A Beautiful Fall

by Chris Coppernoll

  “Thank you, Beverly.”

  “Oh, it’s my pleasure,” Beverly said, giving her a carefree smile, just like Noel’s. “Your father is the sweetest man. I was so sorry to hear what happened.”

  “I’ll make sure to tell him hey for you,” Emma said.

  “You do that,” she said.

  Noel and Emma turned the corner and walked down a polished marble hallway, listening to the click of their steps, seeing their reflections beneath them as they walked. They entered the elevator, which they found waiting with its doors open, and pushed the button for the fourth floor. Slowly the doors closed and they felt the small, enclosed space creep upward. Emma closed her eyes, feeling emotionally frayed and physically worn. She’d run an East Coast marathon to get there since that morning. Ever since the mystery phone call had jarred her awake, reminding her that Juneberry had been more than just a dream. Only the one thing mattered now. She wanted to see her father.

  The elevator doors opened on the fourth floor directly in front of the nurses’ station. Emma approached the two women working behind it.

  “Hi, my name is Emma Madison, and my dad was admitted here this morning … Will Madison?”

  “Hi, Emma, I’m Dena. Your dad has told me all about you,” she said, in a way that conveyed he was doing well. “I know you want to see him. He’s right down there in room C.”

  Noel took a step backward, giving Emma space to see her dad privately.

  “I’ll just stick around out here,” he said.

  Dena put aside the folder she’d been charting and led Emma down the hallway. The 5'2" woman gave off an inexplicable feeling of comfort in her powder blue scrub pants, spiffy white tennis shoes, and a basic white smock with teddy bears on it.

  Emma followed without speaking. It was like she was passing through the antechamber of a sacred church. Dena walked with light steps. Emma felt weighed down with the mounting anticipation at seeing her father.

  Dena stepped through the doorway of room C.

  “Will, you’ve got a visitor.”

  Emma entered his room slowly, taking in the sight of her father for the first time in forever.

  Will Madison lay in a sterile hospital bed with an oxygen feed underneath his nose. An IV line dripped clear fluid down a long, transparent tube into his right thigh. He raised his hand slightly and slowly off the bed to wave.

  She stood at the doorway watching him. How much older he looked to her, a mixture of passing years and the survival of a sudden heart attack.

  “Hey, Dad,” Emma said to him in a tone as soft as fleece. She tiptoed into his room, finding a place by the side of his bed. She reached over the metal safety railing that ran the length of his bed and took hold of his hand.

  “You came,” he said, in a voice as dry as an old Western movie. A satisfied smile eased up in the corners of his mouth.

  “Yes, of course,” Emma said, wrapping her other hand around his. “How are you feeling?”

  “Better than I was at breakfast,” he smiled, trying to settle her nerves with humor. “I’m okay, darlin’. They were able to get in there and fix the problem in no time flat.”

  Emma leaned in closer, speaking softly to him.

  “I got here as quickly as I could.”

  “I know you did.”

  Will squeezed her hand.

  “Emma,” Dena said, checking the IV drip and writing in Will’s chart. “I’ll be at the nurses’ station if you need anything.”

  “Thank you,” Emma called out to Dena over her shoulder.

  Emma took a closer look at her dad. His hair was matted, pressed against his chiseled face like salt-and-pepper doll’s hair. His cheeks were red, not as a result of his morning heart attack, but from working outdoors around the farm: his favorite summer pastime. She looked into his coast blue eyes. They radiated intelligence and light … and exhaustion.

  This wasn’t the time to unravel a complicated past. She squeezed her father’s hand again.

  “I’m here, Dad. I’ll stay with you until you get well.”

  She smiled and marveled at how the small, simple expression put her dad at ease. She watched him smile too, just before those intelligent eyes turned down for sleep. The South Carolina lawyer, a man the governor called “The Advisor,” lay frail and silent beneath a thin, cream-colored hospital blanket. Only the fragile, regular bleep of his heart monitor broke the silence.

  Emma returned to the nurses’ station.

  “Dena, I want to thank you for taking such good care of my dad.”

  “That’s what we try to do around here. That’s why they pay us the big bucks.”

  Emma grinned at the remark, more than a little relieved that her dad was all right.

  “Dena, can you tell me anything about the sort of treatment my dad required?”

  “I can tell you he was treated in the ER. They were going to do the procedure in the OR, but Dr. Anderson decided that the treatment could be performed on your father there. He’s the surgeon who inserted the stint, and he’ll be able to answer more of your questions.”

  “Do you know when Dr. Anderson will be in again?”

  “He usually visits patients early in the morning before scheduled surgery. I know he’s scheduled tests today to determine the extent of any heart damage, but as far as long-term prescribed medications and that kind of thing, you should probably talk to Dr. Anderson.”

  Noel approached the nurses’ desk.

  “Everything okay?” he asked.

  “Yeah, I think so. He seems to be doing fine, which is a huge relief.”

  “Praise God.”

  “Yes, absolutely,” Emma said, knowing that it could have been a much different outcome.

  Emma turned her attention to Noel. He’d been so kind all day, but it was time to let him go. Emma wasn’t used to depending on others.

  “Noel, I think I’m going to stay here awhile. You probably should get on with your day. I’m sure you have a lot to do.”

  “I can stay,” he told her. “I mean, I can just stay in the waiting area. I don’t want to get in your way or anything, but you don’t have a car. So, if it’s all the same to you, I think I’ll just stick around.” He joked, “Who knows, you might get hungry for a Snickers bar. I’m the only one of the two of us who knows where to find the vending machines.”

  Emma laughed.

  “You’re really something, Noel. I once asked a taxi driver in Boston to stay outside an office building while I ran in to pick something up. I was back downstairs in less than two minutes, but when I got outside, the taxi was nowhere to be found, and I was paying him money.”

  “You forget, this is my vacation. What better way to chill than to hang out here? It’s quiet. Besides, I’ve got a good book out in the truck. I’ll just bring it in.”

  They looked at each other for a moment without speaking. She knew she needed him and that it would be better if he stayed. She also knew the sacrifice he would be making.

  “Well, thank you,” Emma finally said.

  Noel Connor’s friendly gesture wasn’t merely a small-town custom, although it was in a small town that Noel had learned to practice the art. Noel’s kindness sprang up from the marrow of his bones. Character had been fused into his DNA.

  “I’m just going to the waiting room to collect my thoughts for a while,” Emma said. Noel nodded, the brim of his hat tipping as he watched Emma walk off.

  The rest of the day was a slow haze. Emma sat for hours in the wooden chair next to her father’s bed. She held hands with the sleeping man, sharing a one-sided conversation with the man who had raised her. Finally, Emma herself had fallen into a deep and dreamless sleep.

  o o o

  In the fourth-floor waiting room, Noel Connor sat, still reading his book, settled into the s
ame chair where Emma had last seen him.

  “You’ve been here all this time?” Emma said, shaking her head in disbelief.

  “It’s a good book.”

  “I owe you big-time, Noel, and don’t try to talk me out of it.”

  Noel closed his book.

  “How’s he doing?”

  “He’s awake, and seems to be doing a lot better. Says I’m the one who needs to be getting some rest.”

  “You ready to go to your dad’s house?”

  “Yes, I’d really like to get settled in.”

  They left the hospital the way that they came, past Beverly’s welcoming center, now dark and vacant for the night. Outside, the orange sun was descending behind the tree line with a faint smoky pink sash trailing behind in the clouds.

  “My mom left your dad’s house keys with me,” said Noel. They seemed to have taken care of everything. Conversation was easy with him. The day’s events bonded them into kindred spirits. “She didn’t know if you’d have any, so I’ve got some for you.”

  “Yes, I’ll be needing those,” she said, feeling like someone who’d needed assistance at every turn.

  “She’s the one that found him, you know.”

  Emma felt like a sleuth picking up details here and there about what had happened that morning. “How frightening for her. I’m just glad she was there checking up on him.”

  Noel’s Dodge hummed down Junction Road as the last ounce of daylight dripped into night. Emma gazed out the window, exhausted and hungry.

  Twenty-four hours earlier, she’d been preparing for trial. She left the office late for a steak dinner with Colin at Abe & Louie’s before going to bed on the third floor of her townhouse where the muted sound of taxis lulled her to sleep.

  Somewhere in her weary mind, a thought rattled again in its little tin cup. Who would be the first to ask her, “Why didn’t you come back?”

  Noel switched on his headlights to drive the rest of the dark country two-lane. Soon, he pulled onto the gravel horseshoe drive and shifted the stick on the steering post to Park.

  “Here are the house keys. Do you want me to help you get some lights on?”

  “The porch light’s on. I think I’ll be okay,” Emma said.

  She swung open the truck door, and Noel got out to unload her luggage. The evening moon gave the farmyard a silvery tint. It reminded Emma of all the nights in high school when she, Christina, and Noel’s mom, Samantha, had packed up or unloaded their cars in this drive. Always off on some new adventure, or coming back late from a sunny day at the lake.

  “Noel,” Emma said, turning around from her route to the front door.

  “Yeah?”

  “Thanks,” she said. “For everything.”

  He gave her one more nod of the plain straw hat, and Emma dragged her bags up the grassy walkway illuminated by the truck’s high beams. At the top of the stairs, she pushed open the heavy oak door and waved Noel on.

  Emma walked in and clicked on the entryway lights, peering up the red-carpeted staircase of the hundred-year-old house. It looked weirdly the same as it had when she was in high school. The same family pictures on the walls, younger faces in outdated clothing, looked out through glass and frame. She climbed the long staircase to her old bedroom, toting both suitcases, keeping her mind off the thing she feared most about being alone in the house.

  Emma switched on the golden bedside lamp in her old bedroom and sat on the checkered quilt. She barely possessed the strength but managed to shower and change into her pajamas before crawling into a familiar canopy bed. She hadn’t eaten much that day, just some pretzels and orange juice on the plane, but Emma felt too exhausted to care.

  Emma snuffed out the bedside lamp and lay in the still beam of moonlight stenciled across her comforter. In the murky twilight before sleep, she chased away the absurd feeling that she wasn’t alone in the house and thought of the question one last time: Who would be the first to ask, “Why didn’t you come back?”

  ~ Three ~

  I’m just a small town girl

  And that’s all I’ll ever be.

  —KELLIE PICKER

  “Small Town Girl”

  Twelve years had passed since Samantha Connor had seen her cousin. More than anything, she wanted to be there for Emma like she’d been there for Will on the morning of his heart attack. She considered her discovery of Will in his kitchen that morning more than just an accident of good fortune.

  Emma’s and Samantha’s mothers had been the closest of sisters, like families often are in small-town America. Emma had been too young to remember anything about her mother’s funeral. Samantha, who was five years older, remembered many things, and had many unhappy pictures from that desolate afternoon when her mother broke down crying. She remembered the tears shed behind closed doors, the strangers who came by the house after the service and spoke in low voices. She even remembered the black leggings her mother made her wear to the funeral.

  Samantha had always thought her strong maternal instinct had grown out of that day, a flower from dirt, and given her both cause and capacity to watch over Emma. Samantha couldn’t imagine a world without her own mother, and seeing Emma grow up orphaned from the love of a mother troubled her. Samantha had filled in missing gaps whenever she could.

  She watched over Will, too, when it became clear with the passing years that Emma wouldn’t be returning from Boston. That’s how she’d happened to find him that morning, sitting at his kitchen table in a white T-shirt and striped pajama bottoms unable to move or speak. Beads of sweat had dotted his forehead on a chilly morning in September. That’s what scared her the most. Seeing his right hand clench the front of his T-shirt, his mouth half open but barely able to speak, and the broken coffee mug scattered on the kitchen floor.

  Samantha responded quickly, calling 911 from the wall phone mounted in the kitchen. She stayed with him until the ambulance arrived. Two quick-thinking EMTs immediately transported Will to Wellman Medical rather than treat him on his kitchen floor, a decision that may have saved his life.

  Samantha called Emma using the phone number she found under E in Will’s address book on his work shelf next to the paper-towel rack and her aunt’s yellowing Betty Crocker cookbooks that Will refused to throw away. She sent Noel to pick Emma up from the airport because she knew it was the most efficient thing to do. Samantha was just that way and always had been. She cared for everybody, but she cared for Emma most of all.

  Samantha would have liked to have picked up Emma or followed the ambulance to the hospital or stayed at the hospital with Will. And she would have, if not for the doctor’s warning of keeping away from all excitement until after the baby was born.

  At nineteen, Samantha married her high school sweetheart, Jim Connor, and a year later, gave birth to their first child, Noel. As a freshman, Emma often joined the Connor family dinners or helped with babysitting or spent the night when her dad had to travel.

  Christina Herry had moved to Juneberry from Phoenix, Arizona, in the sixth grade. She and Emma were locker neighbors and quickly became the best of friends, bonding over their wholehearted agreement that Mrs. Holstead, the science teacher, was psychotic. It was the start of a beautiful friendship that deepened through junior high and high school, and included Samantha as often as not.

  After graduation, Christina went on to pursue her four-year undergrad degree at Clemson, a short fifty-mile hop from Juneberry. Emma applied to Boston University, and four busy years later, was accepted to Harvard Law School. Trips to Juneberry became fewer and fewer as her schedule grew more demanding. Inevitably her big-city success pulled Emma away from her small-town past. Like red taillights driving away at night, Emma’s presence ebbed in their lives, becoming smaller and smaller as time went by. Even phone calls between the three best friends faded as the years passed, until only Saman
tha and Christina were left to wonder what had happened. Why had Emma let their friendship slip away?

  “Do you think she’s changed?” Jim asked, unbuttoning his pale blue shirt.

  “Noel said when he picked her up she looked very professional, but that she was friendly. He said they talked a lot.”

  Jim draped his shirt on a hanger and hung it in the closet. He continued talking to Samantha in his T-shirt and boxers.

  “What time are you planning on seeing her tomorrow?”

  “Why? Do you think you could join us?” Samantha asked, half hoping Jim would say yes, yet realizing somehow it would probably be better if he didn’t.

  “I think you need to see Emma by yourself,” he said.

  Jim pulled on a pair of navy blue sweatpants and a silver Clemson sweatshirt. Samantha watched her husband and smiled an easy, contented smile.

  “How is it I never grow tired of your looking after me?”

  “I don’t know,” Jim said. “Guess you’ll have to answer that for yourself. I just know you’re always the one looking after everyone else. Gotta have somebody watching your back.”

  Samantha caught her reflection in the bedroom mirror. After two kids and another one on the way, Samantha felt far removed from her high school figure. She drew closer to Jim and laid her arms over his shoulders.

  “Do you ever wish you would have married someone else?”

  Jim slid his arms around Samantha’s waist and pulled her closer, gently closer. As close as a nine-month pregnancy would allow.

  “Shhhh. We have to keep all this a secret,” Jim flirted with her in a whisper.

  “Keep what a secret?”

  “That marrying the love of your life at eighteen, having two-and-a-half kids, and living in an old house in a small town is the key to happiness.”

  Samantha sighed her contentment. Jim lightly rubbed Samantha’s back.

  “Do you really feel that way?” she asked.

  “You always ask me that like you don’t believe me.”

  “Oh, I believe you,” she said. “Maybe I just like hearing you say it over and over again.”