The Probable Future (10 page)

THE ORACLE

I.

HAT WAS A ROSE BUT THE LIVING PROOF OF
desire, the single best evidence of human longing and earthly devotion. But desire could be twisted, after all, and Jealousy was the name of a rose that did well in arid soils. Red Devil flourished where no other rose grew, at the edge of the garden, in shadows. In many ways, a rose resembled the human heart; some were wild, others were in need of constant care. Although many varieties had been transformed and tamed, no two were exactly alike. There were those that tasted like cherries and those that smelled like lemons. Some were vigorous, while others faded in a single day. Some grew in swamps, some needed bushels of fertilizer. Rose fossils dating back three and a half billion years had been found, but in all this time there had never been a blue rose, for the rose family did not possess that pigment. Gardeners have had to be satisfied with counterfeits: Blue Moon, with its mauve buds, or Blue Magenta, a wicked rambler
that was actually violet and had to be cut back brutally to stop it from spreading where it wasn’t wanted.

None of these false varieties grew in Elinor Sparrow’s garden. She wanted a blue that was true, robin’s-egg blue, delphinium blue, blue as the reaches of heaven. Clearly, she was a woman who didn’t mind taking on an unattainable task. Other gardeners might have backed down from the rules of genetics, but not Elinor. She wasn’t scared off by what others proclaimed impossible any more than she was bothered by the clouds of mosquitoes that rose at dusk at this time of year, as soon as the earth began to warm and the last of the snow had melted.

Elinor Sparrow hadn’t cared about gardening until her husband’s accident. The garden at Cake House, established hundreds of years earlier, had been neglected for decades. A few of the old roses Rebecca Sparrow had planted still managed to bloom among the milkweed and spiny nettles. The stone walls, carefully chinked by Sarah Sparrow, Rebecca’s daughter, were still standing, and the wrought-iron gate put up by Elinor’s own great-grandmother, Coral, had not rusted completely and was easily cleaned with boric acid and lye.

Elinor should have built her world around Jenny when Saul died in that accident on a road outside Boston, but instead she walked into the garden and she had never come out again. Oh, she’d gone grocery shopping, she’d passed her neighbors on Main Street on her way to the pharmacy, but all she had truly wanted was to be alone. All she could bear was the comfort of earth between her fingers, the repetition of the tasks at hand. Here, at least, she could make something grow. Here what you buried arose once more, given the correct amounts of sunlight and fertilizer and rain.

Elinor Sparrow had brought forth record-breaking blooms in past growing seasons: scented damasks as big as a horse’s hoof, rosa rugosas that would flower until January, Peace roses so glorious that upon several occasions thieves had tried to steal cuttings, until the
wolfhound, Argus, whose canines were worn down to nubs, managed to scare the intruders away with a few deep woofs. Seeing all the greenery behind the stone walls, even in the month of March, when the buds were only beginning to form, no one would ever imagine how difficult it had been for Elinor to garden in this place. For two years after Saul died, nothing would grow, despite Elinor’s best efforts. It may have been the salt on her skin, the bitterness in her heart. Whatever the reason, everything withered, even the roses that Rebecca Sparrow had planted. Elinor hired landscapers, but they failed to enlighten her and merely suggested she use DDT and sulfur. She sent soil samples to the lab at MIT and was told there was nothing amiss that a little bonemeal and tender care couldn’t correct.

One day, when Elinor was working in the garden, nearly defeated, thinking it might not be possible for her to go on, Brock Stewart, the town doctor, stopped by. Dr. Stewart still made house calls back then; the reason he was at Cake House was because Jenny, only twelve at the time, had called and asked that he come. Jenny had a long-drawn-out bout with the flu, accompanied by a hacking cough that wouldn’t go away and headaches that were so bad she kept the room dark. She was only in sixth grade, but she had already learned to take care of herself.

“Where’s your mother?” Dr. Stewart had asked after he’d examined Jenny. Why, the girl was quite feverish, and she didn’t have a glass of water on her night table or a cold cloth for her forehead.

“My mother is in the garden.” Jenny was a serious individual, even then. “It’s the only thing she cares about, so I put a curse on it.”

“Did you?” Dr. Stewart was a fine physician and he never overlooked a child’s opinion. “What sort of curse?”

Jenny sat up in bed. She had meant to keep the curse secret, but she was so flattered by Dr. Brock’s interest she let him in on the intricacies of the hex.

Come here no more, not in day, not in evening, not in rain, not in sunshine.

Jenny smiled at the doctor, pleased by how solemnly he considered the enchantment. “I looked it up in a book in the library corner in our parlor. It’s a verse that keeps the bees away. No garden can grow without them.”

“I didn’t know that.”

As the town’s only doctor, Brock Stewart was always amazed by the various ways people found to hurt each other, without even trying, it seemed. He was continually astounded by how fragile a human being was, yet how miraculously resilient; how it was possible to carry on through illness and hardship in the most unexpected ways.

“My father was the one who told me that bees dislike bad language,” Jenny went on, her tongue loosened. “What they hate most of all is when somebody in a household dies. They often take off when that happens.” Jenny’s knotted hair looked perfectly black against her overheated skin. She was a very precise girl who hated flowers, dirt, earthworms, and disorder. She had Scotch-taped a row of her tiny paintings to the walls, intricate monkey-puzzle watercolors in which things fit together perfectly: rug and table, house and sky, mother and daughter.

“I see.” Dr. Stewart wrote it all down. Children seemed to like when he did that, even the older ones; they could tell he was paying attention when he committed their comments to paper. “And is there a cure for this curse?”

“If someone dies or if the go-away verse is spoken aloud, the bees won’t come back until you offer them cake. Anything sweet will do. And you have to invite them to come back. Politely. Like you mean it. Like you care.”

Dr. Stewart phoned the pharmacy and asked them to deliver some antibiotics, then he patted Jenny’s feverish head and went out to the garden. Elinor Sparrow was on her hands and knees, weeding a bed in which every shrub had turned mottled and leafless. She barely took notice of people anymore. She was too twisted up by her
own terrible fate, far too wounded to pay attention to much of anything other than her empty garden.

“I see nothing’s growing,” Brock Stewart called out.

“Congratulations on stating the obvious.” Elinor didn’t like most people, but at least she respected Brock, so she didn’t chase him off. Not right away. She had never once caught him in a lie, and that couldn’t be said for many folks in town. “Do I get a bill for that opinion or is it free?”

“You’ve been cursed,” Dr. Stewart informed his neighbor. “And you probably deserve it.”

Every time the doctor saw Elinor he was reminded of the way she had looked at him on that icy evening when he had to tell her about Saul’s accident. She had looked inside him then, as though searching for the truth. She was looking inside him now. Dr. Stewart was a tall man, and there were some children in town who were afraid of his height and his stern manner. But the ones who knew him well didn’t fear him at all. They asked him for lollipops; they told him about what mattered most to them, curses and bees and forgiveness.

“You’re overlooking all the important things, Elly. Just listen.”

They stared at each other over the garden gate. Elinor Sparrow could not believe this man had the nerve to call her Elly, but she let that pass. She listened carefully. White clouds moved across the sky and the light was especially clear, with the luminous, milky quality out-of-town visitors always noticed.

“I don’t hear anything.” Elinor brushed the dirt from her hands and knees, annoyed.

“Precisely. No bees.”

“No bees.” Elinor felt like an idiot. Why hadn’t she noticed before? The silence was so obvious, the problem so apparent. “Who would have put a curse like that on me?”

Dr. Stewart shrugged. After all these years of being the only doctor in a small town, he knew enough not to place blame, especially when it resided so close by.

“Now that you know what’s wrong, you can fix it. Here’s how: Feed ’em cake.” Dr. Stewart made this suggestion matter-of-factly, much as he would recommend aspirin for headaches or ginger ale and licorice syrup for stomachaches. “Then ask them to come back. And be polite when you do it. Their feelings have been hurt. And they’re not the only ones, if you really want to know.”

Elinor had gone directly to the kitchen once the doctor left. She searched the pantry until she found a week-old sponge cake, which she doused with brandy and cream. But before she could carry the platter outside, the doorbell rang. It was the delivery boy from the pharmacy, who dropped off Jenny’s antibiotics, then rushed back to his car, making a hasty U-turn before Elinor could approach and accuse him of trespassing.

As Elinor Sparrow examined the vial of chalky penicillin, she realized something about her house. Cake House was even more silent than the garden was without bees. She had hurt their feelings, and she hadn’t even known it. She had been caught in some sort of web that spun days into months, months into years. She understood exactly where the curse had begun. It was the damage she’d done, it was the way she’d turned away, it was the child left to fend for herself.

Jenny was half-asleep when Elinor came upstairs with her medicine.

“Take this and hurry up,” Elinor said.

Jenny was so surprised to have her mother ministering to her that she quickly did as she was told.

“Now get out of bed and come with me.”

Jenny threw on her bathrobe and followed, barefoot and confused. She thought of a dozen possibilities for her mother’s sudden interest: the lake had overflowed, the pipes in the house had burst, the wasps in the attic had broken through the plasterboard. Surely, it must be a true emergency for her mother to think of her.

“I haven’t been paying attention to things.” They had stopped in
the pantry, so that Elinor could fetch the sticky cake. Ants had crawled onto the plate, and the smell of the brandy was overwhelming. “Now I have to give this to the bees. I have to ask for their forgiveness and invite them to come back.” She looked right at Jenny, her tangled hair, her wary expression. “I hope it’s not too late.”

Elinor took the cake outside. Before she had taken two steps, a bee had appeared to hover above her in the air.

“Was Dr. Stewart the one who told you about the bees?” Jenny was feverish, and being on her feet made her dizzy. She stayed on the porch and leaned against the railing. “I told him a secret, and he went and told you.”

“Of course he did. Now let’s hope it works.”

As for Elinor, she felt light-headed as well. Like a fool, she had thrown something away, and now she was trying her best to get it back. The cake she was holding smelled like spring, a heady mix of pollen and honey, lilacs and brandy. Dozens of bees had begun to follow Elinor across the lawn. Perhaps there was a cure for some things: what was ruined, what was lost, what was all but thrown away.

“Please come into my garden.”

Elinor pushed open the gate and the bees followed her inside, but Jenny stood where she was, stubborn, unforgiving.

“Come with me,” Elinor said to her daughter.

By then, hundreds of bees were flying over Lockhart Avenue, skimming over the thorn bushes on Dead Horse Lane, buzzing through the forsythia and the laurel.

Jenny was hot from her fever and cold from the chill of the day. She realized that her mother hadn’t thought to recommend that she put on shoes; Elinor wasn’t that sort of mother, no matter what she might pretend. Jenny’s toes had a tingling feeling, the sign of sure disaster. But which way was adversity? She could walk forward or could take a step back, or she could stay exactly where she
was, unmoving, which is what she did on that day of a hundred bees. She did not make a move.

Despite Elinor’s failed attempt to reconnect with her daughter, Elinor then began to turn more often to Brock Stewart for advice. If a decision needed to be made, she telephoned for his opinion, not that she’d necessarily follow his suggestions. Why, she could spend hours arguing with him, debating an issue, worrying a point. It got so Dr. Stewart’s family, his wife, Adele, who was one of the Hapgood cousins, and his son, David, knew when the phone rang at odd hours it probably wasn’t a patient or the hospital over in Hamilton. It was Elinor Sparrow. Why the doctor wasn’t more put out by her nattering away at him no one understood for certain.

The way Elinor saw it, at least there was one place she could turn for a truthful answer. At least there was one honest man in town. All these years later, with Adele gone, and poor David’s young wife gone as well, Brock Stewart was still the only company Elinor could tolerate, except for her dog, Argus. Tim Early, the vet in town, was amazed the wolfhound had made it into his twentieth year, unheard-of for the breed. Dr. Early insisted that Argus was simply refusing to die as long as his mistress was alive. He was that loyal, Dr. Early joked, faithful to the end.