The Probable Future

by Alice Hoffman

  The soap shed was the meeting spot that Jenny and Will chose when Elinor forbade them to see each other. Before long, their desire had mixed with the scent of harsh soap that still clung to the air. The windows had no glass and never had; Rebecca hadn’t even bothered with oil-soaked paper, she’d wanted the fresh air. Still, the shed was easily warmed by the fires Will set in the enormous hearth where Rebecca’s pots of boiling laundry had once been attached to the iron bar which swung out from the bricks. It was one of those fires that nearly destroyed the shed back when Will and Jenny were teenagers. They had stayed all night in the laundry shed, and Will had lingered after Jenny had slipped back to Cake House to get dressed. Later that morning, from her classroom at the Unity High School, Jenny had looked out the window of her earth science class and had spied smoke. Right away, she guessed what had happened. Fire stations from three neighboring towns were called in, along with the Unity division, which some people say was founded by Leonie Sparrow, who could take burning-hot bread from the oven bare-handed and walk through fire without being scorched.

  The shed was charred and waterlogged by the time the firemen were through—still, it was standing. Jenny had wondered about Will’s carelessness, but afterward, as they’d stood there watching the last of the embers, Will had denied having anything to do with the fire. He’d stood there and chomped on an apple as he explained to Jenny how he’d made certain to carefully put out the fire before he’d left that morning. When he was done with the apple, he threw the core into the still-burning embers in the fireplace. People said whenever the pips of an apple popped noisily in a fire it was a sign that true love was nearby. But on this day there was only the sizzling sound of what had been burned and destroyed and the call of crows overhead.

  Elinor Sparrow accused Will of arson. Her lips twitched as they always did whenever a liar was near, but the charges were soon dismissed. There was no proof and no witnesses, and the judge was Catherine Avery’s first cousin, Maurice. It wasn’t until fifteen years later, after Stella had already been born and they lived in the apartment on Marlborough Street, that the fire was mentioned again. Will and Jenny had been watching a newscast about brushfires sweeping through the California canyons; house after house had burned to the ground and Jenny said something about the blaze being impressive.

  The shed went up quicker than that, Will had said.

  That was when Jenny knew her mother had been right. He’d stood there and watched Rebecca’s shed burn, then lied right to Jenny’s face. She’d lost that little portrait she loved and he’d never even bothered to tell her the truth. So why should she be certain now, as she sat across from him in a jail cell, that the truth wasn’t once again melting in Will’s mouth as he proclaimed his innocence, so that every word came out twisted in an odd, untrustworthy shape.

  “I regret it, you know,” Will said as Jenny was leaving, in a hurry to get to the Rabbit School before the news of Will’s arrest began to filter down to Stella.

  There were so many possible reasons for Will’s apology, Jenny couldn’t begin to guess what he was referring to exactly.

  “Regret what?”

  “Hurting you.”

  It was a glimmer of truth that blinked like a firefly, then quickly faded. But, frankly, Jenny felt she had no one but herself to blame for what had gone wrong. She’d been a headstrong girl who’d refused to listen to anyone, a fool, intoxicated by spring fever and her own misguided certainty about love.

  “What’s done is done. Anything else you want to admit to me while we’re at it?”

  “Not a thing,” Will said, so quickly that it was evident, even to Jenny, he was lying. All the same, she kissed him good-bye. The fact of the matter was, she regretted it, too.

  JENNY RAN ALL THE WAY to the Rabbit School, crossing against red lights, nearly getting herself run down in the process. But she needn’t have bothered to hurry. By nine that morning several girls in ninth grade were already discussing the article in the Herald which had mentioned Will Avery by name. By ten, two detectives had stopped by to question Stella. By the time Jenny arrived, Stella had a migraine and had taken refuge in the headmistress’s office. Her blond hair was unbraided and falling down her back, her lips were stained with lipstick, her face was drawn. When Jenny arrived, she found her daughter huddled in an overstuffed chair that stood on wooden claws. Scores of students had sat in this same chair facing parents who’d been called in and informed their daughters weren’t working hard enough, or they were sticking their fingers down their throats to rid themselves of calories; they had failed geometry or cut their arms with razor blades. Now it was Stella who sat there, their perfect star. Stella, who didn’t look up, but instead continued to play with her bracelet, so there was a hollow, pinging sound in the room.

  On this occasion, the headmistress, Marguerite Flann, had little to say. She left them alone so that Jenny could try to explain what had happened.

  “Don’t bother,” Stella interrupted. “I know why you’re here. The police came by to question me. I know what they’ve done to Daddy.”

  “They had no right to question you without a parent here.” Jenny was outraged, but she couldn’t help but take a moment to steal a look at her daughter. “Are you wearing red lipstick?”

  “It was only an informal questioning. They told me I didn’t have to say anything. But I told them the truth. Actually, it’s scarlet.”

  Jenny sunk into the headmistress’s leather chair. Scarlet.

  “So what was the truth?” she asked Stella.

  “I told them that I could see how this woman was going to die, and that I only saw it with some people, but I was so sure about her that I made Daddy promise he’d go to the police. They didn’t believe me. They thought I was covering for him.”

  The intense love Stella felt for her father was evident, and why shouldn’t it be? Here in the headmistress’s office there was the smell of furniture wax, a scent that always reminded Jenny of her own father, a professor of economics and amateur carpenter. Her father, who had spent a year of his free time building Jenny her model house, who had called her his pearl, who had left his classes in Boston one spring evening only to skid off the road. A sudden cold front had left black ice along the asphalt. It was March, that unpredictable season, and he should have known better, he shouldn’t have been driving so fast. He had never returned, but he’d left behind the model of Cake House on his workbench, newly finished, the interior woodwork already oiled so that it smelled especially sweet when Jenny peered inside. To this day, Jenny could walk into a stranger’s apartment and begin to cry for no apparent reason, only to discover that the oak dining set or the cherrywood desk had been newly waxed, and that the scent of citrus in the air was lemon polish, the sort her father vowed was best.

  Statistics, Jenny had learned early on, never mattered when they applied to you, not if you were the one in a thousand who’d been struck by lightning, not if you were the one whose father wasn’t coming home, whether he had crashed his car on an icy road or was sitting in a jail cell. Jenny couldn’t help but resent the other girls at the Rabbit School who would leave at the end of the day, worried about grades and clothing and their love lives, when her own daughter would be fretting over the many ways it was possible to lose someone in this world.

  “It really was me who saw what was going to happen—I saw it with Miss Hewitt, and with the taxi driver, and then with that woman in the restaurant. The police didn’t believe me,” Stella insisted, “but he had nothing to do with it. I swear it.”

  The thirteenth among them, born feet first on the day of the equinox. What had Jenny expected? Had she ever really thought Stella would grow up to be an ordinary girl, one who would blend in with the crowd, who would find only happiness and be spared any sorrows?

  “I believe you.” Jenny was well aware that her daughter belonged to the day in March when the birds took flight, when the earth shifted and the spring constellations appeared in the sky, the lion and the lamb side by
side, sharing one heaven, at least temporarily.

  They assumed their worries would remain private, but tragedy isn’t like that, it rises through the air, it circulates to be twice-told, then told again. Jenny and Stella had no notion of how many people were aware of Will’s situation, until they tried to leave the school. Juliet Aronson, an obvious bad influence, in Jenny’s opinion, stopped them at the door, out of breath, full of advice.

  “You don’t want to go out there,” Juliet declared.

  Juliet had already come up with a plan; she would go outside and announce that she was Stella Sparrow Avery, thereby distracting the band of reporters gathered on the sidewalk. Juliet had dealt with the likes of these carrion creatures for years, ever since her mother’s trial. She was only too happy to get back at them now.

  “I think Juliet’s right. You’d better go around to the back,” Marguerite Flann, the headmistress, suggested, for a crew from Channel Four had arrived. Mrs. Flann escorted them around to the rear exit, which led to an alley. “I think Stella had better stay home for the rest of the week. Just until this hoopla dies down.”

  And then they were let out in the alleyway, empty except for stray cats. They stared at each other. Little sparks of uncertainty were in the air. The stench in the alley was of garbage, but also of fear.

  “No school for a week. You should be happy,” Jenny said.

  “Right.” Stella buttoned her blazer, though the day was quite warm. “I’m ecstatic.”

  They traipsed down the alley, past the overflowing trash cans and Dumpsters. The Rabbit School van was parked here, used for field trips, along with several of the teachers’ cars.

  “When we get to the street we may have to run,” Jenny said.

  “Run?” Stella was even paler than usual, and her socks had fallen down around her ankles. She looked younger than she had this morning, even with that scarlet color she had on.

  In fact, they bolted when they turned out of the alley. There was a single shout, and they knew the crowd had spied them. They sprinted down Commonwealth, hoping to throw off anyone who might be tracking them. All the same, two reporters continued to chase them, with the brashest following at their heels when they ducked into the pharmacy. It was the same pharmacy where Stella had stolen her lipstick. Cheap, Stella thought to herself as she and her mother hid in the hair products aisle. Cheap as can be.

  The reporter who’d followed them wouldn’t back off. He waylaid them in the hair products aisle. “I just want to talk to you.”

  “No, you don’t.” Jenny stepped in front of Stella. “You want to harass us.”

  The pharmacy owner, an elderly gentleman whom Stella recognized from her past thievery at the makeup counter, came to shoo the reporter out of the store.

  “Vulture,” he said.

  And not the only one. When they finally did get home, taking a long, circuitous route through the Public Garden, then up Charles Street, there were more than a dozen messages on the phone machine from various news organizations, including two talk shows based in New York which regularly interviewed people about their personal tragedies.

  “The phone is ringing again,” Stella said, her tone anxious when they at last sat down to a pitiful dinner of canned soup and burned toast.

  It had done so ever since they got home, with one prying individual or another at the end of the line. The last call had come from Marguerite Flann, who, upon considering the magnitude of the situation and reviewing her options, now recommended that Stella not return to the Rabbit School for the rest of the term. For the child’s own good, of course, although it was true that Mrs. Flann herself was getting call after call from the newspapers, and such publicity wasn’t exactly approved of by the school.

  Now, when they couldn’t bear the notion of one more nasty call, Jenny got up and unplugged the phone from the wall. “There. It’s stopped ringing.”

  They both laughed, but Stella soon grew somber. “I’m going to fail math now. And if they don’t want me at Rabbit, where will I go?”

  “We’ll think of something,” Jenny assured her. But, in fact, she had no idea of what to do next. There was no school in Boston, public school or private, where Stella would be safe from conjecture and gossip. Already, there had been stories on the six o’clock newscasts on every local station. At eleven, Channel Twelve had footage of Jenny and Stella sneaking down the alley behind the Rabbit School, running away, as though they were criminals themselves.

  That night, Jenny fell asleep in a chair by the window. She had been thinking of the model of Cake House her father had made for her. She’d been remembering the stories he told, how he’d said that the cherry trees in the woods all around Unity had grown from stray stones dropped by crows, and the peach trees that were naturalized all over town had washed ashore after a shipwreck. Now when Jenny dreamed it was of a tightrope, set between two great trees, one cherry, one peach, both abloom with thousands of white blossoms, set into their branches like stars. She dreamed of falling a very great distance, down in a spiral, unable to stop herself. She woke just before she hit the ground, in a panic, her heart pounding. For once, she had experienced her very own dream, not someone else’s. She knew exactly how to interpret it. She knew just where it led.

  Outside the street was pitch black, except for the amber pools on the concrete wherever there was a streetlamp. As soon as she plugged the phone in again, it began to ring. Jenny answered and was greeted by the reporter who had followed them into the pharmacy. He was from one of those dreadful newspapers that printed nothing but trash, still he must have thought himself to be extremely persuasive, for he was trying his best to sweet-talk Jenny into an interview, wanting her daughter’s reaction to the news that her father had committed a brutal murder. Jenny’s reaction was to hang up on him. He called again. This time Jenny picked up, but she didn’t speak. Unfortunately, he did.

  “I’m going to get that little daughter of yours to talk to me. You can count on that.”

  Jenny hung up, then reached for the receiver to dial out before he had a chance to call back again. She’d have to have their phone number unlisted. She’d have to put a new lock on their door. But there was no time for that now. Jenny had already decided what she must do first. It was late now, the hour when the moon was in the center of the sky, when the pigeons were finally silent and daylight seemed like a foreign country, hundreds of miles away. The street outside was completely empty when Jenny dialed the number of Cake House, which she still knew by heart. Amazing how after so many years she remembered that this was the week when the forsythia bloomed, each branch filling with radiant bursts of light. How odd that she could recall the timetable of the train to Unity, odder still that she was able to recognize her mother’s voice as soon as Elinor picked up the phone, as though it had been only yesterday when they had last spoken, as though they’d been talking to each other all along.

  THE ORACLE

  I.

  HAT WAS A ROSE BUT THE LIVING PROOF OF desire, the single best evidence of human longing and earthly devotion. But desire could be twisted, after all, and Jealousy was the name of a rose that did well in arid soils. Red Devil flourished where no other rose grew, at the edge of the garden, in shadows. In many ways, a rose resembled the human heart; some were wild, others were in need of constant care. Although many varieties had been transformed and tamed, no two were exactly alike. There were those that tasted like cherries and those that smelled like lemons. Some were vigorous, while others faded in a single day. Some grew in swamps, some needed bushels of fertilizer. Rose fossils dating back three and a half billion years had been found, but in all this time there had never been a blue rose, for the rose family did not possess that pigment. Gardeners have had to be satisfied with counterfeits: Blue Moon, with its mauve buds, or Blue Magenta, a wicked rambler that was actually violet and had to be cut back brutally to stop it from spreading where it wasn’t wanted.

  None of these false varieties grew in Elinor Sparrow’s garden. She wanted
a blue that was true, robin’s-egg blue, delphinium blue, blue as the reaches of heaven. Clearly, she was a woman who didn’t mind taking on an unattainable task. Other gardeners might have backed down from the rules of genetics, but not Elinor. She wasn’t scared off by what others proclaimed impossible any more than she was bothered by the clouds of mosquitoes that rose at dusk at this time of year, as soon as the earth began to warm and the last of the snow had melted.

  Elinor Sparrow hadn’t cared about gardening until her husband’s accident. The garden at Cake House, established hundreds of years earlier, had been neglected for decades. A few of the old roses Rebecca Sparrow had planted still managed to bloom among the milkweed and spiny nettles. The stone walls, carefully chinked by Sarah Sparrow, Rebecca’s daughter, were still standing, and the wrought-iron gate put up by Elinor’s own great-grandmother, Coral, had not rusted completely and was easily cleaned with boric acid and lye.

  Elinor should have built her world around Jenny when Saul died in that accident on a road outside Boston, but instead she walked into the garden and she had never come out again. Oh, she’d gone grocery shopping, she’d passed her neighbors on Main Street on her way to the pharmacy, but all she had truly wanted was to be alone. All she could bear was the comfort of earth between her fingers, the repetition of the tasks at hand. Here, at least, she could make something grow. Here what you buried arose once more, given the correct amounts of sunlight and fertilizer and rain.

  Elinor Sparrow had brought forth record-breaking blooms in past growing seasons: scented damasks as big as a horse’s hoof, rosa rugosas that would flower until January, Peace roses so glorious that upon several occasions thieves had tried to steal cuttings, until the wolfhound, Argus, whose canines were worn down to nubs, managed to scare the intruders away with a few deep woofs. Seeing all the greenery behind the stone walls, even in the month of March, when the buds were only beginning to form, no one would ever imagine how difficult it had been for Elinor to garden in this place. For two years after Saul died, nothing would grow, despite Elinor’s best efforts. It may have been the salt on her skin, the bitterness in her heart. Whatever the reason, everything withered, even the roses that Rebecca Sparrow had planted. Elinor hired landscapers, but they failed to enlighten her and merely suggested she use DDT and sulfur. She sent soil samples to the lab at MIT and was told there was nothing amiss that a little bonemeal and tender care couldn’t correct.