Someone was coming toward the car. A figure moved between the trees beside the creek. It was a boy carrying an umbrella. He was skinny and wore jeans and no shirt. He stepped down to the bank and splashed across to the car with the umbrella over his head. Billy rolled down the window, and the rain swept in, drenching him.
“Are you the doctor?” the boy said.
“Doctor?” Billy said.
“Luther said he saw car lights. We prayed you’d come. Are you smoking pot?”
“I’m stuck on this rock,” Billy said.
“I see that,” the boy said.
“I was making good progress, and the next thing I knew the wheels were spinning.”
“Creeks aren’t the best for driving in a storm,” the boy said.
Billy rolled up the car window. He opened the door and put out his foot. The rock was massive and slick; the creek was about to overtake it. He eased himself out and stood clear of the car. He was still wearing his grandfather’s driving gloves and holding the joint. He lowered one foot into the creek, leaped in, and lunged toward the bank, where his feet sank into the wet earth. “I’m fine,” he said. “I made it.”
“Don’t you have your doctor’s bag?” the boy asked.
He looked to be twelve or thirteen, the age of Billy’s students, but Billy didn’t recognize him.
“It’s our mother,” the boy said.
“Your mother?”
“She’s up that way.” He held the umbrella over Billy, who said, “What’s wrong with her?”
“It’s cancer.”
“I’m sorry,” Billy said.
“She’s up here,” the boy said.
There was no need to lock the car or take the key. Billy put the joint in his shirt pocket with the pills — it would get soaked; he should have left it in the car, but there was nothing he could do about that now — and said, “I doubt I’ll be able to help her. I want you to know that,” and then followed anyway, a few steps behind the boy, to the place where the boy had crossed the creek on his way down. Billy watched the boy wade through the water, and then slogged in after him. The creek here was deep and fast. The car would be all right or not. Billy leaned against the torrent and struggled up onto the bank, and then he and the boy pushed ahead, slipping in the mud and on the mossy ground, pushing branches away from their faces. Once, Billy stumbled, and the boy held the umbrella over him while he got up. The umbrella was torn and bent, and water poured down it onto Billy’s neck.
They went over a rise, and then walked down along what looked like a lane — maybe the land had been cleared at one time — a grassy, open promenade between the trees. The lane led into a hollow. There was a cabin, a shed, really, with a sinking roof and small square windows and a chimney overtaken by ivy. The cabin featured a porch, though not much was left of that, only a few boards elevated on piled stones, with no steps leading up from the yard to the door. The cabin had two front doors, oddly — one beside the other. Billy didn’t see an actual road, or a car parked nearby, but there was trash littering the ground.
The boy hopped onto the porch, closed and shook the umbrella, and stomped clay from his shoes. Billy climbed onto the porch — he had to heave himself up — and kicked the red mud off his own heels. The boy pushed open the door on the left. “I brought the doctor,” he called inside.
“Show him in,” a man answered.
The boy held the door. Billy had to duck under the frame. Water ran from every part of him. The floor inside was missing in places, and the air felt cold, like a draft from underground. It smelled like the earth. Water dripped through the roof. Two windows, one in the rear and one on the side of the cabin, let in faint light — their panes, if they’d ever had any, were gone.
Billy’s eyes were adjusting. The cabin seemed bigger from inside than from out. As he came in, he saw, to the left of the door, a tumble of bags and suitcases. A dividing wall ran down the middle of the cabin, splitting the space — that explained the two front doors — and there was an interior door, partway down the dividing wall, leading to the cabin’s right-hand side. The room on the left, the one he was in, might have been ten feet wide by thirteen or fourteen feet deep. The fireplace and the chimney were over in the other half.
Billy saw a bed pushed up under the window at the back of the cabin. A woman was lying in it, and a man stood over her. The man spoke to the boy on the porch: “Caleb, put down that umbrella and get the doctor something to dry himself.”
Billy heard the other front door open and close, and he heard the sounds of the boy moving behind the dividing wall. Billy could feel his footfalls traveling through the floorboards.
“She’s struggling,” the man said to Billy.
The bed was an old iron thing with a mattress on top. The woman had a coat draped over her and a bundle of clothes for a pillow. Rain spattered the windowsill above the bed but didn’t seem to be getting on her.
“We’ve moved her from corner to corner all night, except where the floor’s out. The water follows her,” the man explained.
“It’s been quite the storm,” Billy said.
He picked his way across the damaged floor to the bedside. His shoes squished.
“Don’t fall through,” the man said.
The man was bald and hadn’t shaved — he wore the shadow of a beard. It was hard to tell if he was old, or maybe just Billy’s age, and he spoke with an accent that reminded Billy of the Appalachian mountain speech he’d heard when he was a boy, but which, even so, he couldn’t place — it wasn’t local.
“I’ll be careful,” Billy said. He felt as if he were seeing through a fog. The splashing rain on the windowsill made a mist in the air, but it was also the pot, deranging his balance, his sense of perspective.
At the bedside, Billy leaned down and saw the woman shudder beneath the coat that was covering her. Then she was still. The door in the dividing wall opened, and the boy appeared and handed him a damp, dirty piece of cloth, a towel, of sorts.
“Thank you,” Billy said.
The man said to the boy, “Go find your brother and tell him the doctor’s arrived.” The boy left the room through the front door. To Billy, the man said, “We didn’t mean to be staying here.”
They stood over the woman on the bed. Why were there no chairs? Everything looked wrecked and rotten.
Billy went down on his knees. The man said, “I know there’s nothing to be done,” and knelt, too.
The woman’s eyes were closed and her mouth was open. Her skin seemed stretched, and her lips were parched. The man told Billy that she’d taken neither food nor water for some time. He and Billy faced each other over her. There was a moment when Billy’s heart raced. The man studied him. Billy looked down. The man said, “You’re not a doctor, are you?”
“No, I’m not. I’m sorry.”
“But you’re here.”
Billy explained, “I teach junior high over in Crozet. I was on my way to the dump to throw some things out.”
“The dump’s not up here.”
“The road was blocked. I took the creek and wrecked on the rocks.”
Billy heard footsteps on the porch. The door opened and the cabin shook as Caleb and his brother came in. The brother was bigger than Caleb, older, and wore a dark shirt. They stood dripping side by side at the foot of the bed, and Billy remembered sitting at his own mother’s deathbed, feeding her a mixture of morphine drops and Ativan, squeezing her hand, and telling her he would miss her, while her breaths came farther and farther apart.