Cold Fire

to bring them together at last.
    First, she had to burn away the tangled weeds of one last lie that Jim had told her and that, consciously if not subconsciously, he had successfully told himself. “There was no traffic accident, honey,” she said, putting a hand on his knee. “That isn't how it happened.”
    Jim lowered his eyes from the blackbirds and regarded her with nervous expectation. She could see that he longed to know the truth and dreaded hearing it.
    “It happened in a restaurant—”
    Jim slowly shook his head in denial.
    “—down in Atlanta, Georgia—”
    He was still shaking his head, but his eyes were widening.
    “—you were with them—”
    He stopped denying, and a terrible expression stained his face.
    “—it was called the Dixie Duck,” she said.
    When the memory exploded back to him with pile-driver force, he hunched forward on the bench as if he might vomit, but he did not. He curled his hands into fists on his knees, and his face tightened into a clench of pain, and he made small inarticulate sounds that were beyond grief and horror.
    She put an arm around his bent shoulders.
    Henry Ironheart looked at her and said, “Oh, my God,” as he began to realize the extremity of denial to which his grandson had been driven. “Oh, my God.” As Jim's strangled gasps of pain changed into quiet sobs, Henry Ironheart looked at the flowers again, then at his aged hands, then at his feet on the tilted braces of the wheelchair, everywhere he could think to look to avoid Jim and Holly, but at last he met Holly's eyes again. “He had therapy,” he said, trying hard to expiate his guilt. “We knew he might need therapy. We took him to a psychiatrist in Santa Barbara. Took him there several times. We did what we could. But the psychiatrist—Hemphill, his name was—he said Jim was all right, he said there was no reason to bring him any more, just after six visits, he said Jim was all right.”
    Holly said, “What do they ever know? What could Hemphill have done when he didn't really know the boy, didn't love him?”
    Henry Ironheart flinched as if she had struck him, though she had not meant her comment to be a condemnation of him.
    “No,” she said quickly, hoping he would believe her, “what I meant was, there's no mystery why I've gotten farther than Hemphill ever could. It's just because I love him. It's the only thing that ever leads to healing.” Stroking Jim's hair, she said, “You couldn't have saved them, baby. You didn't have the power then, not like you have it now. You were lucky to get out alive. Believe me, honey, listen and believe me.”
    For a moment they sat unspeaking, all of them in pain.
    Holly noticed more blackbirds had gathered in the sky. Maybe a dozen of them now. She didn't know how Jim was drawing them there—or why—but she knew that he was, and regarded them with growing dread.
    She put a hand over one of Jim's hands, encouraging him to relax it. Though he slowly stopped crying, he kept his fist as tight as a fist of sculpted stone.
    To Henry, she said, “Now. This is your chance. Explain why you turned away from him, why you did … whatever you did to him.”
    Clearing his throat, wiping nervously at his mouth with his weak right hand, Henry spoke at first without looking at either of them. “Well… you have to know … how it was. A few months after he came back from Atlanta, there was this film company in town, shooting a movie—”
    “The Black Windmill,” Holly said.
    “Yeah. He was reading all the time….” Henry stopped, closed his eyes as if to gather strength. When he opened them, he stared at Jim's bowed head and seemed prepared to meet his eyes if he looked up. “You was reading all the time, going through the library shelf by shelf, and because of the film you read the Willott book. For a while it became … hell, I don't know … I guess maybe you'd have to say it was an obsession with you, Jim. It was the only thing that brought you out of your shell, talking about that book, so we encouraged you to go watch them shoot the picture. Remember? After a while, you started telling us an alien was in our pond and windmill, just like in the book and movie. At first we thought you was just play-acting.”
    He paused.
    The silence lengthened.
    About twenty birds in the sky above.
    Circling. Silent.
    To Henry, Holly said, “Then it began to worry you.”
    Henry wiped one shaky hand down his deeply lined face, not so much as if he was trying