Free The Why of Things: A Novel by Elizabeth Hartley Winthrop Page B

to. “I don’t know,” she says finally. She prods at her stubbed toe and sighs, feeling suddenly drained. “I’m tired,” she says. She gets up off the rock, clutching her arms around her. “And freezing.”
    Saul gets up, too. “Yeah,” he says. “I’ve got to get up early. I have to check my traps. I just set them out last week.”
    Last summer was the first time Saul and Sophie had let Eve come with them in the boat to check his lobster traps. Eve wonders if she’ll ever get to help him again, and thinks probably not. She sniffs. “Where’d you park?” she asks.
    “By the gate to the public quarry. Not far. Do you want an escort home?”
    “Please,” Eve says. “The house is two seconds away. I think I’ll make it.” She rubs her hands up over her arms to warm them. “Thanks, though,” she adds.
    “Sure. I’ll see you, Eve,” Saul says, touching her lightly on the shoulder before turning away.
    Eve watches him start to walk away, and she wonders when she will see him again—he who had been such a summer constant—and how, if at all, he will factor into their lives now. “Hey, Saul,” she calls.
    Saul turns around.
    “You should stop by sometime,” she says. “Probably everyone would want to see you. If you want.”
    “Yeah, I will. It would be good to see your family.” He raises a hand. “Night, Eve.”
    “Night, Saul.”
    *  *  *
    J OAN and Anders lie side by side in bed beneath sheets that feel damp after all the evening’s rain. They have just turned off the lights when they hear the distant sound of a car engine passing down the dirt road beyond the house. The sound gets louder, almost as if the car might come up the driveway, and in the pocket of time before it begins to fade the question Joan has been struggling to avoid all day finally presents itself to her, and there is no denying it. She props her head on her hand and looks at her husband. “What if we’d been here?” she asks. “Like Eve said?”
    “What?”
    “What if we’d been here? What if we’d gotten here on Thursday, instead, or even just a few hours earlier?”
    Anders turns his head and looks Joan in the eye. He isn’t surprised by her question. He knows Eve has brought it up to them both. “We didn’t,” he says quietly.
    Joan isn’t surprised by his answer. She sighs and drops back onto her pillow. “I know it doesn’t do any good to wonder, but I can’t help it. It’s hard not to think that the outcome might have been different if we’d been here.”
    “And it might not have,” Anders says. “It might have all been worse.”
    Joan ponders this. Anders is right; they could have seen the whole thing happen and been unable to do anything about it, and this would have been worse. “Maybe,” she says. “Still.” She lets her eyes wander over the water stain on the ceiling, absently tracing its familiar, turtle-shaped outline, just visible in the darkness.
    The door downstairs opens, shuts, and then they hear Eve’sfootsteps on the stairs, then in the hall, the reverse sequence of the sounds they’d listened to her make half an hour before.
    “What do you suppose she’s been up to?”
    “Something to do with the quarry, I’m sure,” Anders says. “She’s fixated.”
    Joan sighs. “I know it. I can’t say that I totally blame her.” She pulls the sheets farther up her chest. “Do you think she’s okay?”
    “Eve? I don’t know,” Anders says. He looks at his wife; he can see moonlight glinting in her eyes as she gazes at the ceiling. “I think she is, as much as she can be.”
    Joan is quiet for a minute. “I do worry about her. She’s so . . . tough. I wish she would let her guard down. Or I wish that she felt she could. I wish she would talk to someone.”
    Anders knows where Joan will go next, and says nothing. He looks up at the ceiling himself.
    “I wish you would talk to someone, too,” Joan says, turning her head.
    She slides her hand across the sheets toward