“How so?” When Stella wouldn’t say, Elinor insisted. She was curious, too. Here was the bargain: if she were to give out information, she wanted some in return. “Go on. I won’t be shocked, whatever it is.”
“For one thing, I know you’re not well.” Stella began to braid her hair, a worry habit she’d recently begun. “It’s some organ …”
“Pancreatic cancer.” No one in Unity was aware of Elinor’s illness, let alone its exact nature, except for Brock Stewart. Elinor Sparrow looked closely at her granddaughter to see how Stella might have guessed her secret. All she saw was that there wasn’t a single lie inside the girl. “You can tell me when,” she declared.
“People shouldn’t know when they’re going to die,” Stella said mournfully. “If you knew when, you’d never accomplish anything. You’d just sit there and wait for the terrible day to come. Maybe you’d even go crazy knowing—every day of waiting would be torture. You’d never read books or build buildings or fall in love. It would just get you in trouble, like what happened when I told my father and he tried to help someone.”
“It would be different for me. I wouldn’t mind knowing.” Ever since Elinor had finished her treatment and been told there was nothing more that could be done, she’d been waiting. For her, it would be a relief to have a timetable, something final at last. “I’m old. I’m not putting up buildings. I’m not falling in love. I can know when the time will be, Stella, and it won’t hurt me. I have nothing to lose. Tell me.”
“It won’t be any time soon,” Stella allowed. “It will happen when there’s snow falling.”
Did Elinor now feel a dread of snow when she heard this prophecy? Most people with her strain of cancer did not last but a few months. She might have considered herself lucky before to have any more time; had that changed? Now when winter approached, would she try her best to flee, to find some place on earth where snow could never touch her, a southern vista where she might live forever? Or would she go to her window when the first flakes fell, grateful for one last glimpse of the cold white sky?
“I’m sorry. I didn’t want to see it and I probably shouldn’t have told you. It’s so much better not to know.”
Elinor understood that the gift someone was given was often the one most difficult to accept. Now, as it turned out, after a lifetime of searching for the truth, Elinor had told a lie herself, for she did indeed have something to lose, and she had already fallen in love with this child.
“I might as well teach you one thing about Rebecca Sparrow. Something it can’t hurt to know. As long as you don’t tell your mother.”
Stella followed her grandmother out of the garden, down toward the lake. The air was mottled and cool, fish-light, March-light. The sky was tumbling down, making the lawn appear endless and deep, a lake of new grass, dusky and brown at the edges. Soon enough, they reached the path Hap Stewart had described, the one where nothing grew. The woods on either side were filled with wild cherries and gooseberries, chokeberry and huckleberry, and several of the wild peach trees said to have floated ashore from a shipwreck, which bore the sweetest fruit in the county. Yet on the path they took nothing grew, just as Hap had said. Not swamp cabbage nor milkweed, not nettles nor common grass.
“Is this where the horse panicked?”
“That horse was bit by a fly and ridden by an idiot,” Elinor told Stella. “And it was after Rebecca died, so they can’t blame her for that.”
They had reached the muddy shore where the snapping turtles laid their eggs. The branches of the weeping willows dipped into the shallows; swarms of mosquitoes drifted over the water.
“Stand right here. My grandmother, Elisabeth, taught me this.” Elinor pointed to a spot on the muddy shore. “Arms straight out. Now close your eyes and don’t move. Don’t even blink.”
Stella heard them before she saw them: the fluttering of feathers, the chirrup so close to her ear, the sound of the wind, as though the sky were wrapping around her, so near it was falling onto her skin.
“Stay absolutely still,” Elinor advised.
Stella felt one bird land, then another. One lit on her left shoulder. One on her right arm, then a dozen or so more. By the time she opened her eyes, something was vibrating in her chest, a bird beating against her rib cage. The sky that began with her and went upward was teeming with sparrows. Her new science teacher had told them that the sky only looked blue because moisture mixed with dust and made it appear that way. In truth, without the blue light, without the dust, space was empty. People saw what they thought they saw, not what was actually there. They made up their reality out of water and dust.