were in the room, and she supposed their cries were echoing down the
fireplace chimney from the roof Just birds. Their chatter faded.
She turned to Henry Ironheart again. “Atlanta? No, I guess I don’t
know about that.”
“I didn’t think you did. I’d be surprised if he talked about it; even
to you, even if he loves you. He just doesn’t talk about it.”
“What happened in Atlanta?”
“It was a place called the Dixie Duck-”
“Oh, my God,” she whispered. She had been there in the dream.
“Then you do know some of it,” he said. His eyes were pools of sorrow.
She felt her face crumple in grief, not for Jim’s parents, whom she had
never known, and not even for Henry, who presumably had loved them, but
for Jim. “Oh, my God.” And then she couldn’t say any more because her
words backed up behind her own tears.
Henry reached out to her with one liver-spotted hand, and she took it,
held it, waiting until she could speak again.
At the other end of the room, bells were ringing, horns blaring, on the
TV game show.
No traffic accident had killed Jim’s parents.
That story was his way of avoiding a recounting of the terrible truth.
She had known. She had known, and refused to know.
Her latest dream had not been a warning prophecy but another memory that
Jim had projected into her mind as they had both slept. She had not
been herself in the dream. She had been Jim. Just as she had been Lena
in a dream two nights ago. If a mirror had given her a look at her
face, she would have seen Jim’s countenance instead of her own, as she
had seen Lena’s in the windmill window. The horror of the
blood-drenched restaurant returned to her now in vivid images that she
could not block from memory, and she shuddered violently.
She looked toward the window, the courtyard, frightened for him.
“They were performing for a week at a club in Atlanta,” Henry said.
“They went out for lunch to Jimmy’s favorite place, which he remembered
from the last time they’d played Atlanta.”
Voice trembling, Holly said, “Who was the gunman?”
“Just a nut. That’s what made it so hard. No meaning to it. Just a
crazy man.”
“How many people died?”
“A lot.”
“How many, Henry?”
“Twenty-four.”
She thought of young Jim Ironheart in that holocaust, scrambling for his
life through the shattered bodies of the other customers, the room
filled with cries of pain and terror, reeking with the stench of blood
and vomit, bile and urine from the slaughtered corpses. She heard the
heavy sound of the automatic weapon again,
chuda-chuda-chuda-chuda-chuda-chuda, and the please-please-please-please
of the terrified young waitress. Even as a dream, it had been almost
beyond endurance, all the random horror of existence and all the cruelty
of humankind boiled down to one devastating experience, a savage ordeal
from which full psychological recovery, even for an adult, would take a
lifetime of struggle. For a ten-year-old boy, recovery might seem
impossible, reality intolerable, denial necessary, and fantasy the only
tool with which to hold on to a shred of sanity.
“Jimmy was the only survivor,” Henry said. “If the police had gotten
there a few seconds later, Jimmy wouldn’t have made it either.
They shot the man down.” Henry’s grip tightened slightly on Holly’s
hand. “They found Jim in a corner, in Jamie’s lap, in his daddy’s lap,
his daddy’s arms, all covered with. . . with his daddy’s blood.”
Holly remembered the end of the dream -the crazyman is coming straight
at her, knocking tables and chairs aside, so she scrambles away and into
a corner, on top of a dead body, and the crazyman is coming closer,
closer, raising his gun, she can’t bear to look at him the way the
waitress looked at him and then died, so she turns her face to the
corpse -and she remembered awakening with a jolt, gagging in revulsion.
If she’d had time to look into the face of the corpse, she would have
seen Jim’s father.
The avian shriek shrilled through the recreation room again. It was