Good Hope Road

Silence hung over us like a cloud as we left Poetry behind, traveling the backroads south, toward the hospital in Springfield. My thoughts tangled in a web of questions, I watched the miles pass as Drew piloted the truck through muddy low-water crossings and over country bridges where streams of thick brown water crashed against the cement guardrails. Closer to the interstate, the roads were clogged with wrecked cars, construction equipment clearing debris, and sightseers gawking at ruined homes.

Everywhere, the destruction was unimaginable—cars overturned in ditches, trees stripped, power lines hanging from broken poles, entire neighborhoods vanished.

We reached the interstate, and Drew exhaled a long breath through pursed lips, visibly relaxing in the seat beside me. “I think we’ll be all right now,” he said. “I came through here this morning. About a mile from here, a tornado went right across the interstate. There are wrecked cars stacked up two and three deep everywhere. The whole road is closed. A mile south of here you hit the line where the tornado left the ground, and just like that, everything’s normal.” He pointed ahead. “Up there, see. You can see where it changes.”

I gazed ahead to where the earth turned from black to green. The metal farm buildings beside the road were barely damaged, just a few sheets of tin lifted from the edges of the roofs.

“It’s hard to believe,” I muttered, but my thoughts weren’t really on the tornado damage. My mind was spinning with questions. Will Daddy be awake when we get there? What news will the doctors and nurses have about Daddy, about Nate? Will we be able to take Nate home? What will happen afterward . . . ?

The sign beside the road said, SPRINGFIELD 15 MILES. I knew from going for Mama’s cancer treatments that the hospital was only ten. Ten more miles . . . What then?

Drew’s hands tensed on the steering wheel, as if he were thinking the same thing. “I hope Darla’s gone when we get there,” he muttered. “I’m not in the mood to deal with her crap.”

The knot in my stomach pulled tighter. Drew’s ex on top of everything else . . . “It doesn’t sound like things are too good between you and her,” I probed, even though I knew it was probably a subject better left alone. Drew and I had enough problems of our own to deal with. Still, what he’d said to her bothered me. I told you before, my family is none of your business. . . . Did that mean they had talked about us before?

I waited to see if he would say anything more. He glanced sideways and saw me watching him as we pulled off the exit to the hospital.

“She’s always in my business, that’s all,” he grumbled, looking over his shoulder to weave into traffic on the access road. “Always trying to get in my head, acting like I’m one of her social work cases, or something. I don’t need that crap.”

“Is that why you don’t want her to know about us?” I wanted to swallow the words as soon as they were out. Yet I wanted to know the answer.

“But she doesn’t know about us, does she? She doesn’t know how things were with Mama and Daddy and us?” The pain of his rejection stabbed the old wound inside me.

“You sound like her.” Drew pulled the truck into the parking lot of the hospital, threw it in park, and got out, clearly anxious to end the conversation. He stood with one hand on the door, scanning the parking lot, probably looking for Darla’s car.

I peered through the mud-spattered windshield, gazing at Vista Ridge Hospital. It loomed twelve stories high, its dark granite surfaces and mirrored windows reflecting broken images of Springfield that looked like the work of the tornado itself. I glanced over my shoulder to make sure it was only a mirage.

Nearby, a news crew was interviewing a doctor outside the emergency room. I heard the drone of their voices through the open window, but not the words, and I wondered if that doctor had treated Daddy or Nate. I wondered if he had dealt with the kind of chaos after the storm that we had seen in Poetry.

Everything that had happened in the Poetry armory seemed unreal now. The undisturbed city street behind me made it seem as if the tornado couldn’t possibly have happened just an hour’s drive north in Poetry. My mind grasped the idea that I was going inside to see Mama after one of her cancer treatments.

“I guess we’d better go in,” Drew said, following my line of vision to the news crew. “Check on Daddy first, see if he’s awake.”

I nodded, my stomach rolling over. I tried to picture Daddy in a hospital bed, pale and weak, helpless the way Mama had been after her cancer treatments.

I don’t want to go inside. “What do you think Daddy will say?” Will he ask what happened at home? “I . . . I mean, how do you think he’ll be?”

Drew squinted at our reflection in the hospital windows. “We’ll just have to see. He’ll be pretty weak, if he’s awake at all.” I could see in him the same thing I felt inside, that thin white line between duty and fear. He closed the door and walked to the sidewalk without waiting to see if I was following.

I slid from the truck and hurried after him, following through the doors and into the building. The air inside was strong with the smell of antiseptic and thick with the odor of people and bedding.

I looked up and down the halls as Drew went to the desk and asked for Daddy’s room number. Around us, both sides of the corridors were lined with beds filled with people. I wondered if all of the other hospitals were as overwhelmed as Vista Ridge.

A little boy stirred on his bed nearby in the hallway, whimpered, and turned over in his sleep. Stepping closer, I laid a hand on his arm and looked at his head, where his hair had been shaved away and a long gash had been closed with sutures. He sniffled quietly, his cheeks and lashes wet with tears as he muttered drowsily.

“Ssshhhh,” I whispered. “It’s all right. Just rest for now.” The straight blond hair clinging to his forehead made me think of Nate when he was younger.

The boy quieted and I stood watching him breathe. I wondered where his mother was, and why he was lying in the hallway all alone with no one to comfort him.

She nodded, a flash of sadness crossing her face. She wiped it away as if she were erasing a blackboard, looked at the boy’s chart, and took his pulse. “Probably having a nightmare. It’s common. It’ll get better with time. It just takes time . . . and prayer. Lots of prayer.” She hung the chart again and walked away.

Tears prickled in my eyes, and I turned away, trying not to think of what it meant, that after nearly forty-eight hours he was still alone and no one knew his name.

“It’s just sad to see so many people hurting.” I ran my hands up and down my arms, smoothing away the goose bumps. “Seems like it’s too big of a mess for anybody to take care of, like things will never be all right again, I mean.”

Drew put a hand on my shoulder, and we started toward the elevator. “If you’d seen how bad this place was a couple days ago, you’d think this was all right.”

“I guess so.” I thought about how bad Poetry was a couple days ago, and how things were slowly coming back to some kind of order. “I just feel sorry for people having it so bad. That little boy over there in the bed has had surgery on his head, and they haven’t even figured out who he is yet.”

Drew laughed softly under his breath as we stepped onto the elevator. “Guess you haven’t changed much. You always did want to rescue every lost critter that got dumped on Good Hope Road. Remember when you found that litter of kittens in the culvert outside, and you hid them in the barn and sneaked milk out to feed them with an eyedropper?”

“Oh, my gosh, I had forgotten all about that.” I had forgotten a lot about those days before Drew left and Mama got so sick. “I kept those kittens for weeks, remember? I used to get you up at night, because I was afraid to sneak out to the barn by myself and feed them.”

For a minute I forgot where we were, caught up in the warmth of the memory. “We used to sit out there in the barn for a long time, remember, and listen to the crickets chirp and the coyotes howl.” My eyes started to close, and I could smell the damp summer air again, feel the cool mist as it rose from the dew-covered pastures, see stars glittering through the gaps in the old tin barn. “That was so . . . peaceful.” At that moment, everything in me wanted to go back to one of those secret summer nights, when I was safe in the barn with Drew.

The elevator chimed, and the doors swung open. The summer mist, and the coyotes, the stars, the rhythmic sounds of the insects rushed out the door like air being sucked into a vacuum.

Drew let out a quick breath and stepped into all that was left—the sterile corridor of the hospital. “Until Daddy found the damned things and drowned them all.”

He pushed open the ICU door, and we stepped into the nurses’ station. Behind glass panels up and down the hallway, patients lay connected to masses of wires and tubes. Around them, medical staff moved purposefully and loved ones stood by bedsides with worried faces.

I followed Drew down the hall, hearing the breath moving in and out of my body, my heart beating slowly, in time with the beeping machines.

Come on, Jenilee, get your head together. I heard Mama’s voice in my mind. She sounded impatient. I knew she expected me to go in there and take care of Daddy.

I wished we had gone to see Nate first. Seeing Nate, alive and smiling, making jokes and laughing, would make everything else easier. It always did.

“There’s Daddy,” I heard Drew say. He motioned through the doorway of an ICU cubicle, and both of us stood in the entrance, watching a nurse move efficiently around a stone-still body covered lightly with a sheet and wrapped in a tangle of machines, tubes, and wires, like a bull trapped in a barbed-wire fence.

“You can go on in and speak to him for a few minutes, if you want to. He probably won’t wake up at this point. He was responsive for about an hour earlier today, but he was in a lot of pain and became combative with the IV and tubes, so he is pretty heavily sedated now. We brought your brother down to see him and they were able to talk for a few minutes, but he has since become weaker. His pulse rate dropped and we’ve had to put him back on the oxygen mask.”

“I’ll leave you alone now. Only a few minutes, though, all right?” She laid her hand on my arm as she passed. “Things look a little more encouraging today, overall. They think they’ve halted the internal bleeding, but he’s still very weak. Don’t stay long.”

We stood a moment longer in the doorway. Finally I stepped into the room. Three steps forward, and I stood at the foot of Daddy’s bed.

I squinted at the bed, trying to see Daddy in the swollen, bruised face with the tube coming from the nose. I listened to the slow rise and fall of his breathing, tried to imagine his voice. I couldn’t see anything left of the hard, angry man I remembered. Silent and pale against the wrinkled white sheet, he was just another lost creature, like those kittens, at the mercy of forces stronger than he was.

The figure in the bed didn’t answer. The room was silent except for the rhythmic sound of the pulse oximeter and the steady beep of the EKG.

“Let’s go see Nate,” I said. “The nurse said they were trying to keep Daddy under for a while. It probably isn’t good for us to be here talking to him.”

I turned to follow him. Just before I slid my hand free, Daddy’s fingers squeezed mine. I looked at his face, but there was nothing—no movement, no flutter of eyelids. Laying his hand against the sheets, I turned and followed Drew out the door.

We left ICU and wound through the corridors to Nate’s room. My fingers burned in that hot circle of Daddy’s life. I knew that he would wake up. He would wake up and he would take over our lives, like he always had.

I didn’t tell Drew. I didn’t want him to know how I felt inside. It was wrong of me to think that way about Daddy when he lay near death in a hospital bed. He needed us now.

We came to the room that was Nate’s, and Drew pushed open the door. There was only a small walkway in between rows of beds. Nate was sitting up, his leg raised on a stack of pillows, encased in a cast that ran from his ankle to his hip.

The other boys in the room looked up as the door swished closed behind us. Disappointment that we weren’t there for them registered on their faces. Nate’s face lifted into an easy smile, the smile I remembered except for the swollen black-and-blue eye above it.

All the love I had for him filled me, and I rushed forward, grabbed him in my arms, and drank in the scent and the feel of him.

“Oh, God,” I heard myself whisper, my voice shuddering with tears that I couldn’t keep away. “Oh, Nate, thank God.”

Nate held on to me for a minute, then started trying to wiggle out of my grip. “You’re gonna give me broke ribs to go with my broke leg,” he complained, chuckling in that silly way of his. “Geez, Jenilee, turn loose already.”

He rolled his eyes, blushing and looking twelve, not sixteen. “Geez, cut that out already.” Pushing my hand away, he looked around the room, which was filled with boys his age, most of them in casts of one kind or another.

“Hey, Nate.” Drew’s expression was a mirror of Nate’s—as if they didn’t know each other at all. “How’s your leg? You look a little better than when I saw you this morning.”

Nate rapped his knuckles against the cast. “Yeah. Don’t hurt so much now. Guess I better stay away from metal detectors for a while. They stuck a piece of number-five pipe in there and screwed the whole thing back together with toggle bolts.”

For just an instant, Nate looked a little hurt by that. His gaze wavered toward Drew, and his grin fell. He turned back to me, his blue eyes intense, questioning, desperate. “Did you see Daddy? Did you find out anything new? Darla’s been trying all day to get information, but they won’t hardly tell us anything.”

“We didn’t find out anything new,” I said, before the conversation could turn to Drew and Darla. “The nurse said he was a little better, but that’s about all we know. He was sleeping when we were there.” His fingers closed around mine. He squeezed my hand. “He didn’t wake up.”

“Y’all should of come earlier. Darla said maybe Daddy would have been calmer if someone he knew was with him.” He glared narrowly at Drew, as if that were Drew’s fault. Nate had learned to blame Drew for a lot of things. He’d learned that from me.

Drew shrugged, looking out the window, his eyes hard. “Darla’s not a nurse. She doesn’t know.” His eyes said the rest as he glared narrowly at Nate. She doesn’t know Daddy.

Nate straightened in the bed and leaned forward, ready to fight right there in the hospital room. My body tensed and my stomach squeezed into a knot, just the way it always did when chaos was about to break loose in our family. I sat there, as usual, feeling small and powerless.

“Daddy’s full of crap,” Drew shot back. “I told him before I left this morning that I was coming back as soon as I found Jenilee. He was awake when I said it. He knew I was coming back.”

“Stop it!” I heard myself hiss, the words beating in my head like a drum. The other boys in the room turned to look at me. “Just stop it, both of you.”

Drew and Nate fell silent, staring at me openmouthed. “We’re not going to do this. We’re all finally together. Do you know how many people wish they could have their families together right now?” Bold with anger, I flailed a hand toward the door. “There’s a little boy downstairs with stitches in his head and John Doe on his tag, because they haven’t found his family yet.”

Nate crossed his arms over his chest and sank back against the pillows, like a pouting boy. “Sorry, Jen. He just ticks me off.”

“No, Nate, you want to get ticked off,” I spat. “You’re trying to pick a fight. It isn’t anything Drew did.”

“Just shut up about it! Hush about Daddy, and hush about Darla. You’re just trying to make Drew mad.” Nate looked hurt, as if he thought I was choosing Drew over him. For so long, it had been just me and Nate, clinging to each other to keep from being swept under.

I leaned close, putting my forehead against his. “I’m sorry, Nate,” I whispered. “I don’t want to fight. I’m so sick of fighting.”

Nate shrugged away from me, then rubbed his eyes with the pads of his fingers. “I didn’t mean to start anything. I’m just uptight about Daddy. He ain’t doin’ good. He said he was really hurting, and I told the nurse that, and she wouldn’t give him anything else. He got mad and started pullin’ on those IV things.”

“He’s sleeping now,” I said. “It’s all right.” When will it ever be all right? What would the picture of all right look like?

Nate nodded, wiping his eyes impatiently, turning toward the window because he didn’t want Drew to see him crying. “I just keep thinking that if I’d of gotten out of the truck sooner and gone for help . . . If I wouldn’t of sat there and waited for help . . . then Daddy . . . I should of gone for help sooner. By the time I got him here, his belly was so full of blood, he couldn’t breathe anymore, and . . .” He slammed a fist into the mattress, turning onto his side so that his back was to us. “It hurt too bad to get my leg out from under the seat, so I just sat there. I should of gotten out. . . .”

I wondered if Daddy had laid the blame on Nate, or if that was all in Nate’s mind. “That’s not true.” I felt Drew’s hand on my shoulder, his fingers trembling, as close as he dared come to touching Nate.

Nate shook his head violently against the pillow, as if he were trapped in the throes of a bad dream. “He tried to get me to go sooner, but I wouldn’t do it. I told him somebody would come get us out . . . and . . . and then he passed out, and I kept waiting. I should of yanked my leg out from under the seat and gone for help before I did.”

Drew’s shoulders softened, and he turned toward the door, rubbing his forehead. “We should get Nate out of here,” he said quietly. “I’ll go see about the paperwork and check on Daddy one more time.”

“All right.” I turned back to Nate, feeling the air touch my shoulder when Drew’s hand fell away. I shivered, even though the room was warm. Someone coughed in another bed, and I realized again that we were surrounded by people.

“You’ll feel better once we get you home.” I talked to Nate the way I did when he was a little boy and had the flu, or strep throat, or a stomach virus. Those were the only times Nate slowed down long enough to need affection. “The electric is still out, so no TV, but you can lie in your own bed. That’ll feel good, right?”

He didn’t answer, just wiped his face on the sheet and stared out the window, as if nothing I could say would help this time.

Scrubbing my fingernails against my forehead, I tried to think of the right thing to say. “We can’t stay with Daddy. He’s still in ICU. They only let us in for a minute or two. The nurse said they gave him medication to keep him under until they see how he’s doing. The roads will be clear tomorrow, and Drew or I can come back. You can’t stay, Nate. You’re not in any shape for it. You need to get home and rest.”

Just press a bandage to it. Press hard. Hold it long enough, and the blood will stop flowing. Dr. Albright had said that to me when we were working in the armory. I doubted if even he knew how to bandage what was wrong with Nate.