The Why of Things: A Novel (9 page)

A
nders wakes on Monday morning in the blue light of dawn, which creeps like fog over the windowsills and spreads across the floorboards, rustling the curtains and bluing the tangled sheets. Outside, the night bugs are chirping less and less, their argument lost to the morning birds, whose songs are growing bolder. For a moment, he only lies there with his eyes closed, hoping that he will fall back to sleep even as he understands that he will not; his eyelids twitch and tremble as thoughts begin to tumble in, many small ones at a time, and about nothing in particular—just noisy enough to keep sleep at bay.

After several minutes, he opens his eyes again, amazed by the process of dawn, by how quickly morning happens; objects in the room that only moments before were grainy and undefined have gathered themselves, taken distinct shape, as if their particles had strayed by night and are returning now in the brightening light. Quietly, he gets out of bed and goes into the bathroom to get
dressed, where it is dark enough yet that his face is just a shadow in the mirror; still, he does not turn the lights on.

He passes barefoot around the bed, where Joan lies sleeping on her side; she stirs at the creak of floorboards, and Anders pauses in the doorway. Then he pulls the door shut behind him. He passes Eve’s room first as he makes his way to the stairs. Her door is cracked open; when he looks inside he can see her splayed out across the mattress, one arm dangling over an edge, a foot sticking out from beneath the sheets. The door to Eloise’s room is closed; quietly he turns the knob, compelled to check in on his daughter even if he risks waking her. Eloise is curled on her side, facing away from the door, cocooned in sheets he tucked at her insistence as tightly as possible around her little body last night, as she demands he do every night after he has finished reading her the latest chapter in whatever book they’re reading, which right now is
Alice in Wonderland
. Anders vividly remembers reading this years ago to the older girls, as he lay against pillows on the floor between their beds in Maryland. The familiarity of the text as he reads this book to Eloise now has a curious effect, making him feel as if no time has passed at all since last he read the book, and at the same time very old when he compares his present self to the person he was then. Gently, he shuts her door again and continues down the hall to Sophie’s room.

As he did yesterday, at first, after pushing open the door, he only stands on the threshold, surveying the room and the few objects his oldest daughter left behind: magazine, photograph, earrings, mug. Then he enters the room and wanders over to the desk, where he sits down in the chair and leans on his elbows, his hands clasped and the backs of his thumbs to his lips. He lets his eyes wander to the magazine, an old copy of
Scientific American
, and from there across the grain of the wood-top desk to the pencils
in the I♥NY mug, their erasers hard with age, Sophie’s name etched in gold along their sides.

It comforts him to know the origins of each item before him—the pencils a gift from Joan’s sister, bestowed to each niece upon the start of kindergarten in such abundance they can still be found all around the house in Maryland, ready writing instruments if only they were ever sharpened. The mug was from a trip Anders took with the older girls to New York City the year that Eloise was born. It was the souvenir Sophie had chosen from the gift shop at the Statue of Liberty, where she’d tripped on the lobby floor and chipped her front tooth. Given the choice, she’d opted not to fix it, just as she’d decided against braces, insisting that she liked the teeth she had, as if to fix them in any way were akin to getting new ones. She was always loyal to a fault. The magazine was a gift subscription from her parents for Christmas her freshman year; science was her favorite subject. Ever since she was little, she’d loved to examine the way things worked, from the inside of Anders’ old watch to the way the waves changed as the tide came in, inching ever closer up the shoreline.

Anders sighs. Absently, he pulls open the desk’s topmost drawer, where he finds a pad of Post-it Notes, a few loose paperclips, masking tape, and a smooth, orange seashell, which, after a pause, he slips into his pocket. The bottom drawer is empty, though the wastebasket below is not; there is a Twizzler’s wrapper at the bottom, a balled-up Kleenex, a movie ticket stub, which when he takes it from the basket he sees is from August 12, for a matinee of
Citizen Kane
playing at the arts cinema in Rockport. He remembers Saul coming to pick her up that afternoon. There is a crumpled scrap of paper with doodled stars around a street address in Beverly—588 Cabot—a chewed toothpick, a broken barrette.

Anders lines these things up before him on the desk, takes a deep breath. It is light outside now, the birds in noisy chorus
in the trees; early sunlight glints in beads of moisture gathered on the windowpane. For a moment, Anders only gazes out past these, watching foliage tremble in the gentle morning breezes. And then he looks away, slowly slides the magazine across the desk toward him, and, imagining his daughter doing the same, he lets it fall open where it will and starts to read.

*  *  *

E
VE
also rises early, pleased when she looks out the window to see that the day is perfectly clear. It is as if yesterday’s rain has cleansed the air of a layer of scum that had somehow been blurring things since they arrived; her bike lies gleaming in wait in the grass, her chariot for today’s mission.

L. Stephens, it turns out, lives in Georgetown, which is two towns up the coast and one over from Gloucester, about twenty miles away. Yesterday afternoon, while her family played yet another game of Monopoly, Eve had been looking through the phone book for any other Favazzas when it occurred to her that their phone book is local, covering Gloucester alone, and that the elusive L. Stephens may well live somewhere else. It was raining hard outside, and since the power was briefly out and she couldn’t investigate on-line, Eve put on a poncho and rode down to Arthur’s store. She propped her bike against a telephone pole and went inside, the useless yellow plastic of her poncho clinging to her skin.

Arthur was sitting behind the counter, flipping through a magazine.

“I need a phone book,” Eve said.

Arthur looked up at her. “You look like a drowned rat,” he commented.

“Thanks. But I need a phone book,” Eve repeated.

“I don’t sell phone books.”

Eve rolled her eyes. “I need to
look
at a phone book. Not just local. You have one?”

Arthur studied her, then pulled a fat phone book out from a shelf under the counter. To her excitement, Eve found an L. among the Stephenses, whose information she greedily copied down, her mind racing.

Now, hurriedly, she gets dressed, and then takes the cooler bag filled with all that she has collected from the quarry from underneath her bed. She empties the contents into a plastic bag, which she puts back beneath her bed; last, as sacrilegious as it seems to her to do in summer, she puts on a pair of sneakers, which she ties tightly, tucking the loose ends of the laces beneath the tongues. Even she’ll admit that Georgetown is too far away to ride barefoot.

*  *  *

J
OAN
isn’t concerned when she wakes to find herself alone in bed; she assumes that Anders has gone down early to make coffee, or else gone for a walk while the morning is still cool. She pulls her clothes on absently, making a mental list of the things she’d like to get done today, like getting that painting she’d bought last summer framed, and buying flowers for around the house, and organizing her study—and her brain—and figuring out how to get these things done while dealing with logistics, like ferrying Eloise to camp and home again, and dealing with the oil cleanup people who are scheduled to come this afternoon.

She wakes Eloise and leaves her in her room to choose clothes; she is on her way downstairs when she notices that the door to Sophie’s room, which yesterday was closed, is open. She pauses, then continues slowly down the hall, pausing again when she comes to the open door. Inside the room, she sees Anders at their daughter’s desk, his head down on folded arms atop an open
magazine; Joan can tell by the rise and fall of his back that he is sleeping. She wonders how long he has been there, how much of the night she might have spent alone. She considers waking him, but she does not, thinking that perhaps he’d not have wanted to be found, that he came here by night purposefully, to mourn privately, and alone, and she respects this even as it heightens her own sense of isolation.

*  *  *

W
HEN
Anders comes downstairs, he finds Eloise and Joan already in the kitchen. Eloise is sitting sullenly at the table, absently stirring the few bloated Cheerios that remain in her bowl. Joan is leaning against the counter with a mug of coffee. “And one year,” she is saying when Anders appears in the doorway, “Evie’s group sailed up the river to Richdale and bought candy.” She slides over so that Anders can get to the coffee machine on the counter. A mug waits for him beside it.

“I still don’t want to go.”

Anders fills his mug and taps in a fine dusting of fake sugar from an open packet.

“You know,” Joan says after a moment, “Daddy feels just the way you do. It’s his first day of camp, too, did you know that?”

Anders pours cream into his coffee, watches as the white ribbons of it swirl into the dark liquid before it all clouds into a single color.

“He’s feeling anxious about it, but he’s going to give it a try anyway and see how it goes. Isn’t that right, Dad?”

Anders turns around. “That’s right,” he says, “I am.” It’s true that the first of his scuba classes meets today, but he has not yet in fact committed to going, as Joan well knows. He takes a large sip of coffee. It burns his tongue.

Eloise peers up at her father suspiciously. “You’re going to camp?” she asks.

“Well,” Anders says. “Kind of.” He puts a slice of bread into the toaster and pulls out a chair across from his daughter. He sits, leans forward on his elbows. “It’s a scuba diving class. It’s sort of like camp.”

“Do you know anyone there?”

“Nope.”

“Are you scared?”

“Not scared. Maybe just a little anxious, like Mom said. A little nervous.”

“You see?” Joan says. “It’s natural to be nervous when you’re about to do something for the first time. But if you let that frighten you out of trying things, you’d end up never doing anything!” The toaster pings. Joan puts a hand on Anders’ shoulder before he can start to get up. “I’ll get it.”

Anders glances at Joan over his shoulder, then returns his attention to Eloise. “Your mom’s right,” he says. “I remember you were very nervous about swimming lessons when you were little. And imagine if you hadn’t gone!”

Eloise narrows her eyes. “I was nervous about swimming?”

“You were,” Anders says. “You even hid in the closet.”

“I did?”

Joan sets Anders’ toast down before him, spread with butter and honey.

“And think about what a fish you are, now,” Anders says.

Eloise seems to consider this.

Standing above them, Joan brings her hands together. “Lunch,” she says. “Peanut butter or ham?”

Eloise spoons up a single soggy Cheerio and chews it thoughtfully. “Ham,” she says. She looks at her father as Joan begins to
rummage through the fridge. “What kind of sandwich are you going to have?” she asks.

“Oh, I don’t need a sandwich,” he says.

“Yes, you do. What will you have for lunch?”

“They have food at Daddy’s camp,” Joan calls over her shoulder. “He’ll be able to get his lunch there.”

Eloise lifts the final two Cheerios from her bowl, decides against eating them. She pushes the bowl away and sits back in her chair, regarding her father as he eats his toast. “Are you going to have to wear a wet suit?” she asks.

Anders holds up a finger as he chews, savoring the salty sweetness of the butter and honey. He nods as he swallows. “I imagine so,” he says.

“Are you going to have to wear flippers?”

“I imagine I’ll have to wear flippers, too.”

“I know how to walk in flippers. Do you know how?”

Anders shakes his head. “Tell me,” he says, taking his last bite of toast.

“You have to walk backward,” she says. “Otherwise you’ll trip and fall.”

“Backward.” Anders nods again. “I’ll remember that. Thanks for the pointer.”

Joan returns to the table with a fat brown bag. “Lunch. Ham sandwich, peanut butter crackers, grapes, and a brownie. And apple juice.” She looks at the clock above the door. “It’s eight-thirty now, which means we need to be out of here in about ten minutes. Eloise, why don’t you and I go get your things together, and then we can hit the road.”

“Okay,” Eloise says. She starts to get up, then pauses. “Are you going to pack, Dad? They gave me a list of what I have to bring. Did they give you a list?”

“I think I probably just have to bring a bathing suit and a
towel,” Anders says, getting up from the table. “Not too much packing for me to do, so I’ll stay here and do the dishes while you two get ready.”

Joan and Eloise go upstairs. Anders brings his plate and mug and Eloise’s bowl over to the sink. He does the breakfast dishes and the few remaining dishes from dinner last night. He glances through the window to the empty spot of grass where Eve’s bike usually sits at the edge of the driveway. He wonders where she’s already gone off to.

He puts the last dish in the rack, shakes the excess water from his hands, and then dries them on his shorts. As he turns around, Eloise and Joan reenter the room. Joan is carrying Eloise’s new tote bag. Eloise is wearing one of her sisters’ old life jackets. She puts a towel and a pair of Anders’ trunks on the kitchen table. “I got your things for you,” she says.

Anders glances at Joan, who gives him an almost imperceptible wink, then looks at his daughter. “Well, thank you very much, Eloise,” he says. He looks at his wife again. “Where’s Evie?” he asks.

Joan shrugs. “Her note was cryptic. But it assured she’d be back before dinner. And when I called her phone, I heard it ringing in her bedroom.”