The Probable Future

“Damn you,” he said, to the bee and to Stella and to the woman he once thought he loved who had caused all this trouble in the first place when she turned him down. It was all their fault, especially the bee, for the damned thing wouldn’t leave him alone. If he wasn’t careful, he’d hear the sound inside his head and it would block out everything else, and then he’d be in trouble. He’d be running blind.

More fire trucks passed him, called in from North Arthur, but he kept on running, faster now, because there were more bees behind him. The bees smelled sweet, they had pollen from the laurels and the red clover coating their bodies, but they sounded terrifying. Before long, there were a hundred, and then two, and then it was a cloud that hummed behind him, keeping pace without effort. There was no way to run from them, but he thought there was, just as he’d thought the woman he’d gotten rid of in Brighton wasn’t anyone worth remembering. He had no idea that bees like dead trees best of all; they always return to the comfort of heartwood gone dry if given a choice, for the wood in those old branches was so soft it was like marrow.

The man who was running was an out-of-towner; he couldn’t know what was up in front of him. Unlike Will Avery, who always avoided the corner where the oak tree stood, since a single sting could kill him on the spot. Unlike Matt Avery, who knew enough about bees to feel comfortable when they swarmed. Matt understood that bees liked order and that unexpected or rowdy behavior would cause them to be agitated. That was one thing nobody wanted, an enraged swarm at his heels, but that’s what the man who couldn’t run fast enough had now.

Jimmy Elliot had helped pull the rowboat ashore. He had begun to chase after the figure he’d seen, but had to stop after a half-length. He stood panting at the edge of Dead Horse Lane, trying his best to catch his breath. He vowed then and there to give up cigarettes. Actually, he made several promises to himself as he stood there on the shore, dripping water, sick with worry and love. Coming onto the shore, he was the only one to have seen someone take off. Just a shadow, just a glimpse, but Jimmy knew how easily it was to slip into the dark; he had robbed several houses in the neighborhood, and even though he’d given that up since he’d been caught and forced into community service, he hadn’t forgotten what it was like. Just because people didn’t bother looking at shadows, that didn’t mean they weren’t there.

It was a shadow who had the bees trailing after him, who jumped into a patch of stinging nettle when Dr. Stewart’s old heap of a car rattled by. This shadowman, itching like crazy and running as fast as he could, had no particular escape route in mind; he’d follow the train tracks back to Boston, where he’d rethink and replan. And then he stopped unexpectedly, despite the bees. He thought he spied an elephant on the corner, gray and brown, bellowing as it loomed up before him. The man who thought nothing of murder, who would have willingly done it twice, stood there immobilized. His breath was hot in his cold, muddy body. He couldn’t possibly be seeing straight. The trunk of the elephant was swinging out toward him. When the last dead section of the oak tree fell, it was dripping with honey; the bees were circling, one cloud, one being, as every bone in the body of the man who’d stopped running was broken, as everything he’d once been unwound in the soft, dark night.

They took Hap Stewart to the hospital in Hamilton, and from there he was flown to Boston for emergency surgery. Stella drove to the city with Dr. Stewart. They didn’t speak on the ride in, but they didn’t have to. Brock Stewart was going eighty miles an hour on I-95 and Stella wished he would go faster. They didn’t bother to find a motel; there was no need for one. Stella was still wearing her wet clothes with Jimmy Elliot’s shirt buttoned all wrong on top. She had water and frogs and weeds in her boots, and her hair stuck up, like feathers. She didn’t care about any of that, nor the fact that she squeaked when she walked, nor the dark water she dripped all over the hospital lobby. They decided to camp out in the waiting room, where Dr. Stewart fell asleep some time near dawn. Stella, on the other hand, must have inherited something from Sarah Sparrow, for like Sarah she could stay awake all night long. No one would ever guess she hadn’t had any sleep. No one would guess how hard she could wish for something.

The surgery lasted eleven hours, and for all that time Stella pictured Hap’s face, his shining eyes, the way he’d been laughing in the moments before the oar had struck him. When Stella saw the surgeon approach, she shook Dr. Stewart awake and he blinked in the fluorescent light of the waiting room while the surgeon told them the good news. Someone else might not consider six months to a year of rehab good news, but Stella and the doctor most certainly did. One of Hap’s legs would be shorter than the other, and he would most certainly walk with a limp, but even that was good news to them.