The Why of Things: A Novel (8 page)

But instead of passing, the footsteps grow louder, and then suddenly Eve sees the shape of a figure in the woods, much closer than she’d expected from the sound. She scrambles from her seat, tripping over a fallen branch as she tries to flee. She cries out, terrified, and has just gotten to her feet again when she hears someone call out her name.

“Eve!”

She turns around, her pulse still ticking wildly in her neck, though she immediately recognizes the voice.

“Saul?” she says, catching her breath, a little bit angry now and embarrassed by her terror.

“Hey.” Saul turns on a flashlight, the beam bobbing in her direction as he steps closer. “I didn’t mean to scare you.”

“Then why the hell did you sneak up on me like that?”

“I didn’t sneak up,” he says.

“You didn’t have your flashlight on. You didn’t call out. You just . . . crept. I didn’t know it was you.”

“And I didn’t know it was you. All I saw was the end of a cigarette. I thought it might be your mother.”

Saul is standing in front of her now, and the fact of his presence is mildly disconcerting. She realizes that she hadn’t expected to see him this summer, that in her mind it was almost as if he had died along with Sophie. And yet, here he is, utterly familiar and real.

“Well it was me,” Eve says finally.

“And it was me. And I’m sorry if I scared you.”

Eve climbs back onto her perch and looks at Saul suspiciously. “What are you doing here anyway?”

“Walking,” he says.

“Walking?”

“Walking. Thinking. I wanted to get outside, after the rain.” Saul sits down next to her. “I didn’t know you smoked.”

“I don’t really,” Eve says, feeling caught. “Just when I feel like it.” She glances over at Saul, thinking that just as he has caught her, she has caught him, too, in a way. She wonders how much time he spends wandering around here, thinking about Sophie, remembering, and it makes her almost uncomfortable to consider. An image appears in her mind of Saul at Sophie’s funeral, his eyes red and hollow, his shoulders slumped, as if the awkward suit he wore were a great weight. It made her uncomfortable to see him that way, too, beaten and defeated, in such contrast to the Saul she knew, almost as if she were seeing him naked. “Do you walk around here a lot?” she asks.

“Just when I feel like it.”

Eve hugs her knees to her chest, wishing she had gotten a sweatshirt after all; her clothes are damp from sitting on wet rock. Despite her initial irritation and surprise, she is glad to see Saul, glad for the company. “Did you feel like it last night?” she asks.

“No. I was working last night. Why?”

“Well,”
Eve says, delighted to share the story. “A pickup truck drove into our quarry.”

“What do you mean, a pickup truck drove into your quarry?”

“I don’t really know. I mean, it ended up in there somehow. When we got here yesterday I saw tire tracks on the grass, and they ended at the edge of the quarry, right at the high ledge, and then the police came and divers came and they found a body.”

“Oh, wow,” Saul mutters.

“Yeah, it was a guy, like thirty or so. No one knows what happened, exactly. But they’re saying in the paper that there was no foul play, which I guess means they’re assuming either accident or suicide.”

The word hangs between them heavily.

“Jesus,” Saul says. “That’s creepy.”

“I know.” Eve is quiet for a minute, considering. “I don’t see how someone could accidentally drive into a quarry. I mean, that’s a pretty big accident. But I don’t think it was a suicide, necessarily, either,” she says.

“Well why do they think it might have been?” he asks, looking at her carefully.

“I don’t know, really. I guess it’s just the easiest answer and they’re too lazy to bother with anything else.”

“So what makes you think it wasn’t?”

Eve pauses a moment, worried that confessing she thinks it’s murder sounds childish. “I don’t necessarily think it
wasn’t
, just that it might
not
have been. I mean, for one thing, his windows were up. Wouldn’t he have rolled his windows down?”

“Probably.”

“Exactly.” Eve lets out a frustrated breath, pulls her legs up. “I guess it just bothers me that they’re jumping to conclusions without looking into things a little more.”

“How do you know they’re not?”

“Well, it certainly doesn’t look like they are, as far as I can tell.”

“Huh.” Saul runs a hand through his hair. “Who was the guy, do they know?”

“James P. Favazza.”

“James Favazza.”

Eve looks at Saul. “Do you know him?”

“Know him?” Saul shakes his head. “No. What else do you know about him?”

“Nothing really. Just what was in the paper, which was that he was twenty-seven, that his wallet and cash were on him, and that he was last seen at his mother’s house on Magnolia Street. And that he liked to drink beer.”

“That was in the paper?”

“No. But there were a lot of beer cans and beer bottles in the truck. And a cooler bag. And a T-shirt from some bar. I collected it all from the quarry, since no one else was. I have it all inside.”

“Huh. What bar?”

“On the T-shirt? Someplace called Vic’s. It’s in the phone book.”

“I know Vic’s. That place is a dump.”

This piques Eve’s attention. “You’ve been to Vic’s?” she asks.

“Once. Once was enough. You know the place. It’s kind of across from the grocery store and the CVS?”

Eve tries to picture the various buildings that stand opposite the grocery store and CVS; the only two she can conjure clearly are Steve’s sub shop and Salah’s ice cream, because she’s been inside both of these, but the rest appear in her mind as vague shapes that have held no relevance in her life. “Yeah, I guess,” she says uncertainly.

There are footsteps in the distance, a shout, laughter. Eve and Saul listen.

“Maybe he was drunk,” Saul says when it is quiet again. “And he drove in accidentally.”

“Yeah, I know. But the thing is, the truck drove between two trees that are so close together it would be hard to do it even sober. Not to mention maneuvering his way up these roads and down our driveway in the first place. I don’t know. If he was a good enough drunk driver that he got all the way to the quarry I
don’t know why he’d suddenly turn into such a bad drunk driver that he’d drive right in.”

“Which would suggest suicide.”

“I’m not convinced,” Eve says flatly.

They sit quietly for a minute. Eve pulls a twig from a bush and rolls it between her palms, thinking. “Oh, and the autopsy,” she says. “They’re doing one, even though they’re saying there wasn’t foul play, which is a little weird.”

“I don’t know about that,” Saul says. “I think that’s probably a matter of procedure.”

Eve shoots him a look. “You sound exactly like my father.”

They are quiet for a minute. “How is your dad?” Saul asks finally.

Eve shrugs in the darkness.

Saul turns to look at her, questioning.

“He’s fine,” Eve says.

“Your mom?”

“She’s fine. Eloise is fine. I’m fine. We’re all fine.”

“I’m just asking, Eve.”

“And I’m just answering. What am I supposed to say?”

“Jesus, I don’t know.”

Eve puts a chin on her knee. “How are you?” she asks, after a moment, feeling a little as if she is somehow giving in.

“I’m fine.”

“See? It’s a perfectly acceptable answer.”

“Fair enough.”

“How’s college?”

“Okay. I’m taking next year off.”

“What are you going to do?”

“South America, I think. Teaching English.”

“I was supposed to go to South America this summer,” Eve says. “And build houses.”

“Why didn’t you?”

Eve considers this. There are many answers. She didn’t want to leave her family so soon after Sophie died, feeling more needy for them—despite herself—than she has since she was a little girl. She worried that something might happen to one of them while she was gone. She couldn’t face spending a summer with a bunch of kids her age who have come to seem almost alien to her. Or perhaps, she thinks, she feels like the alien; she hasn’t called any of her own friends since arriving here, nor does she really want to. “I don’t know,” she says finally. She prods at her stubbed toe and sighs, feeling suddenly drained. “I’m tired,” she says. She gets up off the rock, clutching her arms around her. “And freezing.”

Saul gets up, too. “Yeah,” he says. “I’ve got to get up early. I have to check my traps. I just set them out last week.”

Last summer was the first time Saul and Sophie had let Eve come with them in the boat to check his lobster traps. Eve wonders if she’ll ever get to help him again, and thinks probably not. She sniffs. “Where’d you park?” she asks.

“By the gate to the public quarry. Not far. Do you want an escort home?”

“Please,”
Eve says. “The house is two seconds away. I think I’ll make it.” She rubs her hands up over her arms to warm them. “Thanks, though,” she adds.

“Sure. I’ll see you, Eve,” Saul says, touching her lightly on the shoulder before turning away.

Eve watches him start to walk away, and she wonders when she will see him again—he who had been such a summer constant—and how, if at all, he will factor into their lives now. “Hey, Saul,” she calls.

Saul turns around.

“You should stop by sometime,” she says. “Probably everyone would want to see you. If you want.”

“Yeah, I will. It would be good to see your family.” He raises a hand. “Night, Eve.”

“Night, Saul.”

*  *  *

J
OAN
and Anders lie side by side in bed beneath sheets that feel damp after all the evening’s rain. They have just turned off the lights when they hear the distant sound of a car engine passing down the dirt road beyond the house. The sound gets louder, almost as if the car might come up the driveway, and in the pocket of time before it begins to fade the question Joan has been struggling to avoid all day finally presents itself to her, and there is no denying it. She props her head on her hand and looks at her husband. “What if we’d been here?” she asks. “Like Eve said?”

“What?”

“What if we’d been here? What if we’d gotten here on Thursday, instead, or even just a few hours earlier?”

Anders turns his head and looks Joan in the eye. He isn’t surprised by her question. He knows Eve has brought it up to them both. “We didn’t,” he says quietly.

Joan isn’t surprised by his answer. She sighs and drops back onto her pillow. “I know it doesn’t do any good to wonder, but I can’t help it. It’s hard not to think that the outcome might have been different if we’d been here.”

“And it might not have,” Anders says. “It might have all been worse.”

Joan ponders this. Anders is right; they could have seen the whole thing happen and been unable to do anything about it, and this
would
have been worse. “Maybe,” she says. “Still.” She lets her eyes wander over the water stain on the ceiling, absently tracing its familiar, turtle-shaped outline, just visible in the darkness.

The door downstairs opens, shuts, and then they hear Eve’s
footsteps on the stairs, then in the hall, the reverse sequence of the sounds they’d listened to her make half an hour before.

“What do you suppose she’s been up to?”

“Something to do with the quarry, I’m sure,” Anders says. “She’s fixated.”

Joan sighs. “I know it. I can’t say that I totally blame her.” She pulls the sheets farther up her chest. “Do you think she’s okay?”

“Eve? I don’t know,” Anders says. He looks at his wife; he can see moonlight glinting in her eyes as she gazes at the ceiling. “I think she is, as much as she can be.”

Joan is quiet for a minute. “I do worry about her. She’s so . . . tough. I wish she would let her guard down. Or I wish that she felt she could. I wish she would talk to someone.”

Anders knows where Joan will go next, and says nothing. He looks up at the ceiling himself.

“I wish you would talk to someone, too,” Joan says, turning her head.

She slides her hand across the sheets toward him, slips it in the hollow beneath his back. “But you know that.”

Anders breathes in slowly through his nose, feeling Joan’s gaze upon him. He is acutely aware of her hand beneath him, and he knows that this is partly a gesture, that one time upon feeling her hand there, he would have next rolled toward her and pulled her against him, and that things would have proceeded from there according to an intimate, unspoken choreography. He doesn’t move. Somewhere nearby, a dog is barking, and he finds himself counting the number of barks.

“Don’t you?”

“Yuh,” he says. “I know.”

Joan returns her gaze to the ceiling. “But I know I can’t force you.”

“No,” Anders says.

When, a moment later, Joan glances over at Anders again, he has closed his eyes. She studies his profile, the shadows of his cheekbones, the jut of his Adam’s apple, and even though he is right there beside her, she feels as if there is a giant space between them. He seems very far away, or buried deep within himself; she would give anything to reach inside and yank him out, and her powerlessness to do so fills her with panic, as if time were somehow of the essence and slipping quickly away.

“Anders,” she whispers. “Anders.”

But Anders has fallen asleep. For a moment, Joan watches the rise and fall of his chest in the moonlight, her chest tight with a mixture of love and sadness. And then she turns her head, closes her eyes; and though her fingers have begun to tingle beneath her husband’s back, she leaves her hand where it is.