Дэвид Балдаччи - Wish You Well

These people would stare, smile nervously, and then move on to “rejoice” with someone else of a more understanding nature.

Next, they were to go to the grave-site service where the priest would no doubt say more uplifting words, bless the children, sprinkle his sacred dirt; and then another six feet of ordinary fill would be poured in, closing this terribly odd spectacle. Death must have its ritual, because society says it must. Lou did not intend to rush to it, for she had a more pressing matter to attend to right now.

The same two men were in the grassy parking lot. Freed from ecclesiastical confines, they were debating in normal voices the future of what remained of the Cardinal family.

“Wish to God Jack hadn’t named us as executors,” said the older man as he pulled a pack of cigarettes from his shirt pocket. He lit up and then pressed the match flame out between his thumb and forefinger. “Figured I’d be long dead by the time Jack checked out.”

The younger man looked down at his polished shoes and said, “We just can’t leave them like this, living with strangers. The kids need someone.”

The other man puffed his smoke and gazed off after the bubble-topped hearse. Up above, a flock of blackbirds seemed to form a loose squadron, an informal sendoff for Jack Cardinal. The man flicked ash. “Children belong with their family. These two just don’t happen to have any left.”

“Excuse me.”

When they turned, they saw Lou and Oz staring at them.

“Actually, we do have family,” Lou said. “Our great-grandmother, Louisa Mae Cardinal. She lives in Virginia. It’s where my father grew up.”

The younger man looked hopeful, as though the burden of the world, or at least of two children, might still be shed from his narrow shoulders. The older man, though, looked suspicious.

“Your great-grandmother? She’s still alive?” he asked.

“My parents were just talking about us moving to Virginia to be with her before the accident.”

“Do you know if she’ll take you?” the younger man eagerly wanted to know.

“She’ll take us” was Lou’s immediate reply, though in truth she had no idea at all if the woman would.

“All of us?” This question came from Oz.

Lou knew her little brother was thinking of their wheelchair-bound mother. She said in a very firm voice to the two men, “All of us.”

CHAPTER FOUR

As Lou stared out the window of the train, it occurred to her that she had never really cared that much for New York City. It was true that during her childhood she had sampled many of its eclectic offerings, filling her days with trips to museums, zoos, and theaters. She had towered over the world on the observation deck of the Empire State Building, laughed and cried at the antics of the city dwellers trapped in glee or doom, observed scenes of emotional intimacy and witnessed passionate displays of public outcry. She had made some of these treks with her father, who had so often told her that the choice to be a writer was not the mere selection of an occupation, but rather the choice of an all-consuming lifestyle. And the business of a writer, he carefully pointed out, was the business of life, in both its uplifting glory and its complex frailty. And Lou had been privy to the results of such observations, as she had been enthralled by the readings and musings of some of the most skillful writers of the day, many in the privacy of the Cardinals’ modest two-bedroom walkup in Brooklyn.

And their mother had taken her and Oz to all the boroughs of the city, gradually immersing them in various economic and social levels of urban civilization, for Amanda Cardinal was a very well-educated woman intensely curious about such things. The children had received a well-rounded education that had made Lou both respect and remain ever curious about her fellow human beings.

Still, with all that, she had never really become that excited about the city. Where she was going now, that she was very eager about. Despite living in New York City for most of his adult life, where he was surrounded by a large supply of story material that other writers had culled with critical and financial success over the years, Jack Cardinal had chosen to base all his novels upon the place the train was carrying his family to: the mountains of Virginia that rose high in the toe of the state’s topographical boot. Since her beloved father had deemed the place worthy of his life’s work, Lou had little difficulty in deciding to go there now.

She moved aside so that Oz could look out the window too. If ever hope and fear could be compressed into one emotion and displayed on a single face, they were now on the little boy’s. With any given breath, Oz Cardinal looked like he might either laugh till his ribs pushed through his chest, or else faint dead away from utter terror. Lately, though, there had only been tears.

“It looks smaller from here,” he commented, inclining his head at the fast-receding city of artificial lights and concrete blocks stacked around welded threads of steel.

Lou nodded in agreement. “But wait until you see the Virginia mountains—now, they’re big. And they stay like that, however you look at them.”

“How do you know? You’ve never seen those mountains.”

“Of course I have. In books.”

“Do they look all that big on paper?”

If Lou hadn’t known better, she would have thought Oz was being smart, but she knew her brother did not possess even a mildly wicked bone in his whole being.

“Trust me, Oz, they’re big. And I’ve read about them in Dad’s books too.”

“You haven’t read all of Dad’s books. He said you weren’t old enough.”

“Well, I’ve read one of them. And he read parts of all the others to me.”

“Did you talk to that woman?”

“Who? Louisa Mae? No, but the people who wrote to her said she really wanted us to come.”

Oz pondered this. “That’s a good thing, I guess.”

“Yes, it is.”

“Does she look like Dad?”

This stumped his sister. “I can’t say I’ve ever seen a picture of her.”

It was clear this answer troubled Oz. “Do you think she’s maybe mean and scary-looking? If she is, can’t we come back home?”

“Virginia is our home now, Oz.” Lou smiled at him. “She won’t be scary-looking. And she won’t be mean. If she were, she never would have agreed to take us.”

“But witches do that sometimes, Lou. Remember Hansel and Gretel? They trick you. Because they want to eat you. They all do that. I know; I read books too.”

“So long as I’m there, no witch is going to be bothering you.” She gripped his arm, showing off her strength, and he finally relaxed and looked over at the other occupants of their sleeper compartment.

This trip had been financed entirely by the friends of Jack and Amanda Cardinal, and collectively they had spared no expense in sending the children off in comfort to their new lives. This included a nurse to travel with them, and to stay with them in Virginia for a reasonable length of time, to care for Amanda.

Unfortunately, the hired nurse seemed to have taken it upon herself to act as the disciplinarian of wayward children as well as overseer of motherly health. Understandably, she and Lou had not particularly seen eye to eye. Lou and Oz watched as the tall, bony woman tended to her patient.

“Can we be with her for a bit?” Oz finally asked in a small voice. To him the nurse was part viper, part fairy-tale evil, and she scared him into the next century. It seemed to Oz that the woman’s hand at any moment could become a knife, and he the blade’s only target. The idea of their great-grandmother having witchlike qualities had not come entirely from the unfortunate tale of Hansel and Gretel. Oz held out no hope that the nurse would agree to his request, but, surprisingly, she did.