The Why of Things: A Novel Read Online Free Page A

she descends. She swims past a jagged ledge, and then a crevice where two boulders come together, and then another ledge, keeping her eye on the vague white shape, and she is just about to run out of air when the thing is finally within her reach. Without ascertaining what it is, she snatches it from where it sits half on an underwater ledge, half fluttering in the depths. She can feel that it’s fabric of some sort, heavy in her hands as she swims for the surface as quickly as she can.
    She bursts into daylight, gasping for air. After the silence underwater, the sounds around her now seem magnified: the water dripping from her ears and hair, the intake of her breath, a dog barking in the distance. She swims to the quarry’s edge, grasps the ledge, and spreads the white thing out. It is a man’s T-shirt, dripping, stained, and heavy with water. Beneath the cartoonish image of a pint of beer, faded lettering reads: I Get My Kicks at Vic’s.
    *  *  *
    J OAN and Anders get up not long after Eve. Joan wakes up when she feels the mattress sink beneath her weight as Anders gets out of bed, as if it were a water bed. Her heart sinks in much the sameway when reality floods onto the briefly, blissfully blank slate of her mind, when she remembers the truck in the quarry, the covered furniture, the bags and crates in the hallway. And of course, like every morning, Sophie. She wonders when she’ll ever shake that feeling.
    She doesn’t like transitions, and as has been true every summer they’ve spent in this house, since long before the girls were born, she knows she cannot possibly feel settled here until their clothing is unpacked, their things put away, and, this year, that poor man’s truck pulled from the quarry floor. At least, she thinks, they have gotten the body out. She’s not sure she could live with that. She puts on yesterday’s clothes, which she left folded on the bench at the foot of the bed, and goes downstairs, leaving Anders in the bathroom brushing his teeth.
    The first floor of the house, aside from the kitchen, is one large, open space divided into the suggestion of proper rooms by the arrangement of furniture. A couch and two large armchairs are gathered around a sturdy coffee table trunk in the evocation of a living room. A dining table resides by the large, multipaned bay window that looks out over the quarry. Bookcases line the far wall, in front of which is an Oriental carpet—the only carpet to cover the room’s otherwise bare, wooden floorboards. There are beanbag chairs and pillows on the carpet, which is where some days in the past the girls have built their Lincoln Log villages and set up their train tracks, and where on other days they have curled up to read.
    Joan wanders through the room, pulling off the sheets that have covered the furniture all winter. It smells musty; the house isn’t winterized, and a good deal of moisture seems to have accumulated this year. They have been talking about winterizing the house for the twenty years they’ve owned it, but for various reasons they’ve never had it done. The house had originally belongedto an eccentric sculptor who would spend his summers here. Joan has heard he kept seals and swans in the quarry, and threw parties at which musicians performed on a floating stage. When he died, he left the house to his housekeeper, who let it fall into disrepair as she aged; by the time she died, it was in bad enough shape that Joan and Anders were able to buy it for a steal, along with several odds and ends inside—the Oriental carpet, the coffee table trunk, a gaudy set of crystal plates, all of which raise more questions than they answer about the man, and oftentimes have made Joan feel as if they’re living with a ghost. Joan had spent her childhood summers on Cape Ann in a house that her grandmother owned, and that to Joan’s dismay had to be sold upon her death to cover various debts, and so, when on a nostalgic visit here she and Anders