The Probable Future (11 page)

If Elinor had been a more forthcoming person, she might have laughed and said,
Well, then, that means the poor boy doesn’t have long
, but instead she merely shot back,
I assume you’re still charging as much as you always have
, intimidating Tim Early the way she always did, so that he threw in a bottle of Pet Tab vitamins for Argus, on the house.

In fact, Elinor had become ill just when the rose she’d last grafted seemed to be thriving. She had taken one of Rebecca’s old roses, a variety found only in Unity that was said to wither if gazed upon by human eyes, and crossed it with a magenta climbing hybrid she had been developing for several years. At present, the new rose didn’t look like much. Should any thief wander into her garden, he would surely bypass the scraggly shrub near the stone wall, protected from
storms and scorching heat, in favor of what were clearly the showier specimens, so carefully pruned, so worthless to Elinor. Whether or not Elinor would last to see this crossbreed, she had no idea. Brock had refused to give her odds, even when she pressed him for statistics.

A tree could fall on us right now
, he had said.
Lightning could strike us, then what would happen to all of those careful statistics?

Elinor often thought of Will’s mother, Catherine, how very quickly she went after her cancer was detected. Elinor hadn’t cared much for the Averys, but wished them no harm. She certainly had never placed a rope with black feathers under Catherine Avery’s mattress to curse the family when Will and Jenny ran off, despite what some gossips might have said. Anyway, that was so long ago, and looking back on the mismatch, Elinor understood there was no one to blame. It was the season had caused them to run off, pure, undiluted spring fever, a hazard for everyone. As a matter of fact, Elinor pitied Catherine having to raise a liar like Will Avery, although the younger boy, Matt, had turned out fine.

For fifteen years Elinor had hired Matt Avery to clear away dead-wood and saplings felled by storms. Every once in a while, someone left a basket of mint and rosemary on Elinor’s back porch, and she had a sneaking suspicion that someone was Matt, perhaps to repay her for the visits she’d made to his mother during her last weeks. All through the summer when Catherine was dying, Elinor brought her fresh roses, Fairy pink, not Elinor’s favorite variety, but the one Catherine most preferred. After Elinor was diagnosed, she kept Catherine’s courage in mind during her own treatment at Hamilton Hospital. Over the winter, she had gone through several months of chemotherapy, all the while keeping her business to herself.

But that had always been her failing as well as her strength; she refused to confide in anyone, or ask for help, or simply let on that she was human. By the time she had told Brock that her bones were
aching—not the usual arthritis, something deeper and sharper— she had kept it to herself for too long. Now that there was a new doctor over in Monroe, Dr. Stewart volunteered his time at the clinic in North Arthur and the rest home near I-95; Elinor was his only full-time patient. When the phone rang at night, it could only be one person who needed him. A single patient, Elinor Sparrow, and somehow he had failed her.

You couldn’t have possibly known what I refused to tell you
, Elinor had insisted, obstinate as ever.

Perhaps it was true; there had most likely been nothing he might have done to save her. All the same, the doctor often awoke in the middle of the night with his heart pounding, even when the phone hadn’t rung. He awoke thinking Elinor’s name, as he had for years, even before Adele had passed on, before his son, David, and his grandson, Hap, had moved in with him. In the mornings, Brock Stewart often had the urge to call and check up on her, but Elinor never picked up her phone at that hour; she was out working, for she had restored her garden in a way she had never repaired the rest of her life.

She was there at work on the afternoon that her daughter came back to town. It was a lovely day, and Elinor was wearing a mask and gloves as she dusted the soil with fertilizer. All through the winter, most of the plants in her garden appeared to be nothing more than a fistful of sticks, but now those sticks were greening, sending out new shoots, and would soon be in need of pruning. After the cold, harsh months, the rosebushes were especially hungry for bonemeal and fish meal and human attention. The little crossbreed against the wall seemed quite insatiable, so today Elinor decided to cover the soil around it with alfalfa filled with extra nutrients.

When she was done, Elinor went into the house, followed by her old dog. The bones in her ankles and knees were particularly bothersome, with a sharp pain that often made her dizzy; lately, she’d become
dependent on a cane. Elinor Sparrow, the woman who leaned on no one, now relied on a stick.

Bonemeal
, she thought as she walked to the house.
That’s what I am
.

She’d make a paltry sample of that, given what the cancer had done to her. She’d seen the X rays; her bones looked like lace, a filigree as beautiful as it was deadly, much the way leaves looked when Japanese beetles were done with them.

Elinor washed her hands, then fetched her purse and car keys. She told Argus to stay, though he whined and followed her to the porch. The dog was still watching when Elinor got into her Jeep, which was rusted out on the side panels and the floor, and in need of a new transmission. It was mud season and Elinor wove in and out along the driveway in an attempt at avoiding the worst of the ditches. She’d been meaning to ask Matt Avery to level off the driveway for the past five years, but had never gotten around to it. Mud splashed up, dashing against the fenders of the Jeep, coating the wheels. There were still patches of ice in the woods, even on this fine day, and dozens of snowdrops growing nearby. There were those who believed that the Angel of Sorrow had long ago turned snowflakes into snowdrops, the first wildflowers to bloom every year, as consolation to anyone who had passed through the desolate reaches of winter. Personally, Elinor Sparrow had her doubts about this. As for snowdrops, she considered them to be little more than weeds.

Still, the appearance of these wildflowers reminded her that spring had indeed arrived. Elinor rolled down her window and breathed in the fragrant air. Yes, it was definitely here. Before evening, some rain would fall, much needed in the garden, but for now the dampness was caused by the lake air; the horizon was filled with the sweet, green light that arose at this time of year, especially near the shore of Hourglass Lake. When she gazed in her rearview mirror, Elinor could see Argus, still on the porch, loyal as
ever. She hadn’t even wanted a dog, but one day Argus had arrived in the backseat of Brock Stewart’s car. The doctor had found the mutt by the side of the road, and his son, David, a widower who had moved into Brock’s house with his own son, was allergic to dogs, as was Elinor’s daughter. But Elinor’s daughter hadn’t been back for years, and the puppy needed a home.

“Just take him for a week,” Dr. Stewart had suggested. “If you don’t like him by then, I’ll find another place for him.”

Never agree to take a puppy for a week, Elinor knew that now. A week was all the time it took to be won over completely, despite the messes on the carpets and the shedding, the chewed slippers and shredded books. She hadn’t really known she was going to keep him until there had been a thunderstorm, which had terrified the puppy. Elinor had been forced to sit on the kitchen floor of her big, empty house to comfort him. When she reached to pat him, she could feel his heart pounding. She never called Brock Stewart to pick up the dog, and when he next came to visit, Argus was already sleeping in Elinor’s room, keeping guard by the door.

Today it was Elinor who was the one to stand guard there on the platform of the Unity train station. It was a small, serviceable depot, built in the Gothic Revival style out of brown granite by a work crew from out of town, ornate, with a brass clock which rang on the hour, loudly, positioned in the center of the pitched roof so that high school students on the other side of town often claimed to be disturbed by the chiming during exams. The noon train, which had left Boston’s South Station at 10:45, was late, which was no great surprise. When the train did finally pull in, there was a big rush. The passengers must be gotten off quickly so that service would continue on to Hamilton. Eli Hathaway, surely one of the oldest taxi drivers in the Commonwealth, was honking his horn, offering the services of his ancient blue station wagon that had
UNITY’S BEST AND ONLY TAXI SERVICE
scrawled on the side in black paint. Sissy Elliot, as old as she was mean, was slowed down by her walker—far worse than a cane,
Elinor was delighted to note—and had to be helped into the coach car by her daughter, Iris, which held up the process of unloading entirely.

Elinor recognized Sissy Elliot, her neighbor to the west to whom she hadn’t spoken in twenty years, yet on this day she didn’t recognize her own daughter. Of course, she had been expecting an obstinate girl of seventeen, a girl so foolish she had run off two months before her graduation from high school. Jenny had been accepted at Brown and at Columbia, but instead she’d gone off to Cambridge and gotten a job at Bailey’s Ice Cream Parlor, where she fixed hot fudge sundaes and raspberry lime rickeys in an effort to support Will at Harvard. Elinor was looking for that girl, the one who’d made one mistake after another, someone ruled by her own cravings who didn’t know the first thing about love. She was searching the crowded platform for an individual with long black hair, wearing jeans and a pea coat, but instead there was a woman of more than forty, her hair still dark, but shorter now and pulled back, dressed in a perfectly ordinary camel-colored raincoat over a black suit. But some things had remained the same: there were the same distrustful, luminous eyes, as dark as Rebecca Sparrow’s. There were the high cheekbones, the cool demeanor. There was her daughter, after all these many years.

Alongside this woman was Elinor Sparrow’s granddaughter, a duffel bag in her arms, a backpack slung over her right shoulder, for her left, the one broken at birth, ached on damp days such as this. She was a blonde, and that was a surprise. The Sparrows had always been dark and moody, tragedy-prone and sorrowful, but Stella seemed cheerful as she gazed around the platform. She was tall, with fine features, and she was clearly a quick study, for she had already spotted her grandmother, though they had never before met. Right away, she began to wave wildly.

“Gran!” Stella cried. “We’re here!”

Perhaps fear was the reason Elinor Sparrow couldn’t move from
her place on the platform, or perhaps it was the look on Jenny’s face when she turned to see her mother. It was the same exact expression of disappointment that Jenny displayed back on the day when the curse was broken and the bees returned to the garden, when she was already convinced it was too late for her mother to make things right between them.

Luckily, Stella had no such fears. She ran to Elinor and hugged her. “I can’t believe I’m finally here.”

“Well, you are.” Elinor appraised her granddaughter: here was a forthright girl who wasn’t afraid to speak her mind. Here was a girl who wouldn’t slink around resenting a person until it was too late to make amends.

The woman in the raincoat approached more cautiously. She was wearing expensive leather boots and a splash of color on her lips, but in some ways she looked the same, just as worried and fretful an individual as she’d always been.

“The train was late,” Elinor Sparrow said to Jenny. The first words she’d said to her daughter in nearly twenty-five years and they had formed as a complaint. She sounded far more put out than she’d intended.

“Are you implying it’s somehow my fault?” Jenny was just as cold as ever, and now her hackles were raised. “I suppose I’m responsible for the train keeping to its timetable. Is that it?”

Stella stepped between them, anxious to terminate this particular argument before it got started.

“All she said was that the train was late. Mere statement of fact.”

Frankly, Stella sounded far more adult than either her mother or her grandmother. Silenced, Elinor and Jenny stared at each other. It was difficult to say who was more shocked by the other’s appearance. The well-cut dark hair, the fine lines around the eyes and the mouth. The white hair twisted into a knot, the cane, the withered spine. Twenty-five years, after all. A quarter of a century. It took a toll.

“Stella is right,” Jenny agreed. “You’re doing me a favor. I’m not going to fight with you.” She began to walk toward the parking lot. Just being in Unity gave her the chills, and Jenny buttoned her raincoat; she wished she’d worn a scarf. “I presume the dilapidated Jeep is yours?” she called over her shoulder.

“Was she always this nasty to you?” Stella asked as she and Elinor followed Jenny through the lot. She wanted her grandmother to slow down. She wanted all the time she could get with her. Stella had that fizzy feeling in her head and she was a bit breathless in the damp air. At the moment she’d spied her grandmother on the platform, she had seen how it would end, with snow and silence on a brilliant afternoon. She had seen they only had until the winter, and that wasn’t nearly enough.

“Not until I disappointed her.” Elinor was furious at herself for being so slow. It took ages for her to traverse the parking lot. Jenny was already getting into the front seat, and they weren’t even halfway there.

“That’s no excuse for her behavior.” Stella liked her grandmother, and she liked their secret history, the phone calls Jenny never knew about, the times she had turned to her grandmother for support and advice. “Everybody gets disappointed.”

When Elinor got into the Jeep, she found Jenny had rolled down the windows. “It smells like an old dog in here. I’m allergic. Not that you’d remember,” she said to her mother.

Stella was still out back, tossing her backpack and duffel bag over the rear gate of the Jeep.

“How was her birthday gift?” Elinor said to Jenny.