The Roots of the Olive Tree (23 page)

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

The River

W
here to, boys?” Elizabeth asked. Beside her, Frank had rolled down the window and let his head lean ever so slightly into the wind. Guy was spread across the rear seat with his back against the door. They were both smiling.

“Las Vegas,” Guy said.

“Mexico,” Frank said.

Elizabeth made a left onto Sixth Avenue and headed toward the river. She thought about taking them to the casino in Red Bluff, but worried that Guy wouldn’t be able to get out of the car. It had taken him a good five minutes to get himself into the backseat, and that had been with the front desk nurse watching closely, ready to call the trip off if he stumbled. This time of year, the park down by the river was typically beautiful, and it would be a good place to sit and talk.

Frank and Guy talked across the seat and occasionally broke into giggles. They made jokes about the nursing staff and traded gossip about the other residents. Guy did impressions of a woman they called Gladys, although Elizabeth couldn’t place the name. He sucked in his cheeks and batted his eyelashes and dropped his voice two or three octaves to deliver her come-ons.

She drove past Frank’s old family farm, which had been sold and turned into tract homes. They were identical structures with large, imposing garages that faced the streets and tile roofs that somehow managed to look like plastic instead of clay. She started to point it out to Frank, but then changed her mind. Instead she tried to explain to Guy what the land had looked like when she was young, how she could look down from Hill House and see row after row of olive trees.

“Driving past the rows of ordered trees could give a person vertigo,” she said, thinking of the optical illusion the rows of trees created.

“I don’t like olives,” Guy said. “Too salty.”

Elizabeth felt a chill and rolled up the windows in the car. Frank turned to Guy and asked if he’d ever tried olives that weren’t cured in brine. She glanced quickly at her husband. This was something Frank would have asked before his dementia. He rarely talked about olives anymore. She slowed down to make the turn into the river park.

“Tried ’em all,” Guy said, listing off all the olives he knew. “Don’t like the oil either, it puts too much of itself into whatever you’re making. Canola oil is better, just gives food a little bit of slipperiness.”

Elizabeth pulled into a parking spot, surprised to find few other cars in the lot. It was summer and the children were out of school. When she’d come down before with Erin, a few weeks earlier, there had been scads of young people tossing disks and kicking around balls to one another. Even the playground was quiet, no squeaking swings or squeal of children as they slid down the aluminum slide that heated up to an almost unbearable temperature on hot, sunny days.

Frank said, “Have you ever tried my daughter’s oil? I guess it is still made from olives, but she uses the fruit from a special grove of trees that Anna’s father planted when he arrived here from Australia.”

Elizabeth’s breath caught.

“Honey,” Frank said turning to her. “Tell him what I mean. Callie’s oil has special properties, right?”

Guy sat up and leaned toward Frank. “What do you know?”

Elizabeth put her hand on her husband’s arm. “Frank? Do you know who I am?”

He laughed and then kissed her on the forehead before getting out of the car.

She hurried after him, and then remembered Guy. She turned the key and rolled all the windows down in the car, speaking quickly to him, trying to explain about Dr. Hashmi and her children and that lucidity was so rare.

Guy shushed her. “Go after him,” he said. “I’ll be fine. I can see the river from here, and the air smells sweet. Not a trace of disinfectant.”

When she reached Frank, he was standing on the sidewalk that ran parallel to the river. She slid her hand into his and realized then why the park was empty. The thunderstorms of the past month had overloaded the river. It had crept past its banks and covered the strip of grass where the teenagers usually spread their blankets and played their games. The water lapped at the edge of the playground, soaking the wood curls that were spread six inches deep around the structures to keep the children from cracking their heads. The few other cars in the parking lot belonged to people who needed a place to ponder. She looked over her shoulder to check on Guy and saw the people in their cars, eyes closed, heads resting on steering wheels or eyes focused on a point in the horizon. She’d parked on the far side of the lot so that the view of the river was through the back window of her Skylark. She saw Guy’s face, round as the moon, squinting at them.

“I need to talk to you about the boys,” she said.

“How’s Callie doing? I worry about her and Deb. When is she up for parole?”

Elizabeth squeezed his hand tightly. She wanted to tell him about that summer, about Deb’s escape, Erin’s baby, their planned trip to Australia, and the incredible news about Anna, but she couldn’t waste time with it. He needed to know about Callie, that she was finally happy.

“Your daughter is in love,” she said. “She’s like a teenager, but he’s a good man, a scientist, widowed.”

“Is he from someplace else? Pakistan? India? Did I meet him?” Frank’s blue eyes searched her face. “I did, didn’t I?”

Elizabeth rushed to assure him. “He’s part of this. What I need to talk with you about. He did some tests on us—”

“Are you all right? Do you have cancer? Are you dying?” Frank’s voice was high, and he sounded like a child.

“No. Quite the opposite. The doctor gave Anna another thirty years and me fifty if I want them,” Elizabeth said.

“That’s another lifetime,” he said.

“He knows about the boys. Knows what I did to get them.”

Frank’s eyes narrowed, and he straightened up, pulling his shoulder blades close together. This was the posture they’d taught boys in high school, when they were readying everyone for war. “Why would he have checked them? Everyone knows it isn’t the men who live so long, not at least when compared to you Keller women.”

“They have daughters, you know. Your sons have become grandfathers.” She didn’t think Frank was slipping back into dementia. It was difficult for her to remember that her rough and tumble boys had grown into men and then lost their hair and had hips replaced.

“If they’re so old as that, I guess they’re old enough to know that I’m not their father.”

Elizabeth had wanted a more definitive answer from him. “You’re their dad, though.”

“I’m not anything,” Frank said.

They stared at the water for a time. Elizabeth fiddled with her necklace and wondered how aware Frank was about his memory loss. He bent down and picked up a few stones and bits of concrete that were strewn around the ground and then began throwing them into the river. Elizabeth felt her opportunity slipping away with each plunk of stone hitting water. She put her hand on his arm, stopping him from throwing his last few rocks into the river.

In one breath, Elizabeth asked him, “Should I tell the boys you’re not their father?”

He hurled his handful of rocks at the water, and they hit like a spray of buckshot. She felt the impact of those stones in her heart, and she wished that he’d been born fifty years later so that he never would have had to choose between a family and love. No, that wasn’t right. Frank loved her; it just wasn’t the same sort of love that other married people had; there was no desperation, no attraction, just resignation.

“Can Callie handle it?” he asked. “If they know, she needs to know. I worry that she’s not strong enough to live with it, to understand. But maybe she’s learning to be stronger at that flight school.”

Elizabeth smiled. She’d forgotten how protective Frank had been before Callie left for school. How he didn’t see that his influence, his parenting, had given his daughter the wings she needed to leave Kidron. If Callie hadn’t been in that plane crash, then Elizabeth would have told them all years ago about their fathers. Frank would have told them himself and explained their actions.

“It’s hot out here,” Frank said.

She was lost in her thoughts about Callie and the boys, so she didn’t react quickly enough when Frank reached down and rolled his pant legs up. He kicked off his shoes, slippers really. How had she not noticed his footwear when they left Golden Sunsets? He waded into the water.

“Don’t,” Elizabeth said, reaching for him, but he stepped away from her farther into the water. He turned, waving her off, and then a branch fallen from a large spruce tree hit the back of his knees causing them to buckle. He fell backward into the water and his head submerged for just long enough for him to swallow water. She saw his throat constricting at the sudden influx of water.

“Frank!” she screamed.

He made an effort to stand. What had seemed like placid water had a brisk current and somehow in his flailing, Frank was pulled from the backwater into the current and struggled to stay afloat.

From behind her, she heard Guy scream. “Go after him. Go after him. Oh God. You’ve got to reach him.”

“Stand up!” she shouted to her husband. She trotted along the sidewalk, watching his stumbling, desperate attempts to gain footing on the river bottom. She saw a tree ahead of him, one that at one point had been a shady spot for the Frisbee players to lounge under. “Grab the tree!”

Elizabeth was not a strong swimmer. She hesitated, looking around her for something to extend to Frank. She heard him call her name, and looking up she realized that he’d managed to use the tree to stop himself. He had his back against the trunk and was half sitting, half standing in the water. It was too deep for him to sit, but shallow enough that he was able to keep his upper torso above the water.

She heard Guy yelling again. He sounded closer, and when she looked back at the car, she saw that he’d opened the door and managed to crawl out onto the pavement. A woman who’d been sitting in a blue sedan was walking toward them with a phone in her hand.

“Mama. Please. Mama!” Frank was crying. He’d fully returned to his dementia. Elizabeth could only wonder what he thought as he looked around him. She did look like his mother, it was one of the reasons he’d married her, and now that she was old and wrinkled, she looked like everyone’s mother or grandmother.

She stepped into the water and felt it course across her ankles and into her sneakers. She felt safer with them on, thought that stepping onto the soggy grass beneath the water would be less slippery. He wasn’t far from the sidewalk, but she could see that he’d exhausted himself. He’d lost his hat, and she saw the age spots on the crown of his head, along with the jagged scar he’d gotten when his brother had hit him with a stick they had used to play ball. The scar ran from just over his left ear down his neck and looked like a crack in glass just before it broke.

“Help,” he called again.

Elizabeth was within an arm’s reach of him and the water was above her knees. She felt the current pulling at her slacks, and as she stepped, the water splashed up into her face. It was not clean, and now that she was in it, she began to worry about sewage and dead animals and snakes. “You’ve got to stand up, Frank,” she said.

He grabbed onto her shoulder and pulled hard enough that she stumbled into the tree. He clawed at her, and she felt herself begin to lose her balance. The water flowed much more quickly around the tree; it pushed against her. Frank fell backward and his head again slipped under the water. She leaned over, grabbing desperately at his shirt, trying to pull him up toward her. She stepped backward to give herself more leverage and the current took her legs out from under her. The last image she had was of Frank’s brown eyes opened wide in terror under the water. His mouth gaped, and she knew that he wasn’t going to make it.

The water was cold. Elizabeth thought she should panic, flail her arms and yell for help, but she couldn’t find the energy. She realized that she wanted to sink, to join Frank on the bottom of the river. She was tired of her secrets, tired of living. Hadn’t she done enough? Wasn’t ninety years more than enough? The water slammed her arm into a boulder, and for a moment a blinding pain ripped through her body. She screamed and a bit of water, which tasted like day-old fish, rushed into her mouth. She felt her shirt catch on a limb that was trapped between rocks on the bottom of the bank, and it held her in place.

The air was smoky in this section of the river. She realized she’d floated miles downriver of Woodson Bridge to where the rice farmers were ending their season by burning the stubble of their harvested crops. The smoke hung low in places around the edges of the bank, making it impossible to see if anyone had come after Elizabeth. She wondered if Guy had seen her be carried away, or whether the woman on the phone had reached help. The water was loud, like standing next to a waterfall, and she thought she heard voices drifting from the bank or a pleasure boat. There were murmurs of the constantly changing river channel. A man talking about snags and shoal, and maybe a woman crying, and the memory of Mims talking about how land never belonged to a family until they had laid their dead in it.

She looked up at the sky as the branch held her in place and water rushed around her. The river was running faster than its normal four miles per hour, and she could tell by the trees and the gravel that she was just a few hundred yards from Foster Island. Above her an osprey flew with a stick in his talons. His brown-and-white-striped feathers outstretched as he rode the air currents, the white cross of his belly and the edges of his wings spread like fingertips. She closed her eyes against the sun and relaxed her body. The water, which had been pushing against her rigidity, rolled her body over. With her face pressed against the river water, she tried to raise up her neck to get a breath of air, but the water was moving too quickly and the angle at which she was twisted made it too awkward for her to move. She stopped fighting and opened her eyes, but the water was too murky, too filled with sediment for her to see the bottom of the river.