The Probable Future

  One day, when Elinor was working in the garden, nearly defeated, thinking it might not be possible for her to go on, Brock Stewart, the town doctor, stopped by. Dr. Stewart still made house calls back then; the reason he was at Cake House was because Jenny, only twelve at the time, had called and asked that he come. Jenny had a long-drawn-out bout with the flu, accompanied by a hacking cough that wouldn’t go away and headaches that were so bad she kept the room dark. She was only in sixth grade, but she had already learned to take care of herself.

  “Where’s your mother?” Dr. Stewart had asked after he’d examined Jenny. Why, the girl was quite feverish, and she didn’t have a glass of water on her night table or a cold cloth for her forehead.

  “My mother is in the garden.” Jenny was a serious individual, even then. “It’s the only thing she cares about, so I put a curse on it.”

  “Did you?” Dr. Stewart was a fine physician and he never overlooked a child’s opinion. “What sort of curse?”

  Jenny sat up in bed. She had meant to keep the curse secret, but she was so flattered by Dr. Brock’s interest she let him in on the intricacies of the hex.

  Come here no more, not in day, not in evening, not in rain, not in sunshine.

  Jenny smiled at the doctor, pleased by how solemnly he considered the enchantment. “I looked it up in a book in the library corner in our parlor. It’s a verse that keeps the bees away. No garden can grow without them.”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  As the town’s only doctor, Brock Stewart was always amazed by the various ways people found to hurt each other, without even trying, it seemed. He was continually astounded by how fragile a human being was, yet how miraculously resilient; how it was possible to carry on through illness and hardship in the most unexpected ways.

  “My father was the one who told me that bees dislike bad language,” Jenny went on, her tongue loosened. “What they hate most of all is when somebody in a household dies. They often take off when that happens.” Jenny’s knotted hair looked perfectly black against her overheated skin. She was a very precise girl who hated flowers, dirt, earthworms, and disorder. She had Scotch-taped a row of her tiny paintings to the walls, intricate monkey-puzzle watercolors in which things fit together perfectly: rug and table, house and sky, mother and daughter.

  “I see.” Dr. Stewart wrote it all down. Children seemed to like when he did that, even the older ones; they could tell he was paying attention when he committed their comments to paper. “And is there a cure for this curse?”

  “If someone dies or if the go-away verse is spoken aloud, the bees won’t come back until you offer them cake. Anything sweet will do. And you have to invite them to come back. Politely. Like you mean it. Like you care.”

  Dr. Stewart phoned the pharmacy and asked them to deliver some antibiotics, then he patted Jenny’s feverish head and went out to the garden. Elinor Sparrow was on her hands and knees, weeding a bed in which every shrub had turned mottled and leafless. She barely took notice of people anymore. She was too twisted up by her own terrible fate, far too wounded to pay attention to much of anything other than her empty garden.

  “I see nothing’s growing,” Brock Stewart called out.

  “Congratulations on stating the obvious.” Elinor didn’t like most people, but at least she respected Brock, so she didn’t chase him off. Not right away. She had never once caught him in a lie, and that couldn’t be said for many folks in town. “Do I get a bill for that opinion or is it free?”

  “You’ve been cursed,” Dr. Stewart informed his neighbor. “And you probably deserve it.”

  Every time the doctor saw Elinor he was reminded of the way she had looked at him on that icy evening when he had to tell her about Saul’s accident. She had looked inside him then, as though searching for the truth. She was looking inside him now. Dr. Stewart was a tall man, and there were some children in town who were afraid of his height and his stern manner. But the ones who knew him well didn’t fear him at all. They asked him for lollipops; they told him about what mattered most to them, curses and bees and forgiveness.

  “You’re overlooking all the important things, Elly. Just listen.”

  They stared at each other over the garden gate. Elinor Sparrow could not believe this man had the nerve to call her Elly, but she let that pass. She listened carefully. White clouds moved across the sky and the light was especially clear, with the luminous, milky quality out-of-town visitors always noticed.

  “I don’t hear anything.” Elinor brushed the dirt from her hands and knees, annoyed.

  “Precisely. No bees.”

  “No bees.” Elinor felt like an idiot. Why hadn’t she noticed before? The silence was so obvious, the problem so apparent. “Who would have put a curse like that on me?”

  Dr. Stewart shrugged. After all these years of being the only doctor in a small town, he knew enough not to place blame, especially when it resided so close by.

  “Now that you know what’s wrong, you can fix it. Here’s how: Feed ’em cake.” Dr. Stewart made this suggestion matter-of-factly, much as he would recommend aspirin for headaches or ginger ale and licorice syrup for stomachaches. “Then ask them to come back. And be polite when you do it. Their feelings have been hurt. And they’re not the only ones, if you really want to know.”

  Elinor had gone directly to the kitchen once the doctor left. She searched the pantry until she found a week-old sponge cake, which she doused with brandy and cream. But before she could carry the platter outside, the doorbell rang. It was the delivery boy from the pharmacy, who dropped off Jenny’s antibiotics, then rushed back to his car, making a hasty U-turn before Elinor could approach and accuse him of trespassing.

  As Elinor Sparrow examined the vial of chalky penicillin, she realized something about her house. Cake House was even more silent than the garden was without bees. She had hurt their feelings, and she hadn’t even known it. She had been caught in some sort of web that spun days into months, months into years. She understood exactly where the curse had begun. It was the damage she’d done, it was the way she’d turned away, it was the child left to fend for herself.

  Jenny was half-asleep when Elinor came upstairs with her medicine.

  “Take this and hurry up,” Elinor said.

  Jenny was so surprised to have her mother ministering to her that she quickly did as she was told.

  “Now get out of bed and come with me.”

  Jenny threw on her bathrobe and followed, barefoot and confused. She thought of a dozen possibilities for her mother’s sudden interest: the lake had overflowed, the pipes in the house had burst, the wasps in the attic had broken through the plasterboard. Surely, it must be a true emergency for her mother to think of her.

  “I haven’t been paying attention to things.” They had stopped in the pantry, so that Elinor could fetch the sticky cake. Ants had crawled onto the plate, and the smell of the brandy was overwhelming. “Now I have to give this to the bees. I have to ask for their forgiveness and invite them to come back.” She looked right at Jenny, her tangled hair, her wary expression. “I hope it’s not too late.”

  Elinor took the cake outside. Before she had taken two steps, a bee had appeared to hover above her in the air.

  “Was Dr. Stewart the one who told you about the bees?” Jenny was feverish, and being on her feet made her dizzy. She stayed on the porch and leaned against the railing. “I told him a secret, and he went and told you.”

  “Of course he did. Now let’s hope it works.”

  As for Elinor, she felt light-headed as well. Like a fool, she had thrown something away, and now she was trying her best to get it back. The cake she was holding smelled like spring, a heady mix of pollen and honey, lilacs and brandy. Dozens of bees had begun to follow Elinor across the lawn. Perhaps there was a cure for some things: what was ruined, what was lost, what was all but thrown away.

  “Please come into my garden.”

  Elinor pushed open the gate and the bees f
ollowed her inside, but Jenny stood where she was, stubborn, unforgiving.

  “Come with me,” Elinor said to her daughter.

  By then, hundreds of bees were flying over Lockhart Avenue, skimming over the thorn bushes on Dead Horse Lane, buzzing through the forsythia and the laurel.

  Jenny was hot from her fever and cold from the chill of the day. She realized that her mother hadn’t thought to recommend that she put on shoes; Elinor wasn’t that sort of mother, no matter what she might pretend. Jenny’s toes had a tingling feeling, the sign of sure disaster. But which way was adversity? She could walk forward or could take a step back, or she could stay exactly where she was, unmoving, which is what she did on that day of a hundred bees. She did not make a move.

  Despite Elinor’s failed attempt to reconnect with her daughter, Elinor then began to turn more often to Brock Stewart for advice. If a decision needed to be made, she telephoned for his opinion, not that she’d necessarily follow his suggestions. Why, she could spend hours arguing with him, debating an issue, worrying a point. It got so Dr. Stewart’s family, his wife, Adele, who was one of the Hapgood cousins, and his son, David, knew when the phone rang at odd hours it probably wasn’t a patient or the hospital over in Hamilton. It was Elinor Sparrow. Why the doctor wasn’t more put out by her nattering away at him no one understood for certain.

  The way Elinor saw it, at least there was one place she could turn for a truthful answer. At least there was one honest man in town. All these years later, with Adele gone, and poor David’s young wife gone as well, Brock Stewart was still the only company Elinor could tolerate, except for her dog, Argus. Tim Early, the vet in town, was amazed the wolfhound had made it into his twentieth year, unheard-of for the breed. Dr. Early insisted that Argus was simply refusing to die as long as his mistress was alive. He was that loyal, Dr. Early joked, faithful to the end.

  If Elinor had been a more forthcoming person, she might have laughed and said, Well, then, that means the poor boy doesn’t have long, but instead she merely shot back, I assume you’re still charging as much as you always have, intimidating Tim Early the way she always did, so that he threw in a bottle of Pet Tab vitamins for Argus, on the house.

  In fact, Elinor had become ill just when the rose she’d last grafted seemed to be thriving. She had taken one of Rebecca’s old roses, a variety found only in Unity that was said to wither if gazed upon by human eyes, and crossed it with a magenta climbing hybrid she had been developing for several years. At present, the new rose didn’t look like much. Should any thief wander into her garden, he would surely bypass the scraggly shrub near the stone wall, protected from storms and scorching heat, in favor of what were clearly the showier specimens, so carefully pruned, so worthless to Elinor. Whether or not Elinor would last to see this crossbreed, she had no idea. Brock had refused to give her odds, even when she pressed him for statistics.

  A tree could fall on us right now, he had said. Lightning could strike us, then what would happen to all of those careful statistics?

  Elinor often thought of Will’s mother, Catherine, how very quickly she went after her cancer was detected. Elinor hadn’t cared much for the Averys, but wished them no harm. She certainly had never placed a rope with black feathers under Catherine Avery’s mattress to curse the family when Will and Jenny ran off, despite what some gossips might have said. Anyway, that was so long ago, and looking back on the mismatch, Elinor understood there was no one to blame. It was the season had caused them to run off, pure, undiluted spring fever, a hazard for everyone. As a matter of fact, Elinor pitied Catherine having to raise a liar like Will Avery, although the younger boy, Matt, had turned out fine.

  For fifteen years Elinor had hired Matt Avery to clear away dead-wood and saplings felled by storms. Every once in a while, someone left a basket of mint and rosemary on Elinor’s back porch, and she had a sneaking suspicion that someone was Matt, perhaps to repay her for the visits she’d made to his mother during her last weeks. All through the summer when Catherine was dying, Elinor brought her fresh roses, Fairy pink, not Elinor’s favorite variety, but the one Catherine most preferred. After Elinor was diagnosed, she kept Catherine’s courage in mind during her own treatment at Hamilton Hospital. Over the winter, she had gone through several months of chemotherapy, all the while keeping her business to herself.

  But that had always been her failing as well as her strength; she refused to confide in anyone, or ask for help, or simply let on that she was human. By the time she had told Brock that her bones were aching—not the usual arthritis, something deeper and sharper— she had kept it to herself for too long. Now that there was a new doctor over in Monroe, Dr. Stewart volunteered his time at the clinic in North Arthur and the rest home near I-95; Elinor was his only full-time patient. When the phone rang at night, it could only be one person who needed him. A single patient, Elinor Sparrow, and somehow he had failed her.

  You couldn’t have possibly known what I refused to tell you, Elinor had insisted, obstinate as ever.

  Perhaps it was true; there had most likely been nothing he might have done to save her. All the same, the doctor often awoke in the middle of the night with his heart pounding, even when the phone hadn’t rung. He awoke thinking Elinor’s name, as he had for years, even before Adele had passed on, before his son, David, and his grandson, Hap, had moved in with him. In the mornings, Brock Stewart often had the urge to call and check up on her, but Elinor never picked up her phone at that hour; she was out working, for she had restored her garden in a way she had never repaired the rest of her life.

  She was there at work on the afternoon that her daughter came back to town. It was a lovely day, and Elinor was wearing a mask and gloves as she dusted the soil with fertilizer. All through the winter, most of the plants in her garden appeared to be nothing more than a fistful of sticks, but now those sticks were greening, sending out new shoots, and would soon be in need of pruning. After the cold, harsh months, the rosebushes were especially hungry for bonemeal and fish meal and human attention. The little crossbreed against the wall seemed quite insatiable, so today Elinor decided to cover the soil around it with alfalfa filled with extra nutrients.

  When she was done, Elinor went into the house, followed by her old dog. The bones in her ankles and knees were particularly bothersome, with a sharp pain that often made her dizzy; lately, she’d become dependent on a cane. Elinor Sparrow, the woman who leaned on no one, now relied on a stick.

  Bonemeal, she thought as she walked to the house. That’s what I am.

  She’d make a paltry sample of that, given what the cancer had done to her. She’d seen the X rays; her bones looked like lace, a filigree as beautiful as it was deadly, much the way leaves looked when Japanese beetles were done with them.

  Elinor washed her hands, then fetched her purse and car keys. She told Argus to stay, though he whined and followed her to the porch. The dog was still watching when Elinor got into her Jeep, which was rusted out on the side panels and the floor, and in need of a new transmission. It was mud season and Elinor wove in and out along the driveway in an attempt at avoiding the worst of the ditches. She’d been meaning to ask Matt Avery to level off the driveway for the past five years, but had never gotten around to it. Mud splashed up, dashing against the fenders of the Jeep, coating the wheels. There were still patches of ice in the woods, even on this fine day, and dozens of snowdrops growing nearby. There were those who believed that the Angel of Sorrow had long ago turned snowflakes into snowdrops, the first wildflowers to bloom every year, as consolation to anyone who had passed through the desolate reaches of winter. Personally, Elinor Sparrow had her doubts about this. As for snowdrops, she considered them to be little more than weeds.

  Still, the appearance of these wildflowers reminded her that spring had indeed arrived. Elinor rolled down her window and breathed in the fragrant air. Yes, it was definitely here. Before evening, some rain would fall, much needed in the garden, but for now the dampness was caused by the l
ake air; the horizon was filled with the sweet, green light that arose at this time of year, especially near the shore of Hourglass Lake. When she gazed in her rearview mirror, Elinor could see Argus, still on the porch, loyal as ever. She hadn’t even wanted a dog, but one day Argus had arrived in the backseat of Brock Stewart’s car. The doctor had found the mutt by the side of the road, and his son, David, a widower who had moved into Brock’s house with his own son, was allergic to dogs, as was Elinor’s daughter. But Elinor’s daughter hadn’t been back for years, and the puppy needed a home.

  “Just take him for a week,” Dr. Stewart had suggested. “If you don’t like him by then, I’ll find another place for him.”

  Never agree to take a puppy for a week, Elinor knew that now. A week was all the time it took to be won over completely, despite the messes on the carpets and the shedding, the chewed slippers and shredded books. She hadn’t really known she was going to keep him until there had been a thunderstorm, which had terrified the puppy. Elinor had been forced to sit on the kitchen floor of her big, empty house to comfort him. When she reached to pat him, she could feel his heart pounding. She never called Brock Stewart to pick up the dog, and when he next came to visit, Argus was already sleeping in Elinor’s room, keeping guard by the door.