Chapter 8 - The Journey South
Three days later, a long black Lincoln sedan pulled off the Interstate onto Route 16 in Raleigh County, West Virginia.
The mountains were dark purple against the gray November morning sky, their sharp ridge lines dotted with the black skeletons of oak trees and the rusted iron frames of old coal tipples that had been abandoned twenty years ago.
Nathan was driving.
He had left his dark suit and polished leather shoes in New York. He wore a heavy wool flannel shirt, dark blue jeans, and a pair of brown work boots he had bought in Beckley an hour ago.
I sat in the passenger seat, wearing a simple gray coat, holding the blue shoelace from my old folder between my fingers.
"It’s three miles past the church," I said, pointing out the window toward a narrow gravel turnoff that wound up between two steep clay embankments. "Near the second creek bridge."
Nathan turned the wheel, the heavy tires of the sedan crunching over the wet gravel and fallen pine needles.
He hadn't spoken much during the eight-hour drive from Manhattan, but it wasn't a cold silence. Every twenty minutes, his right hand would leave the steering wheel, find mine on the leather seat, and hold it tight for a few miles before returning to the road.
"Are you nervous?" he asked softly as the car bounced over a wooden plank bridge spanning a brown, fast-moving stream.
"I haven't been back since the funeral," I whispered. "Aunt Clara took them to her house two days after I got out of the hospital."
The car rounded a sharp curve near an old coal seam outcrop, and there it was.
A small, story-and-a-half frame house painted a faded yellow, sitting on six brick piers above the red clay garden. A low wooden porch ran along the front, decorated with three plastic pumpkins and a line of drying Indian corn hanging from the rafters.
On the porch steps sat three children.
The eldest boy—Johnny—was nine now. He was tall, thin, with dark hair that stuck up in the back like my father’s used to, wearing a denim jacket that was two sizes too small for his wrists.
Beside him sat Paul, seven, turning a piece of pine wood over in his small hands with a rusted pocketknife.
And sitting on the bottom step, wearing a bright pink woolen hat with two large pom-poms on top, was Lily. She was four.
As the heavy black car pulled onto the grass near the well pump, all three of them stopped moving.
Johnny stood up first, his small hands dropping to his sides, his eyes wide and dark as he looked at the New York license plates.
I opened the car door before Nathan had even turned off the engine.
My boots hit the wet clay, and I ran.
I didn't care about the high lace collar. I didn't care about the stiff wrap around my ribs. I dropped onto my knees in the wet grass four feet from the porch steps, my gray coat trailing in the mud.
"Johnny!" I cried out, my voice cracking into a sob that I had kept locked behind my ribs for two long years. "Johnny! Paul!"
Lily didn't know who I was at first. She froze on the bottom step, her tiny pink pom-pom hat tilting to one side as she looked at the lady in the fine gray coat.
But Johnny knew.
He let out a sharp, high yell that echoed off the mountain wall behind the house, jumped off the porch, and slammed his small body into my chest so hard we both tumbled back onto the wet clover.
"Emily!" he screamed, his arms wrapping around my neck, his cold cheeks pressing against my chin. "Emily! You came back! You came back from the city!"
Paul was second, dropping his pine wood and throwin his arms around my waist, his face buried into the wool of my coat, sobbing so loud the dog at the neighboring farm started barking up the hill.
I held them both, my hands burying themselves into their dark, thick hair, kissing their cold foreheads, their cheeks, their small, chapped ears, crying so hard I couldn't see the yellow house or the purple mountains behind them.
Lily walked down the steps slowly.
She stopped two feet away, her finger in her mouth, her big brown eyes looking at the white roses that Nathan had placed on the dashboard of the car before we left New York.
Nathan stepped out of the driver’s side.
He didn't come close immediately. He stood by the front fender of the car, his broad shoulders framed against the mountain trees, his flannel shirt open at the throat, watching us with tears streaming quietly down his pale, strong face.
Lily looked from me to Nathan.
She walked over to him, reached out her tiny hand, and touched the clean leather of his new work boots.
"Are you the man from the hospital?" she asked in a small, clear voice that sounded just like my mother’s used to when she was singing in the kitchen.
Nathan dropped onto one knee in the mud.
May you like
He didn't care about his new boots. He didn't care about his flannel shirt. He looked at the tiny four-year-old girl who had been carried through a falling roof four years ago, reached out his long, broad hand, and let her small fingers wrap around his thumb.
"Yes, Lily," Nathan whispered, his voice shaking like an old bell. "I’m the man from the hospital. And I’ve come to take you home."
