The Probable Future

by Alice Hoffman

  If anyone expected letters of protest, they were sorely disappointed. To most people in town, Rebecca Sparrow was nothing more than a portrait in the library, one of the first settlers in Unity, a young girl with long black hair. Folks got used to the idea of Rebecca’s memorial, just as they became accustomed to seeing Stella on the town green, sprawled on the grass on days that were fine and on those that were foul. Something that had taken so long now went up in no time, right in the very center of the green, surrounded by plane trees and lindens. Atop the simple granite slab there was a bronze bell which, when it was rung, would be heard for miles around. There would never be silence again, at least not in this town.

  Elinor and Jenny came to the common on the evening when the bell was set in place. It was a windy night in May, and Elinor and Jenny had both dressed up. It was an occasion, after all. Stella hadn’t wanted a public display; no fireworks to announce the memorial’s completion, no town sing-alongs. It was a family matter, first and foremost. Jenny did the driving now, and she helped her mother along the path that cut across the common. Stella had picked a handful of violets, which she’d set on the step of the memorial in a little glass vase.

  “Did it turn out all right?”

  Elinor was out of breath and chilled, but seeing the memorial was worth the trek she’d made from Cake House. She nodded her approval; it was, indeed, beautiful. She thought about everything that was invisible: courage, honor, pain, love. She narrowed her eyes and the memorial disappeared, just for an instant; then it was right there in front of them again.

  “It’s perfect,” Jenny Sparrow said.

  It was the hour when the light faded quickly, when it drifted down and turned everything blue, houses and steeples, fences and sidewalks. In the time when Rebecca Sparrow lived in this town, people believed blue could protect them from evil, and they often attached strips of indigo homespun to their undergarments and the hems of their skirts. They believed anything sewn with red thread could cure what ailed them, be it fevers or nightmares or fits of coughing, that bay laurel could protect a man from lightning, that helping a blind man would bring good fortune. They believed that remembering someone could bring them back to you long after they had departed, if you only concentrated hard enough, if you stood outside on a windy night and tried to count every star sprinkled across the universe like rice on a table or stones in a lake, like bones in a body or snowdrops in the grass.

  ————

  IF A TRAVELER was without a map in this section of Massachusetts, he could easily grow confused. The villages blended together to any out-of-towner passing through, particularly when the view was surveyed from the window of the train. Look, and look again; white steeples, town halls, houses with black shutters. Farther out—malls, triplexes, parking lots—and farther still—green woods, streams, fields of black-eyed Susans and barley. It was a quilt without distinction, lilac here, green there, bordered by blurred faces, by rocks and clouds, by bricks and train tracks. Imagine the stations that go by: Concord, Lincoln, Hamilton, Monroe, North Arthur, Unity. The last of these had been built in 1930, out of brown granite, constructed by men from out of town, from Boston or New Haven, men so desperate for jobs they were willing to sleep on cots set up in Town Hall. There they dreamed of home and of trains and of the brown granite dust that fell everywhere whenever the stone was cut, dusting their faces, drawn into their lungs.

  When Elisabeth Sparrow came to feed these men she brought pots of nine-frogs stew and over a hundred loaves of bread. Elisabeth heard these men crying in their sleep, she heard them praying for a familiar face, a kind word, supper set before them with care. She was that face, those words, that bread for an entire year. The train station was built with Elisabeth in mind; her name could be found etched into the granite in dozens of places, although an individual had to know what he was looking for in order to identify the lettering. On the whole, people in town didn’t seem to notice; to them, the marks were all but invisible, dusty strikes, like a chicken’s scratch, a pattern that was indeed impossible to make out if someone was standing too near.

  Eli Hathaway used to be a common sight here, out in the parking lot in his taxi or chatting with the ticket-seller, Enid Frost. Eli himself had made a hobby out of counting the times Elisabeth’s name appeared in stone, and at last count it was 1,353. But the days of Eli Hathaway’s counting her name were over. Now, it was the new driver, Sam Dewey, from over in Monroe, who was parked at the station. Sam was an overly eager fellow who’d confide to anyone who got into his cab that he was trying to start a new life in Unity after his divorce. Indeed, he had a lot to learn. Ever since that incident with Sissy Elliot, when he left her outside the Laundromat, where she stood on the street for several hours, hoping for a neighbor to pass by to give her a lift, Sam had been studying local maps. He no longer had to ask his passengers for directions: How do you get to Lockhart Avenue? What’s the shortcut to the mall in North Arthur?

  On the seventeenth day of May only one passenger got off the early train. Sam Dewey had already begun to wonder if he’d be able to earn a living driving a taxi in this town, so he made a bet with himself on that day, not that he was a betting man, not since his wife had left him, claiming he spent more time at Foxwoods than he did with her. All the same, if the gentleman on the platform got into his cab, Sam would stay in town. If, on the other hand, the fellow who’d gotten off the train turned and walked away, or if a friend or relative came to pick him up, Sam would move to Florida. Just thinking about Boynton Beach, where he’d been once on holiday, and the sunny life that might be ahead, cheered Sam up mightily. But after he went to the phone and looked through the Yellow Pages, the man on the platform approached. He was a well-dressed individual in his thirties, dark hair, a good-looking man who wasn’t bogged down by luggage, except for a backpack slung over one shoulder.

  Walk on by, Sam started thinking, because after only a few weeks, he could already feel his body molding into the indentation in the driver’s seat left by Eli’s inert form, positioned in the very same place for so many years. But as it turned out, Boynton Beach would have to wait. Sam would be staying in Unity, at least for the time being. It seemed he had a passenger.

  “Lucky you’re here,” the passenger said. He was a little out of breath and he wasn’t as well dressed as Sam had first thought. It was an old suit, actually, but who was Sam to judge? He himself was wearing a frayed sweater and a pair of chinos stained with coffee. “I thought there’d be a car rental place,” the fellow said.

  “In Unity? You’ve got the wrong town. Wait a second, maybe you do have the wrong town,” Sam joked, angling for a tip later on. “Who is it you’re going to see?”

  When the passenger said he was just passing through and thought he’d find a motel, Sam Dewey told him, once again, wrong town. The closest motel was the Night Owl in North Arthur, so if it were lodgings he wanted, his best bet was Laurie Frost’s guesthouse. Laurie was Enid the ticket-taker’s daughter, and quite attractive; Sam wouldn’t mind if she felt grateful enough for this referral to say yes if he asked her out to dinner. Laurie’s guesthouse was really a converted garage, but it looked fine to most people’s eyes, and Sam waited as his passenger walked up the slate path bordered by hostas. He stood outside, leaning up against the taxi, where he smoked a cigarette and nodded as a man ran past.

  “Slow down,” Sam called out to the runner, feeling quite neighborly as Will Avery went by. Will was not in the least deterred by the fact that Laurie’s house was at the top of a hill, but he didn’t want to waste any energy in speaking. “Save your energy! Take a taxi!” Sam suggested, but Will only waved and kept on, as he did every morning on his sweep through Unity.

  When Sam’s passenger returned, he wanted to drive around a bit, see the town. He sneezed several times. “Damn it,” he said as they headed back down the hill.

  “It’s the pollen.” Sam cast himself in the role of local expert. “The lilacs, the grass, all the wildflowers. Pollen everywhere y
ou look. My guess, you’re a city boy.”

  The passenger described a historic house he’d heard about, one built like a wedding cake, and Sam Dewey assured him it wouldn’t be a problem to drive over and take a look. Of course, without an address, Sam had no idea of where to go, so he drove around awhile, circling the town and wondering how much he could charge for this tour. He stopped for a minute outside Town Hall, ran in, and quickly scanned the map posted in the hall which listed points of interest. Cake House. The earliest surviving building in town. It had to be that.

  They drove past the old oak, surrounded by orange cones, for the branches were now dangerously brittle on one side, down Lockhart, to reach what some people called Dead Horse Lane.

  “Can’t go any farther,” Sam Dewey said. At least they could see the three chimneys from here, and a bit of the roofline as well. “My cab would never make it past the ruts they’ve got. Look at that one!” He pointed to a hole in the driveway so deep it was filled with water. What appeared to be a large stone, but was in fact a snapping turtle, was in the center of the mudhole. “I’d break my axle on that.”

  The passenger paid and got out. This time he told Sam not to bother to wait. He let Sam Dewey believe he’d checked into the guesthouse, when all he’d done was pick up the copy of the Unity Tribune that was on Laurie Frost’s doorstep and stick it in his backpack. He didn’t want to appear to be a drifter, although that, in fact, was what he was these days. He liked to walk, he told the nosy cabdriver, and that seemed to satisfy Sam Dewey and send him on his way. The passenger walked down the driveway, past the mud puddle. There was the white house that looked so much like the model he’d taken from the table in the front hall of the apartment on Marlborough Street. There was the very same porch, the windows with their funny bumpy panes of glass, the hedges of laurel that were so sweet the bees that hovered around the blooms were groggy, unlike the felt ones on the model’s laurels, bees stuck on with glue, with wings that never moved.

  One thing he’d said was true: he was just passing through. He’d need a place to rest though, so he turned into the woods. In fact, he wasn’t a city boy as that idiot taxi driver had deduced. He’d been raised in the north, far up in New Hampshire, and there he’d stayed until his girlfriend had broken his heart and moved to Boston. In time he had followed her; he’d won her back, but she’d cast him aside again. Twice was once too many times to do that to him.

  Now, stepping into the woods again, he felt at home. He kept going until he reached the Table and Chairs; amazed by the rock formation, fascinated by the many shapes nature invented, he took from his backpack the newspaper he’d swiped from Laurie Frost’s doorway and the lunch he’d brought with him, a ham sandwich fixed by the maid at the motel in Medford where he’d stayed last night. In exchange for the sandwich, and a free room, he’d left the model of Cake House behind; it had been a gift for the four-year-old daughter the maid had no choice but to bring to work with her in the mornings, since she hadn’t the money for a baby-sitter. Why shouldn’t he leave it for the child? He didn’t need the thing anymore; he had it committed to memory by now, every brick, every stone, every bit of glass.

  When he was done with his lunch, he tidied up so that he wouldn’t leave a trace. He always left the woods the way he’d found them; he liked the way things looked when there hadn’t been human intervention. Frankly, he stayed away from human things. It was sheer luck that he stumbled upon the shell of the old laundry shed, the one Will had all but destroyed so many years ago. Still, the huge core of the chimney remained, and the fireplace would give him shelter. He stood inside of it and immediately felt at home. Seeing one of the bricks was missing, he put his hand inside and drew out a small portrait. There’d been a photograph in the hallway he’d noticed the day Will let him in. Her hair had been blond then but this was the girl he wanted to get rid of. He was sure of it. Once he dispatched this meddler who had seen what he was about to do before it happened, there’d be no one to connect him to the crime, not that his ex-girlfriend hadn’t deserved it, not that they all hadn’t got what was coming to them, not that he’d had a single restless night of sleep since she’d said her last words to him: How can you do it? How could your love have come to this?

  THE KNOT

  I.

  IT WAS A BEAUTIFUL SATURDAY MORNING when it happened, so bright Will had woken at the very first light. He was off running earlier than usual, at a little after 5:00 A.M., when the town was still sleeping and only the birds were available to keep him company. At 5:30, the garbage trucks began to lumber through town, stopping first at Hull’s Tea House, where the new kitchen helper had set out the trash neatly in barrels the evening before. Liza was awake, of course, baking blueberry scones, watching out the window for Will to run by at some point on his route, as he did every day, sometimes leaving a newspaper on her back step, sometimes a handful of violets in a paper cup, sometimes a note with a single word: You.

  Elinor Sparrow was always awake at this hour. She didn’t have much time to waste, and her sleep came in fitful periods of napping. Now, when she managed a few hours of restless sleep, she always dreamed of snow. Jenny, bombarded by her mother’s dreams, had a whole series of snow paintings set out on her dresser and window seat. In the past few days she had gone through so many tubes of titanium white that Mavis Strickland, who stocked the pharmacy’s small art supplies section, suggested Jenny order directly from the distributor.

  But Jenny needed more than white. Snow could be blue, she had realized, or violet, or the palest pink. It could be an integral part of one’s life: her love for Matt was like a snowstorm, sudden, insistent, leaving her breathless. Stella’s hair when it was cut had most surely fallen like snow all over Liza’s bathroom floor, in an endless blinding whirl. Snow was the flour in the kitchen at the tea house as it was sifted into a bowl or the laundry flakes when Jenny washed her mother’s sheets; it was the rice pudding Jenny brought upstairs on a silver-plated tray, one of the few foods Elinor could still keep down. Stars like snow dusted the black night. Snow in the dust motes as rays of sun streamed in through the library window. Snow in the rattle of the last dead arm attached to the oak tree on the corner of Lockhart and East Main, a huge, rotten branch, still uncut, the paper-thin leaves shaking like the air before a storm, before the utter quiet, before whatever came to pass. Snow gathered in the petals of the peach trees, which bloomed throughout town all at once, pink-white flower-ice that smelled of the summer that would soon arrive. Little wonder there were so many words for snow in some languages, the way there was a litany of possible expressions for love or sorrow, or the many varieties of rain Elinor had named.

  There were endless sorts of lies, as well, and Stella Sparrow Avery told one more. A last little lie that wouldn’t hurt anyone. Poor Liza had actually brought some oatmeal cookies and a glass of milk to Stella’s room, for she had come to have a heart-to-heart. Upon hearing footsteps on the stairs, Stella had drawn the covers up to her neck, hoping to be left in peace, but Liza could not be dissuaded and Stella lay there, trapped, as Liza asked her questions about her feelings. Did Stella mind if Liza was involved with her father? Should they wait? Or perhaps they should see a therapist in North Arthur together and discuss the new configurations in their life?

  “I’m fine with it,” Stella was quick to say. If this wasn’t a white lie, then at least it was pink, a love-tinged fib told to protect Liza. No, Stella wasn’t happy that both her parents were dating. Weren’t they supposed to be the ones who were old and sensible and she the one who went wild? But even if Stella wanted to resent Liza, it would have been difficult; Liza was simply the kind of person it was difficult to hate. But not difficult to lie to, so Stella smiled and said goodnight and thanked Liza for the cookies and watched her go out and close the door behind her.

  Lie of omission, lie of a teenaged girl, lie of good-night before I climb out the window, lie of I’ll explain it all to you in the morning if you find out I haven’t slept in my bed, but of cou
rse if you never find out, then you really don’t need to know. White lie, pink lie, black-and-blue lie. It wasn’t Jimmy Stella was going to meet, but Hap Stewart, and it wasn’t all fun and games either. Hap was angry at her, annoyed that their joint science project was late because Stella had been spending so much time with Jimmy. True enough, she had taken to meeting Jimmy at the Table and Chairs up in the woods after supper, where they kissed for hours even though Stella had a hundred more pressing things to do. She called him late at night at a prescheduled time just to hear his voice. He couldn’t even pass a simple high school class—he was taking earth science for the third time, for goodness’ sakes—but each time Stella saw him standing out on the road with a handful of pebbles to throw at her window and that confused expression, as though he’d been drawn to her without reason or forethought, she thought it would be perfectly fine if Jimmy Elliot were the only person in the world, and if all she saw was his face, nothing more.

  To assuage Hap, ignored and now in danger of failing science himself due to their late project, Stella had come up with a plan. They needed one more water sample, something no one else in the class had, for them to make up for their lateness with the project. Hap had been the one to suggest Hourglass Lake, then Stella had said they should sleep out there and take the sample early in the morning, first thing. She brought along her backpack and a sleeping bag flung over her good shoulder and she climbed out the window of the tea house, down the trellis that would be covered with clematis in June. She also brought along six peanut butter sandwiches to sustain them, several glass sampling vials, and a flashlight. Hap, who met her at the corner where the oak stood, contributed a tent that smelled like a damp cellar, where it had been stored for fifteen years. The night was warm and humid and mosquitoes were hatching everywhere.