5
After her breakdown, after the so-called “treatment center,” Holly answered an ad from a small publisher who wanted to hire an indexer for a series of three doorstop-sized books about local history written by a Xavier University prof. She was nervous when the interview began—scared stiff, more like it—but the editor, Jim Haggerty, was so obviously at sea when it came to indexing that Holly was able to tell him how she’d proceed without stuttering and getting all tangled up in her own words, as she had so often in her high school classes. She said she would first create a concordance, then make a computer file, then categorize and alphabetize. After that the work would go back to the author, who would vet, edit, and return it to her for any final changes.
“I’m afraid we don’t have a computer just yet,” Haggerty said, “only a few IBM Selectrics. Although I suppose we’ll have to get one—wave of the future, and all that.”
“I have one,” Holly said. She sat forward, so excited by the possibilities that she forgot this was a job interview, forgot Frank Jr., forgot about going through four years of high school known as Jibba-Jibba.
“And you’d use it for indexing?” Haggerty looked bemused.
“Yes. Take the word Erie, for instance. That’s a category, but it can refer to the lake, the county, or to the Erie Native American tribe. Which would have to be cross-referenced with Cat Nation, of course, and Iroquois. Even more! I’d have to go over the material again to get a handle on that, but you see the way it works, right? Or wait, take Plymouth, that’s a really interesting one—”
Haggerty stopped her there and told her she could have the job on spec. He knew an index-nerd when he saw one, Holly thinks as she sits on the bed.
That first job, an earn-while-you-learn situation if ever there was one, led to more indexing jobs. She moved out of the house on Bond Street. She bought her first car. She upgraded her computer and took more classes. She also took her pills. When she was working, she felt bright and aware. When she wasn’t, that sense of living in a cellophane bag returned. She went on a few dates, but they were clumsy, awkward affairs. The obligatory kiss goodnight too often made her think of Frank Jr.
When the indexing work ran thin (the publisher of the doorstop history books went broke), Holly worked for the local hospitals, which were loosely affiliated, as a medical transcriptionist. To this she added claims filing for Cincinnati District Court. There were the obligatory visits home, more of them after the death of her father. She listened to her mother complain about everything from her finances to the neighbors to the Democrats who were ruining everything. Sometimes on these visits Holly thought of a line from one of the Godfather movies: Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in. At Christmas, she and her mother and Uncle Henry sat on the couch and watched It’s a Wonderful Life. Holly wore her Santa hat.
6
Time to go.
Holly gets up, starts to leave the room, hears her mother’s imperative voice (Leave it like you found it—how many times have I told you?), and goes back to smooth out the tartan coverlet. For who? A woman who is dead? It’s one of those laugh-or-cry situations, so Holly laughs.
I’m still hearing her. Will I be hearing her forever?
The answer is yes. To this day she won’t lick frosting from the beaters (you can get lockjaw that way), she’ll wash her hands after handling paper money (nothing so germy as a dollar bill), she won’t eat an orange at night, and she’ll never sit on a public toilet seat unless absolutely necessary, and then always with a frisson of horror.
Never talk to strange men, that was another one. Advice Holly followed until meeting Bill Hodges and Jerome Robinson, when everything changed.
She starts for the stairs, then thinks of the advice she gave Jerome about Vera Steinman, and goes down the hall to her mother’s room. There’s nothing she wants here—not the framed pictures on the wall, not the clutter of perfumes on the dresser, not any of the clothes or shoes in the closet—but there are things she should get rid of. They’ll be in the top drawer of the night table next to Charlotte’s bed.
On the way, she diverts to the wall where the framed pictures form a kind of gallery. There are none of Charlotte’s late (and not much lamented) husband, and only one of Uncle Henry. The rest are mother-and-daughter photos. Two in particular have caught Holly’s eye. In one she’s about four, wearing a jumper. In the other she’s nine or ten, wearing the kind of skirt that was all the rage back then: a wraparound with a showy gold safety pin to hold it closed. In her bedroom she hadn’t been able to remember why she hated the coverlet, but now, looking at these pictures, she understands. Both the jumper and the skirt are tartans, she had blouses that were tartan, and (maybe) a sweater. Charlotte just loved tartans, would dress Holly and exclaim, “My Scottish lassie!”
In both pictures—in almost all of them—Charlotte has an arm slung around Holly’s shoulders. Such a gesture, a kind of sideways hug, can be seen as protective or loving, but looking at it repeated over and over in photographs where Charlotte’s daughter progresses from two to sixteen, Holly thinks it can convey something else as well: ownership.
She goes to the night table and opens the top drawer. Mostly it’s the tranquilizers she wants to get rid of, and any prescription pain meds, but she’ll take everything else as well, even the Every Woman’s multi-vites. Flushing them down the commode is a no-no, but there’s a Walgreens on the way back to the Interstate, and she’s sure they’ll be happy to dispose of them for her.
She’s wearing cargo pants with voluminous pockets, which is fortunate; she won’t have to go back downstairs to get a gallon-sized Baggie from the rickrack drawer. She begins stuffing the bottles into her pockets without looking at the labels, then freezes. Beneath her mother’s pharmacy is a stack of notebooks she remembers well. The top notebook has a unicorn on the cover. Holly takes them out and thumbs through one at random. They are her poems. Terrible limping things, but each one from the heart.
I lie in my leafy bower to watch the clouds go by,
I think of my love so far away, I won’t see him for many a day,
I close my eyes and sigh.
Even though she’s by herself, Holly can feel her cheeks heating up. This stuff was written years ago, it’s the juvenilia of an untalented juvenile, but her mother not only kept it, but kept it close by, possibly reading her daughter’s bad poetry before turning out the light. And why would she do that?
“Because she loved me,” Holly says, and the tears start, right on cue. “Because she missed me.”
If only that were all. If not for the crying and wailing about the dastardly Daniel Hailey. She had sat at the kitchen table of this house on Lily Court while Charlotte and Henry explained how they had been gulled. There had been much breast-beating. There had been stationery and spreadsheets. Charlotte must have told Henry what they would need to convince Holly of their lie and Henry had supplied it. He had gone along, as he always did with Charlotte.
Holly thinks that if Bill had been at that family meeting, he would have seen through the deception almost at once. (Not a deception, a con, she thinks. Call it what it was.) But Bill hadn’t been there. Holly should have seen through it herself, but she was new at the game then, and in spite of the dizzying amount they were talking about—a seven-figure amount—she hadn’t really cared. She had been absorbed in her new love of investigation. Besotted, in fact. Not to mention blinded by grief.