“What are you talking about? You loved Patty.”
“I fed Patty,” Jane answered fiercely. “I fed the goddamn girl for years. Those parents were never home, going this place and that, some party here, some evening there, leaving other people to take care of their kids.”
“Janie, calm down.”
“Please don’t tell me to calm down,” she said. “Please don’t do that, Bob.”
She heard him sigh quietly, could picture in the dark how he rolled his eyes.
They drove the rest of the way in silence, passing Christmas lights, twinkling reindeer; Jane looked out the window, her hands jammed into the pockets of her coat. It wasn’t until they were through town, out on the final long stretch of Basing Hill Road, that Jane spoke again, quietly, with genuine confusion in her voice. “Bobby, I didn’t know you’d ever run into the Lydias at the Orlando airport. I don’t think you ever told me that.”
“You probably forgot. It was a long time ago.”
Ahead of them through the trees the moon gleamed like a shiny little curved particle in the black sky of the night, and something moved in Jane’s water-filled mind. It was the way the Lydia woman had looked at her, and then looked away, right before going up the balcony stairs. Purposefully now, Jane made her voice calm, almost conversational. “Bobby,” she said, “please tell me the truth. You did see them at the Miami airport, didn’t you?”
And when he didn’t answer, she felt her bowels ache, and an age-old sliver of anguish shuddered deep within her—how tired it made her, that particular, familiar pain; a weight that seemed to her to be like a thick, tarnished silver spreading through her, and then it rolled over everything, extinguishing Christmas lights, streetlamps, fresh snow; the loveliness of all things—all gone.
“Oh, God,” she said. “I can’t believe it.” She added, “I really can’t believe it.”
Bob pulled the car into the driveway and turned off the engine. They sat. “Janie,” he said.
“Tell me.” So calm. She even sighed. “Tell me, please,” she said.
She could hear in the darkness of the car how his breathing was quicker now; and her own was, too. She wanted to say their hearts were too old for this now; you can’t keep doing this to a heart, can’t keep on expecting your heart to pull through.
In the dim light that shone from their front porch, his face looked ghastly and ghostly. He must not die right now. “Just tell me,” she said again, kindly.
“She got breast cancer, Janie. She called me at the office that spring before I retired, and I hadn’t heard from her in years. Really years, Janie.”
“Okay,” Jane said.
“She was very unhappy. I felt bad.” He still did not look at her; he stared over the steering wheel. “I felt…I don’t know. I can tell you I wish she hadn’t called.” Now he sat back, taking a deep breath. “I had to go to Orlando to close down that account, so I told her I’d come see her, and I did. I went down to Miami and I saw her, and it was awful, it was pathetic, and the next day I flew back from Miami, where I saw the Grangers.”
“You spent the night with her in Miami?” Jane was shivering now, her teeth would chatter if she let them.
Bob was slumped in his seat. He put his head back on the headrest and closed his eyes. “I wanted to drive back to Orlando that night. That’s what I’d planned. But it was too late. I didn’t feel like I could leave, and then, frankly, it was too late for me to feel I could safely drive back. It was awful, Janie. If you could know how stupid and awful and miserable it was.”
“So how much have you spoken with her since then?”
“I called her once, a few days after I got back, and that was it. I’m telling you the truth.”
“Is she dead?”
He shook his head. “I have no idea. I probably would have heard from Scott or Mary maybe, if she’d died, so I assume she hasn’t. But I have no idea.”
“Do you think about her?”
He looked at her pleadingly in the semidarkness. “Jane, I think of you. I care about you. Only you. Janie, it was four years ago. That’s a long time.”
“No, it isn’t. At our age, it’s like turning a couple of quick pages. Blip-blip.” She made a hand gesture in the dark, a quick back and forth.
He didn’t answer this but only looked at her with his head still back against the headrest, as though he had fallen out of some tree and lay now, unable to sit up, his eyes rolling sideways to look at her with exhaustion and terrible sadness. “All that matters is you, Janie. She doesn’t matter to me. Seeing her—it didn’t matter to me. I just did it because she wanted me to.”
Jane said, “But I just don’t understand. I mean, at this point in our lives, I just don’t understand. Because she wanted you to?”
“I don’t blame you, Janie. It’s ridiculous. It was so—nothing.” He put a large gloved hand over his face.
“I have to go in. I’m freezing.” She got out of the car and went up the front steps of their home as though she were stumbling, but she didn’t stumble. She waited for him to unlock the door and then moved past him into the kitchen, then through the dining room into the living room, where she sat down on the couch.
He followed her, and turned on the lamp, then sat on the coffee table, facing her. For a long time they just sat. And she felt that her heart was broken again. Only now she was old, so it was different. He slipped off his coat.
“Can I get you anything?” he asked. “You want some hot chocolate? Tea?”
She shook her head.
“Take your coat off, though, Janie.”
“No,” she said. “I’m cold.”
“Oh, please, Janie.” He went upstairs and came back down with her favorite sweater, a yellow angora cardigan.
She put the sweater on her lap.
He sat down next to her on the couch. “Oh, Janie,” he said. “I’ve made you so sad.”
She let him help her, in a moment, put the sweater on. “We’re getting old,” she said then. “One day we’re going to die.”
“Janie.”
“I’m scared of it, Bobby.”
“Come to bed now,” he said. But she shook her head. She asked, pulling back from his arm, which had gone around her, “Didn’t she ever marry?”
“Oh, no,” he said. “No, she never married. She’s mental, Janie.”
After a moment, Jane said, “I don’t want to talk about her.”
“I don’t either.”
“Never again.”
“Never again.”
She said, “It’s that we’re running out of time.”
“No, we’re not, Janie. We still have time together. We could still have twenty years together.”
When he said that, she felt a deep and sudden pity for him. “I need to sit here for just a few more minutes,” she said. “You go on up to bed.”
“I’ll stay with you.” And so they sat. The lamp from the side table threw a dim and serious light throughout the silent room.
She took a deep, quiet breath and thought how she did not envy those young girls in the ice cream shop. Behind the bored eyes of the waitresses handing out sundaes there loomed, she knew, great earnestness, great desires, and great disappointments; such confusion lay ahead for them, and (more wearisome) anger; oh, before they were through, they would blame and blame and blame, and then get tired, too.
Next to her she heard her husband’s breathing change; he had drifted into a sudden sleep, his head thrown back against the cushions of the couch. And then she saw him give a start.
“What is it?” She touched his shoulder. “Bobby, what were you just dreaming?”
“Whew,” he said, raising his head. In the dim light of the living room he looked like a half-plucked bird, his thin, dry hair sticking out in different angled patches from his head.
“The concert hall roof fell in,” he said.
She leaned toward him. “I’m right here,” she said, putting her palm to the side of his face. Because what did the
y have now, except for each other, and what could you do if it was not even quite that?
Tulips
People thought the Larkin couple would move after what happened. But they didn’t move—perhaps they had nowhere to go. Their blinds remained drawn, however, day and night. Although sometimes in the dusk of winter, Roger Larkin would be found shoveling his driveway. Or in the summer, after the grass got high and sad-looking, you might find him out mowing the lawn. In both cases he wore a hat far down over his face and never looked up when someone drove by. Louise, there was never any sight of at all. Apparently she’d been in a hospital down in Boston for a while—the daughter lived near Boston, so that would make sense—but Mary Blackwell, who was an X-ray technician in Portland, said Louise had spent time in the hospital there. What was interesting was that Mary was criticized for reporting this, even though at the time there wasn’t a soul in town who wouldn’t have chopped off a baby finger for news of any kind. But there was that small outpouring against Mary. With the HIPAA privacy laws these days, she could have lost her job, people said. Remind me never to have shock treatments in Portland, people said. And Cecil Green, who brought hot coffee and doughnuts to the reporters who hung around the house those days, took a scolding from Olive Kitteridge.
“What in hell ails you?” Olive demanded over the phone. “Feeding the vultures like that—good God.” But Cecil was known to be a little “slow,” and Henry Kitteridge asked his wife to leave the fellow alone.
How the Larkins got groceries, nobody knew. It was assumed the daughter from Boston must have some hand in getting her parents food, because once a month or so there would be a car parked in the driveway with a Massachusetts license plate, and while she was never seen in the local grocery store, perhaps she brought with her her husband, whom nobody in the town of Crosby would recognize anymore, and maybe he did some shopping in Mardenville.
Had the Larkins stopped going to visit their son? Nobody knew, and after a while people did not talk too much about it; sometimes people driving past the house—large and square, painted pale yellow—even turned their heads away, not wanting to be reminded of what could happen to a family that had seemed as pretty and fresh as blueberry pie.
It was Henry Kitteridge, responding in the middle of the night to a police call that the alarm in his pharmacy had gone off (a raccoon had made his way inside), who saw the Larkins pulling out of their driveway, Roger driving, Louise—presumably Louise, for the woman had a scarf around her head and was wearing dark glasses—sitting motionless beside him. It was two o’clock in the morning, and that’s when Henry understood that this couple came and went under cover of night; that most likely, most certainly, they would drive to Connecticut to visit the son—but they did it with a furtiveness, and he thought perhaps they would always live this way. He told Olive this, and she said “Yikes” softly.
In any event, the Larkins and their home and whatever their story was inside it eventually receded so that their house with its drawn shades took on, over time, the nature of one more hillock in the dramatic rise and fall of the coastal landscape. The natural rubber band around people’s lives that curiosity stretched for a while had long ago returned to encompass their own particularities. Two, five, then seven years passed by—and in the case of Olive Kitteridge, she found herself positively squeezed to death by an unendurable sense of loneliness.
Her son, Christopher, had married. Olive and Henry had been appalled by the bossiness of their new daughter-in-law, who had grown up in Philadelphia, and who expected things like a diamond tennis bracelet for Christmas (what was a tennis bracelet? but Christopher bought her one), and who would send back meals in a restaurant, one time demanding the chef be brought to speak to her. Olive, suffering a seemingly endless menopause, would be washed over with extraordinary waves of heat in the girl’s presence, and one time Suzanne said, “There’s a soy supplement you could take, Olive. If you don’t believe in estrogen replacement.”
Olive thought: I believe in minding my own business, that’s what I believe in. She said, “I’ve got to get the tulips in before the ground freezes.”
“Oh?” asked Suzanne, who had proven to be consistently stupid about flowers. “Do you plant those tulips every year?”
“Certainly,” said Olive.
“I’m sure my mother didn’t plant them every year. And we always had some in the back of the house.”
“I think if you ask your mother,” Olive said, “you’ll find you’re mistaken. The bloom of a tulip is already in its bulb. Right there. One shot. That’s it.”
The girl smiled in a way that made Olive want to slap her.
At home Henry said, “Don’t go telling Suzanne she’s mistaken.”
“Oh, hell,” said Olive. “I’ll tell her anything I want.” But she made some applesauce and took it over to their house.
The couple hadn’t been married four months when Christopher called from work one day. “Now, listen,” he said. “Suzanne and I are moving to California.”
For Olive, everything turned upside down. It was as though she’d been thinking, This is a tree, and here is a kitchen stove—and it wasn’t a tree at all, or a kitchen stove either. When she saw the FOR SALE sign in front of the house she and Henry had built for Christopher, it was as though splinters of wood were shoved into her heart. She wept at times with such noise the dog whimpered and trembled and pushed his cold nose into her arm. She screamed at the dog. She screamed at Henry. “I wish she’d drop dead,” Olive said. “Just drop dead today.” And Henry didn’t admonish her.
California? Why all the way across this vast country?
“I like sunshine,” Suzanne said. “New England autumns are fine for about two weeks, and then the darkness settles in, and—” She smiled, lifting a shoulder. “I just don’t like it, that’s all. You’ll come visit us soon.”
It was hard stuff to swallow. Henry, by then, had retired from the pharmacy—earlier than planned; the rent had skyrocketed, and the building was sold for a big chain drugstore to move in—and he often seemed at a loss for how to fill his days. Olive, who had retired from teaching five years earlier, kept telling him, “Get yourself a schedule, and stick to it.”
So Henry took a woodworking class at the extension school in Portland and set up a lathe in the basement, eventually producing four uneven, but quite lovely, maple salad bowls. Olive pored over catalogues and ordered one hundred tulip bulbs. They joined the American Civil War Society—Henry’s great-grandfather had been at Gettysburg, and they had the old pistol in the hutch to prove it—driving up to Belfast once a month to sit in a circle and hear lectures about battles and heroes and so forth. They found it interesting. It helped. They chatted with other Civil War people, then drove home in the dark, passing the Larkin house, where no lights were on. Olive shook her head. “I always thought Louise was a little off,” she said. Louise had been a guidance counselor at the school Olive taught in, and there was something about Louise—she would talk too much and too gaily, and wore all that makeup and put such a fuss into her clothes. “She got absolutely tipsy at the Christmas parties,” Olive said. “One year downright drunk. I found her singing ‘Onward, Christian Soldiers’ sitting on the bleachers in the gym. Honestly, it was disgusting.”
“Well,” said Henry.
“Yes,” agreed Olive. “Well, indeed.”
And so they were getting on their feet, Olive and Henry, finding their way in this retirement-land, when Christopher telephoned one night to say calmly that he was getting divorced. Henry was on the phone in the bedroom, Olive on the phone in the kitchen. “But why?” they asked in unison.
“She wants to,” Christopher said.
“But what happened, Christopher? For God’s sake, you’ve only been married a year.”
“Mom, it’s happened. That’s all.”
“Well, then come on home, son,” Henry said.
“No,” Christopher answered. “I like it out here. And the practice is going well. I have no in
tention of coming back home.”
Henry spent the evening sitting in the living room with his head in his hands.
“Come on. Snap out of it,” Olive said. “At least you’re not Roger Larkin, for God’s sake.” But her hands were trembling, and she went and took everything out of the refrigerator and cleaned the inside and the racks with a sponge that she dipped into a bowl of cool water and baking soda. Then she put everything back into the refrigerator. Henry was still sitting with his head in his hands.
More and more often, Henry sat in the living room with his head in his hands. One day he said, with sudden cheerfulness, “He’ll come back. You’ll see.”
“And what makes you so sure?”
“It’s his home, Olive. This coastline is his home.”
As though to prove the strength of this geographical pull on their only offspring, they traced their genealogy, driving to Augusta to work in the library there, going to old graveyards miles away. Henry’s ancestors went back eight generations; Olive’s went back ten. Her first ancestor had come from Scotland, was indentured for seven years of labor, and then started out on his own. The Scottish were scrappy and tough, surviving things you’d never dream of—scalpings, freezing winters with no food, barns burning from a lightning flash, children dying left and right. But they persevered, and Olive would be temporarily lightened in spirit as she read about this.
Still, Christopher remained gone. “Fine,” he would say when they called him. “Fine.”
But who was he? This stranger living in California. “No, not right now,” he said when they wanted to fly out to visit. “Now isn’t a good time.”
Olive had trouble sitting still. Instead of a lump in her throat, she felt a lump in her whole body, a persistent ache that seemed to be holding back enough tears to fill the bay seen through the front window. She was flooded with images of Christopher: As a toddler, he had reached to touch a geranium on the windowsill, and she had slapped his hand. But she had loved him! By God, she had loved him. In second grade, he had almost set himself on fire, trying to burn his spelling test out back in the woods. But he knew she loved him. People know exactly who loves them, and how much—Olive believed this. Why would he not allow his parents to even visit him? What had they done?
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