Pete sighs. “Fourteen over the last five days. Nine of them had Zappits, which are now as dead as their owners. The oldest was twenty-four, the youngest thirteen. One was a boy from a family that was, according to the neighbors, fairly weird about religion—the kind that makes fundamentalist Christians look liberal. He took his parents and kid brother with him. Shotgun.”
The five of them fall silent for a moment. At the table on the left, the card players burst into howls of laughter over something.
Pete breaks the silence. “And there have been over forty attempts.”
Jerome whistles.
“Yeah, I know. It’s not in the papers, and the TV stations are sitting on it, even Murder and Mayhem.” This is a police nickname for WKMM, an indie station that has taken If it bleeds, it leads as an article of faith. “But of course a lot of those attempts—maybe even most of them—end up getting blabbed about on the social media sites, and that breeds still more. I hate those sites. But this will settle. Suicide clusters always do.”
“Eventually,” Hodges says. “But with social media or without it, with Brady or without him, suicide is a fact of life.”
He looks over at the card players as he says this, especially the two baldies. One looks good (as Hodges himself looks good), but the other is cadaverous and hollow-eyed. One foot in the grave and the other on a banana peel, Hodges’s father would have said. And the thought that comes to him is too complicated—too fraught with a terrible mixture of anger and sorrow—to be articulated. It’s about how some people carelessly squander what others would sell their souls to have: a healthy, pain-free body. And why? Because they’re too blind, too emotionally scarred, or too self-involved to see past the earth’s dark curve to the next sunrise. Which always comes, if one continues to draw breath.
“More cake?” Barbara asks.
“Nope. Gotta split. But I will sign your cast, if I may.”
“Please,” Barbara says. “And write something witty.”
“That’s far beyond Pete’s pay grade,” Hodges says.
“Watch your mouth, Kermit.” Pete drops to one knee, like a swain about to propose, and begins writing carefully on -Barbara’s cast. When he’s finished, he stands up and looks at Hodges. “Now tell me the truth about how you’re feeling.”
“Damn good. I’ve got a patch that controls the pain a lot better than the pills, and they’re kicking me loose tomorrow. I can’t wait to sleep in my own bed.” He pauses, then says: “I’m going to beat this thing.”
? ? ?
Pete’s waiting for the elevator when Holly catches up to him. “It meant a lot to Bill,” she says. “That you came, and that you still want him to give that toast.”
“It’s not so good, is it?” Pete says.
“No.” He reaches out to hug her, but Holly steps back. She does allow him to take her hand and give it a brief squeeze. “Not so good.”
“Crap.”
“Yes, crap. Crap is right. He doesn’t deserve this. But since he’s stuck with it, he needs his friends to stand by him. You will, won’t you?”
“Of course I will. And don’t count him out yet, Holly. Where there’s life, there’s hope. I know it’s a cliché, but . . .” He shrugs.
“I do have hope. I have Holly hope.”
You can’t say she’s as weird as ever, Pete thinks, but she’s still peculiar. He sort of likes it, actually. “Just make sure he keeps that toast relatively clean, okay?”
“I will.”
“And hey—he outlived Hartsfield. No matter what else happens, he’s got that.”
“We’ll always have Paris, kid,” Holly says in a Bogart drawl.
Yes, she’s still peculiar. One of a kind, actually.
“Listen, Gibney, you need to take care of yourself, too. No matter what happens. He’d hate it if you didn’t.”
“I know,” Holly says, and goes back to the solarium, where she and Jerome will clean up the remains of the birthday party. She tells herself that it isn’t necessarily the last one, and tries to convince herself of that. She doesn’t entirely succeed, but she continues to have Holly hope.
Eight Months Later
When Jerome shows up at Fairlawn, two days after the funeral and at ten on the dot, as promised, Holly is already there, on her knees at the head of the grave. She’s not praying; she’s planting a chrysanthemum. She doesn’t look up when his shadow falls over her. She knows who it is. This was the arrangement they made after she told him she didn’t know if she could make it all the way through the funeral. “I’ll try,” she said, “but I’m not good with those fracking things. I may have to book.”
“You plant these in the fall,” she says now. “I don’t know much about plants, so I got a how-to guide. The writing was only so-so, but the directions are easy to follow.”
“That’s good.” Jerome sits down crosslegged at the end of the plot, where the grass begins.
Holly scoops dirt carefully with her hands, still not looking at him. “I told you I might have to book. They all stared at me when I left, but I just couldn’t stay. If I had, they would have wanted me to stand up there in front of the coffin and talk about him and I couldn’t. Not in front of all those people. I bet his daughter is mad.”
“Probably not,” Jerome says.