The Why of Things: A Novel (5 page)

“Anyway,” she says, to ward off further conversation, hastily grabbing a paper from the rack and putting it under her arm. She takes a few wet bills from her shorts pocket and puts them on the counter. “See you, Arthur,” she calls over her shoulder as she bolts.

*  *  *

E
VE
leaves her bike lying on its side in the grass at the edge of the driveway. She can see through the kitchen window that her family is up. Or her parents, anyway. Her father is sitting at the kitchen table, and her mother is at the sink. As Eve crosses the grass, steam from the water fogs the window, slowly obscuring her parents from view.

When she lets the screen door slam behind her, her mother shoots her a look. “Your sister’s sleeping,” she says.

“It’s eight-fifteen!”

“And she was up well past her bedtime. You know she’ll be a grouch otherwise.”

Eve rolls her eyes and tosses the newspaper onto the table. “I brought the paper,” she says. “You’re welcome. It’s most interesting, today.”

“Thank you, Eve.” Her mother turns off the faucet and dries her hands on her shorts.

Eve pulls out a chair at the kitchen table and sits down across from her father, who reaches for the newspaper, sliding away from him a brochure that Eve recognizes from the photographs on the front.

Eve lifts it from the table. “So, time to cash in,” she comments.

“Or else wimp out,” Joan says, leaning back against the counter.

“What do you mean?”

“Your father’s waffling.”

“What do you mean he’s waffling? What’s there to waffle about?”

“He thinks he’s too old to take up things like scuba diving.”

“I am,” Anders says, opening the paper.

“You are not,” Eve says. “You weren’t too old to take up snowboarding last year.”

“That was last year.” Anders looks out from behind the paper. “And I broke my wrist!”

“Come on, Dad! It says here that the prerequisites are:
‘the ability to swim, good health, a love for being in the ocean. Minimum age, twelve years.’
It doesn’t say anything about a maximum age.”

“Good health,” Anders says, and grins halfheartedly. “I have acid reflux.”

“ ‘Good health,’ ”
Eve reads. “They define it.
‘Normal, healthy heart, lungs, ears, and sinuses. Circulatory and respiratory systems and body air spaces are healthy and normal. No severe emotional or neurological problems.’
It doesn’t say anything about acid reflux.”

Anders sighs. “We’ll see,” he says. He lowers the paper onto the table. “They made quick work of our body.”

“It’s in the paper?” Joan asks. “What does it say?” She comes around the table to look over her husband’s shoulder.

Anders snaps the paper straight again. “Not much, at this point,” he says.
“ ‘Body retrieved from quarry,’ ”
he reads.
“ ‘Authorities say the body of a Gloucester man was pulled last night from a private quarry in Lanesville. Officials confirmed it was the body of James P. Favazza, twenty-seven, who was reportedly last seen at his mother’s apartment on Magnolia Street late Friday morning. It appears that Mr. Favazza drove his car into the quarry sometime Friday afternoon. Officials said Favazza’s wallet, including cash, were on him when he was pulled from the water. Officials believe that there was no foul play involved in the incident, although an autopsy will be conducted to determine the cause of death.’ ”

Eve sits back and folds her arms across her chest. “I don’t understand why they rule out foul play right out of hand,” she says. “I mean, think about it. It’s kind of a big mistake to ‘accidentally’ drive into a quarry. And there are a lot of other, easier ways to off yourself, if that’s what they’re thinking.”
Like driving onto
the train tracks
, she almost says, but she stops herself. “But there
aren’t
a lot of convenient places to dump a body,” she finishes instead.

“Eve,” Joan says.

“It’s true. You have this secluded quarry where nobody’s been for months. Who even
knows
how many bodies could be down there?”

“Eve,” Joan says again.

“Plus they’re doing an autopsy. Why would they bother doing an autopsy if they’re so sure there was no foul play?”

“I’d say it’s probably a matter of procedure,” Anders says. “They need to be one hundred percent sure. And they probably want to check for other things—I’d imagine they’d do a toxicology report, for instance, to see whether there were drugs in his system, or alcohol, which would suggest, you know, maybe a drunken accident.”

“But if they need an autopsy to be one hundred percent sure, that means they aren’t one hundred percent sure. What if it comes back that he went into the quarry already dead? From, I don’t know, blunt trauma to the head or something? It’s going to be too late to figure out what really happened. They should at least investigate a
little
. I mean, there was a
body
in our
quarry
.”

“A body?” Joan, Eve, and Anders turn; Eloise has appeared in the doorway, still dressed in her Pluto nightshirt, a look of distress on her face. “A
body
? I am
never
going in the quarry again!”

Y
ears ago, when they’d first bought the house, Anders spent a summer building a stone wall to run along the back edge of what would later become his rose garden. He hired a local guy with a flatbed truck and a block and tackle rig to help him transport rocks from the woods to the yard. They stacked the rocks waist high against the incline of the hill at the back of the garden, assembling the wall in such a way that it looks not so much like it’s leaning against the hillside as much as it’s holding the hillside in. Over the years, Anders has wedged various trinkets into the wall’s nooks and crannies, so that the wall itself has almost become a piece of art. There are old porcelain dolls, small rounded stones collected from the beach, bits of pipe, a clay rabbit made by Eloise one year in a summer art class, an old glass Coke bottle, seashells, a thin length of metal bent into the curling shape of a treble clef. There is an army of old tin soldiers that Joan once found antiquing. They are confederates, by the faded look
of their painted uniforms, but Anders split the army into two and arranged them in opposing battle formation among the stones, leaving them on the perpetual brink of war. His wall is somewhere between a family joke and a legend; in any case, it has made him a frequent recipient of random trinkets. It is rare for a birthday or Christmas to go by without his receiving something meant to be added to the wall.

This year for Christmas, Eve gave him a copper compass rose, about the diameter of a tennis ball. He and his daughter stand in front of the garden now, looking over the tops of the roses at the wall and trying to decide where the compass rose would fit best. Joan has taken Eloise to the beach while Eve and Anders wait for the tow truck and more divers to come retrieve James Favazza’s truck from the quarry.

Anders holds the compass rose out at arm’s length. “Over there, you think?” he asks.

“Mmm.” Eve sounds uncertain. “Over, I think. To the right.”

Anders moves his arm. “There?”

“Over more.”

Anders moves his arm farther. “Good?”

“I’ll show you.” Eve picks her way through the roses and points to a spot between a small black wishing stone and a marble. She points. “Here,” she says.

Anders nods and walks carefully through the roses himself. Their leaves, he notices with dismay, are covered with brown and black spots, which can’t be a good thing. He squats down before the wall. “I suppose up should be north,” he says.

“I guess.”

Anders nestles the compass rose into the nook that Eve has chosen. “There,” he says. He looks up at his daughter for approval. But she is looking out over the quarry, her face concerned.

“There’s more gas,” she says. “The truck’s still leaking gas. There’s more than there was this morning.”

“It may still be,” Anders says thoughtfully. He stands, brushes his hands off on his thighs. “But even if it is, the truck’s coming out now, anyway.”

“Where
are
they, anyway?” Eve lets out an impatient breath and turns to leave the garden. Anders watches her go, seemingly oblivious to the scratch of thorns against her bare legs, though he can’t imagine that she doesn’t feel them. She walks to the far edge of the quarry, where the gas slick has gathered, and crouches down.

Anders frowns. He has spent most of the day with Eve. After breakfast at George’s, while Eloise and Joan took the station wagon to the grocery store, Eve had chosen to accompany Anders in the old Buick to the Building Center. He had thought the Buick, a convertible that spent the winter underneath a tarp in the garage and that Joan and Eloise have now taken to the beach, would lighten Eve’s mood, but as Anders did his errands, Eve had only trailed behind him wordlessly, clearly preoccupied. He tried to talk to her about how she felt about tenth grade, and whether she thought she’d go out for varsity lacrosse this year; she shrugged. He tried to talk to her about what she planned to do this summer, since at the last minute she’d opted out of the program she’d been enrolled in, building houses in South America; she shot him a look and wondered aloud whether Joan had put him up to the question. The only topic she showed an interest in discussing was the truck in their quarry, and how it may have come to be there.

Eve has always been free spirited, independent, and tough, but lately that toughness has become impenetrable, sometimes abrasive. Anders understands that Sophie’s death has left her reeling, but it is not something she is willing to discuss. Anders isn’t
sure, even if she were willing, what he would say, and the niggling knowledge that he should fills him with a dual sense of responsibility and failure.

Anders turns around, bends down to make sure the compass rose is securely in place before leaving the garden. He pauses, unsure of whether to go to his daughter, who is still crouched down at the water’s edge, or to leave her be and start bringing out the rest of the porch furniture from the garage. He has, he feels, nothing to offer her—no solace, no understanding or explanation—as much as he wishes that he did. Before he can decide one way or the other, suddenly Eve stands, and then Anders can hear what has gotten his daughter’s attention: the growing sound of crunching gravel. The tow truck is finally making its way up the drive.

*  *  *

T
HEIR
local beach is at the head of a rocky cove, and at high tide is just a small strip of sand. This afternoon the tide is out; lines of pebbles and seaweed stripe the beach, making it look as if the tide has gone out in discrete steps instead of gradually receding, every stripe a record of what each retreating wave has left behind. Joan has rarely seen the tide so low; off the point, clammers are out on mudflats she didn’t know existed, their cuffed pants like bells around their legs, and the sandbar extends beyond its normal bounds into the bay.

Eloise has spent the past half hour burying her mother; Joan lies in a trough covered by sand. Her daughter has carefully sculpted her body into the shape of a mermaid, her lower half neatly scaled with mussel shells, her wrists adorned with seaweed bracelets. Eloise has also built her two large breasts, the nipples of which she has covered with sand dollars. Or maybe the sand dollars
are
her nipples; Joan isn’t sure. Right now, Eloise is at the
edge of the beach, among the rocks, in search of other objects with which to decorate her mermaid mother.

The sand feels good. It is a cool and reassuring weight, and though part of her is curious about what is going on at the quarry, Joan is just as glad to be here. For a weekend, the beach is quiet; there are a handful of teenage girls sunbathing, and a young couple with a naked baby, and a very large woman who has been effortlessly floating since they arrived almost an hour ago, her body its own raft. Her endurance is impressive; Joan felt the water with her toe when they first arrived, and it is frigid.

There is a small plane performing stunts overhead, barrel rolls and loop-the-loops. Joan watches it anxiously, remembering the time when Sophie and Eve were young, before Eloise, when they saw from the beach a stunt plane like this one fall from the sky. Typical, she thinks, if today of all days, this year of all years, this should happen to happen again.

Suddenly Eloise appears above her, eclipsing the sun. Joan squints up at her daughter. “What have you got for me now?” she asks.

“This,” Eloise says angrily, thrusting forward a dead seagull by its rubbery webbed foot.

“Oh, Eloise! Put that down!”

Eloise deposits the bird on the sand beside her mother. Though Joan’s impulse would ordinarily be to move away, she stays put beneath her mermaid skin.The gull is small, and Joan can tell by the soft brown of its feathers that it is very young. It is newly dead; it has not yet been scavenged by bugs or other birds, nor does it have the deflated appearance that the carcasses of small creatures usually seem to have. It is completely tangled in fishing line; the clear wire is wrapped around its legs, its beak, and even around one of its wings, which suggests to Joan that the more the creature tried to free itself, the more mired it became.