The Probable Future (35 page)

“And you reciprocate this …” Jenny had to search for the word. “Feeling?”

“Liza’s an amazing woman. She knew I was innocent long before the charges against me were dropped. Did you see her on
Inside Edition
? She was right there with me.”

“Well, fancy that. So now you want me to forgive you?”

“Pretty much. We’ve been through so much together, Jen. All of our adult lives. It would mean a lot to me.”

What had Liza Hull done to Will? Put a spell on him? Helped him find his inner self? Or had she simply believed in him?

“Then tell me one thing. That day you and your brother came here on my birthday, you said it was your dream I was describing.”

Will nodded. “The black angel, the bee who wouldn’t sting, the fearless woman.”

“Yes. That’s the one.”

“I wanted it to be my dream, but I was too scared to sleep that night. You know me, on a good night I rarely dream, but back then I was terrified that the dead horse might rise. I was biting my nails. My brother told me the horse belonged to Charles Hathaway, and that it reared when he tried to force it down the path where Rebecca Sparrow had walked. Matt was studying local history even back then, but who would have guessed he had a dream like that inside him.”

People made mistakes all the time, and sometimes it was more than worthwhile to forgive someone, even if that person was Will. Even if the first words he’d ever spoken to her were lies.

“Didn’t you guess it was Matt? You two even have the flu at the same time,” Will said as he was leaving. “That should tell you something.”

Was love catching, like a common cold? Or was it more like a virus that afflicted a person gradually, until the unsuspecting individual was sick with love, consumed by it, riddled by its aftereffects? Once Will had left, Jenny Sparrow realized that her blood was so hot it felt like burned sugar inside her veins. Was it possible that her light-headedness was as much caused by thinking about Matt as it was from her fever? Why was it so difficult for her to recognize her own heart’s desire, a task not unlike stringing beads on a thread of
smoke, or setting a fire to green wood, or finding her way through the dark without a lantern or a flashlight or a sliver of moon?

There was a knock on her door. Elinor came in, dependent on her cane, but carrying a tray all the same. She had heard the bell, rung when Will lifted it from the table, and here she was with the tea she had not brought to her daughter nearly thirty years earlier, the tea that was never made but had caused so much bitterness.

“What’s this?” Jenny said, surprised.

“Elisabeth Sparrow’s recipe for break-a-fever tea. Mint and lemon and lavender honey. I’ve also got some of that horrible stuff I mixed up. Bird’s-nest pudding. It’s supposed to be good for you.”

There was indeed a bowl full of some unrecognizable pudding-like stuff poured into a baked apple. The last thing Jenny wanted was food, but she forced herself to take a taste of the pudding. To please her mother, she realized.
How odd
, she thought.
We’re trying to make each other happy. How backward. How unlike us.

“It’s creamy,” Jenny said. “You made this?”

Love was never a mistake, even when it wasn’t returned. It was not unlike the phlox in Catherine Avery’s garden, untended, ignored, but there all the same.

“I’m sure it’s terrible,” Elinor said. “You don’t have to humor me.”

“I thought you could always tell when someone was telling the truth. Or at least it always seemed that way.”

“I knew a lie. That’s different from knowing the truth. Isn’t it funny; as far as I can tell, Will’s stopped lying.”

“He’s in love with Liza Hull.”

“Should we be happy for Liza or send her our sympathies?”

“Happy.” Jenny nodded. “Definitely.”

Elinor reached for the little watercolor of the tiger on the hillside. “How lovely. I dreamed that same image last night. That’s the hill behind the lake.”

“But there aren’t any tigers in Unity.”

“I know. I was dreaming of tiger lilies.”

They both laughed at Jenny’s error; she had seen a cat instead of a flower, a liar instead of a man who’d be true.

“I got it wrong yet again,” Jenny said.

Elinor took Rebecca’s compass from her pocket. “Maybe you need this.”

“Isn’t this from the case in the parlor?”

“What good does a compass do under glass? I thought you might put it to some use.”

Jenny thought about what her mother said all that day as her fever raged. She thought about tiger lilies and cups of tea and the strange turns love took. In the evening, Elinor came back with some vegetable broth and a cold compress for Jenny’s forehead, and not long after, Jenny’s fever broke. One minute she was burning up and the next she was cool and refreshed, probably the result of Elisabeth’s tea. Break-a-fever, break a heart, break every rule if you must.

Jenny took off her flannel pajamas and quickly dressed; she had a frantic desire for fresh air and for something more. When she stepped outside, there was the Archer, on the western horizon. There was Pegasus, high in the east. In the dark, the house really did look like a wedding cake, layer upon layer of white paint. She walked past the laurel, past the lilacs; she kept on until she had turned the corner by the old oak, half of which had leafed out and half of which was dry as kindling. She didn’t quite know where she was going until she was almost there. She could feel the weight of the compass in her pocket, and before long, she saw the phlox, blooming like little stars in a row.

Jenny knocked on the Averys’ back door, and when no one answered, she found the key under the mat, where it had always been stowed. The kitchen was dark—Will must be at Liza’s—but someone was home, that much was certain. Jenny could feel a person
dreaming. In the dream a man was lost on a long road. It was a lane that never ended, which repeated itself just when the dreamer thought he’d reached the end. Night had begun to fall for the dreamer, but the time frame was unnaturally fast, with so many stars racing through the sky it was impossible to recognize the constellations. Even Polaris, the most constant point of all, had changed its position.

He was lost, Jenny could feel that. She had reached the door to his bedroom, where he slept with all the curtains drawn. He was so deeply asleep he didn’t open his eyes until she lay down beside him. Jenny thought about the first moment when she’d seen him following along as if he didn’t matter, always in the background, two steps behind, but staring at her across the lawn on the morning of her thirteenth birthday, when she was too young to know any better.

After he’d woken, she put the compass in his hand. She could feel the heat of his body, the fever he’d had for thirty years. Jenny Sparrow took off her clothes; she didn’t want anything between them. She felt cool, like a stone fished from the lake. She was so close, it was like a wave had come over him. He had convinced himself he was satisfied with his life; he’d stopped thinking about what he might have had or could have been. All the same, with Jenny in bed next to him, he was already drowning. That was what desire could do to a person. That’s what it did to him.

“Am I dreaming?” Matt Avery said. “Did I lose my thesis? Are you really here?”

Long ago, there were women in Unity who wore summer’s peach stones around their necks all year round, hoping for love. There were still people in town who believed it was this custom, rather than the shipwrecked saplings bound for Boston, which had caused so many peach trees to grow wild in backyards and all through the woods. Every time a new house was built, a bucket of peach stones would be found, and even children on their way to
school knew that finding one meant luck, no matter the outcome: love forgotten, love gone wrong, love despite all odds, love ever after, love after all this time.

II.

J
ENNY WAS WORKING
at the tea house on a Saturday afternoon. No one who saw her would have guessed that she had been a moody girl who couldn’t wait to run away from home, unhappy most of the time, waiting for the worst to befall her. Today, she was cutting up a plum pie and thinking about Matt’s kisses. She was halfway through this task, humming a song about love, when an odd-looking girl came straggling in through the door, with Hap Stewart tagging along behind with a somewhat mystified expression. Jenny, as a matter of fact, couldn’t stop thinking about Matt. For the past two nights she had gone out walking after Elinor went to bed, only to find herself at his back door, knocking softly, so Will wouldn’t hear. She had tiptoed through the living room as though she were a teenaged girl herself, somehow transported back to the time when a kiss meant something, when it could bring her to her knees.

Since she’d fallen for Matt, she’d been as irresponsible as a teenager, coming in late to work, failing to see her own daughter. Jenny was so distracted she paid no attention to the girl who’d come to the counter, only nodded to Hap, before going to grab a couple of menus. Liza came out with a tray of raspberry tarts as Jenny was setting the menus down on the countertop.

“Hey, Jen. Aren’t you going to say hello to your daughter?” Liza might as well have hit Jenny over the head with a sledgehammer or tossed a handful of stinging yellow jackets into the crust of the plum pie she had recently cut into slices. Was it really possible that this outlandish girl was her wonderful child, her equinox girl,
her baby, her whole world? Of all the changes in her daughter, what was the most distressing? The choppy black hair? The smudgy eye pencil she had taken to using? Was it how tall Stella was? Five-seven, a woman’s height. Or was it how pale the girl was, more so it seemed than ever in contrast to that raven hair? Or was it simply the way she was staring at Jenny, as though her own mother were a stranger who didn’t know the first thing about her? It was the exact same expression that had been on Jenny’s face when she had glared at her mother on the day she ran down the driveway and threw herself into Will’s car, ready for Cambridge and the rest of her life.

Lately, Will had been stopping by the tea house in the afternoon, and while he waited for Liza, he and Jenny had coffee and discussed their daughter, this shared worry, the one subject on which they could agree. Was she still seeing visions? Was she carrying on with Hap? (Will thought possibly, Jenny said no way.) Was she spending too much time trailing around after Dr. Stewart, visiting the dying and the hopeless? What sort of hobby was that for a young girl, anyway? When was the last time either of them had heard Stella laugh out loud? Wasn’t it dangerous for her to come by and help her grandmother in the garden when her whereabouts were supposed to be kept secret?

“Is that permanent?” Jenny asked.

The girl with dark hair who resembled her daughter sat at the counter, sulky and ill tempered and ready for a fight. Ink, that’s what the color of Stella’s hair brought to mind. The sort that was far from invisible. She sneered, but failed to answer.

“Hey, Mrs. Avery, that pie looks great,” Hap said with a nervous smile. You could cut the tension between mother and daughter with the plum-stained knife in Jenny’s hand. Hap drummed his fingers on the counter. In one of his late-night conversations with Juliet Aronson, Juliet had told him most people had only one best feature, but he had two, his height and his integrity. “I guess I’ll have to try some.”

“It’s Sparrow, not Avery,” Jenny corrected. “I’m divorced.”

“Is that why you’re sleeping with my uncle?” Stella took a wedge of pie between her fingers and shoved it into her mouth. Plum syrup plopped onto the countertop. It looked like a blob of ink, like half a butterfly’s wing, like a lie, twice-told. Jimmy Elliot had let slip that he’d seen her mother leaving the Avery house at 2:00 A.M., when he was walking home from the tea house. She certainly hadn’t been there to see Will.

“What are you talking about?” Jenny flushed with color.

There was the lie.

“I’m not sleeping with anyone.”

There it was twice.

“Uh huh.” Stella cleared the blob of pie filling off the counter with her finger and sucked it off. “Neither am I.”

Jenny stared at her daughter and had a single, horrible thought:
Jimmy Elliot
.

Stella looked straight back and traced an
X
on her chest. “Cross my heart,” she said.

Lying could run in a person’s nature, or it could spring up out of necessity and circumstance. But there were some individuals who merely stumbled into lying, honest people who fell before they knew it, only to find themselves drowning in a pool of words. It had happened to Stella, but perhaps seeing death would make a liar out of anyone. For instance, only yesterday Stella had told her science teacher, Mr. Grillo, that she would bring in her overdue homework on Monday when what she really wanted to say was:
Stop drinking, it’s ruining your liver, you’ll die of cirrhosis if you don’t watch out
.

She clearly couldn’t walk up to people and tell them whatever future she saw for them. Honesty was like a stone, dropped and irretrievable once it was spoken aloud. But a lie never stayed put, it spread in a slinky circle, a puddle of deceit. There were straight-out lies and crooked ones and ones left unsaid. There was the unspoken lie about taking Matt’s thesis, and the veiled lie, for although Jimmy
Elliot threw rocks at her window most nights and he came up to her bed, she wasn’t technically sleeping with him.

When Jimmy had told Stella about her mother wandering around in the middle of the night, Stella wanted to know if Jenny had seemed happy or upset.

“I don’t know.” They’d been under the quilt and Jimmy was burning hot. The last thing in the world he wanted to do was talk about Stella’s mother, but he had only himself to blame for bringing up the subject. “She looked confused.”

Confused, exactly how Jimmy himself looked when he stood outside in the dark, waiting for Stella to throw him the key. Confused when she kissed him, when she told him to go, when she said she never wanted to see him again, when she told him to come back. Stella knew what that was, which is why she left without bothering to say good-bye to her mother. One lovelorn individual per family was more than enough.