The Why of Things: A Novel (13 page)

This is where James Favazza’s mother lives. Elizabeth Favazza. Joan knew in the back of her mind from the moment she first saw the address printed in the obituary that she would end up back here, though she’s not sure exactly why; she doesn’t fully understand her own motives. There isn’t, after all, really anything to see. If she were a character in a book, she thinks, something of consequence
would happen right now: visitors would solemnly arrive, and Joan would be able to catch a glimpse through the door as they went inside, or else Elizabeth Favazza herself would come out. Or maybe Joan would go knock on the door, and she would say to Elizabeth Favazza . . . what? She isn’t sure.

Joan sighs and puts the car into gear. In the group she goes to in Maryland, there is one mother who lost two children in a fire, and another whose daughter was killed in a car accident. Two mothers lost their sons to cancer, and one woman’s daughter was murdered. Joan is grateful for the group, but she also feels as if she doesn’t quite belong, or that she isn’t worthy; her daughter took her own life. Joan can’t help but feel that this is a reflection of her own failures as a mother, and that while these other mothers’ children were taken from them, she somehow had a hand in losing her own child. Elizabeth Favazza, she imagines, might feel the same.

She follows the backstreets down to Washington, where she comes to a stop, her blinker ticking, pensive and uneasy. The last image she has of Sophie is at the breakfast table the morning that she died. When Joan came down to the kitchen that morning to set coffee brewing, she found Sophie already awake and dressed—although maybe, it occurred to Joan later, she had been there all night. She was sitting in her usual spot at the table, her hands cupped around a mug of tea. Sunlight slanted through the window, illuminating one side of Sophie’s face and casting shadows across the other, catching in the steam that twisted slowly upward from the mug between her hands.
You’re up early
, Joan had said, or something to that effect, thinking that Sophie had soccer practice, or a meeting for the photography journal that she coedited. She can’t remember exactly how Sophie responded; Joan was groggy and unfocused, on early morning autopilot. She ought to have been paying better attention, she thinks again now,
as she has thought many times since. Indeed, she’s haunted by that image, which has come to represent the moment where she missed her chance. She suspects it will trouble her forever: her daughter at seventeen, beautiful and sad, that curl of steam, the sunlight in her eye and on her face, cast by an autumn sun frozen there against the sky, standing still there as if for all time. This is the moment, for Joan, where life separated from itself.

The traffic is crawling on Washington Street, with cars backed up in line for the rotary, and Joan wishes she had taken the back way to Eloise’s camp; even if it takes longer, at least she would be moving. She watches the cars around her waver in the heat as she remembers. Many times she has returned to that image of Sophie to try to find something that she may have missed—in Sophie’s posture, or expression, anything. She wonders what would have happened if, instead of dumping coffee grounds and water into the machine and hurrying upstairs to get dressed, to wake up Eve, to get Eloise ready for school, she had taken the time to sit down across from her daughter and talk to her. It has occurred to her that perhaps Sophie was there waiting for her, knowing that she’d come down early, hoping to catch her mother before she was caught up in the momentum of the day. But even at that hour Joan was already caught up in it. She was so caught up in the momentum of life that although she clearly recognized that Sophie was depressed, she failed to comprehend that her daughter had reached a point at which life no longer felt worth living.

She considers the fact that James Favazza was last seen here, at his mother’s house. Was it to say good-bye, she wonders? Had he known already what he was later going to do—if in fact what happened was a suicide? What might have the visit been like, and is Elizabeth Favazza being haunted by it just as Joan is haunted by the memory of Sophie at the breakfast table? Had Elizabeth sensed that anything was wrong? Is she obsessively replaying the
image of her son’s truck receding down the street three days ago? Will she wish forever that she had waved to him and called him back?

Behind Joan, a car honks. The traffic has moved on; there are maybe five or six car lengths between her car and the car ahead of her. She blinks hard, returning herself to the day, and puts her foot gently on the gas.

*  *  *

T
HERE
are two ways onto the island part of Cape Ann, one by a highway that crosses the river proper over a large-spanned bridge, and the other by a smaller road that crosses the river’s narrow cut over a drawbridge. Anders takes the highway, since it is a straight shot to Gloucester from Danvers. For the sake of the Buick, he takes it slow, cruising along in the traveling lane. The warm air has quickly dried his hair, which was wet from the pool and now stands up on end, windblown and stiff with chlorine.

They spent only the second half of the class actually in the pool; the first half took place in the classroom, going over the general vocabulary and principles of scuba diving, and learning how all the equipment works—regulator, cylinder, mask, pressure gauge, depth gauge, and buoyancy control device, or BCD, which is a sort of inflatable jacket that divers wear and that Anders had never been aware of. Afterward, Dave distributed booklets about diving for them to read as homework before class meets again, and then he outfitted them each with gear of their own, which they will keep until the class ends. When they finally got to the pool, they practiced breathing exercises and learned basic skills, like how to get water out of your mask, and how to recover your regulator if it comes out of your mouth. They also learned how to do something called a fin pivot, which involves kneeling at the bottom of the pool, your BCD empty of air, and then inflating the
BCD just enough that you achieve neutral buoyancy, the force of the weights in your belt equal to the force of the added air. It was difficult to find that balance—at first Anders kept adding so much air to his BCD that he rose to the surface. But once he achieved it, the sensation was almost magical, unlike anything he’d experienced before, similar to what he imagines it would be like to exist in a world without gravity. Though he is still wary of the prospect of an ocean dive, today wasn’t bad, he has to admit.

He reaches over and turns the car radio on, glancing back and forth between the road and the thin orange line moving across the radio’s cracked face as he tunes it. The antenna, he discovers, is broken, bent at the top perhaps by the weight of the tarp that covered it all winter, and the stations crackle in and out. He carefully adjusts the knob, and he’s almost got a station playing the Beatles to come in clearly when he glances up at the road and sees out of the corner of his eye a bicyclist riding on the highway’s shoulder. He sees the person only as a passing flash, but something tells him with visceral certainty that it is Eve; this is confirmed by a quick look in the rearview mirror. Anders’ eyes widen in disbelief, and he pulls the Buick onto the shoulder of the highway, turns the engine off.

He stares into the rearview mirror, watching as his daughter pedals closer. She is not yet aware of him; she is looking down at the pavement just beneath her tires instead of looking at the road ahead. She pedals wearily, each pump a seeming effort. About twenty yards behind him she finally looks up, and at the sight of her father in the Buick she stops her bike. She puts a foot on the ground and lifts a hand from the handlebar, pushes the loose hairs from her face.

Anders waits. For a minute, Eve just stands there, as if considering her options. Cars whiz by. Finally, she lifts her foot from the ground and slowly starts to pedal up behind him. They look
at each other in the rearview mirror until she has reached the car and pulled up alongside it.

“Hi,” she says.

Anders gives her a hard look. She is sweaty, and there are faint smears of dirt across her face. She looks at him with a combination of uncertainty and boldness, as if both dreading rebuke and inviting a challenge. “Hi,” he finally says. He gets out of the car and comes around to the other side, opens the passenger door. “Get in.”

Eve does as he instructs, and Anders lifts her bike into the backseat before getting back into the car himself. Beside him, Eve stares straight ahead.

“Eve,” he says finally. “Your mother and I give you an awful lot of freedom, because we trust you to use your head. But the highway? You know better than to ride your bike on the highway.”

“I had no choice,” Eve says.

Anders raises an eyebrow. “Oh?”

“I didn’t! The drawbridge was stuck open. This was the only way to get back.”

“To get back,” Anders repeats. “Eve. You know better than to ride your bike on the highway,
particularly
without a helmet, and you know better than to leave Cape Ann in the first place.”

Eve is silent.

“Don’t you?”

“I had to.”

“Why?”

Eve folds her arms across her chest.

Anders waits. “Hmm?” he asks when she says nothing.

“You wouldn’t get it.”

“Try me.”

Eve takes a deep breath, then slowly lets it out. “There was a
cooler bag in the quarry and it had the person’s name on it and I wanted to return it so I did.”

Anders sucks air through his teeth. “Ah,” he says. “Straightforward enough.”

Eve shrugs.

“And where did you need to return it?”

“Georgetown.”

“
Georgetown!
Jesus, Evie.”

“It’s not
that
far.”

“It’s over twenty miles! Thirty, maybe!” It makes Anders’ heart leap to consider his helmetless daughter riding her five-speed bike all the way to Georgetown, and he is glad that he didn’t know about it until now that she is safe in the car beside him. “Did it occur to you that your mother or I would have driven you over?”

Eve looks at him like he’s crazy. “No, you wouldn’t have,” she says. “It was a crappy old cooler bag and it was falling apart and you would have said I was nuts.”

She’s probably right. Anders regards his daughter. “And so why did you want to return it?”

Eve takes another deep breath, in and out. “Just because,” she says at last, instead of really explaining. She would, if she’d had any success, but she hadn’t learned a single thing from Larry, either about James Favazza or who the murderer might be. “I don’t even know if it was really even his. And my helmet,” she adds, turning to her father, “might fit if my head was the size of an apple.”

Anders sighs. “Well, we’ll have to get you new one,” he says, hiding a smile. He turns the key in the ignition, and after a few cranks the engine sputters to life. He waits for a gap in traffic, and then pulls out onto the road. They ride in silence until the highway soars up over the bridge, from which height they can see dark clouds gathering over the bay.

“Looks like it might rain again,” Anders comments then, dismayed to think of his roses, whose situation isn’t helped by rain.

“Good thing I ran into you,” Eve says. Anders slows the car as they approach the rotary at the highway’s end. “Where were you coming from, anyway?” Eve asks. She looks sidelong at her father, bracing herself against the door as they come around the rotary’s curve.

“Danvers,” Anders answers. “I had my first scuba session.”

Eve turns in her seat, excited. “Oooh!” she says. “You went? How was it?”

“It was okay.” Anders rubs an eye, taking their exit.

Eve narrows her eyes. “It was just
okay
?”

“It wasn’t bad,” he concedes. “The instructor was actually one of the divers from Saturday.”

Eve’s eyes go from slits to circles. “He was? What did he say? What’s down there? What did he see? Did you ask?”

Anders shrugs. “He didn’t say much,” he says. “I mean, he said it was—interesting, I think he said, whatever that means.”

“Interesting?” Eve repeats, incredulously. “Interesting how? Why? What did he say?”

“Nothing,” Anders says. “He didn’t. He was just—you know. One lady lives in Rockport, and he said that was good diving, one girl is going—I forget where, East Timor—but he said there was good diving there, too. I think he was just trying to include me.”

“Yeah, but
Dad
,” Eve says. “Come
on. Think
about all the stuff that could be down there. I can’t
believe
you didn’t ask.” She slumps against the seat. She looks at her father again. “Will you
ask
next time?”

Anders doesn’t respond, thinking that with all this quarry business it is going to be a long summer. He hadn’t meant to add fuel to Eve’s fire.

“Will you? For me?”

“Yes, Eve. For you, I’ll ask.”

*  *  *

E
LOISE
brings a dead chipmunk home with her from camp. Joan does not know this at first, but in the car on the way home Eloise insists on holding her tote bag in her lap, and after Joan notices her daughter continuously peering into it she finally asks her what’s inside. Eloise doesn’t answer, but at the next stop sign she tips the bag toward her mother, displaying the small body of a chipmunk resting on the towel at the bottom of her bag.

“I found it behind a shrub. In the parking lot, while I was waiting for you.”

Joan takes a breath. “Oh. And you thought you’d bring it home?”

“It needs a burial.”

Joan nods. “We can give it a burial,” she says, as if it is perfectly normal; she figures it’s best to simply bury the creature as a matter of course rather than make an issue of the fact that her daughter has brought a dead animal home with her from camp, two days after she brought a dead bird home from the beach.

When they get back to the house, they find Saul Collins there waiting on the back porch. He is sitting on the stairs, stroking the cat, which he has always done even though he is allergic.

Eloise sees him first. “Saul!” she cries, breaking into a run as she crosses the grass to the house.