Cold Fire

He looked away from the tombstone, at Holly. He tensed with alarm, although he did not know why. "In the windmill? How? What happened? How can you know?" "The dream I told you about. Climbing the mill stairs, looking through the window at the pond below, and seeing another woman's face reflected in the glass, your grandmother's face.”

"It was only a dream.”

Holly shook her head. "No, I think it was a memory, your memory, which you projected from your sleep into mine.”

His heart fluttered with panic for reasons he could not quite discern.

"How can it have been my memory if I don't have it now?" "You have it.”

He frowned. "No. Nothing like that.”

"It's locked down in your subconscious, where you can access it only when you're dreaming, but it's there, all right.”

If she had told him that the entire cemetery was mounted on a carousel, and that they were slowly spinning around under the bleak gun-metal sky, he would have accepted what she said more easily than he could accept the memory toward which she was leading him. He felt as if he were spinning through light and darkness, light and darkness, fear and rage.

.

With great effort, he said, "But in your dream. I was in the high room when grandma got there.”

"Yes.”

"And if she died there. ”

"You witnessed her death.”

He shook his head adamantly. "No. My God, I'd remember that don't you think?" "No. I think that's why you needed nineteen years even to admit to yourself that she died. I think you saw her die, and it was such a shock that it threw you into long-term amnesia, which you overlaid with fantasies, always more fantasies.”

A breeze stirred, and something crackled around his feet. He was sure it was the bony hands of his grandmother clawing out of the earth to seize him, but when he looked down he saw only withered leaves rattling against one another as they blew across the grass.

With each heartbeat now like a fist slamming into a punching bag, Jim turned away from the grave, eager to get back to the car.

Holly put a hand on his arm. "Wait.”

He tore loose of her, almost shoved her away. He glared at her and said, "I want to get out of here.”

Undeterred, she grabbed and halted him again. "Jim, where is your grandfather? Where is he buried?" Jim pointed to the plot beside his grandmother's. "He's there, of course, with her.”

Then he saw the left half of the granite monument. He had been so intently focused on the right half, on the impossible date of his grandmother's death, that he had not noticed what was missing from the left side. His grandfather's name was there, as it should be, engraved at the same time that Lena's had been: HENRY JAMES IRONHEART. And the date Of his birth. But that was all. The date of his death had never been chiseled into the stone.

The iron sky was pressing lower.

The trees seemed to be leaning closer, arching over him.

Holly said, "Didn't you say he died eight months after Lena?" His mouth was dry. He could hardly work up enough spit to speak, and the words came out in dry whispers like susurrant bursts of sand blown against desert stone. "What the hell do you want from me? I told you.

.

eight months. May twenty-fourth of the next year. ”

"How did he die?" "I. I don't. I don't remember.”

"Illness?" Shut up, shut up! "I don't know.”

"An accident?" "I. just. I think. I think it was a stroke.”

Large parts of the past were mists within a mist. He realized now that he rarely thought about the past. He lived totally in the present.

He had never realized there were huge holes in his memories simply because there were so many things he had never before tried to remember.

"Weren't you your grandfather's nearest relative?" Holly asked.

"Yes.”

"Didn't you attend to the details of his funeral?" He hesitated, frowning. "I think. yes. ”

"Then did you just forget to have the date of his death added to the headstone?" He stared at the blank spot in the granite, frantically searching an equally blank spot in his memory, unable to answer her. He felt sick.

He wanted to curl up and close his eyes and sleep and never wake up, let something else wake up in his place.

She said, "Or did you bury him somewhere else?" Across the ashes of the burnt-out sky, the shrieking blackbirds swooped again, slashing calligraphic messages with their wings, their meaning no more decipherable than the elusive memories darting through the deeper grayness of Jim's mind.

Holly drove them around the corner to Tivoli Gardens.

When they had left the pharmacy, Jim had wanted to drive to the cemetery, worried about what he would find there but at the same time eager to confront his misremembered past and wrench his recollections into line with the truth. The experience at the grave site had shaken him, however, and now he was no longer in a rush to find out what additional surprise awaited him. He was content to let Holly drive, and she suspected that he would be happier if she just drove out of town, turned south, and never spoke to him of New Svenborg again.