A Dangerous Age (22 page)

O
LIVIA WAS IN HER BED
. As soon as she hung up the phone, she started yelling to Mary Lily, who had just returned to Tulsa. “Bobby’s going over there,” she said. “I know it. You should have heard his voice. He was excited about it. I swear he was.”

“What did he say?” Mary Lily asked.

“Nothing. He doesn’t know yet what he can tell me. Get me a computer. I’ll figure it out. Get me the one on the chair.”

Mary Lily handed Olivia the thin, flat silver computer, and Olivia started researching all the data the Pentagon had released in the past few days. Half an hour later she had found nothing she didn’t already know. Troop deployments were announced every Friday.

“Come eat breakfast with me,” she told her father when she got him on the phone at his hotel. “I need you. I think Bobby is being sent over there. I can’t figure out what for, though, and I’m getting worried. It isn’t good for this baby if I worry.”

“What time do you get up?”

“Come at seven. I’ll be up by then.”

“I’ll be there.”

“Bring in the papers and buy me
USA Today
on your way over. I think they give it away at hotels.”

“I’ll be there.”

D
ANIEL HUNG UP
the telephone and fell down on his knees beside the bed to pray. He was a devout Episcopalian who believed in God in a very old-fashioned way. The older his
children became, the more he found himself praying to his God. Things he would never have dreamed of asking for for himself he prayed for fervently for his children. Hostages to fortune, he told himself this night. That’s what my sister Anna said they were. Some guy called Bacon wrote it down and she read it. She said that was why she was glad she never had any children, except she wasn’t glad and if she had had them she wouldn’t have killed herself just because she got cancer.

B
OBBY CALLED
O
LIVIA
back at nine the next morning just as Olivia and Mary Lily and Daniel were finishing the waffles Mary Lily had made for breakfast.

“I’m going to Baghdad to train Iraqi foot soldiers to call in the drones when they need them,” he said. “My colonel’s going for a couple of weeks, as well as more men from here. And an Iraqi psychologist from the University of Michigan, who’s going to figure out which ones of them are spies. I’m not going to be in danger, Olivia. I probably won’t ever leave the compound.”

“All right.”

“How are you doing? When do you see the doctor again?”

“In three days. She might let me get up. I’m afraid to weigh myself. I bet I’ve gained ten pounds.”

“I’m not going to be in danger, Olivia. So I guess I won the bet, then.”

“I guess you did.” Olivia turned to her father and her aunt. “He gets to name the baby. I lost a bet.”

“Tell your granddaddy to start looking for a Cherokee name,”
Bobby said. “One that everyone else hasn’t already named someone. Look, I have to go. I’ll talk to you tonight.”

“Can I do anything?” Daniel asked when Olivia had hung up the telephone.

“Yes,” she said. “I have a detailed map of the Middle East; I want you to take it to Kinko’s and get it blown up into a wall-size poster, the bigger the better. And I want a blown-up map of Baghdad also. I’ll have to find one. You might have to go by the paper and pick one up.”

“Whatever you want,” Daniel said. “Whatever I can do.”

B
OBBY CALLED
O
LIVIA
three more times before he left. All three calls were short. In none of them did either Olivia or Bobby say what they were feeling; nor did Bobby tell her more about what he was going to be doing in Iraq or where or when.

Later she would be glad she had not known, as she might have repeated it to someone in some way.

“So did your granddad ever come up with a name?” Bobby asked in the last conversation they had.

“He said he had an ancestor named Vitochuco who almost killed de Soto by summoning the power of a great bird and turning his arms into wings. He said they used to call men in his family Vito when they wanted to praise them for their courage. I thought that sounded pretty good. Vito Tree. What do you think?”

“I like that. Yeah, I like that a lot. It would be a good name if he wanted to rodeo.”

“Well, he sure as hell isn’t going to rodeo. If you think I’m ruining my body to bring a son into the world so he can break all his bones in the rodeo, you’re wrong.”

“Yeah, after we get him, I guess we’ll just keep him in the house and watch him.”

“We better put Vitochuco on the birth certificate or people will think he’s Italian.”

“Daniel Vitochuco Tree. I guess that’s about it, then. I’d like to stop worrying about it, so that’s okay with me if it’s okay with you.”

“When are you leaving Nevada?”

“In the next day or so. They don’t announce it ahead of time. They’re all careful as hell about that kind of information, especially when there’s a senior officer on the trip.”

“Okay, then.”

“I love you, baby.”

“And me you. Take care of yourself.”

“I will.”

F
ORTY-SEVEN HOURS
and six minutes later, the armored vehicle Bobby was riding in on the road into Baghdad from the airport came under fire from insurgents, swerved to avoid a car driven into the road, and was blown up by a hand-thrown grenade made in Ohio and stolen by insurgents from an ammunition dump in Pakistan three years before. The colonel escaped with superficial wounds, as did both soldiers riding in the backseat. The driver and Bobby were killed so quickly they
didn’t have time to finish going into shock or scream or be in pain or care.

L
ITTLE
S
UN HAD BEEN
restless all night. Finally he had gotten out of bed at four in the morning and gone out to the earth island to sit cross-legged on the mound and watch the waxing moon slip behind the line of trees to the east of the mound. There were many stars still in the sky and they all foretold disaster. Not all the beauty of the earth in early June, not the new full growths of leaves or the wildflowers blooming or the cherry trees laden with fruit or the smell of honeysuckle or the knowledge that deer were in the woods waiting to walk out to the pond and drink the cold clear water from the springs, not the song of early morning birds could erase what Little Sun knew.

W
HEN IT WAS
light he got up, shook out his old legs, and walked back to the house to wake Crow. “We must go to Olivia,” he told her. “Get up now. We must leave as soon as we can.”

T
HE NEWS CAME
as it always comes. Two marine officers walked up the path to Olivia’s house at seven fifteen in the morning and rang the doorbell, and Mary Lily and Philip Whitehorse, who had come over early to have breakfast before a rodeo showcase, went to the door. Daniel was reading the newspaper in the living room. Olivia was sitting on the
edge of her bed, looking out the windows at the mockingbirds, and had seen the officers park the official-looking automobile and get out and begin to walk toward her house. She put on a pair of loose khaki pants and a shirt from the collection of maternity clothes her sister had sent her from New Orleans. She pulled her hair back in a ponytail and put on leather sandals and walked down the stairs to where her father and her aunt and the nephew of the man who had taught her to ride cutting horses stood with the two marine officers in the hall that led from the front door into the house.

All her life she would remember that moment, and the faces that were turned toward her, and how her first thought had been that she must not lose the child she was carrying—her first thought because she had already gone into a denial so swift and terrible it would follow her to her grave. All her life she had denied that her mother was dead and that she had no mother. All her life she had denied that she had not known her father, and even after she found him, she denied that in the years before she knew him she had longed to know him. Now she denied that Bobby Tree was dead. She refused to acknowledge that Bobby was not going to come home or hold her in his arms or calm her down or call her on the telephone or be her husband or her friend or see his child or live with her.

“Come in,” she said to the marine officers who were already in the hall. “You have brought us bad news, haven’t you?”

“T
HE PRESIDENT WILL
want you to come to Washington to receive the medals,” the officers said to her later.

“No,” she answered. “I’m pregnant, and I’ve had trouble with the pregnancy. I cannot travel, not for many months. I’m the editor of the
Tulsa World
, our newspaper here. I’m on a leave of absence for the duration of the pregnancy. Please tell the president I am honored that he wants me to come there, but it is impossible at this time.”

She was sitting on a black leather chair that was a copy of a Mies van der Rohe design, and she had not shed a tear or stopped for one moment thinking that she must keep her back straight and her shoulders square and her chin high.

The doorbell was ringing. “Excuse me,” she said. “That might be my grandparents. My grandfather is an intuitive. He probably knew this before you did.” She got up from the chair and went to the front door and opened it, and Crow held out her arms and Olivia hugged her fiercely, and then Little Sun came into the hall and took her hand and held it and they walked back into the living room to finish talking to the officers about when they would have a body to bury.

“Have you told Bobby’s father?” Daniel asked the officers.

“They were looking for him,” one of the officers answered. “I don’t know if they have found him yet.”

M
ANY PEOPLE LEFT
work to come to Olivia’s house. One of the first to arrive after Little Sun and Crow was Kathleen Whitman, Olivia’s obstetrician. She took Olivia
upstairs and examined her and told her she could stay up for four hours, as long as she went to bed for an hour in the afternoon and was careful about how many times she went up and down the stairs. “We’ll start walking together next week,” she said, looking deep into Olivia’s eyes, for once being her physician more than her friend. “Can you get to the track by the hospital? It’s a great new surface. I really need to start exercising again. I’ve gained eight pounds and my blood pressure’s on the rise. It would be good for both of us. Can we plan on that?”

“Except for the funeral. I have to get through that, but it may be ten days before we have his body anyway. So yes, Wednesday morning at seven. I’ll meet you there. Can you do that?”

“I’m going to do it. Physician, heal thyself, and so forth. You’re the one who used to tell me that.”

“Wednesday at seven, then. I’m going to get dressed. People will be coming over. Stay. I want you here.”

Olivia got up from her bed and changed clothes, putting on a flowered sundress Jessie had sent her. It was white piqué with big red and yellow flowers and appliqué on the straps and a yellow grosgrain belt that tied in a bow at the side. She put on red sandals and went into the bathroom and brushed her hair and tied it back in a neater ponytail, and added the pearl earrings her father had given her the year she turned seventeen. Then she and Kathleen went downstairs to talk to people and thank them for coming to her house.

“How did they find out about it?” Olivia asked her father later, when the house was full of people.

“Mary Lily called your doctor,” he said. “I don’t know about the rest.”

At ten o’clock, Daniel went into the television room and called Jessie and told her what had happened.

At eight that evening, Jessie arrived at the Tulsa Airport with her husband, King Mallison. They had left their children with her mother-in-law and come on the first plane they could get. It was surprisingly easy on Memorial Day to get an airplane from New Orleans to Tulsa, if you were able to fly first class, which they were now that King had joined his stepfather’s law firm, which represented management in labor disputes.

They got to Olivia’s house at nine fifteen that night. Jessie went upstairs and sat on the edge of Olivia’s bed and held her hand until Olivia took the sleeping pill Kathleen had prescribed for her. After Olivia fell asleep, Jessie sat beside her sister in the darkened room. After a while, Mary Lily came into the room and sat on the other side of the bed. They stayed there for a long time, watching the sleeping widow. Before she left the room, Jessie picked up the flowered sundress and took it to the closet and hung it on a hanger, putting the little straps into the hanger clips so it would not fall on the floor.