The Why of Things: A Novel (34 page)

All opt to get into their wet suits later, and after each has gathered his gear, they follow Dave down the path through the trees. No one speaks, and it seems to Anders almost eerily still, silent but for the pattering of rain on the canopy and the rustle of shrubbery and undergrowth brushed by a leg. He listens for a white noise he may be missing—birdsong or the buzz of insects—but the birds and bugs are silent, too.

By the time they reach the shoreline, the rain has fully stopped, and Anders finds himself wishing that it had not; he is sweating under the weight of all his gear, and would welcome the cooling effect of rain against his skin. He sets his gear down on the rocks, which descend in sloping shelves toward the water. Here is a jagged union between land and sea, Anders thinks, when compared to their tidy meeting at the beach, or the symbiotic interweave of river and marsh. The last rocky ledge ends about three feet above the waves, which roil and froth beneath, menacing and gray, sending up great sprays of foam each time they crash against the shore.

“Are you kidding me?” Caroline says in disbelief.

“I told you guys,” Dave says. “It’s a toughie, but trust me, it’s not as bad as it looks. I’m confident in you guys. You’ll be fine.”

“I get it that we have to giant-stride in,” Pete says. “But how exactly do we get out?”

Dave points. “Over there,” he says. “There’s a rock with a good foothold just under the surface. You can’t see it today—the tide’s super high because of the moon.”

Anders looks uncertainly in that direction, but all he can see are waves hurling themselves against the rocks. “Is it always this rough?” he asks.

“It’s generally on the rougher side,” Dave allows. “But it doesn’t make any difference once you’re submerged, right?”

Anders raises his eyebrows in response, the words of Longfellow’s poem repeating in his head:
Like a sheeted ghost, the vessel swept tow’rds the reef of Norman’s Woe . . .

*  *  *

W
HEN
the rain lets up, Eve decides to ride into town to pick up the film she and her father dropped off yesterday on the way home from Rowley—both the roll she took, and the rolls she found. She goes up to her mother’s study for a pen and paper, scrawls a quick note explaining where she’s gone. She is just putting the pen back into the mug on her mother’s desk when the open spiral notebook beside the dismantled typewriter catches her eye. It is, of course, the word
quarry
that draws her attention. She glances over her shoulder toward the doorway, even though she knows she is alone in the house, and pulls the notebook toward her; she cannot help herself.

They stand at the quarry’s edge: Catherine, Jake, and their youngest girls, Claire and Genevieve, who will not go to bed. The water below them is black and looks thick as tar; reflections of light from the house are wavering rectangles
on its surface: window, window, door. Now and then, debris will bob through the light. An empty beer can. A flip-flop. A plastic bag.

Eve blinks, wide-eyed, and sits down to read further, though of course it is all familiar—it is almost exactly an account of the night they arrived. Of course, it is not exact—Claire does not, in her mother’s account, hide from a carload of teenagers in the shadow of a tree, nor does she find three cigarettes by the side of the road. But Eve can recognize in Claire much of herself—her desperation to know what happened, her outrage at the authorities’ lack of concern. And the character that is her mother—Eve didn’t realize how much her mother actually cared. She’d mistaken her mother’s stoicism for indifference, and beyond the fact that this Catherine character does seem to care, the very fact that her mother is writing this story at all belies any seeming lack of interest.

The writing stops after several pages, at the end of the night; on the opposite page, her mother has jotted down some notes under the heading Chapter 2. Eve reads these curiously, wondering how her mother intends to go on.
EF getting phone call that JF is dead. Or does someone have to tell her? Brother? Same house as on Magnolia, green, dark, etc., Hopper painting. How does she react?

Eve turns the page, hoping that her mother has made more notes on the other side, but the rest of the pages in the notebook are blank. Eve slumps back in the chair, amazed. Obviously, JF is James Favazza, but EF—who would that be? His mother, she’d assume, though there were so many surviving family members listed in the obituary that she doesn’t remember them all by name. She gets up and goes down the hallway to her bedroom, where she pulls James’ obituary from her bedside drawer.

James Favazza, 27, of Gloucester, died unexpectedly on Friday evening. He was born in Gloucester on Feb. 3, 1983, son of Elizabeth Favazza of Gloucester and the late Gordon Favazza. He attended Gloucester High School. James was employed at Gorton’s Fish Company in Gloucester. James was a quiet, caring person and was very loyal and well liked by all of his friends and he also enjoyed bowling. He loved his family very much and will be missed by all who knew him. He is survived by his mother, Elizabeth Favazza; two older sisters, Benedetta “Bunny” Favazza of Quincy and Jocelyn Favazza Trupiano and her husband, George Trupiano, also of Quincy; and one younger brother, Billy Favazza, of Gloucester.

Arrangements: His funeral Mass will be held at St. Ann’s Church on Wednesday, June 26, at 11 a.m. Relatives and friends are cordially invited to attend. Visiting hours will be held at the Greely Funeral Home, 212 Washington Street, Gloucester, on Tuesday from 5 to 7 p.m. In lieu of flowers, contributions can be made to the family, c/o Elizabeth Favazza, 932 Magnolia Street, Gloucester, MA 01930.

So EF
is
the mother, and the house on Magnolia Street hers. Eve suddenly recognizes how little thought or attention she’s given to the family James left behind, as fixated as she’s been on trying to understand how his death actually occurred, but her mother’s musings have made her realize that there is also what happened to Elizabeth, the mother, and to Bunny, and to Jocelyn, and to Billy, who all have stories of their own, too—and so, for that matter, do her mother, and her father, and even Eloise. These are utterly exhausting realizations, and larger than her mind right now has room for.

Eve folds the obituary, tucks it back into the drawer, and takes the note for her mother downstairs to the kitchen.

*  *  *

J
OAN
returns to the house not long after Eve has left for town. She sets the flowers from the florist on the table beside Eve’s note, and then she collects last week’s bouquets, which she carries a few short steps into the woods to the old compost pile. Anders does not use this compost for his garden; the pile simply came with the house, one of those things like the bust and the crystal plates and the racy books upstairs that always make Joan feel vaguely as if they are renters, that the sculptor will resume residence as soon as they have gone away for the year.

In the kitchen, she washes out three vases and then trims the stems of the iris and cornflowers. As she’s placing one of the bouquets on the dining table in the bay window of the main room, she pauses to look outside. It stopped raining while she was in the florist shop, and she wonders, as casually as she can, how the dive is going. The sky seems to be brightening, though the occasional drops of rain still strike the windowpanes like so many handfuls of pebbles, shaken by the breeze from the overhead leaves. A thinning layer of mist skims the quarry, which is swollen with rain, the rocky ledges suddenly much lower to the surface. At the water’s edge, the wine bottle and glasses from last night are still out on the table between the lawn chairs, where she and Anders left them last night to lead each other through the dark indoors and up to bed, where they came together for the first time in a long time. Joan gazes out the window, remembering, though the memory has the distant quality of a dream, less a discrete series of actions than a broader experience, almost a notion.

She slips off her sandals and goes outside to retrieve the bottle and glasses. The wet grass is cool against her feet. The air feels cooler, too, now that the rain has ended, and she wonders if it will begin to rain again, if this is a lull between storms or if the
system has passed; while the sky has indeed brightened considerably toward the west, the eastern sky looks ominous. She gathers up the glasses and the half-drunk bottle of wine, which she empties into the grass, vaguely aware of the growing sound of a car engine. The sound always fills her with a sense of expectation, even though more often than not the sound continues past their driveway down the road. This time, though, the sound gets louder, and she glances up at the eastern sky as she makes her way across the grass, wondering if its threat is indeed imminent, wondering if maybe Anders’ dive is canceled after all and he is home. The notion fills her with relief.

In the kitchen, she sets the glasses in the sink and looks out through the window above, and she is more disappointed that it is not Anders than surprised when she sees pulling up the driveway the same maroon car that has appeared here twice before, as if she’d been actively anticipating its return. She feels her heart pick up speed, though she is not necessarily afraid; her instinct is to feel more curious than threatened. She cannot see the driver through the glare of the windshield, but she remembers his scrawny appearance, his deep-set eyes and narrow features, the shadows cast by his cheekbones. Just as it has before, when the car comes near to the house it comes to an idling halt. Joan debates going out to find out what the driver wants, and she wishes that the car were at such an angle that she could see him inside and so read his expression.

She wonders again if whoever the driver is might have something to do with James Favazza’s death, even as she realizes that lately she has been seeing everything through that lens. Still. It occurs to her briefly that this young man could be a private investigator, hired by Elizabeth Favazza to inquire into all that the authorities are not, though she dismisses this possibility as unlikely, given the young man’s appearance, and given the fact
that he doesn’t simply come and knock on the door. She thinks of Eve’s theories, of the possibility of foul play. Perhaps there is some sort of evidence lying around that they have overlooked, that this young man has come back in order to retrieve. Or perhaps he, too, was here the day of the death, and left something of his own behind. Perhaps he has come up the driveway three times now in the hopes of sometime finding the driveway empty, so that he can get out and find whatever it is he might be looking for. In any case, Joan has concluded that he knows what happened here, and how, whatever role he may have played.

All of these thoughts flash through Joan’s mind in only a few seconds, during which time the car begins to back down the driveway. Joan hurries out the door, remembering her regret for not confronting the same young man the other day. “Hello!” she calls, waving. “Can I help you?” The young man gives a quick glance in Joan’s direction before returning his eyes to the driveway behind him, picking up speed instead of stopping. “Wait!” she calls. “Stop!” But he does not, and soon the car has disappeared from sight, and Joan is alone in the driveway. But this time, she does not simply stand and stare and wonder; without bothering to return to the house for her flip-flops or her purse, she gets into the car, takes the keys from the floor, and follows him, her curiosity unwilling to let him get away.

*  *  *

T
HE
waves may be irrelevant once submerged, but it is not without trepidation that Anders plunges the three feet from the rocks at Norman’s Woe into the seething waters below. Immediately, he swims away from the shore to wait for the others a few yards out, so that the waves will not toss him against the rocks, though with every large swell he finds he is swept shoreward and must swim out again. The smaller chop within the swell surprises him
again and again with facefuls of water, which blur the window of his mask, adding to the general sense of dizziness he feels in the waves. Pete, Caroline, and Dave appear to be in conversation at the water’s edge; Anders wishes, as he struggles to maintain a safe distance from the shoreline, that they would hurry up and get in.

He tries to picture what this place must look like in winter, when the
Rebecca Ann
and the
Favorite
went down, the rocks white with ice, the tide pools frozen over, the sea and sky both dark and bitter cold, as if the contrast might provide some comfort, but the accompanying images of bloated rag-doll bodies tossing in the surf has the opposite effect. Instead, he tries to forget about these things, though the more he tries to banish them from his mind, the more insistent they become. Finally, he sees Pete enter the water with a splash. He swims competently in Anders’ direction and removes his mouthpiece. “Caroline’s a little freaked out,” he explains. “But she’s coming. She’s fine.”

And in a moment, Caroline does indeed leap into the water, followed shortly by Dave, and the two swim toward where Pete and Anders are waiting. Dave removes his mouthpiece. “All right,” he says. “We’re going to swim out a little bit farther, right around where that lobster pot is out there, and then we’ll descend. Everyone good?” The three nod, and then they all swim in the indicated direction, where Dave gives the signal to deflate their BCDs.

*  *  *

I
N
the time since she first noticed the bar from the window table at George’s, it has not ceased to amaze Eve that Vic’s is so central in town, that she has been oblivious to it for the years and years she’s gone to the car wash, the grocery store, Salah’s, George’s, the CVS. And yet, there it is. After she has picked up her film, she pauses on her way out of the pharmacy and looks over at the bar,
which sits squat and solid and nearly facelike, its windows like glassy eyes on either side of the nose of a door. She’d eyed it yesterday when she and her father dropped the film off on the way home from the junkyard, though she hadn’t dared suggest that they go check it out, and it had been crowded besides, a group of smokers banished to the curb, music emantating from within. But now, still late morning, Vic’s appears to be closed; the two opposing doors in the entryway are shut, and the beer signs in the windows are colorless shadows of their glowing, neon selves. The sidewalk is empty but for a red paper Coke cup with a plastic lid and straw, which rolls gently across the concrete in the breeze.