Hero

by Mike Lupica

  “How did you know . . . ?”

  “You’re starting to sound like a broken record, boy.”

  “So you know Kate, too?”

  “In a manner of speaking.”

  “And I suppose you know Alba, and Uncle John?”

  The old man smirked. “Even your buddy Spence.”

  Zach thought: It’s like he’s been following me.

  He said, “Were you here the day the plane crashed? Did you see it happen?”

  “Didn’t need to,” Mr. Herbert said. “What happened to him had been happening for a long time, and he was the only one who didn’t see it. On either side of the fight.”

  “What does that mean?” Zach said. “You either saw the crash or you didn’t.”

  “And the thing is, I tried to warn him.”

  “You tried to warn him,” Zach said. “About what, exactly?”

  “You ever hear the expression about people starting to believe their own press clippings? That’s what started to happen to your father.”

  “You’re telling me that my dad did something that caused this to happen?”

  The old man paused a beat before answering.

  “In a way, yes.”

  Zach Harriman was starting to get dizzy now, trying to keep up with this, all of it swarming around him like flies.

  Mr. Herbert said, “It wasn’t just one thing, mind you. It was a lot of things, over a lot of years. Almost like he was another very smart guy accumulating too much debt.”

  “Listen,” Zach said, “I have to get back to the city soon. So if you know something about my dad’s accident—even though I don’t think it was an accident—how about you just tell me.”

  “You’re not ready for that yet,” the old man said. “You’re closer than you used to be, a lot closer. But still not there.”

  Zach started to say something smart back to him, but the old man held up a hand, stopping him. “And there are things I could tell you, about both your father and yourself, that you need to find out for yourself. That’s the way it worked for him and that’s the way it has to work for you. The only way.”

  “I wish I knew what the heck you were talking about,” Zach said. “But I don’t. And I don’t have any more time for this.”

  Another smile. “Actually you do. Trust me.”

  “Trust you?” Zach said. “I don’t have any idea who you are, really. Or if Mr. Herbert is even your name. Or if you really knew my dad at all.”

  The old man put out his hand. “Let me see the coin for a second,” he said.

  Something about the casual way he asked made Zach do it. Zach unclenched his fist, held his palm open and handed it over.

  And when it was in the old man’s hand, it was as if a switch had been thrown, the coin suddenly as bright and brilliant as some kind of neon light.

  Almost like the Morgan was on fire.

  The old man’s face was lit by it, too.

  “You should trust me because I was the one who first told your father he had the magic in him,” Mr. Herbert said.

  He tried to hand the coin back to Zach, but Zach pulled his hand away, as if touching it would be like touching a hot stove.

  “Don’t be afraid, boy,” the old man said. “You’ve got the magic, too.”

  He flipped the coin in the air between them and Zach caught it.

  Then the old man turned and began walking away.

  14

  MAGIC?

  What did that mean?

  Zach knew he couldn’t just let the old man walk away like this, not knowing if he’d ever see him again. He’d come here looking for answers and now he had what felt like a hundred more questions.

  “Wait!”

  The old man was moving faster than Zach expected, away from the crash site, deeper into the field, about to disappear into grass as tall as he was, grass that seemed to have sprung up while they’d been talking.

  Zach ran after him, pulling out his cell, seeing that it was one-thirty already, knowing that his chance of making the two o’clock bus was disappearing as fast as Mr. Herbert.

  And then, just like that, the old man was gone.

  Impossible, Zach thought.

  He had only looked down at the phone for a second, long enough to check the time.

  He ran harder to where he had last seen Mr. Herbert. Zach ran as though there was an engine inside him, propelling him, yet one more time he felt out of control, chasing the unknown. Only, this time, the need made him feel almost desperate.

  Not life and death.

  But close enough.

  He had to find this old man, had to find the one person who seemed to know the changes that had been taking place inside him.

  Who claimed to know his father and how he’d died.

  “I was the one who first told your father he had the magic in him.”

  Zach ran through the high grass toward the water, toward the darkest part of the sky, the Morgan trying to burn a hole in the palm of his hand.

  He ran, ignoring the high grass as it whipped him across the face, feeling as if all the wind of the day were at his back now. Closed his eyes and ran, faster. Feeling like he was the one flying now, across this field where his father had crashed.

  Like he’d become invisible.

  When he opened his eyes—like he was coming out of some kind of dream—Zach saw that he was now running across the Sheep Meadow in Central Park.

  Saw that he was home.

  But . . . how?

  Zach leaned against a tree, out of breath, put the Morgan dollar in his pocket and pulled out his cell phone.

  One-thirty. The same time he had seen when he was still trying to make the two o’clock bus more than a hundred miles from here.

  As if he had texted himself home.

  As if by magic.

  15

  HE started walking down Fifth Avenue, toward home, before remembering he couldn’t show up there without Kate, and the Knicks game wasn’t close to being over yet. Tip-off had been at one, which meant the second quarter was just about to begin.

  Maybe I should just text myself over to the Garden, Zach thought.

  See if he could make himself appear at the corner of 33rd and Seventh the way he had in Central Park.

  Thinking: Okay, this is seriously weird.

  Something had just happened to him. Something that the old man said connected Zach to his dad. Something that made no sense, not in the real world anyway.

  “Don’t be afraid, boy,” the old man had said to him. “You’ve got the magic, too.”

  Like this was the movies, or TV, like he was in that show Heroes he used to watch. Or had climbed into an old Fantastic Four comic book.

  Yet he wasn’t made up. And this was no movie.

  Could he really have powers?

  He needed to talk with Kate. Needed the power of her.

  No secrets between them on this. Tell her everything, leave out nothing, hope that she didn’t think he’d lost his mind. Ask her to help him figure out what it all meant.

  He needed to see her right now, prove to her that he was back in the city and not still out on the island getting ready to board that two o’clock bus.

  Zach reached into his pocket. Not the one with the Morgan dollar inside it, his other pocket. Found the ticket to the Knicks he’d left there. He’d offered it to Kate before he left, telling her she could ask somebody else to go to the game with her.

  She’d given him a look and said, “What, and blow your cover?”

  Zach didn’t run this time, downtown and then cross-town to the Garden. He used conventional transportation, putting his hand up and hailing a New York City taxi and saying the words his dad used to let him say:

  “Take me to the Garden.”

  Once, saying that had seemed like all the magic he’d needed.

  He didn’t text Kate on the way or call to tell her he was coming. Zach didn’t completely understand why he wanted to surprise her, but he did. Just be there next t
o her when she turned around.

  He got out of the taxi in front of the Garden marquee on Seventh, walked through the lobby with its huge color photographs of current Knick players, past the mural showing all the great Garden athletes of the past, handed his ticket to the man at the turnstiles and went up the escalator to the floor of the arena, hearing his first cheers from inside as he got closer to the game.

  Usually his excitement at being at the Garden would start as soon as he walked in off the street, but not today. Today the excitement was knowing he was about to see Kate and have her see him, that he had something even more amazing to show her than a Wilson Chandler dunk.

  He kept showing ushers his ticket, telling them he knew where his seat was. As he made his way down toward it, he looked up at the clock above the court, saw there were four minutes left in the first half. David Lee was at the free throw line.

  When he got close, he spotted Kate’s ponytail, saw her leaning forward, all of her energy—Zach sometimes thought you could light their whole building with it—focused on her man, Lee.

  Who made the first free throw.

  “How’s the game?” Zach said, not waiting, sitting down next to her.

  She was as startled as Zach had been by Mr. Herbert, like she was seeing a ghost.

  “Whoa,” she said.

  “Whoa yourself.”

  “You can’t be here,” she said, eyes big.

  “I know.”

  “Oh, good, as long as you know.”

  “Not only do I know. I can explain.”

  David Lee made his second free throw and the crowd cheered. The Celtics called a time-out. The Knicks City Dancers came out to perform one of their numbers to some hip-hop music Zach vaguely recognized, music exploding from everywhere as if everything underneath the spoked Garden ceiling had turned into a giant boom box.

  “You cannot explain how you made it all the way to the Hamptons and back by now,” Kate said over the music. “Unless you flew.”

  Zach smiled and said, “I sort of did.”

  Then he told her they needed to talk and couldn’t do it here. Just like that Kate grabbed her book bag from underneath her seat. And they left.

  When they were down the escalators and back in the lobby, Kate said, “Okay, this is as long as I’m waiting. We’ve got some major weirdness going on here. Did you get on that bus before or not?”

  “I did,” Zach said. “Walk with me and I’ll try to explain.”

  They walked up to 34th Street and then started heading east, past Macy’s and Herald Square. The words came out of Zach like a blast of air. He told her about how strange he’d been feeling lately, like someone else had been living inside him. He told her about the cab dropping him off by Land’s End. Then he told her about the old man, this stranger who seemed to know everything about his dad and him. And how he was certain that the man knew even more, including about the crash.

  He told her what Mr. Herbert had said about the magic.

  “Magic?” she said. “Like pulling a rabbit out of your hat or a quarter out from behind your ear?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “Then what exactly?”

  They were already to Fifth Avenue by now, ready for the long, straight shot up to the apartment.

  “You said I could tell it my way,” Zach said, and he had been, trying to tell it in some kind of order, as it had all happened, knowing the whole time he was saving the best stuff for last.

  “Okay, I’ll shut up,” Kate said.

  “See, when I said that I flew here, I wasn’t lying. Only I didn’t take a plane or a helicopter. I started running after the old man and the next thing I knew, well, I was back here.”

  “You ran all the way from the Hamptons to New York City? Please tell me you’re not making this all up,” Kate said. “That you didn’t hop off the Jitney at the airport stop and take a cab back to the city just to game me.”

  Zach told her the truth. “Not my brand.”

  She stared hard at him, then said, “I know.”

  Neither one of them moving.

  “Powers,” Kate said.

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, that’s a little unexpected.”

  “You think?”

  She smiled then, not the way she did when she was making fun of him. Just a smile that told Zach that she believed him.

  It was the kind of smile that made him feel as if everything was going to be all right, even though he knew that probably wasn’t true, that nothing was going to be the same for him ever again.

  “I guess that leaves me with only one question,” Kate said.

  “Shoot.”

  Kate Paredes smiled at him again and said, “Are you gonna have to wear a cape?”

  16

  WHAT did his mom know about all this?

  Mr. Herbert had said he was a friend of the family. If that was the truth, and who knew what the truth was with this guy, did that just mean Zach’s dad?

  Or did it mean his mom was in on the secret, too?

  But if he asked her about Mr. Herbert, he’d have to explain how he’d met the old man. Every time Zach played it out in his head, no matter how many different ways he tried to start the conversation, it didn’t end well for him.

  Forget about superpowers. Zach didn’t think he had the brainpower to carry it off. He still had to find a way, not just to ask his mom about the old man, but about what the old man had said.

  Had his dad really had powers? And if so, why hadn’t they saved his life?

  Zach waited until the next morning. He and his mom were having their Sunday morning breakfast at their favorite coffee shop. They had been coming here every Sunday for years, always taking the same back booth. Zach always ordered what his dad used to call his “truck stop breakfast”: scrambled eggs and ham with a small stack of pancakes on the side and home fries. He was even allowed to have a black-and-white milk shake.

  Today he was polishing off the last of his home fries when he said, “Mom, is there anything about Dad that I don’t know that I should?”

  As casual as if he’d asked her to pass the salt.

  She was wearing a Harvard sweatshirt that had belonged to his dad. It looked huge on her, yet she never seemed to care. She wore it every Sunday, like it was her coffee-shop uniform.

  She smiled at Zach over her coffee cup.

  “There’s a question out of left field.”

  Zach wanted to keep it light. “You ever wonder why it’s not right field, or center?”

  “No,” she said. “I never did. But this isn’t a baseball conversation, is it?”

  He shook his head. “Dad,” he said.

  She put her cup down and leaned forward. “Well,” she said, “I think there was a lot I didn’t know about your dad’s work.”

  “I’m not asking about his work,” Zach said. “I know a lot of that was classified or top secret and all that. And that he was never really telling us everything, even when one of his missions was over. That’s not what I’m talking about. I was wondering if there was stuff I ought to know about, like, his life.”

  It wasn’t the first time Zach had wondered about this. Even when his dad was alive, Zach had never learned as much about Tom Harriman’s early life as he wanted to. He knew that his dad had been an orphan, raised in group homes until he finally got foster parents—Richard and Carol Harriman—about the time he was Zach’s age.

  Richard and Carol had been in their fifties at the time and living in Greenwich, Connecticut. They paid for Tom to go to Brunswick Academy, a fancy private school, and saw him become a three-sport star there and president of the student body before he went off to Harvard.

  The Harrimans died his freshman year at Harvard, in a car accident.

  “They gave me a life,” he’d said to Zach once. “I just wish they could have seen how it turned out.”

  Zach had heard plenty about his dad’s high school years, and his college years, but very little about being an orphan, the group home
s, about growing up without parents. Tom Harriman had never said anything about trying to find out who his birth parents were.

  Zach had asked his dad once what he’d been like as a kid. Tom Harriman just smiled and said, “Exactly like I am now, just younger.”

  Zach had always wanted more. Now he needed more.

  He asked his mom, “Did he ever tell you about when he was young?”

  “No,” she said. “Usually he’d just make a joke out of it. If I tried to press him, and I did try to press him occasionally, he’d just say, ‘Oh, sure, beat up on the orphan boy.’ But then he always used humor when he wanted to keep me at arm’s length. If we’d have one of our rare arguments and he knew he was in trouble, he’d say, ‘You can’t make me go live on the street. Been there, done that.’ I know there had to have been some terrible times for him, but I couldn’t ever press him enough to get him to talk about them. Now I wish I had.”

  “Me too.”

  The coffee shop was emptier than usual today, quieter, so Zach tried to keep his voice low. “Did he have any talents he never talked to me about?”

  “You mean like sports talents? Come on, you know what he was like. As far as I could tell, he could do anything he wanted to. And well. From rock climbing to high diving to running marathons. He was almost like a freak when it came to all that.”

  Freak, Zach thought.

  With a freak boy. Who knew Spence’s nickname for him would be so dead-on?

  “And in addition to everything else,” Elizabeth Harriman said, “he thought he was the greatest pilot on the planet.” She put sad eyes on Zach and said, “Sorry, kiddo.”

  “No need to apologize.”

  If she was holding back, keeping something from him, she was doing a world-class job of it.

  But he stayed with it.

  “Nothing out of the ordinary, though?”

  “Where are we going with this, pal?”

  “I’m just curious,” he said. “Didn’t you always tell me curious was a good thing? You know what they used to say about Dad: there had to be three Tom Harrimans to accomplish everything he accomplished in his life.”