The Why of Things: A Novel (17 page)

“But if you did?”

“I don’t.”

“I think I’d rather burn to death. It would be less . . . frantic, maybe. You’d probably just pass right out because of the pain. But drowning, God. I
hate
when I can’t breathe. That would be the worst.”

She has twisted the straw wrapper into a rope, which she ties carefully into a knot. “If I had to pick a way to die, like if the world were going to end tomorrow, I would want to take a running start
and jump off a really tall cliff. For a second I bet it would feel like flying.” Then she looks her father sharply in the eye. “Not that I would ever do that,” she says.

Just then the waitress arrives with Eve’s pancakes and toast on two separate plates, which she sets loudly on the table, and by the time she has left again it feels too late for Anders to respond to his daughter’s remark; that moment in their conversation has passed.

Eve lifts one of the jelly containers still lined up on the table and peels back the flap. Anders watches as she spreads her toast with jelly as they wait for the rest of the food.

“Mixed fruit,” he comments.

“What?” Eve looks up.

“Mixed fruit. That’s your favorite?”

“Usually I like strawberry. I’m just in a mixed fruit sort of mood today.”

After the waitress has returned with the rest of their breakfast, they eat in silence for several minutes, both intent on their food. Anders has just opened his mouth to broach the subject of jobs when Eve starts in again. “Do you think we can find out about, whatever, the preliminary findings?”

“Eve,” Anders says.

“Just out of curiosity. I think we have a right to know.”

“Eve,” Anders says firmly. “You cannot fixate on this all summer long.”

“I’m not
fixating
,” she says through her mouthful.

“You’re going to have to figure out another way to occupy your time. You need to do something with your summer. See some of your friends. Did you ever call Abby back?”

Eve looks away.

“You know, Mom’s friend,” Anders ventures, “what’s-her-name, the photographer? She photographs weddings? She’s looking for an assistant for the summer. You could do that.”

Eve looks at her father with disdain. “Wedding photography?”

“It wouldn’t be a bad gig. And think about it—weddings are on Saturdays. It’s one day a week. But it would be something to do. And it would earn you some money.”

“
Wedding
photography,” Eve repeats.

“Do you have another idea?”

“Prostitution would be preferable.”

The waitress comes over to the table and freshens Anders’ coffee. When they are alone again, Eve sighs. “You shouldn’t worry. I’m not going to just sit around all summer. I never have before, have I?”

Anders regards his daughter; it is true, when she grew out of camp, she was a counselor-in-training for two summers, and last summer she worked in the shipbuilding museum in Essex, helping to restore an old sloop.

“I’ll find
something
,” Eve continues, spreading jelly onto another piece of toast.

Anders pours cream into his coffee, stirs it thoughtfully. “It just occurred to me,” he says; his dirt-stained fingertips have reminded him. “When I was at the nursery the other day I heard the owner mention they were understaffed.” He shrugs. “Just a thought.”

Eve pulls her mouth to the side, contemplating this. “I’d do that,” she says finally.

Anders glances up at her. “Really,” she continues. “I’ll go
today
if it would make you feel better.”

“It might make
you
feel better,” Anders says, lifting his fork to resume eating, “to have something to do.”

“I’m just fine, thanks.” Eve stabs a home fry. “Except for one thing.”

Anders lifts a piece of bacon. “What’s that?” he asks before taking a bite.

“Can we make a deal?” Eve asks. “If I agree to go to the nursery today?” An impish look is spreading across her face, and Anders responds warily.

“I don’t know. What kind of deal are we talking?”

“A fair deal,” Eve says. “I only ever make fair deals.”

*  *  *

S
T
. Ann’s Church is in a residential neighborhood of Gloucester, in the midst of a zigzagging network of narrow, one-way streets. Joan stands at the bottom of the stone steps that lead to the heavy church door, looking up at the building, which seems to sway as above it high white clouds race across the sky. A pair of pigeons is perched at the edge of the steeple’s base, facing into the wind.

This, according to his obituary in the paper, is where James Favazza’s funeral will be held in a few hours’ time. While it has crossed her mind, Joan does not plan to attend; it would be strange to go to the funeral of somebody she didn’t know, an infringement, somehow, to sit in on other people’s grief. Still, she feels drawn to the church, wanting to pay respect in her own private way. She puts her hand on the cool metal rail of the banister and climbs the steps to the large wooden door, a small rectangle of which is propped open. Tentatively, she steps inside.

It is cool in the church, and smells of incense and old books. It is dark, too, and it takes a moment for her eyes to adjust. Funeral programs are already laid out on a table by the door; Joan slips one into her purse, then gazes around her. She has driven by this church many times, but she has never been inside, and she is surprised by its size. She feels small beneath the high, vaulted ceiling; the nave could seat a thousand people at least. For a brief moment Joan worries that even if a good number of people show up later for the funeral, the church will still feel empty.

It is not quite empty now; there is an older woman in a pew up front, and a middle-aged man in another pew about halfway up, praying on his knees. At the very front of the church, in the sanctuary, the choir is gathered in the choir stall, though at the moment, only one man is singing, a melancholy Latin hymn. Joan walks quietly to a back pew. She feels almost as if she ought to kneel and cross herself before sidling in, but she also feels this would be fraudulent, done in imitation and not out of faith.

The pews are wooden, box-style pews, more typical of a colonial New England meeting house than a Catholic church, and the kneeler is so wide that there is very little foot room, as if designed to force worshippers to their knees. Joan sits quietly, her hands clasped together in her lap, and listens to the man sing. He has a low, deep voice, and though Joan cannot understand the words, at the mournful tenor of the melody her eyes begin to well with tears.

She has never been a religious person, though she does believe in something, and she finds a humbling comfort in a church—not in the institution, but in the physical structure. When, years ago, she and Anders took a trip to Europe, what struck her most—more than the art or the food or the cities—were the massive stone cathedrals. Their elaborate architecture, and impossible size, and the fact that they each took generations to build seemed to Joan to bespeak a faith that she feels
must
be based in something real, even if she simultaneously feels that she does not quite have access to whatever that thing is.

Strangely, she feels closer to it since Sophie’s death. In the days immediately following, there were moments, between crippling waves of grief, that she was possessed by an exhausted and necessary numbness. In these moments, she felt as if she were looking down at herself from a great height, and she was filled with wonder that she was able to endure, able to go on living. But also
in these moments, she understood that others had lived through this, too, and had survived intact, and that this, the experience of loss, was part of what it meant to be alive. These moments, of course, were brief, but the knowledge they allowed gave her the strength to withstand the next battering wave of anguish, and they made her more acutely aware than she had ever been of the common, and humbling, experience of living. Later, she found a quote by Mark Twain about his own daughter’s death that articulated just what she had marveled at.
It is one of the mysteries of our nature
, he wrote,
that a man, all unprepared, can receive a thunderstroke like that and live.
Perhaps this is where her faith lies, Joan thinks—in the essence and endurance of humanity.

She draws a breath. The man’s singing slows as he comes to the end of the hymn. His voice rests on the last, long note, and fades.

Joan sits quietly for several minutes more and then rises; soon the mourners will begin to gather, and she has the day to attend to. From inside the church, the rectangle of the open door is blinding with daylight, and Joan finds herself dreading reentry into the bright, white world beyond. But when she steps out through the doorway, the brightness softens, and the world is tolerable after all, and as always it continues to go on. A car drives slowly down the street, stopping to let two children cross. Overhead, a seagull caws, and in the distance, Joan can hear the whistle of a train.

*  *  *

“I
’LL
wait here,” Anders says, parking the Buick in the shade of the trees at the edge of the nursery lot. He shuts the engine off, but leaves the key turned in the ignition partway so that he can listen to the radio; there is a call-in program about aliens and outer space, the only station that today the antenna will pick up.

Eve gives her father a beseeching look; Anders pulls a business
card out of his wallet, a reminder of the deal they made at breakfast. Eve narrows her eyes. “What’s that?” she asks.

“Officer Baldwin’s card,” Anders says. “One of the cops from the other night.”

“He left you a card?”

“Just so we’d have a contact.”

“He left you a
card
?” Eve repeats. “So we’d have a
contact
? You had a contact all along and you didn’t tell me? And why would we need to have a contact anyway if everything is just so cut and dry, no foul play, case closed?”

Anders lifts his hands in the air: I don’t know.

“Did you just roll your eyes?” Eve demands.

“Me? Never.” He suppresses a smile.

“You think I’m obsessed.”

Anders does not respond, and Eve sighs heavily, hoists herself from the front seat, and leaps over the car door. She turns around on the other side and looks her father in the eye. “I’m not obsessed, Dad. I’m simply understandably curious.”

“You are that.”

This time, it is Eve who does not respond; instead, she spins around and makes her way across the dusty lot without a backward look. Anders watches her go, her feet bare and her jean shorts tattered, the pink streak in her hair catching the sun. He can just hear the bells hanging from the nursery door jangle tinnily as she disappears inside, and then, when they are silent, he is left with the sounds of birds overhead, with the
beep-beep-beep
of a flatbed truck backing up the hill across the lot, with voices speaking of infinity, the boundless nature of outer space.

*  *  *

T
HE
nursery is cool, compared with the sun outside. Eve blows some loose hairs from her face. When her eyes adjust to the shadows,
she sees the place is relatively empty; a man stands by the seed rack, reading the back of a seed packet, and a woman is comparing various spades and trowels where they hang along a wall. The quiet puts Eve in mind of a library or a museum or a church; moving quietly herself, she approches the counter, where a man is intently examining sheets of paperwork, a pair of dirty rimless glasses low on his nose.

“Excuse me,” Eve whispers.

The man raises a finger, his eyes still on the papers before him, holds it there in the air; it is stained with dirt, soil caking the short, ridged nail. Eve waits, watching the man’s eyes dart back and forth across the page. He is a tall man, with dark, deeply lined skin and a shock of white hair; he seems to Eve somehow ageless, both youthful and ancient at once. He is wearing a short-sleeved, checkered button-down with a second pair of glasses in his breast pocket nestled alongside a small, worn notepad; a white, wormy scar runs the length of his muscled forearm, from wrist to elbow. Eve stares, both intimidated and intrigued.

The man takes a long breath through his nose, and finally looks up. “May I help you?”

“Um, yes,” she begins; she’d half forgotten why she came here. “I’m here about the job?”

The man blinks at her. “What job?”

Eve frowns. “I thought you were hiring.”

“And what led you to believe that?”

“My dad. He said you said you were understaffed. Or something.”

“I am understaffed. But I’m not hiring.”

For a moment, Eve is speechless. “Oh,” she says, finally. “Are you sure?”

The man looks at her, his face without expression.

“I mean—Oh.”

The man holds her gaze; Eve feels frozen by his eyes into place until finally, at the sound of the back door opening, he looks away, and Eve does, too.

Josie Saunders is standing in the doorway, brushing her hands off on a filthy white apron. Anders had mentioned that Josie worked here, which meant nothing to Eve. Though Sophie and Josie were friends, Eve has never known Josie well—she’s always just been one of any number of the older girls who might have come over to sunbathe, or swim, or sit around sucking on freeze pops while Eve and her own friends spied from the woods—the friends, like Abby, who so far this summer she has gone out of her way not to see. The mystery of James Favazza’s death has been quite enough, anyway, to keep her occupied. Josie smiles at her now. “Hey, Eve,” she says.

Eve waves, gives a quick smile, not particularly eager to engage, and wishing at this point that she were anywhere but here.

“Are you finished with the mulch?” the man asks Josie.

“Yeah, I’m done. Except for the shrubs near the treeline. I didn’t know if you wanted me to do them.”

“I do.” He turns back to Eve. “You see I’ve got a helper already,” he says.

Eve nods; she can hear the rush of embarrassed blood coursing through her viens. “Prostitution it is then,” she mutters before she can stop herself; the man raises an eyebrow, but he doesn’t respond, and, blindly, Eve turns to leave.