The Why of Things: A Novel (31 page)

Joan opens her mouth, unsure of what to say. “Oh,” she says, finally. “No.” She takes a breath. She casts a quick look toward the car, where Eloise sits buckled in the backseat. “I’m sorry. I—I don’t know what to say.” She looks at Elizabeth Favazza beseechingly. “I didn’t say anything because . . . I don’t know.”

“I probably wouldn’t have mentioned it if I were you, either. I just had to let you know. That I know who you are. And that I know you know who I am.”

Joan feels her eyelids twitch; she tries to blink the sensation away. “Well, I’m sorry,” she says.

Elizabeth Favazza shakes her head. “Don’t be sorry.”

“No,” Joan says. “I am. I’m sorry about your son.” She swallows “I’m sorry about James.”

Elizabeth Favazza looks at Joan quietly. She nods. “Thank you,” she says. “I am, too.”

*  *  *

T
HEY
find James Favazza’s truck at the far end of the lot, parked in tall grass between an old Honda sedan and a Volkswagon Dasher, the likes of which Anders hasn’t seen in years. The men inside gave them permission to take a look around, which Anders requested after he’d installed the new antenna; they have done so quietly, Anders trailing Eve up and down each row of cars.

He stands now several feet back from the truck, watching as his daughter slowly circles it, snapping pictures. The wheels have been removed, as have most other useful parts: the steering wheel, antenna, likely the transmission inside, although this may have been water damaged. Anders is mildly perturbed to realize how little about the truck he’d registered the other week, when it was first pulled from the quarry; he looks closely at it now, trying to see the truck as Eve must, with an eye to every detail. The smashed window on the driver’s side. The Red Sox bumper sticker. The rust spots on the door, which stand out only slightly from the color of the truck itself. The dent in the front bumper; he would wager Eve wonders whether it was there before the truck ended up in the quarry, or whether it was dented when it hit the quarry floor; likewise for the cracked red taillight case. All details, in the end, that don’t explain a thing.

“I can’t believe it’s really here,” Eve says, standing at the rear of the truck. She crouches down to take a picture, brushing absently at the tall blades of grass tickling her ear.

Anders does not respond, only watches as Eve stands, walks
around to the truck’s far side. She stops at the passenger-side door and looks inside; Anders can see her through one window, then the next, framed there. After a moment she lifts her eyes to meet his; she looks serious, pensive. She sighs, then comes around the hood of the car to where her father is standing, folds her arms. “They took everything,” she says. “There’s nothing in there.”

“No.”

“Even the glove box is gone.”

They stand looking at the truck without speaking. Cicadas sizzle in the grass around them, and seagulls caw overhead. Anders puts a hand very gently on Eve’s neck; this time, she does not shrug him off.

*  *  *

T
HE
typewriter is as Joan left it yesterday when Elizabeth Favazza called, the lid removed, the experimental piece of paper blank behind the platen. She lifts the spool from its posts, even though she hasn’t yet gotten a new ribbon to replace the old one; she realizes that a replacement might be hard to come by anyway these days. She flips the ribbon over to see if there is any ink left on the other side, but when she replaces the spool and lid and tries again to type, the paper remains blank beneath each typebar’s strike. She sighs, sits back in her chair, and looks out the window, where innumerable black starlings flit restlessly from branch to branch in the trees, preening and calling and swooping. Yesterday she’d admired these birds and the pattern they made against the sky; today they seem ominous, all of them together like a big black cloud in the trees, and she is struck with a surprising certainty that they were there in the branches the day James Favazza drove his truck into the quarry, screeching him to his death.

She sits forward and puts her chin into her hands, remembering Elizabeth Favazza’s words:
I know who you are
, and then,
I know where it happened
. It turns her perception of yesterday’s encounter with the woman on its head—
Joan
was the one in the dark, even as she’d approached the situation thinking the opposite, and Elizabeth Favazza knew just who she was dealing with. It makes Joan feel self-conscious to think back on, almost annoyed; she’d gone to such lengths to protect the woman from knowledge she already had:
I know who you are
. Joan frowns; Elizabeth Favazza does not know who Joan is, not really. She has no idea how much they actually have in common, and Joan did not take the opportunity to tell her, though part of her now wishes that she had, as if to forge this bond would relieve her of her isolation. But she hadn’t been prepared. And there had been Eloise waiting in the car.

She gazes out the window at the quarry, black and glossy and deep.
I know where it happened
.

Slowly, she stands and walks down the hallway to Eve’s room. The door is open; clothes are piled on the wicker chair in the corner of the room, where the cat lies sleeping, contented to have the house to himself again. A book sits open and facedown on the bedside table—her daughter, she sees, has gotten all of twelve pages into
Northanger Abbey
, a book she’d started weeks ago. But Joan can understand Eve’s distraction. She gets onto her knees between the twin beds and peers beneath the one Eve sleeps in, where she sees the bag of “evidence” her daughter has collected from the quarry. When Anders brought it downstairs on Trivia Night, she hadn’t even bothered to look at the contents; to her, at that time, it was only so much junk.

She empties the bag onto the floor and sits down on the edge of Eve’s bed, looking down at all the items her daughter has gathered. There are beer cans and bottles, the Vic’s T-shirt, a flip-flop, a bowl, a water bottle. She wonders what of Sophie’s might have been left behind at the tracks, what items, if any, might be lying
even now at the base of the embankment: the miniature troll that dangled from her rearview mirror, a shred of clothing, an elastic band, all things that Joan has never considered before, things, like these before her, that she wouldn’t think to miss.

She looks out Eve’s window at the quarry, remembering the bubbles that had risen glug by glug the other night, the residue of oil, the black-clad divers, the horror of it all. She wonders
what
exactly Elizabeth Favazza thinks happened, whether she thinks it was an accident or intentional that her son ended up in the quarry. While they both must live with the
why
of things, Joan isn’t sure that she could live with that uncertainty—the uncertainty of
what
—herself, though the moment the thought occurs to her, she feels guilty for it, guilty to feel grateful to be sure of what she’s sure, which is, without a doubt, that her daughter chose to leave her.

J
ust before dinnertime, Eve marches into the kitchen to announce that she won’t be eating with her family tonight; she’s going down to Lanes Cove for the bonfire and a cookout with some friends. Anders is sitting at the kitchen table, reading about the various shipwrecks said to have occurred at the reef where his class will dive tomorrow, and Joan is at the counter slicing radishes for a salad; both look at her with blank surprise. “Oh,” Joan says, finally. “Okay,” and they watch, otherwise speechless, as Eve passes through the kitchen and out the door, which she lets slam shut behind her.

She can feel her parents’ eyes upon her as she crosses the driveway, dutifully dons her new helmet, and mounts her bike, but she does not look back, nor does she allow herself a moment to pause and reconsider her decision, which is as surprising to her as it clearly was to her parents. She’s not even sure exactly how it came about; one minute she’d been stretched out on her bed,
staring at the ceiling, and the next she was striding downstairs and out the door, damned if she’d miss out on the bonfire just because she’s a dead girl’s sister.

It troubles Eve a bit that she had no idea that tonight was the night of the bonfire, not because of the fire itself, but because it takes place on the full moon. Normally, in summers, she pays close attention to the phase of the moon, to the timing of the tides, to the movement of constellations across the sky, as if meting out the summer one day at a time, and relishing each day for its distinctive character. But she has no idea what the tides are doing now, nor has she really considered the moon or stars since the night that they arrived.

Lanes Cove is just down the hill from their quarry, at the end of a short spur off the main road around the corner from Arthur’s store; the closer Eve gets, the less sure of her decision she becomes, and by the time she reaches the main road, her ambivalence has become full-blown intimidation. She plants a foot on the ground for balance and looks around her. Cars are parked haphazardly all along the shoulder as far as she can see, and groups of people are making their way down to the cove with chairs and blankets and coolers and beers. One guy has painted his body blue, and another guy is wearing a clown suit. One couple is struggling down the street with a particularly enormous cooler, the girl walking backward and giggling loudly every time she stumbles. Eve doesn’t see what’s funny, or why the girl doesn’t just set the cooler down for a second and turn around, and she watches their slow progress until they, like everyone else, have disappeared around the corner.

She takes an unhappy breath, picturing that couple and their like gathered in groups along the water’s edge, playing music and dancing and drinking. Last year, she went to the bonfire with
Sophie and Eloise and Saul, and they watched from a safe distance, in a little row of their own atop the breakwater that walls the harbor in. In years before that, when she was young, her father would bring them down, if they went at all; for a few years in between, the city outlawed the event, claiming that it drew too raucous a crowd. She has never gone to the bonfire as an insider, and even though Josie has explicitly invited her, she doesn’t feel like one. She pictures the group gathered around the public quarry the other night, the beer bottles, Ms. Rolling Stones, the way they all would look at her; all pity aside, she can’t picture herself among them anyway.

She looks toward Arthur’s store, which stands like a safe haven across the road, and she pedals over; even though there’s nothing she particularly wants inside, it is somewhere to go other than down to the cove, which she isn’t sure she has the nerve to do, and after her announcement of intent she can’t just turn around and go home. It’s been awhile since she’s seen Arthur anyway, though she’s been just as happy not to have to go each morning and get the paper alone.

She has just propped her bike against the telephone pole outside the store when she hears the bells on the door jangle, and when she turns, she sees Saul coming through the door, a bag of ice under his arm. Immediately, she feels herself turn red. She hasn’t seen Saul since Trivia Night, the memory of which encounter fills her with a combination of embarrassment and anger, though she’s not sure whether that anger is directed more at Saul for his girlfriend or at herself for being a fool.

“Hey, Evie,” Saul says.

Eve glances over Saul’s shoulder, waiting for the girlfriend to follow him out the door, but he appears to be alone. She pulls her helmet off her head. “Hi.”

“You going down to the bonfire?” he asks.

Eve shrugs. “No,” she says. “I was just going to the store. I’d kind of forgotten about the bonfire until now, so . . .”

Saul studies her, shifts the bag of ice from beneath one arm to the other. “How’s it going, anyway?” he asks.

“Fine.”

“Any progress?”

“What do you mean, progress?”

Saul shrugs. “The quarry. Vic’s. All that.”

Eve narrows her eyes, feeling teased. “Don’t be a jerk, Saul.”

“I’m not being a jerk. I’m honestly just asking.”

“Well, no. No progress.” She looks him in the eye, still thinking of their encounter in the woods. “How’s your girlfriend?”

Saul’s face falls. “Evie.”

Eve drops her gaze to the sidewalk, stares down at a black gum spot on the pavement. “Sorry,” she says, wishing she had held her tongue. It occurs to her that maybe Saul really
was
curious, which is more than she can say for anyone else, and she has no right to punish him for being alive, even when Sophie’s not. She lifts her eyes. “I really am,” she says. “I didn’t mean it.”

Saul nods. “I know,” he says. “It’s all right.”

Eve sighs, gazes absently down the street at nothing in particular.

“Hey,” Saul says, punching her lightly on the shoulder. “If you’re not doing anything you should really come down to the bonfire. I heard it’s huge this year.”

Eve looks back at him. “I don’t know,” she says.

“What else are you going to do?”

Eve shrugs, though it
is
the bonfire, and the idea of having Saul as a chaperone does make the whole thing seem somehow easier.