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all right.
” She did
not look back as she left the room.
Dozing in the bump-out room, she expected the phone to ring.
In the morning, Henry was in his wheelchair, a polite smile on his face, his
eyes unseeing. At four o’clock, she returned and spooned into his mouth his
supper. The next week was the same. And the week after that. Autumn was upon
them; soon it would be dark as she fed him his supper from the tray that
sometimes Mary Blackwell brought.
One evening when she returned home, she looked through a drawer of old
photographs. Her mother, plump and smiling, but still foreboding. Her father,
tall, stoic; his silence in life seemed right there in the photo—he was, she
thought, the biggest mystery of all. A picture of Henry as a small child. Huge-
eyed and curly-haired, he was looking at the photographer (his mother?) with a
child’s fear and wonder. Another photo of him in the navy, tall and thin, just a
kid, really, waiting for life to begin. You will marry a beast and love her, Olive
thought. You will have a son and love him. You will be endlessly kind to
townspeople as they come to you for medicine, tall in your white lab coat. You
will end your days blind and mute in a wheelchair. That will be your life.
Olive slipped the picture back into the drawer, her eye catching a photo of
Christopher, taken when he was not yet two. She had forgotten how angelic he’d
looked, like some creature newly hatched, as though he had not yet grown a skin
and was all light and luminescence. You will marry a beast and she will leave
you, Olive thought. You will move across the country and break your mother’s
heart. She closed the drawer. But you will not stab a woman twenty-nine times.
She went into the bump-out room, lay down on her back. No, Christopher
wouldn’t stab someone. (She hoped not.) It was not in his cards. Not in his bulb
—planted in this particular soil, hers and Henry’s, and their parents before them.
Closing her eyes, she thought of soil, and green things growing, and the soccer
field by the school came into her mind. She remembered the days when she was
a schoolteacher, how Henry would leave the pharmacy sometimes in the autumn
to come and watch the soccer games on the field beside the school. Christopher,
never physically aggressive, had spent most of the games sitting on the bench in
his uniform, but Olive had suspected he didn’t mind.
There was beauty to that autumn air, and the sweaty young bodies that had
mud on their legs, strong young men who would throw themselves forward to
have the ball smack against their foreheads; the cheering when a goal was
scored, the goalie sinking to his knees. There were days—she could remember
this—when Henry would hold her hand as they walked home, middle-aged
people, in their prime. Had they known at these moments to be quietly joyful?
Most likely not. People mostly did not know enough when they were living life
that they were living it. But she had that memory now, of something healthy and
pure. Maybe it was the purest she had, those moments on the soccer field,
because she had other memories that were not pure.
Doyle Larkin had not been at the soccer games—he had not gone to that
school. Whether Doyle even played soccer, Olive didn’t know. She could not
recall Louise ever saying, “I must go to Portland this afternoon to see Doyle in a
soccer game.” But Louise had loved her children, had bragged about them
endlessly; when she’d spoken of Doyle being homesick at summer camp, her
eyes had moistened, Olive now remembered this.
There was no understanding any of it.
But she had been wrong to visit Louise Larkin, hoping to feel better by
knowing the woman suffered. It was ludicrous, as well, to think that Henry
would die because she had told him he could. Who in the world, this strange and
incomprehensible world, did she think she was? Olive turned onto her side, drew
her knees up to her chest, turned on her transistor radio. She would have to
decide soon whether or not to plant the tulips, before the ground was frozen.
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