I&#39ll Be There

by Holly Goldberg Sloan

  He’d never seen another one since.

  Since they’d left Montana, Sam’s father always told the same story. His wife had died giving birth to the young one, and then he’d lost his business. Riddle always looked like he was either just getting over a cold or just coming down with one.

  He’d squint out at the world, and people just naturally felt bad for the whole motherless family.

  Clarence said he’d been in auto parts. Not many people asked him about auto parts, and that was a good thing because he knew next to nothing about them.

  He’d explain that he couldn’t pay his employees healthcare insurance premiums, but he’d chosen his workers over profit. He kept it going for as long as he could, and then finally the government came and forced him to declare himself bankrupt.

  Sam and Riddle’s father believed in life experience. That’s what he told the two boys. That’s why he’d never let them go to school once they took to the road.

  But they really didn’t go to school because Clarence didn’t just hate all teachers, he loathed the whole system.

  The two boys had slept late for years. Now that they were older, their father didn’t bother to even try to feed them, and they always woke up hungry.

  Sam and Riddle had been taught to stay out of sight during school hours because people wanted to know why two boys were wandering around doing nothing. Plus it was better to let fast-food places open and have trash build up before they headed into the world.

  They made a habit of not hitting the streets until the sun was high in the sky and knew to say that they were homeschooled if anyone asked. But Sundays were different. Sundays, they could be seen at any time.

  And Sundays there was music.

  Sam pulled on his shoes and stared at his little brother, who was asleep on the stained mattress on the floor in the corner. Riddle’s breathing, as always, was heavy, and his permanent congestion had the wheeze of some kind of new bronchial infection.

  Sam thought about trying to prop his head up higher on the pillow because sometimes that helped, but instead he took a pen off the floor and wrote in large letters on a scrap of paper, Be back soon.

  Sam had seen the First Unitarian Church when they originally came to town.

  Was there a Second Unitarian and a Third? Was it some kind of contest?

  Because now, standing in front of the brick building on Pearl Street, he could see that this house of worship was much more upscale than what he was used to. These First Unitarians were the winners. The parking lot was mostly full and the cars were new and clean, and that wasn’t right for him.

  This church was in the best part of town, and nothing about it looked desperate. He didn’t go into places like this.

  The way he saw it, the less money people had, the more instruments they played and the more food they put out. And the easier they were for him to be around.

  But Sam had been all over his own neighbourhood and, without Riddle at his heels, he had walked faster and somehow had ventured farther than before.

  Sam had heard the pipe organ playing from down the street. It was just too intriguing. And now he could see that the First Unitarian’s large wooden doors at the front were propped open.

  He could get in and get out.

  And maybe catch a glimpse of what was making the amazing sound.

  But it wasn’t that easy.

  The first problem was that no sooner had Sam entered than a man appeared from nowhere and closed the oversize doors. It sounded like the closing of an entrance to a vault.

  Sam slid silently into the pew in the last row. The organ stopped playing almost immediately, and a minister appeared. He wore a robe but also a tie. He leaned into a microphone and offered up some words. Sam never heard anything these people said. Instead he studied the large space.

  To Sam, a room that was clean and smelled vaguely like flowers and candles was exotic. And scary. He was now giving this place his full attention.

  The walls were covered in wood that looked to him like pieces of soft leather. There was a large light fixture that hung from the ceiling up front, and it had rows of tiny candles, but they weren’t really candles. They would look better, he thought, if they weren’t fake. But then it would be impossible to light them without a huge ladder. And also they might drip down onto people, which would be painful.

  The long wooden pews were not comfortable. But they never were. If you want people to pay attention, it was important to keep them from settling in. Hadn’t his father taught him that?

  The man in charge finally stopped speaking, and a choir stood up from a section off to the side. The singers were all ages and shapes, wearing white robes, and they looked to Sam like birds. He didn’t know the names of many types of birds, but he’d seen his share, and he felt sure that some place must have big white birds with clean feathers and hairy heads.

  Then the organ again began to play, and Sam watched as a girl in the group started to weave her way through the other singers. He could see that she was his age. And he could tell, as she edged towards a microphone, that she was very nervous.

  Emily was feeling all sweaty but sort of cold at the same time. This was just ridiculous. Her father, who was standing off to the side, waving his right hand in some way that was supposed to be significant, was for sure not going to ever get any eye contact.

  Once she got to the microphone, she seized on her strategy. She was going to focus on the back.

  The way back.

  Because that’s where the people sat who checked their email and monitored sports scores. The back of the church was filled with bodies that were there but not there. The nonlisteners.

  Those were her people. Or her person.

  Because when she raised her eyes from the floor, she could see that today there was only one body in the last row.

  Emily lifted her chin and opened her mouth and now sang directly to him.

  ‘You and I must make a pact

  We must bring salvation back

  Where there is love,

  I’ll be there.’

  She could hear herself. But not hear herself. And that was the only blessing of her day. Emily knew the song. She knew the words.

  ‘I’ll reach out my hand to you

  I’ll have faith in all you do

  Just call my name and I’ll be there.

  I’ll be there to comfort you

  Build my world of dreams around you

  I’m so glad that I found you.

  I’ll be there with a love that’s strong

  I’ll be your strength, I’ll keep holding on

  Let me fill your heart with joy and laughter

  Togetherness, well that’s all I’m after

  Whenever you need me, I’ll be there.’

  She was singing this all to a guy who she’d never seen before.

  She could see that he was tall and thin. He had dark brown hair, which was wild and messy. Like it wasn’t cut right.

  The person who she was singing to was tan, like he spent a lot of time outside, even though it was still late winter.

  And she realised that he looked uncomfortable. Like he didn’t belong back there. Just like she didn’t belong on the platform up front.

  And he was intently watching her.

  Pretty much everyone was watching her.

  But what suddenly mattered was only that he was watching her.

  Because all that had mattered to her was watching him. And now she’d made that commitment and she couldn’t stop.

  She was definitely giving the words of the song new meaning. Isn’t that what her father had wanted? A heartfelt reinterpretation?

  Was she having an out-of-body experience?

  Her mouth was moving and sounds were coming out, but that didn’t make sense.

  What made sense was in the back row.

  She could not really sing.

  That was just a fact.

  But it was also a fact that she was riveting. She was raw and exposed a
nd not really hitting the notes right. But she was singing to him.

  Why him?

  He wasn’t imagining it.

  The girl with the long brown hair had her small hands held tight at her sides and, maybe because of how bad she was, or because she was staring right at him and seemed to be singing right to him, he couldn’t look away.

  She was saying she’d be there.

  But no one was ever there. That’s the way it was. Who was she to tell him such a thing?

  It was intimate and suddenly painful. Not just for her.

  But now for him.

  Very painful.

  3

  For a long time Sam was certain his mother would rescue him and Riddle.

  Once she realised that they were gone, she would have called the police or the fire department (didn’t they take cats out of trees?) or Mrs Holsing, his second-grade teacher. Or even the neighbours. The ones named Natwick at the end of the street in the blue house who always waved when he walked by. People would be looking. He was sure of it.

  Which of course was the case in the beginning. But his mother wasn’t the kind of woman to lead an effort. She lacked not just the determination but also the organisational qualities of leadership. And it wasn’t her fault.

  When Shelly was a baby, her mother had placed her on the kitchen counter when she came in from the market. She’d only turned her back for a moment and the small child had wiggled free of the plastic bucket that was one of the early versions of a car seat. The straps were so complicated. Who needed them?

  Shelly’s head hit the floor with a thud that sounded like a bat hitting a watermelon. She was unconscious for a full five minutes, only coming around as their station wagon pulled into the emergency-room parking lot.

  The doctors kept baby Shelly overnight and said everything was probably fine. The family couldn’t deny that she was a loving child, calm and easy to care for. But after that day, she no longer had the potential for her father’s brainpower or her mother’s musical ability. If her mind was some kind of computer, that fall to the kitchen floor wiped away whole sections of her hard drive.

  Once Sam’s father took off with her boys, Shelly started going to a bar called My Office. The gimmick of the place was the revolving front door. There wasn’t another one in town, and this piece of salvaged metal and glass, from a former bank building in Denver, made it appear that you were really going into a place of interest.

  In reality, the inside was just the corner space of the neighbourhood mini-mall, and the only other attempt at an office setting was that a wall of dinged filing cabinets made up the bar.

  Shelly went straight there from work, which got her through the hardest time of the day. Dinner hour was when she most missed her two boys, and if she wasn’t drinking, she found herself cooking for people who no longer existed.

  At My Office, Shelly always sat facing the door sipping Shirley Temples because they reminded her of the kids. But her Shirley Temples had two shots of vodka dumped in with the red syrup.

  Clarence had been gone for only six weeks when she got hit. She was walking home after a half dozen sweet drinks when, according to the police report, she darted out into traffic. It was impossible to know if it was suicide, an awkward street crossing, or both. She was pronounced dead on the scene. But they took her to the hospital anyway.

  The nurse who admitted her body was the same nurse who had been there the day, over forty years before, when she had come in as an infant. The nurse had been young then, fresh out of school. Now she was in her sixties and had arthritis in her knees.

  But she remembered.

  She wrote the words Head Injury on the form for the death certificate and at the last minute added in parentheses preexisting condition. She believed in full disclosure.

  Six months later, the town’s local chief of police retired. The new man in charge of the department was an outsider who was all about responding to the immediate needs of the community. With no one pressing for updates on the missing boys, the case moved lower in priority.

  Shelly’s mother passed away from a stroke the following year and, after that, even if they had been found, there was no one to return the boys to. The missing Border children were an open file that was in reality closed.

  But of course Sam didn’t know that.

  He imagined his mother in the old house waiting. Even in his fantasies, Shelly was never in the world looking for him. She was always sitting by the phone, staring out the window, longing for him to come through the front door and into her arms.

  With time the fantasy faded, as did his image of his mother, until when he thought of her, which was rare, she was always in deep shadows, her face unseen. As the years passed, the whole house had turned dark and lost its shape.

  But now, glued to the wooden pew in the back row of the First Unitarian Church, he felt an old feeling flooding over him. Sam’s mother was there, somewhere, reaching out to him. She was trying to show him a way home.

  Because hadn’t she played this song? Hadn’t she sung ‘I’ll Be There’ to him? Is that why he knew this music so well?

  And with the connection, the knot, which was permanently twisted in his stomach, released.

  Emily knew her face was flushed.

  Deep red. She told her friends that when that happened, it was chemical – related to having one of her parents descended from northern Europe – and that it had to do with blood pressure. Her best friend, Nora, read somewhere in a magazine that a red face meant a person was more likely to have some kind of throat cancer later in life.

  But maybe she’d made that up.

  It was confusing. But everything was now confusing.

  This guy, this person, this stranger sitting in the back of the church, was causing her to feel weird. Was it him, or was it all in her? Was she feeling something real or just projecting? But wasn’t singing one of the things that most exposed your soul? And wasn’t her soul exposed enough?

  The choir joined in, harmonising with the words ‘I’ll be there’.

  And then suddenly it was over.

  The organ hit the last note. But instead of stepping back and taking her place in the choir, she moved through the other singers to the steps and left the sanctuary.

  She went down the dark hallway that was hidden by the altar, and she opened the single rear exit door and bolted out into the harsh light.

  Sam watched her flee.

  He understood completely.

  Hadn’t he spent his whole life running? The girl with the off-key voice and the glossy sheet of brown hair and the watery eyes was now gone.

  The choir continued, seamlessly moving on to another song. But Sam was up on his feet as well. He didn’t care that the big wooden doors made noise. He pushed down on the brass bar and was outside.

  In moments he was around the back of the church and standing next to the girl who was in some kind of distress. He put one hand on her shoulder. Her eyes were all watery. He didn’t want her to cry. If she cried, he might cry. Why would they go to that place?

  But he’d learned how to make emotions go away. He was an expert at that. So why was he back here behind the church right now? He was supposed to be invisible. Right?

  Right?

  And then he found himself saying, ‘You’re going to be okay. Really . . . It’s all right . . .’

  He was comforting her. The girl who couldn’t sing and who had been so exposed. Her choir robe parted, and she shook it off and he could see she had on black trousers that fitted over her perfect little legs and a crisp white shirt that clung to her now small, sweaty body.

  Sam suddenly wanted to scoop her up and maybe get on a motorcycle and drive away with her. Except he didn’t know how to ride a motorcycle, but he’d seen that in a movie once on TV and the guy was wearing a military uniform and the girl knew him and she wanted to be scooped up.

  And then, as she stared at him, it was all too much. She abruptly turned away.

  And that’s when h
er breakfast of toast, eggs and bacon made its second appearance of the morning.

  Because this girl didn’t know him and, if she did, she would never want to have anything to do with him. This girl had taken one long, intense look at him and that, combined with her singing, had made her sick. He reached out and instinctively took hold of her long hair to keep it from the next retch.

  He wished he had a rag or a towel or something she could use to wipe off her mouth. But he didn’t and then the side door of the church suddenly opened and a woman was standing there. She said, ‘Emily, are you all right?’

  Sam dropped his hands and released her hair and stepped away and it was over.

  Broken. Done.

  He turned on his heel and took off, moving fast but without running.

  Away.

  Away from her.

  Emily looked from her mother, now heading towards her, over her left shoulder and then her right shoulder to the boy, and she realised that he was going, going, gone. That caused a second wave of anxiety. Where was he? But more to the point, who was he?

  And then her mother was with her, and she picked up the choir robe off the ground and she used it to wipe her daughter’s face, which was sweaty and hot.

  You and I must make a pact

  We must bring salvation back

  Where there is love, I’ll be there.

  But she didn’t know his name. She didn’t know anything.

  Emily shut her eyes. In the orange and red sparkles, which were her eyelids, she saw the parking lot and the Unitarian Church. Maybe she had made it all up. She had a way of constructing stories out of nothing. She saw expressions on people’s faces and imagined all kinds of incidents. That’s just who she was. Curious? Born with too much imagination? A little off-centre?

  But then she opened her eyes, and in the distance, on the sidewalk going up the hill towards Cole Street, was a receding figure. He was real.

  He had been there.

  4

  Sam went home to get Riddle. But his mind kept flashing pictures of her. The girl. With her gaze locked on him. The girl who couldn’t sing.

  Riddle would make the images stop, because he had a way of bringing everything into perspective. With his grey eyes and his wheezy breath, Riddle needed Sam. Even though the brothers were only five years apart in age, it seemed like even more – to them and to the outside world.