flash back, at will, through his years in the classroom, which seemed so
vivid that those thousands of days might have occurred concurrently only
yesterday.
“-because that life held no threat for you, it was filled with purpose
and peace. The only things you forget, push relentlessly down into the
deepest wells of memory, are those things having to do with the death of
your parents, the death of Lena Ironheart, and your years in New
Svenborg. Henry Ironheart is part of that, so you continue to wipe him
from your mind.”
The sky was contusive.
He saw blackbirds wheeling across the clouds, more of them now than he
had seen in the cemetery. Four, six, eight. They seemed to be
paralleling the car, following it to Solvang.
Strangely, he recalled the dream with which he had awakened on the
morning that he had gone to Portland, saved Billy Jenkins, and met
Holly.
In the nightmare, a flock of large blackbirds shrieked around him in a
turbulent flapping of wings and tore at him with hooked beaks as
precision-honed as surgical instruments.
“The worst is yet to come,” he said.
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t know.”
“You mean what we learn at Fair Haven?”
Above, the blackbirds swam through the high, cold currents.
Without having a clue as to what he meant, Jim said, “Something very
dark is coming.”
Fair Haven was housed in a large, U-shaped, three-story building outside
the town limits of Solvang, with no trace of Danish influence in its
architecture. It was strictly off the-rack design, functional and no
prettier than it had to be: cream-tinted stucco, concrete-tile roof,
boxy, flat-walled, with out detail. But it was freshly painted and in
good repair; the hedges were neatly trimmed, the lawn recently mown, and
the sidewalks swept clean.
Holly liked the place. She almost wished she lived there, was maybe
eighty, watching some TV every day, playing some checkers, with no worry
bigger than trying to figure out where she had put her false teeth when
she’d taken them out last night.
Inside, the hallways were wide and airy, with yellow vinyl-tile floors.
Unlike in many nursing homes, the air was neither tainted with the
stench of incontinent patients left unclean by inattentive staff nor
with a heavy aerosol deodorant meant to eliminate or mask that stench.
The rooms she and Jim passed looked attractive, with big windows opening
to valley views or a garden courtyard. Some of the patients lay in
their beds or slumped in their wheelchairs with vacant or mournful
expressions on their faces, but they were the unfortunate victims of
major strokes or late-stage Alzheimer’s disease, locked away in memories
or torment, largely unconnected to the world around them. Everyone else
appeared happy; and patients’ laughter actually could be heard, a rarity
in such places.
According to the supervisor on duty at the nurses’ station, Henry
Ironheart had been a resident of Fair Haven for over four years.
Mrs. Danforth, the administrator into whose office they were shown, was
new since Henry Ironheart had been checked in. She had the slightly
plump, well-groomed, and inoffensively self satisfied look of a
minister’s wife in a prosperous parish. Though she could not understand
why they needed her to verify something that Jim knew already, she
checked her records and showed them that, indeed, Henry Ironheart’s
monthly bill was always promptly paid by James Ironheart, of Laguna
Niguel, by check.
“I’m glad you’ve come to visit at last, and I hope you’ll have a
pleasant time,” Mrs. Danforth said, with genteel reproach meant to make
him feel guilty for not visiting his grandfather more often while at the
same time not directly offending him.
After they left Mrs. Danforth, they stood in a corner of the main
hallway, out of the bustle of nurses and wheelchair-bound patients.
“I can’t just walk in on him,” Jim said adamantly. “Not after all this
time. I feel. . . my stomach’s clutched up, cramped. Holly, I’m
afraid of him.”
“Why?”
“I’m not sure.” Desperation, bordering on panic, made his eyes so
disquieting that she did not want to look into them.
“When you were little, did he ever harm you?”