The Why of Things: A Novel (4 page)

She is thirsty. She goes into the kitchen and takes a glass from the cabinet. The glass is dirty; there is a dead spider at the bottom, traces of dust and cobwebs. She sets this glass aside and takes another; this one, too, is filthy. She scans the glasses in the cabinet; all of them have spent the winter right-side up, the receptacles of dirt, dust, and insects.

Her automatic assumption is to blame Anders, who is usually the one to put the house away, covering the indoor furniture with sheets and bringing the outdoor furniture to the garage, unhooking the washer and dryer, and overturning the glasses in the cabinet, while Joan herself packs up their things for the trip home, strips the beds, and cleans out the refrigerator. But just as quickly as she leaps to blame him, she remembers that he hadn’t been in charge of these things last year. He’d had to go back to Maryland early for a music seminar, and packing up had been left to her and the girls alone.

She thinks back to the day of their departure, and how the oppressive heat of the week had finally given way to Sunday’s torrential rain. In her mind’s eye, she can see Eve and Sophie at either end of a wicker couch, their shorts and T-shirts pasted to their bodies. Eloise, she remembers, was upstairs howling in pain from swimmer’s ear whenever the effect of her eardrops wore off, which was frequently. The roof in the upstairs bathroom had developed a leak, and one of the car tires was flat. Joan had been hassled, cranky; Sophie and Eve were quietly helpful, tiptoeing around their mother, carrying furniture through the rain, covering their duffels with garbage bags to get them dryly to the car, performing tasks she hadn’t even asked them to do. And then Joan remembers—she had been unplugging the washer and dryer in the laundry room when she had heard a glass break. In the kitchen, Sophie had just begun the process of turning over the glasses when she’d let one slip, and this small accident was, for Joan, the final straw. She remembers cursing.
Jesus Christ, Sophie
, she’d said.
Try to be a little more careful
. She remembers angrily taking the broom from the closet to sweep up the shards of glass.
It’s a glass, Mom
, Sophie had said. She reached for another glass, and then she shook her head.
Forget it. You can do it
. And with that she’d left the room.

It was just a glass, Joan thinks now, feeling punished by the memory. At the time, there was Eloise wailing upstairs, and Anders gone, and the rain, and the roof, and the flat tire on the car. But it was just a glass.

Joan brings the dirty glass in her hands now to the sink to wash it out. At home in Maryland, these types of memories—ones triggered by objects, by certain articles of clothing, by stains on a rug or drawings on the wall—have been visited and visited again each time the object or the stain or the drawing is encountered, and finally their potency has begun to fade. In Maryland, Sophie’s absence has slowly woven itself into the fabric of reality. Not so here, Joan realizes. Here they are encountering her absence for the first time. Here they will have to endure the pain of losing her all over again.

*  *  *

E
VE
stands barefoot on the pedals of her bike as she coasts downhill on the unpaved road that leads away from their house through the woods toward the main road and the local variety store, where she’ll pick up the paper for her parents as she does most summer mornings, though usually with Sophie. She can feel her cheeks trembling as she speeds over ruts and rocks, and the wind makes tears roll back from the corners of her eyes. Her hair is still wet, and her shorts and T-shirt are dampened by her wet bathing suit underneath. The T-shirt she found in the quarry she has left drying on a ledge in the sun—on the ledge where its presumed owner was laid last night, a vessel forever emptied of the body that used to fill it. Eve shudders with a morbid excitement to consider it; though grim, the discovery is electrifying.

She skids to a stop where the dirt road spills out onto the main road that circumnavigates the cape, tracing the coastline. From here, she can see all of Ipswich Bay spreading goblet shaped
before her. She pedals across the street to the edge of the road, sets a foot down for balance. Below her, at the water’s edge, crabs scuttle the mud, and egrets stand patiently, still, flightless. Out across the bay, Hog Island hulks on the horizon, a dark shape against the sky. She can smell low tide, rotten and fresh at once, and she is filled suddenly with a longing ache, though she doesn’t need to long for this place anymore; she is here, at last. But the ache remains, because it is not the same; she is here, at last, but alone.

She takes her free foot from where it rests on the pedal of her bike and angrily kicks a rock, cringing at the pain in her bare toe. The rock, though hardly bigger than a grape, makes a loud splash in the shallows, startling the egrets into stiff and labored flight. They resettle only yards from where they were, sink again into the mud and their heavy-lidded waiting. Eve glances down at her toe; a flap of skin has peeled away from its tip, and the raw skin beneath is still white the way a wound is before it realizes itself and begins to bleed. “Fuck,” Eve says. This toe will be stubbed all summer now.

*  *  *

A
NDERS
has deposited each bag and crate where it belongs, the final bag his own. This he has put down in front of his dresser, where a brochure from the local dive shop sits among the seashells and driftwood and old anniversary cards that have collected there over the years, beside his wallet and planner and the contact card of one of the officers from last night. Anders brings the brochure over to the window, the many panes of which are breaking the early sunlight into bright squares across the floor, and then, when he opens the brochure, across its glossy surface. The brochure features photographs of divers gathered on a beach before a dive, of a red and white flag bobbing on the surface of
the water, of various sea creatures: orange starfish, sea anemone, a shark.

For Father’s Day, his family—Joan, really—has given Anders scuba diving lessons. She’d folded into his Father’s Day card this brochure, which describes the various diving classes offered, and she had circled the one she’d signed him up for: a two-part group course, with six students, which meets twice a week for the first six weeks of summer. The first class is on Monday, the day after tomorrow. Anders is ambivalent about the prospect. He does vaguely remember expressing curiosity about diving one night this spring, as they watched some deep-sea program on TV, but it seems to him that swimming among coral reefs and exotic fish is one thing; getting into a wet suit and gathering around the edge of some pool with a group of strangers is another entirely. And it isn’t just wet suits; he thinks of the divers last night, with their masks and fins and tanks and weight belts and regulators and all the other gadgets they’d had to strap to their bodies. Anders is generally wary of activities that require so much gear. But beyond that, the idea of scuba diving has always somewhat terrified him. To be willingly separated from one’s own death by virtue of only a fallible oxygen tank seems crazy to him. He has read of more than a few local divers over the years who have drowned in the waters off Cape Ann, and his imagination always brings him to those last horrifying moments without air even as a world of it lies only meters above.

Since October, Joan has signed Anders up for other classes in addition to this one, as if he were a child she had to keep occupied. She signed him up for a watercolor class this winter that met every Tuesday evening at a local gallery. This spring, she signed him up for a cooking class that met on Saturday afternoons. She encouraged him to join her yoga class, though she didn’t actually sign him up for it, and he didn’t go. Anders knows what his wife is doing;
she makes no effort to disguise her motives. She believes that he’s been depressed since Sophie died, and that these new activities will somehow distract him from his sadness. Privately Anders thinks it’s natural that he should be melancholy, and he has gone to these classes not so much for therapeutic reasons as much as he has to placate his wife. Joan has also tried to get him to join a group for grieving fathers, similar to the one she attends for mothers, but this he has refused to do. He doesn’t want to share his grief with strangers.

Anders rubs his eyes with the fingers of one hand, thinking vaguely of the irony of the fact that Joan, in trying to distract him from death with this latest class, is actually bringing him closer to a confrontation with what to him represents such proximity to it. He folds the brochure and slips it into his pocket, looks out the window. The breeze is silvering the leaves of the birch trees behind the garden, where his roses appear to be struggling. Some of them have bloomed, though not as many as usual for this time of year, and Anders can tell by the scarcity of leaves that something isn’t right. He planted the rose garden nearly a decade ago, each bush with blooms a different color: pink, red, yellow, white, burgundy. And pink-tipped peach, Sophie’s favorite. He frowns.

Often the fact that his daughter has died does not seem real to Anders. When he left for Rome with the high school choral group that Monday morning in October the week that Sophie died, he left behind a very different life from the one he would return to just days later, and he has been left with the feeling that he missed out on the most transformative event of his life. His experience was not, as Joan’s was, of phone calls from the police, of hospitals and morgues and bodies and other things that would have both insisted and affirmed that what was happening was real. His experience was instead of waiting three hours in line to get through security at the airport, and then of waiting for a flight that
was seven hours delayed. His experience was of sitting at the gate next to a woman who had tried to show him pictures of her new grandchild, of being offered peanuts—peanuts!—on the plane. He had felt acutely as if the world were somehow mocking him as he tried to navigate the everyday mundane while carrying the unfathomable burden of his daughter’s death. When finally he arrived home, it was to a life that had, without warning, been radically altered in his absence, and he wonders, if he’d been there to experience the awful nuts and bolts of the change, whether it might somehow make more sense.

Anders rubs his eyes again. He can hear through the floorboards the sound of glasses clinking in the kitchen below, and he turns from the window to go downstairs. After standing in the bright light of the window, it takes a moment for his eyes to adjust to the darkness of the hallway. His and Joan’s bedroom is at the end of the hall; he passes the bathroom on his right, and to his left, the door to Eve’s, then Eloise’s room. In front of Sophie’s room, he pauses, and after a moment of hesitation, pushes open the door and looks within. He is aware that the room is exactly how she left it, tidy and bare but for a magazine on the corner of her desk, a handful of pencils in an I♥NY mug, a pair of earrings affixed to the shade of the lamp on her dresser, and, above this, a photo of all three girls after one of Sophie’s soccer games tucked into the corner of the mirror frame. He gazes around the room, frowning, and then, gently, he shuts the door and quietly continues down the hall.

*  *  *

“N
O
shoes?”

Arthur sits behind the counter, his black head of hair bent down over a newspaper. His voice is gruff. His voice is always gruff. Eve stands in the doorway of the store and looks down
at her bare feet; she holds her stubbed toe up off the floor so as not to track any blood on the linoleum tiles, which are always vaguely dirty anyway. The store, and Arthur, have been here for as long as Eve can remember, selling the usual variety store assortment of soda, chips, juice, and candy, and behind the counter, cigarettes, travel-sized toiletries, batteries, and film. It also supplies basic things—peanut butter, toilet paper, white bread, ketchup, and an assortment of canned goods that have sat on the shelves untouched for so long that a layer of dust has settled on their lids.

“I never wear shoes,” she says.

“I know,” Arthur says, still looking down at the paper. “And I’ve told you about my neighbor growing up who rode his bike barefoot.”

“And his foot slipped back into the spokes and his heel sliced off.”

“Happy summer,” Arthur says, lifting his eyes from the paper for the first time. “I was wondering when you were going to appear.”

“How did you know it was me, anyway?”

“A hunch.”

Eve rolls her eyes. She crosses the room to the refrigerator for a drink, and as she peruses her options, she can hear Arthur turning the pages of the newspaper.

“So tell me about this suicide,” he says.

Eve feels herself grow suddenly hot. “What?” she says, too quickly. She turns around.

He lifts the paper and waves it in front of him. “The guy in your quarry,” he says.

Eve blinks. “Oh,” she says, though she can feel the flush still in her cheeks. She pulls out a lemonade and then slides the door
shut. Arthur flips the paper around and spreads it out on the counter, and Eve steps over to look at it.

Inside, there is a small picture of the divers pulling the man from the water. In the photograph, you cannot see the man’s face, but the image is etched firmly in Eve’s mind: bluish skin, bruised cheek. She shudders. Behind the divers, back near the ambulance, she and her father stand awkwardly, both of them looking a little lost, near unrecognizable. She stares at the image, unhappily revisited by the sensation she had this morning of feeling wholly disconnected from a former self, and this one only from last night. “Suicide,” she repeats, finally. “Is that what they’re calling it?”

Arthur shrugs. “Accident, suicide,” he says, as if these were one and the same.

Eve swallows her protest. “I’m surprised it made it into the paper,” she says, instead. “That was just last night.”

“Well, they managed to slip it in,” Arthur says.

“Evidently.” Eve blurs her eyes at the photograph until it is out of focus. She is aware of Arthur’s gaze upon her, which makes her acutely uncomfortable. She doesn’t know whether he knows what has happened with Sophie and is looking at her with a sympathy she doesn’t want, or if he doesn’t know and is beginning to register the fact that she has appeared at the store this morning uncharacteristically alone. She prefers neither alternative; she doesn’t want to be the object of pity, nor does she want to have to explain.