Olive Kitteridge - Elizabeth Strout [29]
But the gesture, the smooth cupping of the little girl’s head, the way Suzanne’s hand in one quick motion caressed the fine hair and thin neck, has stayed with Olive. It was like watching some woman dive from a boat and swim easily up to the dock. A reminder how some people could do things others could not.
“Hello,” Olive says to the little girl, but the child does not reply. After a moment, Olive says, “How old are you?” She is no longer familiar with young children, but she guesses this one is around four, maybe five; nobody in the Bernstein family seems tall.
Still the child says nothing. “Run along now,” Olive tells her, but the girl leans against the doorjamb and sways slightly, her eyes fixed on Olive. “Not polite to stare,” Olive says. “Didn’t anyone teach you that?”
The little girl, still swaying, says calmly, “You look dead.”
Olive lifts her head up. “Is that what they teach you to say these days?” But she feels a physical reaction as she leans back down, a soft ache beating on her breastbone for a moment, like a wing inside her. The child ought to have her mouth washed out with soap.
Anyway, the day is almost over. Olive stares up at the skylight over the bed and reassures herself that she has, apparently, lived through it. She pictured herself having another heart attack on the day of her son’s wedding: She would be sitting on her folding chair on the lawn, exposed to everyone, and after her son said, “I do,” she would silently, awkwardly fall over dead, with her face pressed into the grass, and her big hind end with the gauzy geranium print stuck up in the air. People would talk about it for days to come.
“What are those things on your face?”
Olive turns her head toward the door. “Are you still there? I thought you’d gone away.”
“There’s a hair coming out of one of those things on your face,” the child says, bolder now, taking a step into the room. “The one on your chin.”
Olive turns her gaze back to the ceiling and receives these words without an accompanying wing beat in her chest. Amazing how nasty kids are these days. And it was very smart to put that skylight over the bed. Chris has told her how in the winter sometimes he can lie in bed and watch it snow. He has always been like that—a different kind of person, very sensitive. It was what made him an excellent oil painter, though such a thing was not usually expected of a podiatrist. He was a complicated, interesting man, her son, so sensitive as a child that once, when he was reading Heidi he painted a picture to illustrate it—some wildflowers on an Alpine hillside.
“What is that on your chin?”
Olive sees that the little girl has been chewing on a ribbon from her dress. “Crumbs,” Olive says. “From little girls I’ve eaten up. Now go away before I eat you, too.” She makes her eyes big.
The girl steps back slightly, holding the doorjamb. “You’re making that up,” she finally says, but she turns and disappears.
“ ’Bout time,” Olive murmurs.
Now she hears the sound of high heels clattering unevenly down the hallway. “Looking for the little girls’ room,” a woman’s voice says, and Olive recognizes the voice of Janice Bernstein, Suzanne’s mother. Henry’s voice answers, “Oh, right there, right there.”
Olive waits for Henry to look into the bedroom, and in a moment he does. His big face is shiny with the affability that comes over him in large groups of people. “You all right, Ollie?”
“Shhh. Shut up. I don’t need everyone knowing I’m in here.”
He steps farther into the room. “You all right?” he whispers.
“I’m ready to go home. Though I expect you’ll want to stay until the last dog dies. Don’t I hate a grown woman who says ‘the little girls’ room.’ Is she drunk?”
“Oh, I don’t think so, Ollie.”
“They’re smoking outside there.” Olive nods toward the window. “I hope they don’t set the place on fire.”
“They won’t.” Then, after a