The Probable Future
Page 24

The intense love Stella felt for her father was evident, and why shouldn’t it be? Here in the headmistress’s office there was the smell of furniture wax, a scent that always reminded Jenny of her own father, a professor of economics and amateur carpenter. Her father, who had spent a year of his free time building Jenny her model house, who had called her his pearl, who had left his classes in Boston one spring evening only to skid off the road. A sudden cold front had left black ice along the asphalt. It was March, that unpredictable season, and he should have known better, he shouldn’t have been driving so fast. He had never returned, but he’d left behind the model of Cake House on his workbench, newly finished, the interior woodwork already oiled so that it smelled especially sweet when Jenny peered inside. To this day, Jenny could walk into a stranger’s apartment and begin to cry for no apparent reason, only to discover that the oak dining set or the cherrywood desk had been newly waxed, and that the scent of citrus in the air was lemon polish, the sort her father vowed was best.
Statistics, Jenny had learned early on, never mattered when they applied to you, not if you were the one in a thousand who’d been struck by lightning, not if you were the one whose father wasn’t coming home, whether he had crashed his car on an icy road or was sitting in a jail cell. Jenny couldn’t help but resent the other girls at the Rabbit School who would leave at the end of the day, worried about grades and clothing and their love lives, when her own daughter would be fretting over the many ways it was possible to lose someone in this world.
“It really was me who saw what was going to happen—I saw it with Miss Hewitt, and with the taxi driver, and then with that woman in the restaurant. The police didn’t believe me,” Stella insisted, “but he had nothing to do with it. I swear it.”
The thirteenth among them, born feet first on the day of the equinox. What had Jenny expected? Had she ever really thought Stella would grow up to be an ordinary girl, one who would blend in with the crowd, who would find only happiness and be spared any sorrows?
“I believe you.” Jenny was well aware that her daughter belonged to the day in March when the birds took flight, when the earth shifted and the spring constellations appeared in the sky, the lion and the lamb side by side, sharing one heaven, at least temporarily.
They assumed their worries would remain private, but tragedy isn’t like that, it rises through the air, it circulates to be twice-told, then told again. Jenny and Stella had no notion of how many people were aware of Will’s situation, until they tried to leave the school. Juliet Aronson, an obvious bad influence, in Jenny’s opinion, stopped them at the door, out of breath, full of advice.
“You don’t want to go out there,” Juliet declared.
Juliet had already come up with a plan; she would go outside and announce that she was Stella Sparrow Avery, thereby distracting the band of reporters gathered on the sidewalk. Juliet had dealt with the likes of these carrion creatures for years, ever since her mother’s trial. She was only too happy to get back at them now.
“I think Juliet’s right. You’d better go around to the back,” Marguerite Flann, the headmistress, suggested, for a crew from Channel Four had arrived. Mrs. Flann escorted them around to the rear exit, which led to an alley. “I think Stella had better stay home for the rest of the week. Just until this hoopla dies down.”
And then they were let out in the alleyway, empty except for stray cats. They stared at each other. Little sparks of uncertainty were in the air. The stench in the alley was of garbage, but also of fear.
“No school for a week. You should be happy,” Jenny said.
“Right.” Stella buttoned her blazer, though the day was quite warm. “I’m ecstatic.”
They traipsed down the alley, past the overflowing trash cans and Dumpsters. The Rabbit School van was parked here, used for field trips, along with several of the teachers’ cars.
“When we get to the street we may have to run,” Jenny said.
“Run?” Stella was even paler than usual, and her socks had fallen down around her ankles. She looked younger than she had this morning, even with that scarlet color she had on.
In fact, they bolted when they turned out of the alley. There was a single shout, and they knew the crowd had spied them. They sprinted down Commonwealth, hoping to throw off anyone who might be tracking them. All the same, two reporters continued to chase them, with the brashest following at their heels when they ducked into the pharmacy. It was the same pharmacy where Stella had stolen her lipstick. Cheap, Stella thought to herself as she and her mother hid in the hair products aisle. Cheap as can be.