It was odd to him: being in a wheelchair when he didn't need to be. It was a kind of superficial helplessness, but it was strictly enforced by the pretty nurse looming over him. Tyler felt the weight of her gaze as he shifted around in the vinyl seat to talk to her.

"I'm sure they'll be here any minute," he said, cutting off the words that she had begun to form when he moved. After her mouth closed, her reaction was a delayed customer-service smile—lips curling too far upward to truly be genuine. The wrinkles from her tight-lipped smile gathered around her deep-set eyes, drawing attention to the dark circles surrounding them.

"S'fine, Hun," she said. She sounded tired. "I know how family can be."

"Yeah," Tyler said, rolling his eyes and punctuating the word with a chuckle-like exhalation from his nose. "Mine's pretty... disorganized, to say the least."

Her smile tightened, the strain on the corners of her mouth causing her makeup to crack.

Fifteen minutes prior, Tyler had informed her that his family was "almost here" after he had received a message from his sister that they had arrived in Beckley. The nurse—Heather, maybe—had wheeled him outside despite his thousandth insistence that he could, indeed, walk; and, for the thousandth time on her part, Heather had patiently explained it was just hospital policy as they had stepped from the cool interior of the heat of the West Virginian summer.

In that time, Tyler had tried to pull more conversation out of the woman, but she wore her exhaustion like a Halloween mask. After their most recent exchange, he readjusted himself back into a front-facing position; Heather's face held the type of "no-bullshit" expression that only someone who had been told that their shift relief called off at the last minute could hold. He had seen it many times and worn it often himself. He pulled down on his phone's text messages again, hoping to get them to reload a message that had failed to come through.

Nothing.

He frowned, then turned the phone's screen off and turned it over on his leg, diverting his attention past the white square pillars of the monolithic concrete awning to the mature trees along the hospital drive. The heat had wilted the trees' leaves, giving them a sickly look uncharacteristic of the well-manicured lawn around them. Cars drove leisurely along the road beyond the white curved sign that the trees were planted near, filling the hot, stagnant air around them with the sounds of machine-made breezes and tires rolling along asphalt.

There was something about the mountains—tree-covered, green—on the horizon that caused his stomach to churn with unease. The heat and humidity was just like he was used to in other states he had lived in in the same area, but the air was so laden with the scent of childhood summertimes that it caused a deep pit of dread-filled nostalgia in his body. There was something sickly about home.

Tyler clicked his phone back on, looking for a text message from Kat. She still hadn't sent anything beyond that they had arrived in town.

He ran his fingers along the surface of the black cast wrapped around the entirety of his right leg, frowning at the coarse texture. He had had casts before, as a child, but it had been so long ago that he forgot what it was like to be forced to wear one. The pain was easier to ignore than the immobility of his limb, although the dull, radiating discomfort from below his knee could become unbearable after hours of its throbbing.

He didn't even know what happened. He was on the barge, then he was in the hospital.

The doctor said it was his tibia, that it was broke real bad, and something about splintering and bone fragments. It all was too medical and complicated, especially with how disorienting everything had been, that when the doctor informed him that they would need to place a metal rod inside his leg so he had hope of walking again, Tyler was quick to sign the papers.

For the briefest of moments, he saw the black water of the Ohio River—the way it looked on a moonless night—and then his phone chirped, and he pressed a button on its side to view the notification.

Turning on Harper. C u soon!

Tyler shifted in the chair again, saying, "They just now turned on Harper." Heather sighed, regarding him with a face full of disdain and exhaustion. "I'm so sorry."

"No," Heather said, waving her hand dismissively while shaking her head, "it's fine, Honey. You can't control 'em."

"At least they'll be here soon." He offered a smile about as genuine as Heather's had been minutes earlier, and she returned the expression with a quick up-down of her own lips before turning her attention to somewhere behind Tyler's head—probably her phone.

He typed a thumbs-up back to Kat, then turned his attention to the road just beyond the back of the Raleigh General Hospital sign. There weren't many cars passing by. Despite the people driving by, the cars parked in the lots of the hospital and the buildings surrounding it, there was an emptiness about the place; as though the trees on the mountains in the horizon would close in one day and swallow up Beckley and all the population of the state.

No more morphine, he thought as he rubbed his temples. He usually denied the doses of the stuff offered to him at the hospital, unless his leg was especially painful. It gave him nightmares, and an outlook on the world so grim that he could have been thirteen again.

As a conductor on a cargo train, he had seen the vastness of America, and how empty its heartland felt. West Virginia was a metropolis in comparison to the emptiness of the Great Plains or the vacancy of the Mojave Desert. The crushing desolation he felt seeing the immensity of the earth on those trains mirrored his feelings for Beckley despite the city's buildings or the people were driving by or Heather the nurse standing behind him fed-up with his family's tardiness.

Meadow Bridge, his hometown, was even smaller. His skin crawled.

He pulled up his phone and scrolled through the pages of apps. The icons were inviting with their colors and pictures, but he scrolled past them, onward, then back through, pacing through the pages with his thumb—forward, then backward.

"Looks like they're here," Heather said, pulling Tyler away from his absent swiping. He looked up. A van—an old one, the kind some people lived in, light brown with darker stripes—had pulled on the hospital's lane and was creeping toward them. Kat waved from the passenger seat, the huge grin splitting her gaunt features evident even with the distance between them. Tyler waved back with his left hand, but with less vigor. Dad was in the driver's seat, looking grim as ever.

Heather unlocked the brakes on the wheelchair's wheels, then pushed Tyler toward the curb. She reengaged the brakes just as the van stopped beside them. Before it had even been put in park, Kat opened her door bounded out of the van in a flurry and enveloped Tyler in a tight hug, all the while saying, "Tyler! S'been forever!"

From the open door, Dad's curses as he attempted to get the van to shift into park could be heard clearly over the engine. Kat's short, ginger hair tickled Tyler's cheeks, and, when he reached a hand up to return the gesture, he could feel her spine and shoulder blades through her tank top.

"Kat, you really ought to eat more," Tyler said, punctuating his phrase with a chuckle despite his genuine worry. Kat drew away and shook her head. She was probably rolling her eyes beyond the cats-eye sunglasses, judging by the smile still firmly plastered on her orange-stained lips.

"I'll eat more when they pay me more," she said, hands on her hips. She was thinner than Tyler remembered. She had always been petite, but her body seemed almost angular—her elbows too sharp, shoulders to square and legs too thin.

The van's engine sputtered, then roared as it finally shifted into park. Dad's door slammed, and Tyler looked away from Kat to their father walking around the front of the van. Dad pushed his sunglasses up into his receding hairline, offered a nod to Tyler, then looked to Heather as he came to stand by Kat's side.

"What's the damage?" he asked. His deep, gruff voice was clear even over the unsteady noise of the van's engine.

"He really did a number on himself," Heather said, her voice taking on a much more chipper tone than it had earlier. "I got these papers here that go over how ta take care of 'im, the diagnosis and all that." A stack of papers stapled together was exchanged over Tyler's head. "There's prescriptions in there that need filled too. Some's for painkillers—Oxycontin and ibuprofen—and the other is for amoxicillin to keep 'is leg from getting infected."

Dad held the stack of papers in his hand, heavy eyebrows drawn down as he contemplated whatever was on the first page. He started to thumb through the other pages as the nurse spoke up again, "Let's get him in the van, yeah?"

Kat nodded, then pulled open the door on the side of the van. Its interior was much nicer than its weathered exterior: the carpet had apparently been cleaned, and the aftermarket leather armchairs used in lieu of seats appeared much newer than the van itself. Seated at the small table on the side of the vehicle opposite of everyone was Tyler's grandfather, who was settled into one of the comfortable-looking chairs.

"Hi Papaw!" Tyler said, a sudden rush of joy passing through him. "I didn't know you were coming!"

Despite the sagging, grayish skin on his face, Papaw's smile was still evident as he waved his fingers in Tyler's direction. It had been so long since they had seen each other; since Mamaw passed three years prior.

The nurse walked in front of Tyler, holding a pair of silver crutches. They had practiced with them the day before—or, well, he and another nurse, not Heather, he had only seen her with other patients before.

"Sit up as much as ya can," she said.

Tyler braced himself on the heels of his hands as he stiffly pushed himself forward. A shot of pain ran up his body, radiating from his leg, and he clenched his jaw as it passed through him. He scooted a little further forward, his useless leg stuck straight-out and heavy, and gratefully grabbed the crutch Heather was holding out for him. She gave him instructions on using the crutch to right himself: "Put ya weight on your good leg, yeah, you got it!"

His leg felt like searing flames despite being immobile. The muscles in it tensed and tightened as though attempting to make it bend and move like his other leg. He found himself breathless from pain and a pin drop's away from real tears by the time he was upright. Heather handed him the other crutch, and he placed it under his left arm. He rubbed his eyes and let out a loud breath as the pain began to dull back to normal. A hand touched his shoulder, and he glanced over to see Kat by one side and Heather at the other.

"Alright, let's getcha in there," Heather said. She and Kat spotted him as she guided him on how to very carefully place one crutch, then the other, into the van. In one, jarring movement, he sprung off his good leg and landed inside the van. His cast scuffed the floor, and he made a noise as the edges of his vision blurred.

"That wasn't so hard, was it?" Kat asked. She had both hands on one shoulder, offering less support than one of his crutches.

"Yeah," Tyler said, turning his head to Kat and grimacing at her with all his teeth. Kat had pushed her sunglasses up to her hairline, and her thin eyebrows were drawn down with concern or sympathy—perhaps a combination of both.

"Looks like Dad had some questions for the nurse," she said, looking beyond Tyler. He twisted himself to look, and saw Heather and Dad talking with each other. "Guess it's up to me to get you to your seat! C'mon, you've had crutches before."

"Yeah, but I ain't had a metal rod in my leg before."

"Oh stop your complaining." Kat walked around him, standing on his right side to offer support for the broken side of his body. "Go sit 'cross from Papaw, I gotcha."

Tyler grunted as he hobbled carefully over to the seat across from his grandfather, then slowly slid down the leather back of the chair until he was sitting. His leg throbbed, hot, red-like, and he bit back tears as every thump of his heart made his leg muscles strain and twitch.

"Y'got something to sit my leg on?" Tyler asked through gritted teeth. His leg was stretched out at an uncomfortable angle that pulled on all the muscles and tendons in his groin and back, adding new discomfort on top of the radiating pain.

"I think we got a milk crate," Kat said. "Lemme check." She disappeared to the back of the van, and Tyler focused on breathing through the pain overtaking his senses. The van shook as Kat looked around.

"Y'ain't a-lookin' too good there," Papaw said, cotton-mouthed. Despite himself, Tyler smiled, then he let out a quiet laugh that was mostly expelled air.

"I'd say the same for you, Papaw," Tyler said. His playful intonation was somewhat lost in the pained delivery of the words, but Papaw's face lit up, and he burst into wheezy laughter.

Kat returned, holding a black, plastic crate with web-like holes. She placed it upside-down on the floor by Tyler's broken leg, then, without warning, grabbed his foot and pulled up. Her tiny body strained with the motion, and it took Tyler a moment before he comprehended what it was she was trying to do through the fire coursing up through his leg from her unsolicited motion. He twisted in his seat, which moved his leg upward just enough with Kat's combined effort to get it placed atop the milk crate.

She remained doubled-over, then started laughing. Tyler was dizzy from the strain on his leg, and had slumped back into the chair as his brain fogged over.

"Gosh!" she said, turning her face up to look at Tyler. "That's frickin' heavy!"

"It ain't that heavy," he said, breathless, rolling his head in the chair to lock eyes with his sister. He knew the cast felt heavier than it was; his nurses had all been able to move his leg around freely without needing any help from him, and they had all been women.

The pain became more bearable the longer he sat still, and, soon Kat returned to her upright position. After some effort, Tyler and Kat were able to scoot the crate into a comfortable position for him. The scooting had been much less painful than the lifting, although his leg throbbed much more noticeably thank before, but the strain was evident on Kat's features; her fair skin, which had been lightly tanned, was flushed red by the time the mild physical activity had been finished.

"You're awful red," Tyler said. He was more upright in his seat than he had been before. Across from him, Papaw nodded. Kat brought the back of her hand to her beet-red face, then shook her head.

"I guess I need to drink more water," she said.

"Honey," Papaw said, looking up at her from beyond the folds of his eyelids. "Your health ain't no joke. Ya need ta take care of yourself."

"I know, Papaw," she said. She smiled, but it didn't meet her eyes. Tyler glanced to Papaw. His lips were set in a firm line, almost like he was about to speak again, but then the driver's door swung open.

"Thank ya kindly, Miss Heather," Dad said as he hoisted himself into the driver's seat. "I'll be sure ta give you a call if we need anythin'."

Kat scampered over to the open side door of the van, stepping down onto the curb by the empty wheelchair. She closed the side door, then climbed into the passenger seat while Dad was going through his farewell pleasantries with Heather. How many times had Kat received the same comment and lecture about her health and weight?

Tyler looked to the wall next to him for a seatbelt, his frown deepening when he didn't see one. His leg still ached.

"No seatbelts?" Tyler asked Papaw, who shook his head. "Well, so much for safety, huh?" He glanced down at the table between them, noting the cracking tan Formica and the neatly-folded newspaper turned to the crossword on the back. About half of the spaces had been filled in with heavy-handed block letters in blue ink.

He was going home to Meadow Bridge, with his family. A creeping, cold sensation—empty and dark—passed through him. Every muscle in his body told him to run as the feeling passed over him.

"Alright, you have a good day too." Dad rolled up the crank window, then put the van into gear after Heather had stepped back onto the sidewalk. The van rolled slowly over the speed bump at the end of the pick-up section of the hospital drive, pulling Tyler from the creeping emptiness into a sudden shot of searing-hot pain. It was nothing like lifting his leg onto the milk crate, but enough to make him wish he had taken the nurse's offer up on morphine before Heather took him to pick-up. Nightmares were preferable to pain that only grew worse each time he dared move his leg.

As they neared the end of the lane to turn onto Harper Road in front of the hospital, Kat turned around in her seat and looked right at Tyler. She had her sunglasses on, but he felt the intensity behind her gaze.

"So," she said, beginning the imminent question, "what happened?"

"Wow," Tyler said, sure to coat his words with heavy sarcasm as he slipped out of politeness and into his role as Kat's brother. "Haven't been home in three years and the first thing you ask isn't, 'Tyler, how've ya been?' Really?"

"You coulda came home any time, but ya chose not to." She lowered her sunglasses on her nose, green eyes making contact with Tyler's. "So I'm askin' ya what is finally forcing you to come home."

"I do like bein' employed, Kat," Tyler said. "Not that you'd understand."

Her eyes narrowed, and she pointed at him with her left hand as she said, "I'll have ya know—"

"You kids quit it!" Dad said. Kat's finger was still firmly pointed at Tyler, but she turned to face their father. Papaw was laughing in his wheezing, dry way.

"No amount o' distance o' time will keep kin from bein' kin," Papaw said. Tyler couldn't help but smile, and Kat did the same, dispelling some of the tension in the air. Despite the looming, amorphous fear surrounding home, there was something about being back with his family that, for the moment, was satisfying.

"Kat does have a point, though, Son," Dad said; Tyler braced himself against the table as they made another turn. "Sure, ya schedule might've been odd, but ya could've came home if ya got time off. This must be God a-tellin' ya to come back home, and I would be lyin' if I said I wa'n't a bit curious myself what happened to you."

Black water. The image flashed in front of his eyes, and drew breath from his lungs as if the darkness of the image were drowning him.

"But if ya don't wanna share, that's fine too." He looked up into the rearview mirror, eyes crinkled up around the edges with an implied smile. "I don't need ta know if my son was on some kinda drug barge, af'er all."

Tyler winced as the van went over a bump in the road before they were stopped at a light, then turned his attention outside. Berkley wasn't much of a town. Outside the three windows by his and Papaw's table, the only thing to see were gas stations and weathered strip malls with half their storefronts boarded over.

The Anne Marie wasn't a front for drugs, but it didn't matter what he told Dad or Kat unless it was an outright lie. Mystery fueled their imaginations, and, in their minds, him not knowing what happened to him meant that Tyler was trying to hide something. He almost wished that was the case.

"I bet 'e was trafficking cocaine," Kat said after the van continued forward. "Don't want to disappoint the family more, do ya Ty?"

"Now, don't be like that, Kat," Dad said.

Some things really never changed.

The venom Kat felt toward him was fully merited. Ever since Mamaw died, he had avoided every chance to return to Meadow Bridge. His evasion was so obvious that his family had stopped inviting him to holidays after two years of no-shows.

It made sense for Kat to be a special kind of bitter.

"I really don't know what happened," Tyler finally said.

"Uh-huh." Kat's sarcastic response got a light slap in the arm from Dad as he steered the van onto the highway.

"Really," he said, voice taking on a wistful tone as his mind drifted back to the barge. "I was just keeping an eye on the engines. It was dark—new moon, I think, or maybe rain was comin'. There was some kind of terrible noise, then—" water; black, terrible water "—I don't know." He shook his head, suddenly acutely aware of the silence of his family members and how far-away he must have looked and sounded. He forced a more cheerful tone out of his throat to say, "It's weird, y'know, waking up in a hospital after workin' on a boat for the past few months."

He kept a smile on his face for what felt like far too long. Dad was focused on driving, on the cars swiftly passing them by on the highway, and Kat and Papaw were regarding him in two completely separate ways that felt equally scrutinous.

"Tyler, the barge ran aground," Kat said. "Don't you remember that?"

His fake smile fell. A vague recollection of something about the Anne-Marie running into a sandbar seemed to be jostled out of a deep recess of his memory from Kat's comment. He had no memory of the barge running aground. Someone must have told him at some point, or maybe he read about it.

"I knew about it," he said, "but only after the fact."

Kat's full expression was hidden behind her sunglasses, but her forehead had creased along with her deep frown.

"Strange things always seem t'happen along them rivers," Papaw said, breaking the silence. "I thank God y'survived with your life, Ty."

Tyler nodded and mumbled his agreement. His coworkers had always touted stories about this monster or that, but the barge had been fairly safe, stable work. Rivers had different complications than oceans; the worst that would realistically happen would be a barge running aground onto a sandbar or hitting a bridge or debris. Considering the danger of boats at sea, Tyler had always chocked the river stories up to a crew of men aboard a relatively safe and unexciting vessel wishing to feel as important as men at sea.

Yet, the way everything happened... it certainly was strange. Maybe not strange in the way Papaw was implying, nor the kind of "strange" that people whispered about the Great Pyramids or Stonehenge, but his inability to contact anyone at the company about what had happened felt they-want-to-dodge-a-lawsuit kind of strange.

He looked out the window as they finally merged onto I-64. Besides the highway itself, any signs of civilization along the road were sparse, even just outside Beckley. The mountains towered above the land on either side of the van, trees full and green under the clear summer sky. The grass along the sides of the road was browning from heat, and some younger trees were as wilted as the ones in the hospital's courtyard.

"So," Dad said after some time, "what has this son o' mine been up to? 'Fore the accident an' all."

Tyler pried his gaze from the window to look at the rearview, noting Dad's eyes trained back on him.

"Well, since I saw y'all last, I, uh..." he trailed off; there was a lot of time to cover. "I mean, I had the barge job on the Ohio, of course. Before that, I had my conductor job on the transcontinental trains." He frowned. There was a lot he left out. "I mean, I've just been hoppin' place to place, y'know, like I always do." His leg hurt.

"What made ya wanna work on a barge?"

"I'unno, seemed cool. Hadn't done it before, and I mean, I liked the train job—the Great Plains just kinda creeped me out. At least there's civilization along the Ohio River."

"I think ya just get bored," Kat said. Papaw looked up from doing his crossword, then shook his head before returning his attention to it.

"Probably," Tyler said, despite both he and Kat knowing that 'boredom' was only part of the truth. She always teased him about how he ran away from everything, and she was absolutely correct; not that he cared to do anything about it.

"Whatever the case," Dad said, "I ain't glad y'broke your leg, but I am glad ya get to stay with us—even if s'against your will."

Tyler grimaced, partially from the van rolling over another bump and from the idea of living with his father or sister. He asked, "Where am I staying anyway? With you? Kat?"

"I ma—"

Papaw, still looking at his crossword, pen in hand, said, "He cin look over my house."

Kat's head whipped around, and Tyler could only imagine how wide her eyes must've been behind the sunglasses. Dad looked just as surprised in the rearview mirror.

"Look over your house?" Tyler asked.

"I ain't gettin' younger. I hain't seen much o' the world, an' I was plannin' on askin' ya t'go along w'me, Tyler, but considerin' your leg an' all..." He looked up from his crossword. "I'm takin' that vacation to Florida I've been talkin' about fer years. Need someone t'take care o' my house whilst I'm gone."

"Florida's beautiful, Papaw." Tyler smiled, reaching out and touching his grandfather's cold fingertips. "You're going to love it there." Papaw smiled at him. "I'm sad I can't go, but... thank you for lettin' me take care of your home."

Dad and Kat were uncharacteristically quiet. When they weren't interrogating Tyler, they had been bickering back-and-forth through the ride, but they were both silent for a discomforting amount of time.

Finally, Kat asked, "Does this have to do with what happened in th' holler?"

The holler? Which holler?

There was a new kind of silence as Papaw turned his whole body toward Kat. Tyler's questions felt stuck in the back of his throat as Papaw beckoned Kat to lean closer with a single finger, then whispered into her ear. His gray, age-spotted hand came up to hide his lips from view as though Tyler could lip-read, then he sat, slowly, back into his chair.

Kat's tanned face had paled considerably, and she settled silently back into her seat.

It was as though the air had been tainted. Dad switched on the radio, sifting through the different degrees of static before settling on a static-riddled country station that Johnny Cash was playing on. Kat never put her feet back up on the dashboard. The question she had raised in Papaw's company was like cursing in front of the man—a type of true, nasty sin. Despite the curiosity nagging the back of his head, Tyler remained silent and watched the hills and trees roll by as they traced their way across nowhere.