The Probable Future
“It’s fine,” Jenny assured her. “You won’t be punished for your thoughts. And she really is a bitch.” Why, Sissy Elliot made Elinor seem like a darling, a notion that was entirely disconcerting for Jenny.
“It’s not very compassionate to be so judgmental,” Liza Hull told them both. “When there are ashes around, then you can be sure something has burned.”
“What does that mean?” Cynthia and Jenny both wanted to know. They couldn’t help but laugh to visualize Sissy Elliot pushing her walker through a pile of ashes.
“It means when somebody’s that nasty, it’s because she must have walked through fire. Those comments you’re getting are flying off her like sparks without her even knowing she’s all burned up inside.”
“I think Liza’s saying we’re the bitches,” Cynthia whispered to Jenny.
The back door opened and Stella peeked inside. “Is that your great-gran out front?” she asked Cynthia. When Cynthia nodded, Stella said, “I thought we should probably avoid her. I’ve heard she cooks up babies for lunch.”
“Only on Tuesdays.” Cynthia grinned. “The rest of the time she eats lemon chess pie.”
“Ooh,” Stella said. “Pie.” She grabbed a slice for herself. “Is that who Jimmy takes after? Your great-gran?”
“She refuses to sit down at the table with him. Even at Thanksgiving. She calls him ‘the delinquent,’ right to his face.”
Although Cynthia was two grades ahead, she’d taken Stella under her wing at the high school; the two often had lunch together. Cynthia’s brother had tried to join them on several occasions but Jimmy had been told, in no uncertain terms, that his presence was not appreciated. For this Stella was eternally grateful, for something strange happened to her when he was around, and she hated herself for whatever wicked thing she felt. It was during these lunches with Cynthia, with Jimmy glowering at them from across the room, that Stella had heard all about Sissy Elliot, who was known to keep a pile of rocks by her front door, ready to throw if anyone was foolish enough to walk across her lawn.
“Where’s your partner in crime?” Cynthia joked. “I thought you and Hap were always together.”
Stella opened the door wider and there was Hap Stewart waiting for her on the back porch. Hap leaned his head through the door and asked for a piece of pie-to-go, if that wouldn’t be a bother. He was ill at ease in Jenny’s presence, but he had that grin you couldn’t help but respond to, a sort of goodness that shone through.
Stella came to stand next to her mother as Jenny wrapped up some pie for them. “So you made it through your first day.”
“Barely,” Jenny admitted. “I never worked so hard in my life.”
Stella had a heavy backpack over her shoulder, always favoring that side that had been broken at birth. She wore jeans and boots and an old rain slicker that Jenny thought she recognized as her own from years ago. Stella’s hair streamed down her back, rain-soaked and pale. All the same, she looked more solid since she’d moved to Unity.
“But you made it through.” Lest she sound too complimentary, Stella added, “Now I can say my mother’s a professional pie-server. I’ll be home late. We’re still working on our science project. Can I have another piece of pie in case I run into my uncle?”
“Your uncle?” Jenny had a light-headed feeling, surely brought on by standing on her feet all day.
“He’s cutting down that big old tree on the corner of Lockhart. I met him there one day. He’s great. But it’s so weird—he’s nothing like Dad.”
“No,” Jenny said. “He wouldn’t be.”
“Call me later,” Cynthia reminded her new friend as Stella and Hap left through the back door. Cynthia and Jenny finished cleaning up the kitchen, allowing the more compassionate Liza to collect the bill from the grans. Let her be hit by the sparks of old Sissy’s comments. Let her put out the fire.
“I think I will spit in your great-gran’s tea next time she comes in,” Jenny confided to Cynthia. She wished she could feel as at ease with Stella as she did with this child with the scarlet hair.
Cynthia laughed. “I wish my mother was more like you.” Annette Elliot was a lawyer like her husband, Henry, and Cynthia hadn’t spoken to her in a month. “Nothing I do is right.”
“Maybe everyone wishes her mother was like someone else.”
“Especially my grandmother, I’ll bet,” Cynthia said.
Jenny had thought, Especially me, but in light of Sissy Elliot’s dreadful behavior, she didn’t feel she especially deserved anyone’s sympathy. She was now completely exhausted; all the same, she decided the walk home would do her good, the fresh air might revitalize her. The rain had eased off and was little more than a sprinkle, so she turned down Liza’s offer of a ride home.
“Get a bike, like me,” Cynthia called as she zoomed past the porch of the tea house, spraying Jenny with water from the damp road. “It will take you where you want to go.”
But where was that exactly? Jenny was far too old to be taken in by the green light of spring or by the way she felt when she breathed in the humid air. She was certain Liza Hull was mistaken. She and Matt weren’t even the same people anymore. She would assuredly never have recognized him if Liza hadn’t informed her of who he was. He was just a good-looking man hired to take down the oldest tree in town, waving good-naturedly, someone she used to know, nothing more.
BECAUSE OF THE RAIN, the oak on the corner of Lockhart Avenue had been spared one more day. Matt had been taking the tree down slowly, in pieces, the top limbs first, and he didn’t want the trunk to split on him, as it was a sure target for lightning. In fact, Matt had been in the library ever since noon, having lunch in the historical collections annex, able to enjoy the sandwich he picked up at the market by special permission of Mrs. Gibson, who didn’t usually allow food in the library, but was willing to make an exception for one of her favorite patrons.
Matt especially liked the collections room when it rained; he felt as though he were in a fishbowl, swimming toward knowledge, diving into the journals of the Hathaways and the Elliots and the Hap-goods. Today he had been working on his favorite topic, charting the effects of the Sparrow women on the town of Unity. Constance Sparrow had begun the lifesaving station, out on the tip of the marshes where the lighthouse was later built, initially set up because her husband was a sailor, so often at sea. Coral Sparrow, who predicted the weather with amazing accuracy, rang the bell at the meetinghouse to warn of storms, thereby evacuating half the people in town during the hurricane of 1911, an incident which began the weather service stationed on the far end of Lockhart Avenue, still in operation and far more accurate than those meteorologists on TV. Most people in town knew that Leonie Sparrow began a brigade that was later to become the volunteer fire department. But few people knew that Amelia Sparrow was the first midwife in Unity, and if not for her ability to see a mother through the most difficult of births, there’d be no Hathaways in town, including old Eli, for Margaret Hathaway would have died during labor before producing a single heir.
“Still fooling around with those Sparrow women?” Mrs. Gibson said when Matt brought the key to the research room to her desk at the end of the afternoon. She and Marlena Elliot-White exchanged a look. Neither had figured out why none of the girls in town had managed to snag Matt. Mrs. Gibson’s own daughter, Susan, who had changed her name to Solange and was dating a married man up in Boston, an alleged artist who treated her cruelly, when here was Matt, all alone in the library nearly every day, free as a bird.
“Hopefully, I’ll be done by the end of May,” Matt said. “That’s when my thesis is due.”
Mrs. Gibson lowered her voice. “I heard about your brother.” She looked over her shoulder to make sure that Marlena, who always reported everything back to her mother, Sissy, and her half-sister, Iris, wouldn’t overhear. “I’ve heard he murdered some woman in Boston.”
“I’m the one who told you!” Marlena called, not in the least tricked by her coworker’s whisperings. “
And it’s not exactly a secret. There was a full report in the Boston Globe and the Unity Tribune.”
Matt had a soft spot for Mrs. Gibson, even though they’d all been terrified of her back when they were kids. No talking! the boys in town would scream at the top of their lungs when they saw Mrs. Gibson on Main Street or in the market, but Matt had never resented the fact that she wanted books cared for properly or that she insisted upon peace and quiet.
“My brother had nothing to do with it. Murder takes some kind of effort unless it’s accidental, so you can count Will out. You know he never applies himself at anything. This is one time he’s innocent.”
“Well, that’s nice.” Mrs. Gibson was headed off to the research room, where the founding fathers’ journals were stored in a metal cabinet that had a separate humidity control. “I’m glad it wasn’t Will. To tell you the truth, I always hoped he’d find his way. If only for your mother’s sake.”
Driving through town on his way home, Matt thought about how easy everything had been for his brother. Good fortune stuck to Will like glue. He didn’t even have to try and he came out a winner. On that night when they’d dared each other to sleep beside Hourglass Lake, the payoff had been that whoever chickened out first was bound to be the other’s servant for an entire day. But for all Will’s bravado, Matt had always wondered if his brother had in fact been too scared to sleep that night. Matt had woken early, his bones aching from the damp ground, to find Will watching him, his sleeping bag thrown over his shoulders like a cape, his expression bleary. The boys blinked at each other in the cool, laky air.
“I’ve been keeping my eye on you,” Will had said. “I’ve been waiting for you to bolt and run. Why don’t you go ahead and run right now? I can hear that horse underwater. He’s coming after you.”
They had spent the night so close to the shoreline they both smelled like water weeds. But obviously the dead horse had not yet risen, although the other boys in town swore that when the demon surfaced it would chase them into the lake, forcing them to run until it wasn’t solid ground beneath their feet, but floating lily pads. So far, that hadn’t happened, and Matt had experienced a fairly good night’s sleep.
A bee buzzed around him, and Matt waved it away, mindful of his brother’s allergy. “Well, keep waiting,” he’d responded. “I’m not running.”
The air was green, filled with pollen. It was the first warm day of the season, and the mayflies had already begun to hatch. Matt swore he could smell a dead horse, not that he was about to change his mind. The stink might be nothing more than skunk cabbage in the ditches.
Matt usually deferred to Will, and his sudden defiance made Will laugh. “Okay, little bro. We’ll see who wins.”
Well, who always won? Who walked away with everything? All the same, looking back, Matt was fairly certain Will had been terrified by their night at the lake. He’d never admit it, Will would lie till there wasn’t a breath left in his body, but Matt had seen the haunted look in his eyes; he’d seen Will huddled beneath his sleeping bag, peeking out like a rat from a burrow in the field.
Matt knew only too well that courage was an elusive companion. All he had to do was look at his own life to see what could happen to a man who didn’t step up to the plate. He’d been so afraid of coming in second-best, so sure he’d be repelled and rejected, that he’d never even tried. Not at anything, not really. He just drifted through, until here he was, a grown man, with nothing of his own. Driving along Main Street, his files and books in a jumble behind his seat, he wondered if he’d have half the courage of some of the old-timers whose journals he spent his afternoons looking through, those men who walked into uncharted territory, those women who suffered a hundred losses.
He had read in Simon Hathaway’s journal that the figure on the horse of the Civil War memorial was indeed modeled after Simon’s own son, Anton. But it was only through reading Morris Hapgood’s diary that he knew the truth beyond the facts and was aware that Anton’s mother, Emily, visited the monument each and every day until she died. Snow or sleet never stopped her. Why, she didn’t even look up; she didn’t once see the sky again after her son died. All that had mattered to Emily in this world had been buried in the ground, and there were people, Morris Hapgood’s wife, Elise, among them, who believed that the lily of the valley that grew at the base of the monument arose from her tears.
Although Matt’s thesis centered on the Sparrow women, he had yet to find a single word written by any of them, other than a few slips of Elisabeth’s recipes. Everything he knew he’d learned from the journals and diaries and letters of the men of Unity, a stew of fact and possibility, salted with gossip. As for the women, they left behind journals filled with shopping lists and newspaper articles, birth announcements and obituaries, specific details anyone would have guessed would have been lost to time. But when it came to Rebecca Sparrow, most of the facts of her life were still unknown. Some history wasn’t just hidden, it was buried, locked away not only to protect the innocent but also to obscure the guilty, and thereby relieve the descendants of both from the burdens of the past.
Matt always slowed down when he passed the town green, as a mark of respect to those citizens who’d come before him. He’d done so even back when he was a boy riding his bike, delivering newspapers. But now he stopped altogether. He put on the brakes and switched on the wipers to clear off the windshield. He had pretty good vision, so he assumed he was seeing straight. He could feel a chill settle on his skin as he rolled down his window.
“Jenny?” he called.
She was standing near the Commemoration to the Men Who Fell in the Revolution, Matt’s favorite monument. Though forbidden by law, Matt had come down here one evening with several large sheets of white paper and black chalk. One of the chalk rubbings he made was now framed, hanging over his bed, an angel to keep watch while he slept.
Matt left his truck idling and got out. It was definitely her.
“Jenny Sparrow?”
Jenny turned when she heard her name called. At that moment, her head was filled with peach pie and dirty dishes and tallies in which the numbers didn’t add up. Minutiae, true enough, but a big relief from obsessing about Will, or her mother, or Stella. She narrowed her eyes as a man walked toward her, waving his hands as though he knew her. It was that tall, good-looking man that Matt Avery had grown up to be. It was the person she’d forced out of her mind.
“Hey, there,” Jenny called back uncertainly. “Matt?”
Matt grinned and hugged Jenny before he could stop himself. Then he took hold of his own stupidity and backed away.
“You look exactly the same,” he told her.
“No one looks the same after all this time, Matt.”
Still, Jenny was flattered. Could it be she never noticed the way he looked at her, that he had been following her, not his brother? Not that Jenny put much stock in anything Liza Hull told her. Love wasn’t like that, was it? Just sitting there in a back drawer for all these years, like a shirt you’d never bothered to try on, but which was still there, neat and pressed and ready to wear at a moment’s notice. At any rate, he couldn’t possibly think she looked anything like she used to. Hadn’t he seen that her hair was much shorter, that there were lines around her eyes and across her forehead, that she was a woman and not the same headstrong girl she once had been?
“I heard you were in town. I met Stella, and I was going to call you at your mother’s, but I didn’t know if you wanted to hear from me. I thought you might hang up.”
Jenny laughed. Funny how Matt seemed so completely changed yet so thoroughly familiar. He’d always been worried and cautious, thinking about others, second-guessing himself. “Why? Because of that fight a million years ago on New Year’s Eve? Whatever happened, I’m sure Will deserved it.”
“Oh, he did.”
Matt’s face had grown moody at the mere mention of his brother. Stella had been right in her assessment, he was nothing like Will. He was thoughtful to a fault, carrying
his regret around with him as though every mistake he’d ever made was lashed to his back.
“Well, it was years ago,” Jenny reminded Matt. He looked so adrift, Jenny had the urge to reach out to him, but instead she took a step back and nearly stumbled over the black granite monument.
Matt put out his arm to steady her. He had thought about Jenny Sparrow every single day since that New Year’s Eve when he last saw her. Now he supposed he was staring. He’d been staring that day he was on the ladder, trying to puzzle out if it really was her.
“Actually, I tried to call you,” Jenny told him, just to say something, just to stop him from staring. “But you were never home. I wanted to thank you for paying Henry Elliot’s fee and putting up the bail money.”
“Don’t forget the detective. I’m paying for that, too. Good old Will,” Matt said forlornly. “He can make a pauper out of anyone.”
“I’m well aware of that. Whatever you do, don’t lend him your truck. Not ever. Not if he tells you there’s a pile of gold over the border in New Hampshire, and all he has to do is pick it up and you’ll both be filthy rich. Although I don’t think even Will could do much damage to that old thing.”
Jenny nodded to Matt’s battered warrior of a pickup and they both laughed. Something very odd is going on here, Jenny thought. She felt that line of heat across her skin. The rain had started up again, but neither one had made a move to leave.
“Good old Will,” Matt said.
“Not that he killed anyone.”
It was probably the humidity that was making it difficult for Jenny to breathe. All this country air, the pollen, the dampness. She wished she had a paper bag to breathe into. She wished her nerves were steadier.