The Probable Future

In less than an hour, Stella’s best feature, her long blond hair, which Juliet Aronson had always advised she wear loose so that it fell down her back like a handful of stars, had been turned black. She used a pair of nail scissors to cut it short, above her ears, exactly as they had chopped off Rebecca’s hair on the morning of her drowning, a single braid of which Charles Hathaway kept in a drawer along with the compass and the star and the bell and, when he found them in his son’s belongings, the ten arrowheads lined with Rebecca’s blood. There the possessions stayed until Rebecca’s daughter returned them to where they belonged. That was the first thing Sarah Sparrow did when she left the Hathaways’: she built the case where the mementos were still stored. She insisted on remembering. The glass wasn’t added till later, but the casement itself was carefully made from oak and hawthorn and ash. Sarah needed no sleep, so she stayed up all night, working until the job was through. Only then did she give a few strands of her mother’s hair to the sparrows who were waiting so patiently. Each strand was quickly woven into their nests in the reeds, where it called out on windy days, spooking horses and frightening local boys, murmuring to anyone who might be brave enough to walk down the path where nothing grew, but where long ago there were snowdrops before it was the season, growing through the hardest ice, a gift from the Angel of Sorrow.

THE CHARM

I.

IT WAS THE SEASON WHEN PEOPLE IN UNITY put in their gardens, when winter’s fallen maples were culled and chopped into firewood for the year to come, when the peach trees bloomed and spring fever was at its height. Usually, at this time, Matt Avery would be working overtime, but this year he had stopped answering the phone. Even the old oak tree was still standing, though it was leafless, and people said it wailed whenever the wind blew through. Matt didn’t care about the tree; he was a man who had always risen by 5:30 A.M. without having to bother setting his alarm clock, but now he couldn’t get out of bed. He heard his brother rattling around in the kitchen, fixing coffee, chatting on the phone with Liza, and there Matt would be, quilt over his head, convinced that getting dressed or brushing his teeth or even breathing was far too much of an effort.

Matt had fallen victim to the flu, a potent springtime variety that boiled the blood and made for light-headedness, an illness that left him suffering with aching bones and a cough that rattled his ribs. Perhaps he was so afflicted because his resistance was down: in losing his thesis, he appeared to have lost everything. The world no longer interested him. Everything he’d ever tried in his lifetime had gone wrong. Now it was Will who was the early riser; he who used to wake at noon now concocted protein shakes at dawn. He who favored Scotch and gin gulped bottled water. As unbelievable as it seemed, Will Avery had taken up running. He left the house at six and didn’t return until eight, when Matt would once again hear him, whistling like a madman as he showered, some prelude of Chopin’s that could set a person’s teeth on edge if all he wanted was peace and quiet.

Will had begun to give piano lessons on their old Steinway, the one they’d both learned on so long ago, although Matt had been tone-deaf and Will had a natural aptitude. Their teacher had actually told their mother that Will flared with talent, whereas Matt … well, Matt was a lost cause. Indeed, it was true. And now he had misplaced his thesis to add to his many failures. Gone was the project he had been working on for so many years, due to be handed in at the end of the week. To be sure he had notes and the first drafts of six of the ten chapters. He had the very last page, the one he’d been revising when the damned thing disappeared. But what sort of fool did not have a copy of the finished product? A fool such as himself it would seem, a man who had taken twenty years to complete his education and who couldn’t seem to get to the end even then.

Whatever Matt Avery wanted slipped through his fingers like water. If he couldn’t have love, if he had no hope, then at least he could teach, or so he had believed. The chair of the history department at the state college, Brian Lewis, had proposed Matt teach a night class for the fall, an offer that would surely be retracted when it became known that Matt’s thesis was AWOL. Thinking about his fate, Matt couldn’t help but consider Charles Hathaway’s last days, how he’d taken to his bed when his granddaughter left and went back to live at the house by the lake, how he’d suffered with fevers and delusions, even though his wife brought him chamomile tea and poltices made from poplar leaves. Charles Hathaway wrote in his journal that he’d dreamed of Rebecca Sparrow so often she seemed to be with him even in his waking hours, sitting at the foot of his bed, dripping with green water, slipping away from him whenever he tried to reach out.