The Probable Future

On the shoreline, Jimmy Elliot pulled off his boots and his shirt. He couldn’t see Stella, paddling around and crying on the other side of the Little Pearl, but he jumped in the water anyway. He was a lousy swimmer, but he made it there. He helped Stella into the boat, then looked round for Jenny as he spit out water that tasted like frogs.

Jenny was underwater, and when she came up, sputtering, there was grit and mud in her teeth.

“Stay with Stella and the boat,” she told Jimmy. At that moment she had no idea who he was. A teenager with dark hair who looked frightened when he saw her. Still, he was there to keep an eye on Stella while Jenny went down to search again. The moonlight sunk into the water with her; it spread out in a crinkly silver splash, then disappeared, leaving only pitch. Jenny felt something spindly, a leg, perhaps, or the bones of the old horse, or the remains of Rebecca Sparrow. But it was only drifting root strands trailing beneath some water lilies, twisted into a braid. Jenny grabbed something heavy; she thought she had something, she thought it was Hap, but found it was only an old boot she’d brought to the surface, which she hurriedly threw back, before she went down for the third time.

Stella leaned over the edge of the Little Pearl, to put her cold hand in Jimmy’s as he clung to the boat. He felt amazingly hot, even though the water was frigid. He felt alive. “She’ll find him,” Jimmy said. “Your mother’s a good swimmer.”

In the boat, Stella finished making the wish she had begun when they first rowed into the lake. When they drowned Rebecca Sparrow, everything had been white, blindingly so. Blinding sunlight, blinding ice, snow that fell like stars. Only the water had been dark, as it was now; it pulled Rebecca down and twisted around her like a sheet, with water weeds and the silky tendrils of the water lily roots threaded around her ankles, her wrists, her waist.

Elinor was at her bedroom window. A wind had come out of nowhere and it shook the leaves from the trees. From where she stood, Elinor could see her granddaughter in the boat on the lake. But she couldn’t see Jenny. All at once she wondered what on earth she’d been doing all these years, why she’d needed a rose that might never bloom, why she’d allowed all those years to pass when she didn’t see Jenny, why she’d shut the door against one and all. Love could do that to some people and they wouldn’t even know how much they’d missed out on; they simply remained in the place where love had left them, while the whole world spun around.

In the water, something was pulling Jenny down; perhaps it was the weight of her own body, or the rush of her own descent. She thought he was a log at first because it was so dark, but she grabbed hold of whatever it was. Already, she thought she might not get back herself. There was no air in her lungs, but she could see the moonlight, and the surface of the water moving, and the shape of Jimmy Elliot reaching out to her as she dragged Hap Stewart along, gripping tightly to this boy who was meant to live even though he’d been thrown hard and part of his spine had been shattered. Hap was hoisted into the rowboat where Stella breathed life back into him: she refused to stop until he blinked his eyes open, until he could see the stars in the sky, not from beneath the black pool of water but from the safety of the boat as it bobbed up and down in the water, as the ambulance and the fire trucks came tearing down Lockhart Avenue, so fast the marks their tires made on the asphalt would last until October. Ever after, Lockhart Avenue would seem to have a white stripe on either side of the road, and there were people in town who would step on their brakes every time they took the turn off East Main Street, slowing down to consider just how lucky they were.

What was a siren but a call to your neighbors, a cry that would let them know that grief of one sort or another was coming through, as it did for someone every day, every evening. It had to be someone, and on this night it was Hap; on this night, when the wind picked up until the fair day was gone from memory. Running down the lane, muddy and wet, was the man who had killed his ex-girlfriend in Brighton, who had hit Hap with his oar, though he’d been aiming for Stella. Stella, who was too smart for her own good, just like his ex-girlfriend. No one would have noticed his ex was missing, if not for that girl and all the publicity her father had generated. His ex-girlfriend had no family and only a few friends; she should have already been forgotten. Instead, people had remembered. On the corner in Brighton where the victim’s apartment building was located, neighbors had taken to leaving wreaths of lilies and ivy, as if she’d been someone important. A fund-raising committee had been organized which allowed a gravesite and a headstone to be purchased. Only last week, the University of Massachusetts, where she’d begun taking classes toward her graduate degree, had named a scholarship in her honor. All because that damned girl had noticed her in a restaurant. All because people thought once she was murdered, she had a story to tell, a worthless story as far as this man was concerned, a woman’s story that had no beginning, only an end. She was nothing more than the bee that was humming nearby, which the man neatly swatted away from his ear as he jogged down Lockhart Avenue.