The Why of Things: A Novel (10 page)

“What a surprise,” Anders says.

Joan looks up at the clock and then puts her hand on Eloise’s head. “Ready, Freddy?”

Eloise looks at the floor, seeming a bit to lose her resolve. “I guess,” she says.

Joan goes to the door and holds it open. Eloise looks at her father. “Aren’t you going to camp?” she asks.

“My camp doesn’t start for a little while,” he explains. This is true; whether or not he decides in the end to go, the diving class doesn’t start until eleven.

Eloise’s face falls. “Oh,” she says. She looks toward her mother. “Mom, I really don’t know if I want to go!”

“It’s going to be fun!” Joan says with forced brightness. “It’s okay to be nervous, but you’ll have a great time.”

Eloise lets her shoulders slump.

“Hey,” Anders says. “Look, I’ll leave at the same time as you guys, if it’ll make you feel better.” He shrugs. “I’ll just get there a little early, it’s no big deal. But we can all go off to camp together this way.”

Eloise seems to hesitate, but she doesn’t argue.

“Does that sound like a good plan?” Joan asks from the doorway.

Eloise nods, and Anders extends his hand to her, to walk together to the door. Just as they are about to step through the threshold, Eloise stops short, looks at her father incredulously. “Your
things
, Dad,” she says.

Anders bats his brow with a palm. “Of course!” he says. “Silly me.”

He returns to the table to get his towel and trunks where Eloise has laid them, then follows his wife and daughter outside, where he finds them waiting for him beside the station wagon. “Well,” he says. He bends down to give his daughter a kiss. “Have fun,” he instructs.

“You have fun, too,” she says. “Are you still nervous?”

“A little bit,” he says. “But I’m looking forward to it, too.”

He stands and leans in to give his wife a kiss. “Bye,” he says. Joan gives his hand a squeeze, winks again. Then Anders walks down the driveway to the Buick, which is parked behind the station wagon, blocking it in. He’ll go to the nursery, he decides, and find out what can be done about his roses.

He has just put his trunks and towel into the backseat and
found the old sunglasses he keeps in the glove box when Eloise appears at his door.

“Here,” she says. She holds out her brownie. Saran Wrap glistens in the sun. “In case the food is gross.”

Anders takes a breath; Eloise may as well have wrapped her little fist around his heart. “Keep your brownie,” he says. “You’ll be hungry, and I’m sure the food will be fine.”

“No, Dad, take it!” Eloise insists, and Anders understands that there will be no fighting her.

“Thank you, sweetheart,” he says. He takes the brownie and puts it on the seat beside him. “That’s very generous of you.”

Eloise runs back to the station wagon, and Anders backs the Buick down the drive to a spot where he can turn around. When he glances in the rearview mirror, Joan and Eloise are two small figures waving in the glass. Anders raises his own hand in response as he drives away, and holds it up until he rounds a bend in the drive and has passed out of sight.

*  *  *

A little more than an hour after she has left the house, Eve arrives in Essex, a small strip of a town one over from Gloucester, with marsh on either side. She lets her bike coast into the town, breathing heavily. There are more than thirty antique stores in Essex, and three clam shacks, and while ordinarily during a summer day the town is crowded with antiquers and tourists waiting in endless lines for fried clams, it’s early enough in the morning that things are still quiet, the causeway empty of traffic, except for the occasional car and a produce truck making a delivery. A pair of dogs trot purposefully down the street.

Eve pulls her bike up outside a donut shop along the causeway; though she ate before she left the house, she is hungry again, and she still has miles to go. She buys two donuts, one chocolate
honey-dipped and one Boston cream, which she eats sitting atop one of several picnic tables beside a low-slung clam shack looking out over the marsh. The restaurant won’t open for a few more hours, but the smell of fried food mixes with the sulfurous odor of low tide. Eve gazes out at the view as she eats, following the twists of the tidal river through marsh grass to where it meets the bay, across which she can just make out the contours of Cape Ann. She finds the water tower on the horizon and uses this to approximate just about where their own house lies. She imagines her family there having a breakfast of their own, Joan and Anders and Eloise at the kitchen table, and she is struck, suddenly, by a strange and surprising pang of loneliness.

She frowns as she reaches into her pocket for James Favazza’s obituary, which she clipped from yesterday’s paper. It is disappointingly sparse, and although Eve has read it enough times that she practically knows it by heart, she scans it again anyway.

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.

There is a photograph of James Favazza beside the text, about the size of a postage stamp. Eve has studied this carefully. It is cropped so that you can only see his face, but she can tell by the horizontal slats behind him that he is standing in front of someone’s house. He is looking directly at the camera, and it seems to Eve that he was just about to speak when the shutter clicked; his mouth is parted, and his eyes are animated, focused, his neck craned slightly forward. He is wearing glasses, too—rectangular glasses with dark rims—and the shadows they cast across his cheek suggest that the sun was directly overhead. Eve wonders if he wore glasses all the time, and if they are now somewhere on the quarry floor.

She takes her second donut from its bag and eats it slowly, breaking off small bits at a time. She wonders what L. Stephens will be able to tell her about James Favazza. She wonders if he will be distraught or shocked at the sight of the bag, and whether or not he knew that his cooler bag was in the truck at all. She wonders how much time L. Stephens spent with James Favazza in that very truck that would be James Favazza’s grave, drinking beers from the cooler bag propped open on the seat between them.

A seagull coasts in from over the marsh and settles in the dirt only yards away from where Eve sits. She breaks off a piece of her donut and pretends to toss it in the bird’s direction. The bird starts and skitters to snatch up the scrap, but finds nothing there.

“Greedy,” Eve says, putting the piece of donut into her own mouth. Instantly she feels guilty. She swallows, looks at the bird. “Fine,” she says, tossing a crumb, which the seagull throws down
its gullet in a single gulp. Eve narrows her eyes. “You didn’t even savor that, you jerk.”

The bird regards her closely, waiting for more, its unblinking yellow eyes hard and glassy, like marbles set into its skull. Eve looks back, and for just a fraction of a second she thinks of Sophie, as if her sister might somehow inhabit the bird. But she quashes the thought before she’s even allowed it to really occur; it’s a seagull before her, greedy and bold, nothing more. She puts the last of the donut into her mouth and lunges at the bird, arms raised; it takes to the air, cawing, and Eve stands at the edge of the marsh, watching as it flies away.

*  *  *

A
NDERS
drives unhurriedly in the direction of the nursery, mesmerized by the flickering of sunlight through the canopy of trees overhead, splotches of it flashing like so many Rorschach inkblots across the car hood as he goes. He thinks of the article in the magazine on Sophie’s desk that he read this morning, which for some reason he cannot get out of his head. It was about the Tunguska event of 1908, when some kind of meteor or comet crashed above Siberia. Anders had never heard of this event before, but something about it struck him as he read, and as he thinks about it now. The force of the explosion washed over the land like a giant roaring wave of heat, knocking people off their feet and breaking windows in villages hundreds of miles away. In the days that followed, the night skies glowed so brightly that people as far away as London could read the newspaper by their light. If it had happened earlier or later, the magazine said, with the world at any other point on its axis, it could have been a disaster. New York or London could have been obliterated. If it had happened over the ocean, it would have made tidal waves big enough to destroy coastlines. It could
have been the worst disaster in human history, but humanity was spared; what boggles Anders’ mind is that so few people know about it.

The nursery is a few miles down the main road and another half mile up a back road like their own. Anders follows the road to where it dead-ends at a dirt lot among the trees. He parks in the shade at the edge of the lot, looks up at the trees above him, silhouetted starkly against the sky. Trees, he thinks, were the main casualty of the whole event, eighty million of them toppled, fanning out in the shape of a butterfly. In the magazine, there were pictures of the trees, grainy old sepia images of them scattered like pickup sticks. What struck Anders most were the trees at ground zero; though their limbs and bark had been stripped away, they were still standing, though it seemed to him that the trees were not so much resolute as uncertain which way they should fall.

The trees now overhead sway dizzyingly against the clouds, and Anders drops his gaze, blinks, returns his attention to the task at hand. On one side of the lot where he has parked is the gate to Bay View Auto Recycling, an odd junkyard of a place set a ways back out of sight in the woods; on the other side is the nursery, a warehouse-type structure with a large greenhouse attached to the back. Anders parks in the shade at the edge of the lot, and walks toward the nursery through the cloud of dust kicked up by his arrival.

The bells on the door jangle behind him as he enters, the sound loud in the relative silence of the place. Shovels, trowels, spades, and bulb planters hang along one wall. Underneath these, coiled hoses are neatly piled. A flotilla of wheelbarrows is arranged in one corner of the room, near a large rack of seed packets. There’s no sign of any person. Anders glances at his watch, thinking that the nursery might not yet be open, but it is well after nine. He
walks softly through the room to the back, where a door gives onto the greenhouse. Anders cups a hand to the glass, looking in, and though he sees nobody there among the rows of plants, either, he steps inside.

To enter into the greenhouse is to enter a different atmosphere. It is warm and moist, and the mingling smells of earth and fertilizer permeate the air, though when Anders bends close to a lily, he is overwhelmed by its sweet scent. He gazes into the single open blossom. A deep, flecked pink stains each petal at its center, fading toward a crisp white edge. Glowing orange anthers, powdery with pollen, tremble at the ends of delicate filaments. Four other flowers on the plant have not yet bloomed; they rise from the stalk like hands held together in prayer. Anders’ mother always said that if anything could persuade her there was a God, it would be the design of flowers, and looking at this lily now, Anders thinks that it maybe could persuade him, too, if anything at this point could. Perhaps, he thinks, half joking, instead of scuba diving he should look into some gardening classes—he might have a better chance at finding the solace Joan’s hoping for.

“Can I help you?”

Anders looks up. A man has come in from outside, where endless trays of perennials sit out on tables in the shade. His hands and even his bare forearms are thoroughly stained with dirt. He scratches his cheek, which then has dirt on it, too. Anders recognizes the man as the nursery owner, the same person who sold him his roses nearly a decade ago, though he hasn’t changed over the years; it would be impossible, Anders thinks, for the lines in his face to deepen, his hair to grow more white. But while he is familiar to Anders, Anders doubts if he himself would be familiar to the man, being just one of so many customers.

“Yes,” Anders says. “I’m having some trouble with my roses. They seem to be losing their leaves.”

“Are they blooming?”

“Yes, they’re blooming. But maybe not quite as well as usual. And I noticed dark splotches on the leaves that haven’t fallen.”

“Ah. Sounds like black spot,” the man says matter-of-factly.

“Black spot?”

“It’s a fungus. Diplocarpon rosae.”

“Oh.” This means nothing to Anders.

“When did you begin to notice the defoliation?”

“This weekend, but that’s only because we just arrived here for the summer. So I don’t know how long it’s been happening.”

The man scratches his head. “If they’re still blooming, that’s a good thing. Heavy leaf shed will interfere with flower production. But all the rain won’t help.”

“What can I do?”

“Black spot’s a toughie. Common enough, but pretty damaging. The fallen leaves carry the fungus, and the spores get to the healthy leaves via wind and rain. Very contagious, especially with the rain we’ve been having, as I said. But you can give fungicide a try.”

Anders nods. “Whatever I have to do. You’re sure it’s black spot?”

“Sounds like it. Could also possibly be Cercospora leaf spot, but around here it’s not likely. And you’d do the same for that. Fungicide.” The man gestures toward the front room of the nursery. “I’ve got what you need in the store.”