The Probable Future

“Oh, I know that,” Elinor said. “You’d rather have her living with lions in the zoo.”

“Why should I trust you to take good care of her? You never took care of me. You’re right, I’m not thrilled about her being here, any more than I was to learn about the phone calls you made to her. I want Stella to have more than I did.”

“I see.” Elinor put down her teacup. She felt quite hot, really. Absolutely feverish, which wasn’t uncommon for some people at this time of year. “But you’ve been the perfect mother?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“Good. Because Stella doesn’t say it either.”

This always happened; it went too far too quickly: sticks and stones, needles and pins, words too painful to remove, like a splinter, like thorns, like slivers of glass.

“At least I tried.”

“And of course you were the only one who did.”

Stella had been given a bag of scones by the ever-generous Liza Hull, and she now turned to their table and waved. Stella looked happy, even Jenny could see that. Clearly, she’d been hoodwinked by Unity; she’d been taken in by the birdsong, the pale green spring, the forsythia beginning to open, those branches of undiluted light right outside the window.

The tea house, Stella had been informed on her tour, was the only building other than Cake House to withstand the fire of 1785, when the rest of the town had burned to ashes. Leonie Sparrow had worked at the bakery then, a lucky happenstance, for Leonie was the one who toted leather buckets of water from Hourglass Lake to pour over the roof of the tea house, thereby protecting the shingles and straw from bursting into flames. Leonie enlisted the aid of half a dozen customers, creating a brigade, then went home to Cake House, where she continued to battle the fire long after anyone else would have been overwhelmed by smoke. In doing so, Liza announced, Leonie started the Unity volunteer fire department.

“They call the fire truck Leonie,” Liza told Stella. “They’re about to get a second truck they plan to name Leonie Two.”

“Are you coming up to the house?” Elinor asked Jenny, as she paid the bill.

“I don’t think there’s time.” It was nearly two. Time to go, time to find her way out of town before she, too, was drawn in by the green light and the forsythia. “I think I’ll just go on back to the station. And, Mother,” she added, in a tone that made it seem as though she were about to swallow poison, “do you think it’s possible for us to stop fighting while Stella’s staying with you? For her sake?”

“Of course it’s possible.” It was possible for people to walk on glass, after all, to go without sleep, to judge a liar, to find what had been lost, to dream what they never could have imagined in their waking life.

“Then it’s also possible for you to keep her away from anything to do with Rebecca Sparrow while she’s here. I don’t want her hearing all those ridiculous stories.”

Jenny got up from the table, in a hurry to leave. If she missed the train, she’d be trapped. If she missed it, she’d have to walk up Lockhart Avenue to Cake House, making the turn by the big oak tree that some people swore was the oldest in the Commonwealth. She grabbed for her purse and her raincoat. That was when the second knife fell to the floor. Hearing it bang against the hardwood, Elinor felt her heart lift.

Drop it twice and she’s bound to stay.

Let Jenny do her best to avoid the path where Rebecca Sparrow pulled the arrows from her side. Let her kiss her daughter good-bye and hurry to the train station, ignoring the trill of the peepers, avoiding the snowdrops on the lawn. Let her run down Main Street, if she must, to catch the three o’clock train to Boston. Let her try to stay away, but it was clear enough now that she couldn’t run fast enough. It was absolutely certain. Birds always did come home to roost. Before too long, Jenny Sparrow would be back once more.

II.

THE WEEK BEGAN with warm weather, too warm for the wool sweater Stella had chosen to wear for her first day at Unity High School. For the first time Stella wished she hadn’t skipped a grade. Perhaps if she were enrolling in the Hathaway Elementary School, grades K–8, fear would not be rising in her mouth as it was now, a black stone she couldn’t seem to spit out as she walked along the lane. This was the same route her mother had taken when she was in high school. Stella wondered if there had been blue jays swooping across the lane back then; if there had been the scent of bay laurel, planted by the colonists to protect against lightning, growing wild ever since.

Today, there were huge cumulus clouds in the hazy sky, and Stella felt the sultry dampness in the air; it was already frizzing her hair. Everything at Cake House was faintly wet, the blankets and the carpeting. All night long, Stella had heard the peepers on the shore and the whisper of reeds. She’d remembered that her science teacher at the Rabbit School had told the class that a cloud was a floating lake. Just think of it: all that water contained above rooftops and trees, a lake above our heads. Stella had lain in her bed, with its sodden bedsheets, trying her best to sleep in her new room. She had not been given her mother’s bedroom, but instead she slept in an alcove on the second floor, dusty, closed off for years, but with a pretty view of the lake. Still, with all those peepers calling, it had been impossible to doze off. At a little after midnight, Stella had gone downstairs, to the phone in the parlor, where she’d called Juliet Aronson.