his cycle. She has even wondered if, after the movie ends, he creeps out of bed and murders his whole family.
They watch the movie, Charlotte in her Christmas dress and Holly in her Santa hat. Holly thinks, I am moving somewhere else now. I feel myself going. It’s a sad place, full of shadows. This is the place where you know death is very close.
On the screen, Janie Bailey says, “Please, God, something’s the matter with Daddy.”
That night when she sleeps, Holly dreams that Chet Ondowsky comes out of the Frederick Building elevator with his jacket torn at the sleeve and the pocket. His hands are smeared with brick dust and blood. His eyes are shimmering, and when his lips spread in a wide grin, squirming red bugs spill from his mouth and stream down his chin.
December 19, 2020
1
Holly sits in four lanes of unmoving southbound traffic, still fifty miles from the city, thinking if this miles-long jam-up doesn’t let go, she might be late to her own funeral instead of early.
Like many people who struggle with insecurity, she’s a compulsive planner-aheader, and consequently almost always early. She expected to be at the Finders Keepers office by one o’clock on this Saturday at the latest, but now even three is starting to look optimistic. The cars around her (and a big old dumptruck ahead of her, its dirty butt looming like a steel cliff) make her feel claustrophobic, buried alive (my own funeral). If she had cigarettes in the car, she would be smoking them one after the other. She resorts to cough drops instead, what she calls her anti-smoking devices, but she only stashed half a dozen in her coat pocket and soon they will be gone. That would leave her fingernails, had they not been clipped too short to get a good grip.
I’m late for a very important date.
It wasn’t because of the gift-giving, which came after her mother’s traditional Christmas breakfast of waffles and bacon (it’s not Christmas for almost a week, but Holly was willing to pretend along with Charlotte). Charlotte gave Holly a frilly silk blouse she’ll never wear (even if she lives), a pair of medium heels (ditto), and two books: The Power of Now and Anxious for Nothing: Finding Calm in a Chaotic World. Holly hadn’t had the opportunity to wrap her presents, but she did buy a Christmassy gift bag to put them in. Charlotte oohed over the fur-lined slippers and shook her head indulgently over the bathrobe, a $79.50 purchase.
“This is at least two sizes too big. I don’t suppose you saved the sales slip, honey.”
Holly, who knew damn well she did, said, “I think it’s in my coat pocket.”
So far so good. But then, out of the blue, Charlotte suggested that they go and see Henry and wish him a merry-merry, since Holly wasn’t going to be there on the actual big day. Holly glanced at the clock. Quarter of nine. She’d hoped to be on the road and headed south by nine, but there was such a thing as carrying obsessional behavior too far—why, exactly, did she want to arrive five hours early? Plus, if things went badly with Ondowsky this would be her last chance to see Henry, and she was curious about what he’d said: Why are you afraid?
How did he know that? He had certainly never seemed particularly sensitive to the feelings of others before. More the opposite, actually.
So Holly agreed, and they went, and Charlotte insisted on driving, and there was a fender-bender at a four-way stop sign. No airbags deployed, no one was hurt, no police were summoned, but it did involve certain predictable justifications on Charlotte’s part. She invoked a mythical patch of ice, ignoring the fact that she only slowed rather than stopped at the four-way, as she always did; all of her driving life, Charlotte Gibney had assumed she had the right-of-way.
The man in the other vehicle was nice enough about it, nodding and agreeing with everything Charlotte said, but it involved an exchange of insurance cards, and by the time they were on their way again (Holly was quite sure the man whose fender they’d bumped dropped her a wink before getting back into his own vehicle), it was ten o’clock, and the visit turned out to be a total bust, anyway. Henry had no idea who either of them were. He said he had to get dressed for work and told them to stop bothering him. When Holly kissed