The Why of Things: A Novel (19 page)

When another cloud eclipses the sun, she waits for the sudden light, and as she waits, she gradually becomes aware of a distant cawing sound—one of many gulls in an inbound trawler’s wake, she’d guess, but she doesn’t hear a motor’s throaty sound, and instead of passing harborbound and fading, the cawing remains constant, as does this cloud before the sun. Puzzled, she opens her eyes, lifts her head from the sand.

Before her, the sea and sky are impossible shades of blue but for the white of spraying wave tips and the gray-bottomed clouds that float across the sky, and the massive one now passing the sun. She recognizes the day as one of those end-of-summer days after the season has snapped; summer’s haze has lifted overnight, revealing the forgotten shapes of islands on the far horizon. She realizes with horror that somehow, summer has passed without her knowledge, and her heart begins to race to consider all that she has missed, all that she has not done that she meant to do, and all that she is not prepared for.

She sits upright on her towel, runs a nervous hand through her hair, seeing for the first time the source of that mournful cawing: a seagull is staggering along the shoreline, its wing ensnared in fishing wire. The bird’s eyes are yellow and wild, and it lets out strangled cries as it stumbles along, dragging its wing across the sand. She looks desperately around her, for what she isn’t sure—some way to help the creature—and then to her relief she sees Anders walking with Sophie at the far end of the beach. She waves in their direction, but uselessly, for their backs are toward her; when she tries to call out, she cannot get her voice to work. Finally, Anders turns, not to look at her but to gaze up at the shadowing cloud, and when he does this she sees that it is not Anders at all, but the young man from the maroon car, the one who came up the driveway today.

It is only then that Joan understands that she is dreaming, and with effort she extracts herself from slumber, aware as she often is when emerging from a dream what a thin line exists between wakefulness and sleep. She can still feel the beach’s gusting breeze; this is the evening draft coming in through the open window of her office. She can still hear the cawing of the wounded gull; this is the yammering of birds that have gathered in the trees somewhere outside. She opens her eyes to find that she has fallen
asleep in the papasan chair in which she’d been reading; the patch of sunlight in which she’d positioned the chair some time ago has not been shadowed by a giant cloud, but has only made its way across the floor, and now illuminates the half-finished bust in the corner of the room. She gazes at the face emerging from the block of marble: the high, smooth cheekbone of the right-hand side, the intricate curls, the hollow of the eye, all of this informing what the left side might have been.

Joan rubs her eyes. She feels unsettled, less rested than she would be if she hadn’t slept. And she hadn’t meant to fall asleep at all, hadn’t consciously chosen to set her book down and shut her eyes, and this makes her feel worse.

She gets up and goes to shut the open window, before which the empty spider’s web she left intact some days ago has begun to unravel in the breeze. Beyond it, outside, she can see Eve on the far side of the quarry, inspecting the skimmer that still hums away at the water’s edge. On the lawn below, Eloise is playing with the dog, holding an old pig toy of Buster’s just beyond its reach and luring it in circles. Anders, she sees, is in his rose garden, his shirtsleeves rolled and a spray bottle in his hand.

Joan looks at her watch; it is already after six o’clock, and they are meant to leave for the Widow’s Walk in less than half an hour. Eloise by now should have bathed—Anders, too, if he was planning on it. She wonders what would have happened if she hadn’t woken up, how long they’d have carried on, oblivious to time and planning. She takes a breath, slides the window shut, and leaves the room; behind her, dust motes lifted by the window’s closing shimmer unnoticed in a sunbeam.

*  *  *

H
ALF
an hour later, Eve watches from her bedroom window as her parents disappear down the driveway in the Buick. She has
just showered, and is wrapped in a towel; she has left Eloise playing with Funny Foam in the bath. When the car is out of sight, she turns and goes to her bureau, where she discovers she is down to her last clean T-shirt, and as she’s taking it out of the drawer, she accidentally lifts the paper lining as well; underneath, she finds several dozen small notes, all addressed to her in Sophie’s eleven-year-old hand.

During the summer Eve was eight, Sophie left notes every day under Eve’s pillow from Hobbster, a magical Hobbit who lived on a star, to whom Eve would unfailingly respond. For her, their correspondence was nothing short of miraculous. Even when she had nothing specific to ask of Hobbster, or to report, she was sure to leave a note every morning in the bathroom laundry hamper, which served as Hobbster’s mailbox, and all day she looked forward to the evening, when she knew she would find his response beneath her pillow. It made each day as exhilarating as Christmas, and it made her feel supremely special; no one else she knew had a magical friend.

Eve takes the notes with her and sits down on the edge of her bed. She hasn’t read them in years; she’d all but forgotten they were even there. She reads them now as if for the first time; while she clearly remembers the existence of Hobbster, she remembers none of the notes specifically. Most of them respond to daily events Eve must have reported in her own letters: a ride at a carnival, a trip to the beach, a really long traffic jam. One offers advice about an argument Eve can’t remember having with Phoebe Alexander, and one offers advice about an argument she’d had with Sophie herself. In some of the notes, Hobbster reponds to Eve’s queries about his own life: his favorite food is pizza, he has no siblings, he has a miniature pet dragon named Kermit who eats pebbles.

Eve sets the note down, gazes absently at the old drawings hanging on the wall before her, their origins, like the contents of
the Hobbster notes, which she’s sure she once knew by heart, also forgotten, and she wishes fervently that memory weren’t such a fickle thing. She lies back across the bed and blinks up at the drawings, thinking of all the memories she doesn’t have in the weeks and days and even hours immediately preceding her sister’s death, when she didn’t realize she ought to be paying attention. She doesn’t remember the last thing Sophie said to her that morning, or the last thing she said to Sophie, though she tried hard for weeks. She doesn’t remember the last time Sophie braided her hair. She doesn’t remember the last argument they had. She doesn’t remember what they talked about the last time she lay in the dark at the foot of Sophie’s bed, as she sometimes did. She’s not sure if she remembered to tell Sophie a joke she thought she’d love, even though she remembers the joke, which was about a nun who gets tricked into sleeping with a hippy. Dumb, in retrospect. Everything up to the days of Sophie’s death is, in Eve’s memory, a blur; everything thereafter is burned into her mind with laser clarity and detail, awful, haunting snapshots.

Like the memory of Eloise’s orange soda, and how when their mother told them the news, it had slipped from her hands onto the living room floor, where it left an orange stain on the carpet that’s still there.

Or the memory of sitting across from her mother at the kitchen table late at night the night that Sophie died, trying to eat cone-shaped frozen yogurt snacks from the freezer, and how the only light on was the light above the stove, and how it smelled vaguely like smoke from a house fire somewhere in the neighborhood. Her father was somewhere in an airport or the air, trying to get home from Italy. Eloise was upstairs in bed, and Aunt Sam had retired to the guest room, leaving Eve and Joan downstairs alone. It was awkward, sitting there. This is what Eve remembers most. She didn’t know what to say. Her mother didn’t seem
to know, either. They held their cones absently, letting the pink yogurt melt and drip down the sides, each alone in their own numb stupor, each overtaken intermittently by waves of grief that, when they happened to her, felt to Eve very much like nausea, and that when they crippled her mother, made her nauseous all over again. Finally, she got up and threw her cone away. Joan did the same, poured herself a glass of wine instead.

Or the memory of her parents’ embrace when her father finally got home late Wednesday night, and how both of them seemed to hold each other up while at the same time weighing each other down, and how the rain visible through the open door behind them fell like silver needles through the streetlamp’s glow, and how the house smelled like garlic from whatever dish it was someone had brought for dinner.

Or the memory of lying on her back in the drying grass at the base of the maple in their lawn, staring up at the web of branches overhead whose pattern she came to know by heart, and the clouds passing beyond, blown by an unseasonably cold and blustering wind that over the course of a week stripped the maple bare of leaves. And the way the sidewalk turned into a passing blur beneath her feet when, stiff from lying beneath the tree, she’d walk, and the squirrel she passed each day, hanging by its mouth from telephone wires, undone by an electric bite.

Eve shuts her eyes, lets her limbs splay heavily across the bed. The squirrel was there before the day that Sophie died; she does remember this. Susan Baker had pointed it out from the backseat of the Bakers’ car on their way to the Upton Carnival, which she chose to go to instead of going with Sophie to see
La Vie en Rose
at the movies because she didn’t feel like reading subtitles. That’s what she remembers of the days before her sister’s death.

Eve opens her eyes, looks up at the old faded drawing of a rainbow, which, upside down, is a mocking grin. She should have
gone to
La Vie en Rose
, she thinks, and for a few moments she only lies there, listening to the sounds of Eloise sloshing around in the bath, wishing, wishing, wishing that she had been a better sister. Finally, she pulls herself upright and off the bed. She retrieves a pen and piece of paper from her mother’s study, then sits down on her bedroom floor, and starts to write.

*  *  *

A
NDERS
catches intermittent glimpses of the river between roadside houses as they drive around the cape into town. Across the river, the marsh is so swollen with the tide he can hardly make out its mazelike contours; only the very tips of the marsh grass haven’t been submerged. He scans the evening sky to gauge the fullness of the moon, but it has not risen, or if it has, the sun is still so high that it is yet too bright to see. It is hard for Anders to imagine that in winter, by now it has already been dark for hours; even at seven o’clock he can still feel warmth from the sun, which, like the river, he can see off to the right in flashes between houses and trees, though its image hovers multiplied in his vision even after he has looked away.

Anders pulls absently at a hangnail on his thumb, letting his eyes skim over the passing landscape: house, tree, river, house, river, sun, tree, sun, all of it blipping by like images in a cartoon flip book. The Buick’s engine thrums, the note of its sound making an oddly pleasant chord with the tinny sound of an outboard he can just see winding through the marsh, dragging an inner tube in its wake. Suddenly an image of the girls flashes into his mind, all three of them lifejacketed and suntanned, their hair wild and wet, their faces wide and bright with excited terror. This was a Christmas card from three or four years ago, Anders remembers, and he wonders why he should recall it now so vividly; he hadn’t realized how firmly he’d unwittingly committed it to memory. He tries to
remember other Christmas cards, as an exercise of sorts; he can conjure only two others specifically, and both, curiously, are faceless, taken from behind. One is of Sophie and Eve maybe a dozen years ago, sitting naked after a bath before the fire, the tips of their hair wetted into clumps, their small bodies white and round. The other is of Joan, himself, and between them, Sophie, an unsteady toddler holding each of her parents’ hands as they make their way away from the camera down the street. He can’t remember the circumstances under which the photograph was taken, whether it was posed, or just a snapshot, and, if a snapshot, who might have taken it, and where it was they might have been going.

Anders gives his hangnail a final yank, wincing as the skin comes away too deep. He looks down at his thumb, watching as a bead of blood begins to well. He resists the urge to bring his thumb to his mouth and suck the blood away; his hands are stained with dirt, and still covered in fungicide he didn’t have the chance to wash away. It took him longer than he’d imagined it would to spray the roses, though he was determined to finish every bush tonight, before they left and despite the hour, so that all the bushes would be on the same schedule—even though as he tended to the final one Joan sat waiting behind the wheel of the Buick, the engine already running.

He looks over at his wife now. Her hair is tied back into a loose ponytail. Wisps have come free and flutter in the passing wind, which sends ripples through the white linen of her button-down. She is gripping the wheel with both hands, and firmly, he can tell by the way the skin is stretched over her knuckles, and by the muscled ridges of her forearms. Her eyes are slightly narrowed in focus, as if she were studying a difficult text, and she’s pulled her lips in tight between her teeth. Anders wonders what she is thinking about, but he does not ask; he does not want to have to.

He frowns. Earlier this afternoon, when he went upstairs to find the pair of gardening gloves he thought he’d left in his bedroom closet, he caught a glimpse of Joan through the open door of her office, asleep in the sunlight on her large round chair—Anders can never remember what it’s called—and something about the sight made him pause there in the darkened hallway. There was something about the way that she was sleeping, curled in the sun, her hands held as if in prayer beneath her cheek, that made Anders’ heart surge. What it was, he realizes, was the rare and frank vulnerability it revealed—one he suspects she goes to lengths to conceal. As he looks at her now, even as she is gathered, upright and composed, that aura seems to linger about her still, filling him with a quiet sense of urgency that even he cannot quite understand, a desire to
do
something to help her, even as it seems that there is nothing to be done.