Cold Fire

upsets … and maybe you pushed her.”
    As if it had become too much for him to address himself to his grandson any longer, Henry shifted his gaze to Holly. “That year after Atlanta, he'd been a strange boy … almost like a boy we didn't know. He was quiet, like I said, but there was rage in him, too, a fury like no child should ever have. It sometimes scared us. The only time he ever showed it was in his sleep … dreaming … we'd hear him screeching, and we'd go down the hall to his room … and he'd be kicking and punching at the mattress, the pillows, clawing at the sheets, furious, taking it all out on something in his dreams, and we'd have to wake him.”
    Henry paused and looked away from Holly, down at his bent right hand, which lay half useless in his lap.
    Jim's fist, under Holly's hand, remained vise-tight.
    “You never struck out at Lena or me, Jimmy, you was a good boy, never gave us that kind of trouble. But in the mill that night, I grabbed you and shook you, Jimmy, tried to make you admit how you'd pushed her down the stairs. There was no excuse for what I did, how I behaved … except I was grief-crazy over Jamie and Cara, and now over Lena, everyone dying around me, and there was only you, and you were so strange, so strange and locked up in yourself that you scared me, so I turned on you when I should have been taking you in my arms. Turned on you that night… and didn't realize what I'd done until a lot of years later … too late.”
    The birds were in a tighter circle now. Directly overhead.
    “Don't,” she said softly to Jim. “Please don't.”
    Until Jim responded, Holly could not know if these revelations were for better or worse. If he had blamed himself for his grandma's death merely because Henry had instilled the guilt in him, then he would get past this. If he blamed himself because Lena had come into the high room, had seen The Enemy materializing from the wall, and had stumbled backward down the stairs in terror, he might still overcome the past. But if The Enemy had torn itself free of the wall and pushed her …
    “I treated you like a murderer for the next six years, until you went away to school,” Henry said. “When you was gone … well, in time, I started to think about it with a clearer head, and I knew what I'd done. You'd had nowhere to turn for comfort. Your mom and dad were gone, your grandma. You went into town to get books, but you couldn't join in with other kids because that little Zacca bastard, Ned Zacca, he was twice your size and wouldn't ever let you alone. You had no peace except in books. I tried to call you, but you wouldn't take the calls. I wrote but I think you never read the letters.”
    Jim sat unmoving.
    Henry Ironheart shifted his attention to Holly. “He came back at last when I had my stroke. He sat beside me when I was in intensive care. I couldn't speak right, couldn't say what I tried to say, the wrong words kept coming out, making no sense—”
    “Aphasia,” Holly said. “A result of the stroke.”
    Henry nodded. “Once, hooked up to all those machines, I tried to tell him what I'd known for almost thirteen years—that he wasn't a killer and that I'd been cruel to him.” New tears flooded his eyes. “But when it came out, it wasn't right at all, not what I meant, and he misunderstood it, thought I'd called him a murderer and was afraid of him. He left, and now's the first I've seen him since. More than four years.”
    Jim sat with his head bowed.
    Hands fisted.
    What had he remembered of that night in the mill, the part that no one but him could know?
    Holly got up from the bench, unable to endure the wait for Jim's reaction. She stood there, with no idea where to go. At last she sat down again. She put her hand over his fist, as before.
    She looked up.
    More birds. Maybe thirty of them now.
    “I'm afraid,” Jim said, but that was all.
    “After that night,” Henry said, “he never went into the mill again, never mentioned The Friend or the Willott book. And at first I thought it was good he turned away from that obsession … he seemed less strange. But later I've wondered … maybe he lost the one comfort he had.”
    “I'm afraid to remember,” Jim said.
    She knew what he meant: only one last long-hidden memory waited to be revealed. Whether his grandmother had died by accident. Or whether The Enemy had killed her. Whether he, as The Enemy, had killed her.
    Unable to stare at Jim's bowed head a moment longer, unable to