Дэвид Балдаччи: Wish You Well

Oz reached for his mother, incomprehension the only thing between the little boy and possibly fatal panic.

With a whipsaw motion of youthful agility, Lou pulled free of the destroyed guts of the car. The Zephyr’s headlights were somehow still working, and she looked frantically for her father in the confusion of light and dark. She heard footsteps approaching and started saying a grateful prayer that her father had survived. Then her lips stopped moving. In the spread of the car’s beams she saw the body sprawled in the dirt, the neck at an angle that could not support life. Then someone was pounding on the car with a hand, and the person they had almost killed was saying something. Lou chose not to hear the man whose negligent actions had just shattered her family. Lou turned and looked at her mother.

Amanda Cardinal too had seen her husband outlined there in the unforgiving light. For one impossibly long moment, mother and daughter shared a gaze that was completely one-sided in its communication. Betrayal, anger, hatred—Amanda read all of these terrible things on her daughter’s features. And these emotions covered Amanda like a concrete slab over her crypt; they far exceeded the sum total of every nightmare she had ever suffered through. When Lou looked away, she left a ruined mother in her wake. As Amanda’s eyes closed, all she could hear was Lou screaming for her father to come to her. For her father not to leave her. And then, for Amanda Cardinal, there was nothing more.

CHAPTER THREE

There was a calm piety in the sonorous ring of the church bell. Like steady rain, its sounds covered the area, where the trees were starting to bud and the grass was stretching awake after a winter’s rest. The curls of fireplace smoke from the cluster of homes here met in the clear sky. And to the south were visible the lofty spires and formidable minarets of New York City. These stark monuments to millions of dollars and thousands of weary backs seemed trifling against the crown of blue sky.

The large fieldstone church imparted an anchor’s mass, an object incapable of being moved no matter the magnitude of problem that assailed its doors. The pile of stone and steeple seemed able to dispense comfort if one merely drew near it. Inside the thick walls there was another sound besides the peal of holy bell.

Holy singing.

The fluid chords of “Amazing Grace” poured down the hallways and crowded against portraits of white-collared men who had spent much of their lives absorbing punishing confessions and doling out reams of Hail Marys as spiritual salve. Then the wave of song split around statues of blessed Jesus dying or rising, and finally broke in a pool of sanctified water just inside the front entrance. Creating rainbows, the sunlight filtered through the brilliant hues of stained glass windows up and down these corridors of Christ and sinners. The children would always “ooh” and “ahh” over these colorful displays, before they trudged reluctantly into Mass, thinking, no doubt, that churches always made fine rainbows.

Through the double doors of oak the choir was singing to the very pinnacle of the church, the tiny organist pumping with surprising energy for one so aged and crumpled, and “Amazing Grace” trumpeted ever higher. The priest stood at the altar, long arms tenaciously reaching to heaven’s wisdom and comfort, a prayer of hope rising from him, even as the man pushed back against the tidal wave of grief confronting him. And he needed much divine support, for it was never an easy thing explaining away tragedy by invoking God’s will.

The coffin sat at the front of the altar. The polished mahogany was covered with sprays of delicate baby’s breath, a solid clump of roses, and a few distinctive irises, and yet that sturdy block of mahogany was what held one’s attention, like five fingers against one’s throat. Jack and Amanda Cardinal had exchanged their wedding vows in this church. They had not been back since, and no one present today could have envisioned their return being for a funeral mass barely fourteen years later.

Lou and Oz sat in the front pew of the full church. Oz had his bear crushed to his chest, his gaze cast down, a collection of tears plunking on the smooth wood between skinny legs that did not reach the floor. A blue hymnal lay unopened beside him; song was really beyond the boy right now.

Lou had one arm around Oz’s shoulders, but her eyes never left the casket. It did not matter that the lid was closed. And the shield of beautiful flowers did nothing to obscure for her the image of the body inside. Today she had chosen to wear a dress for one of the few times in her life; the hated uniforms she had to wear to meet the requirements of the Catholic school she and her brother attended did not count. Her father had always loved her in dresses, even sketching her once for a children’s book he had planned but never got around to. She pulled at her white socks, which reached uncomfortably to her bony knees. A pair of new black shoes pinched her long, narrow feet, feet that were quite firmly on the floor.

Lou had not bothered to sing “Amazing Grace.” She had listened to the priest say that death was merely the beginning, that in God’s enigmatic way this was a time for rejoicing, not sorrow, and then she did not listen anymore. Lou did not even pray for the lost soul of her father. She knew Jack Cardinal was a good man, a wonderful writer and teller of tales. She knew he would be deeply missed. No choir, no man of the cloth, no god needed to tell her these things.

The singing stopped, and the priest once more took up his ramblings, while Lou picked up on the conversation of the two men behind her. Her father had been a shameless eavesdropper in his search for the authentic ring of conversation, and his daughter shared that curiosity. Now Lou had even more reason to do so.

“So, have you come up with any brilliant ideas?” the older man whispered to his younger companion.

“Ideas? We’re the executors of an estate with nothing in it” was the agitated response from the younger man.

The older man shook his head and spoke in an even lower tone, which Lou struggled to hear.

“Nothing? Jack did leave two children and a wife.”

The younger man glanced to the side and then said in a low hiss, “A wife? They might as well be orphans.”

It was not clear whether Oz heard this, but he lifted his head and put a hand on the arm of the woman sitting next to him. Actually, Amanda was in a wheelchair. A wide-bodied nurse sat on the other side of her, arms folded across her flop of bosom; the nurse was clearly unmoved by the death of a stranger.

A thick bandage was wrapped around Amanda’s head, her auburn hair cut short. Her eyes were closed. In fact, they had never once opened since the accident. The doctors had told Lou and Oz that their mother’s physical side had been mostly repaired. The problem now apparently was only a matter of her soul’s having fled.

Later, outside the church, the hearse carried Lou’s father away and she did not even look. In her mind she had said her good-byes. In her heart she could never do so. She pulled Oz along through the trenches of somber suit coats and mourning dresses. Lou was so tired of sad faces, moist eyes catching her dry ones, telegraphing sympathy, mouths firing off broadsides of the literary world’s collective, devastating loss. Well, none of their fathers lay dead in that box. This was her loss, hers and her brother’s. And she was weary of people apologizing for a tragedy they could not begin to understand. “I’m so sorry,” they would whisper. “So sad. A great man. A beautiful man. Struck down in his prime. So many stories left untold.”

“Don’t be sorry,” Lou had started saying right back. “Didn’t you hear the priest? This is a time to rejoice. Death is good. Come on and sing with me.”