As You Wish

by Jude Deveraux

  It was a very hot day and she and Kit were dressed so differently they may as well have lived in separate countries. Olivia wore long sleeves, her collar up, and a wide-brimmed hat. Her long legs were encased in cotton trousers that reached to her ankles. Kit had on nearly nothing.

  “What about your feet?” Kit asked. “They’re open to the sunshine. Doesn’t that scare you?”

  “You laugh, but you don’t know what sun does to your skin. When you’re forty you’ll look sixty.”

  “And you’ll always look twenty,” he said in such an admiring way that she blushed.

  The old men had delighted in teasing her about the way she and Kit were now working together.

  “You two have certainly become friends,” Uncle Freddy said.

  “I never would have thought that could happen after the way you two started out,” Mr. Gates said.

  “I truly believed that our Livie hated young Kit,” Uncle Freddy said.

  Letty was confused. “But she cooked a second lunch just for him. I thought she liked him.”

  “Did she?” Uncle Freddy asked. “I don’t remember that.”

  Mr. Gates agreed. He didn’t remember that either.

  “It was the best fried chicken I ever had,” Ace said. “How could you forget that?”

  “They didn’t,” Olivia said. “They’re just pulling your leg.”

  That phrase made the children’s eyes widen.

  She didn’t want to be caught in one of their twenty-minute-long “why” sessions, so she changed the subject. “Who wants strawberry Popsicles?” She narrowed her eyes at the men, but her warning just made them laugh.

  It was the next day, as she and Kit were hanging up the laundry, that he heard the screaming. When he dropped one end of the sheet, it scraped the ground.

  “Hey!” Olivia said. “I just washed that. You’re going to have to—”

  “Quiet!” His voice was a command and in the next second he took off running.

  Olivia tossed the sheet into the basket and ran after him. It wasn’t until they’d rounded the trees that she heard the children crying. And there was a low moan of such anguish that it made chills run down her spine. She would have stopped, afraid of what she was about to see, but Kit didn’t slow down.

  When she saw the pond, she halted. To her left were the children, clinging to each other and crying loudly. To her right, Mr. Gates was sitting at the edge of the slimy old pond, his legs in the water. Pulled onto him, facedown, like some sea creature dragged up from the depths, was Uncle Freddy. All of him was wet, with nasty pond weeds clinging to him.

  “Get the kids!” Kit ordered as he went to the two old men.

  “He’s dead.” The agony in Mr. Gates’s voice made Olivia shiver.

  She started toward the children but they ran the opposite way, afraid of what had happened. They were very difficult to catch! She chased them past the chicken coop, through the orchard, and toward the house. “Please don’t let them go in the house,” she said aloud.

  With all those hiding places, she’d never find them.

  She managed to get Ace just as he reached the clothesline. But then, the child was crying too hard to keep running. Olivia went to her knees and pulled him into her arms. His convulsions were making her body shake.

  As Olivia knew she would, Letty stopped running and came back to them. Olivia opened an arm and held her too.

  “We killed Uncle Freddy,” Ace wailed.

  “We drown-ded him,” Letty said.

  She could guess what happened. The children loved to push Uncle Freddy around in his wheelchair. They’d been warned about getting too near the pond with him, but it looked like with all the adults busy that day, they’d disobeyed—a common occurrence with them.

  “It was an accident,” Olivia said, but then she too began to cry. Uncle Freddy and his humor, his kindness and generosity to all of Summer Hill. Gone forever. And poor, poor Mr. Gates. How was he going to live without his friend? How—?

  “I can swim,” came a raspy voice over them.

  Olivia’s head was bent over the children, the three of them clinging together so hard they looked like a human barrel.

  It was Ace who first looked up.

  Kit was standing over them, a weak, dirty Uncle Freddy in his arms.

  “Livie,” Ace whispered, a hiccup in his voice.

  Olivia kept crying. Dear Uncle Freddy. And there was what was waiting for Ace with his mother! It was too much for one child to have to bear in his little life. “I know, Ace, sweetheart, it’s not your fault. It was an accident.”

  “Olivia!” Kit’s voice was stern. She was still holding the children tightly.

  Letty looked at Ace, then turned to see Kit holding Uncle Freddy like he was a baby.

  She let out a scream and pushed so hard that Olivia fell backward onto the ground.

  In the next minute, the children were clutching Uncle Freddy’s hand and laughing, crying, hiccuping.

  “You’re going to get sunburned.” Kit was smiling at Olivia as she looked up at him in astonishment.

  Behind them, Mr. Gates was pushing the wheelchair. From the look of him, he’d aged years.

  Uncle Freddy, his thin, frail body limp in Kit’s arms, smiled at them. “We’re going to put in a swimming pool because I can swim.”

  “Come on, old man,” Kit said, “you’re getting heavier by the minute.” Looking at Olivia, he nodded toward Mr. Gates. He needed to be taken care of.

  She went to him, gave the wheelchair a push that sent it rolling, then picked up his arm and put it around her shoulders. That he made no comment about hugging a pretty girl scared her.

  Ace’s dad, Dr. Everett, was called and while they waited for him to arrive, Mr. Gates insisted on bathing Uncle Freddy. It’s what he’d done since both of them were in their early twenties, and he wasn’t going to neglect his duty now.

  Kit helped undress Uncle Freddy and get him into the hot water, then left him with Mr. Gates, who was still shaking. “They need each other,” Kit told Olivia.

  As for the kids, they were so subdued by what had almost happened that they weren’t making a sound. Olivia gave them peanut butter and jelly sandwiches with glasses of milk and they were in the kitchen, eating in silence.

  Kit had put on a shirt and he and Olivia were sitting on the hall floor, one on each side of the bathroom door. Inside, they could hear Uncle Freddy talking. His voice was low but there was excitement in it.

  “The kids didn’t put the chair’s brake on,” Kit said. “It was all because I made them swear that they wouldn’t go swimming without an adult present.”

  “And Uncle Freddy is an adult.”

  “Right,” Kit said. “I should have added qualifiers. It had to be an adult who could jump in after them if they started to drown. An adult who is not in a wheelchair. One who is—”

  She couldn’t bear to hear him blame himself. “But he found out he could swim?”

  “Yes. His chair rolled into the pond and when he floated out of it, he began waving his arms around. That’s when he remembered how he used to swim. The exertion nearly killed him, but he did make it to the bank.”

  “And that’s when Mr. Gates found him.”

  “Uncle Freddy was so worn-out that he couldn’t move. A lifetime of no exercise takes its toll. When Mr. Gates saw Uncle Freddy lying facedown at the edge of the pond, he assumed he was dead.”

  “And the poor kids...” She started to say more but she heard voices in the kitchen. It looked like the doctor had arrived. “I’ll go.” In the kitchen, Ace had wrapped his arms and legs tight around his father and was crying again. Letty was at the table, tears slowly running down her cheeks.

  “Come on,” Olivia said to the children, “let’s go pick some tiger plants.”

  Dr. Everett, a handsome man, midth
irties, looked at her in gratitude. There were dark circles under his eyes.

  She took the hands of the children and they went outside. They weren’t their usual boisterous selves but wanted Olivia to push them in the swing attached to the big oak tree near the house. It was as though they wanted to revert to being a younger age.

  About thirty minutes later, Kit and Dr. Everett came outside and stood by the car talking.

  Then the doctor looked at his watch, waved in the direction of his son, and drove away. Olivia didn’t like it that he hadn’t said goodbye to Ace and her face showed it.

  “It’s okay,” the little boy said. “His job is very important and my mom needs him.”

  His very grown-up words and tone made Olivia feel that her heart might break. Every Sunday someone came to pick up Ace and take him to see his mother in the hospital. When he got home, it always took Letty quite a while to get him to go outside. Livie had developed the habit of baking a chocolate cake with cherry frosting every Sunday afternoon.

  When the doctor was gone, Kit turned to look at the three of them and grinned, his teeth white against his tanned skin. “Uncle Freddy is out of the tub and he wants ice cream. Anybody else want some?”

  “Me!” the kids yelled and ran ahead. But Ace turned back, took Olivia’s hand, and made her run with them.

  That night, after they got all four kids into bed early, Olivia and Kit flopped down on the couch in the living room. He had made them Tom Collins drinks and she downed half of hers in one gulp.

  “Slow down,” he said. “I’ve had enough disasters today.”

  “You handled everything well,” she said.

  “I did what needed to be done.”

  “I thought Uncle Freddy was dead. He looked like it.”

  “He nearly was,” Kit said. “He only swam about fifteen feet but it’s the most he’s done since his injury. All these years he should have been using an overhead bar, dumbbells. But he didn’t. He—”

  Olivia took his hand and squeezed it. “You were great.”

  When Kit picked up her hand and kissed the back of it, she jerked it away. She suddenly became aware of how alone they were. The men and Ace were tucked away in bed, and Nina had taken Letty home. Kit’s and Olivia’s bedrooms were across the hall from each other. Abruptly, she stood up. “I need some sleep. Today has been too much for me.”

  He nodded but said nothing.

  She paused at the doorway. “What did you talk to Dr. Everett about?”

  Kit closed his eyes for a moment. “Ace’s mom doesn’t have much longer. She’s mostly on morphine for the pain.”

  Olivia stood there, her mind full of what had happened and what was going to happen, and she could feel the tears coming back. She started to turn away, to take her sadness into privacy, but Kit put up his hand, as though telling her to wait. As she watched, he opened a door in a side closet that was full of beat-up old boxes and pulled one out.

  “I brought these with me from home and I think that right now we need them.” He took the box to a big mahogany cabinet on one side of the room. Olivia had never been curious as to what it was, but then, it would take weeks to explore all the furniture in the rambling old house.

  When he lifted the top, she saw that the cabinet was a record player and the whole bottom was a speaker. Inside Kit’s box was a double stack of 45 rpm records.

  She frowned. “You can’t play music now. Everyone is asleep. They need their rest.”

  “Yes, they do. But we need joy more. Uncle Freddy is safe; Mr. Gates will recover; Ace’s mother is alive. Right now, today, this minute, we have everything to be happy about.”

  “You’re right. But just play something soft and quiet, okay?”

  “You got it.” He dropped a pile of records onto the fat spindle and turned the sound up full blast. To Olivia’s horror, out came the raunchy, throaty blast of Steppenwolf’s “Born to be Wild.”

  Olivia nearly leaped across the room as she tried to turn the music off, but Kit grabbed her and began to dance with her, his hips grinding provocatively against hers.

  She fought him for all of about eight seconds, then she yelled, “Oh, what the hell! We’re alive! No one died today!” She gave Kit a look of challenge, a sort of sex challenge. “Come on, Worthless Boy, let’s see if you can dance.”

  “I can’t leap cabbages,” he yelled back, “but with sex, baby, no lessons are required.”

  She kicked off her shoes and started grinding. Using her hips and thighs that had been strengthened by years of dance classes, she went down to the ground and kept moving.

  Kit went with her. He turned so her leg was between his and went down. And down.

  When he leaned toward her as though to kiss her, she pulled back so far her hands touched her ankles. Kit stayed with her.

  Ace was the first one to show up, standing there staring, his eyes sleepy. A minute later, Letty appeared in the doorway—and that made Olivia and Kit start laughing. She was supposed to be at home with her parents, but it wasn’t surprising that she had sneaked out and was sleeping somewhere near Ace—and probably Uncle Freddy.

  The boy ran over and pushed his way between Olivia and Kit, as though laying claim to her.

  “Hey, kid,” Kit said, “this is my girl. Get your own.” Letty, rubbing her eyes, went to Kit.

  The record stopped and there was a moment’s silence as the next one dropped down.

  It was the band Cream, named for being the Cream of the Crop: Ginger Baker, Jack Bruce, Eric Clapton. The best there was. “Sunshine of Your Love” blasted out.

  Kit made another attempt to get to Olivia, but Letty and Ace thwarted him. Laughing, he picked up Letty and began dancing around the big room with her.

  It was no surprise when Uncle Freddy and Mr. Gates showed up. Mr. Gates twirled the wheelchair around in a way that looked like they’d done it many times before.

  What was a surprise was when Nina and Bill walked into the room. They had on swimsuit covers, but no suits on underneath—which sent all the adults into howls of laughter. Obviously, they’d been out having a moonlight swim in the nude.

  “A mating couple,” Kit said to Olivia as Letty’s parents went to the far side of the room and just held each other and swayed.

  The records kept changing and everyone danced. Jefferson Airplane, Rolling Stones, Marvin Gaye, Aretha Franklin, James Brown, Creedence Clearwater Revival. All of it played at a deafening level.

  Somewhere after midnight, the oldest and the youngest gave out. Letty’s parents slipped away into the darkness outside, and Kit lifted Uncle Freddy out of the chair and put him in bed. Mr. Gates took the cot near his friend, refusing to leave the room. Olivia managed to get the kids up the stairs and they fell across the twin beds in Ace’s room. She left them dressed, but put them under the covers.

  When Kit turned off the music, the house had a feeling of being silent, but of also being gratefully, wonderfully awake. The house was an old lady who’d seen wars, births and deaths, and right now she seemed pleased that everyone she loved was safe.

  Olivia stepped into the hall and pulled the door to Ace’s room nearly shut. Kit was standing in front of his bedroom door. He looked so very, very good. He was like all the dreams of male fulfillment that she’d ever had. More than anything in the world she wanted to touch him, feel him, put her skin against his. Their dancing, so close together, had made her very aware of him.

  He was looking at her in invitation. She knew that if she made the tiniest step toward him that he’d open his arms to her, then they’d...

  Before she could have another thought, she mumbled, “Good night,” slipped into her own room, and shut the door firmly behind her.

  * * *

  The next morning, before going downstairs, Olivia had a long talk with herself about her and Kit. She knew that he was infatuated with her, that he
watched her. But it can’t happen, she thought. He would go back to his Yankee college and she’d go to Broadway and end up falling for some producer. She could bear that, but it wouldn’t be fair to him. It was one thing to tell her friend who was playing Jane that she’d had a summer fling with a lusty college boy, but what happened when he showed up with a bunch of his beer-drinking fraternity brothers?

  She’d probably die of embarrassment on the spot.

  No, whatever happened, she needed to be the adult and not let the sight of his beautiful, gorgeous, naked body make her do something that she’d regret.

  She remembered when her mother had first seen Kit. She’d dropped by to give Livie a chinois and pestle to make liver pâté and Kit had walked by on his way to the pond. As usual, he had on very little clothing.

  Her mother lowered her reading glasses and watched him walk the entire distance, until he disappeared in the trees. “Now I understand.”

  Her tone was so suggestive that Olivia was shocked. “Mother!”

  “Dear, you may have come late in life to your father and me, but we spent whole years trying to create you.”

  Olivia was so stunned that she couldn’t speak.

  Mrs. Paget opened her car door. “Actually, young Kit reminds me of your father at that age. Don’t you just love those flat, washboard stomachs?” As her mother started the engine, she said, “Have fun, dear. And I hope you do everything your father and I did.” Laughing at her daughter’s continued silence, she drove away.

  After The Great False Alarm, as Letty’s father dubbed Uncle Freddy’s near death, things changed. Bill had a right to be sarcastic. Because of what happened, he got a lot more work dumped on him. In the past, he’d had the whole thirty-five acres to oversee. High school kids were hired to help, but he said that ever since Woodstock happened last year, all the kids wanted to do was smoke grass and grow hair.

  Then Kit had arrived and taken over nearly everything. For the first time since their daughter was born, he and Nina’d had time to themselves. Bill smiled. Lots of time to themselves.

  But since the near tragedy, Kit spent most of his time giving physical training lessons. He gave two swimming sessions a day to the children, and he spent an hour in the water with the old men. Mr. Gates had never been able to swim, but he needed to help Uncle Freddy, so Kit worked with both of them.