Olive, Again (ARC)

by Elizabeth Strout

  Bernie closed his eyes for a long moment, then he opened them and stared straight ahead through his windshield. He said, “Suzanne, I’m sorry.”

  “No, it was kind of my fault. I let him come on to me.”

  “It was not your fault, Suzanne.” He looked at her now. “It was very unprofessional, what he did. How long had you been seeing him?”

  “Two years.” Suzanne added, “Since my mother went into that home is when I started seeing him.”

  “Oy vey,” said Bernie.

  “But it was just the last few months—oh, it’s so sordid, the whole thing, and you know he’s—oh, no offense, Bernie—but he’s old. You know.”

  “Yes,” said Bernie. He added, “Of course he is.”

  “Please don’t worry. Please.”

  “He should be reported,” Bernie said, and Suzanne said, “I’m not going to report him.”

  He raised a hand then and said, “Goodbye. Good luck, Suzanne. Call if you need me.” Then he started his car, and she felt a terrible desolation return.

  She got out, and went and sat in her car while he drove out of the driveway. A few orangey leaves had fallen onto the hood from the tree above the car. She saw on her phone that her husband had texted to see if she was okay, and she texted back that she would call him soon. She looked through the car window at the charred remains of the house where she had grown up. Try, she thought to herself with a kind of fury, and what she meant was: Try and have a good memory come to you.

  She could not do it.

  She could almost find no memories at all, just tiny fleeting images of her mother veering up from the dining room table at night, a wineglass in her hand, her father, as though in a shadow, walking down the stairs. Doyle, always so skittish, so intense. She turned her head and squinted at the part of Main Street she could see from here, and she thought of this town, where she had spent her youth, but she had gone to a private school in Portland and so the town had never felt as real to her as it otherwise might have. As a young girl she had taken longs walks, alone, she had walked across the bridge and down by the coast; there was a good memory. Then she thought of Doyle sitting next to her in the car each morning, banging his knee, laughing. They’d had a real connection, because they both went to school out of town. And because she had loved him, her little brother. Most days her father drove them to school in Portland, and now Suzanne remembered him stopping at the gas station by Freeport, coming back out of the little store and tossing her a package of cellophane-wrapped doughnuts, six little ones covered in powder. “Here you go, Twinkie,” her father would say, because he would also buy Twinkies for both of them, as well, to have with their lunch.

  Back home, Bernie stepped into the kitchen and walked up behind his wife, who was washing dishes, and put his arms around her. She was a short woman; the back of her head was below his chin. “Oy, Eva,” he said, and his wife turned to him, her hands soapy. “I know,” she said. He held her to him with one arm then, and stood looking through the kitchen window at the cedar tree. “That poor girl,” his wife said, and Bernie said, “Yes.”

  He went back upstairs to his office and sat for quite a while at his desk, turning his swivel chair to look out the window at the river. Suzanne had seemed more childlike than he would have thought from his telephone call to her with the news of her father’s death; she had been calm and adult-sounding then. But he realized that faced with the image of that burned-down house, with the reality of all that had happened, she had been thrown. Still, she had surprised him with her acuity about her father; Roger Larkin had not, in fact, respected the truth that she was a lawyer, he had told Bernie a number of times that she was “really just a social worker.” Bernie sat with his hands on the armrests of the chair and pictured Roger in his younger years, a dark-haired handsome man with a pretty blond wife; she had come from Philadelphia. Roger had come from poverty, in Houlton, Maine, but he was smart and went to Wharton, and then he just made money, and more money. When Roger had first come to Bernie for legal advice, it had been about investments made in South Africa; he needed a loophole, which he had already figured out, and Bernie had advised him. Bernie had said to him that day, “But I don’t like this, Roger,” and Roger had just smiled at him and said, “You’re my legal adviser, Bernie, not my priest.” This had always stayed with Bernie, because he thought that a priest also had to hear the sorts of secrets that Bernie had to hear from his clients, but a priest was—ostensibly—pure; Bernie did not feel pure. Over the years, Roger Larkin had sat on the board of the Portland Symphony, and various other boards as well. One time, many years ago, Roger had walked into this office and said, “I really need you for this one, Bernie.” There had been an affair with a woman in his office, he had to have money arranged for her abortion in New York, and then she had sued him. Bernie had settled the suit quickly, and so it had not reached the papers. That part of her father Suzanne did not seem to know about.

  But more unsettling to Bernie—he shifted in his chair—was the fact that two years ago Louise Larkin had made a telephone call to Bernie; it was in the evening, and Bernie happened to be in his office preparing for a case the next day, and Louise had screamed into the telephone, “He’s trying to kill me! Help me, help!” And then Roger had taken the telephone away from her and spoken to Bernie in a tired voice and said that his wife had dementia and he could not take care of her anymore. Bernie had talked to Roger for quite a while, and suggested that his wife was not so demented that she didn’t know how to call him, and there might be a need to investigate if Louise was calling him for help about her physical safety. Roger had said, “Well, you do what you need to do, Mr. Lawyer Man.” Bernie had done nothing. But the next week he had called Roger and helped get Louise into the Golden Bridge Rest Home; she jumped the waiting line because of Roger’s money. Bernie did not hear from Roger again until six months ago, when Roger came to him with an updated will.

  Bernie watched the river, the clouds made the river seem gray, and then he stopped seeing the river and pictured Suzanne instead, the poor child, so pretty, like her mother had been, and so … so dazed. When she had tightened her hug with him before she left, he had felt— What had he felt? He had wanted to pick her up and stroke her hair and make everything bad in her life go away. He remembered her then as she had actually been as a small girl; she had played with a doll very quietly in the corner of this room while her father had done business with Bernie.

  Uneasiness sat with Bernie now, and he realized it was an uneasiness he had felt on and off for years. His life had been tainted, he thought, by some of his clients, but none more than Roger Larkin had caused him to feel this way.

  He went into the bathroom; he heard the telephone ring, then stop. When he came out he saw the number and recognized that it was Suzanne’s; she had left no message. He called her back, but she did not pick up. And so he just sat. A tenderness flooded through him.

  Suzanne was pulling into the parking lot of the Golden Bridge Rest Home. She had just left the Comfort Inn, where she had gone to pick up her bag, and the woman who worked there had frightened her; Suzanne had called Bernie; she was panicking. He had called her back as she was driving over the bridge and she hadn’t answered; she had been afraid to talk on the phone and drive, she felt that swimmy in her head. Now she sat in her car and glanced at her phone, but remembering how Bernie had pulled away slightly as she hugged him she dropped the phone into her bag and sat with her eyes closed, thinking oh help me help me help me, and then she got out and went inside. Even though she had been there just the day before, the place still took her by surprise. Built back from the road, pleasant-looking with its black shutters, it was a world unto itself, and the smell—of cleaning fluids and also a whiff of human waste—assaulted her the moment she stepped through the double doors.

  She moved past a man sitting in a wheelchair in the hallway and walked down to her mother’s room. When she had come in last
night, her mother had been asleep, and Suzanne had gasped at the sight of her; her mother lay with her gray hair—what was left of it—sticking out on the pillow, and she was as tiny as a person could be and still be alive. It was as though her mother had been in a science fiction movie and that her body—her essence—had been snatched. When her mother’s eyes flipped open, Suzanne had said, “It’s me, Mom, Suzanne,” and her mother had sat up and said, “Hello.” And when Suzanne repeated to her, “Mom, it’s me, your daughter,” her mother said pleasantly, “No, my daughter is dead.” Then her mother had sung a lullaby as she rocked Snuggles, and she was still doing that when Suzanne left.

  Now, as Suzanne entered the room, she had to walk by another woman seated in a wheelchair not far from her mother; the woman looked at her with filmy eyes, and when Suzanne waved her hand at the woman, there was no response.

  Her mother sat serenely in her wheelchair in the corner of her room, with Snuggles on her lap. Her hair had been combed, and she wore a sweatsuit of pale off-white, on her feet were clean white sneakers. “Hello,” she said to Suzanne. “You’re a pretty woman. Who are you?”

  “I’m your daughter, Mom. It’s me, Suzanne.”

  Her mother said politely, “I don’t have a daughter. She died. But when she was a little girl, she had this.” And her mother held up Snuggles. “His name is Snuggles,” her mother said.

  “Mom, you remember this was Snuggles?” Suzanne leaned down toward her mother.

  “I don’t know who you are,” her mother continued, “but my poor little daughter. She was always such a good girl.”

  Suzanne sat slowly down on the edge of her mother’s bed.

  “But her brother!” And her mother laughed then. “Oh, her brother was a nasty little boy. Always wanting his willie played with. Oh, he always wanted me to play with his willie, oh my, he was a bad, bad boy.” She laughed again.

  Chills ran down Suzanne’s side, she felt them going all the way down her leg. “Doyle?” she finally asked.

  Her mother’s face remained uncomprehending, until suddenly it became twisted in fury. “You get out of here right now! Get out! Get out!” Spittle flew from her mouth.

  And then the other woman seated in her wheelchair began to cry. It was a terrible sound—a keening, almost. Suzanne stood up and went out into the hallway. “Help me, please,” she said to an aide going by. “I’ve upset my mother and also some woman who was in here, I guess visiting her.”

  The aide was a small young woman, with no expression on her face, and she said to Suzanne, “I’ll be there in a minute.”

  “Please come in now,” said Suzanne, but the aide was already going into the room next door. “Oh God,” said Suzanne. She went back into her mother’s room, past the woman who was crying so hard, and her mother was half standing out of her chair. She pointed her arm at Suzanne. “You! Get out of here right now!”

  An hour later, Bernie still could not get Suzanne out of his mind. He kept having an image of putting her onto his lap, and holding her to him tightly. That’s enough, he thought, and took out a folder of a case he had to work on.

  When his telephone rang again, he saw that it was her, and he picked it up and said, “Hello, Suzanne.”

  He could hear that she was crying. “Oh, Bernie, I’m so sorry to call you, I really am, but I—”

  “It’s quite all right, Suzanne. I told you to call me anytime, and I meant it. If you call me again in ten minutes, I’ll still mean it.”

  “I’m just so scared,” she said. “I’m so scared!”

  “I understand that. You have every reason to feel scared. But you’re going to be all right.” Bernie said this gently. “I’ve known you for years, Suzanne. And you have always been focused and smart, and you’re going to be just fine. You’re in the middle of a storm at the moment.”

  “Don’t hang up,” Suzanne said.

  “I’m right here,” Bernie answered. “You take your time.”

  “Where are you?” Suzanne asked. “So I can picture you.”

  “I’m sitting right at my desk. Alone,” he added.

  “Bernie,” Suzanne said. “First— Now, please listen to me and tell me the truth. Do you know if my father ever had an affair? The woman who works at the Comfort Inn, when I went back to get my bag, she said she recognized my name from the credit card I had paid with, and she said she had always loved my father—she worked at that gas station in Freeport—and she said my mother used to come into that gas station with him at noontime, always so nice with her red hair, but my mother never had red hair.”

  There was a silence, then Bernie said, “I’m not going to answer that.”

  “Well, I guess you just did.”

  “No. I didn’t.” After a moment Bernie added, “You’re a lawyer, and you know that privilege does not end with the death of a client.”

  “Okay,” Suzanne said. “But just hold on, okay?”

  “I’m right here, Suzanne.” He added, “I’m not going anywhere.” He picked up a paperclip and touched it repeatedly to his desk. He heard her weeping, and then he heard her finally stop.

  “Oh, Bernie. I know my father probably had an affair, he probably had a dozen affairs, and I don’t want to be like my father—”

  “Suzanne.” Bernie’s voice was firm. He let the paperclip stay on his desk. “You are not like your father. Do you hear me? You have always been you. And you alone.” Then he said, “Where are you right now?”

  “At a rest stop on the turnpike. There’s a mother with a little boy and they’re laughing about something and it reminds me of how I used to be with my boys.”

  “And they’re still your boys,” Bernie said. “They always will be.”

  “But, Bernie, can I tell you one more thing?”

  “Of course you can.”

  “I stopped to see my mother before I left town, and she told me that Doyle had always been a bad boy, that he—” Suzanne was crying again. “That he—he always wanted her to play with his willie. Oh God, Bernie. Oh Jesus.”

  Bernie was silent for quite a while, and then he said quietly, “Oh, Suzanne. I don’t know what to say about that.” He leaned forward, setting a hand to his head as he held the telephone in the other.

  “But do you think—oh, Bernie, do you think she ever? Oh God, I work with kids like this! Even my creepy therapist told me that a guy, however nuts he is, doesn’t stab a woman twenty-nine times unless he has a lot of aggression toward a woman. Toward, you know, I guess his mother.”

  “I know what you’re saying,” Bernie said. And then after a moment he said, “I guess we’ll never know.”

  “No.” And then Suzanne said, “But, Bernie, it makes me so sad for that poor boy! You know, I’m going to visit him more often. I usually go once a month to see him there in Connecticut, but now that the boys are gone and I have more time, I’m going to go much more often. I just am, oh God, Bernie, that poor child!”

  “You go as often as you need to,” Bernie said.

  When Suzanne spoke next she sounded exhausted. “Bernie, my father was abusing my mother. She had bruises all over her before she went into that home.”

  Bernie sat up straight; a kind of jolt went through him. He said quietly, “I thought that might be true.”

  “You did? Why did you think it might be true?”

  Bernie closed his eyes, then opened them, and said, “It’s not altogether unusual in those circumstances.” Then he said, “We got her into that place ahead of other people.”

  “How?” Suzanne asked.

  “Your father had money. That’s how.”

  “You helped him do that?”

  “I did.” Bernie felt himself blush. He was lying to her by not telling her how her mother had called him to say she was in danger. He opened his mouth, then closed it.

  “Oh, Bernie. Well, thank you.” She adde
d, “You probably saved her life.”

  “I never saved anyone’s life,” Bernie said.

  Suzanne said, “Bernie. Bernie. Do you realize what I came from? Do you realize that? Oh my God, those people! How did I get out alive?” Then Suzanne said, “But you did too. You got out as well.” She added, “Except your parents were murdered, and mine were—well, they almost were murderers, Bernie. And my brother is a murderer. Oh my God.”

  Bernie said, “But you got out. Just as you said.”

  Suzanne asked, “How did you get out of … where were you born?”

  “Hungary.” Bernie spread his hand over his face briefly. He wanted to commend her for everything she had done with her life, to say that she had lived decently by helping those children every day through the AG’s office, and by raising her boys, and by her loyalty to Doyle. But instead he answered her question. “I got out when I was a kid, because my uncle came to America and my parents wanted me to come with him, they said they would join us soon. And then they didn’t.”

  “I didn’t know you were born in Hungary. Do you remember your parents at all?”

  Bernie glanced around his office before he answered her. It had been a long time since he had spoken of these things to anyone. “Well, I remember my father reading the Torah. I remember my mother setting the table. And I remember her reading to me when I was sick one time and in bed.”

  “Oh, Bernie.” Suzanne’s voice sounded stronger now. “Bernie, can I just ask you one last thing?”

  “Of course, Suzanne.”

  “Do you have any faith? Religious faith, I mean.”

  Bernie felt a physical response to this, as though a small wave had just rolled through his chest. He waited and then he said, “You know, I’ve lived for many years as a secular Jew, and I don’t believe I have any faith in that sense.”

  “But?” Suzanne asked. “There’s a ‘but’—I can hear it in your voice.”