The Probable Future

“We got a report from the detective that there were fingerprints in the victim’s apartment.” Why did he keep talking about his brother? God, was he his brother’s keeper, his apologist, his second-best? “But they weren’t Will’s.” Matt hadn’t spoken this much at one time for years, except to Mrs. Gibson. He finally shut up and drew a breath. “You smell like sugar,” he said, and immediately thought to himself, Idiot.

  “First day of work. Over at Liza Hull’s Tea House.”

  “Liza’s a great girl.” At the moment, Matt couldn’t quite remember who Liza Hull was. Had he always been so dumb in Jenny’s presence, startled into stupidity? “You must be tired. Do you need a ride?”

  “Oh, no.” Jenny took another step backward. She tripped over the granite once more, but this time she salvaged her clumsiness by sitting down on the edge of the memorial. The granite was cold right through her clothes to her skin, but Jenny didn’t care. For some reason, she was burning up. “I’ll walk. It’s good exercise after being cooped up all day.”

  Matt realized there was a scent other than sugar. Jenny Sparrow gave off the odor of lake water, the same seductive scent there had been that night when he and Will camped out on the Sparrows’ property, listening to the chorus of the peepers.

  “I’ll be in touch if I hear any more news about Will’s case,” he told her.

  That damned Will again. Couldn’t he leave his brother out of the conversation for a minute? What he really wanted was to kiss Jenny Sparrow, right here on the town green. It was what he thought about every single time he drove past, only now she was here, sitting on the edge of the memorial, looking up at him.

  “Because I hear from Henry Elliot about Will pretty much every day.”

  At this point, he would have liked to kill Will. Matt made a note to himself: erase this most irritating word, this vilest of names, from his vocabulary, starting now.

  “Oh, Henry. I work with his daughter, Cynthia. She’s sweet, but mixed up. I’m so glad I’m not a teenager.”

  Matt, on the other hand, fervently wished that she was. He wished he could reel back time so that he’d been the one who’d gone inside Cake House and Will had been left in the yard, crouched beside the forsythia. He wished he could go back to the moment when she came across the lawn toward them, barefoot, her long hair tangled from sleep.

  “Rosemary Sparrow could run faster than any man in town,” Matt said. Immediately, he was embarrassed by his non sequitur. He tended to do this—use his storehouse of historical information to lead him away from anything resembling emotions or regret. He was terrible at conversation, a little better if he could recite a few facts.

  “Excuse me?” The rain was falling in earnest now, but Jenny still felt hot. Daffodil rain could do that to you. It could turn you inside out. Jenny unbuttoned her jacket and fanned herself. “Did you say she could run?”

  “She was a relative of yours. A great-great-great-great-great. Revolutionary War. She could outrace a deer, that’s what people said, at any rate. When the British were sweeping through, she ran all the way to North Arthur. She got there in time to save close to a hundred boys, who would have been ambushed by the British, and who took off for the woods instead to do a little ambushing themselves.”

  “Wow.” Jenny laughed. “How do you know all that?”

  “The library. Good old Mrs. Gibson.”

  “Mrs. Gibson! I think I still owe her money for an overdue book. I never returned anything in those days. God, I was thoughtless. She probably has me down on a most-wanted list.”

  “No. Not Mrs. Gibson. She’s a softy. She doesn’t have a list.”

  The clock on the tower at Town Hall chimed, and they both turned, startled. Six o’clock. Darkness was falling through the leaves of the plane trees, along with the rain. Yellow rain, light rain, the daffodil rain that made people do foolish things.

  “You should come over for dinner sometime.”

  From the look on his face, Jenny wondered if she’d said something wrong. He appeared panic-stricken, as though he might turn and run himself, faster, perhaps, than Rosemary Sparrow.

  “You don’t have to. I wouldn’t be offended if you didn’t want to.” She offered him a polite out. “Not many people are fond of my mother. I understand that. Believe me.”

  “I am. I’m very fond of her.”

  “You are? Well, then, some time next week?”

  Matt nodded and headed off across the green.

  “Next week,” he said, having at last avoided including his brother’s name in a sentence.

  He walked right through puddles and didn’t even notice. His boots were soaking, but what did he care? He had left the window of his truck open and now his files would be damp, but he wasn’t concerned about that; he’d dry the papers later, beside the stove.

  Jenny stood up and waved. Unlike dusk in Boston, always so slow to envelop the streets, here in Unity there was a curtain of night. One minute you were standing in daylight and the next you were completely in the dark.

  “Check out the memorial behind you,” Matt called as he got into his truck. “It’s my favorite.”

  He honked his horn as he drove away, and the sound echoed across the green. Jenny felt as though she were drowning somehow. What a strange and rainy place this was. How green and dark and quiet. She turned to inspect the monument she had been using as a bench. She had never once bothered to look at it, not once in all the years she lived here. The past was the past, it was what she had always wanted to run away from. It was the future she’d been interested in, so she’d never noticed the angel carved into the black granite; she never knew that the angel she had seen so many years ago on the morning of her thirteenth birthday had been here all along, the solid twin of what before had only been a dream.

  II.

  THE CLINIC in North Arthur was on Hopewell Street, at the very edge of town where the urban landscape blended into muddy, useless fields, overplowed and left to wither. The only other building for nearly half a mile was a barnlike edifice used to store the county’s school buses. Dr. Stewart wondered if the North Arthur town council had chosen this location as a way of keeping disease at bay, or perhaps they merely wanted to hide the fact that many of the patients were farmworkers who arrived to pick strawberries in June and apples in October. All the same, the clinic had a first-rate staff and a good, level parking lot, something Dr. Stewart especially appreciated, as there was always plenty of space for his huge, old Lincoln Town Car.

  Hap sometimes accompanied his grandfather to the clinic, and this time he’d dragged Stella along. Today there were several physicians from Hamilton Hospital, giving freely of their time along with a nurse practitioner, two RNs, a resident who staffed the small ER room, and a secretary named Ruth Holworthy, who all but ran the place.

  “Hey, Doc,” Ruth called out as they entered the clinic. “I see you brought a couple of freeloaders along with you.”

  “That’s right, Ruth,” the doctor said cheerfully. “My entourage. You two can sit out front and help Ruth,” Dr. Stewart told Stella and Hap. “Do whatever she tells you to do.”

  “Good. No dealing with sick people.” Hap was pleased. Out in the waiting room an elderly man was coughing and there was a little girl who yowled as though she’d been stuck by a pin. “I can’t believe you came along. This place is not exactly a laugh riot.”

  They were alphabetizing the Medicare forms Ruth had given them, sitting cross-legged on the carpet in the rear of the office, beside the filing cabinets. The fluorescent light flickered and the yowling in the waiting room kept up, rising like a mini-siren.

  “I’m not afraid of sick people,” Stella said. “That’s the difference between you and me.”

  “I didn’t say I was afraid. It’s just that they’re so impossible to fix.” Everyone expected Hap to be a doctor, but he didn’t have the heart to deal with the frailties of human beings. “Being a physician is like working on a machine that keeps breaking down, time after time. It’s like a toaster
than burns everything no matter what you do. Or a car that won’t start even if you jump the battery every single day. It’s a pointless battle if it’s one you can’t ever win.”

  Clearly, Hap was thinking of his mother, who had died when he wasn’t much more than five. Hap had told Stella what he remembered most was picking violets with his mother, the scented kind that grew on the stretch of property between the Sparrows’ acreage and his grandfather’s house, beneath tall pine trees. A single image, that’s all he had left of her. Purple stars, Hap had told Stella one day when they were exploring Rebecca Sparrow’s laundry shed. They could see a bank of violets from a window which had never contained glass. That’s what they looked like.

  “Some people are fixable,” Stella said stubbornly. “Plus, they’re more interesting than toasters.”

  All the same, this discussion brought to mind the image of her grandmother covered with snow, unmoving in the garden. Stella shivered just thinking about it. People died, Hap was right, and so often there was nothing you could do about it. No cure could be given, no antidote was available. You simply had to give up hope when it came to some people. But not Hap. Stella wasn’t about to let anything happen to him. If she couldn’t be in love with him, she could at least protect him. She thought of the way he had confided in her while they sat close together in Rebecca’s shed, the look on his face when he spoke about violets. She thought about the way he’d been waiting for her on the first day of school, the way he’d grinned at her when she’d appeared round the corner, walking right toward him. Hap had told her he wished he had his camera with him at that moment; her expression, he swore, was that of a bird that had been trapped and could think only of how she might best escape.

  That’s what Hap was interested in, photography. He had set up a darkroom in his grandfather’s basement, and wherever he went, he carried his camera along in his backpack. He had it with him now, an old Leica, that he used to take a shot of Ruth Holworthy.

  “Cut that out,” Ruth called. “I’m working.”

  “You’ll be happy when you see the print,” Hap called back.

  “You should tell your grandfather you don’t want to be a doctor,” Stella advised. “Then he’ll stop dragging you here.”

  Hap looked at her helplessly. “I can’t hurt his feelings.”

  “Just tell him! He won’t break when he gets the news.”

  There was a ruckus out in the waiting room, never a good sign.

  “Shit,” Hap muttered. “I smell tragedy.”

  “You kids stay right here,” Ruth Holworthy said in the no-nonsense tone of someone used to being obeyed. But Stella had no such intentions and she did no such thing. Instead, she trailed along behind Ruth, ignoring Hap as he grabbed for her arm and reminded her, “That means you.”

  Out in the parking lot, there was an ambulance and several police cars. There had been an accident over on 95, a bad one, and the Hopewell Clinic had been the closest emergency stop. The paramedics came rushing through the waiting room, so that Stella was forced to jump back, out of their way. All the same, she had seen what was before them, the tragedy of the day: a young man on a stretcher, covered with blood, limbs mangled, who would die, not because of any of his obvious wounds, but because of a lacerated liver. And she had seen something more: as they were racing by her, Stella had looked into the young man’s eyes. For an instant, his eyes had focused and met hers.

  Without thinking, Stella began to follow the paramedics into the examining room. Ruth Holworthy put a hand on her shoulder. “You’re not going in there, kiddo. No possibility. No way.”

  But Stella pulled away and went through the doors on the heels of the paramedics. She had a buzzing feeling in her head, so she had barely heard Ruth admonish her, and even if she had heard Ruth cry out behind her, she would have paid no mind.

  When Stella slipped into the examining room, a resident was taking the young man’s vital signs. Everyone was too busy to notice Stella, until Dr. Stewart came in.

  “Good Lord,” he said, when he spied her. She was right there by the door, watching one of the residents from Hamilton Hospital labor over the now unconscious young man. “Stella. Go back to the office.”

  But Stella stayed where she was. She could feel the young man sinking, like a ship out on the ocean. Even she could tell that the resident was not up to the task before him.

  “That doctor can’t help him. He has a lacerated liver.”

  “Did you overhear someone mention a diagnosis?”

  The young man on the table was shivering uncontrollably, the way patients with internal injuries often did. His color was ashen and he hadn’t responded when the nurse practitioner hooked up an I V.

  “It’s what’s wrong with him,” Stella said grimly. She sounded so sure of herself that Dr. Stewart forgot about shooing her out. “Is it something that can be fixed?”

  “That all depends.”

  When he approached, the resident said, “I think I’ve got this covered.” All the same, Doc Stewart examined the injured man’s abdomen. It was bloated and he could feel fluid inside. The pulse rate was dangerously low and Dr. Stewart didn’t like the looks of the whole situation. The resident was taking all the appropriate steps, but sometimes that wasn’t enough. Sometimes there had to be a leap of faith. Brock Stewart had seen it before, a nurse or a doctor who somehow knew what was wrong before any tests were taken. He’d had those gut feelings himself; he’d acted on impulse, he’d taken a risk, when waiting would have meant the possibility of sacrificing a life.

  He signaled the nurse to phone the medevac; they’d need a helicopter. Dr. Stewart would call ahead to Boston so that X rays and surgery could be arranged.

  After the patient had been moved, airlifted out in less than twenty minutes, there was a stunned silence in the clinic. A good deal of blood had washed through the waiting room, a trail that led out through the hall and into the examining room. Ruth always used a mixture of bleach, vinegar, and club soda to remove such stains.

  “I’m better than a professional carpet cleaner,” she declared. She turned to Stella. “Next time I tell you to stay, are you going to listen?”

  “Probably not,” Stella admitted.

  “You’re just like the old doc.” Ruth shook her head; in her opinion, there were some people in this world too stubborn to ever toe the line. “You do as you please.”

  Hap and Stella were both quiet on the drive home. Hap was sitting up front with his grandfather, with Stella in the backseat. She was studying the shape of Hap’s head. He had fine brown hair, but when she narrowed her eyes, it looked as though some sort of light was streaking through in radiant bands. Say it, Stella thought. Let him know who you are.

  “I’m thinking of not becoming a doctor.” It was ridiculous how hard this was for Hap to say out loud. It took all his strength and once it was said, he leaned his head against the car window, drained.

  The day itself was sunny and mild, though you’d never know it while working in the clinic, where the fluorescent lights flickered and the shades were always half-drawn. There was silence for a while after Hap’s proclamation; the old Lincoln turned off the service road and they headed toward town. Light filtered through the leaves of the plane trees. Green and yellow. Shadow and sun.

  “Not cut out for it?” Brock Stewart finally said.

  “No, sir.”

  “Well, Stella, what do you think? Should I draw and quarter him? Should I send him into exile for not following in the family tradition? Should I never speak to him again?”

  Hap blinked, confused. He had been so nervous about telling his grandfather about this decision, he thought he might not be hearing correctly. But Stella laughed out loud. After all this worry, the doctor was letting Hap off easy. She leaned forward, elbows on the seat behind Hap.

  “Your grandpop’s joking,” she whispered, before she turned to the doctor. “Definitely a beheading. But first can we order pizza? I’m starving.”

  “Pizza it is,?
?? the doctor agreed.

  They drove to the doctor’s house, which he had helped to design and build fifty years earlier, when he was newly married to Adele. He had wanted a house which was completely different from his family home, a cottage he had donated to the town. The Stewart House was the first edifice to be built in Unity after the great fire; it was now a dark and rather moldy gift shop where imitation Revolutionary War trinkets were sold to tourists who happened by in summer and fall, looking for a piece of the Freedom Trail. The doctor’s current house had a great deal of glass and overlooked a vista of rhododendrons and azaleas that bloomed pink and white and purple. There was a stockade fence between the driveway and a rolling field on the other side. Once the car had been parked, they all trooped in to the kitchen, exhausted, mud on their feet. Hap called the pizza place in town, to order the delivery of a large pie with everything, while the doctor went to wash up.

  David Stewart, Hap’s father, was a tall, rumpled man who had just gotten home from work. He was in the den, fiddling with the TV, searching for the Red Sox game, when Hap brought Stella in to meet him.

  “So you’re Stella,” David Stewart said when they were introduced. “Well, well. You’re nothing like your mother.”

  Since Stella had always believed being different from her mother to be one of her primary goals in life, Mr. Stewart’s comment should have pleased her. Instead, she felt her face color. Somehow, she felt insulted.

  “Your mother had all that dark, beautiful hair the Sparrow women are known for. Guys at school used to follow her around. Everybody was crazy about her, but she wasn’t interested in anybody but Will Avery.”

  If Juliet Aronson had been there she would have probably said, Oh, yeah? Well, I’m sure you were the guy she was least interested in, Mr. Stewart, you punk, you skunk. You’re an idiot even now. Stella, on the other hand, merely stood there smiling, politely frozen and deeply taken aback by the comparison with her mother. So she was nothing, invisible, a pale imitation of the real thing.

  “My father’s kind of a jerk,” Hap said apologetically when they went outside to wait for the pizza delivery van. “I think he was a disappointment to my grandfather. He sells pharmaceuticals and he does okay, but he was supposed to be a doctor. Kind of like me.”