Olive Kitteridge - Elizabeth Strout [55]
“Okay, listen.” The kid took a deep, quick breath. He got up and came over to her, squatting down, putting the gun on the tile floor. “Any of you move, I’ll kill you.” He looked around. “Just give me a fucking second here.” And then he tugged quickly on both sides of her papery blue robe, tied the white plastic strip in a knot right there on her stomach. His shaved head with the tiny glints of orange stubble was close to her. The top of his forehead was still red from where the ski mask had excited the skin. “Okay,” he said. He took his gun and went back and sat on the toilet.
That moment, right there, when he sat back down and she wanted him to look at her—that was a vivid paint spot on her mind. How much she wanted him to look at her right then, and he didn’t.
In the car, Olive started the engine and pulled out of the parking lot. She drove past a drugstore, the doughnut shop, a dress shop that had been there forever, then she drove over the bridge. Farther ahead, if she continued that way, was the cemetery where her father was buried. Last week she had taken lilacs to put on his grave, though she wasn’t one who went in, especially, for decorating graves. Pauline was down there in Portland, and this was the first year that Olive had not accompanied Henry on Memorial Day to plant geraniums at the head of Pauline’s grave.
There had been a pounding on the bathroom door (locked from the inside by the kid, the way Olive herself had locked it) and the hurried, “Come on, come on, open up, it’s me!” And then she had seen—Henry couldn’t because of where he was sitting, but she had seen, when the kid opened the bathroom door that was being pounded upon—the horrible Pig-Face guy with the rifle hit the boy hard, crack him right across the face, shouting, “You took off your mask! You dumb-shit motherfucker!” Screaming, “You dumb shit!” There was an immediate resurgence of the thickening of her limbs, her eye muscles seemed to thicken, the air got thick; the whole thick, slow feeling of things not being real. Because now they would die. They had been thinking they wouldn’t, but they saw again that they would: This was clear in Pig-Face’s panicky voice.
The nurse started saying Hail Mary’s quickly and loudly, and as far as Olive could remember, it was after the nurse had repeated for the umpteenth time “Blessed is the fruit of thy womb” that Olive said to her, “God, will you shut up with that crap?” And Henry said, “Olive, stop.” Siding with the nurse like that.
Olive, stopping at a red light, reaching down to put the bag from the fabric store back up onto the seat next to her, still didn’t get it. She didn’t get it. No matter how many times she went over it in her mind, she didn’t understand why Henry had sided with the nurse like that. Unless it was because the nurse didn’t swear (Olive bet that nurse could swear) and Henry, trussed up like a chicken and about to be shot, had been mad at Olive for swearing. Or for putting down Pauline earlier, when Olive had been trying to save his life.
Well, she had said some things about his mother then. After Pig-Face had screamed at the kid, and then disappeared again, and they all knew he’d be back to shoot them—in that blurry, thick, awful part when Henry said, “Olive, stop,” she, Olive, said some things about his mother then.
She said: “You’re the one who can’t stand these Hail-Mary Catholics! Your mother taught you that! Pauline was the only real Christian in the world, as far as Pauline was concerned. And her good boy, Henry. You two were the only good Christians in the whole goddamn world!”
She said things like that. She said: “Do you know what your mother told people when my father died? That it was a sin! How’s that for Christian charity, I ask you?” The doctor said, “Stop now. Let’s stop this,” but it was like an engine inside Olive had the switch flipped on, and the motor was accelerating; how did you stop such a thing?
She said the word Jew. She was crying, everything was all mixed up, and she said, “Did it ever occur to you that’s why Christopher left?