A tree could fall on us right now, he had said. Lightning could strike us, then what would happen to all of those careful statistics?
Elinor often thought of Will’s mother, Catherine, how very quickly she went after her cancer was detected. Elinor hadn’t cared much for the Averys, but wished them no harm. She certainly had never placed a rope with black feathers under Catherine Avery’s mattress to curse the family when Will and Jenny ran off, despite what some gossips might have said. Anyway, that was so long ago, and looking back on the mismatch, Elinor understood there was no one to blame. It was the season had caused them to run off, pure, undiluted spring fever, a hazard for everyone. As a matter of fact, Elinor pitied Catherine having to raise a liar like Will Avery, although the younger boy, Matt, had turned out fine.
For fifteen years Elinor had hired Matt Avery to clear away dead-wood and saplings felled by storms. Every once in a while, someone left a basket of mint and rosemary on Elinor’s back porch, and she had a sneaking suspicion that someone was Matt, perhaps to repay her for the visits she’d made to his mother during her last weeks. All through the summer when Catherine was dying, Elinor brought her fresh roses, Fairy pink, not Elinor’s favorite variety, but the one Catherine most preferred. After Elinor was diagnosed, she kept Catherine’s courage in mind during her own treatment at Hamilton Hospital. Over the winter, she had gone through several months of chemotherapy, all the while keeping her business to herself.
But that had always been her failing as well as her strength; she refused to confide in anyone, or ask for help, or simply let on that she was human. By the time she had told Brock that her bones were aching—not the usual arthritis, something deeper and sharper— she had kept it to herself for too long. Now that there was a new doctor over in Monroe, Dr. Stewart volunteered his time at the clinic in North Arthur and the rest home near I-95; Elinor was his only full-time patient. When the phone rang at night, it could only be one person who needed him. A single patient, Elinor Sparrow, and somehow he had failed her.
You couldn’t have possibly known what I refused to tell you, Elinor had insisted, obstinate as ever.
Perhaps it was true; there had most likely been nothing he might have done to save her. All the same, the doctor often awoke in the middle of the night with his heart pounding, even when the phone hadn’t rung. He awoke thinking Elinor’s name, as he had for years, even before Adele had passed on, before his son, David, and his grandson, Hap, had moved in with him. In the mornings, Brock Stewart often had the urge to call and check up on her, but Elinor never picked up her phone at that hour; she was out working, for she had restored her garden in a way she had never repaired the rest of her life.
She was there at work on the afternoon that her daughter came back to town. It was a lovely day, and Elinor was wearing a mask and gloves as she dusted the soil with fertilizer. All through the winter, most of the plants in her garden appeared to be nothing more than a fistful of sticks, but now those sticks were greening, sending out new shoots, and would soon be in need of pruning. After the cold, harsh months, the rosebushes were especially hungry for bonemeal and fish meal and human attention. The little crossbreed against the wall seemed quite insatiable, so today Elinor decided to cover the soil around it with alfalfa filled with extra nutrients.
When she was done, Elinor went into the house, followed by her old dog. The bones in her ankles and knees were particularly bothersome, with a sharp pain that often made her dizzy; lately, she’d become dependent on a cane. Elinor Sparrow, the woman who leaned on no one, now relied on a stick.
Bonemeal, she thought as she walked to the house. That’s what I am.
She’d make a paltry sample of that, given what the cancer had done to her. She’d seen the X rays; her bones looked like lace, a filigree as beautiful as it was deadly, much the way leaves looked when Japanese beetles were done with them.
Elinor washed her hands, then fetched her purse and car keys. She told Argus to stay, though he whined and followed her to the porch. The dog was still watching when Elinor got into her Jeep, which was rusted out on the side panels and the floor, and in need of a new transmission. It was mud season and Elinor wove in and out along the driveway in an attempt at avoiding the worst of the ditches. She’d been meaning to ask Matt Avery to level off the driveway for the past five years, but had never gotten around to it. Mud splashed up, dashing against the fenders of the Jeep, coating the wheels. There were still patches of ice in the woods, even on this fine day, and dozens of snowdrops growing nearby. There were those who believed that the Angel of Sorrow had long ago turned snowflakes into snowdrops, the first wildflowers to bloom every year, as consolation to anyone who had passed through the desolate reaches of winter. Personally, Elinor Sparrow had her doubts about this. As for snowdrops, she considered them to be little more than weeds.