The Best American Mystery Stories 2008

Elizabeth Strout A Different Road

From Tin House

An awful thing happened to the Kitteridges on a chilly night in June. At the time, Henry was sixty-eight, Olive sixty-nine, and while they were not an especially youthful couple, there was nothing about them that gave the appearance of being old, or ill. Still, after a year had gone by, people in this small New England coastal town of Crosby agreed: Both Kitteridges were changed by the event. Henry, if you met him at the post office now, only lifted his mail as a hello. When you looked into his eyes, it was like seeing him through a screened-in porch. Sad, because he had always been an open-faced and cheerful man, even when his only son had — out of the blue — moved to California with his new wife, something people in town understood had been a great disappointment for the Kitteridges. And while Olive Kitteridge had never in anyone’s memory felt inclined to be affable, or even polite, she seemed less so now as this particular June rolled around. Not a chilly June this year, but one that showed up with the suddenness of summer, days of dappled sunlight falling through the birch trees, making the people of Crosby uncharacteristically chatty at times.

Why else would Cynthia Bibber have approached Olive in the shopping mall out at Cook’s Corner to explain how Cynthia’s daughter, Andrea, who after years of evening classes had earned a social work degree, thought maybe Henry and Olive hadn’t been able to absorb the experience they’d had last year? Panic, when it wasn’t expressed, became internalized — and that, Cynthia Bibber was saying, in an earnest half whisper, as she stood next to a plastic ficus tree, could lead to a depressive situation.

“I see,” said Olive loudly. “Well, you tell Andrea that’s pretty impressive.” Olive, years ago, had taught math at the Crosby Junior High School, and while her emotions at times had attached themselves fiercely to particular students, Andrea Bibber had never seemed to her to be anything more than a small, dull, asseverating mouse. Like her mother, Olive thought, glancing past her at the silk daffodils that were stuck in rows of fake straw by the benches near the frozen yogurt place.

“It’s a specialty now,” Cynthia Bibber was saying.

“What is?” asked Olive, considering the possibility of some frozen chocolate yogurt if this woman would move on.

“Crisis counseling,” said Cynthia. “Even before 9/11” — she shifted a package under her arm — “but when there’s a crash, or a school shooting, or anything nowadays, they bring in psychologists right off the bat. People can’t process this stuff on their own.”

“Huh.” Olive glanced down at the woman, who was short and small-boned. Olive, big, solidly built, towered over her.

“People have noticed a change in Henry,” Cynthia said. “And you, too. And it’s just a thought that crisis counseling might have helped. Could still help. Andrea has her own practice, you know — gone in with another woman part-time.”

“I see,” said Olive again, quite loudly this time. “Aren’t they ugly words, Cynthia, that those people think up — process, internalize, depressive whatever. It’d make me depressive to go around saying those words all day.” She held up the plastic bag she carried. “D’you see the sale they’re having at So-Fro?”

In the parking lot she couldn’t find her keys and had to dump the contents of her pocketbook out onto the sun-baked hood of the car. At the stop sign she said, “Oh, hells bells to you,” into the rearview mirror when a man in a red truck honked his horn, then she pulled into traffic, and the bag from the fabric store slid onto the floor, a corner of denim material poking out onto the gravelly mat. “Andrea Bibber wants us to make an appointment for crisis counseling,” she’d have said in the old days, and it was easy to picture Henry’s big eyebrows drawing together as he stood up from weeding the peas. “Godfrey, Ollie,” he’d have answered, the bay spread out behind him and seagulls flapping their wings above a lobster boat. “Imagine.” He might even have put his head back to laugh the way he did sometimes, it would have been that funny.

Olive merged onto the highway, which was how she’d gotten home from the mall ever since Christopher had moved to California. She didn’t care to drive by the house with its lovely lines, and the big bowed window where the Boston fern had done so well. Out here by Cook’s Corner the highway went along the river, and today the water was shimmery and the leaves of poplars fluttered, showing the paler green of their undersides. Maybe, even in the old days, Henry wouldn’t have laughed about Andrea Bibber. You could be wrong thinking you knew what people would do. “Bet you anything,” Olive said out loud, as she looked over at the shining river, the sweet ribbon of it there beyond the guardrails. What she meant was: Bet you anything Andrea Bibber has a different idea of crisis than I do. “Yup, yup,” she said. Weeping willows were down there on the bank, their swooping, airy boughs a light, bright green.

She had needed to go to the bathroom. “I need to go to the bathroom,” she had said to Henry that night as they were pulling into the town of Maisy Mills. Henry had told her, pleasantly, she’d have to wait.

“Ay-yuh,” she had said, pronouncing the word with exaggeration in order to make fun of her mother-in-law, Pauline, dead for some years, who used to say that in response to anything she didn’t want to hear. “Ay-yuh,” Olive had repeated. “Tell my insides,” she added, shifting slightly in the darkened car. “Good Lord, Henry. I’m about ready to explode.”

But the truth was, they had had a pleasant evening. Earlier, farther up the river, they had met their friends Bill and Bunny Newton, and had gone to a restaurant recently opened, enjoying themselves a good deal. The mushrooms stuffed with crabmeat were marvelous, and all evening the waiters bowed politely, filling water glasses before the water had gone halfway down.

More gratifying, however, was the fact that for Olive and Henry the story of Bill and Bunny’s offspring was worse than their own. Both couples had only the one child, and Karen Newton — the Kitteridges privately agreed — had created a different level of sadness for her parents. Even if Karen did live next door to Bill and Bunny and they got to see her, and her family, all the time. Last year Karen had carried on a brief affair with a man who worked for Midcoast Power, but decided in the end to stay in her marriage. All this, of course, worried the Newtons profoundly, even though they had never cared a great deal for their son-in-law, Eddie.

And while it had been a really ghastly blow for the Kitteridges to have Christopher so suddenly uprooted by his pushy new wife, after they had planned on him living nearby and raising a family (Olive had pictured teaching his future children how to plant bulbs) — while it had certainly been a blow to have this dream disintegrate, the fact that Bill and Bunny had their grandchildren right next door and the grandchildren were spiteful was a source of unspoken comfort to the Kitteridges. In fact, the Newtons told a story that night about how their grandson had said to Bunny just last week, “You may be my grandmother, but that doesn’t mean I have to love you, you know.” It was a frightful thing — who would expect such a thing? Bunny’s eyes had glistened in the telling of this. Olive and Henry did what they could, shaking their heads, saying what a shame it was that Eddie essentially trained the children to say these things under the guise of “expressing themselves.”

“Well, Karen’s responsible, too,” Bill said gravely, and Olive and Henry murmured, Well, sure, that was true.

“Oh, boy,” said Bunny, blowing her nose. “Sometimes it seems like you can’t win.”

“You can’t win,” Henry said. “You do your best.”

How was the California contingent, Bill wanted to know.

“Grumpy,” Olive said. “Grumpy as hell when we called last week. I told Henry we’re going to stop calling. When they feel like speaking to us, we’ll speak to them.”

“You can’t win,” said Bunny. “Even when you do your best.” But they had been able to laugh, as if something about it were ruefully funny.

“Always nice to hear other people’s problems,” Olive and Bunny had agreed in the parking lot, pulling on their sweaters.

It was chilly in the car. Henry said they could turn the heat on if she wanted, but she said no. They drove along through the dark, an occasional car coming toward them with headlights shining, then the road dark again. “Awful what that boy said to Bunny,” Olive remarked, and Henry said it was awful.

After a while Henry said, “That Karen’s not much.”

“No,” Olive said, “she’s not.” But her stomach, grumbling and shifting in familiar ways, began some acceleration of its own and Olive became alert, then alarmed. “God,” she said, as they stopped for a red light by the bridge that crossed into the town of Maisy Mills. “I really am ready to explode.”

“I’m not sure what to do,” Henry said, leaning forward to peer through the windshield. “The gas stations are across town, and who knows if they’re open at this hour. Can’t you sit tight? We’ll be home in fifteen minutes.”

“No,” said Olive. “Believe me, I’m sitting as tight as I can.”

“Well—”

“Green, go. Pull into the hospital, Henry. They ought to have a bathroom.”

“The hospital? Ollie, I don’t know.”

“Turn into the hospital, for crying out loud.” She added, “I was born there. I guess they’ll let me use a bathroom.”

There was the hospital at the top of the hill, bigger now with the new wing that had been built. Henry turned the car in, and then drove right past the blue sign that spelled out EMERGENCY.

“What are you doing?” asked Olive. “For God’s sake.”

“I’m taking you around to the front door.”

“Stop the goddamn car.”

“Oh, Olive.” His voice was filled with disappointment, she supposed because of how he hated to have her swear. He backed the car up and stopped in front of the big, well-lighted blue door.

“Thank you,” said Olive. “Now, was that so hard to do?”

The nurse had looked up from her desk in a lobby cleanly bright, and empty. “I need a bathroom,” Olive said, and the nurse raised her white-sweatered arm and pointed. Olive waved her hand over her head and stepped through the door.

“Whew,” she said to herself out loud. “Whewie.” Pleasure is the absence of pain, according to Aristotle. Or Plato. One of them. Olive had graduated magna cum laude from college. And Henry’s mother had actually not liked that. Imagine. Pauline had actually said something about magna cum laude girls being plain and not having much fun.... Well, Olive was not going to spoil this moment thinking of Pauline. She finished up, washed her hands, and looked around as she stuck them under the dryer, thinking how the bathroom was huge, big enough to do surgery in. It was because of people in wheelchairs. Nowadays you got sued if you didn’t build something big enough for a wheelchair, but she’d rather somebody just shoot her if it came to that.

“You all right?” The nurse was standing in the hallway, her sweater and pants droopy. “What’d you have? Diarrhea?”

“Explosive,” said Olive. “My goodness. I’m fine now, thank you very much.”

“Vomiting?”

“Oh, no.”

“Do you have any allergies?”

“Nope.” Olive looked around. “You seem pretty short on business tonight.”

“Well. Weekends it picks up.”

Olive nodded. “People party, I suppose. Drive into a tree.”

“More often than not,” the nurse said, “it’s families. Last Friday we had a brother push his sister out the window. They were afraid she broke her neck.”

“My word,” said Olive. “All this in little Maisy Mills.”

“She was okay. I think the doctor’s ready to see you now.”

“Oh, I don’t need a doctor. I needed a bathroom. We had dinner with friends and I ate everything came my way. My husband’s waiting for me in the parking lot.”

The nurse reached for Olive’s hand and looked at it. “Let’s just be careful for a minute here. Have your palms been itching? Soles of your feet?” She peered up at Olive. “Are your ears always this red?”

Olive touched her ears. “Why?” she said. “Am I getting ready to die?”

“Lost a woman in here just last night,” the nurse said. “About your age. Like you, she’d been out to eat with her husband and came in here later with diarrhea.”

“Oh, for God’s sake,” Olive said, but her heart banged fast, and her face heated up. “What in hell ailed her?”

“She was allergic to crabmeat and went into anaphylactic shock.”

“Well, there you are. I’m not allergic to crabmeat.”

The nurse nodded calmly. “This woman’d been eating it for years with no problem. Let’s just have the doctor give you a look. You did come in here flushed, showing signs of agitation.”

Olive felt a great deal more agitated now, but she wasn’t going to let the nurse know that, nor was she going to mention to her the mushrooms stuffed with crabmeat. If the doctor was nice, she’d tell him.

Henry was parked straight in front of the emergency room with the engine still running. She gestured for him to put the window down. “They want to check me,” she said, bending her head down.

“Check you in?”

“Check me. Make sure I haven’t gone into shock. Turn that damn thing down.”

Although he had already reached over to turn off the Red Sox game.

“Ollie, good Lord. Are you all right?”

“Some woman choked on crabmeat last night and now they’re afraid they’ll be sued. They’re going to check my pulse and I’ll be right out. But you ought to move the car.”

The nurse was holding back a huge green curtain farther down the hall.

“He’s listening to the ball game,” Olive said, walking toward her. “When he thinks I’ve died, I expect he’ll come in.”

“I’ll keep an eye out for him.”

“He’s got on a red jacket.” Olive put her pocketbook on a nearby chair and then sat on the examining table while the nurse took her blood pressure.

“Better safe than sorry,” the nurse said. “But I expect you’re all right.”

“I expect I am,” said Olive.

The nurse left her with a form on a clipboard, and Olive sat on the examining table filling it out. She looked closely at her palms, and set the clipboard aside. Well, if you came stumbling into an emergency room it was their job to examine you. She’d stick her tongue out, have her temperature taken, go home.

“Mrs. Kitteridge?” The doctor was a plain-faced man who did not appear old enough to have gone through medical school. He held her large wrist gently, taking her pulse, while she told him about going to the new restaurant and that she’d only come in here to use the bathroom on the drive home, and yes, she’d had some terrific diarrhea, which had surprised her, but no itchy hands or feet.

“What did you have to eat?” the doctor asked as though he were interested.

“I started off with mushrooms stuffed with crabmeat, and I know some old lady died from that last night.”

The doctor touched Olive’s ear lobe, squinting. “I don’t see any signs of a rash,” he said. “Tell me what else you had to eat.”

She appreciated how this young man did not seem bored. So many doctors made you feel like hell, like you were just a fat lump moving down the conveyor belt.

“Steak. And a potato. Baked. Big as your hat. And creamed spinach. Let’s see.” Olive closed her eyes. “Puny little salad, but a nice dressing on it.”

“Soup? A lot of additives in soup that can cause allergic reactions.”

“No soup,” Olive said, opening her eyes. “But a lovely slab of cheesecake for dessert. With strawberries.”

The doctor said, as he wrote things down, “This is probably just a case of active gastro-reflux.”

“Oh, I see,” said Olive. She considered for a moment before adding quickly, “Statistically speaking, it doesn’t seem you’d have two women die of the same thing two nights in a row.”

“I think you’re okay,” the doctor said. “But I’d like to examine you just the same, palpate your abdomen, listen to your heart.” He handed her a blue papery-plastic square. “Put this on, open in front. Everything off, please.”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” said Olive, but he had already stepped past the curtain. “Oh, for heaven’s sake,” she said again, rolling her eyes, but she did as she was told because he had been pleasant, and because the crabmeat woman had died. Olive folded her slacks and put them on the chair, careful to tuck her underpants beneath them where they couldn’t be seen when the doctor walked back in.

Silly little plastic belt, made for a skinny pinny; it could barely tie around her. She managed, though — a tiny white bow. Waiting, she folded her hands and realized how every single time she went by this hospital, the same two thoughts occurred to her: that she’d been born here and that her father’s body had been brought here after his suicide. She’d been through some things, but never mind. She straightened her back. Other people had been through things, too.

She gave a small shake of her head as she thought of the nurse saying someone had tossed his sister out the window like that. If Christopher had had a sister, he never would have thrown her out a window. If Christopher had married his receptionist, he’d still be here in town. Although the girl had been stupid. Olive could see why he’d passed on her. His wife was not stupid. She was pushy and determined, and mean as a bat from hell.

Olive straightened her back and looked at the little glass bottles of different things lined up on the counter, and the box of latex gloves. In the drawers of that metal cabinet, she bet there were all sorts of syringes ready for all sorts of problems. She flexed her ankle one way, then the other. In a minute she was going to poke her nose out to see if Henry was all set; she knew he wouldn’t stay out there in the car, even with the ball game on. She’d call Bunny tomorrow, tell her about this little fiasco.

After that, it was like painting with a sponge, like someone had pressed a paint-wet sponge to the inside of her mind, and only what it painted, those splotches there, held what she remembered of the rest of that night. There was a quick, rushing sound — the curtain flung back with the tinny whoosh of its rings against the rod. There was a person in a blue ski mask waving an arm at Olive, shouting, “Get down!” There was the weird confusion, for a second the schoolteacher in her saying, “Hey, hey, hey,” while he said, “Get down, lady. Jesus.” “Get down where?” she might have said, because they were both confused — she was sure of that; she, clutching her papery robe, and this slender person in a blue ski mask waving his arm.

“Look,” she did say, her tongue as sticky as flypaper. “My handbag is right on that chair.”

But there was a shout from down the hall. A man shouting, coming closer, and it was the quick thrust of a booted foot kicking over the chair that swept her into the black of terror. A tall man holding a rifle, wearing a big khaki vest with pocket flaps. But it was the mask he wore, a Halloween mask of a pink-cheeked smiling pig, which seemed to pitch her forward into the depths of ice-cold water — that ghoulish plastic face of a pink smiling pig. Underwater she saw the seaweed of his camouflage pants and knew he was shouting at her but couldn’t hear his words.

They made her walk down the hall in her bare feet and papery blue robe while they walked behind her; her legs ached and felt enormous, like big sacks of water. A shove behind smacked into her, and she stumbled, clutching her papery robe as she was pushed through the door of the bathroom she had been in. On the floor with their backs against the separate walls sat the nurse and the doctor and Henry. Henry’s red jacket was unzipped and askew, one of his pant legs caught halfway up.

“Olive, have they hurt you?”

“Shut the fuck up,” said the man with the smiling pink pig face, and he kicked Henry’s foot. “Say another word and I’ll blow your motherfucking head off right now.”

A paint splotch of memory that quivered every time: the sound of the duct tape behind her that night, the quick stripping of duct tape from its roll, and the grabbing of her hands behind her back, the wrapping of the tape around them, because then she knew she was going to die — that they would, all of them, be shot execution style; they would have to kneel. She was told to sit, but it was hard to sit down when your hands were taped behind you and your head inside was tilting. She had thought: Just hurry. Her legs were shaking so hard, they actually made a little slapping sound against the floor.

“Move, you get shot in the head,” Pig-Face said. He was holding the rifle, and he kept turning quickly, while the flaps of his vest bulged, swinging when he turned. “You even look at each other, and this guy shoots you in the head.”

But when did the things get said? Different things got said.

Along the exit ramp now were lilac trees and a red berry bush. Olive pulled up at the stop sign, and then almost pulled out in front of a car passing by; even as she looked at the car, she almost pulled out in front of it. The driver shook his head at her as though she were crazy. “Hells bells to you,” she said, but she waited so she wouldn’t end up right behind someone who had just looked at her as though she were crazy. And then she decided to go in the other direction, heading the back way to Maisy Mills.

Pig-Face had left them in the bathroom. (“It just doesn’t make sense,” different people said to the Kitteridges soon after this happened, after they read about it in the paper, saw it on TV. “It doesn’t make sense, two fellows barging into a hospital hoping to get drugs.” Before people realized the Kitteridges were not going to say three words about the ordeal. What does “making sense” have to do with the price of eggs, Olive could have said.) Pig-Face had left them, and Blue-Mask reached for the doorknob, locking it with the same click it had made for Olive not so long before. He sat down on the toilet seat cover, leaning forward, his legs apart, a small, squarish gun in his hand. Made of pewter, it looked like. Olive had thought she would vomit and choke on the vomit. It seemed a certainty; being unable to move her bulky, handless self, she would aspirate the vomit that was on its way up, and she would do it sitting right next to a doctor who wouldn’t be able to help her because his hands were taped, too. Sitting next to a doctor, and across from a nurse, she would die on her vomit the way drunks did. And Henry would watch it and never be the same. People have noticed the change in Henry. She didn’t vomit. The nurse had been crying when Olive was first pushed into the bathroom, and she was still crying. A lot of things were the nurse’s fault.

At some point the doctor, whose white lab coat had been partly bunched beneath his leg that was closest to Olive, had said, “What’s your name?” using the same pleasant voice he’d used earlier with Olive.

“Listen,” said Blue-Mask. “Fuck you. Okay?”

At different times Olive thought: I remember this clearly, but then later couldn’t remember when she’d thought that. Paint streaks, though, of this: They were quiet. They were waiting. Her legs had stopped shaking. Outside the door a telephone rang. It rang and rang, then stopped. Almost immediately it rang again. Olive’s kneecaps bumped up, like big, uneven saucers beyond the edge of the papery blue robe. She didn’t think she would have picked them out as her own, if someone had passed before her a series of photographs of old ladies’ fat knees. Her ankles and bunions, seemed more familiar, stuck out in the middle of the room. The doctor’s legs were not as long as hers, and his shoes didn’t seem very big. Plain as a child’s, his shoes. Brown leather and rubber-soled.

Where Henry’s pant leg was caught up, the liver spots showed on his white hairless shin. He said, “Oh, gosh,” quietly. And then: “Do you think you could find a blanket for my wife? Her teeth are chattering.”

“You think this is a fucking hotel?” said Blue-Mask. “Just shut the fuck up.”

“But she’s—”

“Henry,” Olive said sharply. “Be quiet.”

The nurse kept crying silently.

No, Olive could not get the splotches arranged in order, but Blue-Mask was very nervous; she understood early on he was frightened to death. He kept bouncing his knees up and down. Young — she had understood that right away, too. When he pushed up the sleeves of his nylon jacket, his wrists were moist with perspiration. And then she saw how he had almost no fingernails. She had never, in all her years of school teaching, come across nails that had been bitten so extremely to the quick. He kept bringing his fingertips to his mouth, pressing them into the slots of the mask with a ferociousness; even the hand that held the gun would move to his mouth and he would chew the thumb tip quickly; a big bump of bright red.

“Get your fucking head down,” he said to Henry. “Stop fucking watching me.”

“You don’t need to speak so filthy,” Henry said, looking at the floor, his wavy hair headed in the wrong direction across his head.

“What’d you say?” The boy’s voice rose like it was going to break. “What the fuck did you say, old man?”

“Henry, please,” Olive said. “Keep quiet before you get us all killed.”

This: Blue-Mask leaning forward, interested in Henry. “Old man. What the fucking-fuck did you say to me?” Henry turning his face to the side, his big eyebrows frowning. Blue-Mask getting up and pushing the gun into Henry’s shoulder. “Answer me! What the fuck did you say to me?” (And Olive, turning down past the mill now, approaching the town, remembered the familiarity of that kind of frenzied frustration, saying to Christopher when he was a child, Answer me! Christopher always a quiet child, quiet the way her father had been.)

Henry blurted: “I said you don’t need to talk so filthy.” Blurted out further: “You should be ashamed of your mouth.” And then the guy had pushed the gun against Henry’s face, right into his cheek, his hand on the trigger.

“Please!” Olive cried out. “Please. He got that from his mother. His mother was impossible. Just ignore him.”

Her heart thumped so hard she thought it made her papery blue gown move on her chest. The boy stood there watching Henry, then finally stepped back, tripping over the nurse’s white shoes. He kept the gun pointed at Henry but turned to look at Olive. “This guy’s your husband?”

Olive nodded.

“Well, he’s a fuckin’ nut.”

“He can’t help it,” Olive said. “You’d have to know his mother. His mother was full of pious crap.”

“That’s not true,” said Henry. “My mother was a good, decent woman.”

“Shut up,” the boy said tiredly. “Everyone please just shut the fuck up.” He sat back down on the toilet seat cover, his legs spread, holding the gun over a knee. Olive’s mouth was so dry, she thought of the word tongue and pictured a slab of cow’s tongue packaged for sale.

The boy suddenly pulled off his ski mask. And how startling — it was as though she knew him then, as if seeing him made sense. Quietly, he said, “Motherfucker.” His skin had become tender beneath the heat of the ski mask; his neck had streaks, patches of red. Crowded together high on his cheeks were inflamed pimples. His head was shaved, but she saw he was a redhead; there was the orangey effervescence of his scalp; the tiny flickers of bright stubble, the almost parboiled look of his tender, pale skin. The boy wiped his face in the crook of his nylon-sleeved elbow.

“I bought my son a ski mask like that,” Olive told him. “He lives in California and skis in the Sierra Nevada Mountains.”

The boy looked at her. His eyes were pale blue, and his eyelashes were almost colorless. The whites of his eyes had spidery red veins. He kept staring at Olive without changing his hangdog expression. “Just please shut up,” he finally said.

Olive sat in her car in the far back of the hospital’s parking lot, where she could see the blue door of the emergency room, but there was no shade and the sun baked through the windshield; even with the windows open, she was too warm. The lack of shade had not been a problem all year, of course. In the winter, she would come and sit with the car running. Never did she stay long. Only enough to gaze at the door and to remember the clean, bright lobby, the huge bathroom with its shiny chrome rail that ran along part of one wall; a rail that right now, perhaps, some old doddering lady was holding on to, in order to hoist herself off the toilet — the rail Olive had stared at as they all sat, legs splayed out, hands behind their backs. In hospitals, lives were changed all the time. A newspaper said the nurse had not returned to work, but maybe by now she had. About the doctor, Olive didn’t know.

The kid kept getting up and sitting back down on the toilet seat. When he sat, he’d be hunched forward, the gun in one hand, the other hand folded in front of his mouth, him chewing the hell out of those fingertips. The sirens did not sound for very long. She had thought that, but maybe they had sounded for a long time. It was the pharmacist who’d been able to signal a janitor to call the police, a special unit brought to negotiate with Pig-Face, but none of them had known that then. A telephone kept ringing and stopping. They waited, the nurse rolling her head back, closing her eyes.

Olive’s little plastic strip of a belt had come untied. The memory of this was a splotch of thick, dense paint. The belt, somewhere along the line, had come untied, and the papery gown was open. She tried crossing one leg over the other, but that made the gown open more, and she could see her big stomach with its folds, and her thighs, white as two massive fish bellies.

“Honestly,” Henry said. “Can’t you find something to cover my wife? She’s all exposed.”

“Shut up, Henry,” Olive said. The nurse opened her eyes and gazed over at Olive, and the doctor of course turned his head to look at her. They were all looking at her now. “God, Henry.”

The boy leaned forward, and said softly to Henry, “See — you gotta be quiet, or someone’s gonna blow your head off. Your motherfucking head,” he added, and sat back. His glance, as he looked around, fell on Olive, and he said, “Oh, Jesus, lady,” a look of real discomfort passing over his face.

“Well, what am I supposed to do?” she said, furious — oh, she was furious; and if her teeth had been chattering before, she now felt sweat rolling down her face; she seemed to be one moist, furious sack of horror. She tasted salt and did not know if these were tears or rivulets of sweat.

“Okay, listen.” The kid took a deep, quick breath. He got up and came over to her, squatting down, putting the gun on the tile floor. “Any of you move, I’ll kill you.” He looked around. “Just give me a fucking second here.” And then he tugged quickly on both sides of her papery blue robe, tied the white plastic strip in a knot right there on her stomach. His shaved head with the tiny glints of orange stubble was close to her. The top of his forehead was still red from where the ski mask had excited the skin. “Okay,” he said. He took his gun and went back and sat on the toilet.

That moment, right there, when he sat back down and she wanted him to look at her — that was a vivid paint spot on her mind. How much she wanted him to look at her right then, and he didn’t.

In the car, Olive started the engine and pulled out of the parking lot. She drove past a drugstore, the doughnut shop, a dress shop that had been there forever, then she drove over the bridge. Farther ahead, if she continued that way, was the cemetery where her father was buried. Last week she had taken lilacs to put on his grave, though she wasn’t one who went in, especially, for decorating graves. Pauline was down there in Portland, and this was the first year that Olive had not accompanied Henry on Memorial Day to plant geraniums at the head of Pauline’s grave.

There had been a pounding on the bathroom door (locked from the inside by the kid, the way Olive herself had locked it) and the hurried, “Come on, come on, open up, it’s me!” And then she had seen — Henry couldn’t because of where he was sitting, but she had seen, when the kid opened the bathroom door that was being pounded upon — the horrible Pig-Face guy with the rifle hit the boy hard, crack him right across the face, shouting, “You took off your mask! You dumb-shit motherfucker!” Screaming, “You dumb shit!” There was an immediate resurgence of the thickening of her limbs, her eye muscles seemed to thicken, the air got thick; the whole thick, slow feeling of things not being real. Because now they would die. They had been thinking they wouldn’t, but they saw again that they would: This was clear in Pig-Face’s panicky voice.

The nurse started saying Hail Mary’s quickly and loudly, and as far as Olive could remember, it was after the nurse had repeated for the umpteenth time “Blessed is the fruit of thy womb” that Olive said to her, “God, will you shut up with that crap?” And Henry said, “Olive, stop.” Siding with the nurse like that.

Olive, stopping at a red light, reaching down to put the bag from the fabric store back up onto the seat next to her, still didn’t get it. She didn’t get it. No matter how many times she went over it in her mind, she didn’t understand why Henry had sided with the nurse like that. Unless it was because the nurse didn’t swear (Olive bet that nurse could swear) and Henry, trussed up like a chicken and about to be shot, had been mad at Olive for swearing. Or for putting down Pauline earlier, when Olive had been trying to save his life.

Well, she had said some things about his mother then. After Pig-Face had screamed at the kid, and then disappeared again, and they all knew he’d be back to shoot them — in that blurry, thick, awful part when Henry said, “Olive, stop,” she, Olive, said some things about his mother then.

She said: “You’re the one who can’t stand these Hail-Mary Catholics! Your mother taught you that! Pauline was the only real Christian in the world, as far as Pauline was concerned. And her good boy, Henry. You two were the only good Christians in the whole goddamn world!”

She said things like that. She said: “Do you know what your mother told people when my father died? That it was a sin! How’s that for Christian charity, I ask you?”

The doctor said, “Stop now. Let’s stop this,” but it was like an engine inside Olive had the switch flipped on, and the motor was accelerating; how did you stop such a thing?

She said the word Jew. She was crying, everything was all mixed up, and she said, “Did it ever occur to you that’s why Christopher left? Because he married a Jew and knew his father would be judgmental — did you ever think of that, Henry?”

In the sudden silence in the room, the kid sitting on the toilet seat hiding his hit face in his arm, Henry said quietly, “That’s a despicable thing to accuse me of, Olive, and you know it isn’t true. He left because from the day your father died, you took over that boy’s life. You didn’t leave him any room. He couldn’t stay married and stay in town, too.”

“Shut up!” Olive said. “Shut up, shut up.”

The boy rose, holding that gun, saying, “Jesus fucking Christ. Oh fuck, man.”

Henry said, “Oh, no,” and Olive saw that Henry had wet himself; a dark stain grew in his lap, and down his trouser leg.

The doctor said, “Let’s try and be calm. Let’s try and be quiet.”

And they could hear the crackling of walkie-talkies out in the hall, the sound of the strong, unexcited speech of people in charge, and the boy started to cry. He cried without trying to hide it, and he held the small gun, still standing up. There was a gesture with his arm, a tentative move, and Olive whispered, “Oh, don’t.” For the rest of Olive’s life she would be certain the boy had thought of turning the gun on himself, but the policemen then were everywhere, covered with dark vests and helmets. When they cut the duct tape from her wrists, her arms and shoulders ached so that she couldn’t put her arms down by her sides.

Henry was standing on the front deck, looking over the bay. She had thought he would be working in the garden, but there he was, just standing, looking out over the water.

“Henry.” Her heart was thumping ferociously.

He turned. “Hello, Olive. You’re back. You were gone longer than I thought you’d be.”

“I bumped into Cynthia Bibber and she wouldn’t shut up.”

“What’s new with Cynthia?”

“Nothing. Not one thing.”

She sat down in the canvas deck chair. “Listen,” she said. “I don’t remember. But you defended that woman, and I was just trying to help you. I didn’t think you’d want to hear that Catholic mumbo jumbo crap.”

He shook his head once, as though he had water in his ear that he was trying to shake out. After a moment he opened his mouth, then closed it. He turned back to look at the water, and for a long time neither said anything. Earlier in their marriage, they’d had fights that had made Olive feel sick the way she felt now. But after a certain point in a marriage, you stopped having a certain kind of fight, Olive thought, because when the years behind you were more than the years in front of you, things were different. She felt the sun’s warmth on her arms, although down here under the hill by the water, the air held the hint of nippiness.

The bay was sparkling brilliantly in the afternoon sun. A small outboard cut across toward Diamond Cove, its bow riding high, and farther out was a sailboat with a red sail, and a white one. There was the sound of the water touching against the rocks; it was almost high tide. A cardinal called from the Norwegian pine, and there was the fragrance of bayberry leaves from the bushes that were soaking up the sun.

Slowly, Henry turned and lowered himself onto the wooden bench there, leaning forward, resting his head in his hands. “Do you know, Ollie,” he said, looking up, his eyes tired, the skin around them red. “In all the years we’ve been married, all the years, I don’t believe you’ve ever once apologized. For anything.”

She flushed immediately and deeply. She could feel her face burn beneath the sunshine that fell upon it. “Well, sorry, sorry, sorry,” she said, taking her sunglasses from where they’d been resting on top of her head, and putting them back on. “What exactly are you saying?” she asked. “What in hell ails you? What in hell is this all about? Apologies? Well, I’m sorry then. I am sorry I’m such a hell of a rotten wife.”

He shook his head and leaned forward, placing his hand on her knee. You rode along in life a certain way, Olive thought. Just like she’d ridden home from Cook’s Corner for years, past Taylor’s field, before Christopher’s house had even been there; then his house was there, Christopher was there; and then after a while he wasn’t. Different road, and you had to get used to that. But the mind, or the heart, she didn’t know which one it was, but it was slower these days, not catching up, and she felt like a big, fat field mouse scrambling to get up on a ball that was right in front of her turning faster and faster, and she couldn’t get her scratchy frantic limbs up onto it.

“Olive, we were scared that night.” He gave her knee a faint squeeze. “We were both scared. In a situation most people in a whole lifetime are never in. We said things, and we’ll get over them in time.” But he stood up, and turned and looked out over the water, and Olive thought he had to turn away because he knew what he said wasn’t true.

They would never get over that night. And it wasn’t because they’d been held hostage in a bathroom — which Andrea Bibber would think was the crisis. No, they would never get over that night because they had said things that altered how they saw each other. And because she had, ever since then, been weeping from a private faucet inside her, unable to keep her thoughts from the red-haired boy with his blemished, frightened face, as in love with him as any schoolgirl, picturing him at his sedulous afternoon work in the prison garden; ready to make him a gardening smock as the prison liaison had told her she could do, with the fabric she bought at So-Fro today, unable to help herself, as Karen Newton must have been with her man from Midcoast Power — poor, pining Karen, who had produced a child who’d said, Just because you’re my grandmother doesn’t mean I have to love you, you know.