Cold Fire

of those waiting-to-be-reanimated people in the worlds within the books upon the shelves within these rooms. For a moment she could not respond to the woman's question.
    Jim looked too stunned to pick up the ball this time. His grandfather was alive somewhere. But where?
    “No,” Holly said, “nothing's wrong. I just realized how late it's getting—”
    A shatter of static, a vision: her severed head screaming, her severed hands crawling like spiders across a floor, her decapitated body writhing and twisting in agony; she was dismembered but not dead, impossibly alive, in a thrall of horror beyond endurance—
    Holly cleared her throat, blinked at Mrs. Glynn, who was staring at her curiously. “Uh, yeah, quite late. And we're supposed to go see Henry before lunch. It's already ten. I've never met him.” She was babbling now, couldn't stop. “I'm really looking forward to it.”
    Unless he really did die over four years ago, like Jim had told her, in which case she wasn't looking forward to it at all. But Mrs. Glynn did not appear to be a spiritualist who would blithely suggest conjuring up the dead for a little chat.
    “He's a nice man,” Eloise Glynn said. “I know he must've hated having to move off the farm after his stroke, but he can be thankful it didn't leave him worse than he is. My mother, God rest her soul, had a stroke, left her unable to walk, talk, blind in one eye, and so confused she couldn't always recognize her own children. At least poor Henry has his wits about him, as I understand it. He can talk, and I hear he's the leader of the wheelchair pack over there at Fair Haven.”
    “Yes,” Jim said, sounding as wooden as a talking post, “that's what I hear.”
    “Fair Haven's such a nice place,” Mrs. Glynn said, “it's good of you to keep him there, Jim. It's not a snakepit like so many nursing homes these days.”
     

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    The Yellow Pages at a public phone booth provided an address for Fair Haven on the edge of Solvang. Holly drove south and west across the valley.
    “I remember he had a stroke,” Jim said. “I was in the hospital with him, came up from Orange County, he was in the intensive-care unit. I hadn't… hadn't seen him in thirteen years or more.”
    Holly was surprised by that, and her look generated a hot wave of shame that withered Jim. “You hadn't seen your own grandfather in thirteen years?”
    “There was a reason….”
    “What?”
    He stared at the road ahead for a while, then let out a guttural sound of frustration and disgust. “I don't know. There was a reason, but I can't remember it. Anyway, I came back when he had his stroke, when he was dying in the hospital. And I remember him dead, damn it.”
    “Clearly remember it?”
    “Yes.”
    She said, “You remember the sight of him dead in the hospital bed, all his monitor lines flat?”
    He frowned. “No.”
    “Remember a doctor telling you he'd passed away?”
    “No.”
    “Remember making arrangements for his burial?”
    “No.”
    “Then what's so clear about this memory of him being dead?”
    Jim brooded about that awhile as she whipped the Ford around the curving roads, between gentle hills on which scattered houses stood, past white-fenced horse pastures green as pictures of Kentucky. This part of the valley was lusher than the area around New Svenborg. But the sky had become a more somber gray, with a hint of blue-black in the clouds—bruised.
    At last he said, “It isn't clear at all, now that I look close at it. Just a muddy impression … not a real memory.”
    “Are you paying to keep Henry at Fair Haven?”
    “No.”
    “Did you inherit his property?”
    “How could I inherit if he's alive?”
    “A conservatorship then?”
    He was about to deny that, as well, when he suddenly remembered a hearing room, a judge. The testimony of a doctor. His granddad's counsel, appearing on the old man's behalf to testify that Henry was of sound mind and wanted his grandson to manage his property.
    “Good heavens, yes,” Jim said, shocked that he was capable not only of forgetting events from the distant past but from as recently as four years ago. As Holly swung around a slow-moving farm truck and accelerated along a straight stretch of road, Jim told her what he had just remembered, dim as the recollection was. “How can I do this, live this way? How can I totally rewrite my past when it suits me?”
    “Self-defense,” she said, as she had said before. She swung in front of the truck.