Wish You Well(8)

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 fairytale 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.

As she slid closed the door to the compartment, Oz looked at Lou. "I guess she's not so

bad."

"Oz, she went to take a smoke."

"How do you know she smokes?"

"Jf the nicotine stains on her fingers hadn't clued me in, the fact that she reeks of tobacco

would've been enough."

Oz sat next to his mother, who lay in the lower bunk bed, arms across her middle, eyes

closed, her breath shallow but at least there.

"It's us, Mom, me and Lou."

Lou looked exasperated. "Oz, she can't hear you."

"Yes, she can!" There was a bite to the boy's words that startled Lou, who was used to

virtually all of his ways. She crossed her arms and looked away. When she glanced back,

Oz had taken a small box from his suitcase and was opening it. The chain necklace he

pulled out had a small quartz stone at the end.

"Oz, please," his sister implored, "will you stop?"

He ignored her and held the necklace over his mother.

Amanda could eat and drink, though for some reason unfathomable to her children she

could not move her limbs or speak, and her eyes never opened. This was what bothered

Oz greatly and also gave him the most hope. He figured some small thing must be out of

sorts, like a pebble in a shoe, a clog in a pipe. All he had to do was clear this simple

obstruction and his mother would join them again.

"Oz, you are so dumb. Don't do this."

He stopped and looked at her. "Your problem is you don't believe in anything, Lou."

"And your problem is you believe in everything."

Oz started to swing the necklace slowly back and forth over his mother. He closed his

eyes and started saying words that could not be clearly understood, perhaps not even by

him.

Lou stood and fidgeted, but finally could not take this foolishness any longer. "Anybody

sees you doing that, they'll think you're loony. And you know what? You are!"

Oz stopped his incantations and looked at her crossly.

"Well, you ruined it. Complete silence is necessary for the cure to work."

"Cure? What cure? What are you talking about?"

"Do you want Mom to stay like this?"

"Well, if she does, it's her own fault," Lou snapped. "If she hadn't been arguing with Dad,

none of this would've happened."

Oz was stunned by her words. Even Lou looked surprised that she could have said

something like that. But true to her nature, Lou wasn't about to take any of it back once it

was said.

Neither one looked at Amanda right at that moment, but if they had, the pair would have

seen something, only a tremble of me eyelids, that suggested Amanda had somehow

heard her daughter, then fallen deeper into the abyss that had held her so very tightly

already.

Although most of the passengers were unaware, the train gradually banked left as the line

curved away from the city on its way south. As it did so, Amanda's arm slid off her

stomach and dangled over the side of me bed.

Oz stood there stunned for a moment. One could sense that the boy believed he had just

witnessed a miracle of biblical dimension, like a flung stone felling a giant. He screamed

out, "Mom! Mom!" and almost dragged Lou to the floor in his excitement. "Lou, did you

see that?"

But Lou could not speak. She had presumed their mother incapable of such activity ever

again. Lou had started to utter the word "Mom" when the door to the compartment slid

open, and the nurse filled the space like an avalanche of white rock, her face a craggy pile

of displeasure. Wisps of cigarette smoke hovered above her head, as though she were

about to spontaneously combust. If Oz had not been so fixated on his mother, he might

have jumped for the window at the sight of the woman.

"What's going on here?" She staggered forward as the train rocked some more, before