The Probable Future

  “You wanted a blue rose,” Brock said. “Didn’t you? Wasn’t that the whole point?”

  “Doesn’t everyone want what they cannot have?”

  “Here’s what I think: it’s the quest that matters. Just my humble opinion.”

  Elinor laughed. “You’re not humble. You’re a know-it-all.”

  “Me?” the doctor said. “Know-nothing’s more like it. Don’t know the first thing about roses, so don’t ask me what I think.”

  Elinor was gazing at Cake House. At this hour of the day, the white painted wood took on a blue hue as the sky darkened directly above.

  “I made a wrong turn somewhere,” Elinor said.

  She thought about her dream, the long green road, how single-minded she’d been all these years. Now, she could force a thousand blue roses into existence, just when it wasn’t at all what she wanted.

  As for Brock Stewart, he couldn’t even remember when the way he felt about her had begun. Was it the day he walked up the ice-covered path to tell her about Saul? Or the day after, when he’d found her in the garden once more, barefoot and frozen right through, so that when he brought her home and sat her in front of the fire, the ice on her clothes melted into puddles on the floor? Was is yesterday or twenty years ago? “I’d be lost without you.”

  “Well,” Elinor said sharply, “you’d better get used to it.”

  It sounded as though rain had begun, but it wasn’t any sort of rain Elinor could identify. Not rose rain, or fish rain, or stone rain, not daffodil rain, only the sound of water. It was the doctor, crying. It was all but over, now, now that she knew what she wanted.

  “Let’s have a secret.” Elinor could feel the heat of the stone wall against her back. She could feel the little earthworms in the soil and the roots of her garden beneath her, a plaiting so interwoven it would take an ax to cut through. “Let’s have something no one else in the world knows about.”

  Dr. Stewart wiped his eyes with the back of his hands. Ever since Liza Hull’s baby’s death, he’d stopped trying to hold back his tears. Once or twice he’d cried in front of the residents at the clinic. They’d all turned away, embarrassed, from what they clearly perceived to be an old man’s failing. He’d kept quiet then, but what he’d really wanted to say to all those new residents, so blindly sure of themselves, so convinced that the only way to cure was to deny certain parts of themsevles: This is what it is. Watch me. This is what it’s like to be human in this world.

  “We’ll move the rose,” Elinor had decided.

  Brock laughed. “Why is it that your ideas always include physical labor and a wheelbarrow?”

  But once they began, it wasn’t very difficult to dig up the little rosebush. They lifted the seedling, still in its burlap, set it in the cart, and then it was up to the doctor to push the wheelbarrow. Trout lilies and trillium were blooming and the woods they approached were dark, except in those rare places where the sunlight came through strong as a spotlight, illuminating swirling mayflies and silvery dust motes. The scent in the air was of mud; there were layers of it: red mud, gray clay, fishy lake mud. Swamp cabbage grew thickly here, and in a clearing there was a lady’s slipper orchid. Dr. Stewart stopped to gaze at the remarkable plant. The orchid was the shape of the human heart, but paler, and like the human heart, it was surprisingly strong, especially when you stopped to consider how fragile it appeared to be, how very many ways there were for it to break.

  They went on until they came to the place where people said Rebecca Sparrow had first appeared. She had walked out of the woods one evening as though she were walking out of a dream that had ended, there beyond the flat rocks called the Table and Chairs. Brock Stewart used to come here with Elinor in the weeks after Saul’s death, just to sit here, nothing more, although time after time he’d thought of kissing her. But he’d put the thought away, he was married, happily, really; it was just that this was something more. This was everything he felt inside.

  Argus had followed along at a slow pace. Now, the wolfhound stretched out to watch as Dr. Stewart hacked away at vines in a spot that Elinor had deemed sunny enough. After expending all that energy, the doctor took a break, taking a seat on one of the Chairs, but the granite was cold, and brought little comfort, and Elinor was toting away the vines herself. After he caught his breath, Brock began to dig in the clearing with an old wooden-handled shovel they’d brought along. There were cinnamon ferns growing wild, and yellow iris that had escaped from Colonial gardens, jumping fences, growing underneath hedges. There was jack-in-the-pulpit, and dozens more swamp cabbages, which gave off a sulfury scent if brushed up against. It seemed unearthly quiet here in the woods, but for anyone who listened carefully, there was actually endless sound. The hum of the mayflies and the mosquitoes, the drone of the bees as they visited the wild dogwood, which had come into full bloom, the chattering of catbirds, the song of the warbler, the trill of the sparrows, who had lit on every branch.

  When the doctor had dug a deep enough hole, Elinor removed the burlap from the rosebush; she folded the rough fabric and tossed it into the wheelbarrow. As she worked, she was careful not to look too closely at the little plant, lest she frighten it into invisibility. It was a foolish folk tale, surely, but perhaps not completely without merit. Things withered, after all; they fell away. But some things went on even when no one was looking; unseen, unknown, they grew.

  “Do we mark the path with stones so we can find it again?” Brock Stewart said as he turned the wheelbarrow around.

  “We can never find it again.” Elinor had come to stand beside him. She hooked her arm through his, and rested her hand on the wheelbarrow. “That’s why we brought it here.”

  The way back was tough going, through the underbrush, past the swamp cabbage. Before long the doctor was confused. Perhaps they should have marked the path. “Damn,” Brock Stewart said, for every dogwood tree looked like every other and every stand of yellow iris appeared to be no different from the next.

  The doctor was sweating, he was tired from working so hard, and there were blisters on his hands. Look upward, he had told his son, David, when David was a boy, so very long ago. When you’re lost, remember: the sun always sets in the west and you’re sure to find your way. Now, the doctor wasn’t even able to see the sun through the tangle of trees.

  “I’m not sure where we are,” he admitted.

  “That’s good.” Elinor was so close it was possible to feel her warmth, her certainty, her breath. “If we can’t find it, no one else will. That’s what we want, Brock.”

  They might have stood there together forever, lost in the woods, in the dark, on that ridge where Rebecca Sparrow first appeared so many years ago, from the north, people said, although no one was sure, but luckily the dog knew the way home. They had to trust Argus and walk blindly on; it had grown foggy and there was a pale, light rain that made for mist. It was the last of the season’s daffodil rain, the sort that falls for no reason, when the lawns and the hedges are already green enough, but the sky just can’t stop from falling down.

  At the edge of a clearing the doctor stopped and picked a bunch of yellow iris. His fingers turned green with their sap and his senses grew dizzy with their redolent, golden scent. He could walk here endlessly, never growing tired, never feeling thirst. What initially drew him to anatomy he felt once again on this leafy path: the sheer abundance of life, the heat of it, the connection of things, the mat of roots under the soil, so like blood and bones, the wild potato vines like arteries, the honeybees’ hive, so like a heart. If he could take one thing with him to eternity, it would be the way he felt right now. Their feet were wet and the going was difficult. It was ridiculous for people their age to be wandering around in this manner, and still the doctor didn’t wish it to end. Elinor was feverish, he saw that clearly; a flu, perhaps, easily caught in her weakened condition. He saw clearly, too, they would indeed never come this way again.

  Walk slower, he whispered, because by now the iris he held in his hand
lit their way, globes of light in the dark. I don’t want you to go.

  That night, Elinor dreamed of the rose they had brought into the woods, and in her dream the petals weren’t blue, but silver. A broken mirror reflecting the sky up above. She knelt to pick a single flower, but it came to pieces in her hands: it shattered once, then twice, then a thousand times. Down on her knees, in a panic, she tried to put the pieces together again. She heard someone say, You have it now, and she thought, How ridiculous. I have nothing at all. I’ve lost everything.

  Her hands were bleeding from all that glass. She could see herself in the shards, but she was only a girl. How strange that when she stood up she was still that girl, the one with the long black hair, lost in the woods where the brambles grew. Above her, in the inky sky, the stars were moving too fast, like a child’s wind-up toy. She recognized some of the constellations: Leo, which always accompanied spring. The Herdsman in search of his lamb. Blue-white Vega, the brightest star in Lyra. It all looked like snow, caught in a globe. Shake it, and it falls to pieces. Shake it, and it covers you.

  Jenny arose when the sky was still black, awakened by her mother’s dream. She sat up with a gasp. The girl with long black hair had walked over glass and had never even cried. Jenny’s own face was hot and wet. There was the dawn chorus of the wood thrush peeping through the dark. There was a line of sparrows on the window ledge. A sob escaped from Jenny’s mouth, and it seemed to fly out the window, chasing the sparrows away. But not too far; they perched on the branches of the laurel and fluttered into the damp grass.

  Jenny got out of bed and went to the window. She half-expected to see the girl with black hair standing out on the lawn, dressed in a white nightgown of the sort Rebecca Sparrow was said to have worn when she first walked out of the woods. Night was rising from the grass the way steam lifted from a mirror. Jenny threw on her robe and went down the hall. The floors were cold on her feet; light fell in through the leaded panes of the hall windows so that the dust motes seemed like living things, circling in little whirlwinds.

  It was so early the wasps were first waking, the bees were just beginning to visit the garden, the stars were fading, one by one, until only Venus was left in the sky. Jenny found her mother’s bedroom door ajar. If she’d ever thought to ask, she would have found that her mother had a great fear of sleeping alone, and had ever since that night when the doctor came to tell them Saul was gone. She had the ability to spot a liar, except for the lies spoken by someone she loved. That’s what had caught her up; she’d been distracted by love, which seemed, at least at the time, to be the truest thing in the world.

  Argus always slept beside the bed. Now, he lifted his head when Jenny came into the room; he gazed at her, but Jenny could see from the pale film over Argus’s eyes that he was nearly blind. Why had she not noticed that before? Why hadn’t she taken note of how cold her mother’s room was, or realized that it hadn’t been painted in such a long time that the white walls had turned cream-colored, yellowing with age. Why hadn’t she realized how very ill her mother was until this very moment, this instant when the birds were waking, when the sky was clearing into a milky opaque light, when there was suddenly and surprisingly everything to lose.

  On the nightstand were a handful of yellow iris, the ones picked in the woods, musk-scented, set out in a vase that was familiar to Jenny. It was, in fact, one of Jenny’s first art projects, made in third grade, snaky ribbons of clay, painted brown and blue. She remembered bringing it home one afternoon when the rain was torrential, far beyond fish rain. It had been hurricane rain, plain and simple. Jenny had tucked the vase into her coat. With every step she wished for only one thing: Don’t let it be broken. She was surprised to see now that her mother had kept it, that she had it still, so nearby.

  Jenny’s feet were freezing, so she stepped over Argus, pulled back the quilt, and got into bed beside her mother. Elinor had awakened when she heard someone come into the room. She had always been a light sleeper, but her vision had begun to fail her, and she thought if Argus hadn’t barked, perhaps it was best for her to be silent as well. She felt the bed shift. There was a woman beside her with black hair who appeared to be her daughter. Could that be real? Wasn’t that an impossible thing, no more likely than a dish that could grow legs and run away over the moon or a roomful of straw spun into gold?

  “I’m dreaming,” Elinor Sparrow said. As she spoke, her words evaporated, the way words evaporate in dreams, leaving only a scrim of language, the core of something it’s impossible to understand.

  “Maybe I am, too,” Jenny said.

  They could hear the call of the wood thrush from the lawn. Outside, morning had broken into bands of yellow and green. What was a dream but a way of knowing what was inside you? After all this time, they forgave each other on this morning in May when the world was green, when bees circled the laurel, when words didn’t need to be spoken, when anything that had been lost could still be found.

  IN THE MORNING, Stella called good-bye to Liza, grabbed her backpack, and left as though it were an ordinary day. But when it came time to turn onto Lockhart, and head toward the high school, she went the other way.

  “I’m not going to school,” Stella said when Hap caught up with her. “Take notes for me in science.”

  “I’ll come with you,” Hap said, ever grateful for an excuse to miss classes on such a clear, fine day as this.

  “No.” Too abrupt. Hurt feelings. Could he tell she’d been kissing someone last night? Did it show in the light of day? Could he figure out she wasn’t quite as trustworthy as she appeared to be? “I mean, it’s a family matter.”

  “Sure.” Hap was looking at Stella as though he had just realized something. Perhaps he didn’t know her as well as he’d thought. “You do what you want.”

  Stella went down Dead Horse Lane, and took the cutoff when she came to Rebecca’s path. The day was warm and mayflies circled over the shallows. Long ago, there were so many turtles living here it was impossible to count their number, even though scores of their eggs were collected and made into soup. There were wild turkeys in the thickets and the brooks were filled with alewives, a bony fish that swim inland from the salt marshes every spring. By the time of Rebecca Sparrow’s thirteenth birthday—celebrated on the day when she first walked out of the woods, set in the very center of March— the town of Unity was twice as big as it had been when she first appeared. No one who met her would guess she hadn’t spoken a word of English when she was found, but anyone could tell in a second that her livelihood was laundry, for her hands were chapped and raw, with fingertips the color of plums and nails broken to the very quick. The old washerwoman had died of a pox, leaving Rebecca her house, her kettle, and her secret recipe for barley soap.

  When Charles Hathaway saw Rebecca Sparrow walk over the shattered mirror on the morning of her thirteenth birthday, he knew he’d done right to keep his son away from her. All the same, there was just so much a father could do. When local boys began to shoot arrows at Rebecca for sport, Samuel was the one who chased them away. It was Samuel who visited Rebecca in the evenings, paying no mind to the mosquitoes that hovered over the lakeshore like a black curtain, ignoring the snapping turtles that sank into mud-holes, ready to bite through the toughest pair of boots. He went to see her even after his father insisted he marry one of the Hapgood girls in town, Mary. Even after a son was born to them, he remained loyal to Rebecca, if loyalty meant she was the one he couldn’t wait to be with. He went to the lake no matter the weather; he used a salve of swamp cabbage to keep mosquitoes away, and he knew his way through the dark, past stones and turtles, past the old oak tree where the beehive held honey so sweet bears came down from the woods and refused to be chased away by smokers or muskets.

  When Rebecca was close to her seventeenth year, she gave birth to a daughter on the first day of March, Sarah Sparrow, a calm child who seemed to need no sleep at all. That was the year when the mosquitoes swarmed in huge, dank clouds, and anyone who came t
oo near to stagnant water took ill with a high fever. Samuel was the first to die, and after his death the sickness spread out in a circle, one family to the next. But down at the lake, Rebecca Sparrow was healthy as could be, though she cried for weeks over Samuel. People took note of how her baby thrived. If that was not suspicious enough, Mary Hathaway, Samuel’s widow, had seen Rebecca and the child she held with their arms stretched out, covered by birds, as if they were both made of feathers, not flesh, as if neither one was entirely human.

  It seemed reasonable to question Rebecca about those who’d fallen ill. Soon enough she was brought to the meeting hall, where she was watched carefully for signs that might reveal if the town itself were being put to the test. God worked in mysterious ways, it was true, but so did the devil. Wasn’t that the reason why upstanding men often craved things they had best stay away from? Why women often strayed to vanity, and children needed to be guided, lest they stumble and fall? The town fathers took from her the silver compass she kept in her pocket and the star around her neck; they removed the gold bell that kept the baby occupied, and paid no attention when the poor thing began to wail.

  There were those, such as Mary, who’d had suspicions all along, but now the town fathers agreed there must be a test. Everyone knew a witch felt no pain, so pain was the method they employed. A hot coal was placed into Rebecca’s boot, and the townsfolk were even more certain they were in the right when Rebecca didn’t cry, although clearly her foot was burned, the skin smoldering. They stuck pins beneath her nails, and still she didn’t say a word, though her fingers turned scarlet, and several of the nails dropped off. They added whole acorns to the stew they served her for dinner, and she didn’t spit them out. At last the good women in town were instructed to sew stones into the hem of Rebecca’s dress, and her cloak, then they filled her boots with rocks as well, before they brought her back to the lake.