The Probable Future

“Because I hear from Henry Elliot about Will pretty much every day.”

At this point, he would have liked to kill Will. Matt made a note to himself: erase this most irritating word, this vilest of names, from his vocabulary, starting now.

“Oh, Henry. I work with his daughter, Cynthia. She’s sweet, but mixed up. I’m so glad I’m not a teenager.”

Matt, on the other hand, fervently wished that she was. He wished he could reel back time so that he’d been the one who’d gone inside Cake House and Will had been left in the yard, crouched beside the forsythia. He wished he could go back to the moment when she came across the lawn toward them, barefoot, her long hair tangled from sleep.

“Rosemary Sparrow could run faster than any man in town,” Matt said. Immediately, he was embarrassed by his non sequitur. He tended to do this—use his storehouse of historical information to lead him away from anything resembling emotions or regret. He was terrible at conversation, a little better if he could recite a few facts.

“Excuse me?” The rain was falling in earnest now, but Jenny still felt hot. Daffodil rain could do that to you. It could turn you inside out. Jenny unbuttoned her jacket and fanned herself. “Did you say she could run?”

“She was a relative of yours. A great-great-great-great-great. Revolutionary War. She could outrace a deer, that’s what people said, at any rate. When the British were sweeping through, she ran all the way to North Arthur. She got there in time to save close to a hundred boys, who would have been ambushed by the British, and who took off for the woods instead to do a little ambushing themselves.”

“Wow.” Jenny laughed. “How do you know all that?”

“The library. Good old Mrs. Gibson.”

“Mrs. Gibson! I think I still owe her money for an overdue book. I never returned anything in those days. God, I was thoughtless. She probably has me down on a most-wanted list.”

“No. Not Mrs. Gibson. She’s a softy. She doesn’t have a list.”

The clock on the tower at Town Hall chimed, and they both turned, startled. Six o’clock. Darkness was falling through the leaves of the plane trees, along with the rain. Yellow rain, light rain, the daffodil rain that made people do foolish things.

“You should come over for dinner sometime.”

From the look on his face, Jenny wondered if she’d said something wrong. He appeared panic-stricken, as though he might turn and run himself, faster, perhaps, than Rosemary Sparrow.

“You don’t have to. I wouldn’t be offended if you didn’t want to.” She offered him a polite out. “Not many people are fond of my mother. I understand that. Believe me.”

“I am. I’m very fond of her.”

“You are? Well, then, some time next week?”

Matt nodded and headed off across the green.

“Next week,” he said, having at last avoided including his brother’s name in a sentence.

He walked right through puddles and didn’t even notice. His boots were soaking, but what did he care? He had left the window of his truck open and now his files would be damp, but he wasn’t concerned about that; he’d dry the papers later, beside the stove.

Jenny stood up and waved. Unlike dusk in Boston, always so slow to envelop the streets, here in Unity there was a curtain of night. One minute you were standing in daylight and the next you were completely in the dark.

“Check out the memorial behind you,” Matt called as he got into his truck. “It’s my favorite.”

He honked his horn as he drove away, and the sound echoed across the green. Jenny felt as though she were drowning somehow. What a strange and rainy place this was. How green and dark and quiet. She turned to inspect the monument she had been using as a bench. She had never once bothered to look at it, not once in all the years she lived here. The past was the past, it was what she had always wanted to run away from. It was the future she’d been interested in, so she’d never noticed the angel carved into the black granite; she never knew that the angel she had seen so many years ago on the morning of her thirteenth birthday had been here all along, the solid twin of what before had only been a dream.

II.

THE CLINIC in North Arthur was on Hopewell Street, at the very edge of town where the urban landscape blended into muddy, useless fields, overplowed and left to wither. The only other building for nearly half a mile was a barnlike edifice used to store the county’s school buses. Dr. Stewart wondered if the North Arthur town council had chosen this location as a way of keeping disease at bay, or perhaps they merely wanted to hide the fact that many of the patients were farmworkers who arrived to pick strawberries in June and apples in October. All the same, the clinic had a first-rate staff and a good, level parking lot, something Dr. Stewart especially appreciated, as there was always plenty of space for his huge, old Lincoln Town Car.