The Why of Things: A Novel (2 page)

She stands in the shadow of the front-most tree so as to remain unseen as the car passes, its headlights bright and blinding, illuminating things in flashes as the car lurches over ruts: an overhanging vine, a roadside rock, a cracked and dried-out puddle.

Things are soft in the red glow of fading taillights, and Eve steps out from between her trees. She squints at that rock across the road in the dimming light and steps closer. Three cigarettes lie side by side on the rock, unsmoked. Though not a frequent smoker, she gathers them greedily—they are a rare find—and she has just put them carefully into the front pocket of her shirt when again headlights loom in the darkness.

*  *  *

“T
HEY’RE
here,” Anders says, both he and Joan hearing the sound of the divers’ truck before its beams come up the driveway. He offers Joan Eloise’s hand and all the sleepy weight attached, and she leads their daughter around the quarry to the house, blinded for a brief moment by the divers’ high beams as they pass. She gestures into the light with her free hand, a vague salute, and for some reason, the image of herself squinting and waving, Eloise in tow, now lines itself up with the other images of the day, the only one in which she is a subject.

She puts Eloise to bed; thankfully despite her adamance earlier in the evening that she not miss out on anything, she’s too tired to put up a fight. Probably the mere possibilities of what might be dredged from the quarry’s depths are terrifying enough; though she acts tough, Eloise is easily frightened, and has sense
enough to know when to shut her eyes to things.
Don’t leave the house
, she implores her mother from beneath her sheets, and Joan promises that she won’t, and the fact of it is that she is glad not to go back, not to have to stand there wondering if Eve is right and there
is
some poor soul who died down there tonight. Though of course she’s wondering anyway. She watches the scene unfolding across the quarry from afar, in brief glimpses as she unloads the car, bringing in their summer things and piling them in the house, where the furniture is still covered with sheets. The policemen across the water are faceless figures from this distance, the divers bizarre, black, rubber-limbed creatures lowering themselves into the dark water. She doesn’t need to be any closer; Anders and her imagination will fill in the details, both wanted and unwanted, she is sure of that.

Despite the strangeness of this situation, the potential horror, Joan feels oddly detached from it all, even resigned. As they drove the final miles of their journey late this afternoon she had laid out the evening in her mind, the quarry still the refuge at the end of those symbolic highways, a place of normalcy. They would unload the car first. They would strip the sheets from the furniture and open all the windows to air out the house. While she unpacked their clothing, Anders would go into town and pick up a pizza for dinner, and he’d go to the grocery store for the basic things: milk, juice, water, something to eat for breakfast tomorrow. Eve, perhaps, would take Eloise down to the beach.

But then, only moments after they’d arrived, her plans had derailed; somehow, she was unsurprised. Nothing surprises her much, anymore. There is a car at the bottom of their quarry, possibly—likely—with a body inside. And perhaps this happens often—maybe there are cars in quarries all around the cape. They have had no dinner, aside from the saltines and peanut butter she gave to Eloise before putting her to bed, which were leftovers
from the car ride. The bags are still packed, and the kitchen is empty. Nothing has gone as planned or imagined, which has only served to reaffirm her sense that it is better never to plan or imagine anything, better never to count on the future.

Sophie died on a Tuesday. The following weekend was Columbus Day weekend, a long one; she and Joan were meant to fly to Boston, rent a car, and drive a loop through New England, touring colleges. Instead, they held her funeral. For Thanksgiving, they had had plans to go to Joan’s cousin’s house in Delaware for a family reunion, which under the circumstances they abandoned, and for Christmas they were going to drive to Anders’ sister’s house in Vermont and ski, which they also failed to do. Joan had vaguely counted on going shopping with Sophie for a prom dress sometime in the spring, had counted on going to her soccer games, and taking her to see the World Cup in June, had counted on watching as graduation caps filled the air, so many black shapes against the sky. There are many things that she hadn’t realized she was vaguely counting on; she has gone through the months since with the sense that she took a wrong turn somewhere, or that in some parallel universe another version of herself is leading the life she had expected.

She brings the last load in from the car: her computer and notes, though she hasn’t written much of late. She had always considered herself lucky to be a novelist, to make a living writing books, but lately she has not been able to find much sense in it. It seems there is enough in the real world to worry about without creating a second one to fret over as well. She doesn’t have the energy left to care about that second world, into which she has come to think she invested too much of herself over the years. Indeed, she’d been neck deep in the final edits of her last book when Sophie died, and up at night thinking about her characters and their problems rather than her own living children.

There is a scratching at the door; Joan looks up at the noise and sees through the screen on the dark porch two green eyes: Seymour. She opens the door; the cat darts inside as if chased. Joan steps out just as a neighborhood dog disappears into the shadows behind the house, the jingle of its collar fading into the distance. She leans in the darkness against a column of the porch, slips off a sandal, and scratches at her ankle with her toe; there are mosquitoes. She hears a shout from across the water. A dark, rubber-clad head surfaces, a bright headlamp attached, and then another and another, and then something else: a body, Joan is sure, though she had hoped and hoped that the car in their quarry was empty, a piece of junk abandoned like so much other junk, put into neutral and pushed.
If there is a God, Joan thinks, he treats the world with the same irony as a writer treats her world; it is awful, she thinks, to find herself a character.

*  *  *

A
NDERS
watches as the divers leave the dead man on a sloping slab of granite, head side down, while the paramedics get the stretcher. The cops have mounted a powerful light to the roof of one of the cruisers, lighting the whole scene like a movie set. Anders stands near the ambulance, at the edge of the light, his hand on the back of Eve’s neck. Nearby, he can hear two of the divers talking about the stuck seat belt, and how they’d had to cut through it with a knife. Apparently it’s a pickup truck down there, nose down between some rocks. The third diver is sitting on a rock off to the side, his head in his hands.

Eve had escorted the divers in. When their truck finally pulled up the drive, Anders was surprised, when a door opened, to see his daughter emerge. He’d thought she was still beside him at the quarry’s edge; he hadn’t realized after Joan and Eloise had gone inside that aside from the policemen a few yards back he’d been
standing there alone. The divers followed Eve up the grass to the quarry’s edge. Anders was also surprised at the sight of them. They were wearing cargo shorts, T-shirts, and flip-flops; they were just regular guys, not one of them more than thirty, and they looked almost as if they’d been interrupted from a baseball game or a night at the bar. Anders thought there must be some mistake. He realized he’d half expected them to show up in wet suits and flippers, their air tanks already strapped to their backs. He’d expected divers, not people. They stripped down to the bathing suits they wore beneath their shorts and then pulled on their wet suits wordlessly; they looked afraid, and Anders didn’t blame them. He didn’t envy them their task.

Now two paramedics wheel a stretcher across the grass and collapse it beside the dead man. Silently, they slide a board beneath him, and they seem to Anders as careful with him as they would be if he were alive. They fasten him to the board with straps and hoist it onto the stretcher. When the ambulance had arrived with the policemen earlier tonight, Anders had wondered what the point was, since if anyone was in the quarry, surely they were dead, even as Eve kept pointing urgently to bubbles gurgling to the surface,
signs of life
! It had already been two hours, at the least. Anders gazes at the dead man now. He is young, like the divers, certainly no more than thirty. He is wearing khaki pants and a white T-shirt that is ripped in the armpit, no shoes. He has been maybe three days without a shave. Or he had been three days without a shave until he died, whenever that was. Anders rubs his chin vigorously; his own stubble is about three days old.

The dead man does not look asleep, as Anders imagined he might have, as other dead people he has seen have looked—his mother, and his father, who had passed out of this world as Anders watched, both of them softly overcome by a quiet stillness. What Sophie looked like he does not know, and it is not
something he and Joan have talked about. Joan had had to go identify their daughter’s body alone, while Anders was stuck in the airport in Rome, waiting. He had stared up at the armed guards patrolling on the balcony above him, the melodies of his students’ songs repeating in his head as even at that moment they sang in St. Peter’s Basilica without his direction.

No, this man does not look asleep, but decidedly dead. His skin is a faint blue, and his lips are very dark. His left eye is open just a bit. There is a leaf in his hair. Anders had watched as the divers swam the dead man to the quarry’s edge, had seen that floating leaf catch in the dead man’s hair. This is a detail he will have to remember to tell Joan. He studies the dead man carefully, wondering if he might be familiar in some way from summers past, trying to place him in the land of the living: in the aisle of the grocery store, or pumping gas at the Shell station downtown, or pouring a beer at their favorite local bar. It’s surprising how easy it is to do, animating this lifeless form before him, and he is struck by the familiar bewilderment he feels of late whenever he considers the line between life and death, how permanent, yet how fine.

It is so much harder, he thinks regretfully, to imagine where the living go on the far side of that line—into the nothing where Sophie has forever disappeared.

He looks up from the dead man across the quarry toward their house. The windows are all lit now; the porch is dark but for the glowing tip of a cigarette: Joan, who smokes only when she’s anxious. After the divers arrived and Anders wordlessly handed over Eloise, Joan had tapped her chin nervously, a superstitious tick that annoys Anders only because it makes him nervous, too, even when of his own accord he wouldn’t otherwise be. He had thought that certainly whatever car was at the bottom of the quarry was an empty one, an old one; it is as if Joan worried this young man into it.

*  *  *

E
LOISE
has been in bed for as long as it has taken to count to 4,873 before she hears a series of car doors slam and the light that has been casting looming shadows across her wall is finally shut off. Her jaw aches from clenching, and she knows that her fingernails will have left little moon-shaped marks where she has had them dug into her palm. It’s hard to stop herself from counting now, as hard as it had been earlier to get herself to start, afraid that if she did not the fear that had left her voiceless might also force her mind to freeze and forget to tell her heart to beat.

The porch light outside turns on, and just as quickly off; she hears the screen door downstairs open. She waits for the usual sound of the springs slamming it shut, but it doesn’t come. Her father must have caught the door behind him, and shut it quietly. Though he was probably trying not to wake her, the slam that never comes makes her feel even more unsettled, the way she feels when she cannot find an itch. She hopes that at least he has locked the door, locked all of the doors, even though they never lock anything in summer. But someone has driven into their quarry. Someone may have died in their quarry. There could be killers in the woods. Kidnappers. Thieves. Ghosts. Sophie’s ghost, of which Eloise is ashamed to be afraid. There could be anything out in the woods. Anything, it seems, is possible.

E
ve sleeps badly. She wakes up maybe a dozen times over the course of the night, each time at first unsure of where she is before slowly the room comes into focus: the iron rungs of her narrow bed, its rarely used twin across the room, the old white dresser in the corner, the wingbacked wicker chair where often the cat curls up to sleep. Every time she wakes and looks at the clock, she is incredulous to find that only half an hour has passed since she last looked, especially since each half hour is filled with dreams that seem hours long at least. In one, she’s stuck in a tree that sways dangerously under her weight, threatening to break and leave her at the mercy of the bobcats that circle below, waiting. In another, she goes ice-skating in the grocery store. In yet another, she goes out with her father in a boat they don’t even have, which he crashes into rocks that she tries over and over to point out to him, but that for some reason he can’t see.