The Probable Future

You didn’t tell her the truth, Stella had said when they were driving home.

There is no truth. I thought you knew that by now.

On this visit, Dr. Stewart pulled a chair up to Eli’s bed. “It’s Stella Sparrow who’s visiting,” the doctor told Eli. “Rebecca’s been dead for more than three hundred years. If you’re seeing her, my friend, you’re seeing angels.”

Dr. Stewart took Eli’s pulse. Stella counted along with the doctor; slow as molasses. So slow he was clearly winding down. All the same, ill as he was, Eli paid the doctor no mind. He was convinced he recognized the girl in his room. “I knew I’d see you before I died. I knew you’d forgive me.”

The doctor and Stella exchanged a look. Eli Hathaway would be dead by morning; they could both feel that. Hathaway signaled for Stella to come near and Brock Stewart marveled at the girl’s grit. Even in medical school there were those who’d been repelled by an old man with tubes in his nose and veins, a fellow like Eli, who stank like a bedpan and shook with cold, though the heat was turned up to almost eighty throughout the nursing home, for the comfort of the patients.

“I’ve got something for you,” Eli said.

With difficulty, he tried to open the top button of his striped pajamas. He’d always thought pajamas were a nuisance, and now they were giving him trouble on his last day on earth. Stella helped with the button. There it was, the silver star, the one Eli had worn every day since his own father had given it to him, on his deathbed, as every Hathaway had done since the time it was found among Charles Hathaway’s belongings in the days after his horse had sunk into Hourglass Lake, however deep that bottomless place might be.

When Eli couldn’t unfasten the clasp on the chain, Stella unhooked it for him.

“Yours.” There was a great deal more Eli wanted to say, but his lips were dry, his throat parched; words were escaping him and he had to save them and cherish each one if he were to get out his last request.

All the same, Stella was touched by the gift. She felt like crying, but she didn’t. Instead, she secured the star around her throat. Eli watched her carefully; he smiled even though he was dizzy. He looked at Stella and saw a bowl full of stars and endless, unfathomable blue. Of course it would be heaven, he believed that now, it would be stars, and light, and forgiveness.

“I’m leaving all my holdings to the town, but I want you to decide what to do with it,” he told the dark-haired girl, the one he’d been waiting for all his life. “Get me a piece of paper,” Eli demanded of the doctor. “You’ll be my witness.”

“Are you sure you want to do this?” Dr. Stewart said. “She’s not of legal age.”

“What does her age matter? How old were you when they drowned you?” Eli asked Stella, whom he continued to believe was Rebecca.

Having read Matt’s thesis, now joyously in the possession of the history department at the state college, Stella knew the answer. “Seventeen and a half. It happened on the sixteenth of November.”

“She wasn’t of legal age when they did that to her, was she?” Eli said.

“Is he of sound mind?” Stella whispered to Dr. Stewart.

“What’s the state we live in, old boy?” Dr. Stewart asked Eli.

“You don’t know Massachusetts is a Commonwealth and you call yourself a doctor? Shame on you.”

“He’s sound,” the doctor said. “He can make his own choices.”

Stella went to the nurses’ station for a pad of paper and a pen, then returned and wrote down everything Eli Hathaway said. His accounts in the bank, his investments, his real property, everything he owned in this world would go to the town, and Stella Sparrow Avery would be the trustee.

“Are you sure you don’t want your name down as Rebecca?” Eli asked.

“Stella is fine.”

Hathaway signed the document, although he was so weakened Dr. Stewart needed to help him hold the pen; then the doctor signed as well.

“Now I’m free,” Eli said. “No more driving around town for me. There’s a new fellow doing it and I hear he doesn’t know his ass from a hole in the ground.”

“True,” Dr. Stewart said. “Sissy Elliot wanted to go to the supermarket and the new driver somehow managed to leave her at the Laundromat. She was stuck there for hours.”

“But Rebecca knows what she’s doing.”

Stella was sitting on the ledge of the window. To Eli, with his vision so cloudy, she looked like a bird perched there. She looked like light in the endless darkness. As for Stella, she liked the cool sheen of the star necklace against her skin. When Rebecca walked out of the woods, she’d been wearing this amulet; now it was back where it belonged. In exchange for its return, Stella repaid the favor to the last of the Hathaways. She was glad she’d brought her backpack with her, for she had a great deal of algebra homework due and a dreaded essay to write for American history on Paul Revere. They would be here quite a while, but Stella intended to stay until the end. That was what she had to give Eli: She’d be here with him. She’d see him over.