Olive Kitteridge - Elizabeth Strout [44]
“Oh, I know that. I know.” Olive nodded. “I taught school for thirty-two years. I never saw a girl sick like you, it wasn’t around then—not up here, anyway. But I know from all those years with kids, and—and just living—” Olive stood up, wiped crumbs from her front. “Anyway, I’m sorry.” She started to move away, stopped when she was near the girl. Hesitantly, she raised her hand, started to put it down, then raised it again, and touched the girl’s head. She must have felt, beneath her large hand, something Harmon didn’t see, because she slid her hand down to the girl’s bone of a shoulder, and the girl—tears creeping from her closed eyes—leaned her cheek on Olive’s hand.
“I don’t want to be like this,” the girl whispered.
“Of course you don’t,” said Olive. “And we’re going to get you help.”
The girl shook her head. “They’ve tried. I just keep getting sick again. It’s hopeless.”
Olive reached and pulled over a chair, so that she could sit with the girl’s head on her big lap. She stroked the girl’s hair, and held a few pieces in her fingers, giving Daisy and Harmon a meaningful nod before flicking the hair to the floor. You lost your hair when you starved. Olive had stopped her own weeping, and said, “Are you too young to know who Winston Churchill was?”
“I know who he was,” the girl said, tiredly.
“Well, he said, never, never, never, never give up.”
“He was fat,” said Nina, “so what did he know?” She added, “It’s not that I want to give up.”
“Of course not,” said Olive. “But your body’s going to give up without some fuel. I know you’ve heard this all before, so you just lie there and don’t answer. Well, answer this: Do you hate your mother?”
“No,” Nina said. “I mean, she’s kind of pathetic, but I don’t hate her.”
“All right, then,” Olive said, her big body giving a shudder. “All right, then. That’s a start.”
For Harmon, the scene would always remind him of the day the ball of lightning came through the window and buzzed around. For there was a kind of warm electricity, something astonishing and unworldly in the feeling of the room, as the girl began to cry, and Daisy eventually got the mother on the telephone, arrangements made for her to be picked up that afternoon, promises that she would not go to the hospital. Harmon left with Olive, the girl wrapped in a blanket on the couch. He helped Olive Kitteridge get into her car, then he walked back to the marina and went home, knowing that something in his life had changed. He did not speak of it to Bonnie.
“Did you bring me my doughnut?” she asked.
“There was only cinnamon,” he said. “The boys call?”
Bonnie shook her head.
You started to expect things at a certain age. Harmon knew that. You worried about heart attacks, cancer, the cough that turned into a ferocious pneumonia. You could even expect to have a kind of midlife crisis—but there was nothing to explain what he felt was happening to him, that he’d been put into a transparent plastic capsule that rose off the ground and was tossed and blown and shaken so fiercely that he could not possibly find his way back to the quotidian pleasures of his past life. Desperately, he did not want this. And yet, after that morning at Daisy’s, when Nina had cried, and Daisy had gotten on the phone, making arrangements for the parents to come and get her—after that morning, the sight of Bonnie made him feel cold.
The house felt like a damp, unlit cave. He noticed how Bonnie never asked him how things were at the store—perhaps after all these years, she didn’t need to ask. Without wanting to, he began to keep score. A whole week might go by when she asked him nothing more personal than if he “had any thoughts about dinner.”
One night he said, “Bonnie, do you know my favorite song?”
She was reading and didn’t look up. “What?”
“I said—Do you know my favorite song?”
Now she looked at him over the tops of her glasses. “And I said, what? What is it?”
“So you don’t know?”
She put her glasses onto her lap. “Am I supposed to know? Is this twenty questions?”
“I know yours—‘Some Enchanted Evening.’ ”