“Get your fucking head down,” he said to Henry. “Stop fucking watching me.”
“You don’t need to speak so filthy,” Henry said, looking at the floor, his wavy hair headed in the wrong direction across his head.
“What’d you say?” The boy’s voice rose like it was going to break. “What the fuck did you say, old man?”
“Henry, please,” Olive said. “Keep quiet before you get us all killed.”
This: Blue-Mask leaning forward, interested in Henry. “Old man. What the fucking-fuck did you say to me?” Henry turning his face to the side, his big eyebrows frowning. Blue-Mask getting up and pushing the gun into Henry’s shoulder. “Answer me! What the fuck did you say to me?” (And Olive, turning down past the mill now, approaching the town, remembered the familiarity of that kind of frenzied frustration, saying to Christopher when he was a child, Answer me! Christopher always a quiet child, quiet the way her father had been.)
Henry blurted: “I said you don’t need to talk so filthy.” Blurted out further: “You should be ashamed of your mouth.” And then the guy had pushed the gun against Henry’s face, right into his cheek, his hand on the trigger.
“Please!” Olive cried out. “Please. He got that from his mother. His mother was impossible. Just ignore him.”
Her heart thumped so hard she thought it made her papery blue gown move on her chest. The boy stood there watching Henry, then finally stepped back, tripping over the nurse’s white shoes. He kept the gun pointed at Henry but turned to look at Olive. “This guy’s your husband?”
Olive nodded.
“Well, he’s a fuckin’ nut.”
“He can’t help it,” Olive said. “You’d have to know his mother. His mother was full of pious crap.”
“That’s not true,” said Henry. “My mother was a good, decent woman.”
“Shut up,” the boy said tiredly. “Everyone please just shut the fuck up.” He sat back down on the toilet seat cover, his legs spread, holding the gun over a knee. Olive’s mouth was so dry, she thought of the word tongue and pictured a slab of cow’s tongue packaged for sale.
The boy suddenly pulled off his ski mask. And how startling—it was as though she knew him then, as if seeing him made sense. Quietly, he said, “Motherfucker.” His skin had become tender beneath the heat of the ski mask; his neck had streaks, patches of red. Crowded together high on his cheeks were inflamed pimples. His head was shaved, but she saw he was a redhead; there was the orangey effervescence of his scalp; the tiny flickers of bright stubble, the almost parboiled look of his tender, pale skin. The boy wiped his face in the crook of his nylon-sleeved elbow.
“I bought my son a ski mask like that,” Olive told him. “He lives in California and skis in the Sierra Nevada Mountains.”
The boy looked at her. His eyes were pale blue, and his eyelashes were almost colorless. The whites of his eyes had spidery red veins. He kept staring at Olive without changing his hangdog expression. “Just please shut up,” he finally said.
Olive sat in her car in the far back of the hospital’s parking lot, where she could see the blue door of the emergency room, but there was no shade and the sun baked through the windshield; even with the windows open, she was too warm. The lack of shade had not been a problem all year, of course. In the winter, she would come and sit with the car running. Never did she stay long. Only enough to gaze at the door and to remember the clean, bright lobby, the huge bathroom with its shiny chrome rail that ran along part of one wall; a rail that right now, perhaps, some old doddering lady was holding on to, in order to hoist herself off the toilet—the rail Olive had stared at as they all sat, legs splayed out, hands behind their backs. In hospitals, lives were changed all the time. A newspaper said the nurse had not returned to work, but maybe by now she had. About the doctor, Olive didn’t know.
The kid kept getting up and sitting back down on the toilet seat. When he sat, he’d be hunched forward, the gun in one hand, the other hand folded in front of his mouth, him chewing the hell out of those fingertips. The sirens did not sound for very long. She had thought that, but maybe they had sounded for a long time. It was the pharmacist who’d been able to signal a janitor to call the police, a special unit brought to negotiate with Pig-Face, but none of them had known that then. A telephone kept ringing and stopping. They waited, the nurse rolling her head back, closing her eyes.
Olive’s little plastic strip of a belt had come untied. The memory of this was a splotch of thick, dense paint. The belt, somewhere along the line, had come untied, and the papery gown was open. She tried crossing one leg over the other, but that made the gown open more, and she could see her big stomach with its folds, and her thighs, white as two massive fish bellies.
“Honestly,” Henry said. “Can’t you find something to cover my wife? She’s all exposed.”
“Shut up, Henry,” Olive said. The nurse opened her eyes and gazed over at Olive, and the doctor of course turned his head to look at her. They were all looking at her now. “God, Henry.”
The boy leaned forward, and said softly to Henry, “See—you gotta be quiet, or someone’s gonna blow your head off. Your motherfucking head,” he added.
He sat back. His glance, as he looked around, fell on Olive, and he said, “Oh, Jesus, lady,” a look of real discomfort passing over his face.
“Well, what am I supposed to do?” she said, furious—oh, she was furious; and if her teeth had been chattering before, she now felt sweat rolling down her face; she seemed to be one moist, furious sack of horror. She tasted salt and did not know if these were tears or rivulets of sweat.
“Okay, listen.” The kid took a deep, quick breath. He got up and came over to her, squatting down, putting the gun on the tile floor. “Any of you move, I’ll kill you.” He looked around. “Just give me a fucking second here.” And then he tugged quickly on both sides of her papery blue robe, tied the white plastic strip in a knot right there on her stomach. His shaved head with the tiny glints of orange stubble was close to her. The top of his forehead was still red from where the ski mask had excited the skin. “Okay,” he said. He took his gun and went back and sat on the toilet.
That moment, right there, when he sat back down and she wanted him to look at her—that was a vivid paint spot on her mind. How much she wanted him to look at her right then, and he didn’t.
In the car, Olive started the engine and pulled out of the parking lot. She drove past a drugstore, the doughnut shop, a dress shop that had been there forever, then she drove over the bridge. Farther ahead, if she continued that way, was the cemetery where her father was buried. Last week she had taken lilacs to put on his grave, though she wasn’t one who went in, especially, for decorating graves. Pauline was down there in Portland, and this was the first year that Olive had not accompanied Henry on Memorial Day to plant geraniums at the head of Pauline’s grave.
There had been a pounding on the bathroom door (locked from the inside by the kid, the way Olive herself had locked it) and the hurried, “Come on, come on, open up, it’s me!” And then she had seen—Henry couldn’t because of where he was sitting, but she had seen, when the kid opened the bathroom door that was being pounded upon—the horrible Pig-Face guy with the rifle hit the boy hard, crack him right across the face, shouting, “You took off your mask! You dumb-shit motherfucker!” Screaming, “You dumb shit!” There was an immediate resurgence of the thickening of her limbs, her eye muscles seemed to thicken, the air got thick; the whole thick, slow feeling of things not being real. Because now they would die. They had been thinking they wouldn’t, but they saw again that they would: This was clear in Pig-Face’s panicky voice.
The nurse started saying Hail Mary’s quickly and loudly, and as far as Olive could remember, it was after the nurse had repeated for the umpteenth time “Blessed is the fruit of thy womb” that Olive said to her, “God, will you shut up with that crap?” And Henry said, “Olive, stop.” Siding with the nurse like that.
Olive, stopping at
a red light, reaching down to put the bag from the fabric store back up onto the seat next to her, still didn’t get it. She didn’t get it. No matter how many times she went over it in her mind, she didn’t understand why Henry had sided with the nurse like that. Unless it was because the nurse didn’t swear (Olive bet that nurse could swear) and Henry, trussed up like a chicken and about to be shot, had been mad at Olive for swearing. Or for putting down Pauline earlier, when Olive had been trying to save his life.
Well, she had said some things about his mother then. After Pig-Face had screamed at the kid, and then disappeared again, and they all knew he’d be back to shoot them—in that blurry, thick, awful part when Henry said, “Olive, stop,” she, Olive, said some things about his mother then.
She said: “You’re the one who can’t stand these Hail-Mary Catholics! Your mother taught you that! Pauline was the only real Christian in the world, as far as Pauline was concerned. And her good boy, Henry. You two were the only good Christians in the whole goddamn world!”
She said things like that. She said: “Do you know what your mother told people when my father died? That it was a sin! How’s that for Christian charity, I ask you?” The doctor said, “Stop now. Let’s stop this,” but it was like an engine inside Olive had the switch flipped on, and the motor was accelerating; how did you stop such a thing?
She said the word Jew. She was crying, everything was all mixed up, and she said, “Did it ever occur to you that’s why Christopher left? Because he married a Jew and knew his father would be judgmental—did you ever think of that, Henry?”
In the sudden silence in the room, the kid sitting on the toilet seat hiding his hit face in his arm, Henry said quietly, “That’s a despicable thing to accuse me of, Olive, and you know it isn’t true. He left because from the day your father died, you took over that boy’s life. You didn’t leave him any room. He couldn’t stay married and stay in town, too.”
“Shut up!” Olive said. “Shut up, shut up.”
The boy stood up, holding that gun, saying, “Jesus fucking Christ. Oh fuck, man.”
Henry said, “Oh, no,” and Olive saw that Henry had wet himself; a dark stain grew in his lap, and down his trouser leg. The doctor said, “Let’s try and be calm. Let’s try and be quiet.”
And they could hear the crackling of walkie-talkies out in the hall, the sound of the strong, unexcited speech of people in charge, and the boy started to cry. He cried without trying to hide it, and he held the small gun, still standing up. There was a gesture with his arm, a tentative move, and Olive whispered, “Oh, don’t.” For the rest of Olive’s life she would be certain the boy had thought of turning the gun on himself, but the policemen then were everywhere, covered with dark vests and helmets. When they cut the duct tape from her wrists, her arms and shoulders ached so that she couldn’t put her arms down by her sides.
Henry was standing on the front deck, looking over the bay. She had thought he would be working in the garden, but there he was, just standing, looking out over the water.
“Henry.” Her heart was thumping ferociously.
He turned. “Hello, Olive. You’re back. You were gone longer than I thought you’d be.”
“I bumped into Cynthia Bibber and she wouldn’t shut up.”
“What’s new with Cynthia?”
“Nothing. Not one thing.”
She sat down in the canvas deck chair. “Listen,” she said. “I don’t remember. But you defended that woman, and I was just trying to help you. I didn’t think you’d want to hear that Catholic mumbo jumbo crap.”
He shook his head once, as though he had water in his ear that he was trying to shake out. After a moment he opened his mouth, then closed it. He turned back to look at the water, and for a long time neither said anything. Earlier in their marriage, they’d had fights that had made Olive feel sick the way she felt now. But after a certain point in a marriage, you stopped having a certain kind of fight, Olive thought, because when the years behind you were more than the years in front of you, things were different. She felt the sun’s warmth on her arms, although down here under the hill by the water, the air held the hint of nippiness.
The bay was sparkling brilliantly in the afternoon sun. A small outboard cut across toward Diamond Cove, its bow riding high, and farther out was a sailboat with a red sail, and a white one. There was the sound of the water touching against the rocks; it was almost high tide. A cardinal called from the Norwegian pine, and there was the fragrance of bayberry leaves from the bushes that were soaking up the sun.
Slowly, Henry turned and lowered himself onto the wooden bench there, leaning forward, resting his head in his hands. “Do you know, Ollie,” he said, looking up, his eyes tired, the skin around them red. “In all the years we’ve been married, all the years, I don’t believe you’ve ever once apologized. For anything.”
She flushed immediately and deeply. She could feel her face burn beneath the sunshine that fell upon it. “Well, sorry, sorry, sorry,” she said, taking her sunglasses from where they’d been resting on top of her head, and putting them back on. “What exactly are you saying?” she asked. “What in hell ails you? What in hell is this all about? Apologies? Well, I’m sorry then. I am sorry I’m such a hell of a rotten wife.”
He shook his head and leaned forward, placing his hand on her knee. You rode along in life a certain way, Olive thought. Just like she’d ridden home from Cook’s Corner for years, past Taylor’s field, before Christopher’s house had even been there; then his house was there, Christopher was there; and then after a while he wasn’t. Different road, and you had to get used to that. But the mind, or the heart, she didn’t know which one it was, but it was slower these days, not catching up, and she felt like a big, fat field mouse scrambling to get up on a ball that was right in front of her turning faster and faster, and she couldn’t get her scratchy frantic limbs up onto it.
“Olive, we were scared that night.” He gave her knee a faint squeeze. “We were both scared. In a situation most people in a whole lifetime are never in. We said things, and we’ll get over them in time.” But he stood up, and turned and looked out over the water, and Olive thought he had to turn away because he knew what he said wasn’t true.
They would never get over that night. And it wasn’t because they’d been held hostage in a bathroom—which Andrea Bibber would think was the crisis. No, they would never get over that night because they had said things that altered how they saw each other. And because she had, ever since then, been weeping from a private faucet inside her, unable to keep her thoughts from the red-haired boy with his blemished, frightened face, as in love with him as any schoolgirl, picturing him at his sedulous afternoon work in the prison garden; ready to make him a gardening smock as the prison liaison had told her she could do, with the fabric she bought at So-Fro today, unable to help herself, as Karen Newton must have been with her man from Midcoast Power—poor, pining Karen, who had produced a child who’d said, Just because you’re my grandmother doesn’t mean I have to love you, you know.
Winter Concert
In the dark of the car, his wife, Jane, sat with her nice black coat buttoned up all the way—the coat they’d bought together last year, going through all those stores. Hard work; they’d get thirsty and end up having a sundae at the place on Water Street, the sullen young waitress always giving their senior discount even though they never asked; they had joked about that—how the girl had no idea, as she plunked down their mugs of coffee, that her own arm would someday be sprinkled with age spots, or that cups of coffee had to be planned since blood pressure medicine made you widdle so much, that life picked up speed, and then most of it was gone—made you breathless, really.
“Oh, this is fun,” his wife said now, gazing through the night at all the houses they passed, lit up with different Christmas lights, and it made Bob Houlton smile as he drove; his wife contented, her hands folded on her lap. “All these lives,” she said. “All the stories we never know.” And he smi
led further, reaching to touch her mittened hand because he had known she might be thinking that.
Her small gold earring caught the light from a streetlamp as she turned her head. “Remember on our honeymoon,” she asked, “when you wanted me to care about those old Mayan ruins the way you did, and all I wanted to know was which people on the bus had pom-poms on their shower curtains back home? And we had that fight, because deep down you were scared you’d married a dull thing? Pleasant, but dull.”
He said no, he didn’t remember that at all, and she sighed deeply to let him know she thought he did, pointing, then, to a house on the corner done all in blue lights, strings of blue lights up and down the whole front of it, turning her head to keep looking as the car moved past.
He said, “I’m mental, Janie.”
“Very mental,” she agreed. “You have the tickets?”
He nodded.
“Funny to have tickets in order to get into a church.”
In fact, it made sense to move the concert into St. Catherine’s after this latest storm had caused the roof of Macklin Music Hall to cave in. No one had been hurt, but it made Bob Houlton shudder; he had an image of sitting in the plush red seats, he and Jane, and the roof falling in, the two of them suffocating, their life together ending in that horrible way. He was prone to that sort of thinking these days. He had even had a sense of foreboding coming out tonight, but it wasn’t something he’d say; and she loved seeing all these lights.