The Why of Things: A Novel (32 page)

“If it makes you feel any better, Mona isn’t going to be there.”

Eve blinks at him. “That’s her name?”

Saul nods. “Yeah.” He shifts his bag of ice again, this time to his shoulder. “Come on,” he says. “My hands are freezing. I’ve got a cooler in the car and when it’s full of ice I’ll need a hand getting it down there anyway.” He turns and walks toward his car, which is parked several cars away. Eve watches him go; he is familiar, and safe, and suddenly it makes no sense to do anything but follow.

*  *  *

A
FTER
Anders has read Eloise a chapter from
Alice
and waited as she composed this evening’s Hobbster note, he goes into the kitchen for a bottle of wine to take outside, where Joan is out on a lawn chair waiting for him. They are out of red, but he finds a bottle of cold white in the refrigerator; as he uncorks it, his eye falls to the brochure that describes the dive his class will take tomorrow, at a reef called Norman’s Woe. It is the site of many shipwrecks over the years, though the brochure describes only two in detail. One was the wreck of the
Rebecca Ann
, in a snowstorm in 1823. All of the ten crew members but one were swept out to sea; the lone survivor managed to stay alive by clinging to an icy rock. The other shipwreck was that of the schooner
Favorite
; twenty bodies washed ashore, among them that of a girl tied to a piece of the ship, supposedly the captain’s daughter. According to the brochure, this wreck was the inspiration for Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem
The Wreck of the Hesperus
, though only a verse is reprinted:

And fast through the midnight dark and drear

Through the whistling sleet and snow,

Like a sheeted ghost, the vessel swept

Tow’rds the reef of Norman’s Woe.

Though one might expect to find the wooden ribs of ships and forms of rusted anchors at the site, the photographs of the dive
feature marine life similar to what Anders saw at Plum Cove. Part of him wishes that the history of the reef had not been included in the brochure; he worries that the knowledge might take away from the experience. It seems odd to consider diving in a place where so many have died, even as he knows that in the past he has wandered without a second thought through Civil War battlefields, and over the beaches at Normandy. Still. One of the things he has found strangely difficult to understand since Sophie’s death is how trains—filled with oblivious commuters reading their newspapers or magazines or sipping their coffees—continue to pass several times daily over the spot on the tracks where she was killed, without ceremony or recognition. Of course, he understands this intellectually, just as he does the acceptability of tomorrow’s dive, but on another level it is difficult for him to accept; for him, the spot is sacred, heavy with meaning. When he finally made it home from Italy shortly after she died, visiting the spot seemed, to him, of great importance. Joan felt no similar need or desire, but for her, he supposes, their daughter’s death already seemed real.

He looks out the window at his wife at the quarry’s edge, thinking not for the first time about the fact that their quarry is now that spot for someone else.

*  *  *

J
OAN
looks up at the sky as the last daylight fades, watching as the full moon rises above the far horizon. The stars have started to appear one by one, as if someone were drilling holes in the firmament from some bright other side. Somewhere along the quarry’s edge, bullfrogs are in croaking conversation, and the trees are electric with cicadas, invisible and roaring. She spent the afternoon writing—longhand—and for some reason it came out easier that way than writing has for years, or perhaps it was easy because
she has found material that finally compels her; either way, she feels fulfilled in a way that she hasn’t in some time.

She doesn’t hear Anders’ footsteps behind her in the grass, but she can somehow sense when he’s approaching, and indeed after a second he sets a wine bottle down on the table between her lawn chair and his own, where their wineglasses from dinner sit empty.

“We didn’t have any more red,” he says, sitting down.

“That’s okay,” Joan says. “White’s refreshing.”

Anders pours them each a glass, then leans back, balancing his wineglass on his chest, bracing it in the crevice of two fingers.

“It’s like white noise,” Joan says after a moment.

Anders looks over at his wife. “What is?”

“Listen.”

Anders is quiet. “What am I supposed to hear?” he asks.

“Crickets. Frogs. Cicadas. That’s the thing. They’re like white noise. You don’t even realize how noisy they are until you pay attention. But listen to those guys in the trees especially.”

They listen.

“They are loud,” Anders agrees.

Joan looks at her husband. “I thought you maybe weren’t coming back out,” she says. “Did you read an extra chapter?”

“No.” Anders takes a sip of wine. “She also had to compose a note to Hobbster.”

“Of course.” Joan shakes her head. “Evie. She never fails to surprise me.”

“No,” Anders agrees.

“Who do you suppose she went to the bonfire with? As far as I know she’s done nothing with anyone since we got here—or should I say she’s done nothing to do with anything aside from . . .” She gestures with her chin toward the quarry, then looks over at her husband. “I hear you found the truck, by the way.”

“We did.”

“And?”

Anders shrugs. “Nothing garnered,” he says. “But I don’t think she’d have been satisfied until we’d at least gone looking.”

Joan takes a sip of wine. “I wonder what’s next. What her next expedition might be. The junkyard yesterday, Rowley today, Saul the other night . . .”

“And Georgetown,” Anders adds automatically.

“Georgetown?”

“Oh. Yuh.” Anders takes a breath. “That was the first. She wanted to return a cooler that she found in the quarry. It had a name on it, and I guess whose ever it was lived in Georgetown.”

“You drove her to Georgetown, too? Aiding and abetting.”

“Oh no,” Anders says. “I didn’t drive her. She rode her bike.”

“She rode her
bike
? Jesus.” Joan frowns. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I know,” Anders says. “Sorry. I promised I wouldn’t if she wouldn’t do something like it again. Hence the lift to Rowley,” he adds.

“I see.”

They are quiet for a moment, and then Anders looks over at his wife; she is looking upward, at the sky. “You didn’t tell me you went to James Favazza’s funeral,” he ventures. “I saw the program in your pocketbook.”

Joan meets his gaze, feeling caught at the same time that she is somehow unsurprised. “I didn’t, really,” she says. “I went to the church beforehand. But not to the funeral.”

Anders waits.

Joan takes a breath. “I didn’t plan it, exactly,” she goes on. “I was in town, and . . . I don’t really know why I went.” She knits her brow.

“But you didn’t want to tell me?” Anders asks.

Joan is quiet for a moment. “I don’t know,” she says finally. “I suppose I worried you’d find it . . . upsetting.”

The sound of a car engine grows, then fades, as a car passes on the road nearby.

“Why?” Anders asks when it has gone.

“I don’t know.”

Anders looks at his wife, her furrowed brow and worried eyes. “You’re allowed, you know,” he tells her.

She looks at him questioningly.

“You’re allowed your own response to things,” he goes on. “You’re allowed not to be a rock. God knows you allow it for everyone else.” He holds her gaze. “We’re all okay,” he says. “And I understand.”

“You do?” Joan laughs lightly. “I don’t know if I understand, myself.
I
don’t know why I went.”

“The other day,” Anders says. “I found a scrap of paper with an address in Sophie’s garbage.”

Joan looks at her husband, waits.

“It was a Beverly address, and I went and found it. I don’t know why
I
went, either, really.” He looks over at his wife. “But that’s what I mean when I say I understand.”

Joan holds his gaze, surprised by this admission. She recognizes how difficult it must be; it is difficult for Anders to talk about their daughter at all. “What was the address?” she asks.

Anders looks at her, a curious expression on his face. “Joseph’s,” he replies. “It was Joseph’s.” He sighs, and sits back. Joan reaches across the space between them for his hand; finally, it seems, he is there.

*  *  *

T
HE
bonfire truly is the largest Eve can remember seeing. She sits on a picnic blanket spread across a rocky ledge at the edge of
the cove, her face warm in the light from the bonfire, which towers maybe fifty feet in the air, licking against the sky and sending up great sputtering showers of sparks. Josie Saunders is dancing with a couple of other girls nearby; the three of them spin slowly to reggae playing from a stereo that someone has brought along. Saul has gone off with a couple of guys to find more beer. Steve Busman and a girl whose name Eve didn’t catch are hovering over the grill, cooking up yet another round of hot dogs, though Eve doesn’t think she could eat another thing. She is both satiated and satisfied, and content to sit where she is and watch the scene. All around the cove, the rocks and shore are packed with revelers. People stand in a jagged line atop the breakwater along the cove’s outer edge, shooting off flares and small whistling fireworks. The clown she saw earlier dances in front of the bonfire, the fabric of his suit translucent against the flames. Dark heads bob on the molten surface of the water.

It was easy, in the end, coming down here. She and Saul had lugged his cooler down between them, and as they approached Josie and the others, no one had muttered about her presence, or exchanged looks; they’d only waved in welcome, offered them hot dogs and beer. She’d talked to Josie about the nursery, and about Nestor, who Josie thinks is weird, and she’d talked about forensics with another girl named Maura whose dad works for the FBI. And though she wasn’t interested in the beer, which tastes to her like soap, she did out of sheer curiosity eat a couple of pot brownies, which have put her in a calm and thoughtful mood.

She keeps on picturing James Favazza’s truck, parked so forlornly at the edge of that lot all pillaged of its parts, how its grill had almost seemed to grimace at her when she looked at it headlong. Even though there was nothing worth noting in James Favazza’s truck—not a shred of evidence or a personal effect—the fact that they found it at all was hugely gratifying. It made
her feel like she’d found something to hold onto, had somehow nailed down for her the increasingly nebulous feel of the whole event of James Favazza’s death with its sheer physicality.
Someone died here
, it said to her.
Your search is valid
. And all those pillaged parts! She can only imagine what will become of them; it is curious to think that someone, someday, will hold James Favazza’s steering wheel beneath his hand, and someone else will adjust his rearview mirror. Sophie’s, too, probably. She’s not sure if she’s more comforted or troubled by the notion.

“Hey,” she hears, and Saul sits down beside her with a fresh beer.

“Hey.”

“How you doing?”

“Good,” she says. “Just people watching.”

“This is a good scene for that,” Saul says. “That clown guy’s going to combust, though.”

They watch him dance ever closer to the flames; finally, he swan dives into the water.

Eve looks at Saul sidelong. “So,” she begins tentatively; she cannot help herself. “We did find the truck.”

“The what?”

“The truck. James Favazza’s truck? In the car salvage place in Rowley.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Yeah,” Eve says. “Me and my dad went. Just since you asked about progress. Even though I guess it’s not really progress.”

“Yeah, but it must have been kind of cool to see. Or creepy.”

Eve nods. “Both,” she says.

“And they still don’t know what happened to the guy?”

Eve shakes her head. “Nope,” she says. “And they never will because they’re not doing a thing about it. But.” She sighs, watching the top of the fire, where flame transforms to smoke, mesmerized.
“It’s crazy,” she goes on. “All those recycled car parts they have? They took
everything
from the truck, and they’re going to sell it all. And Dad? He got a new antenna for the Buick, and the guy said it came off of a ’74 Riviera. So it just makes me wonder where it really came from.”

“What do you mean?”

“Like, what car it might have come from. Who it belonged to. If it went to drive-in movies in its past, or if it picked up only classical because it was on the Buick of some old lady who wore a lot of perfume and smoked cigarettes with the roof on and the windows up.”

“A chain-smoking granny in a Riviera.” Saul nods, amused.

Eve shrugs. “I don’t know, that’s the image that came to mind. But seriously. All those auto parts that came from different cars. It’s like their history is living on. Or like a transplant or something. It’s kind of creepy, but it’s kind of cool, too, don’t you think?”

“I guess.”

“It actually kind of makes me want to be an organ donor when I get my license.”

Saul looks at her, grinning now. “How many of those brownies did you eat, anyway?”

“I don’t think it’s the brownies,” Eve says. “I think it’s just me.” But something about the notion makes her start to giggle, and she finds that she can’t stop, which makes her laugh harder, and the look on Saul’s face makes her laugh harder still, until finally she collapses back onto the blanket and she is face to face with the moon overhead, whose face seems tonight to be laughing not at, but with her.