The Probable Future

by Alice Hoffman

  It was afternoon by the time Stella got to the terrible part, the part that took place not ten feet from where she was now hunkered down, beneath a blue sky that was overcast then. They dragged Rebecca Sparrow along this path, which was overgrown with brambles in those days, not caring that her feet were so torn from the rocks in her boots that blood began to seep through the leather. It was January, far too early for the snowdrops to appear, yet everywhere Rebecca’s blood fell snowdrops grew. Everything else was burned away. Grass never grew there again, even thistle would not sprout here, not milkweed, not even thorn apple. The men’s breath billowed out in smoky clouds. There seemed to be no color in the world on this day: the skies were leaden, the reeds, dull brown, the hay in the fields, pale and flaxen, sprinkled with frost.

  They had held off, waiting for the ice to melt, but every day was more frigid than the last. But when one of the Hapgoods took to his bed and two of the White cousins died, they decided they could wait no longer: a group of boys were sent to chop a hole in the ice. Hours had been spent in discussion of what strength of rope to use. As she read, Stella wondered if Rebecca would have escaped if she could. In a footnote, Matt suggested that the idea that witches could fly at night might have been due to hallucinogenics. Flying ointments had been around forever, Matt noted; even Francis Bacon had suggested a toxic concoction that included hemlock, nightshade, saffron, and poplar leaves.

  Many of these poisonous ingredients were easily found in the fields surrounding Unity, but what would an individual see if she were high above town? Wouldn’t she miss everything that was truly important if there was so much distance between herself and the rest of the world? Rebecca was grounded, tied to the village by the presence of her baby daughter, left in the care of the Hathaways. She didn’t even try to run, let alone fly. She had nothing, yet she was weighted down by devotion. Everything she owned in this world had fit into a single basket: the bell, the compass, two dresses, several bars of barley soap that could wash away any stain, be it tar or gravy or blood. Some of the women were handed shears and told to cut off her black hair. Though it was winter, the sparrows sang as if it were already spring. The turtles moved beneath the ice, floating below the surface as though they were logs.

  Many of those in attendance couldn’t understand why Rebecca refused to say a word, and several referred to this fact in their journals. But from reading Charles Hathaway’s recollections of the day, Matt knew that her last words had already been said, in Hathaway’s kitchen, where Samuel’s widow held tight to Rebecca’s baby girl, though she clearly preferred her own child.

  I forgive you.

  They had to listen carefully, and even then were unsure, for afterward Rebecca was mute. Not that her promises or lies were needed. If proven innocent, she would be asked to take her place among the good wives who had sewn rocks into the hems of her clothes. But she who survived a drowning was never deemed innocent, not with stones to weigh her down. She’d been burned and pricked, she’d stepped on glass and been struck with arrows, and she hadn’t felt a thing. When her boots were removed, they were so full of blood the snowbank turned crimson. As they sent her beneath the ice the first time, they could hear gulping sounds from deep within the lake. The sparrows set to chattering and the ice groaned. They pulled her up with the rope they had decided upon, the strongest of all, and asked her to confess. When she would not, they sent her back below. Perhaps her lips had frozen shut, perhaps she lost her voice from the cold. They dunked her twice more, but on the next attempt, when they pulled the rope, it came to them too easily. Nothing was attached but a bundle of weeds.

  The bell and the compass and the star and the braid of dark hair were locked away in Charles Hathaway’s desk drawer, but at night Hathaway could hear them, even with the drawer shut. No matter if he was safe in bed, they spoke to him. Before long, he couldn’t hear anyone’s voice but Rebecca’s, he couldn’t discern his wife calling to him or the thunder on stormy days and he often was found wandering through town. He had grown so fearful of water that he would not wash his hands or face. He stank and grew filthy and even his own horse shied from his presence; his wife and his daughter-in-law and his grandson would not sit at a table with him.

  Sarah Sparrow was raised by the Hathaways, but when she turned thirteen she opened the desk drawer where her mother’s belongings had been stored. She had heard Rebecca calling to her just as surely as her grandfather had. She looked around the Hathaway household and remembered that she didn’t belong. Hathaway went after Sarah when she ran off, for she was his natural granddaughter, but as he neared the lake, he heard Rebecca’s voice again. He’d never really stopped hearing it, it had merely grown quiet. Now it was roaring loud. Maybe it was this voice that spooked his horse, which took off running from the very spot where Stella was now sitting, the place where nothing grew, where clouds of mosquitoes still rose at this hour, where the sky fell down in blue waves. Stella put away Matt’s thesis; it was too dark to read, and she had mostly finished, anyway. Now that she knew what had happened, she had the urge to keep the thesis. Why should it be shared with the town that had done this? Stella packed up and headed for Dead Horse Lane. She could hear the catkins move in the wind, and the hollow reeds rang out, like bells. The lane was inky with shadows, and even though Stella’s mother and grandmother were less than five hundred yards away, in the big old house, it was lonely out here. She thought about Rebecca, in her bloody boots. She thought about Sarah, raised by a woman who despised her. She thought about the horse that had bolted and ran right over the water until it sank, somewhere in the center of lake, which people said had no bottom.

  It was a relief to turn onto the paved road of Lockhart Avenue. Soon Stella heard an echo on the asphalt, a van behind her, sending out blinding pools from its headlights. Stella scrambled to the side of the road, narrowly missing a patch of nettle that would have left her legs stinging right through the jeans that Juliet had helped to dye black. She’d jumped aside so quickly that her head pounded. She could feel the thrum of her pulse when the van pulled up alongside.

  “Hey, there. Want a ride?”

  Stella stopped and blinked. All she could see was a shadow behind the wheel. She thought of that woman she’d seen at the restaurant in Boston and the way she’d died, and her pulse actually hurt. You had to be careful in this world. You had to look twice at what came your way.

  “I don’t bite,” the driver assured her.

  Stella recognized the van: the pizza delivery truck. Now she recognized the driver as well.

  “You almost ran me over,” Stella said, relieved to know who it was who had stopped.

  She saw the driver’s fate hanging over him: a traffic accident somewhere in Maine on a hazy summer day. She wouldn’t get in the car with him for any reason. Not if her life depended on it.

  “I’ve got to get the pizzas out while they’re hot. So do you want a ride or not?”

  “No, thanks. I like to walk.”

  Stella stood there breathing hard, even though it was only the pizza delivery guy who waved and drove off.

  “Slow down,” she called after him.

  The moon had appeared in the sky, an arc of white surfacing. The crab apples were in bloom, and as Stella walked on, she counted the many kinds: there were the ones with white creamy flowers, the ones edged pink, the ones with dark red blooms, the color of the human heart. Tonight, it seemed as though the whole world was breathing; everything was alive. The gnats in the air, the peepers in the ditches, the leaves of the poplars and the ash rustling, like a breath in and out.

  Stella couldn’t help but wonder if this was the path they had taken from town on that cold day when Rebecca’s blood fell on the ice. Was that why Stella felt so nervous? Was that why she had the urge to run? She made a promise to the dark night: if she reached Liza Hull’s safely she would make a sacrifice in Rebecca’s name. All she needed was a sign. Another car passed by, slowing down, but Stella looked straight ahead. Cynthia Elliot had told her
that four years earlier a girl was hit by a car on Lockhart Avenue, and they never did find the driver. She said the body was left on the corner of Lockhart and East Main, with a blanket thrown over it, so that it seemed the girl was sleeping, there in the gutter.

  Stella counted her steps to the old oak tree, then took off running. Juliet Aronson had once suggested that if you counted your steps in the moonlight, when you reached home you’d have the first letter of your true love’s name. But Stella didn’t actually have a home at the moment, and she knew whom she loved despite what common sense recommended, so she counted for counting’s sake. When she reached the tea house she hightailed it upstairs. Liza came to stand in the hall, but all she had time to do was call out a greeting as a streak of lightning fled to the second floor.

  “I’m supposed to be giving you three meals a day. Don’t you want dinner? It’s beef stew. Your father will be here.”

  Every day proved Juliet Aronson’s assessment to be correct. Will Avery was hanging around the tea house like the blackbirds who waited for crumbs.

  “Not hungry,” Stella called back. “Thanks anyway. I’m just so tired. I’m going to bed.”

  “It might be that flu that’s going around,” Liza said.

  When Stella was safe at last, up in her single bed, made up with clean white sheets that very morning, she was still thinking how easily people could disappear. She thought about sparrows and roses and invisible ink and girls who were left in the road. She kept Matt Avery’s thesis under her pillow and all through the night the pages rattled, like the leaves of the trees. Some things are given and some are taken away; some things stay with a person forever. Stella dreamed of lakes and stones, of girls with black hair; she dreamed the same dream as her mother and her grandmother and all of the women in her family who had come before her. When she awoke in the morning she had already decided what her sacrifice would be.

  Long before Liza took the stairs down to the kitchen to begin the day’s baking, before her mother reported for work, before her grandmother went out to her garden, Stella went to the bathroom and locked the door. She shook out her hair and looked at herself in the mirror. Pale as a star, invisible unless seen against the darkness. Thankfully, Juliet had left a shopping bag of everything she had stolen during her weekend in Unity, and that included several boxes of hair dye. All the while Stella was bent over the sink with the water running, she was thinking about that day when ice was covering the lake, when the water below was so cold it could turn a woman to stone, when the fields were dark with crows and a thousand sparrows came to the shore and refused to fly away, even when they were chased with sticks.

  In less than an hour, Stella’s best feature, her long blond hair, which Juliet Aronson had always advised she wear loose so that it fell down her back like a handful of stars, had been turned black. She used a pair of nail scissors to cut it short, above her ears, exactly as they had chopped off Rebecca’s hair on the morning of her drowning, a single braid of which Charles Hathaway kept in a drawer along with the compass and the star and the bell and, when he found them in his son’s belongings, the ten arrowheads lined with Rebecca’s blood. There the possessions stayed until Rebecca’s daughter returned them to where they belonged. That was the first thing Sarah Sparrow did when she left the Hathaways’: she built the case where the mementos were still stored. She insisted on remembering. The glass wasn’t added till later, but the casement itself was carefully made from oak and hawthorn and ash. Sarah needed no sleep, so she stayed up all night, working until the job was through. Only then did she give a few strands of her mother’s hair to the sparrows who were waiting so patiently. Each strand was quickly woven into their nests in the reeds, where it called out on windy days, spooking horses and frightening local boys, murmuring to anyone who might be brave enough to walk down the path where nothing grew, but where long ago there were snowdrops before it was the season, growing through the hardest ice, a gift from the Angel of Sorrow.

  THE CHARM

  I.

  IT WAS THE SEASON WHEN PEOPLE IN UNITY put in their gardens, when winter’s fallen maples were culled and chopped into firewood for the year to come, when the peach trees bloomed and spring fever was at its height. Usually, at this time, Matt Avery would be working overtime, but this year he had stopped answering the phone. Even the old oak tree was still standing, though it was leafless, and people said it wailed whenever the wind blew through. Matt didn’t care about the tree; he was a man who had always risen by 5:30 A.M. without having to bother setting his alarm clock, but now he couldn’t get out of bed. He heard his brother rattling around in the kitchen, fixing coffee, chatting on the phone with Liza, and there Matt would be, quilt over his head, convinced that getting dressed or brushing his teeth or even breathing was far too much of an effort.

  Matt had fallen victim to the flu, a potent springtime variety that boiled the blood and made for light-headedness, an illness that left him suffering with aching bones and a cough that rattled his ribs. Perhaps he was so afflicted because his resistance was down: in losing his thesis, he appeared to have lost everything. The world no longer interested him. Everything he’d ever tried in his lifetime had gone wrong. Now it was Will who was the early riser; he who used to wake at noon now concocted protein shakes at dawn. He who favored Scotch and gin gulped bottled water. As unbelievable as it seemed, Will Avery had taken up running. He left the house at six and didn’t return until eight, when Matt would once again hear him, whistling like a madman as he showered, some prelude of Chopin’s that could set a person’s teeth on edge if all he wanted was peace and quiet.

  Will had begun to give piano lessons on their old Steinway, the one they’d both learned on so long ago, although Matt had been tone-deaf and Will had a natural aptitude. Their teacher had actually told their mother that Will flared with talent, whereas Matt … well, Matt was a lost cause. Indeed, it was true. And now he had misplaced his thesis to add to his many failures. Gone was the project he had been working on for so many years, due to be handed in at the end of the week. To be sure he had notes and the first drafts of six of the ten chapters. He had the very last page, the one he’d been revising when the damned thing disappeared. But what sort of fool did not have a copy of the finished product? A fool such as himself it would seem, a man who had taken twenty years to complete his education and who couldn’t seem to get to the end even then.

  Whatever Matt Avery wanted slipped through his fingers like water. If he couldn’t have love, if he had no hope, then at least he could teach, or so he had believed. The chair of the history department at the state college, Brian Lewis, had proposed Matt teach a night class for the fall, an offer that would surely be retracted when it became known that Matt’s thesis was AWOL. Thinking about his fate, Matt couldn’t help but consider Charles Hathaway’s last days, how he’d taken to his bed when his granddaughter left and went back to live at the house by the lake, how he’d suffered with fevers and delusions, even though his wife brought him chamomile tea and poltices made from poplar leaves. Charles Hathaway wrote in his journal that he’d dreamed of Rebecca Sparrow so often she seemed to be with him even in his waking hours, sitting at the foot of his bed, dripping with green water, slipping away from him whenever he tried to reach out.

  When Matt did manage to get out of bed, for a glass of water or some Tylenol, he didn’t bother to check the phone to see if he had any messages. He simply had given up hope. True, Mrs. Gibson had put up signs in the library, but a lost manuscript wasn’t like a stray dog. It didn’t come when you called; it wasn’t taken in and fed by kindly neighbors; and it assuredly wasn’t waiting in a cage at the pound, tail wagging. The phone calls were always for Will, anyway, for he seemed to have taken over the house. Matt wondered what the mothers of Will’s students would think if they knew Will Avery had spent his entire adult life as a drunkard and a liar. But the fact of the matter was Will had stopped drinking completely. For all Matt knew, he’d stopped lying as well.

  �
�Rise and shine, brother,” Will would call through the wall before he went running, and why shouldn’t good old Will be happy? All charges against him had been dropped, now that the murdered woman’s dinner companion had come forward to say the victim had been considering taking out a restraining order against an old boyfriend, one who wouldn’t leave her alone. The boyfriend had turned up missing, and Will had been the one to identify him, from a photograph, as the so-called reporter who’d interviewed him and stolen the model of Cake House. Inside Edition had already dispatched a reporter to interview Will right on the town green, and there was a rumor that the Today show would be sending a film crew on Memorial Day. Will had been asked to be the parade marshal. Will Avery, who hadn’t visited his mother on her deathbed, who’d lied for sport and cheated on his wife, who’d frittered away his talents and had been the sort of father available only for birthdays and special occasions, would be running alongside the mayor’s white convertible Cadillac on Memorial Day, his music students following along, tossing Tootsie Rolls and lollipops to the crowd.

  Will hadn’t mentioned to anyone—except for Liza, in whom he now confided everything—the reason he’d taken up running. It was a reaction to the fear that arose inside him when he went into the station house in Boston to pick out the photograph of the man who’d stolen the model house. When Will got back to Unity, he was concerned enough about Stella’s safety to go and talk to the chief of police, Robby Hendrix, who had been three years behind Will in school. Robby had assured Will that Stella would not be in any danger, but as far as Will could tell, the most difficult case the Unity police force had dealt with, prior to tracking down what was possibly a cold-blooded murderer, was ridding the neighborhood of a family of rabid raccoons that had to be trapped up in the Elliots’ attic.