The Probable Future

by Alice Hoffman

  Now, at the nursing home, Eli was grumpy, and who could blame him? All the nurses wanted to do was to prick his fingers with needles to test his insulin level or take another vial of blood to check his white count. He was dying, you didn’t need a test to see that, and he was none too happy about it. A new driver, a fellow from Monroe, had bought Eli’s taxi, dirt cheap, and he was probably already overcharging people that needed a ride home. Eli had never asked for more than five dollars and none of his passengers would have guessed that his account in the savings bank was so large that the bank president, Henry Elliot’s brother, Nathan, invited him to Thanksgiving dinner every year. The bank oversaw all of the Hathaway investments, because Eli was convinced financial affairs took too hard a toll on the heart, and he had all that cardiac history to consider. All this time, he’d been a rich man who had driven a taxi, who considered a pair of shoes worthless if they didn’t last a good ten years. But even if he had used his wealth, what difference would it have made? He would have still wound up in the nursing home, his life reduced to his most essential belongings: a bag of clothes, a shaving cup, a pair of eyeglasses that weren’t much good, a straight-edged razor the nurses wouldn’t let him use, and the silver star he wore on a chain around his neck.

  When Dr. Stewart came to see him, Eli didn’t recognize the doctor at first, even though he’d been Eli’s physician for forty years. Eli thought the doc was some old boy from the next room who was roaming the halls, giving people checkups for the hell of it. Eli pulled the sheet up to his neck and told the doctor to get out, but he stopped cold when he noticed the girl. He recognized her immediately. Dr. Stewart leaned down to ask if Eli knew where he was, but Eli waved him away.

  “Rebecca’s here,” he said. He felt his pulse thrum and there was a sweet taste in his mouth. “I must be dying if you’re here.”

  Eli Hathaway closed his eyes and waited for heaven, or hell, if that’s what was in store for him. When nothing happened, he opened his eyes again. There in front of him was Dr. Stewart and the girl with black hair, both peering at Eli as though he were a dancing chicken or a man from Mars.

  Standing there, on a Saturday morning, at an hour when other girls her age were still in bed, Stella saw that Eli Hathaway would die in this room when a massive heart attack came; in less than twenty-four hours his eyelids would flutter and his breath would rise up, all at once. Another girl would have been afraid of Eli, of the scent of death that clung to him, of his crumpled body and the blue veins so very close to the skin, but not Stella. Here in the nursing home, death was everywhere; Stella had spied it in every hallway, in every room. Some of the deaths were so quick, they were easily missed in the time it took to blink. Others were long, drawn-out, not what you’d wish for anyone, not even your worst enemy. In the dining hall of the home, Stella had seen so much death, that one Saturday morning she’d been compelled to sink down onto the linoleum floor, overwhelmed not so much by the sorrow of it all, but by the human dignity, the almost supernatural ability to face the abyss and still order scrambled eggs and toast for breakfast.

  In Eli’s room, Stella looked over at Dr. Stewart and was certain he saw what was about to happen just as clearly as she did. Her grandmother had told her that Brock Stewart was the most honest man in five counties, but in Stella’s opinion, he was a liar, just as she herself was. He’d lied on their last visit to the nursing home, for one thing. Stella saw the look on his face when an old woman, wheezing and spitting up blood, asked if she were dying. Dr. Stewart had brushed the question aside and talked instead about the patient’s grandchildren and about the lush spring, brought on by the record rainfalls in April. There are lilacs growing right in through the window, the woman said cheerfully, setting her original question aside. When I close my eyes I still see purple. I hear bees.

  You didn’t tell her the truth, Stella had said when they were driving home.

  There is no truth. I thought you knew that by now.

  On this visit, Dr. Stewart pulled a chair up to Eli’s bed. “It’s Stella Sparrow who’s visiting,” the doctor told Eli. “Rebecca’s been dead for more than three hundred years. If you’re seeing her, my friend, you’re seeing angels.”

  Dr. Stewart took Eli’s pulse. Stella counted along with the doctor; slow as molasses. So slow he was clearly winding down. All the same, ill as he was, Eli paid the doctor no mind. He was convinced he recognized the girl in his room. “I knew I’d see you before I died. I knew you’d forgive me.”

  The doctor and Stella exchanged a look. Eli Hathaway would be dead by morning; they could both feel that. Hathaway signaled for Stella to come near and Brock Stewart marveled at the girl’s grit. Even in medical school there were those who’d been repelled by an old man with tubes in his nose and veins, a fellow like Eli, who stank like a bedpan and shook with cold, though the heat was turned up to almost eighty throughout the nursing home, for the comfort of the patients.

  “I’ve got something for you,” Eli said.

  With difficulty, he tried to open the top button of his striped pajamas. He’d always thought pajamas were a nuisance, and now they were giving him trouble on his last day on earth. Stella helped with the button. There it was, the silver star, the one Eli had worn every day since his own father had given it to him, on his deathbed, as every Hathaway had done since the time it was found among Charles Hathaway’s belongings in the days after his horse had sunk into Hourglass Lake, however deep that bottomless place might be.

  When Eli couldn’t unfasten the clasp on the chain, Stella unhooked it for him.

  “Yours.” There was a great deal more Eli wanted to say, but his lips were dry, his throat parched; words were escaping him and he had to save them and cherish each one if he were to get out his last request.

  All the same, Stella was touched by the gift. She felt like crying, but she didn’t. Instead, she secured the star around her throat. Eli watched her carefully; he smiled even though he was dizzy. He looked at Stella and saw a bowl full of stars and endless, unfathomable blue. Of course it would be heaven, he believed that now, it would be stars, and light, and forgiveness.

  “I’m leaving all my holdings to the town, but I want you to decide what to do with it,” he told the dark-haired girl, the one he’d been waiting for all his life. “Get me a piece of paper,” Eli demanded of the doctor. “You’ll be my witness.”

  “Are you sure you want to do this?” Dr. Stewart said. “She’s not of legal age.”

  “What does her age matter? How old were you when they drowned you?” Eli asked Stella, whom he continued to believe was Rebecca.

  Having read Matt’s thesis, now joyously in the possession of the history department at the state college, Stella knew the answer. “Seventeen and a half. It happened on the sixteenth of November.”

  “She wasn’t of legal age when they did that to her, was she?” Eli said.

  “Is he of sound mind?” Stella whispered to Dr. Stewart.

  “What’s the state we live in, old boy?” Dr. Stewart asked Eli.

  “You don’t know Massachusetts is a Commonwealth and you call yourself a doctor? Shame on you.”

  “He’s sound,” the doctor said. “He can make his own choices.”

  Stella went to the nurses’ station for a pad of paper and a pen, then returned and wrote down everything Eli Hathaway said. His accounts in the bank, his investments, his real property, everything he owned in this world would go to the town, and Stella Sparrow Avery would be the trustee.

  “Are you sure you don’t want your name down as Rebecca?” Eli asked.

  “Stella is fine.”

  Hathaway signed the document, although he was so weakened Dr. Stewart needed to help him hold the pen; then the doctor signed as well.

  “Now I’m free,” Eli said. “No more driving around town for me. There’s a new fellow doing it and I hear he doesn’t know his ass from a hole in the ground.”

  “True,” Dr. Stewart said. “Sissy Elliot wanted to go to the supermarket
and the new driver somehow managed to leave her at the Laundromat. She was stuck there for hours.”

  “But Rebecca knows what she’s doing.”

  Stella was sitting on the ledge of the window. To Eli, with his vision so cloudy, she looked like a bird perched there. She looked like light in the endless darkness. As for Stella, she liked the cool sheen of the star necklace against her skin. When Rebecca walked out of the woods, she’d been wearing this amulet; now it was back where it belonged. In exchange for its return, Stella repaid the favor to the last of the Hathaways. She was glad she’d brought her backpack with her, for she had a great deal of algebra homework due and a dreaded essay to write for American history on Paul Revere. They would be here quite a while, but Stella intended to stay until the end. That was what she had to give Eli: She’d be here with him. She’d see him over.

  She set to work while Dr. Stewart dozed and Eli Hathaway’s pulse grew so slow it was nearly reversed, a clock unwinding, backward through time. When the light outside faded to dusk, Stella borrowed a lamp from the nurses’ station so that she and the doctor could play hearts. Brock Stewart felt proud for Elinor that this was her granddaughter. He wished that Elinor was here with them, but he knew she needed rest. He wondered now if losing so many people had all been preparation for losing Elinor Sparrow. At night, he still called her, at eight o’clock exactly. It was the time he always looked forward to, when they could discuss their day, no matter how small or insignificant the details. Now he was afraid of that hour, and every time he phoned he felt a sinking dread: What if this is the time when she doesn’t answer? What if it’s now?

  “This might take all night,” the doctor told Stella, as he made himself comfortable in an easy chair after a good hour of cards, a blanket thrown over his shoulders. “I could call you a cab.”

  “I’d wind up someplace I didn’t want to be. You heard what Eli said about the new driver. No. I’ll stay.”

  It had taken three hundred years to get to this day, what was another few hours? Sitting in the darkened room, with both men now sleeping, Stella felt as though she were drifting through space. They breathed in, they breathed out, and then something else. Some time after 2:00 A.M., there was a myocardial infarction. Eli Hathaway began to have convulsions, and then his breathing altered; his color changed, and his eyes became so cloudy he couldn’t see this world anymore. The ETs from Hamilton Hospital were called, and while the ambulance sped toward Unity, Stella remained at Eli’s bedside.

  “He’s going,” Dr. Stewart said.

  Death was in the room with them at that very moment. If it was too much for the girl, she’d leave now. She’d make up an excuse, she’d get sick to her stomach or be desperate for fresh air. Instead, Stella held Eli Hathaway’s hand, and Eli held her hand right back, with all the strength that he had. He was a good man, and he’d had a heavy burden; he’d been driving that taxi of his for longer than most of the town’s residents had been alive. At night, he had dreamed of the lanes and roads of the village. Now he held tight, as though he’d never loosen his grasp. He did it until the girl leaned down, close, in order to whisper that it was all right, he could let go: He was forgiven. After all this time, he was free.

  ONE MORNING, Hap went to the kitchen sink for a glass of water and then he stopped for no discernible reason. He merely felt that something had changed; a drop in air pressure, perhaps, a day that had begun quietly. It was early, and Hap was sleepy-eyed. Looking out at the field he thought he saw a huge pile of hay and leaves. Curious, he pulled on his boots and went out. There was his grandfather, weeping, sitting beside the horse, Sooner, who had died in the night. Already, the horse was cold to the touch.

  “Didn’t it seem like he’d be the one thing that would last forever?” Dr. Stewart had officiated at dozens of deaths; he’d broken agonizing news, held the hands of the widowed and the bereft, and now he found himself crying over a horse that had lived far too long. One he’d never wanted in the first place.

  “Stella will be relieved. She was convinced I’d ride him and break my neck.” Hap sat down beside his grandfather. The field was damp with dew, but Hap paid that no attention to the soggy ground. His grandfather, the strongest man he knew, was crying. “We’ll have to hire Matt Avery to come in with his bulldozer and bury Sooner right here. I guess it wasn’t sooner or later, it was forever.”

  Dr. Stewart nodded. His grandson was a smart, good boy; at least he didn’t have to worry about that. Frankly, he felt connected to him in a way he never had to his own son, David. Maybe he was at fault for that estrangement; he’d been busy, he’d been young, somewhat self-important. The doctor patted Sooner’s cold body and remembered reading somewhere as a boy that cowboys in the freezing pioneer West would kill their horses if need be, and crawl inside them, blood and bones be damned, for the warmth. Although the doctor had been sitting beside his horse for four hours, he had missed the actual moment of death. Now he wondered if a horse breathed out his last the way a person did at the very end, a short exhalation, a rising of the spirit. Was Sooner still here in the field, among the grasses and the stacks of hay? Was he in the air they were inhaling right now, entering into them, becoming as much a part of them as their own lungs and liver and heart?

  Later in the day, the doctor and his grandson went down to Town Hall together. A meeting had been called to discuss Eli Hathaway’s gift to the village, and the doctor, as the witness to the last will and testament drawn up in the nursing home, had been requested to attend. When they arrived, Hap sat in the hallway and read the Unity Tribune while his grandfather and Stella and the members of the town council went into the conference room. Mrs. Gibson was there, and Harry Strong, who owned the market, and Nathan Elliot, the bank president. Hap didn’t mind waiting. He especially loved perusing the police log, the news section he always turned to first. A car had been broken into on Hawthorne Street. A dog, a spaniel named Mitzi, had bitten the mail carrier and neighbors. Jimmy Elliot had been picked up for throwing rocks at the tea house, and his community service had been extended by ten hours.

  “I guess Jimmy Elliot is working for you again,” Hap said to Matt Avery when Matt came by, uninvited, to speak on Stella’s behalf.

  “He was supposed to. Never showed up. What did they nab him for this time?”

  “They got him for throwing rocks at the tea house.”

  “That’s an asinine thing to do.”

  “I think he’s in love.”

  “Ah.” Matt nodded, sympathetic. Even Jimmy Elliot wasn’t immune to such things. “I stopped by your grandfather’s house and took down some fencing and left the bulldozer inside the field,” he told Hap. “Tomorrow morning make your grandfather go out somewhere, take him to breakfast. I don’t think he should be there when I’m digging the hole for Sooner.”

  “He’s pretty broken up.”

  “Well, he spent twenty-five years pretending to hate that horse.”

  After Matt went in to the meeting, it was quiet in the corridor, and Hap got back to reading the police report. People inside the meeting room were surprisingly silent as well, in something of a state of shock as they listened to Dr. Stewart explain that Eli Hathaway had asked Stella to determine what would be done with his estate. At this point many members of the council were wondering if Eli Hathaway wasn’t merely being spiteful in his choice of a teenaged executrix; this child now had the power to decide what to do with far more money than anyone had guessed Eli had possessed. They realized it was a huge bequest as Nathan Elliot read off the list of properties, securities, bank accounts, investments. Wasn’t choosing Stella to oversee it all a joke on the council members and on the town?

  But, no, as it turned out, this was no prank; Stella had already come up with a plan. A clinic was to be built on a lot of Hathaway land, and a doctor and nursing staff employed, for such was Stella’s resolve; people wouldn’t have to go all the way to North Arthur or Hamilton if they were ill. Not only that, but the Hathaway Recreation Center would be bu
ilt across from the library. There would be tutoring and an afterschool program; in the summer, swimming lessons would be offered to one and all. This was well and good, this was excellent, as a matter of fact. The members of the town council began to relax, but then Matt Avery got up and he started to talk. This was something of a surprise as well, for Matt wasn’t known for his oratory skills. All the same, after so many years of plowing snow and cutting down trees, after so much time spent being alone, he couldn’t seem to talk enough. When he finally got in front of a classroom in the fall, he’d go on lecturing for an hour or two at a time, without stopping for breath or a glass of water.

  It took Matt more than an hour to tell Rebecca’s story; those members of the town council who hadn’t been silently taking an oath against Eli Hathaway’s memory were cursing him now. But when Stella stood up to thank Matt for his background for her most important decision, even the dissenters fell silent. Now the other shoe was about to drop, the bloody, stone-filled boot. Stella had on the silver star Eli had given her, the one Rebecca had been wearing when she’d been lost in the woods.

  Stella informed the group that a dispensation from the mayor and the council would allow a memorial to Rebecca to be built in the center of town. A crew had already been approached and were carting a six-foot-tall slab of granite down from New Hampshire; an ironworks in Lowell had already been contacted. If anyone felt that such a memorial was a sacrilege, they didn’t speak up on that day— there was the health center to consider, after all, much needed in town. There was the rec center, where their children would learn to swim—and so work was quickly begun.