The Why of Things: A Novel (16 page)

She gazes out the window, where she can see the bright lights of a low-flying plane blinking across the sky, each blink begging the question
Why? Why? Why?

O
n Wednesday morning, after Joan has left to take Eloise to camp, Anders goes out to the garden to tend to his roses. Today is the first day since they arrived here that isn’t meant to bring rain, so finally this evening he will have a chance to spray them with the fungicide he bought earlier in the week. Fungicide, Anders has learned, is a misleading term; the stuff doesn’t actually kill fungus, but rather protects foliage from fungus’ infection. The instructions are very clear: Anders must remove all of the infected leaves from the roses, and only after that spray the healthy ones that remain.

The leaf removal pains him; there are more infected leaves than healthy ones, and halfway through the garden his plastic bag is nearly filled with leaves, and the bushes he’s left in his wake have the scrawniness of wet kittens. Yesterday Anders did some research on black spot, and he’s learned that it is actually quite a common problem. When he entered the term into the computer, the results produced were endless; rose gardens and black spot
are apparently as associated as dogs and fleas. It surprises him that his roses have never suffered in the decade since he planted them; he would have been more grateful if he’d known all along how lucky he’d been to have avoided the blight. But this is always the way, he thinks; you never know how lucky you were until you aren’t anymore.

He pulls the final leaf from a particularly devastated bush and drops it into the bag, pausing before he moves on to the next bush to look up at a small plane buzzing overhead. He thinks of the framed photograph they have in Maryland, likely taken from a plane such as the one above Anders now. It is an aerial view of the quarry and its surrounds, the ground a green nubbled carpet of trees scarred with the odd black shapes of quarries. Anders wonders, if the photograph were taken at this minute, whether he would factor into it at all, the top of his head a small brown dot. Probably not, he thinks; or if he did, he would probably go unnoticed. He has scanned their own photograph for signs of life before—a runner on the street, or someone mowing a lawn—and found none, though he can’t imagine that nobody was outside when the photo was taken.

Anders moves on to the next bush, which he finds to be in comparably good shape to the one before, for which he makes a point to feel grateful. He has just started in on the garden’s final bush when he hears the jangling sound of a collar above him; he looks up and sees on the rise at the top of the garden wall the same gray dog that has been hanging around all week—Henry, according to the name on the tag. The dog looks down at Anders, its eyes warm black globes peering out through the wiry gray fur of its brows, its nose a third black ball to match. Anders is not surprised; since the dog first appeared the other day, Eloise, certain that it is lost, has been providing it with a constant supply of treats, standing on the lawn and calling it by name until it appears.

“Hello,” Anders says, and the dog runs the length of the wall and down the swell of ground to the edge of the garden, where it stands, looking at Anders expectantly, its nublike tail twitching. Anders frowns, wondering if it’s just hanging around because of the treats, or if in fact Eloise is right, and the dog is lost. Anders leaves the last bush unplucked and picks his way through the roses to where the dog is standing in the grass. He crouches down to read the tag on the collar, thinking he’ll give the owners a call. Two summers ago, after Buster had started to go blind, he was lost for several days before finally someone noticed him hanging around and thought to call them. Anders makes a mental note of the number on Henry’s tag, which he recites to himself over and over again as he strides across the lawn, the dog not far behind him.

He finds Eve in the kitchen beside a bowl of cereal, her eyes slits and her cheeks creased by her sheets. The newspaper is spread out before her; he’d had to go down to Arthur’s store this morning to get it himself, as Eve was still asleep, to his surprise. She looks up as her father enters, and lifts a hand in greeting. Anders waves back, pointing toward the dog as he lifts the old rotary telephone from the wall. “The owners,” he explains as he dials, the disk clattering around the face in a way that Anders has always found satisfying.

The line rings once, twice, three times. Anders shifts the phone from one ear to the other, aware of his daughter’s gaze upon him, even as his own eyes are on the dog, who has settled in the corner of the room. After the fourth ring, a machine answers, one of those automated voices instructing him to leave a message. Anders glances toward Eve, who has set her chin in her hands and watches her father curiously. He leaves his brief message and hangs up.

“So now you’re thinking he’s lost?” Eve asks.

Anders pulls out a chair at the kitchen table. “Maybe,” he says. “It’s hard to say. What do you think?’

Eve looks down at the dog and shrugs. “Maybe,” she says.

“He doesn’t
look
lost,” Anders says.

“But what does lost look like?”

“You have a point.”

“Plus it’d be impossible for him to get skinny with all Eloise has been feeding him.”

“I suppose that’s right.”

Eve gazes balefully down at the newspaper spread before her, and closes it with a sigh. “Nothing new,” she says glumly.

Anders shrugs. “I thought the fire in Essex was pretty interesting.”

“I mean about James. James Favazza.”

“Ah.” Anders folds his arms. “Of course.”

Eve pushes her cereal bowl away, leans forward on her elbows.

“Not hungry?” Anders asks her.

“I am,” she sighs. “Just not for Cheerios.”

“Me neither,” Anders says. “I could eat at George’s, though. You?”

*  *  *

S
AUL
was right: Vic’s is indeed among the buildings clustered haphazardly across from the grocery store and CVS, where three streets intersect to form a sort of triangle, with a self-service car wash in the middle. Eve sits inside George’s at a table by the window, waiting for her father to return from the ATM across the street, and stares at its awning, shocked by her own blindess. She realizes that of course she must have seen the bar before; she’s helped her father wash the Buick at that very car wash, and she’s gone for ice cream countless times at Salah’s, nearby. But she’s never before registered the bar’s presence; nor, she realizes now, her eyes roaming from
one building to the next, has she ever really registered the presence of the thrift store also across the way, or the frame shop, or the Polarity Center. She supposes she’s been vaguely aware of these places, but they have existed only on the periphery of her experience, which has centered around the car wash, around Salah’s, around Steve’s sub shop next to that. Seeing these other places as if for the first time unnerves her; she wonders what else she’s been oblivious to all these years.

A man steps out of a side door of the frame shop, which Eve would guess leads up to the residence above. She wonders what
he
thinks of when he thinks of this area, whether she would recognize his Gloucester if she had access to his mind, or vice versa. She watches him walk down the street, her eyes tracking him as far as the bar, where they come to rest even as the man carries on.

Vic’s is housed in a low, rectangular building of pale brown brick, a style at odds with the more colonial architecture of the frame shop and thrift store on either side of it, yet in keeping with the look of the car wash and the grocery store. Steam lifts from a raised, round vent on the roof, where a fat seagull sits perched on a ledge. Letters affixed to the bricks above the entrance spell out the bar’s name, though the S hangs crookedly, half fallen. Weeds sprout up from the crack where the brick foundation meets the sidewalk. The seagull on the roof cries out, takes flight. A bus lumbers down the street, briefly obscuring the bar from view.

Eve pictures James Favazza’s pickup parked out front, just as yesterday she pictured it in front of Larry Stephens’ house. She wonders just how much time he actually spent there, and what it might be like inside—it does look a little like a dump, like Saul said.

“You order?” her father asks, pulling out a chair and sitting down across from her.

Eve glances at him; she hadn’t noticed him come in.

“Yeah,” she says.

Eve takes an assortment of jelly containers from the small rack on the table and lines them up before her. She briefly considers asking her father if he knows anything about the bar, or informing him of its significance, but she somehow doubts it’s the sort of place her parents would ever go, and after the Georgetown incident yesterday she is wary of broaching the subject of James Favazza too insistently. She looks up at her father. “How would you rate them?” she asks. “Best to worst.”

“The jellies?”

Eve nods.

Her father looks down at the small plastic containers lined up on the table. “I like them all,” he says.

“That’s a boring answer. If you had to choose.”

Her father sighs. He looks down at the jelly containers again and slides them into his own arrangement, with orange marmalade in the “worst” spot and apple in the “best.” “There,” he says.

Eve wrinkles her nose. “Apple jelly’s the best? Blah.”

The waitress comes over with their drinks, sloshing Anders’ coffee onto the table and then swiping at the spill with a dishrag tucked into her apron. “Thank you,” Anders says.

Eve takes a long sip of chocolate milk, sucking in her cheeks around the straw.

Anders puts cream and fake sugar into his coffee, eyeing his daughter, feeling he ought to take advantage of this moment to bring up what she’s going to do with herself this summer. Joan knows a woman who is a wedding photographer, whom she learned yesterday is looking for an assistant for the summer, and Anders has been dispatched to float this idea. Joan knows that if the suggestion comes from her, Eve won’t entertain it for a minute. Eve has grown increasingly intolerant of Joan, impatient and
often short-fused, whether part of her reaction to her sister’s death or a stage of adolescence. Anders suspects that it has to do with the former, that it’s a way of warding off discussion of Sophie’s death, and Joan’s almost desperate insistence on “checking in” and promoting openness. While Anders himself is usually reticent on the subject, he knows that especially in the early days Joan felt no need to hold back, inquiring how they each were feeling, what they were thinking, if they wanted to talk.

He stirs his coffee and clears his throat, but before he can say anything, Eve speaks.

“So,” she says thoughtfully, pushing her drink away from her and settling her chin into her palm, her eyes trained out the window. “How long would you say it usually takes for autopsy results to come back?” She cannot help herself.

Anders takes a sip of his coffee, unsuprised. “Well,” he says, “generally speaking, I think a complete autopsy can take a couple of weeks. But they can probably make preliminary findings pretty quickly.”

“Preliminary findings being . . .”

“Assuming we’re talking about the body, I think they’d be able to tell pretty quickly if he drowned, if that’s what you’re getting at. Also if he had drugs or alcohol in his system.”

“So do you think by now they know all that stuff?”

“I’d say there’s a good possibility.”

“In which case he must have drowned.”

Anders looks at his daughter, puzzled by her logic, even if her conclusion is sound.

“As opposed to being killed some other way and then the body being dumped into the water. Because otherwise they would have to investigate and stuff.”

“I suppose that’s right.”

Eve frowns. “But don’t you think they should investigate
anyway
?
I mean, just because he drowned doesn’t mean he drowned himself, right? He could have been driven into the water by someone else. Well, driven
to
the quarry and pushed in. It
is
a possibility, you have to admit it.”

Anders flattens his mouth. “I suppose anything is possible. But I think they’re probably handling the matter in the way they think is best. And we don’t actually know what’s going on.”

“I know we don’t. I want to. You’d think since it happened in our quarry they would keep us informed.”

“Maybe there’s nothing to inform us of.”

“Well, there is. The autopsy results, for one thing. Or the
preliminary findings
.” Eve lifts her straw wrapper from the table and twists it absently between her fingers, gazing out the window. Outside, an old man is making his slow way down the opposite sidewalk. “What do you think it’s like to drown, anyway?” she asks.

Anders raises his eyebrows, unwilling to admit the detail with which he’s considered the question. “I imagine it’s not very pleasant.”

“If you had to choose, would you rather drown or burn to death?”

Anders looks over Eve’s shoulder for just a moment, looks back. “Thankfully,” he says, “I don’t have to choose.”