The Probable Future

by Alice Hoffman

  “You’re nothing like your father.” They both laughed at that echo of David Stewart’s assessment. Still, Mr. Stewart’s comment stung. Stella was less than her mother, that’s what he’d been telling her. The sort of girl no one in his right mind would follow around. “My father’s kind of a jerk, too. But a nice one. He listens to me. At least, he tries.”

  The face of the patient who’d been in the accident kept surfacing in Stella’s mind, even now, hours after the event. As she gazed at the rhododendrons, as she brushed a strand of hair away or spoke about her father, it was that young man’s face she was seeing. It was the look in his eyes. Something had passed between them that could never be taken back or denied. Perhaps that was all there really was in this world: seeing someone, if even for a moment, looking inside to the deepest core.

  A breeze had come up and there was the scent of loam in the air. Hay and fertilizer. Sweet grass and wild ginger. April. Stella was just starting to relax from the intensity of the day when she noticed something in the field. The thing was eating leaves off a hazel tree. It looked like a camel in reverse, the kind of creature that only existed in dreams, made up of pieces and parts, hoof and head and tail.

  “What is that? Is there some sort of animal out there?”

  “It’s Sooner. My grandfather’s horse.”

  Stella felt herself grow cold, even though the day was still mild, the sunshine bright. She had seen an image of Hap being thrown from a horse on the day she met him; he was in the air, falling much too fast with no one nearby to catch him.

  “They supposedly hate each other, but they’re stuck with each other. Look at Sooner’s back. Ever see such a swayback?”

  “You didn’t tell me you had a horse. Jesus, Hap. You should have told me. We’re supposed to be such good friends, and now this comes out. What else have you kept hidden?”

  “I don’t have a horse.” Hap was surprised by how upset Stella was. “I told you, it’s my grandfather’s.”

  Dr. Stewart had taken in the horse as a favor to a farmer in North Arthur who’d been his patient for decades, despite the many times he couldn’t pay the doctor’s fee. The old farmer was dying, he hadn’t anyone in the world he cared about, except this huge, ancient horse, dusty brown with white markings on its face that formed the shape of tears.

  He won’t live long, the farmer had vowed. He’ll be dead sooner than you can turn around. I promise you. Just let him live out his last in that field of yours. He’ll eat grass and take care of himself if you just throw him a bale of hay when winter comes along. He’ll lay himself down and bury himself, too. I swear. You won’t have to do a thing for him.

  When the old farmer died, Dr. Stewart went down to his worthless acreage. He’d realized he’d forgotten to ask if the horse had a name. If you’re going to die sooner or later, it had better be sooner, the doctor had said aloud as he stood by the fence, at which point the horse pricked up its ears. It was a cold January afternoon and the doctor had come directly from the farmer’s funeral. He rubbed his hands together and wondered what on earth he’d agreed to. He could count the horse’s ribs. He could see that it had mange. But when it came close, the horse’s breath was surprisingly sweet, like apples.

  I’ve been assured this creature will be dead in no time, Brock Stewart told Matt Avery, who borrowed a trailer from the Harmon brothers, which he attached to his pickup on the day he delivered the horse to Unity. Doc Stewart had already paid Matt to fence in the field and build a lean-to, so the horse would have shelter when there was lightning and thunder.

  Don’t count on it. Matt had grinned. Something tells me he’s sticking around.

  So far, sixteen years had passed and the horse seemed unchanged, no older, no closer to death. The vet, Tim Early, had guessed that Sooner was thirty-five or more, from the wear on his teeth, but all the doctor knew was that over time he was out nearly ten thousand dollars, if he included the fencing, the barn, and the feed. As it turned out, Doc Stewart and Elinor Sparrow had the two oldest pets in town, although if anybody dared to call Sooner a pet, the doctor hit the roof. He’s an albatross. He’s a hay bag. He’s no pet. That’s what the doctor told anyone willing to listen. He’s the price I’m still paying for one idiotic moment of mercy.

  “He should have called the horse Later.” Hap laughed. “Or Forever. Or maybe Ten Grand.”

  Stella had a queasy feeling, bad timing because the pizza delivery van had pulled in and was heading along the driveway.

  “Maybe your grandfather should have him put down.” Stella looked sideways to see Hap’s reaction. Right away, he got that furrow on his forehead that appeared whenever he was worried about something. “It would be an act of kindness, really, to put him out of his misery. He’s probably in pain with that back of his and all.”

  “Sooner is as happy as can be. He spends his days eating and shitting and we do all the cleaning up.”

  The delivery guy honked, and Hap went over to pay and collect their dinner. Exhaust drifted from the tailpipe of the idling van and the distance looked hazy and blue. From Stella’s vantage point on the porch, Sooner seemed like a horse in a dream. He moved slowly as he searched out the tender new grass. He disappeared behind the leaves of the hazel tree.

  “Nobody rides him, do they?” Stella asked when they took the pizza inside.

  “Stella, he’d collapse if they did. You’ve seen him. Mr. Swayback.”

  “Well, promise me you won’t.”

  “Why?” Hap had opened the lid of the pizza box and steam rose between them. A pie with everything in Unity meant sausage, peppers, and mushrooms.

  “Because I have good ideas.” Stella hoped that she sounded more lighthearted than she was. “I’m known for them.”

  Stella had taken some plates from the cabinet, but she wasn’t certain she could bring herself to eat.

  “Really?” Hap grinned. “What about the onion?”

  Stella couldn’t help but laugh. Cynthia Elliot had told her that her brother, Jimmy, had been telling people to stay away from Stella, announcing that she came from a long line of bad luck and twisted genetics. As if Jimmy Elliot knew anything about genetics. He had failed earth science twice and was now repeating the class. Plus, he was a liar. Cynthia had told Stella that the fingertip he always swore had been bitten by a snapping turtle had really been torn off by a lawn mower he didn’t know how to start properly. The girls all swooned over Jimmy for some reason, but he seemed intent in following Stella around, or at least watching across the cafeteria at lunchtime.

  One afternoon, Cynthia and Stella had broken into Jimmy’s locker and they’d left a peeled onion stuck with a single pin atop his books, none of which appeared to have ever been opened. It was a joke, but Jimmy had gone around insisting that Stella had put a curse on him, and that she’d done so because she wanted him, badly. It was just a matter of time, Jimmy said, before Stella begged him to go out with her.

  “Oh, please. Jimmy Elliot is such an idiot. Who’s afraid of an onion?”

  Stella felt more cheerful after this discussion, and she wound up eating three slices of pizza after carefully picking off the sausage. Hap’s father ate in the den, in front of the TV, and Dr. Stewart was on the phone and didn’t come into the kitchen until Hap and Stella were washing up.

  “Go ask your dad if he wants some coffee,” Dr. Stewart suggested to Hap, and when Hap had gone off to the den, the doctor came to stand beside Stella at the sink. He could tell that she was a girl who looked straight at death, and he appreciated this trait in a person. It was good practice to stare into the abyss, rather than turn and run the way so many did.

  Brock Stewart had seen more people die than he could put a number to, and it always amazed him to see how individual the process was. Strong men he’d expected to go easily called for their mothers and wept. Honorable people whispered they were ready to sell their soul to the devil if need be, in exchange for one more day, a single hour longer, a breath or two more of this life they held so
terribly dear. Then there were the deaths he had dreaded, sorrowful, untimely endings, that had turned out to be smoother than expected, like a stone thrown into still water, like a sigh. That baby Liza Hull had given birth to nearly fifteen years ago, born prematurely with a heart defect so tragically irreversible the neonatal unit at Hamilton Hospital had told Liza from the start the child had a matter of months at the most. Liza was already divorced from her husband, one of the Hathaway cousins from Boston who joined up with the Merchant Marine, and so Dr. Stewart had gotten in the habit of stopping by and keeping an eye on the baby’s decline.

  Liza called him when the end seemed close. She wanted her daughter to be at home when it happened, and that’s the way it was, the three of them in Liza’s bedroom in the little apartment above the tea house as dusk fell through the trees. Dr. Stewart had tried to prepare himself on the drive over. He assumed this would be one of the toughest deaths, a new life cut off almost before it had begun, a young mother left with nothing, but in fact the night turned out very differently from what he’d expected. Brock Stewart thought he had seen everything, but he’d never experienced a silence and a beauty of the magnitude he was privy to in Liza’s apartment. The way Liza held her baby close and let her go at the same time, the way their breathing settled into a single rhythm, so that the only way he knew the baby was gone was from a subtle shift of air, and then a sob.

  In Dr. Stewart’s experience, the moment of death was always accompanied by an expulsion of breath that was unlike any other. It was as if the spirit arose from the body to join with the air, as if the essence of an individual could no longer be contained by mere flesh and blood. This was the moment when Liza Hull bent her head and kissed her baby’s lips, and the spirit appeared to move into her. For an instant it did, indeed, seem as if they were one being.

  The doctor sat there with Liza all night long. He figured this poor woman was owed at least that: a night without sirens and ambulances, without death certificates. She deserved those few extra hours of peace when the world stood still. In the morning, when light was just beginning to crack open the sky, Doc Stewart phoned down to Hamilton Hospital and gave the hour of death as 5:30 A.M. When the time came, Liza draped a blanket over her child; she was ready when the ambulance arrived.

  Thank you, she said before she left, going downstairs by herself, the baby in her arms. You were with me when I needed you.

  Brock Stewart had already been a physician for many years at that point. He’d seen it all: cancer, heart failure, the slow withering of disease, the utter surprise of accidental mortalities, including two boys who fell through the ice in the marsh and froze to death holding hands. But the night Liza’s baby died, he went out to his Lincoln, the car that could get through anything—mud, or snow, or floods—and he cried. In Liza Hull’s bedroom something had happened, a sort of acceptance the doctor had never experienced before. All this time he’d been fighting against death, his enemy, his dragon, invincible, unbeatable. Now he saw he’d been mistaken. It was as if he’d seen only one stone, but not the river that rushed around it. Death was his constant companion, he understood that now. It followed him into houses, arm and arm, there beside him every time he walked through the streets, as much a part of what he did as the lives that were saved, the babies born, the fevers broken.

  Thank you, he said to Liza Hull, as he sat in his parked car and watched the ambulance go slowly on its way to the morgue at Hamilton Hospital.

  That was why he’d wanted Hap, whom he loved so, to be a doctor. He wanted his grandson to know what that moment had felt like, what it was like to be sitting in your parked car as daylight opened up the night, as the sky shone silver; how it felt to be with someone at the most important hour in their life. Well, the boy clearly wasn’t cut out for it, but this girl Stella was another matter entirely.

  “They got that patient to Mass General in time,” he told her as she dried the dishes. “You were right. Laceration of the liver. He lost a huge amount of blood, but the prognosis is excellent. They’re very hopeful. Good call.”

  Stella tried to keep her excitement in check. If she had seen a death and it had been reversed, then wasn’t she only seeing a possibility rather than certain fate? Could it be that the deaths she had seen were uncertain, easy enough to change if given the right circumstances?

  “I’d been looking through some anatomy texts in the library,” she told the doctor. “I just put the symptoms together. It was a lucky guess.”

  “It was more than lucky, it was smart.”

  Stella was so thrilled by the compliment she didn’t trust herself to speak.

  “I go down to the clinic every Saturday.” The doctor was casual, so as to avoid any pressure. He’d already done that, with Hap and with his son, David, and it hadn’t worked out. “I make rounds at the nursing home out on the highway, too, if you’re ever interested. You’ve got a feel for medicine.”

  “Sure.” Stella had liked being in the clinic; she’d felt completely at home there. Why, she hadn’t even noticed there were little drops of blood on her boots. “Thank you. I’d like that.”

  She was so pleased by the turn of events—the young man with an excellent prognosis, the potential for a person’s fate to change until his last moment—that she threw her arms around the doctor before she headed for the back door. “I’d better get home. Tell Hap I’ll see him in school.”

  Stella went down the driveway, stopping when she reached the field. She felt an odd sort of joy within her, as though all of a sudden she mattered. Giddy, she waved her arms at Sooner, but the horse only stared back at her, peacefully eating grass in the fading April light. Some horses panicked at wind or passing clouds, they spooked when birds took flight, when field mice skittered through the grass, but not Sooner. He’d seen too much to be startled; he’d lived too long to be alarmed.

  “I wish you would die,” Stella told the horse. “Go on,” she urged. She raised her arms to the sky as though magicking away the future she’d seen for Hap, thrown from a horse with no one around to ease his fall. “Die,” she commanded the old swayback.

  Sooner stayed where he was, chewing. But there was someone else around; Jimmy Elliot had come up the driveway, and he’d heard every word. He was wearing jeans and a black shirt which allowed him to fade into the shadows as the light shifted. Now he came to stand beside Stella.

  “That can be arranged,” he said.

  “Please.” Stella laughed. She should have been surprised to see him, but she wasn’t. “What are you going to do? Shoot him? Or maybe you’ll just throw an onion at him. That can be pretty scary.”

  “Hah. Very funny.” Jimmy had actually saved that onion, it was in the back of his closet in a zip-lock plastic bag. “What’s wrong with this horse? Why would you want him dead? He looks harmless. Kind of pathetic, actually. Like your good buddy, Hap.”

  The truth was, Jimmy didn’t know what he was doing there. He’d seen Stella and Hap driving through town with the doctor one minute and the next thing he knew he was walking down the Stewarts’ driveway, stopping to hang on the fence, looking at some old mule.

  “He’s a menace.” Stella thought about what Hap’s father had said, how her mother had driven all the boys crazy, how Stella was nothing like her. She looked over at Jimmy and noticed his puzzled expression. It seemed that Mr. Stewart was wrong. “Just like you.”

  “And you can tell that by looking at me?” Jimmy laughed, and when he did, he didn’t even sound like himself anymore. When he coughed to clear his throat, he felt his heart hit against his ribs.

  “I told you before. I’m a good judge of character.” Stella leaped away from the fence and took off running. “Race you to the road.”

  But Jimmy stayed where he was, watching her, although she was disappearing fast. For some reason he couldn’t take his eyes off Stella, even if that meant letting her win.

  “I don’t think so,” Jimmy Elliot called after her. He grinned when she reached the road. Just as he’d h
oped: once she had won, she didn’t ignore him. Instead, she turned back to wave. “You’re still talking to me.”

  III.

  THERE WAS NO ONE to tell Will when to wake up; he had no job to go to, no wife to complain about his lazy and slovenly ways. Therefore, he rose at noon. No one was around to tell him to clear his dishes away, so they piled up in the sink until they reached a monumental height, a free-form of forks and spoons and chili-encrusted bowls and congealed spaghetti, all of it balanced upon Jenny’s favorite teacups, which were cracking beneath the weight of pots and pans. The other tenants in the building had given up expecting their complaints would force Will to toe the line. Why, he no longer even bothered to carry his overflowing bags of garbage into the stairwell, let alone hoist the bags into the trash chute. Instead, he let it pile up in the hall, and although Mrs. Ehrland had consulted her nephew, an attorney with the housing authority, there was no way to get rid of Will Avery, not even when people began to complain of mice in the hall.

  On weekends the tenants had a bit of a reprieve, thank goodness, for Will often spent Friday and Saturday nights at the home of Ellen Paxton, who wore jasmine perfume, the aroma Jenny had previously detected in their apartment. Ellen taught voice at the music school, and although she wasn’t a great beauty, she supplied Will with some decent meals and good after-dinner sex, if he hadn’t had too much to drink, that is, at which point he often fell asleep on her couch, where he served as a pillow for Ellen’s cat, a shedding Burmese Will despised.

  With Jenny gone, Ellen had become hopeful that her relationship with Will was going somewhere, and Will didn’t particularly want to dash these hopes until he had a little more ready cash. No need to give up Ellen’s dinners or the loans she occasionally handed over when Will was flat broke. Certainly there was no need for her to know that he was also sleeping with Kelly Butler, a waitress at the Hornets’ Nest, who was only twenty-three, young enough not to be disturbed by the mess in Will’s apartment or the fact that he never took her anywhere.