The Why of Things: A Novel (37 page)

After another fifteen or twenty minutes, during which time Eve stares with exhaustion at nothing at all, an old blue pickup pulls up outside the bar, and Nestor climbs out. Eve isn’t sure she’s ever been so grateful to see someone in her life. She lifts herself from her plastic chair, not caring that her leg is asleep. “He’s here,” she announces, as outside Nestor walks stiffly toward the bar, not bothering to alter his gait in the rain. Guy gets up from the booth and goes to unlock the door just as Nestor has reached its other side. Eve swallows anxiously, unsure of exactly how this will play out; she’d been vague on the phone, but urgent enough, she hopes, that Nestor will have the sense to play along. Luckily
enough, when she dialed the nursery’s number, Nestor had been the one to answer; she hadn’t had to go through Josie, which only would have complicated things. “It’s Eve,” she’d said. “I’m in a bit of trouble, and right now you’re the only one who can help.”

There had been a pause on the other end of the line. “Go on,” Nestor had said.

“I’m at a bar called Vic’s in Gloucester, and I need you to come get me.”

“Seems to me something your parents might be the appropriate ones to deal with.”

Eve swallowed. “I know. That’s the thing. I tried. No answer.”

“It’s not my place, Eve.”

“Please.”

“What if I say no? I’ve got a business to run here.”

“Then I’m
stuck
,” she whispered frantically. “I’m going to get
arrested
. It’s bad.”

She could hear Nestor sigh heavily. “You say you’re at Vic’s?”

“Yeah. It’s—”

“I know where it is.” And he hung up the phone.

“Okay, Dad,” Eve had said into the emptiness.

Now Guy opens the door, but Nestor does not come inside, choosing instead to remain on the doorstep.

“You the father?” Guy demands.

Nestor’s eyes flicker; behind Guy, Eve gives him a beseeching look. “Yuh,” he says.

“Your kid was on the premises, looking to take some liquor.”

“I was—” Eve begins.

“You keep quiet!” Guy interrupts her, whirling around. He turns back to Nestor. “She was trespassing out back.”

“That so,” Nestor says.

“Yeah,” Guy says. “That’s so. Thought you oughta know that.”

Nestor nods. “I see.”

“That’s it? You see?”

“I see,” Nestor says. “And we’ll discuss it at home. Thank you for your concern.” He looks over Guy’s shoulder toward Eve, nods once. “Let’s go,” he says.

Eve looks at Guy uncertainly; Guy steps away from the door so Eve can pass through. “I don’t ever want to see you around here again,” he says.

Eve stalks by him, and the feeling of freedom she has as she steps out into the rain is exhilarating. She turns around and glares at the man. “I wouldn’t set foot anywhere near your dirty hellhole again if you paid me,” she says defiantly, and she marches to Nestor’s truck and clambers in, her blood coursing hotly through her veins.

In a moment, Nestor climbs in the other side, and wordlessly he drives away. Despite the fact that her bike and photographs are still sitting in the rain, Eve does not ask where he is going, and he does not go far; he turns right onto the next possible street, drives a hundred yards down, and pulls over. Eve waits for him to talk, but he says nothing; the only sounds are raindrops clattering against the roof of the cab and the splashing sounds made by each infrequent passing car. They are on a residential street; small houses sit quietly in the rain, their small yards empty. Everything seems to Eve to be in shades of gray.

“Thank you,” she says. “I would never have bothered you, but he wasn’t going to let me leave and I couldn’t get either of my parents and I couldn’t stand to be stuck there with that guy and—thank you. And I’m sorry.”

Nestor looks at her expectantly.

“I wasn’t trying to steal liquor or anything else,” Eve goes on.

Nestor waits.

“I was just . . . looking. I’m an idiot.” She shakes her head. “It’s a long story.”

Finally Nestor speaks. “I’m in no rush,” he says. “Rainy days are always quiet at the nursery. Josie can manage.”

Eve shakes her head again. “You don’t want to hear it.”

“I’d say I’m a better judge of that.”

“You really don’t.”

Nestor looks at her. “I believe I’m
owed
an explanation, actually,” he says.

Eve looks him in the eye, noticing how blue the irises are against the stark white, like endlessly deep pools. She takes a breath. “The night we got here, I noticed that there were tire tracks leading into the quarry in our yard. No one believed me at first, but then my parents called the police, and divers came, and just like I thought, there was a truck at the bottom of the quarry, and there was a guy inside. He was dead. James Favazza. He was only twenty-seven.” Eve pauses, exhausted by all there is to tell.

“Go on,” Nestor urges.

And Eve does. She tells Nestor about all the items she collected from the quarry, about the cooler bag and L. Stephens and his Camaro, about the three Marlboros on the rock and the butt in the water, about the boom and the skimmer and the recycled oil, about her trip to the junkyard across the lot from the nursery, about finding the truck in Rowley. All the details together, the way she hasn’t even told her parents, or Saul. She tells him about the preliminary findings, and the failure of the authorities to investigate, and how no one really seems to care. “They just shrug it off as either accident or suicide and don’t even bother to look into anything. But if you’re as drunk as he was, how do you manage to drive all the way to the quarry and then accidentally drive in? And suicide—well, the windows of his truck were rolled up,
which doesn’t make any sense, ’cause you’d want the water to get in faster, and . . . well, I mean, I just don’t think you can
assume
it was suicide. But
no one
has looked into any foul play at all.”

“What sort of foul play are you envisioning?”

Eve sighs. “I don’t know, exactly,” she says. “I mean, I
do
, or I thought I did, but—it just drives me crazy that no one wants to know what really happened, whatever it was.”

Nestor is quiet for a moment. “I don’t see how Vic’s factors into all of this.”

“The T-shirt! I told you. There was that Vic’s T-shirt in the quarry, which means he hung out there a lot, maybe even the day he died!”

“Possibly. But are you sure it was even his?”

Eve can’t allow herself to consider this. “Well, anyway, today I didn’t even mean to go find the bar at all, I was just picking up some photographs from CVS and I saw the Camaro—except that it wasn’t the right one—so I went over, now here we are. But I was
not
after any booze.”

“What
were
you after, really?”

Eve is quiet for a moment. She sighs. “I was curious,” she says. “I mean, I was after Larry at first, but then I wasn’t really after anything. I was just
curious
.” She looks over at Nestor. “Do you believe me?”

He nods. “I do.”

A car drives slowly by, the bass on the radio thudding. It comes to a stop in front of one of the houses across the street, the door of which immediately opens, and a kid in an oversized mesh basketball tank comes out. He leaps the stoop in a single bound and slides into the car, which continues on and away, leaving a vague thudding echo in Eve’s ears even after it has vanished around the corner, like the glowing imprint of the sun in your eyes even after you have looked away.

“It must have been a particularly difficult thing to arrive to, after what happened to your sister.”

The statement knocks the wind out of Eve; she finds she cannot respond.

“The whole situation is possessed of a rather cruel irony. I can understand why it would hold such interest for you.”

Eve’s breath trembles, and she grits her teeth to contain herself. “How do you know what happened to my sister?” she asks.

“Josie told me,” Nestor says. “It must be hard to live with.”

“Why didn’t you say anything before?”

“What is there to say aside from sorry, which you must have heard now countless times?”

Eve is quiet. She knows Nestor is right.

“I figured if you wanted to talk about it, you would.”

“Then why did you just bring it up now?”

Nestor looks at her. “Think about all you just told me.”

Eve remains quiet.

“My wife killed herself,” Nestor continues.

Eve looks at him with surprise; he gazes distantly through the windshield.

“It was many years ago, but the question I still struggle with is
why
. For the living, for those left behind, there is no answer that is good enough.” Nestor looks at Eve. “I imagine you feel the same way.”

Eve blinks rapidly, trying not to cry.

“And I understand that. But sometimes, there simply are no answers. And when there aren’t, you have to give up the search and live with the mystery. It’s hard, I know it well.”

“Sometimes I think that nothing will ever be the same again,” Eve says, crying openly now.

“It won’t,” Nestor says, and he takes her firmly by the hand. “But you, Eve, will be okay.”

T
hey stand at the quarry’s edge, Joan, Anders, Eve, and Dave. Eloise floats in an inner tube nearby. Anders and Dave are wearing wet suits, BCDs, and headlamps, and each has a cylinder strapped to his back. It is morning, and a cool breeze ripples the surface of the quarry, which is still warm from long summer days in the sun; Eloise has reported from the water that it is warmer than the air. Now late August, the season has started to change; the nights are chillier, the air more clear, and though not quite orange yet, the leaves of the trees around them have lost their summer green. The lilies along the quarry’s far edge have blossomed and languished, though Anders’ garden is still aglow with clusters of tiny flowers: the purple of the first butterfly bush, the yellow of the next, and the orange and pink and white of the rest that Eve has brought home from the nursery one by one as Anders’ rose bushes died.

Unlike the night they arrived here, they are not gathered by the high ledge of the quarry, where James Favazza’s truck went in; they are instead almost directly across from that spot. Joan has directed them here; it is here where the people in the photographs
from the old film Eve found were mostly gathered. She holds the photos in her hand now; they are rippled and waterstained, but in several you can make out a small barge in the middle of the quarry, which is anchored to the shore with a line attached near to where earlier in the summer the skimmer stood. Though they are not the grand band Joan had always imagined when she considered the sculptor’s fabled parties, there is on board the barge a man with a guitar, a man with drums, and a woman without an instrument who Joan assumes must be a singer. Other photographs are of clusters of people gathered where Joan and her family are gathered now, many with wineglasses and cocktails and cigarettes, some in laughing conversation, some dangling bare legs into the water. Interspersed among them, as if guests of the party themselves, are dozens of varied sculptures: busts like the one in her study, body parts, and abstract sculptures of all kinds.

Joan had always incorrectly imagined these parties as taking place in the thirties or forties, though in reality they appear to have occurred sometime in the seventies; most of the crowd appears to be in bohemian garb—long dresses, flared pants, large round sunglasses—as one might expect from the type to associate with an artist. When Eve first showed her parents the photos, Joan was amazed that a roll of film could have lasted so long, and when she took the negatives to be archived, the man at the photo store attributed the film’s preservation to the fact that the two unspoiled rolls had been rewound and stored in a canister; the other roll of film, which had been stored unwound and in the camera, was destroyed, much to Eve’s dismay, since that was the roll that she had added to. In the weeks since, Joan has done some research in the town hall archives, looking for more information about this sculptor who once inhabited their house, and for photos of the man so she might identify him in these, and to find out what became of all his work. It is her secret hope and theory that
Anders and Dave will find some of it at the bottom of the quarry; in the book that she is writing, she knows they will.

Anders himself isn’t sure what they will find. He imagines it’s likely they’ll find various items left over from the quarrying days—maybe iron picks, or the pieces of metal that would have held together now disintegrated wooden platforms. No doubt they will find junk—an old bathtub, maybe, car parts or whole other cars, unidentifiable scraps of rusted metal. He looks through his mask at the water beneath him nervously; never before has he dived as deep as he will today. Dave has brought cylinders with larger volumes of breathing gas to compensate for the increased gas consumption at greater depths, and the gas for this dive is helium based, to reduce the risk of nitrogen narcosis. Anders has also received private training from Dave over the past two weeks in preparation for this dive, and he’s been officially certified for greater depths than those his class training prepared him for, but he is anxious nonetheless. But he is interested, too. All of the dives he’s taken this summer have been saltwater dives, and he is curious to see what different sort of life they’ll find down here: slow-swimming bass, freshwater algae, the turtles they see occasionally at the surface; as black and uninhabitable as the water looks from above, he has no doubt they will find life.

Eve doesn’t care what her father finds; she just wants him to find it. It was her idea for him to attempt this dive in the first place, and that he has agreed is nothing short of miraculous. She has spent her whole life wondering what could be down there; she and her sisters have spent countless hours speculating, and finally, finally, she is going to find out.

Eloise is equally curious; when she asked Hobbster in a note earlier this summer, he admitted that he didn’t know, which amazed her, because Hobbster knows everything. He told her that sometimes you have to just live with a mystery. But she suspects
that there are things down there that none of her family would even imagine, because what they don’t know is that Hobbster has cleaned it with a magical chlorine, which in her mind could have given rise to all sorts of otherwise impossible things. For all Eloise knows, there could be mermaids down in the water. There could be talking fish, or singing flowers. There could be a whole miniature magical city of gold. There could be friendly ghosts, which Hobbster has assured her are the only kind. There could be anything down in the quarry. Anything, it seems, is possible.