The Probable Future

“Hey, girl,” Dr. Stewart said when at last Elinor opened her eyes.

She had been dreaming that she was walking down the lane, under a bower of green. Then she saw Dr. Stewart and he looked so handsome, the way he looked when he came back to town after medical school, that she wondered if she had woken at all.

“Hardly a girl,” she was lucid enough to remind him of that.

Elinor’s eyes were filmy; her vision was failing and she felt a weakness in her legs. She thought about the various ways in which a flower faded, some petal by petal, others all at once, torn by wind or circumstance, or merely by time.

“How’s our blue rose?” the doctor asked.

“Not ours. Mine. The burlap’s the only thing that’s yours.”

Brock Stewart laughed.

“If you really want to know, I feel sorry for the poor thing,” Elinor went on. “All wrapped up that way. I’m starting to think there’s no point in being a rose if you’re tied up and covered with burlap.”

If he wasn’t a doctor, if he hadn’t seen it many times before, would Brock Stewart have noticed the darkness around her eyes, the faint plumlike tinge? Would he have seen that her skin was sallow, truly yellow in full light. By now, he knew, the pain in her spine must be unbearable; he’d checked with the pharmacist on how often she filled the prescription for morphine. Perhaps that was why she had been sleeping on the ground, with milkweed pods scattered all around her, dreaming of roads that led home.

“You wanted a blue rose,” Brock said. “Didn’t you? Wasn’t that the whole point?”

“Doesn’t everyone want what they cannot have?”

“Here’s what I think: it’s the quest that matters. Just my humble opinion.”

Elinor laughed. “You’re not humble. You’re a know-it-all.”

“Me?” the doctor said. “Know-nothing’s more like it. Don’t know the first thing about roses, so don’t ask me what I think.”

Elinor was gazing at Cake House. At this hour of the day, the white painted wood took on a blue hue as the sky darkened directly above.

“I made a wrong turn somewhere,” Elinor said.

She thought about her dream, the long green road, how single-minded she’d been all these years. Now, she could force a thousand blue roses into existence, just when it wasn’t at all what she wanted.

As for Brock Stewart, he couldn’t even remember when the way he felt about her had begun. Was it the day he walked up the ice-covered path to tell her about Saul? Or the day after, when he’d found her in the garden once more, barefoot and frozen right through, so that when he brought her home and sat her in front of the fire, the ice on her clothes melted into puddles on the floor? Was is yesterday or twenty years ago? “I’d be lost without you.”

“Well,” Elinor said sharply, “you’d better get used to it.”

It sounded as though rain had begun, but it wasn’t any sort of rain Elinor could identify. Not rose rain, or fish rain, or stone rain, not daffodil rain, only the sound of water. It was the doctor, crying. It was all but over, now, now that she knew what she wanted.

“Let’s have a secret.” Elinor could feel the heat of the stone wall against her back. She could feel the little earthworms in the soil and the roots of her garden beneath her, a plaiting so interwoven it would take an ax to cut through. “Let’s have something no one else in the world knows about.”

Dr. Stewart wiped his eyes with the back of his hands. Ever since Liza Hull’s baby’s death, he’d stopped trying to hold back his tears. Once or twice he’d cried in front of the residents at the clinic. They’d all turned away, embarrassed, from what they clearly perceived to be an old man’s failing. He’d kept quiet then, but what he’d really wanted to say to all those new residents, so blindly sure of themselves, so convinced that the only way to cure was to deny certain parts of themsevles: This is what it is. Watch me. This is what it’s like to be human in this world.

“We’ll move the rose,” Elinor had decided.

Brock laughed. “Why is it that your ideas always include physical labor and a wheelbarrow?”

But once they began, it wasn’t very difficult to dig up the little rosebush. They lifted the seedling, still in its burlap, set it in the cart, and then it was up to the doctor to push the wheelbarrow. Trout lilies and trillium were blooming and the woods they approached were dark, except in those rare places where the sunlight came through strong as a spotlight, illuminating swirling mayflies and silvery dust motes. The scent in the air was of mud; there were layers of it: red mud, gray clay, fishy lake mud. Swamp cabbage grew thickly here, and in a clearing there was a lady’s slipper orchid. Dr. Stewart stopped to gaze at the remarkable plant. The orchid was the shape of the human heart, but paler, and like the human heart, it was surprisingly strong, especially when you stopped to consider how fragile it appeared to be, how very many ways there were for it to break.