The Probable Future

It was a relief to turn onto the paved road of Lockhart Avenue. Soon Stella heard an echo on the asphalt, a van behind her, sending out blinding pools from its headlights. Stella scrambled to the side of the road, narrowly missing a patch of nettle that would have left her legs stinging right through the jeans that Juliet had helped to dye black. She’d jumped aside so quickly that her head pounded. She could feel the thrum of her pulse when the van pulled up alongside.

“Hey, there. Want a ride?”

Stella stopped and blinked. All she could see was a shadow behind the wheel. She thought of that woman she’d seen at the restaurant in Boston and the way she’d died, and her pulse actually hurt. You had to be careful in this world. You had to look twice at what came your way.

“I don’t bite,” the driver assured her.

Stella recognized the van: the pizza delivery truck. Now she recognized the driver as well.

“You almost ran me over,” Stella said, relieved to know who it was who had stopped.

She saw the driver’s fate hanging over him: a traffic accident somewhere in Maine on a hazy summer day. She wouldn’t get in the car with him for any reason. Not if her life depended on it.

“I’ve got to get the pizzas out while they’re hot. So do you want a ride or not?”

“No, thanks. I like to walk.”

Stella stood there breathing hard, even though it was only the pizza delivery guy who waved and drove off.

“Slow down,” she called after him.

The moon had appeared in the sky, an arc of white surfacing. The crab apples were in bloom, and as Stella walked on, she counted the many kinds: there were the ones with white creamy flowers, the ones edged pink, the ones with dark red blooms, the color of the human heart. Tonight, it seemed as though the whole world was breathing; everything was alive. The gnats in the air, the peepers in the ditches, the leaves of the poplars and the ash rustling, like a breath in and out.

Stella couldn’t help but wonder if this was the path they had taken from town on that cold day when Rebecca’s blood fell on the ice. Was that why Stella felt so nervous? Was that why she had the urge to run? She made a promise to the dark night: if she reached Liza Hull’s safely she would make a sacrifice in Rebecca’s name. All she needed was a sign. Another car passed by, slowing down, but Stella looked straight ahead. Cynthia Elliot had told her that four years earlier a girl was hit by a car on Lockhart Avenue, and they never did find the driver. She said the body was left on the corner of Lockhart and East Main, with a blanket thrown over it, so that it seemed the girl was sleeping, there in the gutter.

Stella counted her steps to the old oak tree, then took off running. Juliet Aronson had once suggested that if you counted your steps in the moonlight, when you reached home you’d have the first letter of your true love’s name. But Stella didn’t actually have a home at the moment, and she knew whom she loved despite what common sense recommended, so she counted for counting’s sake. When she reached the tea house she hightailed it upstairs. Liza came to stand in the hall, but all she had time to do was call out a greeting as a streak of lightning fled to the second floor.

“I’m supposed to be giving you three meals a day. Don’t you want dinner? It’s beef stew. Your father will be here.”

Every day proved Juliet Aronson’s assessment to be correct. Will Avery was hanging around the tea house like the blackbirds who waited for crumbs.

“Not hungry,” Stella called back. “Thanks anyway. I’m just so tired. I’m going to bed.”

“It might be that flu that’s going around,” Liza said.

When Stella was safe at last, up in her single bed, made up with clean white sheets that very morning, she was still thinking how easily people could disappear. She thought about sparrows and roses and invisible ink and girls who were left in the road. She kept Matt Avery’s thesis under her pillow and all through the night the pages rattled, like the leaves of the trees. Some things are given and some are taken away; some things stay with a person forever. Stella dreamed of lakes and stones, of girls with black hair; she dreamed the same dream as her mother and her grandmother and all of the women in her family who had come before her. When she awoke in the morning she had already decided what her sacrifice would be.

Long before Liza took the stairs down to the kitchen to begin the day’s baking, before her mother reported for work, before her grandmother went out to her garden, Stella went to the bathroom and locked the door. She shook out her hair and looked at herself in the mirror. Pale as a star, invisible unless seen against the darkness. Thankfully, Juliet had left a shopping bag of everything she had stolen during her weekend in Unity, and that included several boxes of hair dye. All the while Stella was bent over the sink with the water running, she was thinking about that day when ice was covering the lake, when the water below was so cold it could turn a woman to stone, when the fields were dark with crows and a thousand sparrows came to the shore and refused to fly away, even when they were chased with sticks.