The Probable Future (29 page)

III.

A
T THIS RAINY
, green time of the year, the snapping turtles had already laid clutches of eggs in every muddy hollow in the driveway and the lawn. Jenny had even found some beside the kitchen door, which she’d covered with handfuls of grass in the hopes that the opossums and raccoons wouldn’t have those poor kitchen eggs for dinner. Jenny had already found such sorrowful leftovers on Rebecca Sparrow’s dirt path; some animal had gotten to a clutch of eggs and left only the rubbery cases, split in two, emptied and shimmering like pearls. Poor mother turtle. Jenny had wondered if she would know what she’d lost when she returned. Would she tend to the ruined eggs, hopeful still, or would she have already moved on,
back to the depths of the lake, back to the water lilies and the duck grass and the reeds?

Every night, Jenny went to the bedroom where Stella had been sleeping before she moved over to Liza’s apartment. She hadn’t changed the sheets because Stella’s impression had been caught in the creases of the pillowcase, and her scent was there as well, a mixture of resentment and water lilies. Some people swore that when you let a daughter go, she was sure to come back, like the sparrows which perched on the window ledge, begging for crumbs, for crusts, for kindness. But Stella wouldn’t even come to the phone when Jenny called over to the tea house. She was busy, Liza was quick to explain, but Jenny had heard Stella’s muffled voice in the background.
Just tell her I’m not here
.

She had wanted the opposite of what she’d had with her own mother, but somehow it had turned out the same. The same words unspoken, the pain held on to, all tenderness invisible, like ink that has drifted off a page to leave only a blank white sheet. Just last night, Jenny had gone for a walk. It was loneliness that got her walking, and perhaps it was loneliness that drew her to the Avery house, although the path might have come naturally to her, for she’d taken this route so very often as a girl. Past Lockhart Avenue, past the old oak, the most rotten section of which was now held down by wire, like a captured giant that might take to roaming the streets if it were ever freed.

As a girl, Jenny had always felt expectation rising within her as she walked to the Averys’; now she felt it again. She crossed the common, passing the black angel that was Matt Avery’s favorite. Thinking about him, even for a moment, made it difficult to breathe. It was so silly that she tried a child’s trick to ward off whatever was happening to her and began to count to one hundred. She tried not to think about Matt. For reasons she didn’t understand, she imagined a pin, silver, shining. She imagined she was falling right
through the dark, her way lit by a candle, when in fact all she was doing was treading across the town green. There was a faint breeze and the scent of the plane trees rose into the air, spicy and damp.

In town, the shops were closed except for the Pizza Palace, whose blinking neon light cast pools of blue and yellow onto the sidewalk. In Jenny’s day there had been an ice cream parlor in its place, Grandpa’s, run by the Harmon family. There had been cardboard tubs of vanilla bean and butter pecan, and Jenny had worked there for three summers, good practice, it turned out, for the manager’s job at Bailey’s when she moved to Cambridge. Before she could stop herself, she thought about Matt sitting at the counter of Baileys, watching her work, ordering sundae after sundae when he’d preferred bread and butter all along. She thought about the look on his face when he’d walked through the door of the tea house on that rainy day when the rain fell in sheets, the stone rain that filled all the gutters and the streets.

She hadn’t been back to the Averys’ for more than twenty years; it looked smaller than she’d remembered. But there was the old slate path, the white fence, the perennial boarder in which Catherine had taken such pride, a collection which Elinor Sparrow had always dismissed as the typical hodgepodge of the unsophisticated gardener, a jumble of phlox and daisies and snapdragons. Jenny stopped beside a holly tree Catherine had planted to ensure there would be green in her garden all year long. She could see inside the window; there was the exact same furniture, the love seat where she and Will had kissed until they were burning up, until they had no choice but to go further, which they finally did one summer evening when Catherine was out at her bridge club. There was the table under which they’d made love one night when there was a terrible thunderstorm. Catherine and Matt had been home, asleep in their beds, and Jenny was so terrified she and Will would be caught that she’d broken out in hives.

Now, there were dinner guests, quite a large gathering. Jenny
stepped closer to the window, edging through the straggly phlox. Matt and Will were at dinner with a red-haired woman and two girls. Jenny had her nose pressed against the glass before she realized it was Stella and that horrible friend of hers, Juliet Aronson. Will was at the table, offering up a toast. He’d had a haircut and he’d shaved, but he still looked tired and far too thin. He looked nothing like the boy she used to wait for in this very place. She would remain here, hidden, until at last he appeared and they could sneak out to Rebecca Sparrow’s shed, or, when the weather was fine, to the cool, flat rock formation called the Table and Chairs, which they rested upon in order to look up at the stars, kissing until the stone beneath them grew so hot mosquitoes lighting on the granite burst into flame in an instant.

The red-haired woman in the dining room at the Averys’ was Liza Hull, although she looked quite changed. She looked pretty in the candlelight; prettier still when she threw back her head to laugh. Maybe it was the vantage point which altered things, or perhaps the night air, the dark, the scent of phlox, the aroma of something old and new twisted together. Liza had brought a cake, and there was a bottle of white wine. Even the girls had splashes of wine in their glasses. They were most likely toasting Will and his return; they were actually applauding him. Only Matt stood in the background, leaning against the hutch that had belonged to his grandmother. It was here that Catherine displayed her prized Minton pottery. There was a dish which resembled stalks of asparagus, a plate which appeared to be made out of starfish and mollusks, a pitcher that seemed to be lily pad after lily pad, with a frog for a handle. Matt looked up, past the dining table, past the celebration, out into the yard where Jenny stood beside the holly.

Perhaps a branch moved, perhaps it was something else that caught his eye. Whatever it was, Matt seemed to spy her, and as soon as he did, Jenny took off. She ran because of the mistakes she had made, because she’d been so foolish as a girl and so dead wrong as a
woman, because she hadn’t known one dream from another, because she had finally fallen in love. She ran until she was forced to stop, then doubled over to catch her breath before jogging the rest of the way home, through the common that now seemed far too dark, through the shadows the plane trees cast into twisted shapes on the walkways, all the time thinking:
I’ve thrown it all away. Now I have nothing at all
.

O
N
S
UNDAY
, when Stella had gone off to walk her friend Juliet to the train, and Cynthia Elliot had pedaled off on her bicycle to write her final English paper on her chosen poet, Sylvia Plath, due the following morning, Liza Hull closed the tea house and locked the doors. The handyman didn’t work on Sundays and neither did Jenny, and that was just as well. Liza Hull was embarrassed by what she was about to do, although not so embarrassed as to put the thought away. She drew the curtains and then she sat down at the counter and took a photograph of herself with one of those Polaroid cameras she’d picked up at the pharmacy.

She breathed lightly while the film developed right before her eyes, magicking her into existence. Was that really Liza Hull? The woman with the red hair, the shining eyes, the smile that transformed her face? Where was her white coat, her kerchief, her stained clothes, her sacrifice, her sorrow? None of it had developed on this square of film. There was only a woman smiling on the first day of May. It was Liza, it truly was. Liza, who had fallen in love.

Liza Hull’s grandmother had operated the tea house until her ninety-second year; she had known Elisabeth Sparrow when she was a little girl and Elisabeth Sparrow’s hair had already turned white. Granny Hull had once told Liza that, long ago, baking bread was referred to as a “mystery.” Mystery it was, much the same as turning straw into gold. Flour and water and yeast became sustenance. One thing became another, transmuted, as Liza Hull now understood
she herself had become. It was alchemy, nothing less: pieces to a whole, straw into gold, flour becoming bread, she who was ordinary made beautiful, overnight.

Liza went upstairs to her bedroom and opened the closet. There was a full-length mirror hung on the back of the door, one she’d always avoided in the past, artfully draping scarves and shawls over the glass. Now she removed all of the fabric. She took off her clothes and stared at herself. She saw the mystery of one thing becoming another right there in the glass.

Liza reached for a green dress that had always made her think of spring, and slipped it on. She had always been resigned to her own bad luck, but that was about to change. She knew it Friday night, when Will had walked her and the girls home from dinner at the Averys’ house. The girls had run on ahead, giggling, racing toward the common. Liza had told Will he should turn and go home; an escort wasn’t necessary, not in Unity. But Will had insisted; the walk would do him good, and besides, he joked, this way he could leave his brother with the cleaning up. As they strolled, Will didn’t bother to try and charm Liza. He was too tired for that, and he was comfortable with Liza Hull. He’d known her forever, after all, since kindergarten, not that he’d ever paid her the least bit of attention. She was simply there, good old Liza; why, he’d never even noticed that her hair was red until tonight.

“I made a right mess of everything,” he said.

They were walking toward the old oak, the one that would have to wait to be cut down, since Matt had already begun spring cleanup for most of his customers. They stopped and looked at the huge branches; the ones wired to the trunk so they wouldn’t crack off in a storm looked especially sad.

“They call these trees of mercy,” Liza said.

“Really?” Will looked over at Liza, ready to make a joke, but, no, she was serious.

“Maybe if you ask the tree to forgive you, you won’t feel so bad.”

“Forgive me?”

Liza had smiled and nodded. She’d come here often; she knew what it was like to feel that you’d done everything wrong.

Will approached the tree. He was sure he wouldn’t do such a foolish thing, it just wasn’t in his nature, but then he looked over his shoulder at Liza. He got down on bended knee. “Forgive me,” he said. “Forgive me for being a fool, for placing myself above all others, forgive me for all of my lies.”

He realized that Liza had come to kneel beside him. They were on the concrete sidewalk, on the corner of Lockhart and East Main, but it was as dark here as any woods. There was only a sliver of moon in the sky. They could hear the girls up ahead of them, making whooping noises as they ran across the green. It was a starry night, and although Will never noticed such things, he noticed now.

“You are forgiven,” Liza said. “At least by me.”

The external world had maps and signs, but none of these would do for a man who’d lost his way as thoroughly as Will had. A man like Will needed absolute faith, in something, in someone. He needed peace of mind and someone to believe in him, and that was not so easily found.

“I’m forgiven?” He tested the words to see how they might feel in his mouth. He’d never even looked at Liza Hull, and now he couldn’t get enough of her. Now, he believed every word she said.

Out on the green, Juliet was sneaking a cigarette. The orange light of the ash burned with every intake, a single firefly. “Well, I was wrong. Your uncle’s not the one Liza has the hots for. It’s your father.”

The girls had perched on the Civil War monument.

“You think Liza’s in love with my father?” Stella had laughed out loud. “Oh, my God, you are so wrong. Liza? She’s like his exact opposite.”

“Thereby proving nothing. Opposites attract, honey pie. Don’t you know that? It’s some scientific fact, like the way magnets work.”

“Polar opposites.” Stella could feel the cold of the monument right through her jeans, dyed black that very afternoon in the tub in Liza’s bathroom, along with all the rest of her wardrobe. Even her underwear was black now, along with her socks, her T-shirts, her flannel bathrobe.

“Exactly. That’s why they’re drawn to each other. Each makes up what the other lacks.” Juliet had stubbed out her cigarette on the ledge of the monument, leaving Stella to clear away the ashes with the palm of her hand.

Stella was still thinking about polar opposites on Sunday, while Liza was studying herself in the mirror, while Juliet smoked the last cigarette in the pack taken from her aunt’s purse. Stella and Juliet were headed to the train station and for once they hadn’t much to say.

Polar opposites. Definition: a magnetic force that was uncontrollable. Stella knew that magnetic fields could affect human behavior; there were cases of unusual strength during storms, for instance, of women who lifted cars off their baby’s carriages, of men who picked up ponies and carried them to safety when rivers rose. But could such things affect love? Or was it another case of the pin and the candle, a foolish test to measure a phenomenon that could never be understood?

Stella recalled a case Hap showed her in a science journal, the story of a man who could set things on fire with his breath. He was tested again and again. Each time he held a cloth to his mouth and breathed, the fabric would burst into flame. Were some people made of fire, others of water, or earth, or air? Were there those a person was drawn to, no matter how much she might fight her attraction, and others that repelled, no matter how they might try to please?