan says. “He was hanging around here earlier. I think he must live in the neighborhood.”

“He’s got a collar,” Saul says, reaching for the tag attached. “His name is Henry.” He flips the tag over. “No address, though.”

“Is there a number?” Eloise asks.

“There is a number,” Saul says.

“Do you think we should call it?” Eloise asks.

“I don’t think we need to,” Joan says. “I bet he’ll take himself home.”

“But what if he’s lost?”

“Let’s give it a little while and see what happens,” Joan says, feeling on her shoulders the first drops of rain.

*  *  *

A
NDERS
and Eve pull off the road only miles from home to crank the roof up on the Buick; as much of a chore as it is, Anders doesn’t want to risk soaking the leather seats. They get the roof up just in the nick of time and drive the final stretch of road home beneath its canvas dome, the wipers thwumping across the windshield’s glass. When they have pulled into the driveway, Anders turns the engine off, but he doesn’t get out of the car. Eve stays where she is beside him, waiting. Raindrops batter the roof, and water cascades in sheets down the windshield.

Anders turns to face his daughter. “I won’t mention Georgetown to your mother,” he says, “
if
you promise never to do something like that again. No leaving Cape Ann, unless you let
us know first. And unless you bring your phone. You have it for a reason.”

“Okay,” Eve says dully. Unlike most teenagers, Eve can rarely be bothered with her phone.

“
And
, from now on, I want you to wear a helmet.”

Eve doesn’t respond.

“Okay?”

“I haven’t worn a helmet since I was, like, ten.”

“Eve.”

“Fine.”

“I mean it.”

“Fine, okay, I will.”

Anders peers out the window. “Someone’s here,” he says, noticing a car parked beside the station wagon.

Eve follows her father’s gaze, and feels her pulse give an excited rush. “It’s Saul!” she says.

She grips the door handle, looking at her father for approval. “Can I?”

Anders nods. Eve gets out of the car and darts through the rain to the house. She sees through the window that her mother is in the kitchen, but she doesn’t feel like answering questions, and so she goes around to the old wooden door that leads into the main room. It is a door they hardly ever use, made of thick boards canyoned with weathered grooves. Eve tries the heavy brass door handle, but it doesn’t budge. She doesn’t bother knocking, knowing that the rap of her knuckle would never be heard through the wood, and instead goes around to the paned bay window at the front of the house. She is no longer hurrying; by now she has surrendered to the rain, which has pasted her shirt to her back and shoulders. She cups her eyes to the windowpane and peers inside, thinking she’ll tap on the glass to get somebody’s attention.

She sees Saul and Eloise through the glass, sitting on the floor beside a dog she figures must be Saul’s. They are playing a card game—Spit, it looks like, from the speed and intensity with which they’re handling the cards. Saul is cross-legged and hunched forward, flipping his cards over with calm determination. Eloise is sitting on her heels, and unlike Saul’s neat piles of cards, hers are scattered and haphazard, tossed in reckless haste. Eve watches them play until they come to the end of the hand, and Eloise slaps a pile; Saul has let her win.

Outside, Eve blinks. Rain has started to trickle down her back and into her eyes, beading on her lashes. She feels suddenly exhausted, flooded with a dual sense of loss and inadequacy, but mostly she is overcome by the piercing understanding that has washed over her again and again in the past months, with decreasing frequency but no less force, that things will never be the same. The most unexpected things do this to her, and always take her by surprise: a song on the radio, the smell of pine needles or split pea soup, the sight of icicles hanging from the gutter, or of Saul and Eloise playing cards on the floor, where Sophie should be, too. Instead of tapping on the glass, Eve turns away from the window and walks to the edge of the quarry, to that highest ledge. Raindrops bounce on the dimpled surface of the water, relentless and unslanting.

Eve stands at the quarry’s edge and squints through the rain, staring into the endless depths, wondering, if her mother is right and it was suicide, what darkness could ever lead someone to want to be submerged in them forever, just as she’s stood on the tracks in Maryland on the small back road where Sophie drove her car into the path of that train, trying to understand. The tracks run along a ridge, like a giant version of the mole tunnels that ravage their yard each spring, and coarse clumps of grass push their way through the gray stones on either side. The tracks
themselves are old rusted steel; they stain your fingers brown if you touch them, and some of the wooden beams over which they run are also old enough that in places the wood is so soft with rot it sinks beneath a foot. Their father many times took her and Sophie as young girls to the tracks where they pass through downtown to set down pennies and nickels that after a train had blasted past were thin, oblong disks, George and Abe’s faces flattened out of recognition. Eve and Sophie had always stood halfway behind their father as the train approached, hands over their ears to block the sound of its shrill horn, and even the yards away their father kept them from it they could feel the breeze of its passing.

Since October, Eve has visited the tracks, though not always the very spot where Sophie died, at hours when she knows a train will come, and tried to imagine what her sister had been thinking. She wishes she could think it was an accident, some sort of a mistake, but her sister was too careful; she didn’t do anything she didn’t mean to do. And so Eve’s wondered: Had Sophie gone there with a purpose, a plan, and driven her beloved old VW Fox onto the tracks without a second thought? Or had she driven to that small back road and idled yards away from the crossing, uncertain of whether she would really do this thing? Had she gone there before, and turned away, returned to the family as if they all hadn’t just escaped the unthinkable? Had she been afraid? Had she sat stiffly at the tracks’ edge as the train approached, at first nothing more than a vibration in the steel, and then a distant whistle, and then a black thing growing like dread on the horizon? Eve has stood there by the tracks and let those trains blow by, and she has watched them speed away until they are nothing more than silent specks of smoke in the distance, and she cannot understand what the person she thought she understood best in the world had been thinking. All that Sophie said in the note she
left behind was that she loved them, and that she was sorry. But sorry isn’t good enough for Eve; sorry isn’t
why
.

Eve lifts a rock from the quarry’s edge and hurls it into the water, watches as the ripples spread until they are indistinguishable from the ripples of the rain.

*  *  *

A
NDERS
brings Eve’s bike from the Buick to the garage before going into the house. He hurries through the rain with the bike over his shoulder and steps into the cavernous shadows of the garage, and when he goes to stand it up he finally understands why his daughter always leaves it on its side: the kickstand is broken. He leans the bike against a worktable and squats down to examine the thing, which he finds isn’t actually broken, but stuck in the up position, thoroughly rusted into place. Anders stands up, thinking that he’ll come out and fix it later, after he’s gone inside and greeted Joan, but at the sight of Saul’s car in the driveway, he hesitates, remembering his encounter with Josie Saunders this morning.

Instead of going inside, he turns back into the garage and finds a can of WD-40 on a shelf among other cans of paint and primer and various types of cleaning fluid that have been there for who knows how many years. After he has successfully lubricated the kickstand so that it goes down, he decides that while he’s at it he’ll lube the chain. And then he notices that the tires of the bike could use some air, and he has just affixed the nozzle of the pump to the valve on the rear tire when he hears the muttering of a car engine. He looks up and sees through the garage door Saul behind the wheel of his car. Anders lifts a hand in salute, feeling caught, only realizing after Saul has started to carefully back his car down the drive that he is hidden in shadow and can’t, after all, be seen. He lowers his hand, watches as Saul’s car disappears into the trees.

*  *  *

E
VE
is furious with herself for not having come in sooner when she finally does enter the house and discovers that Saul has left. She is also deeply disappointed—and increasingly unsettled—by her encounter with L. Stephens, exhausted by her trip to Georgetown, and generally so out of sorts that at dinnertime she can hardly even enjoy her lobster, and this only heightens her annoyance, because she loves lobster.

She takes herself to bed early, ready for today to be over, but she cannot fall asleep; her mind won’t stop racing. Again and again she goes over the details of her meeting with Larry Stephens, trying to remember every word he uttered, every expression that passed across his face. Looking back, she is certain that she found the right man, and the cooler bag was without a doubt his. He was clearly nervous, she thinks. The way he paused at the top of the porch stairs before coming down onto the lawn—there was something to that hesitation. The way he said he “guessed” the cooler bag was his, as if he wasn’t sure whether to admit it. And the way that once he finally acknowledged that it might be, he didn’t move to take it right away. It was as if he was afraid to touch the thing. And then, once she’d mentioned James Favazza’s name, he was back to denying ownership again. Eve doesn’t buy it for a minute, now that she really thinks about it; the bag, after all, was clearly marked with his name. Nor does she believe for a minute that he doesn’t know who James Favazza is, if his cooler bag was in James Favazza’s truck. What she can’t understand is why he would deny it, unless he has something to hide. Unless he was there the day that James Favazza died. Was he a murderous foe instead of the friend she’d initially imagined him to be? That must be it, she decides. Larry Stephens must have played a role in James Favazza’s death. That would explain everything—
the cooler bag with his name in James’ truck, his strange reaction when he saw Eve with the bag. He even
looks
like the murdering type, with that badass scar—and living at the end of that creepy street . . .