As she turned to leave, Kit’s inclination was to let her go, take her advice, and start over fresh when he saw his sober and predictable father back at the house. But there was much here that he didn’t understand. And it bothered him to think that Holly might know something too important to be left in her hands.
“I don’t want to put it out of my mind,” he said, although he did. “I want to know what’s going on in my own house.”
She turned back and stood thoughtfully, considered what he was asking of her, weighed his words carefully. She said, “Be careful, Kit.”
But he didn’t know what he had to be careful about. “For God’s sake, Holly, if there’s something going on, I want to know what it is. I’m sorry, too, if I walked in on a problem between you and Dad, but I did. And I’d like to know what it is. I might be able to help.”
For the first time Holly became upset. Her chin trembled as she looked at him. She bent a little at the waist as if standing up straight were too difficult. “I don’t think you can,” she said after a moment. “And I’m certain that you’re going to wish you’d left well enough alone.” But she didn’t leave. Instead, she returned to the bench and sat down again, waited quietly, gave him one last chance to go his own way, much as he had done for more than a decade now.
“Tell me,” he said, more gently than anything he’d said to her in a long time. “Tell me what’s wrong.” He sat patiently next to her and gave her some time. And the minutes that she took to collect herself and to consider her words were the last moments of the life he’d always led and had thought he always would.
“I guess it’s wrong to think you could leave well enough alone,” she murmured, more to herself than to him. “Nothing about this is well enough. But I’ve been handling it, getting pretty good at it, since I was eleven years old.” She looked at him, as if she hoped that he would interrupt her, change his mind, opt to prolong the silence they’d honored between them for years. But he did nothing. Said nothing. Simply waited.
“When I was eleven years old,” she continued, looking away from Kit, “he … Dad … began to … to bother me, whenever I was home from school.” She kept her face turned away from him, and as he listened he wondered if he were hearing her correctly. “At first it was little things,” she said, the words coming faster now. “Some of them he’d been doing for years, but I never really thought about them. Like coming up behind me when I was at the piano, standing very close to me so he was pressed up against my back. He never hugged me when I was little, or kissed me, and I used to love it when he’d stand like that behind me. I thought it was something any father would do. I’m sure it is what most fathers do, in a very different way. For very different reasons.”
And all at once Kit did not want to hear another word. He was terribly afraid of the things Holly was saying. She was slowly turning the knob of a door he’d never expected to find in the house at his back, and if such a door existed, if she pulled it open all the way, he knew that he would not want to look through it, to see what waited on the other side. He stood up and began to walk away from her, down the steps of the gazebo, shaking his head. “No, no, no, no,” he said. “You’re not going to do this to me.”
But she had given him his chance, and he had lost it. “Do this to you!” she called after him, scrambling to her feet. “To you. No one has ever done anything to you in your whole goddamned life. You come back here and sit down and listen to me until I decide to stop. I did not start this. I did not call you out here. I did not badger you into talking about the wreck he’s made of my life. All I’ve ever asked of you is a little privacy, which you’ve insisted on denying me. But if you think you have the right to summon me out here, interrogate me like this, then I certainly have the right to answer you the way I choose to answer you.”
She was shouting, her neck webbed with tendons, her arms so stiff at her sides, her hands clenched so tightly they looked like clubs. “All right,” he hissed, holding his palms out toward her, both afraid and half hoping that his father would hear Holly and come striding out to silence her. Kit climbed the steps of the gazebo as if he never expected to leave it again and stood as far from her as he could, his back against a pillar. “All right. Get it over with. Tell me how he’s wrecked your life.” But he was afraid to his bones that he already knew.
“You won’t believe me,” Holly said. All the anger had gone out of her. She seemed tired and almost as if she, too, wanted nothing less than to talk about her life. “But I meant what I said before. Now that I’ve started I’m going to tell you everything I’ve got to tell. And then I want you to leave me alone. I don’t ever want you to bring it up again.”
Kit felt as if he ought to be the one saying these things, for it was precisely how he felt. He wanted her to get it all over with and then put it to rest. If it was something she had lived with, then it was certainly
