The Why of Things: A Novel (15 page)

As soon as it’s formulated, Eve’s theory takes on the weight of truth in her mind. On the one hand, she’s glad it hadn’t occurred to her earlier, or she might have lost her nerve and not gone to Georgetown at all. But on the other hand, what now seems so obvious—of course he had something to do with the death!—makes her wants to tear her hair out with frustration that she hadn’t gone about things differently, planned things out instead of being so impulsive, thought through clearly what she was going to say to Larry Stephens, and how. But now it’s too late; she’s blown her chance.

She’s been in bed for about an hour when she gives up on sleep. She swings herself out of bed and pulls on a pair of shorts and a sweatshirt, and then she takes one of the two remaining cigarettes she found the other night and a book of matches from her bedside drawer and puts these into her pocket. She goes downstairs as quietly as she can, walking at the edge of the staircase where the steps give less. In the big room, she finds her father asleep on the couch, cast in a dim orange glow from the reading lamp above him, which is the only light on in the room. His reading glasses are on the floor, and a book is lying open across his chest. The sight of him makes Eve pause. She wonders if she should wake him and send him to bed, but she also doesn’t want to be discovered. For a moment, she studies her father, watching the steady rise and fall of his chest, almost sadly, though she doesn’t fully understand why the sight of him should make her sad. She decides to leave him where he is, and passes quietly through the room and outside, easing the door shut behind her.

The wood of the porch floor is cool and wet beneath her bare feet. A single lit bulb hangs from the ceiling. Moths and June bugs flit and whir around it, and a string dangling from its switch sways gently in the space beneath. Beyond the porch is darkness; Eve can see nothing out there, though when she steps into the night the objects around her slowly begin to take shape: the trees through which James Favazza’s car passed, the dogwood tree, the rocks at the quarry’s edge, and across the quarry, the hoselike boom floating on the surface of the water. Eve walks around the quarry and picks her way a short distance into the woods, to the far side of the rock pile where she sat last night. She climbs up onto a rock and lights her cigarette, and then she lies back, looks upward through the trees. A balloon is caught in the topmost branches, a black and listless bobbing shape, the helium having surrendered in its struggle to rise. Eve wonders briefly what child might have let it go, and when and where, and if the balloon had been there the other night, too, but she hadn’t noticed. She wonders if it was there the night that James Favazza died. A satellite blinks into view; as she smokes, Eve follows its slow path across the sky.

When her cigarette has burned down to its filter, Eve stabs it out against the rock, and slips it into her pocket instead of tossing it onto the ground, loathe to litter it in the same way Larry Stephens did. She pictures his smoldering butt, the tan speckled filter and the half-burned gold lettering—and here she suddenly sits up straight, because it was a Marlboro, like this one and the other two she found on the rock the other night! She brings her hands to her head, incredulous that she hadn’t considered that those three cigarettes might be linked to James Favazza’s death, wishing deeply that she had not already smoked two of them. She’s more sure than ever now of Larry Stephens’ involvement.

She sighs, wishing Saul would appear again. Part of her, she knows, came out here hoping that he would, just so that she’d have somebody to talk to. It’s possible that he’s out here, she thinks. It’s possible that he is wandering sadly through the woods as she has imagined him doing night after night. She pulls herself upright, deciding that instead of going back inside she will go to the gate to the public quarry, a short walk away, which is where Saul parked last night, to see if his car is there.

Eve gets carefully off the rock and walks slowly through the trees, leaving the house behind her. Fallen leaves are soggy and cold between her toes, but she is warm in her sweatshirt. She reaches out to touch each tree she passes, as if for balance, or a sense of continuity, willing herself not to be frightened by the snapping sound of a breaking branch, or the distant howl of coyotes, or the hoot of an owl. If it were daylight, she reminds herself, she wouldn’t think twice about walking here. Still, it is with no small sense of relief that she finally reaches the road, even if its rocks and pebbles are sharp against the cold bottoms of her feet. She decides that instead of returning home through the woods, she will take the longer route, following this road to where it meets up with the one that leads to the house.

She walks gingerly along the road, cringing but unsurprised when she restubs her wounded toe on a stone. When she comes around a bend in the road, she pauses. She can see the gate from here. Six or seven cars are parked nearby, ominous dark shapes hulking quietly along the edge of the road. The inside light of one of the cars suddenly goes on, and Eve steps quickly behind a tree. She peers out from behind it. Through the windshield of the car, she can see illuminated the faces of a girl and guy, and then she hears a distant chiming as the car doors open and four people get out—the girl and the guy, and two other guys from the backseat,
whom she hadn’t seen at first. Smoke drifts lazily from the open doors, which they shut behind them, one at a time. The driver points a key at the car, and it locks with a chirp.

One of the guys says something Eve can’t make out, and the girl laughs loudly. The four of them climb over the metal gate that marks the path to the public quarry. Eve steps out from behind her tree, watching as the foursome’s flashlights bounce away into the darkness. She walks down the road in the direction of the cars, among which she can make out Saul’s brown Volvo as she approaches. So he is out here after all, she thinks. In front of the gate she pauses again, curious, and no longer frightened; there are clearly many people out in the woods tonight, gathered somewhere at the public quarry’s edge, and the fact of their presence emboldens Eve, seems to cancel out what otherwise imagined thing might threaten. She puts her hands on the gate and hurtles nimbly over it, setting off down the path herself.

She knows this path well, from games of capture the flag, and blueberry picking, and searching for wildflowers. She has rarely spent time back here after dark, as Sophie did, though the glass and cans and bottles and the remnants of fires often present by day testify to what goes on at night.

The path leads about half a mile through the woods to the quarry, where it splits and loops around the quarry’s edge. Eve pauses at the intersection, scanning the water’s circumference for firelight. And sure enough, she sees a flickering glow across the water, silhouetting a bush and illuminating the trunk of a large tree, beneath which she can make out several small figures gathered in a clearing. A shout travels across the water, followed by distant laughter.

Eve follows the path clockwise around the quarry for about ten minutes, and hears the murmur of voices before she has actually
reached the clearing. She slows down, approaching carefully, then crouches down behind a bush in the shadows about ten yards away, where she can watch unseen.

There are about a dozen people gathered in the clearing, which is really a large slab of granite about twenty feet above the water. Two logs have been rolled into place as benches, and between these a fire burns. Two girls sit on one log, one of them resting a head on the other’s shoulder and drunkenly swirling the dregs of her beer. Another girl sits on the ground, leaning back between the legs of a guy, who is frowning in concentration as he seals a joint with his tongue. Three people are sitting along the quarry’s edge, their feet dangling over the side. One girl has climbed into the tree above the clearing; she sits cross-legged in the cleavage of its lowest branches. Eve recognizes this girl as the one from the car, and she recognizes, too, the boy who comes out of the shadows with an armful of branches, one of which he tosses onto the fire, sending up a bright shower of sparks. And then she sees Saul, lying with his head in the lap of a girl Eve doesn’t recognize, gazing up at her as she drags the end of her long brown braid across his forehead.

Eve stands in the shadows and stares; the sight takes her breath away. She wants to run into the circle of light and pummel them both, yank the girl’s braid off, scream and shout at this betrayal. But she is tired suddenly; she feels defeated, and oddly physically drained. It is all she can do to turn away, to disappear into the night.

*  *  *

J
OAN
wakes up not long after she has gone to bed, roused by something that seems at first urgent and specific—like the sudden memory of something forgotten in the oven, or a bath left running—but that she cannot identify. She looks at the clock;
though she feels as if she has been sleeping already for hours, she has been in bed for just shy of one. The bed beside her is empty, and she can tell by the smooth sheets that Anders’ absence is not because he has slipped into the bathroom, but because he has not yet come to bed. She is not surprised, just as this morning she was not surprised to find herself similarly alone. She has grown accustomed to feeling alone; not to
being
alone, necessarily—there has not been a night she and Anders have been separated since he returned home from Italy—but to feeling it. She remembers that first night after Sophie’s death, longing for his presence as she lay alone in bed watching the progression of moonlight across the ceiling, but even after he had returned home the following day, it was as if he had lost some part of himself along the way, and she couldn’t find the comfort she’d counted on in his presence beside her, almost as if he were simply too lost in his own despair.

She wonders how Elizabeth Favazza is spending her first nights. If, like Joan was, she is lying awake in bed, listening not to the hiss of buses kneeling to the curb on Chestnut Street in Maryland, but perhaps instead to the rev of a car engine making its way up Magnolia, or the distant tolling of the fog horn. She wonders if Elizabeth Favazza is running through endless what-ifs in her mind, wondering what she could have done differently, wondering, above all,
why
.

Joan sighs and brings her hands to her temples; the headache she’s been vaguely aware of all day has started to pulse more insistently. She swings herself out of bed and goes into the bathroom, rummages for aspirin in the medicine cabinet, but she finds nothing useful behind the mirror, just leftovers from who knows when—witch hazel for bug bites, a bottle of calamine lotion crusted pink around the cap, a faded box of Band-Aids. She searches next through her pocketbook, which she has left hanging over the bathroom chair, but she cleaned it out before the trip.
She checks last in the drawer of her bedside table; it is not unusual for her that headaches strike at night, and she knows she’s kept a stash there in the past.

The drawer catches on something, and she has to jiggle it open. Inside, there is the usual assortment of random items—a miniature flashlight, a deck of cards, a bookmark, loose change, and, wedged up at the top of the drawer, an old postcard from Happy, Texas, the evident culprit. She takes this from the drawer with wonder; she’s surprised the postcard has been in here all these years, kept, yet long forgotten. It is faded, and bent at the edges, with the photograph of a wide main street lined by low-slung buildings and the words “Happy, Texas: The town without a frown.”

She flips the postcard over, remembering the day they spent near Happy, eight thousand miles into their thirteen-thousand-mile journey the summer before they married. The Buick had blown a tire, forcing them to stop at an old Exxon station in the Texan desert just south of the nothing town, and in the time they had to fill while they waited for the delivery of a new tire from Amarillo, they fatefully decided to have lunch, a giant pulled-pork gas station burrito, which that night came back to haunt them; it was while she and Anders hung in mutual misery over a motel toilet’s porcelain rim that after months of hesitation, Joan finally agreed to marry him. It wasn’t that he’d proposed before and she’d declined; the subject of their marriage was simply an ongoing discussion that for her was not yet resolved—though why she should have reached a resolution while sweating wretchedly on a motel bathroom floor she isn’t even sure herself. Often they have wondered, jokingly, about what might have happened if it hadn’t been for that burrito, whether they’d be living completely different lives. The infamous burrito; the stuff of legend, though really, Joan thinks, if you were going to blame the burrito, you might as
well blame the piece of pipe in the road that blew their tire out in the first place, or the faulty alarm clock at the motel the morning before, which had gotten them on the road hours late. All those little switches in the rails were simply sending them slightly different ways toward the same inevitable end, not changing their ultimate journey. She’s never for a moment thought they wouldn’t be married now if they’d shared a bag of chips for lunch instead.

Joan lowers the postcard into her lap, realizing how much easier it is for her to apply this logic to her life with Anders than to Sophie’s death, wishing that she could, and so find some sense of absolution. Sometimes Joan drives herself mad analyzing specific events, moments, conversations, searching for the blame in each, wishing that she had spoken differently, acted differently, held her temper, remembered to say good-bye, as if any of these individual modifications would have steered the course of events along an entirely different path, like mythical poison burritos, just as she imagines Elizabeth Favazza doing right now as she lies alone in bed. And perhaps, she thinks, returning to that last morning at the kitchen table, that image of her daughter there, they might have. Although when she really considers it, by the same logic as she applies to her life with Anders—burritos, chips, or burgers made no difference—instead of absolution the awful alternative to blaming a moment is to accept that she should have gone about things differently in
every
way, that her cumulative performance as a mother led to how things are today. Either way she cuts it, she blames herself.