“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, midthirties, 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.”