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Wish You Well(10)

By:David Baldacci


she did squeeze him tightly. "Let's just take it one step at a time. We've got a lot going

on."

Lou stared out the window as she held tightly to her brother. Nothing was forever, and

didn't she know that.



CHAPTER FIVE

IT WAS VERY EARLY MORNING, WHEN THE BIRDS HAD barely awoken and thumped their

wings to life, and cold mists were rising from the warm ground, and the sun was only a

seam of fire in the eastern sky. They had made one stop in Richmond, where the

locomotive had been changed, then the train had cleared the Shenandoah Valley, the most

splendidly fertile soil and temperate climate for growing virtually anything. Now the

angle of land was far steeper.

Lou had slept little because she had shared the top bunk with Oz, who was restless at

night under the best circumstances. On a swaying train heading to a new, terrifying

world, her little brother had been a wildcat in his sleep. Her limbs had been bruised from

his unconscious flailing, despite her holding him tight; her ears were hurting from his

tragic screams, in spite of her whispered words of comfort. Lou had finally climbed

down, touched the cold floor with bare feet, stumbled to the window in the darkness,

pulled back the curtains, and been rewarded by seeing her first Virginia mountain face-toface.

Jack Cardinal had once told his daughter that it was believed that there were actually two

sets of Appalachian mountains. The first had been formed by receding seas and the

shrinkage of the earth millions of years before, and had risen to a great height that rivaled

the present Rockies. Later these ridges had been eroded away to peneplain by the

pounding of unsettled water. Then the world had shaken itself again, Lou's father had

explained to her, and the rock had risen high once more, though not nearly so high as

before, and formed the current Appalachians, which stood like menacing hands between

parts of Virginia and West Virginia, and extended from Canada all the way down to

Alabama.

The Appalachians had prevented early expansion westward, Jack had taught his evercurious Lou, and kept the American colonies unified long enough to win their

independence from an English monarch. Later, the mountain range's natural resources

had fueled one of the greatest manufacturing eras the world had ever seen. Despite all

that, her father had added with a resigned smile, man never gave the mountains much

credit in shaping his affairs.

Lou knew that Jack Cardinal had loved the Virginia mountains, and had held high-angled

rock in the deepest awe. He had often told her that there was something magical about

this stretch of lofty earth, because he believed it held powers that could not be logically

explained. She had often wondered how a mixture of dirt and stone, despite its elevation,

could impress her father so. Now, for the first time, she had a sense of how it could, for

Lou had never experienced anything quite like it.

The bumps of tree-shrouded dirt and slate piles Lou had initially seen really qualified

only as small offspring; behind these "children" she could see the outlines of the tall

parents, the mountains. They seemed unlimited by sky or earth. So large and broad were

they that the mountains seemed unnatural, though they had been born directly from the

planet's crust. And out there was a woman Lou had been named for but had never met.

There was both comfort and alarm in that thought. For one panicked moment, Lou felt as

though they had passed right into another solar system on this clickety-clack train. Then

Oz was beside her, and though he was not one to inspire confidence in others, Lou did

feel reassurance in his small presence.

"I think we're getting close," she said, rubbing his small shoulders, working out the

tension of another round of nightmares. She and her mother had become experts in this.

Oz, Amanda had told her, had the worst case of night terrors she had ever seen. But it

was something neither to pity, nor to make light of, she had taught her daughter. All one

could do was be there for the Utile boy and work out the mental and physical snarls as

best one could.

That could have been Lou's own personal scripture: Thou shalt have no greater duty than

taking care of Thy brother Oz. She meant to honor that commandment above all else.

The little boy focused on the landscape. "Where is it? Where we're going to be?"

She pointed out the window. "Somewhere out there."

"Will the train drive right up to the house?"

Lou smiled at his remark. "No. Someone will be waiting for us at the station."

The train passed into a tunnel slashed through the side of one of the hills, throwing them

into even greater darkness. Moments later they shot clear of the tunnel and then how they

climbed! Their degree of ascent made Lou and Oz peer out anxiously. Up ahead was a