The Why of Things: A Novel by Elizabeth Hartley Winthrop Page A

continues down the hall to Sophie’s room.
    As he did yesterday, at first, after pushing open the door, he only stands on the threshold, surveying the room and the few objects his oldest daughter left behind: magazine, photograph, earrings, mug. Then he enters the room and wanders over to the desk, where he sits down in the chair and leans on his elbows, his hands clasped and the backs of his thumbs to his lips. He lets his eyes wander to the magazine, an old copy of Scientific American , and from there across the grain of the wood-top desk to the pencilsin the I♥NY mug, their erasers hard with age, Sophie’s name etched in gold along their sides.
    It comforts him to know the origins of each item before him—the pencils a gift from Joan’s sister, bestowed to each niece upon the start of kindergarten in such abundance they can still be found all around the house in Maryland, ready writing instruments if only they were ever sharpened. The mug was from a trip Anders took with the older girls to New York City the year that Eloise was born. It was the souvenir Sophie had chosen from the gift shop at the Statue of Liberty, where she’d tripped on the lobby floor and chipped her front tooth. Given the choice, she’d opted not to fix it, just as she’d decided against braces, insisting that she liked the teeth she had, as if to fix them in any way were akin to getting new ones. She was always loyal to a fault. The magazine was a gift subscription from her parents for Christmas her freshman year; science was her favorite subject. Ever since she was little, she’d loved to examine the way things worked, from the inside of Anders’ old watch to the way the waves changed as the tide came in, inching ever closer up the shoreline.
    Anders sighs. Absently, he pulls open the desk’s topmost drawer, where he finds a pad of Post-it Notes, a few loose paperclips, masking tape, and a smooth, orange seashell, which, after a pause, he slips into his pocket. The bottom drawer is empty, though the wastebasket below is not; there is a Twizzler’s wrapper at the bottom, a balled-up Kleenex, a movie ticket stub, which when he takes it from the basket he sees is from August 12, for a matinee of Citizen Kane playing at the arts cinema in Rockport. He remembers Saul coming to pick her up that afternoon. There is a crumpled scrap of paper with doodled stars around a street address in Beverly—588 Cabot—a chewed toothpick, a broken barrette.
    Anders lines these things up before him on the desk, takes a deep breath. It is light outside now, the birds in noisy chorusin the trees; early sunlight glints in beads of moisture gathered on the windowpane. For a moment, Anders only gazes out past these, watching foliage tremble in the gentle morning breezes. And then he looks away, slowly slides the magazine across the desk toward him, and, imagining his daughter doing the same, he lets it fall open where it will and starts to read.
    *  *  *
    E VE also rises early, pleased when she looks out the window to see that the day is perfectly clear. It is as if yesterday’s rain has cleansed the air of a layer of scum that had somehow been blurring things since they arrived; her bike lies gleaming in wait in the grass, her chariot for today’s mission.
    L. Stephens, it turns out, lives in Georgetown, which is two towns up the coast and one over from Gloucester, about twenty miles away. Yesterday afternoon, while her family played yet another game of Monopoly, Eve had been looking through the phone book for any other Favazzas when it occurred to her that their phone book is local, covering Gloucester alone, and that the elusive L. Stephens may well live somewhere else. It was raining hard outside, and since the power was briefly out and she couldn’t investigate on-line, Eve put on a poncho and rode down to Arthur’s store. She propped her bike against a telephone pole and went inside, the useless yellow plastic of her poncho clinging to her