Looking around at the sparse but very nice furnishings, including a king bed with hospital rails in the second room, Holly feels a dull and hopeless anger that is very unlike her. She was a deeply depressed teenager and still suffers bouts of depression, and she can be angry, but lacking Holly hope? Not her style. At least usually. Today, though, in this room, circumstances are different.
Esau sold his future for a bowl of lentil stew, she thinks. I didn’t sell mine for anything. They stole it… or tried. That’s why I’m angry. And the two who did it are beyond my reach and reproach, although this one is still breathing. That’s why I’m hopeless. I think.
“How are you today, Uncle Henry?” she asks, pulling a chair up beside him. On TV, contestants are trying to guess humiliate and not having much luck. Holly could certainly help them there.
Henry turns his head to look at her and she can hear the tendons in his neck creak like rusty hinges. “Janey,” he says, and turns his gaze back to the TV.
“No, I’m Holly.”
“Will you bring in the dog? I hear her barking.”
“Have some of this.”
She lifts the protein shake, which is in a capped plastic cup that won’t shatter or spill if he knocks it on the floor. Without taking his eyes off the television, he closes his wrinkled lips around the straw and sucks. Holly has read up on Alzheimer’s and knows that some things stay. Men and women who can’t remember their own names can still ride a bike. Men and women who can’t find their way home can still sing Broadway show tunes. Men and women who have learned to suck liquid from a straw as children can still do it even in their dotage, when all else is gone. Certain facts stay, as well.
“Who was the fifth President of the United States, Uncle Henry? Do you remember?”
“James Monroe,” Henry says, without hesitation and without taking his eyes from the TV.
“And who is President now?”
“Nixon. Nixy-Babes.” He chuckles. Protein shake runs down his chin. Holly wipes it away before it can dapple his shirt.
“Why did you do it, Uncle Henry?” But that isn’t the right question—not that she expects an answer; the question is what you’d call rhetorical. “Let me put it another way. Why did you let her do it?”
“Won’t that dog ever shut up?”
She can’t shut up the dog—if there ever was one it was in the long-ago—but she can shut up the TV. She uses the controller to do it.
“She didn’t want me to succeed, did she? She didn’t want me to have a life of my own.”
Uncle Henry turns toward her, mouth agape. “Janey?”
“And you let her!”
Henry raises a hand to his face and wipes his mouth. “Let who? Do what? Janey, why are you shouting?”
“My mother!” Holly shouts. Sometimes you can get through to him if you shout, and right now she wants to. She needs to. “Fucking Charlotte Gibney!”
“Charlie?”
What’s the point? There is no point. A new millionaire walks into a bar and discovers there is no point. Holly wipes her eyes with her sleeve.
The door opens and the orderly who asked if Holly would help her uncle with his protein shake looks in disapprovingly. “Is everything all right in here?”
“Yes,” Holly says. “I was raising my voice so he’d hear me. He’s a little deaf, you know.”
The orderly closes the door. Uncle Henry is staring at Holly. No, gaping at her, his expression one of deep puzzlement. He is a brainless old man in a two-room suite and here he will stay, drinking protein shakes and watching old game shows until he dies. She will come because it’s her duty to come, and he will call her Janey—because Janey was his favorite—until he dies.
“She never even left a note,” Holly says, but not to him. He is out of reach. “Felt no need to explain herself, let alone apologize. That’s how she was. How she always was.”
“James Monroe,” says Uncle Henry, “served from 1817 to 1825. Died in 1831. On the Fourth of July. Where is that fucking drink? It tastes like shit but I’m dry as an old cowchip.”
Holly raises the cup and Uncle Henry battens on the straw. He sucks until it crackles. When she puts the cup down the straw stays in his mouth. It makes him look like a clown. She pulls it out and says she has to go. She’s ashamed of her pointless outburst. She raises the remote to turn the TV back on, but he puts his gnarled and liver-spotted hand over hers.
“Holly,” he says.
“Yes,” she says, surprised, and looks into his face. His eyes are clear. As clear as they ever get these days, anyway.
“Nobody could stand against Charlie. She always got her way.”
Not with me, Holly thinks. I escaped. Thanks to Bill and only by the skin of my teeth, but I did. “You came out of the fog just to tell me that?”
No reply. She gives him a kiss and tells him again that she has to go.
“Get the man, Janey,” he says. “The one who comes. Tell him I need him. I think I might have pissed myself.”
Barbara is in Olivia’s living room, replying to Holly’s text when Marie calls down from the head of the stairs. “I think you should come up, honey. She wants us both. I think… I think she might be going.”
Barbara sends the text off unfinished and runs upstairs. Olivia Kingsbury—graduate of Bryn Mawr, a poet whose work spans almost eighty years, shortlisted for the National Book Award, twice bruited for the Nobel, once on the front page of the New York Times (at the head of a peace march and carrying one side of a banner reading U.S. OUT OF VIETNAM NOW), longtime teacher at Bell College of Arts and Sciences, mentor to Barbara Robinson—is indeed going. Marie stands on one side of her bed, Barbara on the other. They each hold one of the old poet’s hands. There are no last words. Olivia looks at Marie. She looks at Barbara. She smiles. She dies. A world of words dies with her.
On her way back to the city, Holly stops at a Wawa for gas. After she fills the tank, she drives to the far side of the parking lot and has a cigarette in her usual try-not-to-pollute-the-car position—door open, elbows on knees, feet on the pavement. She checks her phone and sees she’s got a text from Barbara. To which one Holly has sent What do you mean? followed by a more exact request: Is it Rodney Harris you recognized? Have you met him? I know you’re busy but let me know when you can.
The reply: Went to Emily Harris for an intro, didn’t dare cold-call on Olivia. Prof Harris was washing his car. We just said hi. BTW I added Jorge Castro to J’s MapQuest. Probably not impor
That’s where the text ends. Holly supposes Barbara sent it off unfinished by mistake, then got busy doing something else. Holly’s done that herself. She remembers Jerome telling her he marked the various disappearances on a MapQuest printout, but who is Jorge Castro?
She calls Barbara to find out. On the coffee table in Olivia Kingsbury’s living room, Barbara’s iPhone gives out a low phone-on-silent buzzing and then falls still. Holly starts to leave a message, then changes her mind. She locks her car and goes into the little Wawa restaurant (really just a jumped-up snack bar), where there’s free WiFi. She buys a hamburger that’s already grown old in its foil bag, adds a Coke, and sits down with her iPad. She plugs in Jorge Castro’s name and gets a whole slew of hits, including an auto parts millionaire and a baseball player. She thinks the most likely Castro is the novelist and yes, that one has a connection to the college on the hill. Below Castro’s Wikipedia entry is an article from The BellRinger, the college newspaper. She taps on the link, nibbling at her burger without really tasting it—not that there’s much to taste. The store’s WiFi is slow but gets there eventually. There’s a big headline, so Holly guesses it was on page one of the issue published on October 29th of 2012.