Read Online Wish You Well by David Baldacci - Free Book Online Page A

ties for the boys. Lou studied them. Their expressions ran the gamut from dour to pleased, the children being the most animated, the grown women appearing the most suspicious, as though they believed their lives were to be taken, instead of simply their photographs.
    Amanda, in a bed of yellow poplar, was propped up on fat feather pillows, and her eyes were shut. The mattress was feather-filled too, lumpy but soft, housed in a striped ticking. A patchwork quilt covered her. A faded drugget lay next to the bed so bare feet wouldn’t have to touch a cold wood floor first thing in the morning. Lou knew her mother would not be needing that. On the walls were pegs with items of clothing hung from them. An old dresser was in one corner, a painted china pitcher and bowl resting on it. Lou wandered around the room idly, looking and touching. She noted that the window frame was slightly crooked, the panes of glass filmy, as though a fog had infiltrated the material somehow.
    Oz sat next to his mother, leaned over, and kissed her.
    “Hi, Mom.”
    “She can’t hear you,” Lou muttered to herself as she stopped her wandering and looked out the window, smelling air purer than any she had before; in the draft were a medley of trees and flowers, wood smoke, long bluegrass, and animals large and small.
    “It sure is pretty here in . . .” Oz looked at Lou.
    “Virginia,” Lou answered, without turning around.
    “Virginia,” Oz repeated. Then he took out the necklace.
    From the doorway, Louisa watched this exchange.
    Lou turned and saw what he was doing. “Oz, that stupid necklace doesn’t work.”
    “So why’d you get it back for me then?” he said sharply.
    This stopped Lou dead, for she had no ready answer. Oz turned back and began his ritual over Amanda. But with each swing of the quartz crystal, with each softly spoken utterance by Oz, Lou just knew he was trying to melt an iceberg with a single match; and she wanted no part of it. She raced past her great-grandmother and down the hall.
    Louisa stepped into the room and sat down next to Oz. “What’s that for, Oz?” she asked, pointing to the jewelry.
    Oz cupped the necklace in his hand, eyed it closely, like it was a timepiece and he was checking what o’clock it was. “Friend told me about it. Supposed to help Mom. Lou doesn’t believe it will.” He paused. “Don’t know if I do either.”
    Louisa ran a hand through his hair. “Some say believing a person get better is half the battle. I’m one who subscribes to that notion.”
    Fortunately, with Oz, a few seconds of despair were usually followed by replenished hope. He took the necklace and slid it under his mother’s mattress. “Maybe it’ll keep oozing its power this way. She’ll get well, won’t she?”
    Louisa stared at the little boy, and then at his mother lying so still there. She touched Oz’s cheek with her hand—very old against very new skin, and its mix seemed pleasing to both. “You keep right on believing, Oz. Don’t you never stop believing.”

 
     
    CHAPTER TEN
    The kitchen shelves were worn, knotholed pine, floors the same. The floorboards creaked slightly as Oz swept with a shorthandled broom, while Lou loaded lengths of cut wood into the iron belly of the Sears catalogue cookstove that took up one wall of the small room. Fading sunlight came through the window and also peered through each wall crevice, and there were many. An old coal-oil lamp hung from a peg. Fat black iron kettles hung from the wall. In another corner was a food safe with hammered metal doors; a string of dried onions lay atop it and a glass jug of kerosene next to that.
    As Lou examined each piece of hickory or oak, it was as though she was revisiting each facet of her prior life, before throwing it in the fire, saying good-bye as the flames ate it away. The room was dark and the smells of damp and burnt wood equally pungent. Lou stared over at the fireplace. The opening was large, and she guessed that the