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Holly sits silent, looking at the needles. It occurs to her that next to Ellen Craslow, she hasn’t had it so bad. Mike Sturdevant hung Jibba-Jibba on her but he never raped her.
“She didn’t tell me that all at once. It came out in pieces. Except the last part, about the rape and the abortion. That came out all at once. She was looking down at the floor the whole time. Her voice cracked once or twice, but she never cried. We were in that laundry room by the office, all by ourselves. When she was done I put two fingers under her chin and said, ‘Look at me, girl,’ and she did. I said, ‘God sometimes asks us to pay up front in this life, and you paid a high cost. From now on you are going to have a good life. A blessed life.’ That was when she cried. Here, have a Kleenex.”
Until she takes it and wipes her eyes, Holly hasn’t realized she’s crying herself.
“I hope I was right about that,” Imani says. “I hope that wherever she is, she’s fine. But I don’t know. For her to leave so sudden like she did…” She shakes her head. “I just don’t know. The woman who came for her things—clothes, her laptop computer, her little TV, her knickknack ceramic birds and suchlike—she said Ellen was going back to Georgia, and that didn’t sound right to me. Not that going back south means going back home, there’s a lot more Georgia than one little shit-splat of a town, pardon my French. That woman might have said something about Atlanta.”
“What woman?” Holly asks. All of her interior lights have flashed on.
“I can’t remember her name—Dickens, Dixon, something like that—but she seemed all right.” Something in Holly’s expression troubles her. “Why wouldn’t she be? I walked across to check up on her when I saw her going in and out, and she was friendly enough. Said she knew Ellen from the college, and she had her keys. I recognized the lucky rabbit’s foot Ellen kept on her keyring.”
“Was this woman driving a van? One with a blue stripe down low on the side?”
Holly is sure the answer will be yes, but she’s disappointed. “No, a little station wagon. I don’t know what kind, but Yard would, working in the impound and all. And he was here. He stood on the stoop when I went over, just to make sure everything was all right. Did I do wrong?”
“No,” Holly says, and means it. There was no way Imani could have known. Especially when Holly herself isn’t entirely sure that something unlucky happened to the already unlucky Ellen Craslow. “When did this woman come?”
“Well, gee. It’s been awhile, but I think it was after Thanksgiving but before Christmas. We’d just had the first real snowfall, I know that, but that probably isn’t any help to you.”
“What did she look like?”
“Old,” Imani says. “Older than me by maybe ten years, and I just passed seventy. And white.”
“Would you recognize her if you saw her again?”
“I might,” Imani says. She sounds dubious.
Holly gives her one of her Finders Keepers cards and asks her to have her husband call if he can remember what kind of car it was.
“I actually helped her carry out the laptop computer and some of the clothes,” Imani says. “Poor old lady looked like she was in pain. She said she wasn’t, but I know sciatica when I see it.”
March 27, 2021
When Barbara arrives at the old poet’s Victorian home on Ridge Road, red-cheeked and glowing from her two-mile bike ride, Marie Duchamp is sitting on the couch with Olivia. Marie looks worried. Olivia looks distressed. Barbara probably looks mystified because that’s how she feels. She can’t imagine what Olivia feels she needs to apologize for.
Marie is first to speak. “I encouraged her, and I took the envelope to Federal Express. So if you want to blame someone, blame me.”
“That’s nonsense,” Olivia says. “What I did was wrong. I just had no idea… and for all I know you will be pleased… but either way I had no right to do what I did without your permission. It was unconscionable.”
“I don’t get it,” Barbara says, unbuttoning her coat. “What did you do?”
The two women—one in the healthy prime of life, the other a shrunken doll-woman soon to be a centenarian—look at each other, then back at Barbara.
“The Penley Prize.” Olivia’s mouth is doing that trembly, inward-drawing thing that always makes Barbara think of an old-fashioned string purse.
“I don’t know what that is,” Barbara says, more mystified than ever.
“The full name is the Penley Prize for Younger Poets. It’s jointly sponsored by New York publishers known as the Big Five. I’m not surprised you don’t know of it because you are essentially self-taught and don’t read the writers’ magazines. Why would you, when there’s no paying market for poetry? But most English majors in the writing courses know about it, just as they know about the New Voices Award or the Young Lions Fiction Award. The Penley Prize is open for submissions each year on March first. They get thousands, and the response is rapid. Because most of the submissions are awful moon-and-June stuff, I suppose.”
Now Barbara understands. “You… what? Sent them some of my poems?”
Marie and Olivia share a glance. Barbara is young, but she knows guilt when she sees it.
“How many?”
“Seven,” Olivia says. “Short ones. The rules specify no more than two thousand words. I was just so impressed by your work… its anger… its terror… that…” She doesn’t seem to know how to continue.
Marie takes Olivia’s hand. “I encouraged her,” she says again.
