The Probable Future

Was a blue rose any more a fantastic notion than the idea that Elinor’s granddaughter, whose first thirteen years she had missed entirely, now helped out in the garden on sunny afternoons, laughing at the birds who followed closely as she raked mulch, waving away bees that drifted through the damp April air. If the blooms did turn out to be blue, Elinor would feel that she had completed something: a single act that had left its mark, that’s what she wanted. Another, more impatient woman might have cut open one of the buds on the hybrid and taken a peek, but Elinor knew that a blossom that hadn’t yet opened was an untrustworthy measure. Yellow climbers could appear to be orange, snowy floribundas might be streaked with a pink tint that would disappear as soon the petals unfolded in the light of day.

We know what we need when we get it, Brock Stewart had once said. Elinor understood this to be true whenever she heard Jenny in the hallway, when she looked up from her work in the garden to see a light burning in the kitchen. She knew it when the kettle on the back burner of the stove whistled, when the back door opened and shut, when the house she lived in wasn’t empty. She hadn’t understood how alone she’d been until she was no longer alone. She had cut herself off, not unlike those invisible roses which could not bear the weight of humankind.

Elinor had begun to seriously doubt every one of her decisions, and this uncertainty had led her to do a very foolish thing; she had allowed Dr. Stewart to drive her to the hospital in Hamilton for her most recent oncology visit. There had been one condition: he was not to discuss her case with her oncologist, Dr. Meyer. He was not to treat her like a patient once they crossed over the Unity town line.

You know me well enough to know what I’ll do if you ask me not to butt into your life, Dr. Stewart had said.

And, yet, when Elinor came into the hall after her appointment, there he was, conferring with Dr. Meyer. Hopeless, she’d heard someone say. Or was it hapless? Or was it blessed, or was it some entirely new language, one she had no prospect of ever understanding?

You promised me you wouldn’t treat me like a patient, she had said to Brock Stewart when they left the hospital. She was so angry and so disappointed by his untrustworthy behavior, she could hardly catch her breath. You heartless creature. How could you lie to me?

Maybe that had been what was said in the hallway. Heartless.

I don’t lie, Brock Stewart had said, wounded.

What had surprised Elinor most of all was that she hadn’t seen his deception. Gauging an honest man had come so easily to her, like breathing in and breathing out. But now breathing itself hurt, and she’d been blindsided by Brock, just as she had been by Saul. She might have taken the train home, she might have never spoken to the doctor again, if she hadn’t been so damned exhausted. To salvage some of her pride, she walked ahead to the Lincoln, got in, and refused to look at him.

I never said I wouldn’t talk to her, Brock Stewart reminded her when he got in the car. He had turned the key, but he let the old Lincoln idle. You know me well enough to know I could never do anything to hurt you. But you are my business, Elly.

She knew this was true as soon as he said it. It had been true for some time, but she had ignored it. They knew each other better than they knew anyone else in this world, but they had never before admitted what they meant to each other. Elinor didn’t look at the doctor on the ride home, but when the Lincoln pulled up in front of Cake House, she turned to him.

How dare you give me hope at this point?

Ever since, her optimism had surfaced unexpectedly and unbidden, at a time when surely it would have been far wiser to have given up completely. Anyone would understand if she’d chosen to draw a quilt over her head. If she’d closed her eyes and taken a double dosage of the morphine she had saved for the evening. She should have burned anything that smacked of hope in a red-hot fire; she should have swept up all the ashes. Instead, she let it rise up within her. She let it wake her in the morning, and help her to sleep at night. She let it fall down in the rain, and wash down the green lawn into mud puddles where the snapping turtles laid their eggs at this time of year, as hopeful as she was, eager for the arrival of what they cared about most in this world.

AS FOR JENNY, no matter what she did in Unity, she was bombarded by two simultaneous sets of images—whatever she was currently doing, washing the dishes in the old soapstone sink, for instance, was overlaid with something she had done years earlier, climbing out the window above that same sink at midnight to meet Will, or arguing with her mother, or watching her father rake leaves into huge piles near the stone wall one brilliant autumn afternoon.