The Why of Things: A Novel by Elizabeth Hartley Winthrop Read Free Book Online Page A

overhead, barrel rolls and loop-the-loops. Joan watches it anxiously, remembering the time when Sophie and Eve were young, before Eloise, when they saw from the beach a stunt plane like this one fall from the sky. Typical, she thinks, if today of all days, this year of all years, this should happen to happen again.
    Suddenly Eloise appears above her, eclipsing the sun. Joan squints up at her daughter. “What have you got for me now?” she asks.
    “This,” Eloise says angrily, thrusting forward a dead seagull by its rubbery webbed foot.
    “Oh, Eloise! Put that down!”
    Eloise deposits the bird on the sand beside her mother. Though Joan’s impulse would ordinarily be to move away, she stays put beneath her mermaid skin.The gull is small, and Joan can tell by the soft brown of its feathers that it is very young. It is newly dead; it has not yet been scavenged by bugs or other birds, nor does it have the deflated appearance that the carcasses of small creatures usually seem to have. It is completely tangled in fishing line; the clear wire is wrapped around its legs, its beak, and even around one of its wings, which suggests to Joan that the more the creature tried to free itself, the more mired it became.
    “It was next to a tide pool,” Eloise says. “Some stupid fisherman littered and now it’s dead.” She sits down, props her elbows on her knees and her cheeks in her hands.
    Joan sits up, knocking the sand from her torso. “It doesn’t seem fair, does it.”
    “It’s not fair.”
    Joan wiggles her legs free of sand. Mussel shells go sliding. She wraps her arms loosely around her knees and studies her daughter, who is staring intently into the sand. “Maybe we should give it a burial,” Joan suggests.
    Eloise digs her heels into the sand. “Maybe we should just throw it into the quarry,” she says.
    Eloise has been quietly thoughtful since she learned this morning that there indeed had been a body in the quarry, no doubt carefully processing the information, and likely coming up with all sorts of horror stories to explain the event. Joan has not pushed her to share her thoughts, but now she nudges her daughter gently. “Hey,” she says. “What are you thinking?”
    Eloise lets out a weary breath. “I want to go back to Maryland.”
    “We’re here, though,” Joan says. “It was a terrible thing to arrive to, but we can’t let it ruin the summer.”
    “What if we’re haunted now?”
    “We won’t be haunted.”
    “How do you know?”
    Joan takes a breath. When their old dog, Buster, died last summer, Joan had made what she now fears may have been a mistake by telling Eloise to imagine that Buster’s spirit would always be with them. She’d said it was like having an invisible dog. She hadn’t meant to inspire a belief in ghosts. After Sophie died, Eloise had asked seriously if it was like having an invisible sister now, and when Joan said that in a way it was, she saw a distinct glimmerof fear pass across her daughter’s face. “So, Sophie is a ghost?” Eloise had asked. Joan had quickly tried to differentiate between spirits and ghosts, but she’s not sure she made the distinction clear enough. In the end, it was Eve’s quietly brutal reasoning that seemed to placate Eloise most; why, Eve had pointed out, would Sophie come back as a ghost when her whole purpose in dying was to get away?
    “I just know,” Joan says now, finally, loathe to invoke Eve’s logic again.
    Eloise rubs her eye. “Why did he have to pick our quarry?”
    “I don’t know. I don’t think we’ll ever know.” Joan can think of nothing that might offer comfort. It occurs to her momentarily to point out that probably people have died on this very beach, and that they drive by spots where people have died every day on the highway, and Eloise doesn’t consider these places haunted. But she thinks better of this; she understands that observations like these would hardly make her daughter feel more secure. “Let’s