“Clearly remember it?”
“Yes.”
She said, “You remember the sight of him dead in the hospital bed, all
his monitor lines flat?”
He frowned. “No.”
“Remember a doctor telling you he’d passed away?”
“No.”
“Remember making arrangements for his burial?”
“No.”
which case she wasn’t looking forward to it at all. But Mrs. Glynn did
not appear to be a spiritualist who would blithely suggest conjuring up
the dead for a little chat.
“He’s a nice man,” Eloise Glynn said. “I know he must’ve hated having
to move off the farm after his stroke, but he can be thankful it didn’t
leave him worse than he is. My mother, God rest her soul, had a stroke,
left her unable to walk, talk, blind in one eye, and so confused she
couldn’t always recognize her own children. At least poor Henry has his
wits about him, as I understand it. He can talk, and I hear he’s the
leader of the wheelchair pack over there at Fair Haven.”
“Yes,” Jim said, sounding as wooden as a talking post, “that’s what I
hear.”
“Fair Haven’s such a nice place,” Mrs. Glynn said, “it’s good of you to
keep him there, Jim. It’s not a snakepit like so many nursing homes
these days.”
The Yellow Pages at a public phone booth provided an address for Fair
Haven on the edge of Solvang. Holly drove south and west across the
valley.
“I remember he had a stroke,” Jim said. “I was in the hospital with
him, came up from Orange County, he was in the intensive-care unit. I
hadn’t. . . hadn’t seen him in thirteen years or more.”
Holly was surprised by that, and her look generated a hot wave of shame
that withered Jim. “You hadn’t seen your own grandfather in thirteen
years?”
“There was a reason. . . .”
“What?”
He stared at the road ahead for a while, then let out a guttural sound
of frustration and disgust. “I don’t know. There was a reason, but I
can’t remember it. Anyway, I came back when he had his stroke, when he
was dying in the hospital. And I remember him dead, damn it.”
“Clearly remember it?”
“Yes.”
She said, “You remember the sight of him dead in the hospital bed, all
his monitor lines flat?”
He frowned. “No.”
“Remember a doctor telling you he’d passed away?”
“No.”
“Remember making arrangements for his burial?”
“No.”
“Then what’s so clear about this memory of him being dead?”
Jim brooded about that awhile as she whipped the Ford around the curving
roads, between gentle hills on which scattered houses stood, past
white-fenced horse pastures green as pictures of Kentucky. This part of
the valley was lusher than the area around New Svenborg. But the sky
had become a more somber gray, with a hint of blue-black in the clouds
bruised.
At last he said, “It isn’t clear at all, now that I look close at it.
Just a muddy impression. . . not a real memory.”
“Are you paying to keep Henry at Fair Haven?”
“No.”
“Did you inherit his property?”
“How could I inherit if he’s alive?”
“A conservatorship then?”
He was about to deny that, as well, when he suddenly remembered a
hearing room, a judge. The testimony of a doctor. His granddad’s
counsel, appearing on the old man’s behalf to testify that Henry was of
sound mind and wanted his grandson to manage his property.
“Good heavens, yes,” Jim said, shocked that he was capable not only of
forgetting events from the distant past but from as recently as four
years ago. As Holly swung around a slow-moving farm truck and
accelerated along a straight stretch of road, Jim told her what he had
just remembered, dim as the recollection was. “How can I do this, live
this way? How can I totally rewrite my past when it suits me?”
“Self defense,” she said, as she had said before. She swung in front of
the truck. “I’d bet that you remember a tremendous amount of precise
detail about your work as a teacher, about your students over the years,
colleagues you’ve taught with-” It was true. As she spoke, he could