The Why of Things: A Novel (27 page)

“He found us, really,” Joan says. “He’s just been hanging around the house.”

The man grunts. “My nephew’s dog,” he says. He motions in the direction of the living room adjoining, again with his chin. “May as well have a seat,” he says.

Joan follows him into the living room, which is painted the same color green as the foyer. The floor is wood, and though it is covered in large part by a patchwork carpet of mutely colored squares, it yet creaks beneath their feet.

“Sit anywhere,” the man instructs without looking at her, passing through the living room and through a door in the far wall that appears, from the tiles of the room beyond, to lead into the kitchen. Henry does not follow him.

Joan looks uncertainly around the room. There are only two places to sit: a rocking chair by the window in the front corner of the room, across from a large TV on a wooden stand, and a leather couch against the far wall, in front of which sits a coffee table trunk similar to their own. Joan decides to take a seat on the couch; she does not want to have to rock—or to have to fight rocking. She sits on the edge of the couch, feeling oddly grateful for Henry’s presence beside her; she pats him with a new fondness, hopeful that Elizabeth Favazza is less unfriendly than her brother.

After she has waited a minute or two, Joan hears a door close loudly somewhere off the kitchen, and then a moment later the
chirping sound of a car lock just outside the window near where she is sitting; she looks out and sees the brother getting into the car parked in the small driveway beside the house. He turns the engine on, and for several seconds he idles there, fiddling with something that Joan can’t see. Then he wraps his arm around the back of his seat, backs abruptly into the street, and pulls away. Oddly, with his departure Joan feels even more uneasy. She hopes that he has at least informed Elizabeth Favazza of her arrival, and wonders how long she should wait before either going to find the woman herself or leaving.

She takes a breath, wishing there were at least a book on the coffee table for her to pretend to occupy herself with. She lets her eyes wander around the room, from the TV to the rocking chair to a bookshelf she hadn’t noticed from the doorway, atop which sits a large fern, its leaves browning at the edges. On the wall on one side of the bookshelf is a framed print of a Hopper painting, one of sunlight on the side of a white house. On the other side of the bookshelf hangs a mirror, which has the effect of making her feel as if she were looking not
at
it, but
through
it into another identical room, where she sees the same TV on a stand, the same rocking chair, the same bare coffee table, and herself on the same leather couch, framed photographs propped neatly on the table beside it.

Joan looks away from the mirror to look at these. One photograph is of a woman with short, dark hair, maybe in her thirties, holding a small, unhappy-looking child on her lap; Joan thinks this must be Elizabeth Favazza. Another is of this same woman, but older, and with longer hair, standing beside a man on what Joan recognizes as the boulevard downtown; they are leaning back against the railing at the water’s edge, their hair whipping in the wind. Another photograph is of two boys, maybe twelve or thirteen years old, grinning as they dangle a large fish between
them in the air, and another is of these same two boys some years before, sitting at a picnic table as they share half of an enormous watermelon. One of these boys, Joan thinks, must be James, but she can’t tell which based on the photograph that ran with his obituary.

The last photograph on the table is of two young men, who Joan supposes must be the boys grown up—they, too, are slender and dark haired. In this last photograph, they are seated on the edge of a dock, bare chested, their feet hanging in the water, and they look into the camera with similarly distracted smiles, as if they had been in the midst of some engrossing conversation when the photographer interrupted them.

“I’m sorry to keep you!”

Joan turns in her seat; a small, exhausted-looking woman has appeared in the doorway. Joan stands. “That’s all right,” she says. “Don’t worry at all.”

“I just—I had this phone call, and I couldn’t get off . . .” She shrugs. “I’m Elizabeth Favazza.” She gives Joan a tired smile.

“Joan Jacobs,” Joan says, feeling awkward and off balance in the small space between the sofa and the coffee table.

“Yes, Joan,” Elizabeth Favazza says, somewhat distractedly, it seems. She glances down at Henry, who has gotten up from where earlier he’d settled at Joan’s feet and come over to her, his rope-leash trailing. “Thank you for bringing him.”

Joan steps out from behind the coffee table as Elizabeth Favazza greets the dog, and positions herself a few feet away from them, watching. Elizabeth Favazza is undoubtedly the woman in the photographs, though an older version; the lines in her face are more pronounced, and her dark hair has gone partly gray. She looks smaller now than she did in the photographs from when she was younger, as if time has whittled her away; her body is angular beneath her T-shirt, and ropy veins river her forearms and her
hands, which work now to untie the rope from Henry’s collar. When she has gotten it loose, she stands, and holds it out for Joan to take. Joan is just about to do so when it occurs to her that since Henry is not her dog the woman might not have a replacement leash. “You can keep it,” she says.

Elizabeth Favazza lets the hand holding the rope drop to her side, regarding Joan bemusedly. “Thank you again,” she says, and she lets her eyes fall to the dog. “And for keeping him all this time. I’m sure many people would have quit waiting and called the pound . . .”

“It was no trouble at all, really.”

The two women stand quietly, both watching the dog gnaw at a spot on his rump, until outside there is the sudden sound of a lawnmower; when she glances out the window, Joan sees that the man across the street has finally gotten the machine working.

Elizabeth Favazza looks out the window at him, too. “He mows that lawn every day,” she says softly. “I’m surprised there’s any grass left.” She blinks, and then looks at Joan, and suddenly her expression changes. “Before you go,” she says. “Wait here for just a minute.”

She disappears into the kitchen; Joan can hear the sound of a drawer or cabinet opening, and the tear and crackle of aluminum foil, and in an another minute Elizabeth Favazza comes back into the room with a foil-covered plate. “Brownies.” She offers the plate to Joan. “Ready just in time.”

“Oh,” Joan says. “You didn’t have to do that.”

“You didn’t have to keep the dog,” she says.

“Thank you.” Joan takes the plate; she can tell by the bottom that the brownies are still warm. “They smell wonderful. I have a couple of girls at home who I know will be very happy.” She feels her heart speed up just a little as she says this, which is as much in that conversational direction as she dares venture. “Actually,” she
says, glancing at the watch on her wrist, “I’ve got to go get one of them from camp right now.”

“Of course,” Elizabeth Favazza says. She nods toward the door. “I’ll show you out.”

Joan follows her to the door; Henry trails them. She gives Henry a quick rub good-bye and then starts down the steps.

“Have a good afternoon,” Elizabeth Favazza says, as she goes, and though it feels like a lie to say the same when she imagines Elizabeth Favazza going back into the house to spend the rest of the day with her dead son’s dog, Joan turns and tells Elizabeth Favazza to have a good one, too.

*  *  *

N
OBODY
is there when Anders gets home. He goes in through the kitchen door and calls out; no one answers him. Not even the dog is around. He drapes his wet suit over a kitchen chair and puts away the groceries he ended up bringing home from Joseph’s: fat red tomatoes with fresh basil and mozzarella cheese, native corn, teriyaki steak tips, and a loaf of fresh baked ciabatta; he’s decided he’ll cook dinner tonight.

He finds a plastic bag for today’s dead rose leaves and brings it out with him to the garden; of the dozen bushes there, he counts seven that have blooms, which might be some improvement since he began applying the fungicide, though he can’t be sure. One of the bushes, he notes with a frown, appears to have succumbed to the disease completely; it is a bloomless, leafless, thorny shrub. At least the lilies around the quarry are thriving, he thinks. He looks over at them, just starting to bloom; in a couple of weeks’ time what now are pale green slender wicks will have opened into glowing yellow trumpets, their reflections shimmering on the surface of the water. He squints out at things, trying to picture the quarry empty, the steep granite walls and ledges plunging over
a hundred feet down. He finds himself wondering who the men who worked within it were, and what indeed they might have left behind.

In a minute he hears the slow crunch of gravel behind him, and he turns around in time to see Eve appearing on the lip of the driveway on her bike, wearing a backpack and a rusted length of anchor chain around her neck. Between the incline of the driveway, the uneven surface of the gravel, and the combined weight of the chain and her pack, her bike veers sharply this way and that, and of course, despite the fact that he left out several helmets that he found in the closet for her to choose from, her head is bare. At the edge of the driveway, she drops her bike, and then makes her way toward her father across the lawn.

“So,” she says, when she has reached the edge of the garden. “Did you get nitrogen narcosis?”

“No,” he says. “But I saw squid. They glowed.”

“I didn’t know we had squid around here.”

“There’s a lot I didn’t know we had around here,” Anders says. He regards his daughter. “No helmet?”

“Nope.”

“Not one of those worked?”

“Not a one.” Eve surveys the roses, scratching her calf with a toe. “How’re your perennials?” she asks. “They don’t look very good.”

“No,” Anders agrees. “They may not be perennials after this year.”

“That sucks.” Eve wrinkles her nose. She undrapes the chain from around her neck. “But I have this for you. It’s for your wall. I thought it would be a good addition.” She walks carefully through the roses and gives the chain to her father.

“Thank you,” he says. “Where’d you find it?”

“Junkyard.”

Anders gives her a puzzled look.

“The one by the nursery,” she explains. “The one that calls itself a
junk car disposal
, even though it’s technically not.”

Anders raises an eyebrow. “And what were you doing there, pray tell?” he asks, though he’s fairly sure of the answer.

Eve shrugs. “Trying to find James Favazza’s truck.” She says this as if it were a perfectly ordinary thing to do.

Anders looks at his daughter thoughtfully, nods. “I see.” He turns and scans the wall for a spot to rest the chain. Eve watches as he weaves it between a couple of rocks like a giant sideways S. At first, it falls out of place, knocking a small glass bottle from its nook as it goes, but on his second attempt to arrange the chain among the rocks, it stays put. He looks at Eve. “What do you think?”

She nods. “That works.”

They survey the wall quietly, as if it were an intricate painting, Eve’s hands on her hips, Anders’ arms crossed before his chest. A chainsaw whines in the distance.

“So,” Anders says, after a moment. “I’m assuming you didn’t find the truck.

“No.”

“What if you had?”

Eve thinks about this. “I don’t know,” she says.

“Well, what were you looking for?”

“I don’t know, exactly. I would have wanted to see what was in the glove box and stuff. I was looking for . . . evidence.” She frowns, bends down to lift a rock from the soil, which she begins to toss from hand to hand.

Anders waits for her to go on.

Eve sighs. “I don’t really know
what
I’m looking for,” she says finally. “I just—you’re going to think I’m crazy, but I’m pretty sure
I know what happened, and I just want to prove it. I just want to know for sure.” She sighs heavily. “But also, it was more than that, I guess. I mean—all that stuff, the EMS bottle, the flip-flop, even if it doesn’t mean anything, it’s still”—and here she tosses the rock back down into the dirt—“it’s his
stuff
. It shouldn’t just—” She makes a vanishing gesture with her hand, looks up at her father almost desperately. “You know?”

Eve hasn’t offered her theory of what happened, and Anders doesn’t ask her. He’s not sure he’d be able to help her there, but about James Favazza’s stuff, he gets it. He understands. He thinks of the yellow shell, the movie stub, the chewed toothpick, the scrap of paper with the Beverly address. “Yeah,” he says. “I think I know.”

Eve stands. “Why did you assume I wouldn’t have found the truck there, anyway?”

Anders scratches his cheek. “Well,” he says, “for one thing, that place isn’t really that sort of place. And the wrecking service, if I remember correctly, came from Rowley.”

Eve blinks. “So . . . the tow truck . . . oh,” she says slowly. “I guess I wasn’t really thinking they were all part of the same business. I guess I thought the tow truck would have just taken it to the closest place . . .”

Anders pulls his lips in; he hadn’t meant to put ideas into Eve’s head, but he can tell her wheels are turning. “No riding your bike to Rowley,” he says firmly.

Eve holds his gaze.

“Do not even
think
about it.”

“Then drive me.”

Anders folds his arms across his chest.

“You said, I should’ve asked about Georgetown. So I’m asking about Rowley. Will you please drive me.” She states her request more than asking.

Anders takes a deep breath, realizing that he has no real choice but to comply, that otherwise his daughter will no doubt find a way to get there herself. “Fine,” he says. “But we have to make a deal.”

“What kind of deal?”

He looks at Eve seriously. “A fair deal.
I
only make fair deals.”