some more paperwork for you if you feel up to it, Mrs. Gibney.”
Charlotte nods. Over the sodden bouquet of the tissue, her eyes are red and streaming. This is the woman who scolded me for crying in public, Holly marvels. The one who told me to stop trying to be the center of attention. This is payback, and I could have done without it.
Another orderly (the woods are full of them, Holly thinks) has materialized and is loading Uncle Henry’s faded tartan bags and his Brooks Brothers suiter onto a trolley, as if this place were just another Holiday Inn or Motel 6. Holly is staring at this and holding back her own tears when Jerome takes her gently by the arm and leads her outside.
They sit on a bench in the cold. “I want a cigarette,” Holly says. “First time in a long while.”
“Pretend,” he says, and exhales a plume of frosty air.
She inhales and blows out her own cloud of vapor. She pretends.
7
They don’t stay overnight, although Charlotte assures them there’s plenty of room. Holly doesn’t like to think of her mother spending this first night alone, but she can’t bear to stay. It isn’t the house where Holly grew up, but the woman who lives here is the woman she grew up with. Holly is very different from the pale, chain-smoking, poetry-writing (bad poetry) girl who grew up in Charlotte Gibney’s shadow, but that’s hard to remember in her presence, because her mother still sees her as the damaged child who went everywhere with her shoulders hunched and her eyes cast down.
It’s Holly driving the first leg this time, and Jerome does the rest. It’s long after dark when they see the lights of the city. Holly has been dozing in and out, thinking in a disconnected way about how Uncle Henry mistook her for Janey, the woman who was blown up in Bill Hodges’s car. That leads her wandering mind back to the explosion at Macready Middle School, and the correspondent with the torn pocket and the brick dust on his hands. She remembers thinking that there was something different about him that night.
Well sure, she thinks as she drifts toward another doze. In between the first bulletin that afternoon and the special report that night, Ondowsky helped search the rubble, thus transitioning from reporting the story to becoming a part of it. That would change anyb—
Suddenly her eyes snap open and she sits bolt upright, startling Jerome. “What? Are you all ri—”
“The mole!”
He doesn’t know what she’s talking about and Holly doesn’t care. It probably doesn’t mean anything, anyway, but she knows Bill Hodges would have congratulated her on her observation. And on her memory, the thing Uncle Henry is now losing.
“Chet Ondowsky,” she said. “The news correspondent who was first on the scene after the school blew up. In the afternoon he had a mole beside his mouth, but when the special report came on that night at ten, it was gone.”
“Thank God for Max Factor, huh?” Jerome says as he leaves the expressway.
He’s right, of course, it even occurred to her when the news bulletin came on: crooked tie, no time to cover the mole with makeup. Later on, when Ondowsky’s support crew arrived, they took care of that. Still, it’s a little strange. Holly is sure a makeup person would have left the scratches—they were good TV, made the correspondent look heroic—but wouldn’t the makeup guy or gal have cleaned some of the brick dust from around Ondowsky’s mouth in the process of covering the mole?
“Holly?” Jerome asks. “Are you overcranking again?”
“Yes,” she says. “Too much stress, not enough rest.”
“Let it go.”
“Yes,” she says. It’s good advice. She intends to follow it.
December 14, 2020
1
Holly expected another night of tossing and turning, but she sleeps right through until her phone alarm (“Orinoco Flow”) gently wakes her. She feels rested, fully herself again. She slips to her knees, does her few morning meditations, then settles into her tiny breakfast nook for a bowl of oatmeal, a cup of yogurt, and a big mug of Constant Comment.
As she enjoys her little repast, she reads the local paper on her iPad. News of the Macready School bombing has slipped from the front page (dominated, as usual, by the president’s idiotic shenanigans) to the National News section. This is because there have been no fresh developments. More victims have been released from the hospital; two kids, one of them a talented basketball player, remain in critical condition;