The Probable Future

Ever since the accident, Elinor had wondered if Dr. Stewart’s lie had forever bound them together, tied their fate into one strand with invisible thread. She remembered exactly how cold the day was. How the doctor’s breath had turned to frost as he lied. It pained him, she could tell, but he lied anyway. There was snow, the swirling sort that never stuck to the ground, and Elinor went through the snow into the garden, where she could feel the weight of the lie the doctor had told, the lie she had been living when she was so certain she was the one person in town who could divine the truth. She left it to the doctor to tell Jenny, even though it was her duty to do so. Elinor was in so much pain, she couldn’t think straight. She was bleeding from the inside out, and unlike Stella, Elinor had never been able to stand the sight of blood, especially her own.

Even now, she couldn’t bring herself to examine the red marks left by cutting back the roses. If Stella hadn’t been there to see to her wounds, Elinor would have surely ignored them, such was her habit and her inclination, even though she knew whenever someone ignored what hurt her most, she’d wind up in grave circumstances. Ignore love, she now understood, and a person might bleed forever, even if no one could tell.

Elinor wondered why this boy, the doctor’s grandson, was hanging around, grinning, eating peanut butter. The motive might be water samples and fish excrement, but it might be something more. So often love was invisible; sometimes only two people could see it, and everyone else was blind. The women in the Sparrow family never looked before they leaped; they were easily pulled into the sort of desire that wouldn’t let go. Unless Elinor was mistaken, Stella was wearing lipstick and some sort of black gunk lining her eyes. Well, the girl was growing up, wasn’t she? And even if Elinor didn’t see Hap and Stella as well suited, who knew where their friendship might lead. The cat, after all, was most definitely away. Jenny phoned every night, but her attention was taken up with Will Avery. He had returned, trapped in Boston by a court order; he had nowhere else to stay and Jenny hadn’t the heart to turn him away. Well, Jenny certainly wasn’t close enough to hear the bell chiming on her daughter’s bracelet as Stella went out walking into the rain with Hap Stewart. She thought she still had a child as a daughter, but she had something entirely different, someone who had turned thirteen.

As Stella walked along the driveway with Hap, she wished she could predict the weather. She wished she could stay underwater the way Constance Sparrow was said to have done, in which case she could take water samples from the depths of Hourglass Lake. How much better it would be if she could ease someone’s pain, or find what was lost, or tell a liar from an honest man. Instead, all she could see was that Hap Stewart would break his neck when he was thrown by a horse. She had seen this shadow the first day she met him, but she hoped it would disappear. Now as she walked closer beside him, shivering in the rain, she looked at him again. His death was still there.

Stella had already seen that Cynthia Elliot, who worked at the tea house and was two grades ahead, would die of pneumonia in her eighty-second year, and that Mademoiselle Marcus, who taught French I and French II, would be felled by a stroke. She had seen that the wiseguy who had stood behind Jimmy Elliot and teased her in the school cafeteria would be in a car wreck when he was a freshman in college. The way she saw the future of such people was as real to Stella as anything else in this world: a mockingbird, a table, a chair, the smile on Hap Stewart’s face as the rain fell down on them.

There was no way that Stella was going to allow Hap to be thrown from a horse. He was her only friend in town.

“Do you like horses?” Stella asked as they walked along. Having pulled their wet socks and muddy boots back on, there was no need to avoid the mud puddles in the driveway.

“Does this have something to do with the dead horse in the lake?” Hap asked. “You know I don’t believe in that.”

“Just wondered if you liked to go riding. That’s all.”

“Nope.” Hap grinned. “I’m not exactly a cowboy. Anything else you’d like to know about me?” The rain was pouring down now, but neither one cared.

“Maybe. Let me think.” Perhaps she should try Juliet’s test. Perhaps she should feel more about Hap; he was perfect for her, after all. Anyone could see that. “Who would you most want with you if you were stranded on a desert island?”

“Living or dead?” Hap said thoughtfully.

“Either.”

“Male or female?”

“Either.” Stella felt sillier by the moment. Her hair was wringing wet and her clothes were drenched. They were passing by the lake where the rain fell like stones into the still water. They stopped by the shore to watch as lily pads floated by.