Olive Kitteridge - Elizabeth Strout [54]
“He can’t help it,” Olive said. “You’d have to know his mother. His mother was full of pious crap.”
“That’s not true,” said Henry. “My mother was a good, decent woman.”
“Shut up,” the boy said tiredly. “Everyone please just shut the fuck up.” He sat back down on the toilet seat cover, his legs spread, holding the gun over a knee. Olive’s mouth was so dry, she thought of the word tongue and pictured a slab of cow’s tongue packaged for sale.
The boy suddenly pulled off his ski mask. And how startling—it was as though she knew him then, as if seeing him made sense. Quietly, he said, “Motherfucker.” His skin had become tender beneath the heat of the ski mask; his neck had streaks, patches of red. Crowded together high on his cheeks were inflamed pimples. His head was shaved, but she saw he was a redhead; there was the orangey effervescence of his scalp; the tiny flickers of bright stubble, the almost parboiled look of his tender, pale skin. The boy wiped his face in the crook of his nylon-sleeved elbow.
“I bought my son a ski mask like that,” Olive told him. “He lives in California and skis in the Sierra Nevada Mountains.”
The boy looked at her. His eyes were pale blue, and his eyelashes were almost colorless. The whites of his eyes had spidery red veins. He kept staring at Olive without changing his hangdog expression. “Just please shut up,” he finally said.
Olive sat in her car in the far back of the hospital’s parking lot, where she could see the blue door of the emergency room, but there was no shade and the sun baked through the windshield; even with the windows open, she was too warm. The lack of shade had not been a problem all year, of course. In the winter, she would come and sit with the car running. Never did she stay long. Only enough to gaze at the door and to remember the clean, bright lobby, the huge bathroom with its shiny chrome rail that ran along part of one wall; a rail that right now, perhaps, some old doddering lady was holding on to, in order to hoist herself off the toilet—the rail Olive had stared at as they all sat, legs splayed out, hands behind their backs. In hospitals, lives were changed all the time. A newspaper said the nurse had not returned to work, but maybe by now she had. About the doctor, Olive didn’t know.
The kid kept getting up and sitting back down on the toilet seat. When he sat, he’d be hunched forward, the gun in one hand, the other hand folded in front of his mouth, him chewing the hell out of those fingertips. The sirens did not sound for very long. She had thought that, but maybe they had sounded for a long time. It was the pharmacist who’d been able to signal a janitor to call the police, a special unit brought to negotiate with Pig-Face, but none of them had known that then. A telephone kept ringing and stopping. They waited, the nurse rolling her head back, closing her eyes.
Olive’s little plastic strip of a belt had come untied. The memory of this was a splotch of thick, dense paint. The belt, somewhere along the line, had come untied, and the papery gown was open. She tried crossing one leg over the other, but that made the gown open more, and she could see her big stomach with its folds, and her thighs, white as two massive fish bellies.
“Honestly,” Henry said. “Can’t you find something to cover my wife? She’s all exposed.”
“Shut up, Henry,” Olive said. The nurse opened her eyes and gazed over at Olive, and the doctor of course turned his head to look at her. They were all looking at her now. “God, Henry.”
The boy leaned forward, and said softly to Henry, “See—you gotta be quiet, or someone’s gonna blow your head off. Your motherfucking head,” he added.
He sat back. His glance, as he looked around, fell on Olive, and he said, “Oh, Jesus, lady,” a look of real discomfort passing over his face.
“Well, what am I supposed to do?” she said, furious—oh, she was furious; and if her teeth had been chattering before, she now felt sweat rolling down her face; she seemed to be one moist, furious sack of horror. She tasted salt and did not know if these were tears