I&#39ll Be There

by Holly Goldberg Sloan

  He probably did lots of sports. Maybe he played soccer.

  She was glad that she was still on the school soccer team, even if she really wasn’t even a starter.

  She could see him skiing. But she liked to snowboard better than ski now, so she hoped he felt the same way.

  Her family only went up a half dozen times a year, but they’d gone since she was a little kid. So of course she knew her way around the different runs. But what she really liked best about snowboarding was riding the chairlift and looking down on the snowy trees and pretending she was a bird, flying over the mountainside.

  But she’d keep that to herself. Like a lot of what she felt, which could be alarming to those who didn’t see a painting and want to climb inside the picture to get to know the people. She couldn’t help being that way.

  Her mind drifted to his family. Did they like the outdoors? Did they go camping or love something like sailing? Were they a family that had a strong connection to art or some activity like rock collecting, which was what the Schiffs, who lived on the corner, did every weekend? They were all about quartz.

  Or maybe they were big travellers. She hoped that was their interest. She loved getting on planes and flying places. Maybe his family felt the same way, and maybe his parents, once they got to know her, would want her to go on one of their trips.

  She worried now whether her mom and dad would let her go.

  Would they get all crazy and say it wasn’t right for her to travel with his family? Would her mother insist on calling his mother and going over all the details? She could imagine the whole embarrassing scenario. If this all worked out, she decided she would try to keep the moms to an email-only relationship.

  Emily shut her eyes and slowly let out a long sigh.

  All of a sudden, everything was getting so complicated.

  Every now and then, it actually occurred to Clarence that it might take the same amount of effort to do things in a legitimate way as it was to do them his way. But he’d quickly push that thought aside. Because there was no denying the fact that being a thief was a lot of work.

  But he was used to the struggle.

  Clarence kept his vehicle registration current by peeling off a sticker from the back of someone else’s license plate. He took things from people’s mailboxes – payments, money orders, free samples, and his favourite – credit-card bills with pre-printed cheques to cash.

  He’d called himself John Smith for years. There were so many Smiths that everyone got jumbled up in the records. John Smith. One bad Smith don’t spoil the whole bunch, girl.

  Some of his crimes were petty – he stole magazines from newsstands and crates of produce from the loading docks of markets. But he tackled larger offenses as well.

  He went to construction sites after hours and hauled away tools and building materials. He broke into cars and grabbed purses and cell phones. He went to bowling alleys and walked off with other people’s shoes. He took soap and toilet paper from storage cupboards in public bathrooms. He snatched dogs out of fenced yards and returned them, claiming rewards. He jacked potted plants, firewood and spare tyres.

  And then, when he could feel the net closing in on him, he’d move on. That’s why the truck was always packed. Ready when you are.

  The cops had questioned him too many times to even count. He’d been taken in and held overnight in all kinds of places. Hell, there were warrants out for him in half a dozen states. That’s why he went to Mexico. He thought he could just escape the whole damn country, but they had their own sense of justice down there. If he’d hung out any longer, he’d be missing kneecaps – or a lot worse.

  The boys gave him a story. People felt sorry for a single father. And he’d done right by them. He’d taught his kids to survive, and that was the most important thing you could give a child. He rarely had to hit them any more.

  Now that the oldest boy had gotten so big, he’d laid off that. But he couldn’t get the kid to come with him when he was working it. The boy just refused. Even when he was little. Even if you smacked him.

  The younger one was a piece of work. Who knew what he was thinking? Clarence had seen him out in a meadow when he was four years old eating grasshoppers, and that’s when he knew for a fact that the kid was a dud. He didn’t talk much, but he could draw. Crazy-looking stuff. Too bad there was no money in that.

  Sometimes the voices told Clarence that Riddle was out to get him. So he let the older boy deal with the little kid. He’d learned the hard way. Trust no one. Especially your own blood.

  Clarence couldn’t imagine sticking around this place much longer. He’d scammed the rental house, and soon they’d be after him for not paying. He was only still there because college towns had careless kids with money and lots of things that were easy picking. But he’d already had some close calls. People were too interested in his business.

  Any day now, he’d get the boys in the truck and be moving on.

  8

  Bobby Ellis woke up and realised he was thinking about Emily. How messed up was that?

  He knew he should have been really mad, but he wasn’t. The truth was that he hadn’t ever even really noticed her until Riley Holland, the most popular guy in their class, had pointed out that Emily looked like the quirky girl in the commercial for mini tacos that ran during the Super Bowl.

  Riley Holland had good taste. Bobby knew that. And so after Riley made the connection, Bobby started paying attention to Emily. From-a-distance kind of attention to someone.

  Now he went over it all in his mind. He didn’t do anything. She was weird from the moment she got into the car. And she’d been nice to him all week at school. He’d called her three different times, and they’d talked about homework and their friends and music and even dumb stuff like the weather. She’d listened and even added in some curious comments.

  So who was that other person who got in the car last night? And why did this other person, this crazy girl, interest him more than the nice one?

  How messed up was that?

  Emily told her parents she was going to meet a boy named Sam who she’d met at church. This was true. She told her parents that they would meet at the IHOP on River Road. This was true. She asked her dad if he’d drive her there and she said she’d figure out a way to get home or else she’d call for a ride. This was also true.

  She told them that she was meeting him at six-thirty p.m. This was not true. She didn’t want Sam seeing her being dropped off by her father, so she was willing to wait a half hour to avoid that. It’s not that she was embarrassed by her dad, not more embarrassed than anyone is by their dad, but, still, she was seventeen.

  Sam got there early, too, because he really did not understand the time thing. It had been hard leaving Riddle, but he got him a meatball sub at Subway and a Coke. And he’d surprised his brother with a broken clock radio with the old-style digital eyes, the kind that flopped over the numbers instead of projecting them.

  Sam had taken the back off the radio so that Riddle could see the wires and the small circuit board right away. And then he told him to stay in the house and that he’d be gone for two full drawings.

  Once at the restaurant, Sam took a seat under a tree in the grass that grew in a thin strip in the parking lot. He watched as the silver car pulled up to the kerb. Inside he saw Emily say something to the man driving – her father? – and the man smiled at her as she got out.

  Even though he was in shadow, and it was dusk and he was at a distance, Emily saw him. Why could she pick him out from so far away and be so certain?

  She walked over, and he got to his feet and he smiled. She smiled back and managed to say, ‘Hey . . .’

  He said ‘Hey’ back.

  And then they graduated to two syllables and then three and then sentences. And then whole ideas and the real expression of thought.

  In every possible way, it was different from the night before in the car with Bobby Ellis. Bobby could and did, in her opinion, talk about nothing,
and she found it hard to listen. Sam barely spoke, but everything he said was interesting.

  They didn’t go into the pancake house but just started to walk. There was no destination. She had so many questions but tried hard not to interrogate him.

  He’d made a vow to himself that he wouldn’t tell her anything, if he could help it, about his life, but little things dribbled out.

  He’d only recently moved to town. He had a brother. They called him Riddle. He was the boy she saw with him on the street at night.

  Emily said she had a little brother, too. She told him that she went to Churchill High. She said she wished he went there. He said he wished he did, too. But he said he was homeschooled and added that his father didn’t believe in organised things.

  She didn’t understand but took the silence that followed to mean that she shouldn’t pursue it.

  He tried to answer questions without revealing that he did not follow half of what she said. And she didn’t understand the silences and mistook his utter confusion for deep introspection.

  She decided that he was the best listener she’d ever met. She was talking about something called calculus and he thought maybe that was a medicine. She had played in something called AYSO since she was only five. She laughed and said that even then she’d never been any kind of star.

  A star at what, he wondered.

  He told her that he’d lived for five months in Mexico and that they moved a lot. He talked about places he’d seen and sleeping outside and how he had once walked with his brother and father for thirty miles in a single day when their truck broke down in the desert.

  She said she loved to travel and that she was embarrassed to admit she’d hoped that his family felt the same way.

  And then they were outside her house.

  It was eight miles away, and Emily just naturally had gone there. She tried to get Sam to come in, but he wouldn’t. He said he had to go. He told her that he didn’t have a cell phone, but she gave him her number and he said he’d call her.

  She asked him to meet her the next day, and he said he didn’t think he could. He looked anxious now, and even though he was still there, he was suddenly far away.

  For Emily, he was more than she could have imagined. He wasn’t like the other boys she’d done things with. He didn’t try to tell outrageous jokes or bore her with stories where he was some kind of hero. He didn’t boast about stealing his parents’ vodka and drinking with friends or staying up all night to pull a prank. He didn’t take out a cell phone and check for messages or have all kinds of attitude.

  For Sam, she was like someone from another planet. Planet Contentment. She had energy and enthusiasm, and she had to have never seen what he’d seen, because she was so open and so trusting.

  Sam had no idea what the next step should be.

  He was filled with confusion and, now, standing on the edge of her herringbone-brick driveway, what he wanted, more than anything, was to get away. To escape. To make all of the emotion he was feeling simply stop.

  He then reached down and took her hand and brushed it up against his lips, and he lightly kissed the inside of her palm. He then whispered, ‘I will always remember walking with you tonight . . .’ He then let her hand go and turned away and she watched, immobilised, as he headed down the sidewalk, around the corner, and disappeared into the night air.

  Sam didn’t call.

  Emily heard nothing from him.

  Not the next day or the next day or the next.

  Emily became one of those girls. She checked her phone constantly. Neurotically. Obsessively. She was angry at him, and she was angry at herself. She literally had trouble concentrating. How had this happened to her? Why had it happened to her? And how could she make it stop?

  After the first two days, she started looking for him. She walked to the IHOP after school and sat inside, staring out the window. On her third day there, the floor manager offered her a job as a hostess. After that, she never went back.

  Emily knew Sam’s last name, but that got her nowhere. She didn’t know where he lived. He’d said he didn’t go to school. He’d said he moved a lot.

  So had he left town? Even if he had to go, even if there had been some big emergency, why wouldn’t he call to tell her? Why wouldn’t he call to say goodbye? Why wouldn’t he call to say anything?

  The ripple effect of her disappointment hit everyone.

  She and Nora got in a fight about nothing, and they were no longer speaking. Her father, clueless as to what was really going on, worried that her dark mood had something to do with making her sing.

  But her mother knew anxiety when she saw it. And her cheerful daughter was now experiencing real angst.

  And then Emily woke up from a dream believing Sam had been hurt. Hit by a car. Run over in the dark walking home. That had happened to their neighbour Pep Kranitz on a trip to Nebraska and he’d almost died.

  She called the two hospitals in town and asked for a patient named Sam Smith. He wasn’t at Sacred Heart, which was where her mother worked. But he was listed at Kaiser. Room 242.

  She knew it.

  Emily put on a dress and bought daffodils. (Was it right to give flowers to a boy in the hospital? She wasn’t sure. And she wasn’t going to ask her mother.) When she got out of the hospital elevator, the man at the nurses’ desk told her that room 242 was at the end of the hall. Smith, Sam was written in Magic Marker on a wipe board by the door.

  Emily held her breath as a heavyset nurse emerged from the doorway lightly touching her arm as she whispered, ‘He passed.’

  Emily stepped into the room to find a skeletal old man in the metal bed, hooked up to tubes and monitoring devices. His marble yellow eyes with cloudy blue centres were open, staring lifelessly up at the acoustical tile ceiling.

  An elderly woman was folded over the bed gripping the sheet. And then she saw Emily and she pulled herself up and wrapped her arms around the young girl’s neck as she heaved a sob. The daffodils fell from Emily’s hands onto the bed, and she held on to the old woman and began to cry with her.

  She would find out, later, that the Smiths had been together for fifty-nine years.

  It was another first in Emily’s life. A dead man. A dead man named Sam Smith.

  Making a connection to a person can be the scariest thing that ever happens to you.

  Sam knew that now.

  He’d walked around coiled rattlesnakes. He’d jumped off a train bridge to avoid an oncoming train. He’d lain in bed shivering at night with infection and no penicillin. He’d been pulled out to sea by the current when he couldn’t swim. He’d dodged the flying fist of his father. Many, many times.

  But this scared him more.

  This scared him so much that he couldn’t face her again. He’d come home that night, and things had not gone well. Clarence was hearing voices and when he discovered Riddle by himself, the voices got louder. Where the hell had Sam gone?

  Once Clarence started kicking walls, Riddle took off out the back door. He ran into the nearby woods, and Sam spent an hour out there after midnight trying to find his little brother. When he did, Riddle was shaking from the cold, hiding like a small, injured animal, which, Sam thought, of course he was.

  The next morning, when Sam was feeling as if he were going to jump out of his skin if he didn’t go see her, he burned her telephone number. But that didn’t stop him from thinking about her or where she lived.

  It was a yellow house with dark blue trim. It was two storeys, made from wood, and it looked like something that you’d see in a brochure for happy people. There were flowers in the front and a wide green lawn. Two cars without dents were parked in the long brick driveway. There was a basketball hoop attached to the big garage in the back. Wicker furniture was on the front porch, and it had cushions that were clean.

  You could tell that people sat out there in the warm months of the summer and drank lemonade or something in glasses filled with chips of crushed ice, and they probably ate home
made candy.

  After three nights, Sam went there. But only very, very late at night. He knew from experience that in towns of a certain size, only drunks, thieves, insomniacs, and people who heard voices were out on the streets once bars closed. Now he added to the list a new category: the heartsick.

  Sam used alleys and side streets to get there, staying in the shadows. When he arrived, her house would be dark except for a small yellowish light that glowed downstairs behind a gauze curtain by the front window.

  He’d look up at the house and imagine what he thought was her room and he’d picture her under blankets peacefully sound asleep and he knew he’d done the right thing. He’d kept his mess of a life away from her.

  But the room he stared up at wasn’t even her bedroom. It was her brother’s. And what he also didn’t know was that most nights she, too, was awake. She wasn’t asleep under a down comforter; she was awake thinking about him.

  By the fourth day, Sam had played his guitar so much that the calluses on his fingers were cracking. He had to find something to do besides empty people’s trash and work out new chord arrangements.

  So he started to make something. At first he didn’t even know it had anything to do with her.

  He’d go down to the river with Riddle and they’d gather sticks from the shoreline. Riddle liked it there. He’d look for redeemable bottles and stare endlessly at the minnows that darted around the shallow, slimy rocks.

  The tiny fish move like clouds of smoke.

  But the smoke is underwater.

  They stay together and turn like one thing. Because they are many things that understand the one thing.

  And that is sticking together.

  I do not see one of the little silver fish swimming alone. I look. But I do not ever see that.

  Sam would bring bundles of river sticks back to the run-down house and he’d arrange them into shapes. There was a piece of scrap plywood in the heap of trash in the alley and it looked like a worn heart. Now it all made sense.

  Sam took small nails from one of the rusty cans of nuts and bolts and metal crap that his father kept in the back of the packed truck. He hammered the nails into the plywood so that the sharp points poked through. Then he carefully layered the worn river sticks on top, attaching them to the points of the nails.