David Baldacci

by Wish You Well (v5)

  “Thanks for the vote of confidence,” said Jack. “I really appreciate it, Amanda. Especially now. You know this isn’t easy for me.”

  “That’s not what I meant. If you’d only think about—” Lou suddenly hunched forward, one arm grazing her father’s shoulder even as her mother retreated. Lou’s smile was big but obviously forced. “I think California will be great, Dad.”

  Jack grinned and gave Lou a tap on the hand. Amanda could sense Lou’s soul leaping to this slight praise. She knew that Jack failed to realize the hold he commanded over his little girl; how everything she did was weighed against whether it would please him enough. And that scared Amanda.

  “Jack, California is not the answer, it’s just not. You have to understand that,” said Amanda. “You won’t be happy.”

  His expression was pained. “I’m tired of wonderful reviews and awards for my shelf, and then not even making enough money to support my family. All my family.” He glanced at Lou, and there appeared on his features an emotion that Amanda interpreted as shame. She wanted to lean across and hold him, tell him that he was the most wonderful man she had ever known. But she had told him that before, and they were still going to California.

  “I can go back to teaching. That’ll give you the freedom to write. Long after we’re all gone, people will still be reading Jack Cardinal.”

  “I’d like to go somewhere and be appreciated while I’m still alive.”

  “You are appreciated. Or don’t we count?”

  Jack looked surprised, a writer betrayed by his own words. “Amanda, I didn’t mean that. I’m sorry.”

  Lou reached for her notebook. “Dad, I finished the story I was telling you about.”

  Jack’s gaze held on Amanda. “Lou, your mother and I are talking.”

  Amanda had been thinking about this for weeks, ever since he had told her of plans for a new life writing screenplays amid the sunshine and palm trees of California, for considerable sums of money. She felt he would be tarnishing his skills by putting into words the visions of others, substituting stories from his soul with those that would earn the most dollars.

  “Why don’t we move to Virginia?” she said, and then Amanda held her breath.

  Jack’s fingers tightened around the steering wheel. Outside there were no other cars, no lights other than the Zephyr’s. The sky was a long reef of suspect haze, no punctures of stars to guide them. They could have been driving over a flat, blue ocean, up and down exactly alike. One’s mind could easily be tricked by such a conspiracy of heavens and earth.

  “What’s in Virginia?” His tone was very cautious.

  Amanda clutched his arm in her growing frustration. “Your grandmother! The farm in the mountains. The setting for all those beautiful novels. You’ve written about it all your life and you’ve never been back. The children have never even met Louisa. My God, I’ve never met Louisa. Don’t you think it’s finally time?”

  His mother’s raised voice startled Oz awake. Lou’s hand went out to him, covering his slight chest, transferring calm from her to him. It was an automatic thing now for Lou, for Amanda was not the only protector Oz had.

  Jack stared ahead, clearly annoyed by this conversation. “If things work out like I’m planning, she’ll come and live with us. We’ll take care of her. Louisa can’t stay up there at her age.” He added grimly, “It’s too hard a life.”

  Amanda shook her head. “Louisa will never leave the mountain. I only know her through the letters and what you’ve told me, but even I know that.”

  “Well, you can’t always live in the past. And we’re going to California. We will be happy there.”

  “Jack, you can’t really believe that. You can’t!”

  Lou once more rocked forward. She was all elbows, neck, knees—slender limbs seemingly growing before her parents’ eyes.

  “Dad, don’t you want to hear about my story?”

  Amanda put a hand on Lou’s arm even as she gazed at a frightened Oz and tried to give him a reassuring smile, though reassurance was the last thing she was feeling. Now was clearly not the time for this discussion. “Lou, wait a minute, honey. Jack, we can talk later. Not in front of the kids.” She was suddenly very fearful of where this might actually go.

  “What do you mean I can’t really believe that?” Jack said.

  “Jack, not now.”

  “You started this conversation, don’t blame me for wanting to finish it.”

  “Jack, please—”

  “Now, Amanda!”

  She had never heard quite this tone, and instead of making her more afraid, it made her even angrier. “You hardly spend any time with the kids as it is. Always traveling, giving lectures, attending events. Everybody already wants a piece of Jack Cardinal, even if they won’t pay you for the privilege. Do you really think it’ll be better in California? Lou and Oz will never see you.”

  Jack’s eyes, cheekbones, and lips formed a wall of defiance. When it came, his voice was filled with a potent combination of his own distress and the intent to inflict the same upon her. “Are you telling me I ignore my children?”

  Amanda understood this tactic, but somehow still succumbed to it. She spoke quietly. “Maybe not intentionally, but you get so wrapped up in your writing—”

  Lou almost vaulted over the front seat. “He does not ignore us. You don’t know what you’re talking about. You’re wrong! You’re wrong!”

  Jack’s dense wall turned upon Lou. “You do not talk to your mother that way. Ever!”

  Amanda glanced at Lou, but even as she tried to think of something conciliatory to say, her daughter proved swifter.

  “Dad, this really is the best story I’ve ever written. I swear. Let me tell you how it starts.”

  However, Jack Cardinal, for probably the only time in his life, was not interested in a story. He turned and stared directly at his daughter. Under his withering look, her face went from hope to savage disappointment faster than Amanda could take a breath.

  “Lou, I said not now!”

  Jack slowly turned back. He and Amanda saw the same thing at the same time, and it pulled the blood from both their faces. The man was leaning into the trunk of his stalled car. They were so close to him that in the headlights Amanda saw the square bulge of the man’s wallet in his back pocket. He wouldn’t even have time to turn, to see his death coming at him at fifty miles an hour.

  “Oh my God,” Jack cried out. He cut the wheel hard to the left. The Zephyr responded with unexpected agility and actually missed the car, leaving the careless man to live another day. But now the Zephyr was off the road and onto sloped ground, and there were trees up ahead. Jack heaved the wheel to the right.

  Amanda screamed, and reached out to her children as the car rocked uncontrollably. She could sense that even the bottom-heavy Zephyr would not maintain its balance.

  Jack’s eyes were silver dollars of panic, his breath no longer coming up. As the car raced across the slick road and onto the dirt shoulder on the other side, Amanda lunged into the backseat. Her arms closed around her children, bringing them together, her body between them and all that was hard and dangerous about the car. Jack swung the wheel back the other way, but the Zephyr’s balance was gone, its brakes useless. The car missed a stand of what would have been unforgiving trees, but then did what Amanda had feared it would all along, it rolled.

  As the top of the car slammed into the dirt, the driver’s door was thrown open, and like a swimmer lost in a sudden rip, Jack Cardinal was gone from them. The Zephyr rolled again, and clipped a tree, which slowed its momentum. Shattered glass cascaded over Amanda and the children. The sound of tearing metal mixed with their screams was terrible; the smell of freed gasoline and billowy smoke searing. And through every roll, impact, and pitch again, Amanda pinned Lou and Oz safely against the seat with a strength that could not be completely her own. She absorbed every blow, keeping it from them.

  The steel of the Zephyr fought a fearsome battle with the hard-packe
d dirt, but the earth finally triumphed and the car’s top and right side buckled. One sharp-edged part caught Amanda on the back of her head, and then the blood came fast. As Amanda sank, the car, with one last spin, came to rest upside down, pointing back the way they had come.

  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.”

  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 anothe
r 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.