I&#39ll Be There

by Holly Goldberg Sloan

  Debbie could see right away that he was different. He was . . . odd. That was the only way to put it. Not shifty but definitely ill at ease. Something was missing. Confidence? He didn’t look nervous so much as out of place.

  Debbie continued staring. Judging him. It was so unlike her. Emily, expecting her mother to say something, finally spoke. ‘Mom? Mom, this is Sam . . .’

  Debbie sounded flustered. ‘Sam, we’re so happy to have you here. I’m Debbie Bell . . .’

  Jared, always a talker, was also now mute, staring in silence at the tall guy next to his sister.

  Debbie continued, ‘And this is Jared – Emily’s little brother.’

  Sam looked at Jared and gave him a half smile. Of course it did not strike Sam as strange to have a younger brother who was silent. Besides, Sam himself had yet to say anything since he’d crossed the threshold and entered the house.

  The foursome stood awkwardly in the kitchen and then the cellar door suddenly opened and Tim Bell appeared. He must have heard all their footsteps overhead. His music studio was down below, and he spent most weekends working on compositions or doing choral arrangements.

  He, too, when he saw Sam, had the three-second-pause-to-stare reaction.

  Emily’s eyes widened. What was wrong with these people? ‘Dad . . . ?’

  Tim Bell then abruptly stepped forward, his hand outstretched. ‘Nice to meet you, son.’

  Sam put his hand out, and they awkwardly shook hands. It didn’t look like something Sam had done often, if ever. And Tim Bell had a solid grip. Sam instinctively tightened his hand in response. More clumsy silence. More hand shaking.

  Then Jared, who was staring intently up at Sam, said, ‘You’re like the Dark Knight.’

  Ordinarily that kind of comment would have made everyone laugh, but no one did.

  Jared seemed to have hit on something. It wasn’t just that Sam looked like he could have been in the pages of a fashion magazine, it was that there was something about him that said he was living a double life or that he was in conflict, even pain.

  And while the salad was not in the bowl, the rolls were only half-baked in the oven, and the chicken dijon hadn’t been cut up, Debbie tried to defuse the situation by saying, ‘Well, everything’s ready. Let’s eat!’

  He barely touched his meal.

  That was concerning to Debbie and Tim Bell. What kind of six-foot-two, seventeen-year-old boy doesn’t devour food? Especially when you can see in his eyes that he’s hungry?

  He was certainly polite but obviously on edge. In the course of the excruciatingly long twenty-one-minute sit-down dinner, he barely spoke, even when they asked him direct questions.

  They started out with what should have been easy sledding for a teenage boy: what were his favourite sports teams? He claimed to not follow any team sports. Even Jared found this confusing.

  Further questions revealed that he was homeschooled, but he wouldn’t elaborate on anything he was studying, even when asked twice.

  When questioned about his family, he said that he had a little brother and that he didn’t have a mother. They said they were so sorry, and he looked so sorry, too.

  They said that they’d like to meet his brother and his father, and he had no response, other than to look, if possible, even more uncomfortable. He was distant, not unfriendly, but not able to engage.

  He spoke English, but he didn’t speak their language. And even Jared, who usually tried to dominate conversation, was silenced.

  Outside it began to drizzle. And that’s when he abruptly stood up and said he had to go. He had to pick up his little brother, who was at the movies, and he didn’t want him waiting in the rain. They offered to drive him down to the theatre, and he politely but firmly refused.

  That’s when Emily’s mother, concerned about safety, said, ‘Do you drive, Sam?’

  He nodded and said, ‘Yes. I’ve driven for a long time.’

  That seemed perplexing to the parents. They thought he was seventeen. Tim Bell followed up with, ‘A long time?’

  Sam nodded again. ‘Since I was around twelve. But just my father’s truck. No other car.’

  Debbie Bell’s voice was tight now. ‘Your father let you drive when you were twelve?’

  Sam’s voice was even as he replied, ‘Yes, but I don’t take the truck out alone. I just drive when my dad asks me to.’

  Emily thought it all went pretty well. Considering. Obviously the driving thing was strange, but she knew that Sam had lived in Mexico, and he’d spent time on farms and in remote places. Didn’t farm kids all drive tractors when they were little or something?

  Emily took an umbrella with her and walked Sam to the end of the street. She told him again that she wished he’d get a cell phone. He said he didn’t think it was likely. She asked him to meet her tomorrow. He said that he didn’t think he could do that.

  She thought that he might say something about her parents, or her little brother, or her house, or the dog, or the food. But he didn’t.

  Instead, in a matter-of-fact way, he looked at her and said simply, ‘I’ve never known anyone like you.’ And then he walked away.

  Emily stepped through the back door moments later, feeling so alive. He was a mystery. But he was her mystery, and every moment she was getting new clues and seeing new layers of someone who was, at this point, her biggest challenge.

  But then the look on her parents’ faces changed everything. They had questions.

  ‘Exactly where does Sam live?’

  ‘What does Sam’s father do for a job?’

  ‘How long has he been living in town?’

  ‘Have you met Sam’s brother? What is he like?’

  ‘Why wouldn’t Sam talk about being homeschooled?’

  ‘Why didn’t he eat his food?’

  ‘What did Sam mean when he said that he’d been driving since he was twelve?’

  She’d never seen them like this. Emily’s face flushed deep red, and she raised her voice when she tried to answer.

  After a few minutes, Jared came into the room and her father immediately ordered him upstairs. When he said he wanted to stay, they all shouted at him to leave. Now everyone was talking too loud.

  Once Jared was gone, Emily demanded to know what, exactly, they were accusing Sam of. They couldn’t articulate it.

  Her mother managed to say, ‘We’ve been around a lot longer than you have. We can see when someone isn’t . . .’ She couldn’t finish the sentence.

  Emily fired back, ‘Isn’t what?!’

  Her father completed the sentence. ‘Isn’t responsible.’

  Emily did a double take. ‘Responsible?’

  Her father held his ground. ‘Yes, responsible.’

  Emily stared at her parents. ‘How could you possibly know from one dinner that he’s not responsible? What are you really getting at?!’

  Her mother answered, ‘The only thing we know about him is that he’s very good-looking.’

  The way Debbie Bell stared down at the rug made it obvious that this was another strike against him.

  Suddenly a thought hit Emily. A thought that was crushing. Her voice cracked when she finally spoke. ‘What you’re really saying . . . is that something must be wrong with him, for looking the way he does but liking me. Because it would make sense to you if he liked Bo Chubbuck, who all the guys think is so hot – right? Or Emma Allgyer, who even the teachers flirt with!’

  Her father shot back. ‘No, of course not!’

  But then her mother looked away as if she had something else suddenly on her mind. And it wasn’t convincing.

  11

  Sam got to the park, wet from the hour-long walk in the rain, and Riddle wasn’t there. He waited for fifteen minutes and then anxiously headed down the street to the movie theatre, thinking he’d meet up with Riddle on the way.

  But he didn’t.

  By the time he got to the Cineplex, even though it was Saturday night, the place was pretty much deserted out front. The rai
n and the robots must have been a bad combination. Again, no Riddle to be found.

  Sam’s heart rate accelerated, and a voice inside was now saying that this whole night was a mistake. He shouldn’t have had dinner at Emily’s. Her parents were trying hard to be nice, but it was obvious to him that they were suspicious of everything about him.

  And what was worse was that they were right to be.

  The simple fact was that he shouldn’t have left his little brother alone. What if Riddle had decided to walk home? He could imagine all of the distractions in the dark in the rain that may have led him astray. Now Riddle was lost, or worse.

  So Sam started to run. It was three and a half miles back to the mouldy old house off River Road on Needle Lane, and Sam was there in twenty-four minutes. He burst through the door, calling out for his little brother, but, again, nothing.

  And it was impossible to tell if he’d been there and left or just not come home. Their father was nowhere to be seen. That was the only good news of the night so far.

  Then Sam suddenly had another thought. He should have gone inside the theatre to make sure Riddle wasn’t still in there.

  So Sam turned around and took off again, running back through the rain. He was soaking wet, freezing cold, and exhausted after the second three-and-a-half-mile run.

  He had ten dollars left in his pocket, and he used it to buy a ticket. As he passed the refreshment stand he realised for the first time all day that he was really hungry. He had no appetite sitting with Emily’s family. Now he’d give anything for a piece of that chicken with the weird mustard sauce.

  Maybe he could try to get his money back after he’d checked the theatre. He could explain there was an emergency. If this wasn’t an emergency, he wasn’t sure what was. Since he was incapable of lying, he’d do that. That was the ultimate irony of his life. His father couldn’t tell the truth, and he couldn’t lie.

  Sam pushed through the double doors, and it was so dark that he had to stand in the back while his eyes adjusted. After a few moments, he took in the sparse audience.

  No Riddle.

  Sam was just getting ready to leave when he realised that the front row, which he thought was empty, actually had a single occupant. He saw the lump when the screen went blinding white during a shot of a robot in a snowstorm.

  Someone was low in a seat off to the side.

  Sam went down and found his brother sound asleep in what had to have been his third screening of the robot film. He was using his phone book as a pillow and his coat as a blanket. His 3D glasses were on the floor, and popcorn pieces and a small pile of empty candy boxes and wrappers were scattered on the adjacent chairs.

  Riddle slept like a small child, dead to the world. Sam woke him up and got him into the lobby, but Riddle fell back asleep leaning against a video game console. Sometimes too much visual stimulation gave him some kind of overload, and it was like he unplugged from life.

  Sam left him there and went to plead for a ticket refund. In the end, the manager gave back five of his ten dollars. Sam then bought a hot dog and ate it in three bites. He woke Riddle up for a third time, but he just refused to budge.

  So finally Sam got his brother to climb up onto his back, and as the rain continued to fall from the black sky, he carried him home.

  And despite the fact that Riddle was small for his age, he was heavy.

  Clarence never had a plan.

  He believed this to be a great strength. And while he didn’t have any kind of idea for his future, he did have exit strategies, but that was different. That was an understanding of the art of flight.

  Clarence kept extra sets of license plates (which he stole from cars on the streets at night and replaced with ones he jacked from cars recently towed to junkyards). It was surprising how few people noticed that their plates had magically changed when they weren’t looking and would drive with plates belonging to someone else’s registered vehicle.

  It was only when they were pulled over, sometimes years after the exchange had been made, when their registrations didn’t match the car they were driving, that things would so quickly sour.

  At all times packed in the truck, Clarence had two sets of license plates stashed along with two full gas cans, a shotgun, two boxes of ammo, a fishing pole, six magazines with naked girls and a gallon of vodka.

  He kept a large box of saltine crackers back there as well, but they seemed to burn some kind of hole in his brain in the middle of the night, and he usually ate them faster than he could remember to replace them.

  But his biggest problem in life, as he now saw it, was technology.

  Everyone was getting connected. He never understood computers, but people now carried the damn things in their hands, and that was just no good.

  They could now call to report him lurking around in the alleys behind their unlocked garages. And what was worse, they could raise these handheld instruments of torture and snap his picture.

  And then they could send these not-even-blurry shots to the bad guys. Because, for Clarence, the good guys were of course the bad guys. And he was the only good guy.

  Now, just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean someone isn’t out to get you. And in the case of Clarence, there were many people who wanted more than a word with him.

  One of these people was a man named Hiro Yamada. Hiro ran a business called Medford Coin in Medford, Oregon.

  Ten years earlier, Clarence Border, then in his first year on the road with the kids and calling himself John Smith, sold Hiro an Indian Head penny collection.

  Clarence had taken the pennies from Shelly’s underwear drawer when he left. Shelly’s great-uncle Jimmy had given it to her for her twenty-first birthday. Uncle Jimmy got it, before he died, from Grandma Arlene. She felt sorry for him after he lost his left ear in a painting accident when he fell off a wobbly scaffold.

  So Grandma Arlene was the one who loved pennies. No one else in the chain knew a thing about them. And she was no expert.

  Grandma Arlene found the 1877 Indian Head cent in the bottom of a sewing box at a moving sale in 1946.

  She bought the sewing box and didn’t find the penny until she got home. A classic case of finders keepers, losers weepers.

  Only, these people didn’t know they had the penny, so they didn’t know they’d lost it, meaning there were no weepers. But there was a happy keeper.

  Because this one penny was a very valuable penny. Clarence, or in this case John Smith, didn’t know that the 1877 penny was worth a bundle when he took the coins, placed in a blue cardboard coin holder that was really doing nothing to protect them, into Medford Coin.

  Clarence almost made a fatal mistake.

  The pennies were old and tarnished, and he’d decided to stop in a hardware store and have Sam polish them before trying to unload them. Had they removed the natural tarnish from the coins, he would have stripped the collectibles of most of their value.

  But being lazy paid off.

  Clarence went into the store and they had security cameras in the aisles, so he couldn’t swipe the polish. And there was a line at the cashier and he didn’t feel like waiting.

  Later, at Medford Coin, Hiro silently examined the pennies as John Smith yelled at his two little kids to go back and wait in the truck. It seemed obvious to Hiro that the younger of the two had a horrible cold and shouldn’t be in a truck to begin with. He should have been home in a warm bed. Or, from the look of the kid, maybe a crib. He was a tiny thing.

  This was all ten years ago, and the boys hadn’t yet figured out how to comfort themselves or at least figured out not to turn to their father if they needed help.

  Hiro didn’t like John Smith, and he thought that it was obvious that John Smith didn’t collect these pennies, because John Smith didn’t know anything about these pennies. So despite the story that they belonged to his wife, who passed away and left him with the pennies and two little boys, Hiro assumed that they were stolen.

  And that meant that if Hiro bou
ght them, he would try to return them to their rightful owner. Because Hiro and John Smith were not men made of the same cloth.

  The trick was to offer John Smith enough money that he’d take it but not enough that he’d realise the value of what he had on his hands.

  John Smith walked out the door that afternoon with five hundred dollars in cash, a bottle of St Joseph baby aspirin (which Hiro made him take), and Hiro’s two-week-old sunglasses. Outside, when he knew Hiro couldn’t see him, Clarence smiled wide. He’d driven a hard bargain. And taking the man’s sunglasses was epic. He felt good inside.

  Hiro knew that an 1877 penny, in poor condition, was worth four thousand dollars. But this penny wasn’t in poor condition. It was in superb condition.

  And while it had not been certified by the American Numismatic Association, and while there were a large number of counterfeit 1877 coins out there, Hiro knew in his gut that this one was real.

  And that meant it was worth around thirty thousand dollars.

  Hiro put the penny in a protective Plexiglas case. It would take some time, but he knew that eventually he’d figure out where the rare coin, designed by James Barton Longacre, came from, and who was its rightful owner.

  And he’d give it back.

  There might even be a reward involved. But his real reward was knowing that some kind of larger order had been restored.

  Because order, for most collectors, was what it was all about.

  12

  It was as if a layer of frost had formed inside the Bell house. It covered all the furniture, coating the walls and the floors. But it was thickest in the kitchen at the table, where the family ate most of their meals, now in icy silence.

  Only Jared seemed unaffected by the chill, happy to play one of his video games in his lap and use his feet to wrestle with the dog under the table.

  Sam came over to see Emily on Tuesday after school, and on their walk down to the river she gave him two things: a watch that had belonged to her grandfather, Harry, and a cell phone.