Reluctantly she sat down.
Henry said, “Jim's specialness was a family secret, like Lena's and Jamie's. We didn't want the world to know, come snooping around, call us freaks and God knows what. But Cara, she always wanted so bad to be in show business. Jamie worked down there at Warner Brothers, which was where'd he'd met her, and he wanted what Cara wanted. They decided they could form an act with Jimmy, call him the boy-wonder mentalist, but nobody would ever suspect he really had a power. They played it as a trick, lots of winking at the audience, daring them to figure out just how it was all done — when all the time it was real. They made a good living at it, too, and it was good for them as a family, kept them together every day. They'd been so close before the act, but they were closer than ever after they went on the road. No parents ever loved their child more than they loved Jim — or ever got more love given back to them. They were so close … it was impossible to think of them ever being apart.”
Blackbirds streaked across the bleak sky.
Sitting on the redwood bench, Jim stared up at them.
They almost vanished into the eastern clouds, then turned sharply and came back.
For a while they kited overhead.
Those dark, jagged forms against the sere sky composed an image that might have come from some poem by Edgar Allan Poe. As a kid he'd had a passion for Poe and had memorized all of the more macabre pieces of his poetry. Morbidity had its fascination.
The bird shrieks suddenly stopped. The resulting quiet was a blessing, but Holly was, oddly, more frightened by the cessation of the cries than she had been by the eerie sound of them.
“And the power grew,” Henry Ironheart said softly, thickly. He shifted in his wheelchair, and his right side resisted settling into a new position. For the first time he showed some frustration at the limitations of his stroke-altered body. “By the time Jim was six, you could put a penny on the table, and he could move it just by wanting it to move, slide it back and forth, make it stand on end. By the time he was eight, he could pitch it in the air, float it there. By the time he was ten, he could do the same with a quarter, a phonograph record, a cake tin. It was the most amazing thing you ever saw.”
You should see what he can do at thirty-five, Holly thought.
“They never used any of that in their act,” Henry said, “they just stuck to the mentalism, taking personal items from members of the audience, so Jim could tell them things about themselves that just, you know, astonished them. Jamie and Cara figured to include some of his levitations eventually, but they just hadn't figured out how to do it yet without giving the truth away. Then they went to the Dixie Duck down in Atlanta … and that was the end of everything.”
Not the end of everything. It was the end of one thing, the dark beginning of another.
She realized why the absence of the birds' screams was more disturbing than the sound itself. The cries had been like the hiss of a sparking fuse as it burned down toward an explosive charge. As long as she could hear the sound, the explosion was still preventable.
“And that's why I figure Jim thought he should've been able to save them,” Henry said. “Because he could do those little things with his mind, float and move things, he thought he should've been able maybe to jam the bullets in that crazy man's gun, freeze the trigger, lock the safety in place, something, something …”
“Could he have done that?”
“Yeah, maybe. But he was just a scared little boy. To do those things with pennies and records and cake tins, he had to concentrate. No time to concentrate when the bullets started flying that day.”
Holly remembered the murderous sound: chuda-chuda-chuda-chuda …
“So when we brought him back from Atlanta, he would hardly talk, just a word or two now and then. Wouldn't meet your eyes. Something died in him when Jamie and Cara died, and we could never bring it back again, no matter how much we loved him and how hard we tried. His power died, too. Or seemed to. He never did one of his tricks again, and after a lot of years it was sometimes hard to believe he'd ever done those strange things when he was little.”
In spite of his good spirits, Henry Ironheart had looked every one of his eighty years. Now he appeared to be far older, ancient.
He said, “Jimmy was so strange after Atlanta, so unreachable and full of rage … sometimes it was possible to love him and still be a little afraid of him. Later, God forgive me, I suspected him of…”
“I know,” Holly said.
His slack features tightened, and he looked sharply at her.
“Your wife,” she said. “Lena. The way she died.”
More thickly than usual, he said, “You know so much.”
“Too much,” she said. “Which is funny. Because all my life I've known too little.”
Henry looked down at his culpable hands again. “How could I believe that a boy of ten, even a disturbed boy, could've shoved her down the mill stairs when he loved her so much? Too many years later, I saw that I'd been so damned cruel to him, so unfeeling, so damned stupid. By then, he wouldn't give me the chance to apologize for what I'd done … what I'd thought. After he left for college, he never came back. Not once in more than thirteen years, until I had my stroke.”
He came back once, Holly thought, nineteen years after Lena's death, to face up to it and put flowers on her grave.
Henry said, “If there was some way I could explain to him, if he'd just give me one chance….”
“He's here now,” Holly said, getting up again.
The weight of fear that pulled on the old man's face made him appear even more gaunt than he had been. “Here?”
“He's come to give you that chance,” was all that Holly could say. “Do you want me to take you to him?”
The blackbirds were flocking. Eight of them had gathered now in the sky above, circling.
To the real birds above, Jim whispered, “ 'Quoth the Raven, Nevermore.'”
He heard a soft rhythmic creaking, as of a wheel going around and around, and footsteps. When he looked up, he saw Holly pushing his wheelchair-bound grandfather along the walkway toward the bench.
Eighteen years had passed since he had gone away to school, and he had seen Henry only once before in all this time. Initially, there had been a few telephone calls, but soon Jim stopped making those and, eventually, stopped accepting them as well. When letters came, he threw them away unopened. He remembered all of that now — and he was beginning to remember why.
He began to rise. His legs would not support him. He remained on the bench.
Holly parked the wheelchair facing Jim, then sat beside him. “How you doing?” Nodding dumbly, he glanced up at the birds circling against the ashen clouds, rather than face his grandfather.
The old man could not look at Jim, either. He studied the beds of flowers intently, as if he had been in a great rush to get outside and have a look at those blooms and nothing else.