Crooked River: A Novel

by Valerie Geary

  Ollie pushed her lips out like a duck, then sucked them back in again, pressing them together between her teeth.

  “But maybe not.”

  Ollie looked at me. The moonlight turned her skin gray and her eyes ink black. She let her hair go, let it slide and tumble and cascade around her shoulders again. She seemed to be waiting for me to say something else.

  “I want to believe he’s innocent, too, Oll,” I said. “But there’s a chance he might not come home. We have to be ready for that, I think.”

  She turned away from the window, crossed a few steps to her bed, picked up her Alice book, which was lying on the pillow, and returned to me. She held the book out, already opened to a page near the beginning. She pointed at the bottom, at a sentence that read: After a fall such as this, I shall think nothing of tumbling downstairs.

  I laughed. She closed the book against her chest and leaned into my side.

  When we had been waiting at the hospital for someone to come get us, Ollie was still talking then and she’d asked if I was scared. I didn’t answer. She tucked her small body close to mine, covered my hand with hers, and said, “It’s okay to be scared, Sammy.” And then, after a long pause, “We can be scared together. Okay?” I nodded and swallowed back the lump in my throat and stared up at the ceiling until the tears stopped wanting to spill out all over the place. And then I pulled my hand away, stood up, and said, “I’m getting Skittles from the vending machine. You want anything?”

  She wrapped her arms around her bent legs and rested her chin on her knees. “Do you think they have those mini powdered doughnuts? Those are my favorite.” They did and I bought them for her and she ate all but one, rolling the packaging up on itself and setting it on the chair beside her. She said, “I’m going to save it for Mom for when she gets better,” and then she leaned in close, cupped her hand around her mouth, and whispered, “Hospital food’s the worst.”

  I didn’t tell her that Mom wasn’t going to get better, that she was already dead. I didn’t tell her because I was too scared, but I wish I had. Maybe it would have been easier if she hadn’t held on to hope for so long.

  Grandma found the doughnut a few days later in Ollie’s jacket pocket and threw it away. Ollie cried pretty hard after that. There had been so much going on—between the funeral and packing and Bear fighting with Grandma about what to do with me and Ollie—that I probably didn’t do as good of a job taking care of her as a big sister should. I couldn’t think of anything to say that would make her feel better. There was no good explanation for why such a terrible thing had happened and no magic words to fix us.

  This time, I wanted to be a better sister. I wanted to try. I said, “I don’t know what’s going to happen to us now, Oll. I wish I did. I wish I could tell you that everything’s going to work out and we’ll be just fine. But I can’t.”

  Her hand found mine. I loved how warm she was, the inside of her palm like a stone sitting in the sun.

  “I wish there was something I could do to change everything that’s happened,” I continued. “I wish I could bring Bear back. And Mom, too.” My voice cracked.

  Ollie squeezed my hand as tight as she could.

  “It’s just us now,” I said. “We have to look out for each other.”

  She leaned her head against me. Her long hair tickled my arm, but I didn’t mind.

  We stood together in front of the window until the moon slipped behind the trees and the barn became a hulking beast in the dark, until the air inside felt more like the air outside and the frog and cricket choruses were louder than our own thoughts. When we returned to our beds, we left the window open and the curtains fluttering.

  That night, I dreamed us with painted faces. We crept through the woods together, hunting rabbits and howling like wolves. Living wild. And when they came looking for us, we hid in the tall grass and up among the tangled branches, and Ollie pressed her finger to her lips and we could not be found. And, after a while, they went away. They went and left us to our savage selves.

  The next morning when Franny came to wake us for church, I told her I was sick. She leaned over me, laid her hand on my forehead, and said, “You do feel a little warm.”

  I nodded and closed my eyes. “I can still go,” I said. “I can try . . .”

  She pulled the blankets up over my shoulders and tucked them tight. “You’re going to stay right here in bed and rest is what you’re going to do.”

  She brought me plain toast and peppermint tea and a stack of old Better Homes and Gardens. “We’ll be home around noon.” She kissed my forehead and left.

  It was another fifteen minutes before I heard their voices drift out the front door and the truck start up and drive away. And another ten minutes of silence after that before I got up, got dressed, put on my shoes, and went out the back door.

  Earlier, Deputy Santos had stopped by to drop off our duffel bags. Her car pulling into the driveway had woken me, and I’d crept to the landing at the top of the stairs, sat tucked in shadows where no one could see me. They tried to keep their voices low, but I still heard every word.

  “We’ve arrested him for Taylor Bellweather’s murder,” Deputy Santos had said. “Officially.”

  “Oh.” This was Franny, her voice fluttering like a baby bird. “Oh no. No, no.”

  Zeb asked, “What about bail?”

  “His arraignment’s scheduled for Tuesday morning. Until then, we’re going to have to hold him.”

  “There must be some mistake.”

  “There’s evidence. Witnesses. Too many things pointing us in his direction.”

  “An explanation then,” Zeb said. “He must have had some kind of reason, something that makes sense.”

  “He’s refusing to cooperate. He said even if he told us the truth, we wouldn’t believe him, that we’d already made up our minds. Then he asked for a lawyer.”

  “But that doesn’t mean . . .” said Franny. “He couldn’t have possibly . . .”

  “It just doesn’t look good. Things aren’t adding up right. There’s just too much . . .”

  I went back upstairs at this point and buried my head under my pillow. When I told Franny I was too sick to go to church, I wasn’t lying. Not exactly. But how much of my stomachache was from thinking of all those people packed so tight together staring and whispering and casting judgment between hymns, and how much was guilt for my part in all this, I couldn’t tell.

  My father, murderer. And yet, I didn’t believe it.

  The grass in the meadow was trampled and dull. Boot prints marred the dirt. A wadded-up latex glove had been dropped and forgotten under our picnic table. Yellow tape hung limp from a tree branch beside the path leading to our swimming hole. In the apiary, the bees flew in and out of their boxes. Nothing had changed for them. Though the police had left the hives alone, the lean-to where we kept our tools was empty. They’d taken Bear’s hive tool and smoker and everything else he needed to take care of his bees. They’d even taken my suit. Evidence. That’s what they were looking for; maybe that’s what they’d found.

  The bees would be fine by themselves for a few days, and the established colonies could go on indefinitely, if we left them to it. They had enough honey stored to last into next spring when the flowers started blooming again. It was the newer colonies I worried about, especially the swarm we’d just brought home. Those bees hadn’t had enough time to prepare and, to survive the winter, they’d need our help. Wasn’t anything I could do right now, though, nothing I was willing to do without my gear anyway. I left the hives and went to the teepee.

  As I stood on the threshold, looking in, everything was chaos. Bear’s cot was flipped onto its side, his blankets heaped on the floor. The small chest was open, the clothing inside tossed. The filing cabinet drawers were open, too, and I saw now what that crashing sound had been yesterday. A jar lay in pieces, shattered around a
thick puddle of honey. Between then and now, a few bees had followed the scent and found their way inside the teepee. They gathered up the amber sweetness, then swayed drunkenly out the open flap and back to their hives.

  I righted Bear’s cot, then picked up the folding chair that had also been lying on its side and returned it to its place next to the small table. I gathered up papers that had been strewn every which way and started to sort through them. Some were Bear’s sketches, the ones he’d hung from the ceiling. I stacked those in a pile together on one corner of the table. Others were receipts and order forms, paperwork for the honey business. I stuffed those into an empty pillowcase to take back with me to Zeb and Franny’s.

  I found a photograph shuffled in among a stack of beekeeping magazines. It was one I’d seen before, but so long ago, I’d forgotten all about it. A clean-shaven young man with cut-short auburn hair had his arm around the waist of a fairy-sprite woman with high cheekbones and dark freckles, brown hair that fell in curls around her shoulders the way mine used to. She leaned close to him, her head tilted up, her ash-blue eyes fixed on his face, and her mouth frozen in a funny, crooked smile that held all their hope, all their love. Their entire future trembling on her lips: happiness, children, growing old together, dying together. When Mom showed me this picture all those years ago, she’d told me she and Bear had been on their honeymoon in the Italian countryside when a man named Giovanni, who’d been riding past on his bicycle, offered to take their picture in front of an olive grove. She’d said Giovanni had wanted them to kiss for the shot, but Bear had been too shy. I stared at the photograph another second longer, trying to recognize my parents in the faces of these strangers, this woman and this man, so young and in love. This woman with her whole life before her. This man who had nothing to hide.

  I tucked the photograph in my back pocket and gathered up the last of the scattered papers. My name written at the top of one sheet caught my attention.

  Dear Sam,

  I’m sorry.

  The rest of the page was blank.

  I shuffled through the stack. Here was another one:

  Dear Sam,

  There’s so much I want to tell you about what happened but

  The last word ended in a streak of ink, like someone had bumped his elbow, causing the pen to skid.

  Another sheet just had my name and a date from three years ago scrawled in the top corner, but nothing else. There must have been twenty or thirty of these things, letters started but never finished. Words scratched out, whole sentences sliced through with thick black ink. The paper was thin, the sharpness starting to fade. These letters had been written years ago. I tried to put them in order, but most didn’t have dates. Even if they did, I still wouldn’t have been able to sort out what he was trying to say.

  He’d written only a few words on each piece of paper, mostly I’m sorry or I wish things could have been different, I wish I could have been better. The earliest one was written in January the year I turned eight, when I was still too young to understand much of anything. I had refused to talk to Mom for three whole days that winter, giving her the silent treatment because I wanted to punish her. Because I thought it was her fault Bear didn’t want to come home, her fault we couldn’t go live with him in the meadow permanently. Her fault our family was broken.

  This letter started out the same as all the others: Dear Sam.

  And then:

  It snowed today. Enough for me to make a snow family. And when I look at the four of them standing so silently in white, I am reminded of you and your sister and your beautiful mother. I am reminded of what we might have been.

  But after that, nothing. A bunch of blank lines.

  I couldn’t decide whether to feel grateful for these letters—knowing my father thought about me when I wasn’t around, knowing he tried—or pissed off because they didn’t make sense and they weren’t finished and, even if they had been, he’d probably never intended to send them to me. I settled for indifference and piled the letters on the table beside Bear’s drawings.

  When I left, I closed the teepee flap behind me and tied it shut.

  I carried the pillowcase over my shoulder. Along with the honey paperwork, I’d also thrown in Bear’s drawing pencils and empty sketchpads, thinking he might like to have them in jail, if that was even allowed.

  I walked through the trees toward Crooked River. The deputies had come through here, too, flattening the grass and Queen Anne’s lace, leaving deep depressions in the soft ground, tearing apart the woods, looking for clues—small, large, anything that would prove Bear’s guilt beyond a shadow of a doubt.

  On the short drive back to Franny and Zeb’s, I’d told Deputy Santos about finding and then losing Taylor Bellweather’s body, hours before Tony Grant found her a second and final time. I told her, too, about how Bear had left us in the meadow all night and about finding the jacket in his satchel the next morning, the key a couple days later. When she asked me why I hadn’t said something right away, that first time they came to the meadow, I told her I’d been too scared. I thought we were going to get in trouble. I told her Bear had promised me he’d had nothing to do with the murder, and I told her it was my fault we hadn’t contacted the police sooner, not his.

  “I thought I could protect him.” It was the exact wrong thing to say considering the mess we were in, but it was too late for me to take any of it back now.

  Deputy Santos had tightened her grip on the steering wheel. “It’s not your job to protect your father. He’s supposed to be the one protecting you.”

  There was a time before the meadow when all four of us lived together in a two-bedroom duplex in Eugene, six blocks from the university. Mom laughed a lot and sang country songs while she made dinner. Daddy wore suits to work and came home for lunch sometimes. Ollie was a baby, not even a year old, but she’d already said her first word: Pa. I was five going on six and believed the world was Saturday cartoons and playing catch and mint chocolate chip ice cream with fudge sauce on top. We were happy. Then Daddy left.

  Maybe it would have been easier if I had known it was coming. If he had packed a suitcase or kissed us good-bye or given us some kind of reason. But it wasn’t like that. One day, he just didn’t come home. I waited for him by the window, the way I always did, but the driveway stayed empty. I waited the next day, too. And the day after that. Finally, Mom sat me down and held my hand and told me he wasn’t coming home, not for a while anyway. She said it wasn’t anything we’d done, that he just needed some time alone to find himself again. And it seemed strange to me, that he’d gotten lost in the first place. To lose your own self seemed an impossible thing.

  I stopped waiting by the window, but in the dark, after Mom tucked me in and kissed me good night, I made up stories to keep myself from crying. Stories that centered on Daddy being stuck somewhere because of circumstances beyond his control, stuck but desperately trying to find his way home. Stories like he’d been kidnapped and thrown into the back of a van, driven into the woods and left to wander, or his car had broken down in the middle of a desert, or he’d been flying somewhere for work and his plane had crashed on a tropical island. I thought it was only a matter of time before a rescue team found him or he stumbled into a gas station, and then the phone would ring and I would answer and hear his voice on the other end telling me not to worry, he was coming home.

  The story I came back to most often was that he’d been in some sort of accident and hit his head, lost consciousness for a while, maybe even had amnesia. He’d lost his driver’s license and didn’t have any other sort of identification on him, and so the doctors and nurses had no way of knowing who he was, or how to reach his family. One night, almost a year to the day he’d gone missing, I so thoroughly convinced myself that this was the only explanation for his absence, that I ran into the kitchen, where Mom was boiling water for tea, and started shouting, “Where’s the phone book?!”


  She almost dropped the kettle on her foot. “What is it? Calm down. Why do you need the phone book? Sam, talk to me.”

  “The hospitals.” I was close to hyperventilating, my head too light, my heart pounding too fast. “We have to call the hospitals.”

  Mom squatted at eye level and grabbed my shoulders. “Slow down. I’m having trouble understanding you.”

  “Dad,” I said. “He’s hurt. He doesn’t remember who we are. We have to find him and help him remember.”

  I tried to pull away from her, to go and find the phone book on my own, but she’d clutched me tight, pulled me close to her chest, and whispered against the top of my head, “Oh, honey. Your daddy’s not hurt.”

  And that’s when I realized she knew exactly where he was. That’s when I understood he wasn’t lost at all. But when I asked her to tell me why he’d left and where he’d gone, she said it wasn’t anything I needed to worry about. I was too young. No matter how many different ways I asked, she always gave me the same response, “When your father’s ready, he’ll tell you.” But I didn’t see how that was possible. He wasn’t here. He wasn’t anywhere.

  Two years passed and life went on. Then one night, a Wednesday, we were eating dinner—meat loaf, green beans, and applesauce—and I was trying to convince Mom to buy me a new winter coat. She was in the middle of saying “Your old one still fits” when the phone rang.

  Mom answered, and I could tell by the way she crumpled into a kitchen chair—her head falling forward, her hair covering her face, her hand bracing the weight of it all—that it was him.

  “Where are you?” she said. “I thought you were going to call this morning?” And then she was silent for a long time, just listening, nodding her head like he was in the room with us instead of somewhere far away. Finally, she said, “Okay. Mm hmm. Okay. I love you, too,” and then held the receiver out to me. “It’s your father.”

  I pressed the phone to my ear but didn’t say anything for a few seconds. I just wanted to hear him breathing. After a while, he said, “Hello? Sam? Are you there?”