The Probable Future

by Alice Hoffman

  Jimmy Elliot had helped pull the rowboat ashore. He had begun to chase after the figure he’d seen, but had to stop after a half-length. He stood panting at the edge of Dead Horse Lane, trying his best to catch his breath. He vowed then and there to give up cigarettes. Actually, he made several promises to himself as he stood there on the shore, dripping water, sick with worry and love. Coming onto the shore, he was the only one to have seen someone take off. Just a shadow, just a glimpse, but Jimmy knew how easily it was to slip into the dark; he had robbed several houses in the neighborhood, and even though he’d given that up since he’d been caught and forced into community service, he hadn’t forgotten what it was like. Just because people didn’t bother looking at shadows, that didn’t mean they weren’t there.

  It was a shadow who had the bees trailing after him, who jumped into a patch of stinging nettle when Dr. Stewart’s old heap of a car rattled by. This shadowman, itching like crazy and running as fast as he could, had no particular escape route in mind; he’d follow the train tracks back to Boston, where he’d rethink and replan. And then he stopped unexpectedly, despite the bees. He thought he spied an elephant on the corner, gray and brown, bellowing as it loomed up before him. The man who thought nothing of murder, who would have willingly done it twice, stood there immobilized. His breath was hot in his cold, muddy body. He couldn’t possibly be seeing straight. The trunk of the elephant was swinging out toward him. When the last dead section of the oak tree fell, it was dripping with honey; the bees were circling, one cloud, one being, as every bone in the body of the man who’d stopped running was broken, as everything he’d once been unwound in the soft, dark night.

  They took Hap Stewart to the hospital in Hamilton, and from there he was flown to Boston for emergency surgery. Stella drove to the city with Dr. Stewart. They didn’t speak on the ride in, but they didn’t have to. Brock Stewart was going eighty miles an hour on I-95 and Stella wished he would go faster. They didn’t bother to find a motel; there was no need for one. Stella was still wearing her wet clothes with Jimmy Elliot’s shirt buttoned all wrong on top. She had water and frogs and weeds in her boots, and her hair stuck up, like feathers. She didn’t care about any of that, nor the fact that she squeaked when she walked, nor the dark water she dripped all over the hospital lobby. They decided to camp out in the waiting room, where Dr. Stewart fell asleep some time near dawn. Stella, on the other hand, must have inherited something from Sarah Sparrow, for like Sarah she could stay awake all night long. No one would ever guess she hadn’t had any sleep. No one would guess how hard she could wish for something.

  The surgery lasted eleven hours, and for all that time Stella pictured Hap’s face, his shining eyes, the way he’d been laughing in the moments before the oar had struck him. When Stella saw the surgeon approach, she shook Dr. Stewart awake and he blinked in the fluorescent light of the waiting room while the surgeon told them the good news. Someone else might not consider six months to a year of rehab good news, but Stella and the doctor most certainly did. One of Hap’s legs would be shorter than the other, and he would most certainly walk with a limp, but even that was good news to them.

  All along Dr. Stewart had been preparing for the worst, and when the surgeon left them, Brock seemed weakened. He sat back down in one of the plastic waiting room chairs, and he cried, the way he’d been known to when making rounds. The doctor’s son, David, had been away on business and he arrived straight from the airport, shaken, having protected himself from the realm of sorrow ever since his wife’s death. Now he collapsed in his father’s arms.

  “He’s still our Hap. Six months of rehab at Hamilton Hospital. And be prepared when you see him—he’s got a metal halo screwed into his head.”

  “Jesus. I was in Baltimore.” The girl with the dark hair who was sitting with them looked vaguely familiar. “Is that Jenny Sparrow?” Hap’s father asked, confused, for he’d gone to school with Jenny and he knew she should be as old as he was. Ancient, at the moment. Worn out and useless and about a hundred years older than the girl on the bench.

  “Her daughter,” the doctor said. “Elinor’s granddaughter.”

  “Was it a broken neck?”

  “Thankfully, no. But almost as bad. A spinal injury.” The doctor did not say that if the oar had hit him half a centimeter to the right or left Hap would have been paralyzed. “The halo’s going to drive him crazy.”

  Stella had decided it didn’t matter if Hap wasn’t quite as tall; it didn’t matter if his posture was sloped or if he limped, he still had his other best feature. She excused herself and phoned Juliet Aronson from a pay phone. Juliet hadn’t been to a hospital since her father died, she was phobic about such places, but when Stella explained what had happened, she took a taxi and was there in under twenty minutes. When Juliet came flying down the hallway, Stella didn’t recognize her friend. Juliet hadn’t bothered with makeup; she was wearing a nightgown underneath her raincoat and had on plastic flip-flops. This was the way love walked in, barely dressed, confused, panic-stricken, overcome, not caring what anyone thought or what they believed.

  “God, you look terrible,” Stella said, as she led her Juliet down the hallway.

  “You look worse.” Juliet laughed out a noise that sounded broken.

  Stella threw her arms around her friend; they hugged each other, then Juliet backed away.

  “You’re soaking wet.”

  “He has a halo. One of those metal braces that screw right into your skull. It’s his spine that was hurt.”

  Juliet’s face was tight, but she was pretty without all her makeup; without her bravado, she didn’t seem any older then Stella. “I don’t care what he has if he still has his integrity,” she said. “That’s his best feature.”

  In the postop room Hap Stewart was breathing slowly, deeply adrift inside the half-sleep of anesthesia which was only beginning to wear off. He thought he was in a boat floating on the black water. He thought there were mosquitoes in the air, and all around there was the steady droning of bees. He thought a beautiful girl leaned down close and whispered, I’ll always be here. It was the voice from the telephone, the person who knew him inside out, Juliet Aronson. He smiled just to know she was there. A day starts out in one direction and ends in ways no one could imagine, with halos, with true love, with bees, with a swirling mass of stars below the fluorescent light, with good fortune where it was least expected to be found. Hap Stewart knew exactly who he was for one lucid moment, and that was more than could be said for most people. Before he sank back into morphine and sleep, he said Lucky out loud, as if that single word was his prayer and his protection, well worth repeating every day of his life.

  II.

  “SHE’S NOT DREAMING about snow anymore.”

  Matt was working out in the marsh, and Jenny had come to bring him lunch. She no longer had to buy tube after tube of titanium white now that her mother had moved on with her dreams.

  “What is it now?” Matt asked.

  “I think she’s dreaming her life. I’m not going to have any choice but to know her.”

  They were only a few yards away from the spot where Constance Sparrow waited for her husband when he was at sea. Constance could stay underwater for nearly twenty minutes, and was often called upon to search for drowned sailors, each time hoping the man she searched for wasn’t her own husband. She set out a lantern as a beacon to sailors; later, it became the Unity lighthouse, out on a line of black rocks. It was not far from here that the Good Duck had run aground, many year earlier, when the marsh was a deep harbor, perhaps the reason there were hundreds of peach trees growing up through the reeds. Or perhaps this abundance had been caused by women in love, who’d come to the marsh to make one final plea, with their peach stones tied on strings around their necks.

  Either way, Matt had been hired by the town to cut down the seedlings that cropped up around the boathouse each spring, making it difficult for people to get their canoes into the water. He’d defended his thesis an
d accepted the job at the college. In the fall, someone else would have to be hired to clear away the fallen branches on the Elliots’ property and bag the leaves on the common. Someone else would have to plow snow this coming winter, and then in April to power-wash the pine pollen off the sidewalks around Town Hall and the library. But at this time of year there would always be enough work for two men; next May, when classes let out, Matt would be back here at the boathouse, cutting down peach saplings, working so hard the only thing he’d hear was the echo of his own breathing, a steady rhythm.

  Jenny took her latest paintings out of the picnic basket and arranged them in the grass. There was a girl with black hair. There was a garden where everything was green, except for a single azure bloom, hydrangea blue, sky blue, blue as the water had been when the marsh was a deep inlet where peach saplings destined for Boston Harbor had floated. Just last night, Jenny had experienced a dream that was filled with a strange pattern of red and blue lines, not unlike a spider’s web. It wasn’t until she painted the dream that she realized it was a human heart. It was her mother’s life in color, in scarlet and indigo. Now, in the marsh, Jenny lay down with Matt for a few minutes in the grass. Her own heart beat ridiculously fast when she was beside him. Love was like that, like a dream you didn’t quite understand, one in which you didn’t necessarily know what you were looking at until it was right in front of you.

  Love ambushed you, it lay in wait, dormant for days or years. It was the red thread, the peach stone, the kiss, the forgiveness. It came after you, it escaped you, it was invisible, it was everything, even to someone at the very end of their life, such as Elinor Sparrow. The more Elinor slept, the more she dreamed, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t still attached to this world. It was too late for medicine, for intervention, for hope, but it was not too late to give some things away. To her daughter, she gave the dreams of her youth. To her granddaughter, she gave Rebecca’s bell, so she would never be silenced.

  Sometimes Stella sat by her grandmother’s bed and held her hand, and it was the only attachment Elinor Sparrow had to this world: the thread that pulled her back. Sometimes Jenny brought her water or tea, and this was the only attachment: the needle that pulled the thread. Sometimes it was Brock Stewart, carrying her out to the garden so she could feel sunlight, and this was the attachment she had to this world, the cloth that covered her and held her in place, so that she stayed with them like a leaf caught between branches, rattling, paper-thin, so translucent you could see right through into the next world.

  But even those who are barely attached have their worries. Elinor fretted about what would happen to Argus after she passed on. If no one stayed on in Cake House, where would he go?

  “When I die, you’ll have to take him,” she told Brock one day in the garden. She’d been dreaming of Argus. He was a puppy who refused to be separated from her. She tied him to a desk and told him to stay, and he just pulled the furniture along as he trailed after.

  “Another animal that refuses to die? Elly, you can’t do that to me. I just got rid of Sooner.”

  “Sorry. It’s done. I bequeath him to you.”

  “Ah, Argus.” The doctor leaned to rub the faithful dog’s head. “Live well, but don’t live much longer.”

  Elinor laughed. “You mean, mean man.”

  “I’m cruel,” the doctor agreed. “I’m sure my cooking would kill the poor boy in no time flat, since he’s used to your chicken and rice.”

  For so long Elinor had felt nothing, it still was a surprise to feel so much now. Anyone would think that being empty inside would make a person feel light, but in fact it brought with it a terrible heaviness. It was as though her bones had been made of iron all these years, her shoes made of lead. Only now, sitting with Brock in the garden, with Argus dozing at their feet, did Elinor slip off those shoes. The grass felt warm on her toes. Almost summer. Was that a dream, or was it real? She blinked back the sunlight.

  “Where do you think old Sooner is now?” Elinor asked of the doctor’s horse.

  “He’s still in my field. He’s in the earth. In the grass.”

  The doctor turned and wiped his eyes with the palms of his hands.

  “Who would have guessed you’d be crying over that old hay bag.”

  But that wasn’t it at all, Elinor saw that from the look on his face when he turned to her. That was the attachment, that was the way he held on to her.

  From up on the porch, there was the sound of voices, then laughter and a door slamming. Stella and Jimmy Elliot arrived.

  “He had meningitis when he was eight months old,” the doctor said of Jimmy. “I didn’t think he’d make it. I took Henry Elliot aside and I told him he’d better prepare for the worst, but here he is on your front porch.”

  “Creating havoc,” Elinor said, for Jimmy seemed to spend all his time at Cake House. Why, he’d brought Elinor a dinner tray the other evening and he hadn’t even bothered to knock on her door. He’d called her Granny and put a vase of flowers on her dresser.

  “Living his life,” the doctor said. “Good for Jimmy Elliot. Why should he walk when he can run? Maybe he remembers how close he came. He’s surely not going to let anything pass him by while he’s here.”

  The doctor had been wrong about Jimmy the way Stella had been wrong about Hap. She thought he’d be thrown from a horse and break his neck, and now he was safe at home, working with a physical therapist from Monroe and watching TV. He was on the phone all the time to that girlfriend of his in Boston, so Dr. Stewart assumed he was improving each day.

  “That’s the age for it.” Elinor remembered Jenny talking to Will constantly, as if she couldn’t be pried away from the sound of his voice. She remembered the way she and the doctor kept their phones on their pillows, so it seemed they were together, even when they were not. “They’ve got a lot to say. For a while, at least.”

  “Like us.”

  Brock Stewart thought of how, when Hap first came to live with him, he used to bring the boy to pick violets, up on the hill behind Cake House, because Hap’s mother had done so. They trekked to the hillside every spring, until Hap had let him know it was unnecessary to do so. Grandpa, it’s okay. You don’t have to keep bringing me here. I remember this. I remember her.

  “Your horse is in the field.” She had dreamed of that horse, once or twice. She had seen it running, in this world or the next. “Or so you say. But where do we go?”

  “I used to think there was a plan, a rough plan, but a plan all the same,” the doctor admitted. “Now, I believe there are a thousand plans. Every breath, every decision, influences the plan, expands it, shortens it, twists it all around. It’s always changing. Those of us lucky enough to make it through the multitude of possible diseases and accidents get old. We get tired. We close our eyes.”

  “And then? Where are we then?”

  Silly to ask him as though he knew, but in fact the doctor didn’t hesitate. He took Elinor’s hand and placed it on his chest, in the place where he knew his heart to be.

  “There.”

  Elinor smiled and thought At last. At last someone had told her the truth. She could see it and feel it as the days bled into each other, until they were dreams. That was the way time passed now, so that yesterday was the same thing as today, even though a week had passed. They were still in the garden, even though seven days had gone by. There were weeds in the beds and chinks missing from the stone wall. The dark was sifting down.

  “It’s beautiful,” Brock Stewart said of the garden Rebecca had begun long ago. Once a man started crying, he could never get away from it; it became a habit he couldn’t break. The doctor had started that morning when Liza lost her baby, and now he barely noticed anymore. He could stand in a hospital corridor looking at his notes, and not even realize what had happened until the letters were swimming, the ink dripping down the page. He could be in a garden and believe it was raining, until he noticed nothing was coming down from the sky.

  “It will be in ruin so
on enough,” Elinor assured him. “Keep your eye on it.”

  “Still beautiful. Even then.”

  Elinor was resting on the bench the doctor had given her as a present, but now she could barely sit up. She shifted and leaned her head against the doctor. She could hear the steady rhythm of his heartbeat.

  “You were right,” she said. “I’m tired.”

  There were thirteen sparrows on the stone wall; thirteen beds where the roses grew. Time had passed so quickly here. Elinor had turned around twice and it had all passed her by. But at least those iron shoes had been kicked off, the lead was out of her bones. She was drifting, she knew it, and she didn’t even try to stop it from happening. She felt extremely light, as though she had air in her veins rather than her cold, frozen blood. She was exhausted, but the air smelled so sweet. The fresh green air of May.

  Stella had insisted that her grandmother would live until winter, she had envisioned snow, but Brock Stewart knew there were no guarantees. He’d seen it with his own eyes: people he thought would survive lasted only days. Those he believed hadn’t a chance to see morning went on for years. He knew that Elinor was growing weaker, that was a fact, too weak to wait for winter. Some days she dozed in the garden until it was nearly dark, the pearly milk light of May falling down on them.

  There were evenings when the doctor had to carry her back to the house; soon enough, he had to carry her both ways, to the garden and back, wrapped in a blanket, even though the weather was fine. The doctor thought of his old horse in the field whom he missed more than he ever would have thought possible. He thought of Liza Hull kissing her baby good-bye, and of his grandson in his hospital bed, and of all the people he’d seen enter this world and those he’d helped leave it behind. He was a lucky man to be sitting beside Elinor in the garden in the last green days of May. He had loved her for so many years, he would just go on doing it, with or without her.