The Why of Things: A Novel (7 page)

She supposes that if what she was really doing now was revisiting, she would drive past her grandmother’s house where it sits by the harbor. But before she gets to the waterfront, she sees the street she has all along been vaguely looking for, even if she hadn’t entirely admitted it to herself.

She slows down at the next small intersection and peers up at the crooked street sign that tells her she has found Magnolia Street. She sets her blinker and turns left, following the street slowly up a steep incline toward the top of Portuguese Hill. It is the highest point in Gloucester, and so of course Joan has ascended it before, which is why Magnolia Street, as one of the several ways up, would have rung a bell.

“I thought we were going to get ice cream,” Eloise says.

“And we are,” Joan says, gazing at the houses that line the street, and wondering which is James Favazza’s mother’s. The houses are all variations of the same: small, boxy colonials, some with aluminum awnings over their small stoops, all with hinged outer doors whose upper halves, which now are screen, in winter would be storm glass. They are slightly smaller than the houses in other parts of town, and they come up nearly flush to the sidewalk, with barely room for even a small front yard. In one driveway, a man is giving his car a wash, and on the sidewalk opposite, some
kids about Eloise’s age are squatted down drawing on the concrete with fat sticks of chalk. A cat sits on a sunny stoop, grooming itself, and a woman with a wide hat is watering the flowers in her window boxes. It strikes Joan that James Favazza was on this very street just yesterday, alive, and that behind one of these front doors today, his mother is living through the unthinkable. There is nothing to suggest it, though Joan hadn’t really expected there to be. She can remember sitting numbly in the living room the morning after Sophie died, wondering when anything would ever seem of consequence again; food and coffee and cleanliness and the fact that sometime she had lost a contact lens and couldn’t rightly see all seemed insignificant details, and yet the world outside carried on: every half hour, a bus pulled up at the stop across the street, planes crisscrossed overhead, a garbage truck lumbered groaning down the street. Sometimes it briefly occurred to her the things she’d be doing, too—how she had dry cleaning to pick up, and a dentist appointment to get a crown replaced. She runs her tongue over the uncapped tooth now; she’d never bothered to reschedule, as if waiting for the time when that sort of thing
did
seem of consequence again. She’s not sure it ever will, entirely; sometimes still she’ll pause in the middle of vaccuuming or putting gas into the car during a busy morning of errands, overcome without warning by an exhausted sense of pointlessness, and it’s all she can do to carry on going through what are suddenly revealed as empty motions.

“Mom?”

Joan blinks, realizing that she has let the car slow to a stop.

“Are you okay?”

“Of course,” Joan says. “I’m okay. I was just remembering things.” She steps lightly on the gas.

“Like what?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Being a girl here in the summers, like you. Getting ice cream.”

“From Salah’s?”

“It was from Salah’s, actually. It was about half the size that it is now, though.”

“What flavor did you get?”

“Coffee. With jimmies.”

“But that’s what you get now,” Eloise says, sounding mildly confused.

“Well, yes, it is. But I’m still the same person, right?”

*  *  *

A
NDERS
has been digging for half an hour, working to get a hole deep enough to bury the seagull Eloise has brought home from the beach. For the third time, he encounters a rock that blocks him from digging any deeper, but he knows it has to be at least another foot deeper to prevent fisher cats from digging the carcass up. When Buster died last summer, they buried him in the woods not far from here, and when Anders came outside the following morning he found the grave plundered, the dog’s remains picked clean just yards away from where they’d laid him. Anders reburied what was left and never told his family what had happened.

He tries to find the edges of the rock, but it is far too large. He thrusts his shovel into the dirt, stands up straight, and wipes his brow. No wonder his roses are dying, he thinks, a miracle that they have lasted as long as they have in soil as rocky as this.

“Another rock in the way,” he calls over to Eloise.

Eloise sits on the low branch of a nearby tree, blowing at a blade of grass between her thumbs, trying to get it to whistle. Finally she gives up and lets the grass flutter to the ground, where
the seagull sits at the base of the tree in a plastic bag. “Maybe we should try somewhere else. Like on the lawn,” she says.

They have taken the seagull with them a few yards into the woods for burial, and Eloise is right, the soil is probably rockier here than it is on the lawn. Anders looks over his shoulder toward the house, where he can see Joan arranging the porch furniture. “I don’t think your mother would appreciate that,” he says, though the tow truck has made so much of a mess of the lawn that a small seagull’s grave would hardly make a difference. There are deep, muddy ruts from the tow truck’s tires, and the stabilizing flaps have left large rectangular gouges in the grass. And as the crane maneuvered it from out over the water and onto the grass, James Favazza’s pickup truck knocked a sizable branch from the dogwood tree, though it is still jaggedly attached. Anders tried to yank the branch free, thinking to drag it off into the woods before Joan saw the damage, but it’s going to take a saw to make the break complete.

When the truck first rose from the quarry, as it hung there, slowly spinning, and they waited what seemed endlessly for the cab to empty of water, the scene had jogged a memory Anders had forgotten he had, one from his early youth, when his father had been in Vietnam and his mother had taken Anders and his sister to live at their grandparents’ farm in upstate New York. He can’t remember what the circumstances were, but in the memory he is alone in his grandfather’s pickup truck. It is dark, and raining, and through the windshield he can see his grandfather working in the light of the pickup’s headlight beams, using a scalpel to peel the hide from a deer strung above a pit. The deer hangs upside down from ropes twisted around ankles that are thin and fragile as a woman’s wrist, and its naked body looks like muscles in a book, all red and ribbed and lined with white ribbons of fat. The pit beneath the deer steams in the rain.

He has no notion of the memory’s context, and in this sense it is more of a snapshot than an actual memory; he does not know what came before, or what happened after. Nonetheless, at the sight of the truck dangling over the water, the image of the deer flashed into his mind, and he stood at the quarry’s edge, briefly and entirely transported. He finds that memories
happen
to him this way often these days, vivid and, like dreams, unbidden. Some are familiar; others, like this one, he didn’t know he had. It is an odd feeling to remember them; it gives him the sensation he gets from that dream in which you discover in your house rooms you didn’t know were there.

Anders stares out at the mess of the lawn, and the spot where the truck earlier dangled. At the far end of the quarry, Eve is gathering up the beer cans and other debris, pulling these objects toward her with a long stick. The day, which had started cloudless and sunny, has darkened; he can see thunderheads beginning to gather on the horizon.

Anders turns around and grips the shovel. “Okay,” he says, refilling the half-dug hole with dirt. “Let’s give this another try before the rain.”

*  *  *

I
T
does indeed start to rain not long after Anders and Eloise finally get the seagull buried, and it continues on into the evening. It is not a steady rain, but a series of loud and battering summer thunderstorms that subside just as quickly as they begin. During each one, Eve stands at the window looking out at the quarry, imagining with growing agitation bits of evidence being washed away with every downpour. For dinner, Anders cooks hamburgers on the grill in a lull between storms, and they have homemade brownies for dessert. Afterward, Eloise brings out the old Monopoly board, and they play a marathon game, which Eve
wins handily, putting up hotels on all her properties and bankrupting the rest of her family.

After everyone has gone to bed, Eve pulls out from under her bed all of the artifacts she’s collected from the quarry and lays everything out across the floor. The T-shirt from Vic’s has dried. It is size extra large, and stained with flecks of deep green paint. She has looked up Vic’s in the phone book and discovered that it is a bar in downtown Gloucester, and the fact that he had a T-shirt from there suggests to her that James Favazza must have been a regular. In any case, she knows he definitely liked to drink, given the number of empty beer cans and bottles that she collected from the water. The cans are all Budweiser, but there are two kinds of bottles, both specialty beers that Eve has never heard of before.

Eve has also collected a cooler bag, which is mildewed on the inside and smells, unsurprisingly, of beer. The name L. Stephens is written on the side of the bag in permanent marker. She found several Stephenses in the phone book—Donald Stephens, M. Stephens, and Bertrand and Faye Stephens—but there was no listing for any Stephens whose first name begins with L. It occurred to her that L. Stephens could be the son or daughter of any of these other Stephenses, but she’s not sure how to find out. If she knew what L. stood for—Liam or Lucy or Lars—she could call the other Stephens households and ask for someone by that name, but she can’t very well call up and ask for L. But whoever L. is, she’s decided, he could be an important piece of the puzzle. A drinking buddy, she’s inclined to think, and very possibly aware of who might have wanted James Favazza dead.

In addition to the beer bottles, the T-shirt, the gas can, and the cooler, Eve has found a plastic purple bowl—the disposable kind you might take on a picnic—a beat-up water bottle from Eastern Mountain Sports, and a single blue men’s flip-flop. She frowns, squats down in front of the flip-flop. It is well worn, particularly
on the inside edge; the padding beneath the big toe and the heel has been worn down so much that it is only about a quarter of an inch thick. It feels strange to be able to see so clearly the imprint of James Favazza’s foot. Tentatively, she slides the flip-flop onto her own foot. The arch is much higher than her own arch, and the pressure of it makes her feel oddly as if she were somehow foot to foot with James. She shudders and slips the sandal off again, and then she gathers the beer cans and the flip-flop and the T-shirt and everything else and puts it all into the cooler bag, which she zips and puts underneath her bed.

She stands and gazes around her bedroom. Though it’s getting late, she isn’t remotely tired; she feels restless and edgy. She opens the window and puts her head outside. It has stopped raining for good, it seems; she can see the moon flashing through the drifting clouds, and every now and then, a star. She pulls her head inside and crosses the room to her bedside table, where she stashed the cigarettes she found lying on the rock by the side of the road last night. They are Marlboro Reds, which she doesn’t really like, but she figures they’re better than the menthol cigarettes her mother keeps in her pocketbook and smokes so infrequently that they are more often than not old and stale.

Quietly, she goes downstairs and outside. The storms have cooled things off considerably; Eve shivers as she crosses the lawn, but she doesn’t bother to go back inside for a sweatshirt. Instead, she walks around the quarry to its far side and proceeds a few dozen meters into the woods, where a large pyramid of unclaimed chunks of granite rises among the trees. Carefully, she makes her way around the base of the rocky pyramid and settles down in the crevice on its far side, where the rocks come together in the suggestion of a lawn chair. This is the spot where Sophie used to come and smoke in the summer, like the spot up in the limbs of the oak tree in Maryland. She didn’t smoke often, and of course
no one knew about it—their parents, or teachers, who all thought she was perfect—and her secret was safe with Eve. Only when she happened to feel like it, she said, or when she was feeling particularly thoughtful, which, Eve realizes now, was more and more often in the days and weeks leading up to her death; many nights when Eve looked out the window she saw a glowing ember up among the oak leaves. Eve wishes she knew what her sister had been feeling so thoughtful about. But.

In front of her, the woods stretch darkly away, loud with crickets and cicadas, and even though the house isn’t far behind her, in the darkness Eve feels remote from everyone and everything. She lights a cigarette with a match, grimacing as she inhales, wishing that she liked smoking more than she does, but wanting to smoke anyway, so that she’s not just sitting here in the dark. Sophie would kill her if she knew. She leans back and pulls her knees to her chest, tilts her head to look up at the rocks rising above her, black shapes against what sky she can make out through the canopy of trees. The moon, she sees, when the rolling clouds reveal it, is larger than it was last night, which means that a leftward-facing moon is on the wax. She tries to think of a way to make this solid in her memory, though she suspects that it will always be one of those things she can never remember, like the number of c’s in
necessary
or
successful
, or how many feet there are in a mile.

After a minute, she is aware of the distant sound of footsteps in the woods; she freezes, listening, her eyes fixed on the glowing end of her cigarette. There are many paths that meander through the trees, circumventing the various quarries and firepits in the middle of Cape Ann, and oftentimes at night local kids will gather in the woods. But they travel in loud groups, their movement punctuated by shouts and laughter; these are solitary footsteps, accompanied only by the sounds of night bugs, the residual drip of water from the leaves. Hastily, yet carefully, Eve puts her cigarette
out. She knows there’s nothing really to be afraid of, but her heart is pounding nonetheless, and she keeps very still, listening intently, trying to stop herself from thinking about the potential murderer. The footsteps pause, then continue, picking their way carefully along. Part of her wants to get up and run to the house, but her own movement will surely be heard just as clearly as she can hear the movements of whoever is in the woods now, and so she stays where she is, waiting for the footsteps to pass.