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,
“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 louder this time. A couple of the ambulatory residents went to the fireplace to see if any birds were caught behind the damper in the chimney.
“In his daddy's blood,” Henry repeated softly. It was clear that, even after all these years, the consideration of that moment was intolerably painful to him.
The boy had not only been in his dead father's arms but surely had known that his mother lay dead among the ruins, and that he was orphaned, alone.
Jim sat on a redwood bench in the Fair Haven courtyard. He was alone.
For a day late in August, when the seasonal drought should have been at its peak, the sky was unusually heavy with unshed moisture, yet it looked like an inverted bowl of ashes. Mixes of late-summer flowers, cascading from planting beds onto the wide concrete walkways, were missing half their color without the enhancement of sunshine. The trees shivered as if chilled by the mild August breeze.
Something was coming. Something bad was coming.
He clung to Holly's theory, told himself that nothing would come unless he caused it to appear. He only had to control himself, and they would all survive.
But he still felt it coming.
Something.
He heard the screaky cries of birds.
The birds had fallen silent.
After a while Holly let go of Henry Ironheart's hand, took some Kleenex from her purse, blew her nose, and blotted her eyes. When she could speak, she said, “He blames himself for what happened to his mom and dad.”
“I know. He always did. He'd never talk about it, but there were ways it showed, how he blamed himself, how he thought he should have saved them.”
“But why? He was only ten years old, a small boy. He couldn't have done anything about a grown man with a submachine gun. For God's sake, how could he feel responsible?”
For the moment, the brightness had gone out of Henry's eyes. His poor lopsided face, already pulled down to the right, was pulled down farther by an inexpressible sadness.
At last he said, “I talked to him about it lots of times, took him on my lap and held him and talked about it, like Lena did, too, but he was so much locked in himself, wouldn't open up, wouldn't say why he blamed himself — hated himself.”
Holly looked at her watch.
She had left Jim alone too long.
But she could not interrupt Henry Ironheart in the middle of the revelations that she had come to hear.
“I've thought about it all these long years,” Henry continued, “and maybe I figured it out a little. But by the time I started to understand, Jim was grown up, and we'd stopped talking about Atlanta so many years ago. To be completely honest, we'd stopped talking about everything by then.”
“So what is it you figured out?”
Henry put his weak right hand in his strong left and stared down at the gnarled lumps that his knuckles made within his time-thinned skin. From the old man's attitude, Holly sensed that he was not sure he should reveal what he needed and wanted to reveal.
“I love him, Henry.”
He looked up and met her eyes.
She said, “Earlier you said I'd come here to learn about Atlanta because Jim wouldn't talk about it, and in a way you were right. I came to find out a number of things, because he's frozen me out of some areas of his life. He really loves me, Henry, I've no doubt of that, but he's clenched up like a fist, he can't let loose of certain things. If I'm going to marry him, if it's going to come to that, then I've got to know all about him — or we'll never have a chance to be happy. You can't build a life together on mysteries.”
“Of course, you're right.”
“Tell me why Jim blames himself. It's killing him, Henry. If I have any hope of helping him, I've got to know what you know.”
He sighed and made up his mind. “What I've got to say will sound like superstitious nonsense, but it isn't. I'll make it simple and short, 'cause it sounds even screwier if I dress it up at all. My wife, Lena, had a power. Presentiment, you'd call it, I guess. Not that she could see the future, tell you who would win a horserace or where you'd be a year from now or anything like that. But sometimes … well, you might invite her to a picnic Sunday a week, and without thinking, she'd say it was going to rain like-for-Noah come Sunday a week. And by God it would. Or some neighbor would be pregnant, and Lena would start referring to the baby as either a 'he' or a 'she,' when there was no way for her to know which it would be — and she was always right.”
Holly sensed some of the last pieces of the puzzle falling into place. When Henry gave her a maybe-you-
