how wild he had felt that day, glaring back at those who stared at him,
wanting nothing more than to claw his way down into the earth and pull
it over him as if it were a blanket, taking rest in the same hole as his
grandmother. But he could not remember why he had felt that way or why
he was beginning to feel that way again.
He looked at the date of her death once more-September 25-and he was too
frightened now to cry.
“What is it? Tell me,” Holly urged.
“That’s when I came with the flowers, the only other time I’ve ever
come, the day I remember as the day she died. September twenty-fifth. .
. but five years ago, not twenty-four. It was the nineteenth
anniversary of her death. . . but at the time it seemed to me, and
always has, that she’d only just then died.”
They were both silent.
Two large blackbirds wheeled across the somber sky, shrieking, and
disappeared over the treetops.
Finally Holly said, “Could it be, you denied her death, refused to
accept it when it really happened, twenty-four years ago? Maybe you
were only able to accept it nineteen years later. . . the day you came
here with the flowers. That’s why you remember her dying so much more
recently than she did. You date her death from the day you finally
accepted it.”
He knew at once that she had hit upon the truth, but the answer did not
make him feel better. “But Holly, my God, that is madness.”
“No,” she said calmly. “It’s self defense, part of the same defenses
you erected to hide so much of that year when you were ten.”
She paused, took a deep breath, and said, “Jim, how did your grandma
die?”
“She. . .” He was surprised to realize that he could not recall the
cause of Lena Ironheart’s death. One more fog-filled blank. “I don’t
know.”
“I think she died in the mill.”
He looked away from the tombstone, at Holly. He tensed with alarm,
although he did not know why. “In the windmill? How? What happened?
How can you know?”
“The dream I told you about. Climbing the mill stairs, looking through
the window at the pond below, and seeing another woman’s face reflected
in the glass, your grandmother’s face.”
“It was only a dream.”
Holly shook her head. “No, I think it was a memory, your memory, which
you projected from your sleep into mine.”
His heart fluttered with panic for reasons he could not quite discern.
“How can it have been my memory if I don’t have it now?”
“You have it.”
He frowned. “No. Nothing like that.”
“It’s locked down in your subconscious, where you can access it only
when you’re dreaming, but it’s there, all right.”
If she had told him that the entire cemetery was mounted on a carousel,
and that they were slowly spinning around under the bleak gun-metal sky,
he would have accepted what she said more easily than he could accept
the memory toward which she was leading him. He felt as if he were
spinning through light and darkness, light and darkness, fear and rage.
. . .
With great effort, he said, “But in your dream. . . I was in the high
room when grandma got there.”
“Yes.”
“And if she died there. . .”
“You witnessed her death.”
He shook his head adamantly. “No. My God, I’d remember that don’t you
think?”
“No. I think that’s why you needed nineteen years even to admit to
yourself that she died. I think you saw her die, and it was such a
shock that it threw you into long-term amnesia, which you overlaid with
fantasies, always more fantasies.”
A breeze stirred, and something crackled around his feet. He was sure
it was the bony hands of his grandmother clawing out of the earth to
seize him, but when he looked down he saw only withered leaves rattling
against one another as they blew across the grass.
With each heartbeat now like a fist slamming into a punching bag, Jim
turned away from the grave, eager to get back to the car.