The Why of Things: A Novel (11 page)

Anders steps aside to let the man pass and follows him back into the store, where he crouches down before a shelf of bottles and sprays.

“You could do chlorothalonil,” the man says, taking a bottle from the shelf. He pats at his pocket for a pair of glasses, which he holds above the writing on the bottle like a magnifying glass, rather than putting them on. “It’s a general garden fungicide, but
pretty potent. Or,” he says, taking another bottle from the shelf, “you could do propiconazol, which is a systemic fungicide.”

The man looks up, questioningly.

Anders shrugs. “Whatever you think is best.”

“Personally, I’d go with the propiconazol.” He stands up; Anders can hear his knee pop as he rises. “It’ll cost you a little more, but if you want to beat this thing.”

“I do,” Anders says. It makes his heart fall to consider that he might
not
be able to beat this thing.

The man brings the bottle to the register. Anders follows.

“You want to mix two tablespoons per gallon of water, and apply it to the leaves every five to seven days. Evening’s best; otherwise on a hot, sunny day it’ll burn the rose foliage.”

As Anders pays the man, the bells on the door jangle. The man glances up, over Anders’ shoulder. “You’re late,” he says.

“I’m so sorry, Nestor!” a girl’s voice says. “I couldn’t get my car to start, so I had to bike! I swear it won’t happen again.”

The man—Nestor—cocks an eyebrow. “Hope not. I’m understaffed as it is.” He puts the fungicide into a plastic bag, which he hands to Anders. “Here you go. Good luck.”

“Thank you,” Anders says. He begins to walk to the door, where the girl is busy tying an apron around her waist. She is a featureless shape against the bright sky outside, so Anders doesn’t recognize her, at first. But she says his name as he approaches.

“Mr. Jacobs,” she says.

It is Josie Saunders, one of Sophie’s friends. Anders is caught off guard, and feels himself wince at the sight of her; he hadn’t been prepared for such an encounter.

“Josie,” he says, smiling weakly, though he feels utterly unmoored. He clears his throat. “I didn’t know you worked here.”

“I just started,” she says. “It’s only my second week.”

“That’s great.”

“Did you guys just get up here?”

“Friday.”

Josie nods. She completes the knot on the apron. “Well, welcome.”

“Thank you.” Anders tries to smile again, thinking that it would be natural next for him ask after her brother, her parents, her year, but that then it would be natural for her to reciprocate, which would inevitably lead to their having to acknowledge the unspoken thing obviously looming between them, and he’s not sure he has it in him. But almost before this familiar mental calculus is even complete, before he has had a chance to turn for the door, Josie speaks.

“I’m really sorry about what happened,” she says. She looks him directly in the eye, and her expression is more serious than sad or sympathetic, for which Anders is grateful; he is never sure what to do with pity.

He nods at her, and instead of giving the customary thanks, “Yeah,” he says. “Me, too.”

*  *  *

W
HEN
Joan pulls into the driveway after leaving Eloise at camp, she is surprised not to see the Buick parked there; she’d thought that Anders would have turned around a mile or so after driving off this morning and returned to the house just minutes after he’d left. She turns off the engine and sits for a moment in the driveway, puzzled and mildly disappointed that her husband isn’t home, for no good reason except that she’d expected him to be. The house looms empty before her. Beyond it, the water in the quarry glints almost teasingly in the sunlight, its surface rippled by gusts of a warm breeze, and birds chatter in the trees overhead.

She gets out of the car, taking with her the bouquets of flowers she picked up from the florist on her way home—long stalks of
pink gladiola, large-fisted peonies, sunflowers. These she brings into the kitchen, where she trims their ends and sets them into vases that she distributes around the house, carrying the final vase upstairs with her to her study, which she resolves that finally she’ll unpack, a gesture toward getting at least some writing done this summer, though the prospect makes her glum. She hadn’t bothered finishing her edits after Sophie died, just delivered the manuscript as it was, half finished. Since then she has barely touched the keyboard, unable to go on with this central part of her life even as she has urged her family to carry on with their own. More paralyzing than the lack of inspiration—nothing has seemed important or worthy enough, and writing itself a pointless exercise—is the guilt she feels over the attention she paid to her work, especially in October, when it mattered most. That the book did well only makes this feeling worse, the novel still prominently displayed in bookstore windows—mockingly, it seems to Joan, as if to remind her at what cost.

Her study is an upstairs room at the front of the house, looking out over the quarry. It is a sparsely furnished little room. Anders, she sees, has deposited her box of notebooks and her computer beside the old rotary telephone atop her desk, which is a small round table beneath the window. There is a bookshelf lined with the old books that came with the house, left behind by the sculptor who owned it before them; they are mostly pulp romances written in the sixties, from which Joan imagines the older girls have likely derived many questionable ideas about sex over the years. In the corner of the room, by the papasan chair, is a half-finished bust of a young man also left behind by the sculptor. When she looks at it, Joan always has the distinct impression that the unrealized half of his face exists already formed somewhere in the stone, and that if she just chipped away it would quite easily reveal itself.

She crosses the room to the window, where she sees a spider has woven a large and intricate web just inside the frame. It is beautiful, a shimmering silver maze of silk that Joan thinks will be a shame to have to destroy, and then she decides she won’t; there’s no spider at home, and she doesn’t mind sharing space with a web.

Suddenly, she is aware of the growing sound of crunching gravel: a car making its way up the drive. She looks toward the place where the car will soon emerge from the trees, expecting to see Anders in the Buick. But instead, it’s a car she doesn’t recognize, a maroon sedan. It slows, then stops, idling there. Joan frowns, peering down at the car; she cannot make out whoever is inside through the glare on the windshield. After about ten seconds, the car starts to back down the driveway, and then disappears again into the trees.

She stands at the window, looking intently toward the spot where the car has vanished as if waiting for it to emerge again. She feels somewhat unnerved, though she has no real reason to be. Probably someone turned into the wrong driveway accidentally. Or somebody was simply exploring the back roads of Cape Ann and wound up here. Still, it seemed to her that the car had been approaching with purpose, as if it were routine, stopping in its tracks only at the unaccustomed sight of their car in the driveway. And perhaps it
had
approached with purpose, she tells herself—perhaps the driver was scoping out the house to see whether anyone is home so that he could take a swim; in the past they have sometimes come home to discover kids making use of their quarry, and she has no doubt that people must gather here in the off-season when no one is around. It doesn’t really bother her, though perhaps it should.

The phone rings on the desk beneath her, loud and sudden, startling Joan; she feels her heart begin to race. She brings a hand
to the base of her neck and takes a deep breath, letting the phone ring once more before answering as she tries to settle herself. She clears her throat, then lifts the phone. “Hello?” she asks.

She is more relieved than she cares to admit to hear Anders’ voice on the other end of the line, though she’s not sure exactly whom or what she was expecting. “Hi,” he says.

Joan lets out an audible breath. “What’s up?”

“What’s the matter?”

“What?”

“You sound—I don’t know—is everything okay?”

“Yes, I was just . . . the phone startled me. Where are you?”

“I went to the nursery to ask about the roses, but I wanted to let you know I think I may go to the scuba class after all.”

“You
are
!” Joan says, glad for this. “Good. I can deal with the gas people, that’s no problem.”

“Oh, no, never mind, then. I forgot the gas people were coming. I’ll skip the class, I should—”

“No, no!” Joan says. “You should go. Definitely.”

“If you’re sure,” Anders says, sounding uncertain. “I guess it’s done around three, so I should be home after that.”

“We’ll be here.” Joan gazes out the window, where she can see Anders’ rose garden half in shade, his ever-growing wall behind it. “What did they say about your roses?” she asks.

She hears Anders sigh. “Eh. The guy said it’s probably black spot. Some kind of fungus. I don’t think it’s very good.”

“Is there anything you can do?”

“I got some fungicide. We’ll see.”

“Hmm.” Joan frowns. It makes her sad to think of the roses dying, not so much for the plants themselves as for the fact that Anders had planted them and cared for them and even loved them, in his way.

“Well, I’ll see you later.”

“Have fun,” Joan says.

Anders clicks his tongue. “I’ll try.”

*  *  *

T
HE
Paul J. Lydon Aquatic Center is a windowless brick building set back behind the mall in Danvers, which is only a twenty-minute drive from Gloucester, but after even only a weekend on Cape Ann feels worlds away. The sight of the building fills Anders with the same sense of dread he had when, after New Year, his father would drive him back to boarding school and they’d turn up the drive, at the end of which he could see the dark shapes of the dormitories and the library and the dining hall, those buildings that would imprison him for the months to come.

Anders gazes at the center through the windshield, listening to the Buick’s engine tick beneath the hood. He doesn’t have to be here, he understands this; it’s the brownie that’s done it, as difficult as it is for him to explain even to himself. But when he got into the car after the nursery, feeling utterly derailed from the tentative track of his day, the sight of the brownie on the seat beside him made his lungs shrink to the size of pebbles. He pictured Eloise, her arm outstretched over the car door, her face a study of stubborn concern as she offered him the brownie, and then he imagined her at camp without it, and he was overcome by a combination of guilt and love that made him want to weep. He is here, he supposes, to legitimize the gift—to earn it, as little sense as that might seem to make.

He looks at his watch; the class begins in five minutes. He reaches for his swim trunks and his towel and makes his way across the hot pavement to the building. The woman behind the reception desk points him not to the locker rooms, as he’d expected, but to a classroom off the lobby.

It is a windowless room, the walls off-white cinder block and
the floor scratched linoleum tile. Maybe a dozen plastic chairs with arm-desks attached are arranged in a circle, but only three of these are filled. A teenage girl sits in one, doodling in a notebook, her hair a dark curtain around her face. In another chair is a young man with close-cropped hair. He wears fatigues, boots, and a tight-fitting white T-shirt, which makes Anders think that he must be in the military. Finally, there is a woman about Anders’ age, which he finds comforting, given the relative youth of the other two. She smiles at Anders as he takes a seat, grimacing as the legs of his chair shriek against the tiles.

The four of them sit in silence for several minutes. A clock ticks loudly on the wall, and the fluorescent lights flicker. Anders is just beginning to think that it may well be a mistake to be here after all and that it’s not too late to leave when the door partially opens, and he hears a man’s voice calling out something to someone on the other side. There is the sound of laughter, and then the man enters the room and closes the door behind him.

“Sorry I’m late,” he says. He lifts a stack of papers into the air, as evidence, before putting the pile down on a desk at the front of the room. “The Xerox machine doesn’t like me.” He is a young man, with a short ponytail, sun-weathered skin, and bloodshot eyes, a typical outdoorsy type, reminding Anders of a ski instructor or a kayak guide. He smiles at them all broadly. “So,” he says. “I’m Dave, and I’m going to be your scuba instructor. First thing, how about let’s all introduce ourselves, so we’re not strangers.” He turns to the middle-aged woman. “Ma’am?”

“Well,” she says, sitting up straighter in her seat. “I’m Mary Alice Arnold.”

“And where are you from, Mary Alice?”

“I live in Rockport. My husband and I just moved from Maine.”

“I grew up in Portland,” Dave says. “Maine’s a great state.”

“It is a great state. Although so far we’re happy here, too.”

“Good to hear,” Dave says. “Great diving off Rockport.”

“That’s what I’ve heard,” she says. “And I left my job when we moved, so I’ve got lots of time on my hands.”

Anders scratches his forehead, wishing Dave would just get started; this is exactly the type of thing he had dreaded, preferring anonymity to this sort of forced camaraderie.

The teenage girl, they learn next, is named Caroline, and she is from Gloucester. She has just graduated from high school, and before she starts college she is spending a year in East Timor, which is why she wants to be certified. Anders has never associated East Timor with scuba diving, but Dave is wildly enthusiastic. Anders studies her seriously—she is exactly Sophie’s age—but she reminds Anders more of Eve than of his eldest daughter, her slouched demeanor typically teenage.

The military-looking guy is named Pete Brown, from Essex, and he doesn’t say much more than that. Dave doesn’t press him to elaborate.

“And, Mr. Jacobs, you and I have met,” Dave says, turning to Anders last.