The Probable Future

As Elinor Sparrow examined the vial of chalky penicillin, she realized something about her house. Cake House was even more silent than the garden was without bees. She had hurt their feelings, and she hadn’t even known it. She had been caught in some sort of web that spun days into months, months into years. She understood exactly where the curse had begun. It was the damage she’d done, it was the way she’d turned away, it was the child left to fend for herself.

Jenny was half-asleep when Elinor came upstairs with her medicine.

“Take this and hurry up,” Elinor said.

Jenny was so surprised to have her mother ministering to her that she quickly did as she was told.

“Now get out of bed and come with me.”

Jenny threw on her bathrobe and followed, barefoot and confused. She thought of a dozen possibilities for her mother’s sudden interest: the lake had overflowed, the pipes in the house had burst, the wasps in the attic had broken through the plasterboard. Surely, it must be a true emergency for her mother to think of her.

“I haven’t been paying attention to things.” They had stopped in the pantry, so that Elinor could fetch the sticky cake. Ants had crawled onto the plate, and the smell of the brandy was overwhelming. “Now I have to give this to the bees. I have to ask for their forgiveness and invite them to come back.” She looked right at Jenny, her tangled hair, her wary expression. “I hope it’s not too late.”

Elinor took the cake outside. Before she had taken two steps, a bee had appeared to hover above her in the air.

“Was Dr. Stewart the one who told you about the bees?” Jenny was feverish, and being on her feet made her dizzy. She stayed on the porch and leaned against the railing. “I told him a secret, and he went and told you.”

“Of course he did. Now let’s hope it works.”

As for Elinor, she felt light-headed as well. Like a fool, she had thrown something away, and now she was trying her best to get it back. The cake she was holding smelled like spring, a heady mix of pollen and honey, lilacs and brandy. Dozens of bees had begun to follow Elinor across the lawn. Perhaps there was a cure for some things: what was ruined, what was lost, what was all but thrown away.

“Please come into my garden.”

Elinor pushed open the gate and the bees followed her inside, but Jenny stood where she was, stubborn, unforgiving.

“Come with me,” Elinor said to her daughter.

By then, hundreds of bees were flying over Lockhart Avenue, skimming over the thorn bushes on Dead Horse Lane, buzzing through the forsythia and the laurel.

Jenny was hot from her fever and cold from the chill of the day. She realized that her mother hadn’t thought to recommend that she put on shoes; Elinor wasn’t that sort of mother, no matter what she might pretend. Jenny’s toes had a tingling feeling, the sign of sure disaster. But which way was adversity? She could walk forward or could take a step back, or she could stay exactly where she was, unmoving, which is what she did on that day of a hundred bees. She did not make a move.

Despite Elinor’s failed attempt to reconnect with her daughter, Elinor then began to turn more often to Brock Stewart for advice. If a decision needed to be made, she telephoned for his opinion, not that she’d necessarily follow his suggestions. Why, she could spend hours arguing with him, debating an issue, worrying a point. It got so Dr. Stewart’s family, his wife, Adele, who was one of the Hapgood cousins, and his son, David, knew when the phone rang at odd hours it probably wasn’t a patient or the hospital over in Hamilton. It was Elinor Sparrow. Why the doctor wasn’t more put out by her nattering away at him no one understood for certain.

The way Elinor saw it, at least there was one place she could turn for a truthful answer. At least there was one honest man in town. All these years later, with Adele gone, and poor David’s young wife gone as well, Brock Stewart was still the only company Elinor could tolerate, except for her dog, Argus. Tim Early, the vet in town, was amazed the wolfhound had made it into his twentieth year, unheard-of for the breed. Dr. Early insisted that Argus was simply refusing to die as long as his mistress was alive. He was that loyal, Dr. Early joked, faithful to the end.

If Elinor had been a more forthcoming person, she might have laughed and said, Well, then, that means the poor boy doesn’t have long, but instead she merely shot back, I assume you’re still charging as much as you always have, intimidating Tim Early the way she always did, so that he threw in a bottle of Pet Tab vitamins for Argus, on the house.

In fact, Elinor had become ill just when the rose she’d last grafted seemed to be thriving. She had taken one of Rebecca’s old roses, a variety found only in Unity that was said to wither if gazed upon by human eyes, and crossed it with a magenta climbing hybrid she had been developing for several years. At present, the new rose didn’t look like much. Should any thief wander into her garden, he would surely bypass the scraggly shrub near the stone wall, protected from storms and scorching heat, in favor of what were clearly the showier specimens, so carefully pruned, so worthless to Elinor. Whether or not Elinor would last to see this crossbreed, she had no idea. Brock had refused to give her odds, even when she pressed him for statistics.