Olive Kitteridge - Elizabeth Strout [74]
Who did I think she was? thought Olive. (And then: Who do I think I was?)
Henry was still in bed. He had not made it into his chair all day. She sat by him, touching his hand, and fed him some mashed potato, which he ate. It was dark as she prepared to leave. Waiting until she knew she would not be interrupted, she leaned over to Henry and whispered right into his ear, “You can die now, Henry. Go ahead. I’m fine. You can go ahead. It’s all right.” She did not look back as she left the room.
Dozing in the bump-out room, she expected the phone to ring.
In the morning, Henry was in his wheelchair, a polite smile on his face, his eyes unseeing. At four o’clock, she returned and spooned into his mouth his supper. The next week was the same. And the week after that. Autumn was upon them; soon it would be dark as she fed him his supper from the tray that sometimes Mary Blackwell brought.
One evening when she returned home, she looked through a drawer of old photographs. Her mother, plump and smiling, but still foreboding. Her father, tall, stoic; his silence in life seemed right there in the photo—he was, she thought, the biggest mystery of all. A picture of Henry as a small child. Huge-eyed and curly-haired, he was looking at the photographer (his mother?) with a child’s fear and wonder. Another photo of him in the navy, tall and thin, just a kid, really, waiting for life to begin. You will marry a beast and love her, Olive thought. You will have a son and love him. You will be endlessly kind to townspeople as they come to you for medicine, tall in your white lab coat. You will end your days blind and mute in a wheelchair. That will be your life.
Olive slipped the picture back into the drawer, her eye catching a photo of Christopher, taken when he was not yet two. She had forgotten how angelic he’d looked, like some creature newly hatched, as though he had not yet grown a skin and was all light and luminescence. You will marry a beast and she will leave you, Olive thought. You will move across the country and break your mother’s heart. She closed the drawer. But you will not stab a woman twenty-nine times.
She went into the bump-out room, lay down on her back. No, Christopher wouldn’t stab someone. (She hoped not.) It was not in his cards. Not in his bulb—planted in this particular soil, hers and Henry’s, and their parents before them. Closing her eyes, she thought of soil, and green things growing, and the soccer field by the school came into her mind. She remembered the days when she was a schoolteacher, how Henry would leave the pharmacy sometimes in the autumn to come and watch the soccer games on the field beside the school. Christopher, never physically aggressive, had spent most of the games sitting on the bench in his uniform, but Olive had suspected he didn’t mind.
There was beauty to that autumn air, and the sweaty young bodies that had mud on their legs, strong young men who would throw themselves forward to have the ball smack against their foreheads; the cheering when a goal was scored, the goalie sinking to his knees. There were days—she could remember this—when Henry would hold her hand as they walked home, middle-aged people, in their prime. Had they known at these moments to be quietly joyful? Most likely not. People mostly did not know enough when they were living life that they were living it. But she had that memory now, of something healthy and pure. Maybe it was the purest she had, those moments on the soccer field, because she had other memories that were not pure.
Doyle Larkin had not been at the soccer games—he had not gone to that school. Whether Doyle even played soccer, Olive didn’t know. She could not recall Louise ever saying, “I must go to Portland this afternoon to see Doyle in a soccer game.” But Louise had loved her children, had bragged about them endlessly; when she’d spoken of Doyle being homesick at summer camp, her eyes had moistened, Olive now remembered this.
There was no understanding any of it.
But she had been wrong