The Why of Things: A Novel (36 page)

She hangs up without leaving a message. “I can’t reach either of my parents,” she reports. “I promise I was just looking. I was curious.” She glances out the window, where she sees the blue Camaro still sitting along the curb. But now she doesn’t dare ask about Larry Stephens, or James Favazza. “I’m really sorry I trespassed, and it will never happen again. Can I just go?”

“No,” the man says. “Your parents can’t come get you, the cops will.” He holds his hand out to take back the phone.

“Wait a second!” Eve says, pleadingly, desperate. “Just wait a second. My dad didn’t pick up his cell because he probably left it at home. But I know where he is. All I need is a phone book.”

*  *  *

T
O
Anders’ relief, descending does indeed provide immediate reprieve from the lurching swell, and he feels his nerves begin to calm as the weights in his belt pull him slowly toward the bottom. The water is a deep and somewhat murky blue; he can make out little around him beyond the other divers. When he looks up, the surface above looks like a ridged glass ceiling, the light of the upper world filtering through in weak rays. The lobster pot near which they descended is a small, black, silhouetted oval overhead; that the scum-fuzzed rope attached descends beside them provides Anders with an odd sense of comfort, as a tangible connection to the world above.

Partway down, they pause to check each other’s equipment for leaks, as diving protocol demands, and to clear their ears, and then they continue down; only after they have reached a depth of maybe forty or fifty feet do the boulders at the bottom gradually
start to come into view, and then quite suddenly the four find themselves in a labyrinth of large granite shapes. The boulders of the not-so-distant shore evidently drop off quickly to this depth, the tumbled rocks creating crevasses and crannies interspersed with a few spots of sandy bottom. All in all, it seems to Anders, the underwater terrain isn’t much different from what lies above, except that it is full of life. All manner of kelp grows from the rocks: clusters of long yellow strands that vaguely resemble linguine, climbing vines with green transparent leaves, beds of purple moss. One rock is covered with patches of what look like furry pink balls wavering at the end of slender yellow strings. These put Anders in mind of the speaking flowers in
Alice in Wonderland
, and it occurs to him briefly—and not entirely seriously—to pick one of them for Eloise, though he knows it would only languish if taken out of its element.

They swim as a group slowly among the rocks, where creatures go about their business with seeming indifference to the divers’ presence. An eel-like fish with remarkable teeth hides in the shadows of a nearby boulder, where a colony of frilled anemone glows like a field of yellow flowers. Bait fish flit like fireflies, and larger fish—a red one like a giant football, several bluefish, and others that Anders can’t readily identify—swim more slowly through the rocky avenues; jellyfish hover like neon ghosts. Below him, a giant crab scuttles sideways over a stretch of sandy bottom, which Anders searches unsuccessfully for chameleon flounders, willing his eye to find that vague, round figure against the sand. The sand itself is striated with the familiar lines of glass and shells and pebbles along which he’s often walked with the girls at their local beach at low tide, searching for blue or red sea glass, or for small clamshells with holes to be worn on necklaces. Anders finds himself briefly scanning now for the same, out of habit, when Dave touches him on the shoulder and points overhead, where
a swirling school of silver pollack is shimmering quickly by. They seem to Anders to move in a single mass, much in the manner of flocking sparrows, which somehow all can turn at once on a dime, and he watches them dart this way and that until they are out of sight.

Suddenly he is overcome by a curious feeling, as if he were telescoping deep into himself. He becomes acutely aware of the sounds of his inner workings: the dutiful plodding of his heart, the tireless rivers of blood coursing through his veins, each breath rushing like a great wind into his lungs, all of these functions calling attention to the machine that is his body, which soldiers on without his will or effort. He finds himself as amazed by that as he is by the life around him, and bound to that life by a common energy that animates them all, that gives these rocks their kelpy covering, the creatures their ability to be, the machine of his body its power. He looks with wonder at all of these creatures coexisting in their rocky city, more than he’d ever have imagined, even after the dive at Plum Cove, and he allows himself to arrive at an enchanted explanation for all this life. This place is no graveyard, he thinks; it is a place where the energy of those who died here has infused what lives here now, it is
because
so many have died here that so much else now lives.

In all the thinking he’s done about death over the past year, he’s been able to find no solace in any concept he has considered; the scientific reality depresses him, and the notion of heaven is impossible to believe. But down here, he comes to his own understanding of a single energy that inhabits all living things, an energy that is both fleeting and eternal; we each are given it only for a time before it passes on to give life to something else. What is comforting, at last, is the idea that while the energy might indeed pass on, it still exists somewhere, and it cannot be destroyed. The notion is a simple one, but it fills him with a sense of euphoria that
makes him wonder if he might be suffering from nitrogen narcosis, because what this feels like to him is truly rapture of the deep.

*  *  *

J
OAN
follows two cars behind the maroon car, not as much for the sake of stealth as because she had to wait for a car to pass before she could turn onto the main road at the bottom of their hill. It has begun to rain again; despite the wipers’ manic dance across the windshield, sheets of water blur Joan’s view, and in spots the road is narrowed to a single middle lane by the growing puddles collected in the curb. One part of her finds this pursuit verging on absurd, akin to one of Eve’s recent missions; another part of her thinks it not unreasonable at all to demand an explanation for the young man’s repeated appearances at the quarry, particularly given that he ignored her earlier attempt to do so at the scene. To reconcile her two conflicting views, she tells herself that she will continue to follow him only if he takes the exit off the rotary that leads into town, and will confront him at his destination there; if he takes the exit that leads out over the river on the highway, she will complete the rotary’s circle and return home. Even if she is acting somewhat crazy, she’s not so crazy that she’s going to follow him into Boston, for instance, or even as far as Rowley or Georgetown; there are limits.

The rotary is flooded, and the cars circling drive slowly, sending up winging panes of water in their wake; Joan drives cautiously, hating those moments when her tires lose traction with the road, and she is both gratified and anxious when the maroon car takes the exit that leads into town. The car that had been between them took a different exit off the rotary, and though she thinks he must know her car from having seen it in the driveway, she is unconcerned and follows directly behind him, picturing in her mind how this confrontation might play out, imagining the backdrop of
a parking lot, or Main Street, realizing with dismay that she doesn’t have her shoes. But instead of heading into the commercial part of town, he turns off Washington onto Commonwealth, and it is with the same dawning sense of unsurprise that she felt when he first appeared in the driveway twenty minutes ago that she follows him on a now familiar route from Commonwealth to Maple, from Maple to School, and ultimately to Magnolia Street, where he parks in front of Elizabeth Favazza’s house.

As she’d gradually come to understand where he was going, even as, once realized, it felt as if the knowledge had been there all along, Joan had increased the distance between the two cars; she didn’t want to call attention to herself, and she knew the way. Now she pulls over several yards down the street before Elizabeth Favazza’s house, turns the engine off. Water slides in sheets down the windshield; as she looks out through the glass, the young man is a mere shape in the rain, climbing the stairs to his mother’s house, and disappearing inside.

Of course, Joan thinks, of course. She remembers all the photographs of two boys together on Elizabeth Favazza’s side table, all the photographs of those same two boys grown into young men, and she wonders at herself that it had not occurred to her before that this young man might be James Favazza’s brother. She thinks of the days and weeks following Sophie’s death, when Eve would venture off on foot for hours at a time; once, Joan followed her. Her daughter meandered through the gray streets without a coat, oblivious to the crisp autumn chill, and ultimately she came to the railroad tracks where they passed through town near the park, where she simply stood for some minutes, unmoving. Joan watched from a distance, unwilling to intrude on her daughter’s private grief until she heard the distant whistle of a train, at which she ran to Eve in panic, and pulled her close, and held her hard against her body until the train had roared by with a power that
Joan hated to consider. When she let Eve go, her daughter looked at her with a peculiar expression on her face. “I was just looking,” she said. “That’s all.”

Joan looks toward Elizabeth Favazza’s house, imagining Elizabeth Favazza and her surviving son sitting together in the room where Joan herself sat the other day. She could go to them, she thinks. She could knock on the door and demand of the young man what he was doing at the quarry, but she knows, and she knows that he likely has no more idea what happened to his brother than anyone else.
Perhaps in her book things will turn out differently. The man in the maroon car will lead her somewhere else and she’ll learn from him what happened, or the character of Joan will knock on the door and go inside and tell them her own family’s story, and they will become friends; this is what she has wanted to do all along. But in real life she understands that what has happened, happened, and it wouldn’t make a difference. And after all, she reasons, she
doesn’t
have her shoes.

*  *  *

E
VE
waits by the window of the bar, anxiously peering up and down the street, while in the back booth behind her, Guy—she learned his name when minutes ago he’d talked with someone about a missing Heineken order on the phone—continues to do his paperwork, or pretends to; she is sure that she can feel his eyes upon her back, though she does not dare turn around to find out. Raindrops run in crooked paths down the window’s glass, and when she presses her palm to the window, it fogs around the shape of her hand. Across the street, she can see her bike still propped against the side of the CVS, and she worries for her photographs in the rain, hoping that between the plastic of the sleeve of each set and the plastic of the bag that they will be protected.

In front of the bar, a few cars down, Larry Stephens’ blue
Camaro also sits in the rain. Eve can tell by the way the raindrops seem to shrink into themselves and roll in discrete balls down the windshield that Larry Stephens has treated the glass with Rain-X. She knows this because Sophie tried the stuff out on her VW Fox last summer, and the source of this information, plus the uselessness of it, plus the overall injustice of her predicament all combined make Eve’s eyes suddenly well with tears. She quickly wipes them away. She’ll be damned if anyone, but especially this man, this Guy behind her, should see her cry.

She blinks hard, stares out through the glass, the skin of her cheeks firmly gripped between her teeth. She watches a man guide his child down the street out front, the two of them sheltered beneath a huge golf umbrella, the little girl pausing to stand in a shallow puddle, evidently pleased to be putting her rain boots to work. Next she watches another man as he passes down the street, his T-shirt wet against his shoulders and his shorts stuck to his thighs, though he seems oblivious to what Eve always finds the itchy discomfort of wet cloth against skin, the squelch of wet sneakers. This man nods as he passes a youngish woman in flip-flops and a waterproof windbreaker, the hood cinched up around her face, her exposed tendrils dripping. Eve shifts her focus from man to woman as they pass by each other, follows the woman with her eyes in the other direction. The woman carries a pie from Jim’s Bake Shop in one platformed hand, key lime, it appears through the domed plastic of its lid, on which the raindrops bead in much the same way they do against the windshield of Larry Stephens’ car. Three or four shopping bags dangle from the woman’s other hand, which is hidden in the sleeve of her windbreaker.

To Eve’s surprise, the woman slows, and then comes to a stop by Larry Stephens’ blue Camaro, hooks the grocery bags over a finger of the pie hand. She reaches into her pocket for a set of keys, which she uses to open the Camaro door. Eve stares as the
woman opens the back door and sets her things onto the seat inside, her mind racing. Wife? she wonders. Girlfriend? Who might this woman be, and why is she getting into Larry Stephens’ car? The woman pulls off her raincoat and tosses it through the open driver’s door onto the floor, gets into the driver’s seat, and shuts herself inside. Exhaust curls from the pipe as the woman turns the engine on; inside the car, she reaches over, and Eve imagines her taking Paul Simon out of its case, the first notes of “Graceland” starting to play from the stereo.

Eve glances over her shoulder in Guy’s direction, wanting to ask the man if she can just run outside, just quickly, just for a minute, so that she can find out . . . what? She’s not even sure what she would ask at all, and the look Guy shoots her from his corner—withering and disgusted—causes any such request to catch in her throat, and by the time she has turned around again, the blue Camaro has pulled away from the curb. She watches it pass by the bar and drive down the street, the Massachusetts license plate staring back at her through the rain like a cruel joke—one that causes the weakened scaffolding of her suspicions to fall further away. Defeated, she lowers herself onto a plastic chair against the window, tucks her leg beneath her, and settles in to wait.