I&#39ll Be There

by Holly Goldberg Sloan

  In the end, he’d made a heart from many, many pieces of worn wood, weathered by wind and rain, the bark long gone, with only the smooth parts touching, like limbs.

  It was a heart exposed.

  And then Sam couldn’t stop himself. In the middle of the night, he left it on her back doorstep.

  9

  Emily’s father was always the first one out of bed in the morning. He turned up the thermostat on the furnace, put on the coffee, and let out the dog.

  And on this day, he also brought in a wooden heart, made from one hundred and seventy-eight small sticks, intertwined like brown and grey fingers.

  Tim taught music composition and theory at the local college. But he’d minored in studio art when he got his degree from the University of California at Davis. He held the wooden heart in his hands.

  It was amazing.

  Tim carried it into the kitchen and put it down on the wooden table. Five minutes later he was still staring at the thing when Debbie Bell came in dressed for work in her blue nurse’s uniform. She stopped when she saw her husband. From her angle across the room, she could see only what looked like a big pile of the outdoors. She thought there might be an animal involved. Her voice was tense, ‘What is it?’

  Tim motioned with his hand for her to come closer. ‘It’s awesome – that’s what it is.’

  Debbie headed for the table, her eyes widening as she came near. She stood next to her husband in awe.

  And that’s where they both were when Emily entered the kitchen. Their heads swiveled in unison in her direction.

  ‘What?’

  Her father indicated the table. ‘I think someone left something outside for you . . .’

  They were blocking the view of the table. ‘How do you know it’s for me?’

  Her father answered, ‘It has your name on the back.’

  Her mother stepped away, and Emily could now see the wooden mass and she walked over. She looked down at the heart – at the hours and hours and hours of work that had gone into finding the pieces of wood and then placing them together in a sculpture that could easily be in a folk-art museum. And for the first time in days, she smiled. Wide. Full. Complete.

  ‘Sam . . .’

  Her parents exchanged a look. Was this the beginning of the end of their daughter’s trouble? Or was this the end of the beginning, and now they were on to something more?

  Emily picked up the wooden heart. It was heavy, and she could barely carry it.

  Her father stepped forward. ‘Do you need some help with that?’

  She was standing there, but her happiness could be felt like light bouncing off the walls. ‘No. I got it.’

  And as she headed upstairs to her room, she could hear her father, in a hushed tone, whisper to his wife, ‘She’s fallen for some kind of artist . . .’

  So Sam wasn’t gone.

  Once in her room, she’d carefully turned the wooden heart to look at the underside. Carved on a stick in the back, in the tiniest of letters, was the word EMILY and then 4U.

  And on the very last stick was the word SAM.

  Emily went to school that morning and apologised to Nora, explaining that she hadn’t been a good friend, saying that she was sorry. Nora had missed her and was happy to have her back.

  Emily made an effort to participate in class, and she even smiled at Bobby Ellis, who now seemed sort of obsessed with her. She gave Pierre Ruff her math homework after lunch, because she could do it again in five minutes and apparently for him it was a struggle.

  When school was done for the day, she didn’t go right home but stayed and turned in a late assignment in history.

  She threw out a stack of old papers that were crunched up in her locker and ran all twelve laps that the soccer coach suggested they do as off-season training.

  She was back to being herself, but with a difference: she had a secret.

  He would return. She knew it. And this time, she’d be waiting.

  Emily set the alarm clock on her phone for two in the morning. She guessed that would be the earliest that he’d come. And then she put on her favourite jeans and a long-sleeved T-shirt and she climbed into bed.

  Three hours later, when the alarm sounded, she woke with a start. She silently got out of bed, pulled on a sweater and her fleece-lined boots, and slipped into the hallway.

  As she moved past Jared’s room, she could see Felix, the family’s nine-year-old dog, sound asleep on Jared’s bed. The dog’s legs were moving in his sleep and his tail was twitching.

  Once downstairs, Emily took a heavy, red wool blanket from the top shelf of the coat closet and slipped out the front door. She then wrapped herself up and waited on the porch recliner.

  She was surprised that she wasn’t sleepy. Instead she felt just the opposite. She felt so alive. The night was cold, but spring was battling out there somewhere and winter was in full retreat. When she exhaled out her mouth, she could see her breath as a small explosion of white air.

  At first it felt like the whole world was either dead or asleep. Silence. And then she realised this wasn’t actually true. A bird was making a noise in the next-door neighbour’s tree. Was it an owl?

  And some kind of animal was chewing on something – or was it digging? – back by the garage. From far away she could now hear a train. And from another direction, a dog began to bark.

  She sat in stillness, not once checking the time, realising that she’d lived here for ten of her seventeen years, but she’d never experienced the house, the yard, or even the street at this hour.

  That’s what Sam was doing, she thought, giving her a new vision of her own world.

  And then at some point, deep in her time-suspended experience of the dark serenity, she realised that the owl had stopped his rhythmic hooting. And the rodent was no longer digging.

  And that’s when she saw him, in the shadows on the opposite side of the street, heading towards the house. She didn’t move. Her eyes followed his progress. He did not know she was there.

  It was cold outside, but he had on just a plaid shirt, and he wasn’t even wearing a jacket. Didn’t he feel the chill in the moist night air? She could see that his hair was messy and his shoulders were hunched forward. But if anything, he only looked better than she remembered. Sam passed by the edge of a pool of light that shone down from the high-pressure sodium-vapor streetlamp. His hands were in his pockets; his gaze was downwards; he had no idea that she was there waiting. But when he stepped on the edge of her brick driveway, she got to her feet and he saw her. He abruptly stopped.

  But she was moving now.

  She went down the three stairs on the porch, across the small brick walkway, onto the lawn, and in seconds she was right in front of him. She looked up into his face and didn’t say a word as she removed the red wool blanket and slung it around him, wrapping them both now as she pulled him near to her.

  Their bodies were touching, the blanket like a red wool cocoon around them. She shut her eyes, pulled him closer, and he gave in.

  He had no choice.

  When Emily woke up, she knew it wasn’t a dream, because her face was red, like she’d been skiing while it was snowing and she hadn’t worn a scarf.

  She was exhausted when she went downstairs for breakfast, but she had a lightness of being that lifted the spirits of her parents, who of course knew nothing about her experience in the driveway. Emily chewed on a spoonful of oatmeal and then said to her mother, ‘My friend Sam is going to come over after school. We’ll probably go for a walk or something.’

  Debbie Bell tried not to look surprised but nodded. ‘He can stay for dinner if you’d like.’

  Emily only smiled, her eyes giving away her inner happiness as she said, ‘Thanks, but not today.’

  Jared, who at ten years old always seemed a few steps behind, piped up, ‘Is that the boy who disappeared on her?’

  Everyone shot him a look. Who knew he’d been following the drama?

  Tim Bell was surprised that the
discussion unnerved him. Who was this guy? He’d caused some grief in his house so far, that much Tim knew. He wondered what lay in store for Emily in the future.

  It sounded so old-fashioned to think, but Tim Bell hoped the kid came from a good family.

  10

  Ever since the night they’d gone to the movies, Bobby Ellis changed the route he used to drive home. The logical way was to go down Fairmont and cross Skyview, but now he turned earlier, on Agate Street, so that he could go past her house.

  It felt like something a teenage girl would do. Or a stalker.

  He’d never actually seen Emily out front, or even inside through the window, thank God. But he kept at it, sometimes three or four times a day, as he came and went from his own house out into the world.

  Keeping an eye on her was probably biological. Bobby’s father was a lawyer, and his mother was a private detective. They shared offices and referred business to each other.

  Bobby came from a family who believed that what you see is not what you get. They were a family that knew dirty laundry and, as an occupational hazard, believed in conspiracy. They were always looking for clues and always finding them. Which might explain why Bobby liked Emily so much more after their single, undeniably horrible, date.

  Before that night, Emily was a cute girl who attracted a wide group of friends. But she didn’t have any intrigue. She wasn’t the most beautiful girl in their class. And she wasn’t the most powerful or the most sought after. And Bobby Ellis liked competition.

  But then he’d watched her chase after a really good-looking guy in the rain. He’d asked around, and no one knew the guy.

  That right there raised suspicion and intrigue.

  Bobby Ellis knew the difference between the ordinary and the out of the ordinary. Emily Bell was different. And now he wanted her to notice him. He wanted her attention. That wasn’t normally a hard thing for him to accomplish.

  Girls, in general, thought he was good-looking. The problem was on his end.

  He thought most of the girls at Churchill were boring. A more accurate statement would have been that the ones who weren’t boring weren’t as cute as the ones who were boring. Or at least most of the things the cute ones were interested in bored him. That’s how it seemed.

  But Emily didn’t fit that mold. He knew that now.

  Because besides detouring to drive past her house every day, he was also, as his mother would say, doing the legwork.

  He’d checked out her grades, which wasn’t hard because he worked in the office two days a week during his free period, and he had copied all the passwords to the computer database one day when he found them in a file on the vice principal’s desk.

  With access to the system, he could see that Emily Bell was as good a student as he was. Like him, she appeared to do it without really trying that hard.

  He already knew, of course, that she played soccer. He didn’t know until he started his digging online that she’d taken sculpture classes on Saturdays for three years at the Art Centre and she’d won some contest for designing a piece that was on display in the college museum. Or that she’d broken her collarbone in a bike accident (he’d also accessed her medical file, which was part of her release to play a school sport). If knowledge was power, he had to be getting some kind of edge.

  But he couldn’t figure out his plan of attack.

  Should he wait in the weeds? Or should he be more aggressive? And who exactly was this good-looking guy she liked so much? And how come no one knew him?

  Bobby was turning all of this over in his mind when he came home on Thursday. His mother was in the kitchen. She’d put a stack of stuff from work on the dining room table. Bobby picked it up. Among her things was a printout of the local area’s crime report. Both his parents got this as an email every Thursday, and his mother always brought hers home to study. She sometimes got clients that way.

  Bobby was looking at the report. ‘Anything going on in town?’

  His mother answered, ‘Theft was up. It’s been a few months now. Somebody out there’s got sticky fingers.’

  The police department’s weekly update also came with a map that had little yellow dots of the addresses where incidents had been reported. Bobby liked maps and statistics. He studied the printout.

  The map showed that most of the dots were in one neighbourhood. South. Near River Road. He didn’t get out there much. It was the low-rent part of town, because if the river flooded, so did the neighbourhood. Even though that really didn’t happen much any more. But people still at least thought that it could.

  The last time he was on River Road was the night he went to IHOP. It made sense that the thieves lived over there. He was sitting in IHOP when someone stole the heart of the girl he liked. That much he knew for certain.

  The next day after school, Jessica Pope asked Bobby to go get a coffee with her. He thought about it, and even though she looked cute in her low-cut pink shirt, he made an excuse. Jessica Pope wasn’t Emily Bell.

  Bobby told Jessica that he had to do some work for his mother. People always bought that excuse. They assumed he was up to something interesting and important. So after telling Jessica a lie, the idea was planted in his brain.

  Bobby had kept his mother’s crime-incident map. He wasn’t sure why. But it was in his backpack. He dug it out, got into his SUV, and drove across town to check out some of the places where there had been problems.

  The yellow dots.

  Bobby was in the southbound lane of River Road, in the middle of the afternoon on a cloudy day, when he suddenly saw the guy Emily had run after that night. He was with the same little kid, and Bobby knew for sure it was them, because they were dressed in the same clothes. And the little kid was even carrying something against his chest, just like before.

  On instinct Bobby went to the next traffic light, turned the car around, and headed back to follow them.

  And that’s how he found out that the two boys lived in a crappy house at the end of a line of run-down places out on Needle Lane.

  Sam was relieved.

  He’d been fighting thinking about Emily, and he’d lost. And now that he’d admitted defeat, it felt like winning. He never felt like he won at anything, so that further complicated things.

  That week, at the end of every day after leaving Riddle at a picnic table at a park downtown with a candy bar and something new to draw, Sam went to her house. He didn’t go inside but always just took a walk. Emily seemed to understand, without his even explaining much, that his life had complexities.

  Emily had never met anyone like him. He was so different. He didn’t seem to know about television shows or famous people. She couldn’t tell most of the time if he was kidding around with her or if he really had never heard of most of the things kids her age talked about.

  At the end of the week, she said that her parents wanted to meet him. She presented it as a good thing. He had seen them in the house, mostly shadows passing through a room. She said he should come over the next night and stay for dinner. He finally agreed.

  But what was he going to do with Riddle when he went to her house? Leaving for a few hours in the afternoon was one thing, but staying for longer gave him much more reason to be anxious. Especially at night.

  There was a large cardboard box leaning against the back shed, and Sam knew his father had to have taken it from someone. When he got his hands on big stuff, Clarence got himself in trouble. It was one thing to take someone’s hedge clippers; it was another to lift their flat-screen TV.

  And this time, if Clarence announced that they were leaving, Sam knew it wasn’t going to be so easy to get into the truck and just drive away.

  But Sam wouldn’t let himself think about that right now. He was going to think about what to do with Riddle. He decided, in the end, on taking him to the movies, paying for his ticket, and telling him to sit through the show twice.

  Movies were a big deal to them. They could count on two hands how many times they’d been i
n a real theatre. Sam only hoped Riddle didn’t go after the loose popcorn that accumulated on the carpet. Once before, they’d gone into a Cineplex and come out with a plastic sack of half-eaten concession items and, to Riddle, it was as if they’d won a lottery.

  So Sam gave him money for his own food, slipping a can of soda into his pocket. He watched his little brother as the usher at the door tore his ticket in half. He’d picked a movie that featured robots, and Riddle was wide-eyed with excitement.

  Sam’s plan was to meet him at the bench in the park down the street after two shows, which would end up being over four hours later.

  Since the buzz cut, he looked even younger and more vulnerable. But Sam decided that the haircut was good. Because Riddle’s grey eyes and silence had a way of frightening people.

  Emily was waiting, like always, on the porch when he arrived. Instead of going in the house right away, they sat together on the wooden glider. He had told her, that first night walking home, that he always felt more comfortable outdoors than inside.

  In the kitchen, Debbie had Weekend Edition on the radio, and she listened while she supervised Jared, who had his spelling homework in front of him. Her son wiggled on the kitchen stool, his face sour. ‘Why can’t I go out there?’

  Debbie continued to cut up tomatoes for the salad. ‘Because your sister needs her privacy.’

  Jared closed the book. ‘But I want to meet him.’

  Debbie felt the same way but only said, ‘You will meet him.’

  ‘When?’

  Before Debbie could answer, the two teenagers suddenly appeared in the kitchen doorway.

  She was struck by how sweet they looked together. And how different the boy was from the fleeting look she’d seen of him in the church parking lot weeks ago.

  This boy, or young man, really, was incredibly handsome. He had blue eyes, chiselled features, and, while thin, he had a strong physique. But he had none of the cockiness or body language to go with his exterior.