The Probable Future

What’s so funny?

Matt had forgotten to drop the shovel when they took off running and was still holding on to it, his grip so tight blisters were already rising. Matt Avery couldn’t quite believe he’d actually confronted Elinor Sparrow. He hoped when he went to bed that night he wouldn’t find an onion stabbed through with pins beneath his pillow. He knew, after all, there were those in town who insisted such would surely be the fate of anyone who crossed Elinor: the gift of a small token that was said to be accompanied by seven years’ bad luck.

Matt threw down the shovel and sat beside his brother, who was still chuckling, amused and terribly pleased with himself.

Come on. Matt was always the last to know anything. Tell me. What’s so funny?

Will had opened his hand in front of his brother’s face. There in his sweaty palm was one of Rebecca Sparrow’s arrowheads. There was the line marked by blood.

Matt had stood up, furious. You bastard. Will couldn’t remember having ever heard his brother curse before. You made a liar out of me.

Matt took off, cutting through a weedy patch of lawn gone to seed, deaf to Will’s pleas for him to grow up and stop being such a nitwit. What was wrong with telling a lie if it served your purpose? Will was ready to share the arrowhead, if that was what Matt wanted. He was amenable if Matt wanted to claim to have been beside him when he stole the damned thing, if Matt wanted to share in the glory. But Matt never turned around. He collected his sleeping bag and lantern from the far side of the lake, and he was long gone by the time Jenny came to look for Will.

She was barefoot when she came down from the house, flushed from the fight she’d just had with her mother. Their arguments were stark, brittle things, with the insults hurled falling like bombs. As soon as Will heard Jenny approach, he slipped the arrowhead into his pocket. She might as well go on thinking the best of him. When she sat down beside him, on that green March day, her skin overheated, her hair still tangled, Will saw that she was beautiful in a way he hadn’t noticed before.

If my mother hurt you, she’ll be sorry, Jenny told him.

She couldn’t hurt me if she tried, Will had scoffed, his shoulder aching. All the same, Jenny’s concern had moved him; he wanted more of it. She was interesting in a way the other girls in town who chased after him simply were not.

Did you dream about an angel with dark hair last night? And there was a bee and a woman who wasn’t afraid of anything. Not even the deepest water.

Will felt mesmerized. He heard the chorus of the wood thrush, the peepers in the mud. Jenny’s looks were exotic for Unity, the long black hair that floated down her back like lake water, the dark, bottomless eyes. Even Will Avery wasn’t immune to spring fever. He could feel it creeping up on him, clouding his reason. Everything looked iridescent and new in the glittery sunlight.

That was my dream, he said.

I knew it. Jenny was delighted. I knew it was you.

Jenny flicked back her black hair. She smelled like verbena and sleep. Will understood that she trusted him, she believed in him, and the very idea infatuated him. Sitting there beside her, Will temporarily forgot who he was and what he was capable of.

And now, all these years later, he had begun to wonder if it wasn’t the angel Jenny spoke of that he sometimes saw in the dark, waiting on street corners, standing over his bed. It was a hallucination, surely, but one that seemed to follow him around these days. This vision was apparent to him in the bar of the Hornets’ Nest most every night. It was the reason he was drinking too much on the occasion of Stella’s birthday, already on his second Johnnie Walker by the time the salads arrived.

This was one of those nights when he was sure to wind up teary-eyed. Time had passed; his little girl a teenager who would surely see him for who he was before long. Stella was busy playing with the bell on her bracelet; she seemed moody, not at all herself, although the fact that she was distracted allowed Will the opportunity to flirt with the waitress, a pretty girl who was clearly too young for him. Probably a graduate student who would expect him to have long conversations about things that mattered to her, her future, for instance, or her opinion. Seduction, Will had found lately, was so much damn work. It was far easier when someone knew you, when you could let down your guard.

“Does your mother ask about me much?” he inquired of Stella.

Stella shook her wrist. The little bell on her new bracelet made a cool, metallic sound. “Not much.”

“No?”

Her father seemed wounded, so Stella quickly backtracked. “Well, sometimes. But it’s not like we communicate or anything. I can’t talk to her the way I can talk to you.”