Olive Kitteridge (12 page)

“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
sound 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 bunioned toes 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.