The Probable Future

All along Dr. Stewart had been preparing for the worst, and when the surgeon left them, Brock seemed weakened. He sat back down in one of the plastic waiting room chairs, and he cried, the way he’d been known to when making rounds. The doctor’s son, David, had been away on business and he arrived straight from the airport, shaken, having protected himself from the realm of sorrow ever since his wife’s death. Now he collapsed in his father’s arms.

“He’s still our Hap. Six months of rehab at Hamilton Hospital. And be prepared when you see him—he’s got a metal halo screwed into his head.”

“Jesus. I was in Baltimore.” The girl with the dark hair who was sitting with them looked vaguely familiar. “Is that Jenny Sparrow?” Hap’s father asked, confused, for he’d gone to school with Jenny and he knew she should be as old as he was. Ancient, at the moment. Worn out and useless and about a hundred years older than the girl on the bench.

“Her daughter,” the doctor said. “Elinor’s granddaughter.”

“Was it a broken neck?”

“Thankfully, no. But almost as bad. A spinal injury.” The doctor did not say that if the oar had hit him half a centimeter to the right or left Hap would have been paralyzed. “The halo’s going to drive him crazy.”

Stella had decided it didn’t matter if Hap wasn’t quite as tall; it didn’t matter if his posture was sloped or if he limped, he still had his other best feature. She excused herself and phoned Juliet Aronson from a pay phone. Juliet hadn’t been to a hospital since her father died, she was phobic about such places, but when Stella explained what had happened, she took a taxi and was there in under twenty minutes. When Juliet came flying down the hallway, Stella didn’t recognize her friend. Juliet hadn’t bothered with makeup; she was wearing a nightgown underneath her raincoat and had on plastic flip-flops. This was the way love walked in, barely dressed, confused, panic-stricken, overcome, not caring what anyone thought or what they believed.

“God, you look terrible,” Stella said, as she led her Juliet down the hallway.

“You look worse.” Juliet laughed out a noise that sounded broken.

Stella threw her arms around her friend; they hugged each other, then Juliet backed away.

“You’re soaking wet.”

“He has a halo. One of those metal braces that screw right into your skull. It’s his spine that was hurt.”

Juliet’s face was tight, but she was pretty without all her makeup; without her bravado, she didn’t seem any older then Stella. “I don’t care what he has if he still has his integrity,” she said. “That’s his best feature.”

In the postop room Hap Stewart was breathing slowly, deeply adrift inside the half-sleep of anesthesia which was only beginning to wear off. He thought he was in a boat floating on the black water. He thought there were mosquitoes in the air, and all around there was the steady droning of bees. He thought a beautiful girl leaned down close and whispered, I’ll always be here. It was the voice from the telephone, the person who knew him inside out, Juliet Aronson. He smiled just to know she was there. A day starts out in one direction and ends in ways no one could imagine, with halos, with true love, with bees, with a swirling mass of stars below the fluorescent light, with good fortune where it was least expected to be found. Hap Stewart knew exactly who he was for one lucid moment, and that was more than could be said for most people. Before he sank back into morphine and sleep, he said Lucky out loud, as if that single word was his prayer and his protection, well worth repeating every day of his life.

II.

“SHE’S NOT DREAMING about snow anymore.”

Matt was working out in the marsh, and Jenny had come to bring him lunch. She no longer had to buy tube after tube of titanium white now that her mother had moved on with her dreams.

“What is it now?” Matt asked.

“I think she’s dreaming her life. I’m not going to have any choice but to know her.”

They were only a few yards away from the spot where Constance Sparrow waited for her husband when he was at sea. Constance could stay underwater for nearly twenty minutes, and was often called upon to search for drowned sailors, each time hoping the man she searched for wasn’t her own husband. She set out a lantern as a beacon to sailors; later, it became the Unity lighthouse, out on a line of black rocks. It was not far from here that the Good Duck had run aground, many year earlier, when the marsh was a deep harbor, perhaps the reason there were hundreds of peach trees growing up through the reeds. Or perhaps this abundance had been caused by women in love, who’d come to the marsh to make one final plea, with their peach stones tied on strings around their necks.