Authors: Ellen Gilchrist
She fell asleep thinking of her father in North Carolina and how serious he had been at her wedding. She thought about him going outside to find his overseer, Lucas, and telling Lucas about Olivia’s being pregnant, and the way they’d talk about it. She started laughing deep down inside herself in a place that was not touched by the chaos of the outside world or war or the death of innocents or madness or politicians or the glaciers melting in Alaska or in the Antarctic, or by the fate of that poor, scared kid, Pfc. Lynndie England, who had held an Iraqi prisoner on a leash in a dungeon in a country she had never heard of until she got sent there to survive or die, because she was too poor to get an education any other way except to join the United States Army Reserve. Who the fuck do we think we are to blame our sins on this poor girl? Olivia was thinking. What in the fuck do we think we are doing?
I
T FELL TO
L
OUISE
to tell the family that Olivia had taken a leave of absence from her job. “Oh, no, oh, my God,” Jessie said.
“She’s been unhappy with the job for a while,” Tallulah said.
“She never likes to do anything for a long time,” Winifred declared.
“No one in this family finishes what they start,” Winifred’s brother Lynley proclaimed.
“Well, to hell with it,” Olivia’s father said. “Good for her. You can’t serve two masters. I’m starting to think working isn’t all I used to think it was anyway.”
In the Mississippi Sound, pods of dolphins
Hoist up their cubs to the oxygen-laden air
Yesterday I walked past a Catholic school
Where a circle of eight-year-old children,
Holding flowers, were saying the rosary,
Hail Mary, full of grace, blessed art thou among women
And blessed is the fruit of thy womb, blessed, blessed,
Blessed, blessed . . .
T
he goddamn beautiful world, Olivia woke up thinking. She started to get out of bed, then remembered and called to her aunt instead. “I know you’re awake, Mary Lily. Please come here and open the windows and let the spring come in.”
“I got your breakfast ready if you want it,” Mary Lily answered. “And your dad called at six this morning and said he
was coming. He said he was bringing you a wheelchair his daddy used that was real easy to get around in.”
“He’s driving?”
“I guess he is. He said he’d be here late tonight and was it okay if he got here late, and I said we’d have food waiting for him.”
Mary Lily bent over the bed and kissed Olivia on the forehead, then opened the long windows that went out onto an unused balcony. “I’m going to get Philip up here to screen these windows and put in some of those doors that open out. We can put you a little daybed out there.”
“This isn’t going to last that long, Aunt Lily. I’ll be up before he could get it finished.”
“Well, he’s coming today to see about it.” Mary Lily left the room and returned with a breakfast tray that held coffee and toast and boiled eggs. It had been two weeks since Olivia was snatched out of the real world and put to bed and ordered to stay completely still, except when she went to the bathroom. She had started bleeding in the fifth month of her pregnancy, and her good friend and obstetrician, Kathleen, was not taking any chances.
“How will you know when I can get up?” Olivia had asked her the day before.
“When you haven’t had any symptoms.”
“I haven’t had any since you put me to bed.”
“Good. I want to keep it that way. Are you worried about your job?”
“I’m taking a leave of absence. Good thing too. Some people are really mad about the Lynndie England editorial.”
“Do you care?”
“Hell, no. I’m sleeping better since I wrote it. It’s one of about sixty issues that were driving me crazy, having to pussyfoot around. I want Jim to let me write a column. I could get it syndicated. I know I could.”
“He won’t?”
“He hasn’t called me back about it.”
O
UTSIDE
O
LIVIA’S BEDROOM
windows the baby mockingbirds were getting better at flying every day. It was the main happiness she had every morning. She watched them now while Mary Lily sat beside her on the bed, feeding her. On the tray with her food was a small fork and knife she had used when she was a child. Mary Lily had bought it at a yard sale in Healing Springs when Olivia was four years old. It was a “youth set” of plated silver with aquamarine stones in the handles. How Mary Lily had found it in her kitchen, Olivia could not imagine; nor did she question it. She was so accustomed to being adored by her aunt, who was just fifteen years older, that she just accepted it as her due.
“So what’s going on with you and Philip Whitehorse?” Olivia asked. “Are you talking or are you holding your cards to your chest? You might as well go on and tell me about it. You know I’ll get it out of you.”
“He’s coming over about ten this morning. He has to help
Kayo feed horses; then he’s coming over in his truck to see about putting in some of those screened doors that open out. He might paint the porch. If you had that fixed, it would give you a place to sit and write your book.”
“I couldn’t write a book if I was outside. I’d just be watching the birds and sky and wishing I could get to the country. If we were home, we could go walking down into the woods to watch the winter ponds start drying out. A man up in New England wrote a poem about how trees take the winter ponds and turn them into summer leaves. I’ll show it to you. And I meant, are you going to admit you got a thing for Philip?”
“I haven’t got a thing.”
“Yes, you do. Go on and go to bed with him, Mary Lily. You’ve got the whole house. No one will know if it happens in Tulsa. Then you can see if you want to marry him. It would be all right if you left Grandmother and Granddaddy. You don’t have to live your life taking care of people.”
“He’s already got a wife. She’s a drunkard. She lives down in Oklahoma City and she gets mad when their daughter goes to see him. Their daughter is as fat as Miss Drago. I don’t know what I’d want to get into that mess for.”
“Because he’s a good man and you’ve known him all your life, and you don’t have to ever see his drunkard wife and fat daughter. All you have to do is admit you get excited every time he’s coming over. I want you to put on some clothes that fit before he gets here. Put on those black jeans and a pretty shirt and bring a brush in here and let me work on your hair.”
Mary Lily stood up. She was five feet eleven inches tall, and when she stood up straight and held herself proudly, she was as handsome as her father, Little Sun, and as imposing. Mostly she kept that all under the table, as if it were bad taste to be taller and more powerful than other people.
Olivia moved the breakfast tray and very carefully stood up and walked into the bathroom. It had been two weeks since there had been blood, but every time she stood up, she feared it might start again. She had sunk into the routine of staying in bed and no longer resented it, but the fear stayed with her. Stay in there, baby boy, she whispered to herself. You’re safe with me. I would never let anything happen to you.
She had watched a Discovery Channel program about a group of elephants and how the whole group cared for the beautiful babies. She had added an old concern to the list of things she was going to write about when she got her column: the capturing and putting into cages of elephants, dolphins, and maybe any other mammal. Except you can’t stop at that; you have to include research on animals, and I’m not ready to go that far yet.
D
ANIEL
H
AND HAD
flown to New Orleans to see Olivia’s sister, Jessie, and her husband and their children. He had rented a Lincoln Navigator at a luxury car rental place and was getting ready to leave for Oklahoma. He had meant to set out earlier, but Jessie had insisted he have breakfast with the children before he started driving. “I want to send my maternity
clothes to Olivia,” she said. “And I have to go up in the attic to find the box.”
Now the back of the Navigator was packed with long, square boxes holding the elaborate wardrobe of maternity clothes Jessie’s mother-in-law, Crystal Manning, had bought for her. “Okay,” Jessie said, “I want you to take a photograph of her, Daddy. I want to see Olivia pregnant. I’ll never believe it until I see it.”
“Come with me. Take the kids out of school for a few days. It wouldn’t hurt them.”
“I can’t. King has ball games. If he didn’t go, he might not be on first base. He wants to be on first base.”
“I want to pitch,” his ten-year-old grandson said. “But she won’t let me.”
“Why not?” Daniel asked. “Why can’t he pitch?”
“Because he’ll ruin his shoulder. . . .”
Daniel got up and went around the table and patted his grandson on the shoulders and started making his escape.
“S
HE WON’T LET
him pitch,” he told his overseer on the phone as soon as he was out of Uptown New Orleans and on the highway leading west to Oklahoma. “She won’t let him pitch on his baseball team. I swear to God, Lucas. My daddy was right about women. You let them take over and they’ll ruin the children. Now I got to go up to Oklahoma, where the daughter I thought was going to get something done in the
world is flat on her back in bed, about to die in childbirth like her mother did.”
“Calm down, boss. They don’t die anymore. They’re too mean to die of anything. I heard she quit her job running the newspaper. Niall told me the other day. He came by to get some papers out of your desk.”
“To sell the cottage on the island. It’s falling down and nobody wants to go there.”
“It was good fishing. Those oysters were the best I ever had. I hate for you to sell that, boss.”
“I’m in a bunch of trucks. I got to pay attention. Ten four.”
Daniel put both hands on the wheel and started really driving. Two grandsons and another one on the way. He was getting out of this woman life he’d been leading since he was twenty and started getting women pregnant. He drove in peace, planning summers on his farm when the grandsons would come to visit without their mothers, and they could live like men and pitch baseballs ten hours a day if they wanted to.
E
IGHT HOURS LATER
he crossed the state line into Oklahoma. At five that afternoon he was in Tulsa, squinting over the monitor of the five-star navigation system he had paid an extra six dollars a day to have in the automobile. He eased off Yale Avenue and onto Third Street and down to a streetlight and then straight to Olivia’s house. He parked in the driveway and went up the flower-covered path to the doorway and rang the bell, and Mary Lily ran to the door and let him in.
In another two minutes he was standing at the foot of Olivia’s bed. She had been watching a financial news program called
Mad Money
and making notes on a legal pad for stocks she could buy for the baby’s trust fund, when she got enough money to make him a trust fund.
“Oh, Daddy,” she said, pushing a remote to turn off the television. “I’m glad you’re here. It’s so boring lying here. But it’s what I have to do. What’s happening? How’s Jessie?”
He bent his tall body and kissed her on the side of the face. Mary Lily was behind him pulling up a chair, and he sat down in it and surveyed the scene. Olivia’s bed was piled high with books and magazines and notepads. Her laptop sat precariously on a hospital table above the bed. Beside the laptop was a tray holding bowls and cups and a prayer flag that Crow had woven for her and sent with Mary Lily.
“I quit my job,” Olivia went on. “I’m going to write a book. Well, I might write a column for them, if I can get what I want in a contract.”
“We’re mighty happy about the boy, the baby,” Daniel began. “Jessie’s boys are good boys; they’re getting big enough to take out places. She sent you a bunch of clothes. You want me to go get them out of the car?”
“Not yet.” Olivia laughed and pushed papers and books out of her way. “Stack some of this stuff on the floor, would you, Dad? Never mind. Look, go down to the living room and I’ll join you. I can go downstairs twice a day if I don’t walk. I’ll be down there in a minute.”
“I could carry you,” Daniel said. “I used to carry Mother when she got old.”
“It’s not that bad.” Olivia laughed again. “I’m going in next week for tests. We might be out of this bed in a few days.”
Daniel got up, backed out of the room, and followed Mary Lily down the stairs to the sparsely furnished, very contemporary living room, which Olivia had copied out of a magazine called
Real Simple
. It had light-colored board floors, window shades from Pier 1, and wide, comfortable chairs with colored cushions. In a corner beside French doors was a long red leather chaise with a blue leather chair beside it. “Sit in the blue chair,” Mary Lily directed. “I’m going to get you something to drink. We have homemade stew and potatoes and fresh peas for dinner. I hope you’re going to be hungry.”
“I already am. How’re your parents, Mary Lily? They doing all right?”
“They’re glad you can come. It’s hard keeping her in bed. She never stops moving.”
“But the baby, the boy’s all right?”
“She just got tired.”
O
LIVIA GOT OUT
of bed and put on a clean white and blue seersucker robe and slippers. Then she washed her face and combed her hair and went to the stairs, where she sat on the top step and went down them slowly, without standing up. At the bottom of the stairs she finally stood, pulled back her shoulders, and walked into the living room to join her father.