The Probable Future

That night, Elinor dreamed of the rose they had brought into the woods, and in her dream the petals weren’t blue, but silver. A broken mirror reflecting the sky up above. She knelt to pick a single flower, but it came to pieces in her hands: it shattered once, then twice, then a thousand times. Down on her knees, in a panic, she tried to put the pieces together again. She heard someone say, You have it now, and she thought, How ridiculous. I have nothing at all. I’ve lost everything.

Her hands were bleeding from all that glass. She could see herself in the shards, but she was only a girl. How strange that when she stood up she was still that girl, the one with the long black hair, lost in the woods where the brambles grew. Above her, in the inky sky, the stars were moving too fast, like a child’s wind-up toy. She recognized some of the constellations: Leo, which always accompanied spring. The Herdsman in search of his lamb. Blue-white Vega, the brightest star in Lyra. It all looked like snow, caught in a globe. Shake it, and it falls to pieces. Shake it, and it covers you.

Jenny arose when the sky was still black, awakened by her mother’s dream. She sat up with a gasp. The girl with long black hair had walked over glass and had never even cried. Jenny’s own face was hot and wet. There was the dawn chorus of the wood thrush peeping through the dark. There was a line of sparrows on the window ledge. A sob escaped from Jenny’s mouth, and it seemed to fly out the window, chasing the sparrows away. But not too far; they perched on the branches of the laurel and fluttered into the damp grass.

Jenny got out of bed and went to the window. She half-expected to see the girl with black hair standing out on the lawn, dressed in a white nightgown of the sort Rebecca Sparrow was said to have worn when she first walked out of the woods. Night was rising from the grass the way steam lifted from a mirror. Jenny threw on her robe and went down the hall. The floors were cold on her feet; light fell in through the leaded panes of the hall windows so that the dust motes seemed like living things, circling in little whirlwinds.

It was so early the wasps were first waking, the bees were just beginning to visit the garden, the stars were fading, one by one, until only Venus was left in the sky. Jenny found her mother’s bedroom door ajar. If she’d ever thought to ask, she would have found that her mother had a great fear of sleeping alone, and had ever since that night when the doctor came to tell them Saul was gone. She had the ability to spot a liar, except for the lies spoken by someone she loved. That’s what had caught her up; she’d been distracted by love, which seemed, at least at the time, to be the truest thing in the world.

Argus always slept beside the bed. Now, he lifted his head when Jenny came into the room; he gazed at her, but Jenny could see from the pale film over Argus’s eyes that he was nearly blind. Why had she not noticed that before? Why hadn’t she taken note of how cold her mother’s room was, or realized that it hadn’t been painted in such a long time that the white walls had turned cream-colored, yellowing with age. Why hadn’t she realized how very ill her mother was until this very moment, this instant when the birds were waking, when the sky was clearing into a milky opaque light, when there was suddenly and surprisingly everything to lose.

On the nightstand were a handful of yellow iris, the ones picked in the woods, musk-scented, set out in a vase that was familiar to Jenny. It was, in fact, one of Jenny’s first art projects, made in third grade, snaky ribbons of clay, painted brown and blue. She remembered bringing it home one afternoon when the rain was torrential, far beyond fish rain. It had been hurricane rain, plain and simple. Jenny had tucked the vase into her coat. With every step she wished for only one thing: Don’t let it be broken. She was surprised to see now that her mother had kept it, that she had it still, so nearby.

Jenny’s feet were freezing, so she stepped over Argus, pulled back the quilt, and got into bed beside her mother. Elinor had awakened when she heard someone come into the room. She had always been a light sleeper, but her vision had begun to fail her, and she thought if Argus hadn’t barked, perhaps it was best for her to be silent as well. She felt the bed shift. There was a woman beside her with black hair who appeared to be her daughter. Could that be real? Wasn’t that an impossible thing, no more likely than a dish that could grow legs and run away over the moon or a roomful of straw spun into gold?

“I’m dreaming,” Elinor Sparrow said. As she spoke, her words evaporated, the way words evaporate in dreams, leaving only a scrim of language, the core of something it’s impossible to understand.

“Maybe I am, too,” Jenny said.

They could hear the call of the wood thrush from the lawn. Outside, morning had broken into bands of yellow and green. What was a dream but a way of knowing what was inside you? After all this time, they forgave each other on this morning in May when the world was green, when bees circled the laurel, when words didn’t need to be spoken, when anything that had been lost could still be found.