“Try Harder”
(Sarah Olson, ’15)
Lars Keaton goes missing on Good Friday. Holly Mitchell hears of it first on the local news at nine, sitting on the couch in her family home with her knees pulled up to her chest. She recognizes the face presented by the earnest and urgent-looking news anchor, a school picture of a teenager with purple pimples and blondish hair. Holly went to high school with his parents, Joyce and Alex. She stares at Lars, who smiles awkwardly, revealing braces. She pictures him held in a basement somewhere. She pictures him walking alongside the highway in the dark. Joyce must be going mad with worry.
–
Holly works at Chowder’s Bait. This is not ideal. She’s a thirty-five year old woman working full-time at the counter of a bait shop on the six-block-long main street of Walt, Minnesota. The major draw of the store is its sign, oft-photographed by passers-by on their way to more illustrious destinations, with its mildly humorous motto, “Our Baits Try Harder!” underneath a grinning earthworm. At night, the sign glows neon, and the pink worm hovers in the sky, undulating. The store is never open after seven, though, and through traffic in Walt dries up after sundown, so the effect is largely wasted.
In all actuality, Chowder’s Bait is a convenience store that also happens to sell the freshest in minnows and leeches. It does a tidy trade in blank, brightly colored sweatshirts and a variety of magazines on the side of the shop not dedicated to live bait and fiddly, individually packaged lures. The store even has a rack of romance novels, which Holly has been working her way through since she started the job. She used to load articles onto her iPad, trying to turn the hours spent peddling leeches and small-fry into something at least a bit productive, but to sit alone in the murky-smelling bait shop, surrounded by the sloshing of open-air tanks and tapping away on her slick gadgetry under fluorescent lights, made her skin feel too tight and her fingernails too long.
Holly could remember coming to the shop with her grandfather once or twice to fetch leeches for fishing off the dock. The leeches would come home with them in repurposed butter tubs, of the same sort Holly distributes bait into now. “Let’s see if we can trick your Gran,” Grandad would say as he sloshed the container just enough to make Holly shudder at the thought of its contents. “We’ll put them in the fridge, and let’s see if she ends up with a leech on her toast before she realizes.”
Grandad wouldn’t have known the first thing to do with an iPad. She gives up on it about a month into the job, and starts working her way through the romance rack instead.
But in addition to offering a variety of bait and erotica, Chowder’s Bait also has a wider selection of candy than the gas station down the road, and in the afternoon, Holly usually gets a few school kids slinking through the door rather than trudging the extra two blocks to the SuperAmerica. This is how Holly knows Lars, how she can recognize him by sight on the news. He’s one of the troop of sullen teenage boys who shuffle into Chowder’s Bait on weekdays, outfitted in oversized workman’s jackets and knit hats in hunting orange. Holly would like to say that she knew Lars by his customary purchase, that he’d come in and leave with a Snickers every time, but she doesn’t. Lars is just another pale, pimply face in a pasty, drab-colored crowd.
But Holly is behind the counter on the Monday after Easter, four days after Lars went missing, even if his friends are absent. Already sparse business halts completely, and she spends the day alone, with the buzzing of the lights and the gurgling of the bait, and wonders how many children are, right now, being advised against strangers with candy and lost dogs. It’s best not to wander away from home. Stay close, and venture no further.
At nearly five, Newt Bier interrupts her musings and her slow but steady progress through Rogue’s Passion. Holly can tell he won’t be buying anything today. He smiles on the way in, face cracking like the leather of his jacket, and his eyes flick to the window behind the counter, trying to see into the back office. Dan isn’t here, and if Dan’s not here, then Newt won’t be buying whatever unnecessary thing he’s come in here to get. Holly learned a while back that none of the men trust her advice on anything in the store, even though they all come in dead-set on what they want and are never persuaded otherwise. Dan will come stand next to them, nodding his head, and never refute a word they say. Heaven forbid Holly try to do the same.
Newt wanders down the aisle with the rods and stares at the third one down, face puckering further as he scrapes his nails through his silvered buzzcut. His left hand strokes at a reel, but — no, not today. He gusts out a breath and turns to grin at Holly. “Slow day, probably?”
“It’s been empty until you,” she replies, turning her wrist to plop down Rogue’s Passion next to the cash register. Dave takes in the front cover with mild interest. He and the other retired fishermen-cum-farmer types had always eyed her iPad with distrust in those first few weeks. It is a strange place, where the seediest romance novel garners more approval than a standard Apple product, but Holly has lived here almost all her life. She remembers playing high school basketball on the same JV team as Newt’s daughter, Amy. Holly can pick him out in the remembered spectators of her mind, hair browner, eyes less pinched.
“Shame about that Keaton boy,” he says now, wringing his gloves.
“It is. Have they learned anything new?”
“Not last I heard. Linda and I’ll be praying for him, for the whole family.”
Holly nods equivocally and debates asking which rod he was looking at. It’d be the fastest way to get rid of him, honestly.
“He’ll turn up, though,” Newt soothes, clearing his throat and flapping his gloves a little. “These things turn out all right in the end.” He’s probably worried about his grandson. After the tidal wave of worry hit on Friday, the waters have settled, and new anxieties have had room to grow in the still, fetid water of the everyday. It’s a new influx of neuroses for Holly, whose worry had finally plateaued after half a year.
Newt asks, “How’s your mom doing?”
“Better,” Holly lies.
“Well,” and he makes an effort to smile. “That’s some good news at least.” His eyes flicker, again, to the back office. Dan is still gone. Just ask. Just ask, “When will Dan be back in?” Just admit you don’t trust me to fluff your ego about the rod you’re already sure you’re going to buy. Just ask where he is.
“Anyway, I won’t trouble you any longer. You have a good day, now, Holly.”
The bells above the door chime good-bye, and Holly stands up, shuffling about to get the food to feed the bait.
–
The hospice is decorated in the non-threatening color scheme of a Tuscan restaurant, all olive, ochre, aubergine, and the nurses clash with the walls in their pastel-colored scrubs. Holly is a regular fixture on weekday evenings, and she passes through the halls uninterrupted, reluctant curiosity prompting her to glance into patients’ rooms as she walks by. Her eyes snag on the details: a sleep apnea machine sitting by a bed, its lengthy tubes and straps hopelessly tangled and abandoned in a huff by its user. An empty, unmade bed glimpsed through a door as a colorless topographical map. A wilting spider plant in a window. A stripped mattress in a bare room.
It was a weakened heart, the doctor had said. The muscle had been failing for years, probably, but now it was noticeable, critical. Holly had sat, hunched in her chair, and thought about the walls of her mother’s heart, barely moving. High heels, Holly remembers wearing high heels, and taking them off with fumbling fingers so she could walk around, then out of the office to sit in the public bathroom in her stocking feet. That had been seven months and two weeks ago. Holly has been living in Walt for six months and three weeks. She has been working at Chowder’s Bait for six months and eight days.
“Hi, Mom,” she says when she reaches her mother’s room. It’s a nice one, all thing considered, rather big, with a view of the pine trees out back instead of the front parking lot and the frontage road. The walls are bare save a print of red and white tulips in a bright green field, and a white board with the name of the nurse on duty in loping cursive. The bed dominates the room, with a small armchair shoved off towards the side, and Maeve dominates the bed. “I brought the Jell-O eggs.”
The Jell-O eggs are a Mitchell tradition; Holly and her parents would gleefully make use of the egg-shaped molds after they were banned from sale as choking hazards. “Idiots will try to eat them whole,” Holly remembers her mother saying as they opened the molds to reveal the glistening, jewel-toned eggs. “They don’t have two brain cells to rub together, and they’re ruining it for the rest of us.”
Holly had made them this year, because the family made them every year, but she had left them sitting in their cut-glass bowl in the fridge. Her mother had huffed in a way that had nothing to do with her normal shortness of breath, and it had been an icy Easter lunch after that. Holly had brought ham and mustard and green bean casserole and raspberries, but the eggs were missing and it had not been forgotten.
“Oh, good,” Maeve sighs, and her hands flutter around where they rest on the guardrails of the bed. “Move me up and then get one out for me, will you? I’ll get Chloe to put them in the fridge later.”
Holly darts around to the side of the bed and pushes the button to bring the bed upright, then glances around for a plate — “Just put it in that cup there, Holly,” — before fishing out an egg from the bowl. An orange one, orange is her mother’s favorite.
“You don’t want one, sweetie?” Maeve huffs around the spoon. Holly wishes her mother had let her get a new plate and cutlery, but a loose and dusty spoon from the bedside table has been pressed into service instead.
“No, Mom, I’m fine.” She can’t imagine eating Jell-O after working in the bait shop, thinking of the wriggling plastic lures and the curling leeches lurking at the bottom of butter tubs.
“Well,” Maeve coughs and Holly waits stiffly, fingers at the ready to hit the call button. “Well, thank you for making them this year. I know I’m a bother and it’s a trouble you didn’t want to take, but it means—“ and she wheezes for a few moments. “It does mean a lot to me that you went back and made them.”
“Mom, I told you, it wasn’t any extra work. They were already made. I just forgot them.”
“You can—“ a sigh — “tell me whatever you like, but I know you, Holly.”
Holly sits with her mouth shut and her legs crossed while her mother finishes the egg. Maeve’s closet has been straightened since yesterday, the clothes reorganized to look like a rainbow. Holly wonders which of nurses was roped into that bit of spring-cleaning. Now all of Maeve’s outdoor clothes are mixed in with her hanging pajamas. Why she even has outdoor clothes at the hospice is beyond Holly, as her mother hasn’t even left this floor since she arrived. But then, Holly was the one who did her mother’s packing seven months ago.
“Any news on the Keaton boy?” Maeve asks when she’s done, a trembling hand placing the cup on her bedside table.
“No. His picture was on TV, though, that should help.”
“Lucy visited me this morning.”
“If there was any news, she’d have it,” Holly muses, thinking about Lucy Charnetski, Joyce’s mother, who always reminded her of a Chihuahua, small, loud, with very short hair. “She must be out of her mind with worry.”
“’Course she is. Her poor baby. I can’t imagine losing a grandson.” Maeve looks out towards the pine trees outside the window.
“Well, let’s be thankful, then, that I don’t have any grandchildren to worry about.”
Holly winds her right foot around her left ankle, drawing her legs together even more tightly.
“Paul Morris keeps requesting The Bells of St. Mary’s for screenings,” Maeve complains after her wheezing has gone down, “and they keep putting it on.”
“Paul’s the only one who ever asks for anything, Mom.”
“Just because I don’t have something I want to watch more than Paul wants to watch The Bells of St. Mary’s doesn’t mean—“ a wet cough, and Holly contemplates infection — “doesn’t mean I want to watch that three times.”
“You don’t have to go the screenings—“
“They favor him!” Maeve’s voice cracks and she gasps for breath as her throat seems to spasm. Holly gets up to fix the bedspread. It’s been slipping their whole conversation, sliding off the bed, and Holly kneels down to tuck it back under her mother’s legs, staring steadily at the floor. “We’re all dying and they favor him over me, what am I supposed to do with that, Holly?”
“Mom,” Holly says, and Maeve huffs at the sound of it, going quiet and turning back to the window.
Holly straightens the blanket on the other side, too, picking lint from the sunny yellow cotton. This one is from her parent’s house, the house in which Holly lives alone now. She chose this blanket specifically for her mother to bring here, because Holly used to like to bundle herself up in it like an enchilada and find her parents, who would lift her up and tuck in the top and bottom to make her a burrito instead. The blanket used to lie at the foot of the guest bedroom in the basement and smell like the basement, too, like mold and damp leather. Now it smells like a hospital, a scent somehow more stale than basement.
“I’ll tell the nurses you’re sick of The Bells of St. Mary’s,” Holly says when she surfaces from the blanket, knees cracking disconcertingly as she stands up. “You should think of something you’d rather watch.”
“No, don’t say anything,” Maeve sighs. “Then they’ll know I’ve complained.”
Holly sits back in her chair and pulls her phone from her coat pocket, but keeps the screen dark. She can’t remember the last time someone texted her.
“Lucy said they organized a search party now that Easter’s over. Tomorrow. You should ask Dan tonight for the day off. He’ll be fine with it. He’ll come too, I bet. So dress warm.”
Holly pictures calling Dan, who lives alone too. Dan’s monosyllables are even more painful over the phone. She pictures walking alone in the woods in the dark, flashlight beam arcing between trees. She pictures finding a body, curled in on itself between a tangle of roots. It’s been a cold spring. “Right,” she tells her mother.
“You should make that call now,” Maeve shuffles her shoulders and rests her wrists on the guardrails. Her nails are bare and short, splitting vertically and peeling apart. Holly painted Maeve’s nails once, maybe a week after settling into the hospice. They had picked out a neon sparkly purple together. “And get some dinner. You look pale.”
“OK,” Holly stands and leans down to buss her mother on the cheek. Maeve sighs.
–
It feels like a Minnesotan Easter on Tuesday, the day cold and diffuse with diluted midday sunlight. Holly shivers and burrows her nose into her scarf as Alex Keaton yells to the crowd of volunteers about staying with your search group and keeping your phone on at all times. Alex looks pretty good, considering: tired, but hopeful. Joyce, less so. She shrinks behind her husband, her face gray and the skin around her eyes and mouth swollen. She shakes visibly, and her brassy hair blows in front of her face. It was tangled even before the wind picked up.
The crowd of maybe sixty, seventy volunteers stands huddled in a field near the south side of town. If you were going to walk toward the highway to hitchhike, this would be the place to start. The sheriff’s department has provided high-visibility vests of the sort worn by road workers, and so the crowd forms a lurid orange amoeba, undulating in the knee-high grass, consuming thermos coffee and speaking in a chorus of low voices.
Groups are split according to order of arrival and read off from the sign-in sheet. Holly gets placed with Karl Mayhew, a quiet bachelor farmer who smells like smoke from a yard away, and Mark Hale, who was a senior at Walt High School when Holly was a stuttering freshman. She went to prom with his younger brother, Christopher, their junior year. She imagines that introduction. Hi, I’m Holly Mitchell, remember me? I made out with your brother in the creepy parking lot of a Ramada in Fargo. Did he never mention that? Instead, she just says hi.
They’re directed west, into a stretch of woods that begins abruptly where the clear-cutting for the town stopped. Initially the going is quiet, the three of them picking their way through the forest detritus and searching under logs and down gullies. The air is close but cold under the bare tree branches, and everything on the ground is damp and dead. Karl has taken over the task of yelling Lars’ name, his chain-smoker’s voice grinding through the forest like a buzzsaw. The other groups’ calls of “Lars! Lars!” fade away until it’s just Karl and the squelching of boots pulled from mud. It’s about an hour and a half into the search before Mark turns to Holly, a solemn and perplexed expression on his face.
“Think we’ll find him?” He asks.
“I hope so,” Holly lies. She hopes Lars is found, really, but she doesn’t want it to be their group that stumbles across him in this forest, surrounded by the dank and rotting smell of spring.
They’re quiet for a while longer, kicking aside clusters of branches and startling at every squirrel that rustles up a tree. Then Mark tries again, with a smile like something out of a commercial, “You know, we used to get your name wrong all the time when we’d talk about you with Christopher. You remember Christopher?”
“Yeah, I remember. How’s he doing?”
“Oh, fine. We’d call you ‘Molly Hitchell’ and he’d get in a fuss about it. It’d be hilarious, he was so tiny back then.”
Holly makes herself chuckle obligingly.
“You didn’t move back to Walt after college, right? I haven’t seen you around.” Mark twirls his flashlight, which hangs by a string around his wrist. Mark looks like he would belong on one of the covers of the Chowder’s Bait romance novels, with an attractiveness so classic it’s boring, but the tall, dark, and handsomeness stops there. He was the kind of guy in high school with too many letters to fit on a jacket and the same girlfriend for four years. People liked him.
Holly’s mouth pulls into a smile, and she checks around the trunk of a thick oak. “I didn’t, no. You did?”
“Took over my dad’s Ace.”
A ravine the size of the hold on a semi distracts them for a few moments. Karl keeps yelling Lars, and Holly and Mark toggle on their flashlights. Holly steels herself for glassy eyes or maybe a limp, blue hand, but they find nothing more than a few rusted-over beer cans.
“I heard about your mom, Holly,” Mark says as they turn away from the ditch. “From my mom, actually.”
Holly forgets sometimes where she is, and she forgets how nothing is safe or under wraps in Walt. Everyone knows her mother is dying, but they talk about it. They present their sympathy with encouraging smiles, as if a reminder of her imminent loss should be considered a gift.
“Lars!” Karl calls, stepping sideways down a hill. “Lars!”
“So are you visiting her for Easter? Nice of you to help out with the search.”
Holly mashes her lips between her teeth. “No, I’ve moved back into the old house. Actually. My dad died a few years back, and there’s really no one to take care of things. So.”
“Yikes, is it that bad?”
Yes. “Restrictive cardiomyopathy. Her heart’s going.”
“Jesus, Holly.” Mark meets her eyes guiltily and clears his throat a bit. “I’m sorry.”
Holly considers a fallen tree. There’s a puddle underneath it, and she can see fleshy earthworms basking in the rainwater while it lasts. No room for a person under there. “It’s tough but she’s staying positive. She’s doing pretty well at the moment.”
“Lars!” Karl barks to their left.
“So you’re back in Walt from…?”
“Chicago,” Holly fills in the blank for him. “I was working with Allstate.”
“Swank.” Mark is grinning, she can hear it. That grin bites at her. Her fingers are numb. “I bet you had the run of the place. Did you have a corner office and everything?”
Holly did, actually; not of the sort he’s thinking, as it wasn’t bigger than a walk-in closet, but it had walls and two windows and she was good at her job. She had at one point been good at a job where she didn’t sell bait to old fishermen and candy to teenagers. At one point, she had a yearly salary. But these were minimum wage days, and everyone had them. It was just a shame hers were so literal.
“Now I’m back in Walt,” she tells Mark, “because my mother’s in hospice.”
The trees are all too skinny in this part of the woods. There are no good hiding places, and the undergrowth is covered in undisturbed dead leaves, only just exposed by the melting snow. There’s no sign of Lars, or anything, in sight.
“Hey, Karl?” Mark calls. “I can take over for you, if you want.”
–
By the time they return to the field, the sky has gone purple and everything is monochrome in the dusk. Alex is shaking his head when they approach with their flashlights at the ready. No sign of him.
Holly drives home in her Accord, sniffling and freezing while she waits for the heater to start. She remembers falling asleep in her parents’ car, once. It’s one of her most vivid childhood memories, though likely much affected by adult perusal. She had been seven, maybe, or eight, and she no longer remembers where they were driving. But she remembers it was night when she opened her eyes, and she was boggled by the lateness of the hour, the glowing orange numbers on the dashboard that said it was one in the morning. She had squirmed through her seatbelt so that the chest strap was behind her back, and she was lying on her side across the backseat, the car thrumming under her ear. There were no worries before or behind her, just a blank expanse of road and her parents steering their way through the void.
There is her mother in the passenger seat, mouth and nose illuminated by the reflection of the headlights on the road. Her mother’s nose, with the bump on it that hers didn’t have. Holly can turn the memory over in her hands, now, and see the smoothness of her mother’s cheek, and the way her long hair hid her ear. Her mother never blinks in the memory, or turns away, or looks over her shoulder to smile at her daughter. Her face is slack and unmoving, lit up blue by night. Her father is driving the car, but Holly can’t remember tilting her head to look at him. She can invent an image of his face stolen from photographs and edited to fit into the night drive, but really, the memory is only of her mother and the glowing console and the dark.
It’s different, driving now. Of course it is. There’s loss in knowing she’ll never lie down in the backseat while her father drives and her mother watches the road. The doors are no longer locked against worry, and now there’s always a destination.
–
The week passes, and it’s Sunday again. Holly goes to visit her mother twice more before Maeve sighs and says, “You know, you don’t have to check in on me so often. I can survive without seeing you every day,” too clipped to be passive aggressive. This happens every so often. Holly knows now to give it three or four days before turning up again.
Walt Lutheran holds a prayer service for Lars on Sunday night. It’ll be busy, everyone coming out to engage in the business of sympathy like worms emerging to writhe in the rain for a few hours. Holly leaves the safety of her house and her sweatpants, puts on real clothes of the sort she hasn’t worn in days, and drives down to the church. The service is in the basement, and it’s a cloying, claustrophobic nostalgia to walk down the stairs and through dim hallways. Both the faux wood paneling and the fading, homemade Sunday school posters peel from the walls.
Holly reaches the cavernous room that every church must have in its basement, with a piano that’s never used and a raised stage built into the wall, padded so no small heads are hurt during spaghetti dinners and bake sales. No kids tonight, though, just frowning adults. Holly is surprised again, as she always is when people in Walt get together, how all of the women seem to have the same hair color, all of them, that brassy almost-blond that they upgrade with highlights and layering. Holly has the same hair, just like everyone else, and used to have a cute, flippy thing to do with it too, but it’s grown out too long and now it just settles into limp waves. She deposits her things near the back of the horseshoe of chairs and perceives a lack of coffee in the room. The kitchen it is.
It isn’t unoccupied, Holly discovers as she walks through the door and is greeted by Joyce Keaton’s back. Joyce appears to be fanning out Ritz crackers on a platter, adjusting each one just so, then starting at the beginning again, touching each cracker to form the perfect arc. Holly feels a rush of pity, an emotion she hasn’t felt in what feels like eons. “You shouldn’t be the one doing that, Joyce. Please, let me. You go and sit.”
Joyce’s back goes stiff and then the tension seems to pour out of her. She supports herself on the countertop, her hands pale and white. “Holly? Jesus. You scared me.”
Holly looks through the cupboards for the coffee grounds, trying to give Joyce a moment to collect herself. “I’ll finish up in here. Go and sit down, please.”
“I have to do this, thanks,” Joyce says in the same tone Maeve had used. I can survive without seeing you every day.
“OK,” says Holly. She takes out the grounds, measures out the water. She washes her hands when she remembers she hasn’t already. Maybe Joyce doesn’t want to talk about it. Maybe she needs to talk about it. Maybe Holly should distract her. Maybe Holly should go get someone.
“How’s your mom, Holly,” Joyce asks in a way that isn’t asking, her voice somehow as gray as her face was on Tuesday.
“Fine,” Holly says automatically.
“My mom went to visit her a while back.”
“Yeah, I heard.” Holly starts the coffee maker, waits for this conversation to be over. “Tell her thank you for me.”
There’s a crash, and there are crackers all over the counter and circling on the floor. Holly automatically goes to pick them up, falling to her knees, avoiding Joyce’s eyes. “He was blond, you know,” says Joyce, after Holly realizes how idiotic she looks, scrambling to pick up crackers from the dirty floor of a Lutheran church kitchen. “He was blond. I know it’s not supposed to matter, but when he was little he had the blondest hair, it was like a fucking yellow crayon, it was so blond. When he was fourteen it was like he stopped showering, and then it just got brown. Brown and greasy. If he would just wash his hair —” Holly can hear Joyce opening cupboards, getting out plates and bags and cookie sheets and something that sounds like the electric mixer.
“Alex and I would walk around with him, and people would say, what a beautiful daughter! His hair was so pretty and we let it get so long. One day Alex must have gotten sick of it, I don’t know, but he cut it all off, all of it, gave him a buzzcut and brought all the hair home in a little baggie for me. I must have laughed when I saw him first, but I only remember crying later. I still have that hair in the attic. I know just the box it’s in. I could get it out for you.”
The coffee machine starts gurgling, and Holly is almost out of crackers on the floor.
“All I wanted was a kid. I must have told you in high school, I told everything that fucking breathed how much I wanted to get pregnant. Just one, just one kid. And he’d be perfect, half Alex, half me. My son. And he does this to us. We gave him everything, I swear to God, Holly.”
Holly starts on the crackers on the counter, squeezing one eye shut like she’s going to fire a rifle. “You know, you don’t know what’s happened yet, Joyce,” she starts, the words creaking out of her reluctantly. A wrong step and it feels like the ceiling will come down on top of them. “Maybe he didn’t want to go. I’m sure he loves you, and when you find him, he’s going to be so —”
“We know where he is.”
The coffee keeps gurgling until it stops. “What?” Holly turns to look at Joyce and immediately wishes she hadn’t, because Joyce is staring at her and the skin around her eyes is so red it’s like she tried to wipe them with blood-drenched hands.
“The police in St. Paul found him on Friday night. He was in some apartment. High on something — Alex knows what it’s called it, I have no idea. That’s why he left. It was like he was out of his mind. So he’s in rehab now.”
“Sorry,” Holly says after a pause, then shakes her head. “I mean, I’m so sorry, Joyce. I didn’t realize he’d been found. I’m glad to hear he’s— safe. Are we— Are we praying for his recovery?”
Joyce has emptied most of the cupboards and half of the cutlery drawer. Her hands are full of spoons. “No one else knows. Alex thought we’d keep it quiet until we could figure it out. So it’s just us, and you now. I really shouldn’t have told you. I said I’d keep it a secret. I guess by tomorrow everyone will know.”
Holly tries not to feel insulted. “I’m not going to tell anyone.”
Joyce actually laughs. “Thanks for making the coffee. Could you set it out on that table outside? I’d appreciate it.”
Holly does, and then she goes to sit down in the prayer horseshoe. Everyone is still clucking and shaking their heads and hiding their sweat stains. The service will start in four minutes. She tries to sit still, but her skin feels too tight and her fingernails too long. The basement is boiling. She stands and leaves.
–
Holly goes home and walks around the house, turning on all the lights. Her parents never switched to CFL bulbs, and Holly hasn’t bothered to either, when the incandescents go out. Within minutes the house is silent and drenched in yellow, a glow Holly finds more restorative than sunlight. With all the lights on, the house is a three-dimensional photograph, and Holly can wander around in her past by passing from room to room. She stops in the guest bedroom and sits at the foot of the bed, missing her yellow blanket. It’s better that Lars is alive, so much better than all of her visions of slumped bodies in the woods and Joyce bent over double, screaming upon hearing the news of her son’s death. It’s a relief to know. Of course it is. Thank God.
–
Holly drops by the hospice after work on Monday. It’s been three days, so Maeve should be looking forward to seeing her again. Nothing much has changed, maybe one more room newly empty and the angle of the sunlight reaching farther in to the hallways. It gets brighter every time Holly sees Maeve, as the days get longer.
There have been no further screenings of The Bells of St. Mary’s. Paul Morris has taken a turn for the worse, so the last movie was Field of Dreams, which Maeve is pleased about. She’s still working away at the Jello-O eggs. She says she had a red one yesterday. “Very good this year,” she sighs and smiles at Holly, her sagging skin pulling tight for a moment. “How did the prayer service go? I would have liked to be there.”
Holly stares at her nails, which she painted burgundy today at work. The smell of the polish had covered up the bait shop scent of fish and latex. “I didn’t go.”
Maeve’s head jerks back a bit in surprise, and then she coughs. Holly waits patiently for her to get through it. “Holly! I’m surprised at you. You went to school with Joyce. This has got to be—“ a huff— “agony for her.”
“I know it. Time just got away from me. Dinner was barely started and there it was, almost seven.”
“Well! Send her flowers, then. That’s terrible, Holly.”
Holly stares at the trees beyond the window, maps out their branches, looks at hollows between their roots. Holly wonders if Joyce will tell someone else, when she realizes that no one knows. Holly wonders how long they’ll keep up the lie, if Joyce tells no one. Holly will sit in the back at the next prayer service and stare at Joyce and her red eyes. Holly, the walking secret.
“I’ll call for a flower delivery as soon as I get home, Mom. I’ll put both of our names in the card.”
Maeve sighs and glowers a little. “Good. It’s nice to make an effort, isn’t it?”
Holly smiles.