The Probable Future

The reporter who’d followed them wouldn’t back off. He waylaid them in the hair products aisle. “I just want to talk to you.”

“No, you don’t.” Jenny stepped in front of Stella. “You want to harass us.”

The pharmacy owner, an elderly gentleman whom Stella recognized from her past thievery at the makeup counter, came to shoo the reporter out of the store.

“Vulture,” he said.

And not the only one. When they finally did get home, taking a long, circuitous route through the Public Garden, then up Charles Street, there were more than a dozen messages on the phone machine from various news organizations, including two talk shows based in New York which regularly interviewed people about their personal tragedies.

“The phone is ringing again,” Stella said, her tone anxious when they at last sat down to a pitiful dinner of canned soup and burned toast.

It had done so ever since they got home, with one prying individual or another at the end of the line. The last call had come from Marguerite Flann, who, upon considering the magnitude of the situation and reviewing her options, now recommended that Stella not return to the Rabbit School for the rest of the term. For the child’s own good, of course, although it was true that Mrs. Flann herself was getting call after call from the newspapers, and such publicity wasn’t exactly approved of by the school.

Now, when they couldn’t bear the notion of one more nasty call, Jenny got up and unplugged the phone from the wall. “There. It’s stopped ringing.”

They both laughed, but Stella soon grew somber. “I’m going to fail math now. And if they don’t want me at Rabbit, where will I go?”

“We’ll think of something,” Jenny assured her. But, in fact, she had no idea of what to do next. There was no school in Boston, public school or private, where Stella would be safe from conjecture and gossip. Already, there had been stories on the six o’clock newscasts on every local station. At eleven, Channel Twelve had footage of Jenny and Stella sneaking down the alley behind the Rabbit School, running away, as though they were criminals themselves.

That night, Jenny fell asleep in a chair by the window. She had been thinking of the model of Cake House her father had made for her. She’d been remembering the stories he told, how he’d said that the cherry trees in the woods all around Unity had grown from stray stones dropped by crows, and the peach trees that were naturalized all over town had washed ashore after a shipwreck. Now when Jenny dreamed it was of a tightrope, set between two great trees, one cherry, one peach, both abloom with thousands of white blossoms, set into their branches like stars. She dreamed of falling a very great distance, down in a spiral, unable to stop herself. She woke just before she hit the ground, in a panic, her heart pounding. For once, she had experienced her very own dream, not someone else’s. She knew exactly how to interpret it. She knew just where it led.

Outside the street was pitch black, except for the amber pools on the concrete wherever there was a streetlamp. As soon as she plugged the phone in again, it began to ring. Jenny answered and was greeted by the reporter who had followed them into the pharmacy. He was from one of those dreadful newspapers that printed nothing but trash, still he must have thought himself to be extremely persuasive, for he was trying his best to sweet-talk Jenny into an interview, wanting her daughter’s reaction to the news that her father had committed a brutal murder. Jenny’s reaction was to hang up on him. He called again. This time Jenny picked up, but she didn’t speak. Unfortunately, he did.

“I’m going to get that little daughter of yours to talk to me. You can count on that.”

Jenny hung up, then reached for the receiver to dial out before he had a chance to call back again. She’d have to have their phone number unlisted. She’d have to put a new lock on their door. But there was no time for that now. Jenny had already decided what she must do first. It was late now, the hour when the moon was in the center of the sky, when the pigeons were finally silent and daylight seemed like a foreign country, hundreds of miles away. The street outside was completely empty when Jenny dialed the number of Cake House, which she still knew by heart. Amazing how after so many years she remembered that this was the week when the forsythia bloomed, each branch filling with radiant bursts of light. How odd that she could recall the timetable of the train to Unity, odder still that she was able to recognize her mother’s voice as soon as Elinor picked up the phone, as though it had been only yesterday when they had last spoken, as though they’d been talking to each other all along.