The Probable Future

  “That dead horse legend is such a load of crap,” Hap said when they turned down the lane where the horse was supposed to have first spooked, carrying Charles Hathaway to his final destination. “But I heard a group of kids in the playground behind the school swearing it was true.”

  “It’s total crap,” Stella agreed.

  They both laughed, recalling this had been their first conversation: their agreement of what was crap.

  “Fear not,” Hap said.

  “I don’t intend to,” Stella told him.

  One night, at dinner, Stella’s father had told her and Liza about the night he and his brother had spent at the lake when they were boys, waiting for the dead horse to rise. Matt had fallen asleep like a log, Will had said, leaving him to shiver and watch the dark water alone. Charles Hathaway, he’d announced to the murky water. I’m not afraid of you or your horse.

  “People made that up in the old days,” Stella said, “when everyone was still afraid of stupid things.”

  “Right.” Hap was thinking of Sooner, dead in the field, and the look on his grandfather’s face. Now whenever Hap went past the field where Sooner had been for so long, he ran, spooked by the breeze or by the clouds or by the rustling of leaves. He’d been growing a lot in the past few months and he towered over Stella. He thought she’d seem like a stranger with her hair cut short and dyed, but she was still the same.

  “Sometimes when you get rid of your best feature, you find out it really wasn’t anything. Sometimes it turns out your true best feature is something else entirely.”

  Stella stared at him, surprised. “Have you been talking to Juliet?”

  “Juliet?” Hap said. In fact, he’d been talking to her nearly every night, late when everyone else in his household was asleep. The universe had been made out of only two things at such times: the darkness and Juliet’s voice. They hadn’t meant to keep their conversations secret from Stella, but that’s what had happened. Now, Hap was embarrassed, for reasons he couldn’t quite comprehend. He was thankful that he was slow in answering, for the time for an answer seemed to pass; they had to concentrate now so as not to stumble in the ruts.

  The air smelled like sap and mud and violets. It was the waning of the full moon, the milk moon, which had always told gardeners when to plant. They set up their campsite at the far end of Hourglass Lake. From here they could tell why it had been named so: in the middle, at the deepest point, the shoreline was equally indented, creating a narrow passageway that could fit two rowboats at most, such as the two that were hidden in the tall grass. Hap had tripped over one of the boats, then he leaned down to flatten the weeds. The boats hadn’t been used for decades, not since Jenny went out fishing with her father, who called her little Pearl on these occasions, and who taught her that sitting quietly was more important than how many fish were actually caught.

  “We’ll go out into the dead center,” Stella said. “We’ll get our water samples from a location no one’s ever been to before. Mr. Grillo will be so impressed he won’t mind that we’re a little late.”

  “We’re already two weeks late, Stella. I thought we were waiting until morning.” Hap stood there holding two oars he had found, chewed up by field mice and time, but still serviceable. All the same, he hadn’t planned on night fishing. It was dark, in spite of the milk moon. And there was the dead horse to consider, after all, the one he wasn’t worried about.

  Stella began to drag one of the boats out of the grass. Little Pearl, it was called. “I wonder who little Pearl was.”

  Stella, of course, had no idea that her mother had been a girl who liked to go fishing and swimming with her father and who had once counted ninety-two water lilies among the weeds. The bullfrogs were croaking, and the sound of the water was soft as the rowboat was pulled into the shallows. Stella got in.

  “Come on,” she urged, and Hap lurched into the boat awkwardly, holding on to the glass sample vials; Little Pearl tipped with his weight and Stella laughed at her friend.

  The reeds were tall and feathery, black in the night, like the strands of Rebecca Sparrow’s hair when they chopped off her braid. They drifted a bit and could spy the wedding cake house as they neared the center of the lake. There was a light on in the kitchen. Someone couldn’t sleep. Elinor, perhaps, was ailing; someone was most likely fixing tea. Still Stella and Hap were fairly certain they would go unnoticed. They both had the feeling that their friendship was about to change, not unwind, exactly, but shift. It had done so already, because of Jimmy Elliot, and now there seemed to be Juliet. Stella wasn’t a fool; she sensed her two best friends were becoming closer to each other than they were to her. People were coming between Stella and Hap, mattering, if not more, than certainly differently.

  Perhaps that was why they were out on the lake, steering toward the center where a good number of lily pads were sucked into the current created by the movement of their oars. Soon, the yellow water lilies would open, but now they looked like a mass of frogs, the pads greenish black and leathery.

  There was a plashing sound and Stella stiffened. It was a moment when she suddenly felt they had no business being out here at this hour.

  “Bullfrog,” Hap whispered.

  Stella, comforted, leaned back and looked up at the swirl of stars up above. “‘I wish I may, I wish I might,’” she whispered now. Unbidden, Jimmy Elliot came to mind.

  A bullfrog hopped from one lily pad to another, scaring them for a moment.

  “Jesus,” Hap said.

  The boat rocked back and forth, and Stella and Hap held on to the sides and laughed.

  “Jeremiah.” Stella recalled an old song her father sometimes played. The notion of a bullfrog with a name like Jeremiah set them to laughing again, although they tried their best to muffle the sound. For that instant they concentrated completely on not being caught, all they heard was the sound of each other’s mirth, the laughter gulped down. They didn’t hear anything else in the water until the second boat knocked into theirs. It was the boat they’d left behind in the grass, The Seahorse. Stella felt a wave of anger, thinking it was Jimmy following her, but Jimmy had been tossing rocks at her window and was only just turning down Lockhart on his way toward home, disappointed by her absence.

  Stella thought “Seahorse” a second time, and then the anger turned to something else. She divided the word, and was left in that dark instant with a single terrifying syllable.

  When the other boat hit against theirs, an oar was swung out toward them through the black night. Hap was knocked overboard so quickly, it was quicker than the leap of any frog. One minute he had been leaning over to dip a glass vial into the water, trying his best not to laugh at the bullfrog’s antics, and the next he’d been swallowed whole by the dark.

  The oar hit Stella when she turned to see where Hap had gone. It hit her squarely between her shoulder blades, the weakest spot in her body, where the bones had been broken at birth. At that instant of pain she arched her body away from the thing that had hit her. She might have gone overboard as well, but her bracelet, the birthday gift from her father, caught on the screw which held the seat of the Little Pearl in place. Stella tore at her wrist until the bracelet came free. It fell into the water, without a sound, as though it had been swallowed whole.

  Stella was not thinking clearly; certainly, she wasn’t thinking someone had tried to hurt them. It must be a branch, an obstacle they’d missed in the dark. All she thought of was Hap. Stella stood without thinking, so that the boat rocked back and forth and she shouted into the dark. The sound of her cry went across the lake and the lawn, through the kitchen window where her mother was making a pot of chamomile tea, down the lane to where Jimmy had kicked some papery oak leaves into a pile, before setting a match to the collection, trying his best to burn out his disappointment with himself for all of his blind, stupid actions.

  Jenny Sparrow had been up most of the night with her mother, who was suffering with a fever. At first Jenny thought Elinor had caught the sp
ring flu, but Dr. Stewart had assured Jenny this was not the case. It was the beginning of her unraveling, that was the only way he could describe what was about to happen, and it was best to make Elinor as comfortable as possible with blankets and hot tea. The fever made for terrible shivers, but Dr. Stewart did not mention that tea and blankets would not alleviate this condition. The coldness was formed inside: Elinor’s blood was so thin it was as though ice crystals had formed. Brock Stewart did not tell Jenny Sparrow that he had ministered to patients whose last breaths were entirely made out of ice, so that their lips turned blue at the moment of their death, as the crystals which held their essence melted into the warm air.

  Jenny had just set the teapot and cups on a tray when she heard the scream. She was wearing a T-shirt and a pair of sweatpants and she had no shoes on, but she took off running. Every mother knows her child’s cry, and Jenny was no exception. She heard the screen door slam behind her, but she didn’t feel herself push it open. She heard the bullfrogs in the lake, yet she didn’t feel the grass under her bare feet. Up in Elinor’s bedroom, Argus began to bark, and his barking sifted through his mistress’s dreams. By then, Jenny had raced across the lawn where Will and Matt had once stood looking up at her window; she was halfway down the driveway with ruts so deep any one who wasn’t aware of them would surely stumble. She could see the boats on the dark water, like coffins afloat. She could see Stella’s form as the girl leaned toward the lake, too close, and then utterly gone as Stella slipped over the side of the boat, in a desperate attempt to search for Hap. At the same time, Jenny could hear a boy shouting from the lane—Jimmy Elliot, running like a madman in the same direction as Jenny, shouting for Stella, hurdling over clumps of weeds, paying no mind to the nettle and the swamp cabbage, the bloodroot and the water dragons with their fragrant white spikes that snagged on the legs of his jeans.

  A man in one of the boats was standing. He saw Jimmy racing through the weeds and right away he thought he spied a demon. He had followed Stella and Hap in The Seahorse, the boat Jenny’s father always said was the more unpredictable of the two, more difficult to row, more likely to tip. The man who’d never been aimlessly passing through town went over the side, and was grateful for the dark water. He had to get away before the demon came any closer, even though he hadn’t managed to get to the girl. Mission not accomplished. He cursed himself and the demon running through the tall grass and everyone he’d ever known. If he’d been a better swimmer he would have gone after the girl, but as it was, he was lucky to get away before Jimmy Elliot got to the shore.

  Inside the house, Elinor had reached for the phone. When she pushed 1 she was automatically connected to Brock. The doctor was used to Elinor calling at odd hours and in fact he always swore he slept with the phone on his pillow. Indeed, it must be true because he answered after a single ring and assured her he would phone the police and an ambulance. Elinor wanted to see for herself what was going on. But by the time she managed to get out of bed, Jenny had already reached the waist of the hourglass and dove in. Stella was difficult to make out from a distance; she was treading water, shivering as she tried her best to feel in the cold water for Hap. She cried at the same time she splashed around frantically. Jenny pulled her over to the boat.

  “Stay here,” Jenny told her daughter, and for once Stella did as she was told. “I’ll go and get him.”

  On the shoreline, Jimmy Elliot pulled off his boots and his shirt. He couldn’t see Stella, paddling around and crying on the other side of the Little Pearl, but he jumped in the water anyway. He was a lousy swimmer, but he made it there. He helped Stella into the boat, then looked round for Jenny as he spit out water that tasted like frogs.

  Jenny was underwater, and when she came up, sputtering, there was grit and mud in her teeth.

  “Stay with Stella and the boat,” she told Jimmy. At that moment she had no idea who he was. A teenager with dark hair who looked frightened when he saw her. Still, he was there to keep an eye on Stella while Jenny went down to search again. The moonlight sunk into the water with her; it spread out in a crinkly silver splash, then disappeared, leaving only pitch. Jenny felt something spindly, a leg, perhaps, or the bones of the old horse, or the remains of Rebecca Sparrow. But it was only drifting root strands trailing beneath some water lilies, twisted into a braid. Jenny grabbed something heavy; she thought she had something, she thought it was Hap, but found it was only an old boot she’d brought to the surface, which she hurriedly threw back, before she went down for the third time.

  Stella leaned over the edge of the Little Pearl, to put her cold hand in Jimmy’s as he clung to the boat. He felt amazingly hot, even though the water was frigid. He felt alive. “She’ll find him,” Jimmy said. “Your mother’s a good swimmer.”

  In the boat, Stella finished making the wish she had begun when they first rowed into the lake. When they drowned Rebecca Sparrow, everything had been white, blindingly so. Blinding sunlight, blinding ice, snow that fell like stars. Only the water had been dark, as it was now; it pulled Rebecca down and twisted around her like a sheet, with water weeds and the silky tendrils of the water lily roots threaded around her ankles, her wrists, her waist.

  Elinor was at her bedroom window. A wind had come out of nowhere and it shook the leaves from the trees. From where she stood, Elinor could see her granddaughter in the boat on the lake. But she couldn’t see Jenny. All at once she wondered what on earth she’d been doing all these years, why she’d needed a rose that might never bloom, why she’d allowed all those years to pass when she didn’t see Jenny, why she’d shut the door against one and all. Love could do that to some people and they wouldn’t even know how much they’d missed out on; they simply remained in the place where love had left them, while the whole world spun around.

  In the water, something was pulling Jenny down; perhaps it was the weight of her own body, or the rush of her own descent. She thought he was a log at first because it was so dark, but she grabbed hold of whatever it was. Already, she thought she might not get back herself. There was no air in her lungs, but she could see the moonlight, and the surface of the water moving, and the shape of Jimmy Elliot reaching out to her as she dragged Hap Stewart along, gripping tightly to this boy who was meant to live even though he’d been thrown hard and part of his spine had been shattered. Hap was hoisted into the rowboat where Stella breathed life back into him: she refused to stop until he blinked his eyes open, until he could see the stars in the sky, not from beneath the black pool of water but from the safety of the boat as it bobbed up and down in the water, as the ambulance and the fire trucks came tearing down Lockhart Avenue, so fast the marks their tires made on the asphalt would last until October. Ever after, Lockhart Avenue would seem to have a white stripe on either side of the road, and there were people in town who would step on their brakes every time they took the turn off East Main Street, slowing down to consider just how lucky they were.

  What was a siren but a call to your neighbors, a cry that would let them know that grief of one sort or another was coming through, as it did for someone every day, every evening. It had to be someone, and on this night it was Hap; on this night, when the wind picked up until the fair day was gone from memory. Running down the lane, muddy and wet, was the man who had killed his ex-girlfriend in Brighton, who had hit Hap with his oar, though he’d been aiming for Stella. Stella, who was too smart for her own good, just like his ex-girlfriend. No one would have noticed his ex was missing, if not for that girl and all the publicity her father had generated. His ex-girlfriend had no family and only a few friends; she should have already been forgotten. Instead, people had remembered. On the corner in Brighton where the victim’s apartment building was located, neighbors had taken to leaving wreaths of lilies and ivy, as if she’d been someone important. A fund-raising committee had been organized which allowed a gravesite and a headstone to be purchased. Only last week, the University of Massachusetts, where she’d begun taking classes toward her graduate degree, h
ad named a scholarship in her honor. All because that damned girl had noticed her in a restaurant. All because people thought once she was murdered, she had a story to tell, a worthless story as far as this man was concerned, a woman’s story that had no beginning, only an end. She was nothing more than the bee that was humming nearby, which the man neatly swatted away from his ear as he jogged down Lockhart Avenue.

  “Damn you,” he said, to the bee and to Stella and to the woman he once thought he loved who had caused all this trouble in the first place when she turned him down. It was all their fault, especially the bee, for the damned thing wouldn’t leave him alone. If he wasn’t careful, he’d hear the sound inside his head and it would block out everything else, and then he’d be in trouble. He’d be running blind.

  More fire trucks passed him, called in from North Arthur, but he kept on running, faster now, because there were more bees behind him. The bees smelled sweet, they had pollen from the laurels and the red clover coating their bodies, but they sounded terrifying. Before long, there were a hundred, and then two, and then it was a cloud that hummed behind him, keeping pace without effort. There was no way to run from them, but he thought there was, just as he’d thought the woman he’d gotten rid of in Brighton wasn’t anyone worth remembering. He had no idea that bees like dead trees best of all; they always return to the comfort of heartwood gone dry if given a choice, for the wood in those old branches was so soft it was like marrow.

  The man who was running was an out-of-towner; he couldn’t know what was up in front of him. Unlike Will Avery, who always avoided the corner where the oak tree stood, since a single sting could kill him on the spot. Unlike Matt Avery, who knew enough about bees to feel comfortable when they swarmed. Matt understood that bees liked order and that unexpected or rowdy behavior would cause them to be agitated. That was one thing nobody wanted, an enraged swarm at his heels, but that’s what the man who couldn’t run fast enough had now.