The Why of Things: A Novel (33 page)

T
he next day it rains—not in a series of the short-lived, wind-driven squalls they’ve grown accustomed to, but with a tireless insistence, battering and heavy. Joan stands at the stove, listening to the pelting sound of drops against the roof and windowpanes; she imagines she can almost hear the raindrops slapping at the surface of the quarry. Bacon sizzles a duet with the weather in a skillet before her, and pancakes are slowly cooking on the griddle; a few more bubbles around the edges, and they will be ready to flip. Joan stands ready, spatula in hand.

Behind her, Eloise sits at the kitchen table, watching Anders lay out the gear he’ll need for his dive, and peppering him with questions; right now they are discussing methods of entering the water.

“Did you walk backward like I told you?” Eloise inquires.

“Well, we didn’t have to, because we didn’t put our flippers on until we were already in the water.”

“What about today?”

“Today we go in off of some rocks.”

“So you have to jump in?”

“Well,” Anders explains, “it’s more like stepping in. Like taking a big, giant step right into the water.”

“Oh.”

Joan lifts the edge of a pancake with the spatula. She is surprised that Anders is as game as he is about diving; when she’d signed him up it had been more of a desperate, last-ditch attempt to engage him in
something
, after her failures to do so with anything else. Though she wouldn’t ever admit it, or discourage him, in truth the thought of her husband scuba diving makes her mildly anxious; like mountain climbing or bungee jumping it doesn’t strike her as overly safe, and part of her wishes he’d taken to yoga or painting instead. She flips the bacon, one piece at a time.

“Can I try that on?” Eloise asks behind her.

“Sure,” Anders replies.

After a few seconds, Eloise laughs. “Mom, look!” she cries in a muffled voice.

Joan glances over her shoulder; Eloise’s face is covered almost entirely by Anders’ mask. “You look like an astronaut!” she says.

Joan peeks under a pancake again; they are ready to be flipped. She thinks of the time maybe twenty years ago when they were in Colorado and Anders went helicopter skiing. She was apprehensive at the thought in the same way that she is now, and in the end rightly so; one of the blades caught on an outcropping of rock and the helicopter crash-landed on the side of the mountain. No one was hurt, but she remembers being unsurprised when she got the call, and she remembers thinking that she should have listened to her gut and implored him not to go.

“What’s that?” she hears Eloise ask as she spreads a paper towel out on a plate.

“This is called a buoyancy control device. A BCD for short.”

“What is a BCD for? It looks like a life jacket.”

“It does look like a life jacket,” Anders agrees. “But it’s not, exactly.”

“Can I try it on?”

“You may.”

Joan transfers the bacon from the skillet to the plate with the towel; grease spreads across the paper. She pictures her husband running out of oxygen at the bottom of the ocean, or having a heart attack—by the time they got him to the beach, she thinks, it would be too late. Her heart jumps violently at the thought. Impatiently, she checks the pancakes one more time, willing her imagination to settle down. But it bothers her that she should feel this way about today’s dive, when she felt just fine about last week’s by comparison, and she wonders seriously if she ought to stop Anders from going.

“It’s kind of big for me,” Eloise is saying. “Why do you wear a life jacket thingy if you’re trying to sink?”

“Well, like I said, it’s not really a life jacket. There’s this little space here, see? Which you can put air into, and take air out of, and it makes you go up and down.”

“How?”

“Well, if I put air in, the air I added wants to get to the surface, and it brings me with it. So up I go. Make sense?”

“I guess.”

Joan begins to transfer the pancakes onto a plate. She
should
stop him, she decides, as crazy as it might sound.

“But what’s coolest,” Anders goes on behind her, “is when you get to the place where you’re not going up or down. If you have
just
the right amount of air, you just . . . do nothing. You’re suspended. It’s kind of like magic. You don’t have to do anything except just be.”

Joan turns around, a plate in either hand, trying to think of how to express her reservations without terrifying them all. How, after all her encouragement, she’ll explain herself. But as soon as she looks at her husband, she realizes she has no right to stop him. The look on his face is one of wonder, and amazement, and she understands that he has found something that makes him come alive. No matter her imagination, she decides, and no matter her gut, she cannot, will not, take that from him.

She sets the plates on the table. “Breakfast,” she says. “Fuel up for the dive.”

*  *  *

E
VE
wakes to the sound of rain. She doesn’t open her eyes at first; she only listens, and lets her senses gradually awaken to other things: the distant sound of a fog horn, the smells of must and rain, the sheets against her bare skin, the draft of air that passes over her with every revolution of the fan purring in the corner of the room. After a few minutes, she opens her eyes and looks out the window; it is raining steadily, as it was when she first awoke several hours ago, grateful for the weather, which meant she didn’t have to water and could go back to sleep.

After several minutes, she untangles herself from the sheets and pulls on her clothes. She can smell bacon from downstairs, and her mouth waters. She pictures her parents and Eloise down in the kitchen, a big bowl of eggs, strips of crispy bacon, but when she gets down there, she finds the room empty, the dishes put away, the frying pan drying in the dishrack. Neither of the cars is parked in the driveway. She glances at the clock above the door, surprised to discover that it is nearly ten o’clock; she has not slept so late in she can’t remember how long.

She eats a bowl of cereal standing at the kitchen counter, thinking about last night. It is like a strange movie in her memory,
which she attributes to the pot; she remembers the night almost as if she’d witnessed it from above. She stayed until well after midnight, happily watching the bonfire smolder as people milled about and danced and drank around her, and afterward Saul had loaded her bike into the back of his car and driven her home. She glances guiltily at the diminished plate of brownies on the counter, both amused and somewhat horrified to consider the amount of brownies she must have consumed in total last night, between the pot brownies she had at the bonfire and the brownies she devoured when she got home later.

She finishes her cereal and brings her empty bowl over to the sink. Out the window, the rain is slantless and unrelenting. Steam rises from the quarry, which is nettled with endless rings, and the trees stand in solemn stillness at the quarry’s edge. Without really thinking about what she feels compelled to do, she pulls off her shirt, steps out of her shorts, which she leaves pooled on the kitchen floor, and goes outside in her underwear.

The rain is warm against her bare skin, and in only seconds she is soaking wet, her hair flat against her head, raindrops dripping from her eyebrows. She hurries across the lawn to the water’s edge, where without a moment’s hesitation she plunges headlong in. Suddenly, the slapping sound of rain on water is a distant echo, and the day’s gray light is replaced by a velvet darkness, and she keeps her eyes open to it, wondering what it might have been like for James Favazza as his car plunged down, down, down through the infinite darkness, and if he was conscious when he hit the quarry floor. She hopes not, she decides; she hopes the black tunnel of the quarry’s water was seamlessly replaced by the fabled white tunnel of heaven. It’s an interesting thought.

She swims forward, propelling herself as powerfully as she can through the black water toward the center of the quarry, where she comes to a breathless stop. There she lifts her head and looks
around her. The rocks and trees along the quarry’s edge are faint, colorless shapes through the hovering mist. Raindrops seem to bounce upon the water; silver drops of water leap up from the center of every ring, almost as if it were raining in reverse. She floats onto her back and lies completely still, stares up at the gray sky, dares raindrops with her eyes. She feels very much at a convergence point, where raindrops fall and rise, where air and water collide, and when she considers the depths below her, she is struck for once not by the possibilities of what might lie beneath, but by the idea that she is above it all, that though she is level with it, she is also one hundred feet above the surface of the hard earth, that the quarry is like gravity defied.

*  *  *

J
OAN
goes to the florist after she has left Eloise off at camp; the flowers she bought and distributed around the house when they first arrived have passed their prime, the silky ruffle of the peonies collapsed, the manes of sunflowers drooping around each black face, all of them looking earthward like so many defeated lions.

She parks out front and darts to the door through the rain, not bothering with an umbrella for such a short distance, and soon she is enveloped in the shop’s steamy, floral warmth. The store has been here for as long as Joan can remember; summers when she was a little girl, she would come here with her grandmother for the bouquets that they would set around the house each week, as Joan still does today. Cut flowers, her grandmother told her, were fundamental components of civilization, like manners; no matter what the circumstance or situation, one should always have them around. Though she is not quite as diligent as her grandmother was—her grandmother would never have allowed her flowers to get to the point of decay that Joan will tolerate—Joan did take this lesson to heart, and it is rare when there are not flowers of some
kind spaced around the house, whether here or back in Maryland, just as there is always food in the fridge, or gas in the car.

She wanders around the shop, scoping the offerings to see what looks best—hydrangeas, iris, freesia, Asiatic lily—but any of them, in the end, would do. What most people do not know, which Joan also learned from her grandmother, is that there is a language of flowers, that the modern practice of sending flowers for birthdays, deaths, or weddings began in the Victorian era as an entirely different thing, as a method of communication in which different flowers were used to express those sentiments that could not be otherwise spoken. When a woman received a flower, she could either accept or reject the sentiment expressed by wearing the flower on her afternoon call, faceup for acceptance, facedown for denial. Certain types of flowers had very specific meanings; Joan can’t remember many of them now, but her grandmother had a list—ambrosia was love returned, she remembers this; the foxglove insincerity; the heliotrope devotion. Joan rarely bases her selection on a flower’s supposed meaning; she remembers also that the peony is shame, and that is one of her favorite flowers.

Today, Joan chooses a bunch of cornflowers—she cannot resist the blue—and one of yellow iris, even as she also remembers that yellow represents jealousy. She looks around her for one more selection, and she is just about to reach for another bunch of sunflowers when the irresistible fragrance of a potted lily of the valley arrests her. She looks down at the unassuming thing, the fragile white bonnets of the tepals clinging to its slender stems, the broad green fan of its leaves, and she chooses this, which is so humble in appearance and yet powerful in scent; nor is it far from her mind that in the language of flowers the lily of the valley stands for the return of happiness.

*  *  *

N
ORMAN’S
Woe is located on the coast of the mainland just south of downtown Gloucester. Anders drives out over the drawbridge, where he picks up the twisting, tree-lined road that after several miles will lead to the designated parking area for the reef. The road generally follows the contours of the coast, though the ocean is not visible through the trees, and if Anders didn’t know any better, he might think he was on some landlocked country road. He realizes, as he drives, that it is the first time he’s taken the road this summer. Since last year, things have changed only incrementally; a Slow sign nailed years ago to the trunk of a tree has become slightly more engulfed in bark as the tree grows around it; more clutter has accumulated in the yard of a long-rooted mobile home; someone has painted the old boat that has sat for years on its trailer at the edge of a driveway. Everywhere else in the world, it seems to Anders, things change at such a rapid pace it’s hard to keep track of anything; he takes great comfort in the sameness here from year to year.

He tries not to think about his impending dive, because he knows from the last dive that the anticipation is by far the worst part; once he was actually in the water, he reminds himself, he didn’t ever want to surface. He thought when he first woke up that the dive might be canceled due to the rain, but apparently they only cancel when there is lightning involved, and when Anders thinks about it, this makes sense; if you’re underwater, what difference does it make if it is raining above?

By the time he reaches the parking area, the rain has begun to let up anyway. He pulls into the small lot along the side of the road, where he sees that he is last to arrive; Dave, Caroline, and Pete are all already there, Dave in foul-weather gear, Pete in a raincoat, and Caroline beneath an umbrella, looking less than thrilled. Anders climbs out of the car wearing a raincoat himself. “Sorry if I’m late,” he says.

“No worries,” Dave says. “You’re right on time.” He squints up into the rain. “We chose a nice one for it, huh?”

“It looks like it’s letting up,” Anders offers. “The sky is a little brighter over there.”

“It’s supposed to stop,” Caroline says. “I hope it does.”

“Well,” Dave says. “We’re all going to get wet anyway.” He gestures over his shoulder toward a dirt path that leads off through the trees in the direction of the water. “The dive site is about a quarter mile down that path. It’s an easy walk, but it feels farther than it is when you’re carrying all your gear, so we’ll take it slow. If you want, you can get into your wet suits here. Otherwise, you can change out on the rocks.”