The Why of Things: A Novel (20 page)

*  *  *

W
HEN
they arrive at the Widow’s Walk, Anders goes directly to the men’s room to wash his hands while Joan scopes out a table; she’s not surprised to see that there is only one left, at the very back of the room. She hurries over to secure it, and orders each of them a Widow Maker—a strong, fruity rum drink, a specialty of the Widow’s Walk. The trivia has not yet begun, and the room is noisy with clashing conversations that are punctuated by occasional raucous shouts of laughter. Tier curtains hang across the lower half of each window, blocking what little sunlight makes it beneath the broad awning outside, and so it is dimly monochromatic aside from the small pockets of flickering light cast by candles on every table and the neon glow of the flat-screen TV above the bar, which is showing a World Cup soccer game. Joan’s mind leaps immediately to the thought that she would be there now with Sophie if life had gone as she’d expected, and she realizes
suddenly that this event—the World Cup—was as far ahead as she’d concretely envisioned or planned, before things changed. This was where her life fully diverged from that other, imagined, happier one—this was the last place she might ever be able to locate that self living the parallel life in which Sophie was alive.

Shaking away the thought, she pulls the candle on their table toward her and cups her hands around it, out of habit rather than cold, absently touching the hot, soft wax at the rim with her fingertips. Her dream has left her out of sorts, with the awful, panicked sense of having lost a chunk of time, helplessness about the wounded gull, alarm at the transformation of Anders into the man from the maroon car. But she is bothered most of all by the appearance of Sophie in her dream, because as always, when her daughter does infrequently appear in her dreams, it was as if it were an absolutely ordinary thing. When Joan dreamed about her mother after her mother’s death, her dream-self knew that her mother had died, and so it was with wonder and with joy that she encountered the woman in her dreams. Not so with Sophie; when Sophie appears, Joan doesn’t recognize the gift of it until too late, and she has already woken up, and by that time, it is no longer a gift at all, but a missed opportunity to be blissfully fooled. Her dream-self takes her daughter’s presence entirely for granted, and Joan can’t help but feel that this must be a reflection of how things were in life.

Soon the waitress returns with their drinks, dropping four tickets on the table; you get a prize ticket for every drink you buy at trivia night, and for every Widow Maker, you get two. The usual prizes you can win if your ticket stub is drawn at the evening’s end include small, hand-painted fish carved out of two-by-fours, or Widow Maker T-shirts, or a coupon for a Widow’s Walk lobster roll at a future trivia night, or whatever is the evening’s raffle giveaway. Joan arranges their tickets into a tidy row; she has accumulated
four of the wooden fish over the years and is ever hoping to enlarge her school, which hangs above the wet bar off the kitchen in Maryland, a joking homage to the bar here.

She sits back then, and gazes around her. Not much has changed from last year; Joan recognizes most of the faces, though she knows few names. The schedule of nightly entertainment is taped to the door, a microphone and speakers are set up in the front, and the specials are written on a chalkboard propped against a column by the bar, behind which the margarita machine tirelessly churns its neon liquid. The only thing different that Joan can see is the soccer ball hanging from the ceiling—Adidas, of course, which was Sophie’s brand of choice—evidently tonight’s big raffle giveaway, apropos of the World Cup on TV. It spins beneath the fan above her like a taunt.

She notices Anders making his way through the room; she watches him shoulder his way through the noisy crowd, flat-mouthed and apologetic, and she resolves to pull herself together. “My hands seem to have been cided,” he says, sitting down.

“Cided?”

“Like little fungi.” He extends his hands, which are blotched with red. “I should have maybe waited until I had some gloves.”

“Anders, ouch.” Joan grimaces. “I could have told you that.”

“Well,” he says. “Lesson learned.” He pulls his Widow Maker toward him, and tilts it toward Joan before taking a sip. “Cheers.”

Joan touches his glass with the rim of hers and drinks, grateful for the electric shock of rum, feeling it spread warmly through her chest.

Anders lifts the menus from where they stand pinned between the salt and pepper shakers at the side of the table and hands one to Joan. As she looks it over, she feels Anders’ eyes upon her. After a moment, he is studying her still, and she lifts her gaze; as soon as she has, Anders drops his own. Joan regards him for a moment,
and then returns her attention to the menu, on which only the prices have changed; handwritten stickers with new numbers have been stuck over the older, lower prices of last year.

“Joan,” Anders begins. Joan looks up at him again. He seems to hesitate, and then he says, “You can tell me, you know, if there’s something on your mind.”

Joan returns his gaze, looking into one eye, then the next, and though part of her would like to, she realizes that she is afraid to tell him about her dream. She is afraid to tell him about her visit to the church this morning, too, and her drives by Elizabeth Favazza’s house; to verbalize these things seems too much of an admission, one by which they all might come unmoored. She smiles at Anders with a mixture of gratitude and sadness, and realizing, too, that in the face of such an offer her sense of isolation is really no one’s fault but her own. “Of course I know,” she says. “I know.”

*  *  *

T
HE
girls eat their pizza outside, at a table Eve has dragged down onto the grass from the porch. She has poured their milk into wineglasses, and she’s gotten out the formal crystal plates instead of the Make-A-Plate plastic plates they usually use, decorated with the girls’ old artwork. She’d been disappointed earlier to discover the lettuce already washed and spun in the fridge, the tomato sliced, and the dressing made, thinking of the times when Sophie was left in charge, and how she’d actually cook, fixing them things like breakfast for dinner, or her special homemade pasta sauce, or macaroni and cheese with hot dogs sliced into coins. Feeling underestimated, she’d resolved to make the meal special in her own way, slicing pineapple and scrambling hamburger as toppings, and making a garlic butter dipping sauce for the crust, and setting the table fancily outside.

They eat quietly, and though Eloise is gobbling her dinner happily, Eve herself makes a point of eating slowly, wanting to protract the meal and make it an event, rather than a feeding. She is filled with a rare sense of well-being and contentment; she is pleased by her sister’s evident joy, pleased to be responsible for it.

It is the best time of day, in her opinion. The sun’s light has taken on a warm and somehow lazy orange glow, and it filters through the overhanging leaves in hazy, slanting rays, not in the starkly dappled pattern of midday, but instead diffused, hovering like a glowing mist above the lawn, where Henry is sniffing about at the quarry’s edge. The air smells like cut grass and dust and things grilling, and the temperature is, in Eve’s opinion, perfect, such that it is almost difficult for her to tell where her body ends and the air begins. She glances westward. It will be a quiet sunset; it’s one of those cloudless evenings, when the sun slips without ceremony beneath the horizon and the sky slowly fades to black, a few minutes earlier tonight than last, and a degree or two over to the left, to her chagrin; though summer has only just started, already the days are waning.

Suddenly, a cry from Eloise breaks the peace. “Evie!” she screams, jumping out of her seat and racing to the quarry’s edge, where Eve sees that Henry has gotten into the water. “Get him out! Get him
out
!”

“He’s fine!” Eve says, following her sister to the water; and it is true, Henry is swimming quite competently along. “Look at him, he’s just gone for a swim.”

“Get him
out
, Evie! Out, out, out! Henry, come! Come!” She looks at her sister with desperation.
“Evie!”

“Eloise! He’s fine! He just wanted to cool off. Look!”

Eloise looks out at the water, her face stricken; Henry has started to swim back toward them.

“See? He’s a good swimmer.”

“I
know
he’s a good swimmer,” Eloise moans. “But the
quarry
. It’s dis
gusting
.”

“It’s fine, it’s clean over here.” Eve points. “See the bright yellow thing? That’s keeping all the oil over there. And by now there’s probably not much oil left at all. But over here, it’s perfectly clean.”

Henry has swum right up to them by now; he’s got his front paws up on the low ledge where they’re standing and is scrabbling to get his haunches up; Eve reaches down and hoists him out of the water by his collar. The dog gives a vigorous shake; Eloise recoils from the spray. “It is
not
perfectly clean,” she says. “It’s perfectly
disgusting
and it’s always going to be.”

Eloise looks down at the dog balefully, and Eve understands that her sister’s concern is not the oil and gas, but the stain of death. “Eloise,” she says. Eloise looks up at her expectantly; though her mind is racing, Eve can think of nothing right to say. “It’s okay,” she finally says.

“No,” Eloise says. “It’s not.
Nothing
is okay.” She turns and starts to walk across the grass toward the house. Eve watches her. Their elegant dinner sits abandoned in the grass.

*  *  *

B
Y
the time they have finished their cheeseburgers and the trivia section of the night has concluded, Joan and Anders have four tickets each for the drawing that brings the evening to an end. There is ordinarily an interlude of about fifteen minutes between the time the trivia ends and the prize drawing begins, during which background music is again turned on and the din of conversation resumes. When the waitress comes to take their plates away, Anders asks her for one more Widow Maker for himself and Joan to share, and she drops two new tickets on the table.
Anders slides these toward his wife and watches as she neatly lines them up beside the other four she’s arranged into a row.

Their winnings this evening are impressive: they have won two new glasses, a Widow’s Walk visor, and a Styrofoam key chain with the logo of one of the marine shops downtown.
Music
was one of the evening’s trivia categories, so Anders did especially well, although after answering three of the questions correctly, he began to feel a bit like he was cheating, and he stopped raising his hand. He lifts the key chain from the table now and turns it over in his hands, finding it a somewhat arbitrary prize. It was what Joan won for knowing the full name of King George VI. “What was his name again?” Anders asks.

“Albert Frederick Arthur George.”

“How do you know that, anyway?”

Joan considers this. “I have no idea,” she says. She laughs. “It’s sort of a useless piece of information, isnt it?”

“Well, it did get you a West Marine key chain,” Anders reminds her. He sets the key chain down.

The waitress returns with their Widow Maker and two new straws; Anders peels the wrappers from both and puts the straws into the drink, angling one in Joan’s direction. He takes a small sip and sits back. “It’s hard to believe there was a time when we could drink, what, four of these apiece.”

“I know it,” Joan says. “And then happily drive home.” She begins to push her tickets around the table, rearranging the order. “Five times,” she says, thoughtfully.

“What?”

Joan looks up at her husband. “Five times above the legal limit. It
is
pretty drunk.”

“Oh,” Anders says. “The body.”

“James.”

“Yuh.”

“Don’t you think? I mean, five times.”

“I do.”

Joan frowns, watching the emcee fiddle with the microphone, which has occasionally screeched throughout the evening. “What do
you
think happened?”

Anders breathes deeply. He shrugs. “I don’t know.”

“I just assumed it was suicide. Right from the beginning.” The emcee taps the microphone; a thud echoes. Joan pictures the man in the maroon car, pondering how, if at all, he might be involved. But, like all the other things she cannot bring herself to mention, she does not mention him, though part of her had intended to as soon as Anders and Eve returned. “But now I’m not so sure. I just don’t know. I mean, even if it was intentional, how intentional can anything be, really, if you’re that drunk?” She bites her lip, aware of how similar she sounds to Eve.

The lights go down; in the dimness, Anders shakes his head.
“Whatever it was, I’m not sure that it matters,” he says. “The outcome is the same.”

*  *  *

T
HE
girls leave dinner where it is and give the dog a bath, which Eve is pleased serves as adequate balm to soothe her sister’s distress. They play a game of Chinese checkers after that, which she allows Eloise to win; by then it is time for Eloise to go to bed. She does not want to read on in
Alice in Wonderland
without her father, so Eve tells her a made-up bedtime story about a mouse named Steve who gets stuck overnight in a refrigerator; after eating his way through the food on every shelf, finally Steve falls asleep in the cheese drawer. “And so even though he was scared to be stuck at first, in the end he was as happy as if he had died and gone to heaven.”

Eloise peers over the edge of the bed with concern, the light from the hallway glinting in her eyes. “But he
is
going to die.”

“What do you mean? He’s in seventh heaven. It’s like if you got stuck in a Moose Tracks ice cream factory overnight.”

“No, Evie, there’s no oxygen in a refrigerator. You suffocate if you get in one. That’s what Mrs. Wilson said. Refrigerators make you suffocate, and if you put a plastic bag over your head you suffocate, too.”

Eve takes a breath. “Well,” she says. “In this particular instance, a mouse takes up very little oxygen. So there was still plenty by morning, when the owner of the house opened the fridge to get out his breakfast.”