Olive made a grimace of sympathy. “God, Cindy. That sucks. As the kids used to say. That really sucks.”
“It does.” Cindy lay back on her pillow, watching this woman who had come over uninvited. “There’s a nurse who comes in twice a week, and she told me Tom was acting like every man she’s ever seen in these situations. That men just can’t deal with it. But it’s terrible, Olive. He’s my husband and we’ve loved each other now for many years, and this is awful.”
Olive sat looking at Cindy, then looking at the foot of the bed. “I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t know if it’s a male thing or not. The truth is, Cindy, I wasn’t very good to my husband during his last years.”
Cindy said, “Yes, you were. Everyone knew—you went to the nursing home every day to see him.”
Olive shook her head. “Before that.”
“He was sick before that?”
“I don’t know,” Olive said thoughtfully. “He may have been and I just didn’t know it. He became very needy. And I wasn’t— I just wasn’t very nice to him. It’s something I think about a lot these days, and it bugs me like hell.”
Cindy waited a moment. “Well, if you didn’t know he was sick—”
Olive heaved a deep sigh. “I know, I know. But I’m just saying, I wasn’t especially good to him, and it hurts me now. It really does. At times these days—rarely, very rarely, but at times—I feel like I’ve become, oh, just a tiny—tiny—bit better as a person, and it makes me sick that Henry didn’t get any of that from me.” Olive shook her head. “Here I go, talking about myself again. I’ve been trying not to talk about myself so much these days.”
Cindy said, “Talk about anything you want. I don’t care.”
“Take a turn,” Olive said, raising a hand briefly. “I’m sure I’ll get back to myself.”
Cindy said, “One time, it was on Christmas Day, I just began to cry. I cried and cried, and my sons were both here and so was Tom, and I stood on the stairs, just wailing, and then I noticed that they had all left, they walked away from me until I stopped crying.”
Olive’s eyes closed briefly. “Oh Godfrey,” she murmured.
“I scared them.”
“Yuh.”
“And now they will always think of that, every Christmas to come, my sons will remember that.”
“Probably.”
“I did that to them.”
Olive sat forward and said, “Cindy Coombs, there’s not one goddamn person in this world who doesn’t have a bad memory or two to take with them through life.” She sat back and crossed her feet at her ankles.
“But I’m scared!”
“Oh, I know, I know, of course you are. Everyone is scared to die.”
“Everyone? Is that true, Mrs. Kitteridge? Are you scared to die?”
“I am scared to death to die, is the truth.” Olive adjusted herself on the chair.
Cindy thought about this. “I’ve heard of people who make peace with it,” she said.
“I guess that can happen. I don’t know how they do it, but I think it can happen.”
They were quiet. Cindy felt—she almost felt normal. “Well,” she said finally. “It’s just that I’m so alone. I don’t want to be so alone.”
“ ’Course you don’t.”
“You’re scared to die, even at your age?”
Olive nodded. “Oh Godfrey, there were days I’d have liked to have been dead. But I’m still scared of dying.” Then Olive said, “You know, Cindy, if you should be dying, if you do die, the truth is—we’re all just a few steps behind you. Twenty minutes behind you, and that’s the truth.”
Cindy had not thought of that. She had thought that Tom, and her sons, and—people—that they would go on living forever and ever, without her. But Olive was right: They were all headed where she was going. If she was going.
“Thank you,” Cindy said. “And thank you for coming over.”
Olive Kitteridge stood up. “Bye now,” she said.
* * *
When Cindy’s mother was dying—she had been fifty-two and Cindy had been thirty-two—her mother had screamed and wept and cursed Cindy’s father for abandoning them years before. In truth, Cindy’s mother had frequently, during Cindy’s lifetime, screamed and wept; the poor woman had been so tired. But when her mother was dying it scared Cindy terrifically, how her mother carried on, and she had thought to herself: I will not die that way. And this is why she felt so bad that she had done that to her sons by crying hard on the stairs on Christmas Day. Cindy