The Why of Things: A Novel (26 page)

Near the trailer, a rusted metal Coca-Cola cooler stands open, with embossed instructions across the front to Help Yourself, though of course when Eve peers inside the cooler is empty save for twigs, shriveled leaves, and a small pool of scummy water. There is an old shower stall on its side, the rings of the former curtain still around the rail. A claw-footed bathtub sits nearby, so filled with dirt and leaves that seedlings have taken root inside; Eve looks around for a toilet or a sink, wondering if someone has disposed of their entire bathroom here, but these she does not see. There is in fact no rhyme or reason to what has been left here, as far as Eve can discern. There’s a rusted gas can, a plastic blender, and one of the same kind of cast-iron radiators they used to have in Maryland before they had heating ducts installed, and which Eve remembers being frightened of, for reasons that are inexplicable to her now. There is a rust-covered saw with teeth so dull they’re nearly round, a bent pair of tongs, a portable gas grill, a scum-stained glass beaker.

Eve stops where she is and stares down at this, shot suddenly through space and time to the day of Sophie’s death, the memory presenting itself with nauseating and insistent clarity at the mere sight of this small glass container in the woods.

She was in chemistry class, which she hates that she hated because Sophie so loved, doing a lab to determine the molar volume of hydrogen gas, when Mrs. Suskin came and found her; that, in her mind, was the moment when everything derailed, the moment until which life had been its normal self. She was filling a beaker—like this one—with water when Mrs. Suskin tapped her on the shoulder and told her that her mother was waiting for her in the lobby; puzzled, Eve went downstairs. Her mother rose from the bench where she was sitting as soon as Eve entered the lobby and pulled her close with an urgency that made Eve’s limbs go numb with dread.

“I need you to come home with me, okay?” her mother said, the expression on her face one that Eve had never seen before, stunned and rushed and quietly desperate.

“What’s the matter?” Eve asked, feeling an odd combination of anger and fear. She thought at first that something must have happened to her father, that maybe his plane had crashed on its way to Italy, or that he’d had a heart attack, or stroke.

Her mother shook her head rapidly and brought a finger to her lips. “Not here, Evie, okay?” she whispered. “Not here. Let’s go home.”

Part of Eve was inclined to refuse, as if whatever had happened would unhappen if she refused to hear about it and went back to her day, but in the end she didn’t even bother to go to her locker for her things, and instead immediately followed her mother out to the car, her lab coat on, her safety goggles on her head. They drove in silence; Eve was too afraid to ask again what was the matter, and able to take no pleasure in the delicious freedom she would normally feel to be out of the school building in the middle of a school day.

She saw her Aunt Sam’s car in the driveway when they got home; while Joan had gone to pick up Eve, Aunt Sam had evidently
gone to pick up Eloise, and the two were sitting at the kitchen table when Joan and Eve came inside, Eloise sipping the orange soda she would later drop to the floor. Eve had assumed that Sophie, having the lucky schedule and privileges of a senior, would also already be at home when they got there, and it was when Joan ushered the two girls into the living room alone and sat them down on the sofa that Eve began to understand that it was not their father that something had happened to, but Sophie.

Eve stares down at this beaker in the woods, unwillingly remembering, thinking how foolish it was to be determining molar volume when her sister was dead. Part of her would like to lift the beaker from the ground and smash it for what it stands for; the childish, superstitious part of her is afraid ever to touch a beaker again, as if it were the beaker’s fault, if only it were that easy to explain.

*  *  *

T
HOUGH
he meant to go directly home after his dive and spend the afternoon in his garden, Anders can’t resist the urge to drive to Beverly, one of the many small towns on the north shore. Beverly, Salem, Marblehead, Peabody, Swampscott, Lynn—there are too many of these towns to keep straight, all haphazardly arranged and few of them accessible by highway, though from Gloucester, Beverly isn’t far. Less than twenty minutes after he has left Cape Ann, Anders is driving down Cabot Street, the main drag, which is lined with trendy new restaurants, health food stores, an independent cinema, all by-products of the art college in town, places with names like The Organic Garden, and The Atomic Health Café, Kamasinki, Kame, and Soma. He hasn’t been down Cabot Street in years, and he is surprised by how much it has changed since he was last here, particularly in contrast with Gloucester, which is still refreshingly dominated by sub shops and pizzerias,
places with names like Destino’s, Sebastian’s, Trupiano’s, Valentino’s.

He follows Cabot slowly north, the orange shell from Sophie’s desk out on the dashboard. Earlier, when he’d taken it from Dave’s hand and returned it to his pocket, he’d discovered there the scrap of paper that had been at the bottom of his daughter’s wastebasket the other day, the scrap of paper with the doodled stars, the street address in Beverly: 588 Cabot, to which he’s yet to come. He thought he’d thrown the scrap of paper out. He thought he’d tossed it along with the movie ticket stub, the broken barrette, the chewed toothpick, the Kleenex, and the Twizzlers wrapper, those items—items he can still name—which with a sweep of his hand he’d gathered from where he’d set them out on Sophie’s desk, shoved into his pocket, and brought out to the garage to toss into the fifty-gallon trash can they keep there. It had been a pointed decision not to keep them. The shell was one thing; the shell had been in her desk drawer, was something
she
had decided herself to keep. But these other things were things she’d thrown away—they were
garbage
—and he denied himself the urge to keep them; he’d refused to give in to sentimentality.

Somehow, though, this scrap of paper had escaped, and as he stood there by the car looking down at it, he felt his mind lapsing into the magical type of thinking he tries so hard to avoid, and he knew that there was no way he could withstand the impulse to seek out the address written there, as if there were a reason that it was this scrap of paper, and not another item, that was spared.

He peers now out the window, reading the numbers above doorways and looking for 588. He doesn’t know what to expect at 588 Cabot, and in truth the rational side of him expects nothing in particular; at this point, though his heart is skipping nimbly in his chest, he is simply curious. He imagines his daughter driving down this very street around this time last year, in the old VW Fox
she’d bought with her life savings—the old VW Fox in which she died.

The business stretch of Cabot ends around the four hundred block, and soon Anders is in a more residential area, the road lined by older colonials, placards marking a revolutionary battle site on one side, a historic church on the other. Puzzled, he pulls the scrap of paper from his pocket; it confirms that 588 is the address he is looking for. Various unlikely scenarios begin to flash unbidden through his head: this far off the main drag, who knows what 588 could be? A drug dealer. An abortion clinic. A psychic. Anders frowns, annoyed with himself. Probably, he tells himself, 588 is simply someone’s home, the place where a party was held one night, or a friend’s address. He begins to wonder what he should do when he gets there, whether he should go and knock on the door, find out whose house it is, or whether he should simply drive away. He pictures both scenarios from the outside in, as if he were watching himself in a movie. The bereaved father, unhinged, knocking on a stranger’s door—for what? The bereaved father, helpless and hapless, driving forty minutes round-trip to stare at a house and leave. Both scenarios make him cringe.

Soon, though, Cabot leads out under the highway overpass, and Anders finds himself back in familiar territory, at a five-way intersection near the exit where there is a gas station, an art store, Nick’s Roast Beef, and in the center, 588 Cabot Street. Joseph’s. This is a gourmet grocery store where Joan shops at least once every two weeks for the items she cannot get from the grocery store in Gloucester: good marinated meats, imported cheeses, homemade sauces and salsas and dips. He himself has been here many times before as well, but it’s one of those places he’s simply known how to find without knowing the exact address; he’s never associated Joseph’s, on one side of the highway, with the Cabot Street of boutiques, galleries, and cafes several miles down. He
pulls into the parking lot, unsurprised, yet oddly disappointed. Joseph’s—that is all. It’s not that he expected any clues or explanations; it did not take him too long to decide that these do not exist, were scratched away by the pen that lay across the to-do list Sophie left out on her desk before she died. Still. Joseph’s offers him as little to go on as anything else.

Anders sits in the Buick, staring through the window at the store, at his own self reflected in the glass of the dark-paned door; every time a customer goes in or out, he sees himself go reeling.

*  *  *

T
HERE
is an American flag mounted outside Elizabeth Favazza’s front door. This is the first thing Joan notices when she turns onto Magnolia Street, the car windows rolled down and James Favazza’s dog in the passenger seat beside her. Back at the house, she had loaded him into the car as soon as Eve had taken off on her bike—she’s decided not to mention to the girls whom the dog belonged to, for fear of upsetting Eloise and egging Eve on. Over the course of the drive downtown, Henry has made his way slowly forward, settling for a few moments in the backseat before climbing all the way into the front, where he sits now with his chin resting on the sill of the open window, looking as pensive as Joan feels.

It is almost the Fourth of July, and there are American flags mounted outside front doors all up and down the street, but the fact that there is one outside of 932 Magnolia is a detail that particularly strikes Joan. It was not there when she drove down this street a week ago, she is certain, because there are also wind chimes by the door, and she clearly remembers these. She wonders whether Elizabeth Favazza was the one to set the flag out, and if so what she’d been thinking when she did, if it was a concession to the exhausting fact that life goes on. Joan can’t remember exactly
how or when it happened that they themselves surrendered to the flow of living in the days and weeks after Sophie’s death. It was a slow process, she supposes, during which they gave themselves over to the elements of life one thing at a time: first the necessities, like showers and meals; and then things like grocery shopping, and putting gas into the car; and then, finally, the superfluities: filling the birdfeeder, or making a birthday cake, or putting out an American flag. It is a process that is ongoing still, she supposes, but when she thinks back to those first days of numbed shock and sorrow, she is amazed by how far they have come without being fully aware, amazed by the relative normalcy of now, which then had seemed so impossible.

Most residents of Magnolia Street park their cars in small driveways that separate one house from the next; there are few cars parked in the street itself. Joan parks a short ways down from Elizabeth Favazza’s house, preferring to walk the rest of the way than announce her arrival with the sound of the car’s engine and the slamming of its doors, which might summon Elizabeth Favazza to the window to watch as Joan approached, the idea of which would make her overly self-conscious. Unseen, she approaches slowly, letting Henry dawdle at the end of the homemade leash of rope she’s tied to his collar so as to allow him a chance to do his business.

Though at first the street appeared mostly sleepy, now that she is out of the car Joan can hear the laughter and voices of people gathered in various backyards; she can smell something grilling. At the end of the block, a couple of kids are tossing a ball around in the middle of the street, and across the way a man stands in the small strip of lawn before his house, yanking the cord of an old lawnmower over and over again in unsucessful attempts to get the engine going.

After Henry has peed, Joan leads him up the three steps of Elizabeth Favazza’s stoop, where she makes sure to press the doorbell firmly and so avoid those awkward moments when you’re not sure whether the bell inside has sounded, or whether you should ring again. In this case, there is no doubt that the doorbell sounds; she can hear the four or five notes of a cheerful melody inside. She waits, listening to the tinkling of the wind chimes as the American flag flaps gently against her head every now and then in the breeze, reminding herself that as far as Elizabeth Favazza knows, Joan is just a stranger who has found a missing dog, nothing more. It makes her feel fraudulent to deliver the dog under such a pretense, but she’s not sure Elizabeth Favazza would even want to know otherwise, nor what use that information would serve.

In a minute, she hears noise on the other side of the door as Elizabeth Favazza works the lock and turns the knob. She has done her best not to imagine what the woman might look like, because she hadn’t wanted to be unsettled when she inevitably got it wrong; she is unsettled anyway when the door opens and it is not Elizabeth Favazza at all, but a man standing on the other side of the screen door. He looks out at Joan from the shadows within, then glances down at the dog. He sniffs, and pushes the screen door open, letting it go only after Joan and Henry have stepped inside; it hisses slowly shut on its hydraulic spring.

They stand just inside the door, in a small, green foyer at the base of a set of stairs; the first thing Joan notices is the sweet smell of something baking.

“My sister’s on the phone,” the man says. “She’ll be off in a minute.”

Joan nods. “I’m Joan,” she says. “Joan Jacobs.”

The man looks at her for a moment and then nods curtly, but
he doesn’t introduce himself, instead fixing his gaze on Henry, who is sniffing around the base of the umbrella stand by the door. He is a large man, in his late fifties, Joan would guess, his tanned face etched with deep lines that seem borne of weather more than age, as if during his life he has spent a good deal of time outdoors. He gestures at Henry with his chin. “Where’d you find him?” he asks.