Crooked River: A Novel

by Valerie Geary

  The curtain twitched. Mrs. Roth’s long fingers and violet-painted nails poked through, gripping the edge, readying to pull it open again. “Get a broom and clean up this mess,” she said.

  I rushed Ollie out the front door. We jumped on our bikes and rode hard and fast out of town.

  Zeb and Bear sat side by side on the lowered tailgate of Zeb’s truck, parked in front of the hemlock stump. They kicked their legs back and forth in the air like they were boys again and bored with summer. When Ollie and I came around the last bend, Bear hopped off the tailgate first. Zeb climbed down more slowly.

  Two Decembers ago Zeb had broken his hip going down the driveway to get the mail. He wasn’t watching where he was going, he’d said, too busy staring at the snowflakes coming down. He slid on a patch of ice and landed the exact wrong way. He’d recovered quickly for a man his age—seventy-nine and holding—and liked to say it was because he drank a glass of whole milk every damn day of his life as far back as he could remember. He used a cane for a few weeks after, but now he got around just fine on his own, only having trouble if he was climbing up or down from something, or if the weather was about to change. Even then, you’d hardly notice. A slow descent, carefully putting one foot down, testing the weight; a hand rubbing over the bad hip, massaging the aches away. Mom had once said that Zeb was going to outlive us all.

  I got off my bike and leaned it against the side of the truck. Ollie dropped hers in the dirt and ran full speed toward Zeb. He crouched and held out his arms and when she ran into them, he folded her up and swung her around. For a few seconds he was as strong as Zeus, she was as light as a cloud, and there was no such thing as gravity. When he set her down again, she kept tight hold of his hand.

  I was close enough now to see the equipment loaded in the back of the truck: a spray bottle of sugar water, a saw, a ladder, a bucket, an empty Langstroth box. My bee suit and helmet.

  Zeb smiled at me and touched the brim of his straw hat, nodding once. He said, “There’s a swarm trying to make a home in one of my apple trees. Your daddy said you might be able to do something about that?”

  “Me?” I looked over at Bear.

  He was leaning up against the truck bed, arms over the side, hands loosely clasped together in the air. He squinted off into the trees, worrying a long piece of grass between his teeth. Though I’d seen it done, I’d never captured my own swarm—that had always been Bear’s job.

  “You sure?” I asked. “You think I’m ready?”

  Bear took the grass he was chewing on and tossed it aside. “You don’t have to be ready. You just have to try.” He climbed into the back of Zeb’s truck and held his hand out for me. “I’ll be right there, walking you through it.”

  I grabbed hold and swung myself up into the truck bed beside him.

  “Ever seen a swarm scooped from a tree crook?” Zeb asked Ollie.

  Ollie shook her head.

  “No?” Zeb’s expression was the same as if she’d shaken her head no to his asking about whether or not she’d ever seen the ocean. “Well, then, I guess we’ll have to go ahead and make a day of it.”

  He brought her around to the front of the truck and opened the passenger door. As she climbed in, Zeb said, “Did you know that the ancient Egyptians thought bees were messengers sent from the sun god Ra? The Greeks, though, now they believed bees were souls of the dead come back to keep the rest of us company.”

  “Don’t tell her things like that,” I said.

  Zeb came around to the back of the truck again and lifted first my bike, then Ollie’s, up to Bear, who found a place for them beside the beekeeping equipment.

  “No harm in thinking there’s some place to go after we’re done with this life, is there, Sam?” Zeb shut the tailgate, walked around to the driver’s side, and climbed in.

  The back window of the cab was open. Ollie had her head forward, looking through the windshield, but I knew she was listening. I said, “It’s bad enough already, her thinking she can see ghosts. She doesn’t need any more excuses for not talking.”

  “But maybe she does see ghosts.”

  “There’s no such thing.” I sat down on the raised wheel hub, grabbing hold of the side for balance.

  Zeb started the engine. He shouted, “Maybe there is. Maybe you’ve just never seen one is all.”

  I looked at Bear, wanting him to defend me, to say I was right and Ollie didn’t need to hear any more made-up stories about spirits and souls and life going on after you’re dead, but his head was tipped back and he was staring at a vulture circling high above us. If Mom was here, she’d agree with me. She’d tell Ollie the truth: Once you’re dead, you’re dead. There’s just no coming back from that.

  We bumped along the dirt road and then down another single track toward the apple orchard. Ollie stuck her arm out the open passenger window and moved her hand up and down, a rising and falling wave in the wind.

  It only took a few minutes to get there. Zeb parked the truck twenty feet from the tree where the swarm gathered and turned off the engine.

  “Hear that?” he said to Ollie, holding his head out the window and cupping his hand around his ear. “Bunch of old souls singing about heaven.”

  “It’s just bees, Ollie,” I said. “Moving the air so fast with their wings we can hear their vibrations.”

  “Sounds like music to me,” said Zeb.

  I grabbed the sugar water and my bee suit and jumped out of the truck. Bear unloaded the rest of the equipment and joined me under the apple tree. Ollie stayed behind with Zeb.

  Bees swarm whenever the colony grows too big for the hive and they get to feeling like they need more elbow room. The queen and thousands of workers fly off together to find some new place to call home, while the ones who stay behind in the original hive hatch a new queen and carry on about their honey-making business. Bear’s colonies had swarmed only a few times, but he’d always caught them and set them up in newer, bigger hives before they’d gotten too far away. Sometimes, though, swarms showed up out of nowhere, maybe from another keeper’s hives, maybe from a wild colony. Even though bees were their most gentle selves during a swarm, there was still something ominous and disturbing about the way they clumped together on a tree limb or under the eaves of a house. A shifting, dark mass sending out a low and constant drone, the sound of ten thousand wings beating an uncertain rhythm.

  This swarm was balled together, hanging from a thin limb about fifteen feet off the ground. It could have been worse. Once Bear had to capture a swarm that was trying to make its new home in Zeb and Franny’s chimney. I wasn’t there, but Franny said it was quite precarious and Bear was crazy for trying.

  Bear leaned the ladder against the trunk of the tree as close to underneath the swarm as he could get. “Ready?”

  I zipped my suit, cinched my gloves, pulled the veil down over my face, and gave him a thumbs-up.

  I was halfway up the ladder when he said, “Did everything go okay with Deputy Santos today?”

  I missed the next rung and almost slipped off. I balanced, found my footing again, and kept climbing.

  “Yeah,” I called down to him. “She was a little mad at first, but she thinks the jacket could be helpful for setting up a timeline. Anyway, it’s out of our hands now.”

  Bear nodded. “Good.”

  I was surprised at how easy and quick the lie came. Surprised, too, that Bear believed me.

  He passed me the bucket and handsaw. “Watch it now. This part can get a little tricky.”

  8

  ollie

  My sister adjusts her helmet, her veil, her gloves.

  Bear points at her empty bucket and says, “Set it right under that branch and hold it steady.”

  Papa Zeb offers me a sip of his Coke. “Think we’re far enough away?”

  The bees fly around the one from the river, outlining her shape
in the air. She is trying so hard to make my sister notice. But my sister sees only what is right in front of her and says all the rest is fake, just light playing tricks, summer bending the sky. Impossibilities, imaginary friends, and all in my head.

  Maybe she’s right.

  I wish she was.

  As far back as I can remember I’ve seen them. In dim light, they seem almost solid. In bright light, barely visible. If I touch them, it’s ice and fire, energy burning. They are glints and specks, here and then gone. Shimmering. Like heat rising off pavement.

  When I was four, at the zoo with my sister and mother, I grabbed Mom’s sleeve and said, “Who is that man over there?”

  “What man, sweetheart?”

  “The one beside the tiger cage. Under that tree. He’s wearing a funny hat.”

  “I don’t see anyone.” She put her arm around me and squeezed. “Honey, there’s no one.”

  When I was six, the night before Grandma and Grandpa came to stay with us for two weeks, Mom sat on the edge of my bed and told me Aunt Charlotte had an accident while climbing a mountain. She fell. She died. I would never see or talk to her again. She was gone.

  And then she wasn’t.

  Then she was here at our house, coming through the front door behind Grandma and filling the rooms with cold and ice. But I was the only one who noticed, the only one freezing. I started to cry and Mom said, “Oh, honey, what’s wrong?” and lifted me onto her hip. But I couldn’t tell her. I couldn’t tell anyone. Aunt Charlotte’s voice smothered mine. Her words, trying, failing to escape, became trapped inside me. For days after, I kept my mouth shut tight.

  Mom said, “Sweetheart, talk to me.”

  But I was too afraid to try, knowing that the voice I’d hear would not belong to me.

  When Grandma left a room, so did Aunt Charlotte. When Grandma came into a room, Aunt Charlotte came in right behind her. Ice crystals formed on the inside of the windows. Snowdrifts piled in the corners. At night, I shivered beneath the covers.

  When Mom tucked me in, she added another blanket, saying, “I hope it’s not the flu.”

  During the day, my sister rolled her eyes and said, “Stop being a baby.”

  The first time I figured out they could speak, and that I could hear them, was at the funeral. Aunt Charlotte’s voice, a fog-whisper across the back of my neck, I’m not even in there, you know. They left me up on that godforsaken mountain. Said it was too dangerous to bring me down. That’s just an empty box they’re burying.

  Grandpa and Grandma and Aunt Charlotte left a few days later, and the house warmed up and the hand around my throat unclenched and my own voice returned. I asked Mom if the coffin was empty and why we’d had a funeral if there was no body.

  Mom looked surprised. “Who told you that?”

  “Aunt Charlotte.”

  “Your aunt Charlotte’s gone, sweetheart.”

  “But she was at the cemetery with Grandma,” I said.

  Mom started to cry then and pulled me into the chair beside her and told me about heaven, how people went to live there after they died and Aunt Charlotte was smiling and singing with the angels. I let her say what she needed to say, even though I worried some of it might not be true.

  I asked my sister once if she saw them too.

  “What?”

  “Shimmering. The shiny, light parts people leave behind when they die.”

  “You’re talking crazy.”

  “Do you think they’re ghosts?”

  My sister rolled her eyes. “I don’t believe in ghosts.”

  “What about angels?”

  She shook her head. “Nope. Don’t believe in them, either.”

  “Then what happens after you die?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Something happens,” I said.

  “Nothing and nothing and nothing.” She spun tight circles in the middle of the living room. “You get buried in the ground like Aunt Charlotte and then people come and cry over you for a while and then things go back to the way they were before. And that’s what happens.”

  “But what about your soul?”

  “If there is such a thing as a soul, it probably gets buried too.”

  “Of course there’s such a thing as a soul,” I said.

  “What’s a soul if you don’t have a body?” My sister stuck out her tongue.

  I stuck out my tongue too. I said, “What’s a body if you don’t have a soul?”

  “I’m telling Mom,” my sister said.

  The doctor wore a plaid skirt and a red blouse and smiled too wide and called me Miss Olivia. One foot tapping, tapping, in constant motion.

  “Tell me about these . . . Shimmering. How often do you see them?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “Every day?”

  “No.”

  “And how do they make you feel? Scared? Excited? Happy? Nervous?”

  “Like someone’s trying to open my chest and slip inside,” I told her.

  She wrote something on a yellow notepad, then smiled at Mom and said, “This kind of fantasy play is typical for kids her age, especially after losing someone they love in such a traumatic way. She’s filling in the gaps. Try not to worry. She’ll grow out of it. But just in case . . .” and handed her a slip of white paper.

  In the car on the way back home, my sister pinched me and said, “You’re a freak.”

  The one who follows me floats like a cloud above us. She flickers soft pink and rose red, sky blue and honey gold. She likes it when we’re all together—my sister, my father, and me. She’s pretending she’s here with us too and that makes her happy. But she’s not here. Not in the way that counts.

  The one from the river coils tight and tighter around the leather satchel my sister left in the bed of the truck. She hisses at me, but I ignore her.

  My sister uses the handsaw to cut the branch from the apple tree. Some of the bees fly close to her veiled face, but she keeps working, carefully, slowly, the way she’s seen Bear work. She sets the cut branch and swarm gently into the bucket and covers it with a mesh lid.

  “Good work,” Bear says.

  Papa Zeb shivers. “Makes my skin crawl.”

  My sister climbs down the ladder with her bucket of bees and brings it to the truck. The buzzing is so loud, I cover my ears.

  9

  sam

  Friday breakfast at Zeb and Franny’s was a standing tradition for Bear, and me when I was visiting, and now for Ollie, too. We were supposed to be at the house, sitting down at the table, by nine o’clock sharp, but when Ollie and I woke up that morning, Bear was gone. He’d left a note pinned to the inside of the teepee flap: Be back soon. I turned it over, looking for more of an explanation, but the other side was blank. Ollie and I waited until we couldn’t wait any longer, then we walked the quarter mile to Zeb and Franny’s without him.

  They lived in a two-story farmhouse with a wraparound front porch and rooster-red shutters. Wind chimes and hummingbird feeders dangled from the eaves. They’d bought the house and eighty acres right after they were married. The plan, Franny told me once when I asked her why she and Zeb lived all alone in such a big house, was to fill the extra space with kids, and eventually grandkids, and, if God saw fit, great-grandkids, but their first daughter died of pneumonia when she was still a baby, and their second daughter died, too, when she was older, after falling off a horse. Though they didn’t have any more of their own kids after that, they were foster parents for a long time, and Franny said all those kids had filled her heart with more than enough love to last until she died and then some. Besides, they had us now.

  I opened the screen door. The hinges squealed.

  Franny called from the kitchen, “Come in, come in! My babes from the meadow, come in!”

  Ollie and I took off our shoes and crossed through t
he living room toward the back of the house. Framed photographs cluttered the walls, the shelves and end tables, even the top of the piano. Here were pictures capturing nearly a century of well-lived life. A sepia-toned portrait of Zeb in a suit and Franny in her wedding dress, holding hands, heads inclined toward each other. Black-and-white and color photographs of so many children I wondered how Franny and Zeb remembered all their names.

  One photograph stood apart from all the others on an end table beside the couch. Taken three years ago, it was of Bear and Mom and Ollie and me bunched together on the front porch steps. Bear had his arm around Mom’s waist, and Mom had one hand on my shoulder, one hand on Ollie’s. Our smiles were silly and huge. Zeb stood by himself behind us, tall and straight and serious. It was Franny’s idea to take the picture. She’d said she wanted all the people she loved most staring up at her from a single frame. I stopped in front of it and brushed my fingers across all our faces.

  In the kitchen, Franny was busy plunging soft dough into a pan of hot oil, frying up her famous French crullers. The room smelled of warm cinnamon and powdered sugar.

  She smiled when we came through the doorway. “My beautiful girls.”

  Ollie went over and hugged her.

  “Papa Zeb could use a little help outside with the blueberries.” She kissed the top of Ollie’s head and pushed her toward the open sliding glass door.

  A few seconds later, I heard Zeb outside talking and laughing, carrying on a one-sided conversation. I wondered how much Bear had told him about Ollie, if he knew it had been almost five weeks now since she last spoke.

  Franny pulled a cruller from the hot oil and set it on a paper towel to drain. She said, “Papa’s been out there for nearly an hour. Won’t have any fruit for breakfast the way he’s been picking. Slow as molasses on a January morning, that one is.”

  Though we both knew she didn’t mind as much as she made it seem.

  “I still can’t get used to your new haircut,” she said. “Reminds me of a 1920s starlet.”