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Holly should have known better than to delude herself into thinking she could actually do this. Being questioned by that horrible judge with hundreds of eyes on her. Cameras flashing in her face as reporters circle her like vultures. The prosecution ripping into her, making her relive every encounter with Brady, describe everything he did to her and her family. Everything she did.
She was never supposed to be involved in this. What happened to Ollie was tragic, but Holly’s part in the story should have ended with her grieving her cousin, not hacking into computers and bludgeoning a man into brain death.
But Roland said Lou needed a sympathetic witness. Someone who had been personally victimized by the Mercedes Killer, who could testify to the psychological havoc the man was capable of inflicting. It was Lou’s only chance. There was no disputing her guilt—she had murdered a man in cold blood in front of hundreds of witnesses, not to mention the multiple news reporters who caught it on film.
No, the letter of the law was not on Lou Linklatter’s side. But the spirit of the law was a different matter, and Roland was confident that the will of the people, if turned in their favor, would be powerful enough to force the judge to acquit her.
It just so happened that the responsibility of turning it fell squarely on Holly’s shoulders.
She understood the gravity of the situation when she agreed to testify, but it was a hypothetical understanding. Knowing it’s happening today is a different matter altogether.
It feels very different indeed as she picks out her most respectable outfit, hands shaking so hard she almost can’t work the buttons on her coat.
Despite her recent, hard-fought entry into the world of being a functional adult, Holly’s grip on her mind is tenuous at best—most of the time, her psyche feels like a house of cards, one sudden change in routine away from crumbling.
She might have been able to head it off had she spotted the warning signs earlier, noticed the anxiety simmering under her skin before it reached a boiling point, but she didn’t, she never does, and it’s too late it’s going to happen she can feel it and this can’t be happening today because today is the one day she has to be able to act like a normal fucking person for once in her life—
There isn’t enough oxygen in the room, and none of her breathing techniques are working. Her fists clench and unclench, fingers curling in and splaying out, in, out, again, again, again. She hears her mother’s voice, dripping with contempt. Stop being so dramatic, Holly. Here you go again, making everything about you. And she’s right, isn’t she, because this is Lou’s life on the line, it’s Lou who will spend the rest of her life in that terrible place, the one that still gives Holly nightmares—the place worse than prison, so much worse.
She doesn’t know when it happened, but she’s on the floor, clutching her knees to her chest. Her fingers itch with the urge to dig her nails into her skin, but she promised Dr. Sanyal she would stop doing that, so she squeezes her eyes shut and rocks back and forth and back and forth.
(There was an old lady who swallowed a fly.)
She hears a voice, soft and rhythmic, soothing in its repetition, and oh, it’s her, she’s muttering the words to a silly old children’s rhyme Ollie taught her. It isn’t a conscious act—her mouth has a mind of its own, the words spilling out of her like vomit.
(I don’t know why she swallowed a fly—perhaps she’ll die.)
The shrinks called it stimming. The kids at school called her Jibber Jibber and threw things at her.
Get a load of this Jibber Jibber, jibber-jibbering about fuck knows what! Mike Sturdivant’s voice, cruel and mocking, joins Holly’s mother in her chorus of taunts. He was a senior when Holly was a freshman, but he was never content to pick on people his own size. No, he was like Brady in that way—he delighted in tormenting the weak and the helpless. Anyone unfortunate enough to find themselves on the receiving end of his malice was never the same again. Holly certainly wasn’t.
(There was an old lady who swallowed a spider. It wriggled and wiggled and jiggled inside her.)
She doesn’t know how much time passes as she rocks and mutters and tries to catch her breath. She hears footsteps, and the sound of her apartment door swinging open and shut. She must have left it unlocked.
(She swallowed the spider to catch the fly.)
Muffled voices. More footsteps. The door.
(I don’t know why she swallowed a fly—perhaps she’ll die.)
The voices are close. There are people in her apartment. Why are there people in her apartment?
“Holly?” It comes out like a question. Tentative.
(Perhaps she’ll die.)
“I just found her like this.” A second voice. “Should I call an ambulance, maybe?”
(Perhaps she’ll die!)
“Holly.” Firmer this time. Closer. Someone is on the floor with her. “I need you to look at me.”
(PERHAPS SHE’LL DIE!)
“Holly!” She flinches at the sudden noise, her hands flying to her ears, and abruptly stops rocking. She blinks once, twice, three times, her prefrontal cortex slowly coming back online. As her surroundings come into focus, she sees Bill, crouched in front of her so that they’re eye-to-eye. Behind him stands Jerome, wide-eyed, looking shell-shocked.
“I’m fine,” Holly blurts. “I’m fine.” She doesn’t miss Bill’s disbelieving stare, the way his eyebrows raise as the words leave her mouth. People assume she doesn’t notice that sort of thing, but she does. Holly notices everything. She might not understand things in a way that makes sense to other people, but she understands things.
She understands that she has just ruined everything. They think she’s a crazy person. She can see it in their faces, in the way they’re looking at her. It’s a look she’s seen countless times on countless faces, but never from them. Not from Jerome, and especially not from Bill—Bill, who never once treated her like she was broken.
He was never supposed to see this.
Holly scrambles to her feet, smoothing her dress for a moment before she makes her way unsteadily into the kitchen, one hand flapping at her side. She braces herself against the sink with trembling arms.
“Holly…what the hell?” Her back is turned to Bill. She can’t look him in the eye. Instead, she walks to the coat hanger next to the door, and resumes the process of preparing for court.
“I’m just—was having a panic attack, it’s…a really bad one.” Her words come out in a strained staccato. Speech is difficult when emotions are high, a quirk that’s somewhat at odds with her tendency to ramble when nervous. “Um, not that any of them are good, but this one was really bad, but I’m—I’m fine.” She shoves an arm in her coat and reaches for her purse, fumbling with the latch as she tries to open it.
“And Glamour magazine said that panic attacks are the young woman’s new health crisis,” she continues, wringing her hands. “I mean, 40 million Americans suffer from them, and young women are twice as likely, which makes me more normal than weird.” It’s a lie and she knows it. Her whole life, people have made sure Holly never forgets just how abnormal she is.
“Anxiety and stress are supplanting cigarettes as our biggest health threat, so please don’t look at me like I’m some kind of weirdo, please.” She says all this with her gaze fixed firmly on the ceiling, like maybe if she focuses hard enough on avoiding eye contact, she can disappear, make this situation go away.
Disengaging, withdrawing into herself, has always been her way of dealing. She’s a runner, it’s just the way she’s wired. When things get too much, her brain hits the eject button, shutters itself away, leaving her body unpiloted.
Her mother didn’t like that very much. She used it to get Holly institutionalized in her youth, called the men in the white coats to rip her from her bedroom and tie her to their stretcher like she was a rabid dog. They threw around words like “catatonic” and “break from reality,” but Holly, who was always so much smarter than her mother gave her credit for, knew the truth: she didn’t fit her mother’s perfect image, so her mother hid her away. She was a problem her mother didn’t want to have to look at, so she got rid of her.
“You were sitting on the floor, muttering gibberish,” Bill says flatly.
Holly bristles at that. “It’s not gibberish, it’s ‘There Was an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly.’” She learned it from Ollie, and that makes it sacred. “It’s a nursery rhyme. Olivia taught it to me. She said that songs and poems with repetitive verses had a calming effect, almost like a mantra meditation, so if I repeat it to myself—well, it works.” She risks a glance at Bill, searching his features for the telltale signs of pity, revulsion, and judgment she’s come to know so well. What she finds is…consternation, maybe? Incredulity? Something wary and a little sad, but not derisive. She can work with that, probably. Maybe.
“Are you going to be able to do this? Go on the stand?” And as much as she’d like to be, she can’t even be offended by the question, because she’s asking herself the same thing.
Can she do this?
She swallows hard. “I think so.” She knows, even as the words leave her mouth, that she doesn’t sound at all convincing.
Can she do this?
Holly is accustomed to thinking of herself as a runner, but that’s not actually true, is it? Not anymore. She didn’t run from Bill. She let him bum a cigarette off her, and told him things she’d never told anyone but Ollie, and showed up on his doorstep with no regard for whether or not her presence was welcome.
Holly’s gaze flicks over to Jerome. She refused to make herself small with him, and he didn’t ask her to. She insisted they shook hands twice, once with their right hand and once with their left. She corrected him when he was about to wipe Ollie’s hard drive, didn’t dumb herself down for the sake of palatability.
She stood up to her mother—in defense of Bill, but really, in defense of herself, of her agency. I’m thirty-one and a half years old and I don’t have to listen to you!
She didn’t run from Brady. In fact, she ran toward him, almost recklessly so, if she’s being honest. She kept running toward him, even after Janey was blown to bits in front of her eyes. Especially after that.
And then there was the job fair. The site of Mr. Mercedes’s grand reprise. Bill, with his gun raised. Brady, smirking (he was always so smug), his thumb hovering over the detonator. Screams. The kind of noisy environment that would normally have Holly on the floor, hands clamped over her ears. But for once, her mind was quiet.
Holly Gibney’s world was quiet as she rushed the man with the bomb. She didn’t hear the screams, the stampeding footfalls, the distant sirens. There was only one thing she could hear as she brought down six pounds of solid pewter on Brady’s skull: Jibber Jibber, Jibber Jibber, Jibber Jibber. Mike Sturdivant fueled her as she struck again and again and again and again. She didn’t stop when she saw brain matter. When her muscles were screaming with exhaustion. When Brady’s head slumped forward, eyes open but unseeing. There was nothing else—just Jibber Jibber and the sickening crunch of bone. At some point, arms wrapped around her, dragging her away from the bloody heap that used to be Brady Hartsfield. He’s dead. Holly, he’s dead, they kept saying.
Holly’s not a runner anymore. Far from it, actually. She thinks she can do this? No. She turns, looks Bill dead in the eye. “I know so,” she says resolutely, straightening her shoulders.
“You don’t have to be a hero here.” Bill looks dubious, and she can’t really blame him—the scene he walked in on just a few minutes before didn’t exactly inspire confidence, she knows that. And it’s not like she isn’t terrified. But she thinks of Lou living out the rest of her days in a place like the one Holly was sent to, and the choice is clear.
Holly’s fists clench at her sides. “Yes, I do. I very much need to be a hero. For Lou.”
Maybe her hands will shake as they question her. Maybe she won’t be able to look the prosecutor in the eye. Maybe she’ll rock and mutter nursery rhymes and the whole courtroom will think she’s a freak. But she’ll do it. Brady has taken far too much already, and she’s not about to let him take Lou’s future. The Brady Hartsfields and Mike Sturdivants of the world don’t get to keep winning. Holly won’t let them.
Bill studies her quietly before nodding. He beckons for Jerome, and they step out of the apartment, leaving Holly alone. She fixes the collar of her coat in the mirror, pausing to stare at her reflection, and takes a long, deep breath.
In the hallway, Holly locks the door behind her, and turns to her friends, who eye her hesitantly. She nods at them, jaw clenched, gaze steely, and they set off for the car.
Yes, Holly thinks. She can be a hero.