Jim sat unmoving.
Henry Ironheart shifted his attention to Holly. “He came back at last
when I had my stroke. He sat beside me when I was in intensive care. I
couldn’t speak right, couldn’t say what I tried to say, the wrong words
kept coming out, making no sense-”
“Aphasia,” Holly said.
“A result of the stroke.”
Henry nodded. “Once, hooked up to all those machines, I tried to tell
him what I’d known for almost thirteen years-that he wasn’t a killer and
that I’d been cruel to him.” New tears flooded his eyes.
“But when it came out, it wasn’t right at all, not what I meant, and he
misunderstood it thought I’d called him a murderer and was afraid of
him. He left, and now’s the first I’ve seen him since. More than four
years.”
Jim sat with his head bowed.
Hands fisted.
What had he remembered of that night in the mill, the part that no one
but him could know?
Holly got up from the bench, unable to endure the wait for Jim’s
reaction. She stood there, with no idea where to go. At last she sat
down again.
She put her hand over his fist, as before.
She looked up.
More birds. Maybe thirty of them now.
“I’m afraid,” Jim said, but that was all.
“After that night,” Henry said, “he never went into the mill again,
never mentioned The Friend or the Willott book. And at first I thought
it was good he turned away from that obsession. . . he seemed less
strange. But later I’ve wondered. . . maybe he lost the one comfort he
had. ”
“I’m afraid to remember,” Jim said.
She knew what he meant: only one last long-hidden memory waited to be
revealed. Whether his grandmother had died by accident. Or whether The
Enemy had killed her. Whether he, as The Enemy, had killed her.
Unable to stare at Jim’s bowed head a moment longer, unable to bear
Henry Ironheart’s wretched look of guilt and fragile hope, Holly glanced
up at the birds again-and saw them coming. More than thirty of them
now, dark knives slicing down through the somber sky, still high up but
coming straight toward the courtyard.
“Jim, no!”
Henry looked up.
Jim lifted his face, too, but not to see what was coming. He knew what
was coming. He raised his face as if to offer his eyes to their sharp
beaks and frenzied claws.
Holly leaped to her feet, making herself a more prominent target than he
was. “Jim, face it, remember it, for Christ’s sake!”
She could hear the shrieks of the swift-descending birds.
“Even if The Enemy did it,” she said, pulling Jim’s upturned face to her
breast, shielding him, “you can get past that somehow, you can go on.”
Henry Ironheart cried out in shock, and the birds burst over Holly,
flapping and squirming against her, swooping away, then more of them
fluttering and scraping, trying to get past her and at Jim’s face, at
his eyes.
after all, manifesting itself in a whole new way, and The Enemy hated
her as much as it hated Jim.
The birds swirled out of the courtyard, back into the sky, gone like so
many leaves in a violent updraft.
Henry Ironheart was frightened but unhurt. “Move away,” she told him.
“No,” he said. He reached helplessly for Jim, who would not reach for
him.
When Holly dared look up, she knew that the birds were not finished.
They had only soared to the fringe of the bearded gray clouds, where
another score of them had collected. Fifty or sixty now, churning and
dark, hungry and quick.
She was aware of people at the windows and sliding glass doors that
opened onto the courtyard. Two nurses came through the same slider that
she had used when wheeling Henry out to meet Jim.
“Stay back!” she shouted at them, not sure how much danger they might
be in.
Jim’s rage, while directed at himself and perhaps at God for the very
fact of death’s existence, might nevertheless spill over and spend
itself on the innocent. Her shouted warning must have frightened the
nurses, for they retreated and stood in the doorway.