The Why of Things: A Novel (24 page)

Anders looks up, fixing his gaze on a single wisp of cloud streaked like a brushstroke through the sky, and lets himself fall back. Suddenly the sky above him is replaced by a wavery green
shot through with shards of shattered light, and bubbles racing up toward the surface. Anders watches them until they cease, feeling the cold water seep into his wet suit, and then he turns over, so that he is floating facedown, and begins to swim in the direction of the reef.

*  *  *

E
VE
is home from the nursery by nine. She drops her bike in the driveway and heads straight for the garage, wanting to finish cleaning it out so she can begin whatever task she decides to tackle next; since Trivia Night, she has been determined to redeem herself; she screwed up in a way that Sophie
never
would. When she returned to the house that night and her mother asked her what on earth she’d been thinking, it was difficult for her to articulate. She explained about the two types of beer, and about the cooler bag and Larry Stephens, and the Vic’s T-shirt, and the bartender’s response when she called him up, and how certain she felt that she could learn something possibly vital at the bar. She had tried valiantly to get her parents to see, but even as she uttered her justification, it was clear to her—and had already become so, out in the woods—how flimsy it was.

“And why,” her father asked, when she had finished speaking, “even if you are correct in your assumptions, did you have to try to get to Vic’s
tonight
? Vic’s isn’t going anywhere. Saul isn’t going anywhere. Could it not have waited until tomorrow?”

Eve opened her mouth to reply, but she was at a loss for words. “It could have,” she finally agreed.

“All right, then, Evie,” her father had said, and he had given her a firm look. “Listen to me, okay? Enough is enough. Got it?”

“Yeah,” she’d said. “Okay.”

She has tried to moderate her preoccupation with James Favazza in the days since; she hasn’t brought up the incident with
her parents or anyone else, and she has tried to keep busy with other things. Of course she does still think about it—she cannot help herself—and in the evenings, in the privacy of her bedroom, she allows herself to speculate over James Favazza’s things. But she keeps all conjecture to herself, and she has refrained from any active sleuthing that might get her into trouble.

She steps now into the shadows of the garage, where it is cool compared to the sun outside. She surveys the space, pleased by her progress. She’s stored the paints and glues and sprays she deemed worth saving underneath the worktable, in an old glass aquarium that used to hold the Siamese fighting fish they kept when they were younger, which died all at once from poison algae growth. She’s gotten rid of junk from the standing closet, too, and reorganized the remaining contents: fishing poles and tackle (which have not been used in years), a set of oars, extension cords of various colors and lengths. There are only a few more boxes to go through, which she’d left out in the middle of room before going to the nursery this morning.

She sorts through these now. One box is filled with old electronics—wires and cables and other devices she doesn’t recognize and so can’t decide whether to keep or throw away; this box she sets aside for her father to take a look at. In the next box, she finds all sorts of tools—chisels and files and wire modeling tools that she recognizes from ceramics class; these must have belonged to the sculptor who lived here before them.

In the last box, she discovers a transistor radio, an old VCR, and, housed in a sturdy case, a boxy old manual Pentax camera and two used rolls of film. She takes the camera out of its case with interest. Though it clearly hasn’t been used in years, it appears to be functional; it clicks obediently when she presses the shutter release, and when she winds the dial, the film inside advances. She looks at the camera curiously, wondering whose it
is, how old the film might be, what pictures might be on it, and on the other rolls, too.

She takes the camera with her out to the quarry and sits down on a ledge. The zoom, she discovers, is impressive; peering through the viewfinder, she traces the quarry’s edge, adjusting the focus as she goes, amazed by the camera’s ability to capture each crevice up close, and the bits of pollen, and the water bugs afloat on the surface of the water. She looks at the high ledge where James Favazza’s car went in, as if she might see something she has not seen before—a shard of glass from a taillight, maybe—but there is nothing there worth noting. She focuses in on her father’s roses, where, through the camera, she can see a bee hovering above one. She zooms in on the starlings overhead, which have been swarming noisily in the trees all day. Up close, they look decidedly more purple than black, though it is hard for her to focus on one for any length of time before it swoops out of view.

Still peering through the lens, she lowers the camera; suddenly she sees her mother’s face: lined, pensive, staring off into some distance. Eve hadn’t realized her mother was even home. She watches her, sees a flinch of muscle along the side of her mouth, the blink of an eye, the absent parting of lips; studied this way, suddenly her mother looks entirely and oddly unfamiliar, in the way that a word will start to sound strange when you say it over and over again: number, number, number, number. Eve lowers the camera, unsettled; with her bare eyes, her mother is just a figure across the quarry, standing on the porch with a watering can in hand; with her bare eyes, her mother is just her mother again.

But then Joan notices Eve; she lifts a hand, smiles and waves. Eve waves back, and then both of them look up at a heightened chatter in the trees; as if on cue, the starlings clustered overhead rise at once and swarm into the sky, where they seem to become a single swirling entity against the blue.

*  *  *

T
HE
reef is about a hundred yards out past the entrance to the cove and runs parallel to the shore; they have to descend only twenty feet or so to reach it. Anders had imagined the reef would be covered with a thin green film of algae, barnacles, perhaps a few starfish, but it is in fact like an underwater garden; there is the furlike wavering green that Anders had expected, and the clinging starfish, but there are also fist-size pink anemones, and clusters of what look like fragile heads of lettuce, the leaves nearly translucent. There is one sort of plant that looks like a soft green fan, a sheep’s ear of the sea, and one part of the reef is covered with a growth that looks like purple lace.

Anders had thought maybe they’d see a lobster here, a flounder there, perhaps a skate or two skimming the bottom, but there is in fact a whole society of creatures gathered by the reef, coexisting like members of a small city. There are giant hermit crabs, their shells and legs covered with hairlike algae, that seem to creep almost tentatively along, testing each step with a leg before they take it, like blind men tapping with their canes. There are other crabs that look like purple spiders, from which Anders keeps a wary distance, and the more traditionally shaped crabs, with shells spotted like a leopard’s skin. Sitting bloated at the bottom in the shade of a rocky ledge there is a creature the likes of which he has never seen before, a bright red lump of a fish with lazy eyes and a large, O-shaped mouth, which to Anders looks decidedly bored. At the far end of the reef, somewhat removed from the other creatures, there is a pair of squid, hovering pink and electric, their eyes like large round mirrors and their tentacles aglow, as if wrapped around some purple neon current. Anders swims slowly, surveying all of this with amazement, and sometimes, as with the squid and the purple spider-crabs, mild alarm. It is hard
for him to believe that all of this is here, and has been here all along; he feels as if he has been presented with a color he never knew existed.

They have almost swum the length of the reef and back when Anders finds himself above a sandy stretch of seafloor, where he notices camouflaged against the sand a flat fish, which is almost invisible but for the faintest trace of its outline. Anders pauses, and for a moment simply hovers, gazing down. The fish is about the size of a dinner plate, with a delicate tendrilled fringe and round black eyes that seem to study Anders as curiously as he is studying the fish. When he looks more closely, he sees that the fish is actually more transparent than colored like the sand, as he’d originally thought; if he held it up to the light he is sure he would be able to see all its countless fragile bones. After a moment, the fish gives a flick of its tail and slowly swims away, leaving in its wake a slight and quickly settling plume of sand, and a second later, Anders feels a tap on his shoulder. He turns; Dave is signaling that it is time to go up. He looks upward, where Caroline and Pete are already small figures overhead, and then back at Dave, whom he realizes that against diving protocol he had all but forgotten. Dave looks at him questioningly, with two thumbs up. Anders nods. He obediently inflates his BCD and propels himself toward the surface, feeling like a kid on a carnival ride that has come to an end.

Breaking through the surface is
like waking from a pleasant dream; the real world seems vaguely disappointing by comparison. He blinks into the day’s bright light, which is almost blinding after the cavelike dimness of the deep. Everything is the same as it was an hour ago when they descended, though Anders has the odd sense that it shouldn’t be. The bay is still windless and glassy, the sky still a nearly cloudless blue, though he imagines that the
day has gotten even hotter than it was; when he looks toward the shore, the beach is shimmering with heat.

He turns around, looks out again at the bay, where the bell bouy tilts slowly in the gentle rolling swell, mournfully tolling, and where, a few feet away, a cormorant is floating on the surface. Anders lowers his face so his mask is half in the water, half out, and he can see below the waterline, where the cormorant’s legs are tucked against its undersides. They give a kick here, a kick there, and then, while Anders is watching, the cormorant gathers itself and dives. Anders puts his face into the water entirely, and watches as the cormorant swims down, and down, until finally it has disappeared from view, and though he would like to follow it, Anders turns and follows the rest of the class toward the shore.

*  *  *

R
OSCOE
McWilliams and his crew arrive promptly at noon to remove the boom and skimmer from the quarry. After greeting them, Joan goes inside and up to her office to pack her computer away and replace it with the typewriter, which she discovers, when she feeds an experimental sheet of paper into the thing and tries to type, needs a new ribbon. She removes the lid, and she is just about to lift the spool from its posts when the phone on her desk begins to ring. She glances at it with annoyance, but she answers anyway.

“Hello?” she asks, not meaning to sound quite as hassled as she does.

A woman’s voice somewhat timidly replies. “Hello, I’m calling for—Anders Jacobs?”

Joan frowns. “May I say who’s calling?”

“Yes, my name is Elizabeth Favazza. I’m returning his call about a dog he found? He called several days ago.”

For a moment, Joan is speechless. She stares down at the buttons of the typewriter, and one part of her brain bothers, in this moment, to notice that the D and B are the most faded of the keys. She squeezes her eyes shut with thumb and forefinger, remembering for the first time the dog that had been near the porch the night they arrived, frightening Seymour, that jingling collar in the shadows: Henry, of course, just hours after his master had disappeared. “He’s not here at the moment,” she finally replies. She swallows. “But this is Joan Jacobs, his wife. You’re calling about Henry?”

“Yes,” the woman replies. “Henry. My son’s dog. Is he—Do you still have him? I know it’s been days, it’s just that no one got the message until now, I—”

“Yes, no,” Joan interrupts. “No, he’s still here.”

“Oh, he is,” Elizabeth Favazza says gratefully. “I’m so sorry you’ve had him for so long. We just didn’t know. There was an accident, and, well, we—well . . . Anyway, thank you.”

An accident. “No, no, it’s been no trouble at all,” Joan says.

“I’ll come pick him up this afternoon. I mean, if that’s convenient. Where are you?”

“We’re—” Joan gazes through the window, where outside the men have driven their trucks and trailers right up to the quarry’s edge; there is no way she can allow Elizabeth Favazza to come here. “You know, we’re so hard to find,” she says. “Why don’t you let me bring him to you?”

“I don’t want you to go to any more trouble than you already have. I’m sure I can—”

“It’s no trouble at all. Are you downtown?” she asks, even as she pictures the sloping hill of Magnolia Street, the off-white vinyl siding of Elizabeth Favazza’s house, the three-stepped stoop, and the frosted window in the door. “Because if you are, I have to go downtown this afternoon anyway, and I could bring him then.”

“I
am
downtown—but are you sure? You’ve already done so much, and it’s just as easy for me—”

“It’s no trouble at all. Where are you?”

“I’m—just a minute, I’m sorry.” Joan hears muffled voices as she imagines Elizabeth Favazza holds the phone against her chest to speak to whoever has interrupted her. She watches Roscoe McWilliams consult with the other two men, who then walk around the quarry in the direction of the skimmer. Eve is out there, too, hands on hips as she surveys the scene. “I’m sorry,” Elizabeth Favazza says to Joan after a moment. “Are you there?”

“I’m here. You were just about to give me your address.”

“That’s right. I’m at 932 Magnolia.”

“Nine thirty-two Magnolia,” Joan repeats, unnecessarily writing this down.

“That’s a few streets off Washington, up the hill.”

“Yes,” Joan says. “I think I know where it is. Is there a good time?”

“Anytime. I’ll be here all afternoon.” Elizabeth Favazza thanks Joan again, gives her phone number, and they hang up.

For a moment, Joan only sits there, staring out the window as images real and imagined flash through her mind: Elizabeth Favazza’s house, a pickup truck gurgling as it disappears beneath the surface, the dog swimming from it through the dark water, or frantically pacing at the quarry’s edge, Eloise luring that same dog in circles with a stick, rubber-clad divers at night, the stained-glass windows of St. Ann’s.