The Probable Future

From up on the porch, there was the sound of voices, then laughter and a door slamming. Stella and Jimmy Elliot arrived.

“He had meningitis when he was eight months old,” the doctor said of Jimmy. “I didn’t think he’d make it. I took Henry Elliot aside and I told him he’d better prepare for the worst, but here he is on your front porch.”

“Creating havoc,” Elinor said, for Jimmy seemed to spend all his time at Cake House. Why, he’d brought Elinor a dinner tray the other evening and he hadn’t even bothered to knock on her door. He’d called her Granny and put a vase of flowers on her dresser.

“Living his life,” the doctor said. “Good for Jimmy Elliot. Why should he walk when he can run? Maybe he remembers how close he came. He’s surely not going to let anything pass him by while he’s here.”

The doctor had been wrong about Jimmy the way Stella had been wrong about Hap. She thought he’d be thrown from a horse and break his neck, and now he was safe at home, working with a physical therapist from Monroe and watching TV. He was on the phone all the time to that girlfriend of his in Boston, so Dr. Stewart assumed he was improving each day.

“That’s the age for it.” Elinor remembered Jenny talking to Will constantly, as if she couldn’t be pried away from the sound of his voice. She remembered the way she and the doctor kept their phones on their pillows, so it seemed they were together, even when they were not. “They’ve got a lot to say. For a while, at least.”

“Like us.”

Brock Stewart thought of how, when Hap first came to live with him, he used to bring the boy to pick violets, up on the hill behind Cake House, because Hap’s mother had done so. They trekked to the hillside every spring, until Hap had let him know it was unnecessary to do so. Grandpa, it’s okay. You don’t have to keep bringing me here. I remember this. I remember her.

“Your horse is in the field.” She had dreamed of that horse, once or twice. She had seen it running, in this world or the next. “Or so you say. But where do we go?”

“I used to think there was a plan, a rough plan, but a plan all the same,” the doctor admitted. “Now, I believe there are a thousand plans. Every breath, every decision, influences the plan, expands it, shortens it, twists it all around. It’s always changing. Those of us lucky enough to make it through the multitude of possible diseases and accidents get old. We get tired. We close our eyes.”

“And then? Where are we then?”

Silly to ask him as though he knew, but in fact the doctor didn’t hesitate. He took Elinor’s hand and placed it on his chest, in the place where he knew his heart to be.

“There.”

Elinor smiled and thought At last. At last someone had told her the truth. She could see it and feel it as the days bled into each other, until they were dreams. That was the way time passed now, so that yesterday was the same thing as today, even though a week had passed. They were still in the garden, even though seven days had gone by. There were weeds in the beds and chinks missing from the stone wall. The dark was sifting down.

“It’s beautiful,” Brock Stewart said of the garden Rebecca had begun long ago. Once a man started crying, he could never get away from it; it became a habit he couldn’t break. The doctor had started that morning when Liza lost her baby, and now he barely noticed anymore. He could stand in a hospital corridor looking at his notes, and not even realize what had happened until the letters were swimming, the ink dripping down the page. He could be in a garden and believe it was raining, until he noticed nothing was coming down from the sky.

“It will be in ruin soon enough,” Elinor assured him. “Keep your eye on it.”

“Still beautiful. Even then.”

Elinor was resting on the bench the doctor had given her as a present, but now she could barely sit up. She shifted and leaned her head against the doctor. She could hear the steady rhythm of his heartbeat.

“You were right,” she said. “I’m tired.”

There were thirteen sparrows on the stone wall; thirteen beds where the roses grew. Time had passed so quickly here. Elinor had turned around twice and it had all passed her by. But at least those iron shoes had been kicked off, the lead was out of her bones. She was drifting, she knew it, and she didn’t even try to stop it from happening. She felt extremely light, as though she had air in her veins rather than her cold, frozen blood. She was exhausted, but the air smelled so sweet. The fresh green air of May.

Stella had insisted that her grandmother would live until winter, she had envisioned snow, but Brock Stewart knew there were no guarantees. He’d seen it with his own eyes: people he thought would survive lasted only days. Those he believed hadn’t a chance to see morning went on for years. He knew that Elinor was growing weaker, that was a fact, too weak to wait for winter. Some days she dozed in the garden until it was nearly dark, the pearly milk light of May falling down on them.