The Why of Things: A Novel (28 page)

T
hey have Elizabeth Favazza’s brownies for dessert that night. Joan debates whether it would be right to bring them to the table, but in the end she can’t put her finger on a real reason for
not
doing so, as strange as it makes her feel, and there seems no point in letting them go to waste. And it’s true, the girls do love brownies; even Eloise, who sat sullenly through dinner, upset about Henry’s departure, can’t resist.

It is only afterward, while she’s covering them up in tinfoil, that Joan recognizes the problem of the plate. What catches her attention is the delicate blue design of the china, newly exposed by the relative dearth of brownies; all of a sudden the fact that should have been obvious all along presents itself in alarming clarity: they now have Elizabeth Favazza’s plate. Joan can’t believe it hadn’t occurred to her until now, even as she took the plate from the woman’s hands, set it beside her in the car, carried it into the house, and later set it on the table; somehow, even as she must have been aware of the firm feel of china instead of paper or
plastic, she hadn’t registered the implications. And now they have the woman’s plate.

For a moment, Joan only stands at the kitchen counter, staring down at the plate half covered in foil, the cobalt pattern, the tiny chip along the edge. Seymour, having vanished for the past few days while Henry was around, rubs himself purringly against her legs. She can hear the sounds of water running in the pipes overhead as Eloise gets ready for bed, and the thud of laundry spinning in the dryer, and footsteps on the floorboards as Anders makes his way down the upstairs hallway; she stares at the plate, lulled by all these sounds, looks up only at the sound of a moth alighting on the window screen. She blinks.

Earlier, as she sat with Anders as he cooked, he’d asked out of the girls’ earshot what it had been like, returning Henry to James Favazza’s mother. But Joan had only shrugged, pointed at the plate of brownies as if they explained it all. He didn’t press her on the issue, for which she’s grateful; she herself hasn’t quite processed the encounter, which seemed somehow both uneventful and profound.

She thinks back to the night they arrived, when all they knew was that a vehicle, with a body, had gone into the quarry; curiously, the more she’s learned and the closer she’s gotten to it all, the more she doesn’t know and can only imagine. When several days ago, for instance, Anders called the number on Henry’s collar, he’d unwittingly left a message on a dead man’s answering machine, which someone, sometime, had taken it upon himself—or herself—to listen to. Someone had entered his apartment or his house, saw the message light blinking, and pressed play. But who? And why and how? Joan imagines Elizabeth Favazza wherever her son lived, there to—what? to pack away his things?—and listening to messages left by whoever may have called: Anders’ message, of course, but also now-irrelevant messages, from a friend
calling to say hello, or the bank about an overdraft fee, or the dentist’s office calling to confirm some appointment in the future—the kinds of messages that would have seemed a sort of mockery, like the college brochures and the clothing catalogues that continue even now to come for Sophie in the mail.

She imagines Elizabeth Favazza having to sort through her son’s things, having to decide what to keep, what to toss, and what to give away. She imagines a pile of clothing for Goodwill, another table top of things like James Favazza’s coffeemaker, his toaster oven, his bedside lamp—things she wouldn’t need a second of herself, having her own, but that would be wasteful to throw away. And then Joan imagines a bag of the things that nobody would need: his razors, a pair of shin guards, an old backpack, a sweat-stained baseball cap—a bag that may have been intended for the Dumpster, but that would instead live in the back of Elizabeth Favazza’s own closet, the mother unable to throw it away. Joan is grateful that all she has had to do so far is close the door to her daughter’s room.

Joan looks down at the plate once again and finishes wrapping it in foil, slowly accepting what she knows she has to do, which she has been doing all along in her mind. Until now she’s refused to act on it, loathe to use someone else’s tragedy as material; she’s not even tried to write about her own. But it’s not the tragedy itself she’s interested in. She realizes this now. It’s everything else that is attached: messages on machines, American flags, toothbrushes and razors and lost dogs and yard sales where toasters and kitchen tables are sold. The everything else, she realizes, is not Elizabeth Favazza’s, or hers, but everyone’s together, and everyone’s own.

The cat bats at the kitchen door, looks at Joan demandingly. She pushes the plate gently to the back of the counter, turns off the kitchen lights, and goes to let him out into the night.

*  *  *

A
FTER
Anders has read Eloise a section from
Alice
and tucked her tightly in, he turns off the lights and says good night, and he is just about to close her door when he hears her little voice. “Wait, Daddy?”

“Yuh.”

“Can you come here?”

Anders crosses the room, pauses at the foot of her bed. “What’s up?” he asks. Though the room is dim, he can see her face by the light from the hallway; she looks worried.

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know?”

“I don’t know if I’m supposed to say.”

Anders sits down on the edge of the bed.

“Did someone tell you not to?”

Eloise shrugs. “I don’t know. No. But . . . sort of. I think it’s supposed to be a secret.”

“Well then maybe you shouldn’t tell me. Unless you think it’s something I should know.”

“No, but. Well, I don’t know if he wants it to be a secret.”

Anders frowns. “Who?”

Eloise takes a deep breath, looks at her father plaintively. “His name is Hobbster,” she says finally.

It takes Anders a moment to find his voice. “Hobbster?” he repeats. He clears his throat. “Tell me about Hobbster.”

Eloise kicks herself free of her sheets and climbs out of bed. “I have to get something,” she says, and she slips out of the room.

Anders stays seated on the edge of her bed as he awaits her return. In the darkness, the ticking of the clock’s second hand seems magnified, and strangely in keeping with the thud of his heart. Hobbster. It was a curious rush of emotions that coursed
through him when Eloise said the name; for the briefest of moments, the only way to explain this seeming impossibility was with the impossible, and he allowed himself the impossible thought that Sophie must be responsible, and somehow writing from the other side. But this was only fleeting; his next thought was that she had left the Hobbster notes for Eloise last summer, though this made no sense, either. He arrived at the most likely explanation last; it is also the one that makes his heart ache most. Eve, trying to fill her sister’s shoes. He feels a surge of heat behind his eyes, tears that he can’t contain; he catches them with the back of his wrist, stops them before Eloise returns.

She does so momentarily, a few sheets of paper in her hand. “I hid them in the mothball closet because I didn’t want them in my room,” she says. “But
he
leaves them under my pillow.”

Anders takes the notes, first turning on the bedside light so that he can see. There are four altogether, all clearly in Eve’s hand; the last one suggests to Anders that the first three notes have gone unanswered.

I think you don’t like me very much. Maybe you are just afraid, but I promise I am not scary. I am really very friendly, and I just want a friend. But if you do not want to be my friend, I understand, and this will be my last note. Tomorrow is my birthday, and Kermit is making me Moose Tracks ice cream from scratch. It is my favorite kind of ice cream. Love, Hobbster

Anders rests the notes on the bed beside him. “It sounds like you guys have a lot in common.”

Eloise looks at her father uncertainly.

“I don’t know that many people whose favorite ice cream is Moose Tracks.”

Eloise shrugs. “You know at least two. Me and Evie.”

“He’s got pretty good taste in books, too.” Anders gestures toward the Lewis Carroll on the beside table. “I mean, if
Alice
is his favorite.”

Eloise shrugs again.

“Did you write him back?”

“No.”

“How come?”

“I don’t like him leaving notes under my pillow. I don’t like him coming in my room.”

“I see.” Anders pretends to think, fingers on his chin. “Maybe,” he says, “you could write him back and let him know that you’d prefer it if he left them in the hamper instead, like how
you’re
supposed to.”

“What if he says no? What if he comes in my room anyway?”

“I don’t know why he’d do that. It sounds like he just wants to be pen pals.”

Eloise looks at her father skeptically.

Anders shrugs. “Maybe
I’ll
write him. I’m sort of curious about what it’s like living on a star.”

Eloise narrows her eyes. “But he didn’t write to
you
. He wants to be
my
pen pal.”

“This is true. But to be pen pals, you have to both write each other, right?”

“Yeah,” Eloise admits reluctantly. They are quiet. The second hand tocks.

“So what do you think?” Anders asks finally. “Shall I go find a pen and paper?”

Eloise nods.

Anders finds a notepad and a pencil in the drawer of the desk in the hall and returns to his daughter’s room. “Here,” he says.

Eloise sits with the paper and pencil on the floor. “What should I say?”

“Whatever you want. I don’t know. What’s on your mind?”

“The dog. And how I was getting so used to him and then he had to go home and I didn’t even get to say good-bye.”

Anders nods. “So tell him about that,” he says.

“Will you wait here?”

Anders nods. “I will.

Eloise bends over the paper, her hand curled around itself in the odd posture of a lefty; shielding her words with her right arm so her father cannot see, she begins laboriously to write.

Anders goes and stands by the window. The moon is nearly full tonight; outside, he can see its golden crown just beginning to rise from behind the treeline. He watches; the trees’ topmost branches seem, like fingers, to uncurl and let it slowly go, and soon it is a whole, looming orange globe, dim still yet with the power as it rises high to make the trees cast shadows in the grass and turn the surface of the quarry molten silver. Anders searches it for the face that he can never find; tonight, like all nights, it eludes him.

*  *  *

A
FTER
dinner, Eve takes the camera up to her room to document the evidence stored beneath her bed, which, to her relief, her father had returned to her the other night. One at a time, she photographs each item: the EMS bottle, the flip-flop, the collection of bottles and cans, the Vic’s T-shirt, the purple plastic bowl, the Marlboro cigarette butt she found among the leaves in the quarry, and the last remaining Marlboro of the three she found on the rock by the road the night of James Favazza’s death. Earlier, after Roscoe McWilliams and his crew had left, she had also photographed what she thinks of as the crime scene. She photographed from various angles the ledge off of which the truck went in, and the trees the truck had managed to squeeze between, and
the nick left on one by the side-view mirror. She photographed the general area of the lawn where the grass had been briefly flattened by his tires, which is what had suggested to her in the first place the night that they arrived that somebody had driven in. She wishes she’d had a camera all along, to document the grass when it was actually flattened, and the divers by night pulling the body from the quarry, and the tow truck the following day as it raised the truck from the quarry floor. She thinks of how she explained her motives to Roscoe McWilliams when he asked—that she was documenting, so that what has happened here will be impossible to forget. She doesn’t think it’s likely that she ever will, though, kind of like the moment with the beaker, the memory of which earlier today has left her generally out of sorts; not even all her documentation tonight has been able to distract her from the persistent thought:
your sister is dead, dead, dead
.

Glumly, she bags the evidence and makes her way down the hallway to the bathroom, where she avoids eye contact with herself in the mirror as she brushes her teeth. She lets her shorts fall down around her ankles, then lifts them with a toe and opens the hamper to drop them in; it is only as an afterthought that she glances inside for a note from Eloise, having just about given up hope. But there at the bottom of the hamper she sees a piece of paper neatly folded into thirds, with Hobbster printed in big block letters along the back. She pauses with her leg half raised, shorts dangling from her big toe. She lets them drop to the ground, and then tentatively, as if the note might disappear if she moves too fast, she reaches in to retrieve it, her gloom suddenly replaced by the same nervous and excited anticipation she remembers feeling when years ago she received notes from Hobbster.

She lowers the lid of the toilet and sits down, unfolds the note, and starts to read.