Hollis Grant didn't come in on Monday.
I noticed at seven-oh-five. I'd already poured his coffee, black, and set it at the last stool with the paper folded beside it, the way I did every morning. By seven-fifteen the coffee had stopped steaming. By seven-thirty, Clay had noticed too, and was standing at the window with his arms crossed, looking up and down Main Street.
"Fifteen years," he said quietly. "Fifteen years, he's never missed. Not once. Not the morning after his wife's funeral, not the winter it hit thirty below."
"Does he have family?" I asked.
"A nephew in Seattle, I think. Never visits." Clay untied his apron. "Manny, you got the counter. Eva, get your jacket."
* * *
Hollis lived six blocks away in a small white house with green shutters and a porch that sagged a little in the middle. There were window boxes under the front windows, empty now, and a birdfeeder hanging from the porch eave, full. The door was unlocked. Clay knocked anyway, and called his name, and when there was no answer, he pushed it open.
The house was neat and small and smelled like old books and coffee. There were photographs everywhere: on the walls, on the bookshelves, on the piano nobody had played in years. A woman with dark curls and a wide laugh, at every age. On a beach. On a horse. Holding a baby that wasn't theirs. Old, in a garden, in a straw hat, laughing at whoever held the camera.
"June," Clay said softly, following my gaze. "His wife. Died eight years ago."
We found him in the bedroom.
He was lying in bed under a faded patchwork quilt, his head on two pillows, his reading glasses folded on the nightstand beside a pencil and a half-finished crossword. The curtains were open. Morning light came in across the bed, soft and gold. He was awake. He turned his head when we came in, and his pale blue eyes found us, and he smiled.
"Well," he said. His voice was thin as paper. "I'm sorry. I seem to be running late."
Clay was across the room in two steps, kneeling by the bed. "Hollis. Jesus. How long you been like this? I'm calling an ambulance—"
"No," Hollis said. "No, Clay. I don't think so."
"Hollis—"
"I'm ninety-one years old," Hollis said gently. "And I'm tired. And I'm not in any pain. I woke up this morning and I knew. You know how you know when it's going to snow? Like that." He reached out with a trembling hand and patted Clay's arm. "I'd like to stay here. In my own bed. With the window open. If it's all the same to you."
Clay's face crumpled. He turned away, his big shoulders shaking, and pressed his fist against his mouth.
I stood in the doorway, and I couldn't move.
Because I could feel it.
I'd felt his heart the first day I met him, that slow, tired engine that had been running so long. Now it was winding down. Not breaking. Not failing. Just slowing, the way a clock slows when no one winds it, each beat a little further from the last. His lungs were tired. His kidneys were tired. Every part of him was tired in the way that the oldest trees are tired, in the way of something that has stood a long, long time and is ready to lie down.
And I could fix it.
I knew exactly how. I could feel every thread of it. A touch, a little warmth, and his heart would steady, and the color would come back to his face, and tomorrow at seven o'clock he would be sitting at the end of my counter with his coffee and his crossword, asking me for an eight-letter word.
My hands were already lifting.
"Eva," Hollis said.
I froze.
He was looking at me. Past Clay, over the quilt, with those sharp pale eyes that had always seen more than the rest of him let on.
"Come here, dear," he said. "Sit with me a minute."
* * *
I sat on the edge of the bed. Clay had gone to the kitchen to make coffee, because he couldn't stand still and he couldn't stand to leave. I could hear him banging cabinets and swearing under his breath. Crying, I think, too. Follow the newest chapters on g.com.
Hollis took my hand. His was cool and dry and light as a leaf.
This text was taken from NovelPhoenix.com without the author's consent; their chapter there supports the work they create.
"You've got good hands," he said. "I've watched you. Every morning. You've got hands like a nurse." He paused. His eyes searched my face. "Or something else."
My throat closed up.
"I saw Manny's hand," he said. "And Gary's color, the day he came in all gray and left all pink. And Edna Kowalski walking out without her cane. I'm old, Eva. I'm not blind." The corner of his mouth lifted. "I used to teach high school chemistry for forty years. You learn to notice when something doesn't add up."
"Hollis—"
"I'm not asking. I don't need to know." He squeezed my hand, weakly. "I'm only telling you. Because I know what you're thinking right now. I can see it on your face. You're sitting there thinking you could keep me here."
I couldn't answer. My eyes were filling up.
"Don't," Hollis said softly. "Please. Don't you dare."
"Why?" It came out of me like a sob. "Why not? You're not hurting. You could have more time. You could have years—"
"I've had years. I've had ninety-one of them." He turned his head on the pillow, toward the window, toward the light. "I had forty-nine with June. Forty-nine years, and I'd have taken forty-nine more, and I'd have taken them sick or poor or anything else, just to sit across the breakfast table from her one more morning. And then she went, and I've been doing the crossword by myself for eight years. Waiting."
He turned back to me.
"I'm not sad, Eva. I want you to understand that. I'm not afraid. I'm just done. It's my time. And I've been looking forward to it for a while now, if I'm honest." His eyes crinkled. "She always finished the crossword before me. She's going to be insufferable."
I laughed. It came out broken and wet, but it was a laugh.
"Not everything that hurts needs fixing," Hollis said. "Some things are just endings. And endings are part of the story too. Maybe the most important part." He patted my hand. "You can't save everybody, dear. Nobody can. The trick is learning which ones aren't yours to save."
I looked down at our hands. At his thin, spotted fingers wrapped around mine. At my palms, which were already warm, already tingling, already reaching for the thread.
Some people's fate is not to be saved, Ithra had said, in the Garden of Stillness, a lifetime ago.
I'd thought she meant it as a rule. A wall. A cruelty.
I hadn't understood that sometimes it was a gift.
I let the warmth in my hands go cold.
I didn't heal him. I just held on.
* * *
Clay came back with three cups of coffee. He sat on the other side of the bed, and Hollis made him put the crossword in his lap and read him the clues, and we worked it together, the three of us, in the gold morning light. Clay was terrible at it. Hollis corrected him with great relish.
"Seven letters," Clay read. "'Final passage.'"
Hollis smiled. His eyes were closing.
"Journey," he said softly.
It came a little before noon.
His breathing slowed. The spaces between breaths grew longer. Clay held one of his hands and I held the other, and the sun moved across the quilt, and a chickadee landed on the birdfeeder outside the open window and sang.
It was the Reaper. The same one. The one who'd walked into a beige hospital room on the other side of the world, and glanced up at the Veil, and looked at me with that tired, not-unkind face.
Clay couldn't see it. His head was bowed over Hollis's hand.
But I could. And it could see me.
It looked at me for a long moment. At my hand in Hollis's. At my palms, which were cool and dark and still. It looked at the open window, and the chickadee, and the old man smiling in his sleep.
And then the Reaper did something I had never once seen a Reaper do, in six hundred years.
It nodded to me. Slowly. Respectfully. The way one worker nods to another at the end of a long shift.
Then it went to the bed, and held out its hand, and something that was Hollis Grant, something bright and young and laughing, rose up and took it. For just a second, I saw him clearly. Not ninety-one. Twenty-five, maybe, with a shock of dark hair and a grin that took up his whole face. He looked around the room. He looked at Clay, and his face went soft. He looked at me, and winked.
Then he turned toward the light by the window, toward someone I couldn't see, and his whole face lit up like sunrise, and he said something I couldn't hear.
I'd bet everything I have that it was June.
And then they were gone, and there was only the quilt, and the crossword, and the chickadee singing outside, and Clay, who looked up and saw my face and knew.
* * *
Kade found me that night on the bench at Lone Pine, the overlook above the valley. I don't know how he knew I'd be there. I hadn't told anyone. I'd just walked, after Clay went home, and kept walking until I ran out of town and started climbing.
He didn't say anything. He just sat down next to me on the bench and put his jacket around my shoulders, and we looked out at the lights of Kalispell spread out below us in the dark.
"I could have saved him," I said finally. "Hollis. I could have. Easily. I could feel exactly how."
"But you didn't," Kade said.
"He asked me not to."
Kade was quiet for a while.
"When my dad died," he said, "I was the one who found him. On the garage floor. He'd been gone maybe ten minutes. Maybe less. I did CPR until the ambulance came. I did it wrong, probably. I broke two of his ribs. I didn't stop until they pulled me off him." He looked down at his hands. "For a long time, I thought if I'd come downstairs ten minutes earlier. If I'd known CPR better. If I'd made him go to the doctor when his arm started hurting the week before. If, if, if."
"Kade," I said.
"It took me a year to figure out the thing he'd been trying to teach me my whole life." He turned to look at me. "You fix what you can. And you let go of what you can't. And the hard part isn't the fixing. Anybody can learn to fix. The hard part is knowing the difference."
I leaned my head against his shoulder.
"Hollis said something like that," I whispered. "He said the trick is learning which ones aren't yours to save."
"Smart guy," Kade said.
"He was a chemistry teacher," I said.
Kade laughed softly. "Course he was."
We sat there a long time. The stars came out over the mountains. Somewhere far off, a train whistled.
"I think I finally understand," I said. "Why the Writ exists. Not all of it. I still think it's wrong sometimes. I still think there are people who should be saved who aren't. But I understand now that it isn't cruelty. Not always. Sometimes it's mercy. Sometimes letting go is the kindest thing."
"Does that mean you're going back?" Kade asked.
I didn't answer.
He didn't push. He never pushed. He just put his arm around me, and held on, while the lights of the valley glittered below us like a field of fallen stars.