The Why of Things: A Novel (3 page)

At six, she lets herself get up, amazed, horrified, and oddly thrilled to find that the events of the night before were not a dream,
but beyond all that impatient to find out what exactly happened, and what will happen next. Murder, she is convinced of that. But who? And why? And under what circumstances? It occurred to her sometime between dreams last night that the man in the quarry might have been killed and dumped into the water already dead, a much more comforting alternative to the notion of him trapped down there and dying while they stood waiting at the quarry’s edge.

She dresses quickly, pulling on a bathing suit, shorts, and a T-shirt dug from the duffel she’d lugged upstairs and left in the corner of the room last night after the policemen and the divers had left. A few feet above the duffel, tacked to the slope of the wooden ceiling, are the familiar drawings of sailboats and sunsets and rainbows and trees, done by herself and Sophie years ago in now-faded Magic Marker. Eve studies these as she pulls her clothes on. What’s funny, she thinks, is that she has no recollection of making them, even though half have her name scrawled in childish letters at the bottom, and the realization makes her feel oddly disconnected from herself, or a self she used to be. She finds herself wishing that someone, sometime, had taken the drawings down; she’d like to put up a Grateful Dead poster, or a poster of the constellations, or maybe a tapestry. Now, of course, it’s too late.

Dressed, she hurries downstairs and outside to examine last night’s scene by day. She pauses on the porch, which is still empty of the wicker furniture and the low-slung hammocks waiting to be brought out from the garage. The porch looks much larger to Eve, bare. Bird droppings have accumulated at the base of one of the columns. She looks up; there’s a nest in the rafters. She can just see the edge of it, a crude, sturdy arrangement of straw and twig and dry leaf. Woven among all this, Eve notices a short, blue length of the same sort of string she used to make bracelets out of when she was younger. No bird appears to be home.

Eve drops her eyes from the nest to the quarry, a deep, misshapen pool about three hundred feet in length and half as wide. The water had seemed so black, last night; this morning, it seems to have no color of its own. It is instead a perfect mirror of the sky, of the rocky ledges that contain it, of the slender trees that grow stories high at its edge. In the far corner of the quarry, where on ordinary days blown leaves and bits of grass collect, drawn there by some mysterious current, a slick of gasoline has gathered, leaked from the pickup truck that even now sits somewhere at the bottom. The beer cans and the gas can and the other debris that had surfaced last night float there, too. It seems strange to Eve that no one has collected this stuff, as evidence, strange that they have not roped off the quarry with crime scene tape, or stationed officers to keep watch. As far as Eve could tell, no one last night did much of anything except stand around and wait for the divers to bring the body up from the quarry floor—the body that as they waited might still have been a living person.

She takes the porch steps two at a time down to the grass, which is still wet with dew. Blades of it catch in her toes as she makes her way to the edge of the driveway, where she first noticed the tire tracks last night. The tracks on the grass are barely visible now, but Eve can still just make them out, leading up onto the grass from the driveway, and then across the lawn about twenty unwavering meters to the quarry’s edge. Eve walks in the middle of the tracks, scanning the grass for any sort of clue as to what might have happened: a cigarette butt tossed out the window, a candy wrapper, anything. She pauses when she comes to the tree where her and her sisters’ initials are carved, where the truck left a nick as it passed. In the daylight, she is even more amazed that a truck was able to maneuver between this tree and the next one over.

Eve frowns and follows the tracks up a small slope of grass to the ledge from which the truck plunged into the water. This strikes Eve; it’s the quarry’s tallest, about ten feet in height, and the one she and Sophie have always jumped from for the greatest thrill. She gazes across the water toward where the gasoline and debris have drifted; aside from these things, it’s almost as if nothing happened here at all. A row of lilies send up unbloomed stalks, their spider leaves dangling over the quarry’s edge, and leaves drift as they always do among the insects on the water’s surface. She wonders, if the incident had taken place a few months earlier, whether anyone would have ever known. The gasoline might have gradually disappeared. They might have thought the garbage was just that: beer cans left behind by partiers one winter night. They might have gone swimming this summer just yards above a dead body, strapped into his truck.

She leaps down onto a lower ledge—the ledge where they laid the dead man last night—and touches the rock’s surface tentatively, as if it might hold some memory of the body, those clammy limbs. She realizes that this is how she will always think of the ledge from now on—the ledge where they laid the dead man—though she has sunbathed on it hundreds of times, and eaten picnic lunches there, and it is also the spot where she had her first kiss, with Evan Arnolds four summer ago. She peers down into the water; at first, she sees nothing but darkness, but then she can just make out a vague, wavering shape in the depths, like a large, white jellyfish; it calls to her irresistibly. She looks across the quarry toward the house, wooden and rambling. Sunlight glints on the windowpanes. Soon, if they’re not already, her family will be getting up. She strips down to her bathing suit, and before she has time to think herself out of it, think of what else might be down there and what exactly she’s diving toward, she flings herself headlong into the water.

Beneath the surface, the water seems to eat up even light; the sunlight, which above was bright with early morning, here is a struggling yellow haze. It isn’t that there is murk in the water, none of the wavering bits of algae that float in a lake, no specks of dirt. The water is perfectly clear; Eve has collected it in glass jars, looked at drops of it under a microscope, and it is even more clear than water she collected for comparison from the sea. It is something invisible, she thinks, that breaks the sunlight down, or maybe what it is is visible darkness. Eve swims down, holding her arms at her sides so as to make herself as streamlined as possible; she lets her feet do the work. The water, which on the surface was so warm it seemed without temperature, grows colder and colder as she descends. She swims past a jagged ledge, and then a crevice where two boulders come together, and then another ledge, keeping her eye on the vague white shape, and she is just about to run out of air when the thing is finally within her reach. Without ascertaining what it is, she snatches it from where it sits half on an underwater ledge, half fluttering in the depths. She can feel that it’s fabric of some sort, heavy in her hands as she swims for the surface as quickly as she can.

She bursts into daylight, gasping for air. After the silence underwater, the sounds around her now seem magnified: the water dripping from her ears and hair, the intake of her breath, a dog barking in the distance. She swims to the quarry’s edge, grasps the ledge, and spreads the white thing out. It is a man’s T-shirt, dripping, stained, and heavy with water. Beneath the cartoonish image of a pint of beer, faded lettering reads: I Get My Kicks at Vic’s.

*  *  *

J
OAN
and Anders get up not long after Eve. Joan wakes up when she feels the mattress sink beneath her weight as Anders gets out of bed, as if it were a water bed. Her heart sinks in much the same
way when reality floods onto the briefly, blissfully blank slate of her mind, when she remembers the truck in the quarry, the covered furniture, the bags and crates in the hallway. And of course, like every morning, Sophie. She wonders when she’ll ever shake that feeling.

She doesn’t like transitions, and as has been true every summer they’ve spent in this house, since long before the girls were born, she knows she cannot possibly feel settled here until their clothing is unpacked, their things put away, and, this year, that poor man’s truck pulled from the quarry floor. At least, she thinks, they have gotten the body out. She’s not sure she could live with that. She puts on yesterday’s clothes, which she left folded on the bench at the foot of the bed, and goes downstairs, leaving Anders in the bathroom brushing his teeth.

The first floor of the house, aside from the kitchen, is one large, open space divided into the suggestion of proper rooms by the arrangement of furniture. A couch and two large armchairs are gathered around a sturdy coffee table trunk in the evocation of a living room. A dining table resides by the large, multipaned bay window that looks out over the quarry. Bookcases line the far wall, in front of which is an Oriental carpet—the only carpet to cover the room’s otherwise bare, wooden floorboards. There are beanbag chairs and pillows on the carpet, which is where some days in the past the girls have built their Lincoln Log villages and set up their train tracks, and where on other days they have curled up to read.

Joan wanders through the room, pulling off the sheets that have covered the furniture all winter. It smells musty; the house isn’t winterized, and a good deal of moisture seems to have accumulated this year. They have been talking about winterizing the house for the twenty years they’ve owned it, but for various reasons they’ve never had it done. The house had originally belonged
to an eccentric sculptor who would spend his summers here. Joan has heard he kept seals and swans in the quarry, and threw parties at which musicians performed on a floating stage. When he died, he left the house to his housekeeper, who let it fall into disrepair as she aged; by the time she died, it was in bad enough shape that Joan and Anders were able to buy it for a steal, along with several odds and ends inside—the Oriental carpet, the coffee table trunk, a gaudy set of crystal plates, all of which raise more questions than they answer about the man, and oftentimes have made Joan feel as if they’re living with a ghost. Joan had spent her childhood summers on Cape Ann in a house that her grandmother owned, and that to Joan’s dismay had to be sold upon her death to cover various debts, and so, when on a nostalgic visit here she and Anders accidentally discovered this house, Joan could hardly resist. It required a lot of work to slowly restore it, and Joan had always envisioned winterization as the point of completion to their efforts. But then one year the house in Maryland needed a new roof, and another year they thought they might be moving to London, and then they had three girls to get through school. Joan has always wanted to see the quarry frozen, a football field of smooth black ice, but she never has; the few times they have been able to come up in winter have always been too warm.

She brings the sheets to the laundry room and kneels down behind the washing machine to hook it up for the season when she hears Anders’ footsteps behind her.

“I thought I’d go get donuts,” he says.

“Oh, don’t do that,” Joan says. She is hooking up the dryer now, trying to fit the stubborn plug into its socket. “Let’s go out when the girls get up. I could use something substantial.” She crawls backward on her knees out from behind the machines and stands up, brushing her hands off on her thighs. “We could go to George’s.”

Anders helps her push the washer and the dryer back against the wall. He, too, is wearing yesterday’s clothes, Joan sees, and he has had a shave. A small white square of toilet paper clings to his neck, and something about this, the vulnerability it suggests, strikes Joan’s heart with a bolt of distress. Anders has aged since October, the manifestation of a sadness that Joan is both desperate and helpless to ease. And the facts of his graying hair, his deepening wrinkles, have propelled her imagination through the years to consider a time when she might be without him. She frowns.

“You cut yourself,” she comments.

Anders touches the spot. “Last year’s razor. Somehow I managed to forget mine.”

“I hate to think what I’ve forgotten,” Joan says. She sighs, giving the dryer a final push into place with her backside. She goes to the sink to wash her hands, which are dusty from the tubes and wires behind the machines.

“They’re coming with a towing rig later today to bring the car up,” Anders says, over the sound of the water. “Truck, rather. Apparently it was a pickup. They’re coming from Rowley, I guess.”

“Right, you said last night.” Joan rinses her hands. That it was a pickup in their quarry was one of the few things Anders had said last night, after he had come to bed. They hadn’t talked about the irony of what had happened, though it seems impossible to Joan that he hadn’t been thinking about it, too.

She shuts off the tap and turns around. “I hoped at first when I woke up it was a dream.” She gives a laugh. “I wish.”

“Hmm,” Anders says. “Talk about a welcome.”

“What time are they coming?”

“They said between two and four. Whatever that means.”

Joan bends down to retrieve the laundry detergent from the cabinet beneath the sink, shaking her head. “The whole thing is
just sort of hard to believe,” she says, standing. “I don’t even want to think about it, really. It makes me feel ill.”

“Well. There’s a book in it for you, anyway.”

Joan regards her husband reproachfully. “Maybe someday.” She wants to wonder aloud about the young man’s reasoning for driving himself into their quarry, if that’s what happened, about the family he may have left behind. She wants to acknowledge the parallels between what happened with Sophie and what may have happened here. “I’m going to run the washer,” she says instead, holding back because she is afraid of dwelling with him there too much. “Would you bring the bags upstairs, and whatever else? Then maybe the girls will be up, and we can go. I’m starving.”

Joan listens to Anders’ footsteps on the stairs as she dumps detergent into the washing machine. They are slow and plodding, ponderous. She imagines him carrying up not one or two bags at a time, but laboring up the stairs with as many duffels as he can carry at once, bending under their weight; she imagines them as physical manifestations of his sadness. She sets the washing machine running and watches water cascade over the lip of the agitator and onto the dusty white sheets, waiting until it has filled before shutting the door. She spreads her hands on top of the machine, letting its vibrations travel through her body as it begins to wash, listening to the creak of the floorboards overhead as Anders deposits a suitcase here, a duffel there, settling them in.