I&#39ll Be There

by Holly Goldberg Sloan

  He refused them both. She explained that her grandpa gave the watch to her and that it was too big and she could never wear it. And then she looked as if she were going to cry. If he wore it, she would be happy. Someone would be using the watch. It was made for that, not to sit in a drawer.

  And then there was the cell phone. She had to be able to talk to him, especially now that in her own house she had taken a self-imposed vow of silence. This way she could call him. They could make plans.

  Sam finally agreed. But both things were on loan. He’d give them back later. But then she put the watch on his wrist and told him she never wanted it back. Ever.

  He took it off and refused to wear it. She slipped it in the pocket of his old jacket when he wasn’t looking, and he didn’t find the watch until he got home. He put it on his wrist and was surprised that it made him feel so good and so bad all at once. What could he possibly give her in return?

  When her parents couldn’t reach her the next day, she told them she’d left her phone in her locker at school. She used Sophie Woolverton’s cell to call home after soccer practice when she couldn’t get a ride.

  On Friday, when her mother couldn’t reach her, Emily said she lost her charger and her battery had died. The girl who had no experience in deceit found herself learning a new game. She now found all kinds of excuses and fabrications.

  Her parents took the fact that she didn’t answer her cell phone as one more sign of her defiance. They had no idea it really meant that she now spoke to Sam several times during the day and always, every night, before she went to bed. She’d had a phone in her room for four years, but she didn’t use it much. Now she was on it all the time.

  To him, her phone was a form of magic.

  It took three days before Sam did more than just receive calls, but then he finally dialled out, to her, of course. He was surprised at how quickly he came to find comfort from having it hidden in his worn pocket. It was his secret, and it gave him a feeling of power. It made him feel as if he were, for the first time, not completely on the outside of everything.

  At night, when she called, he escaped into the back alley, sitting on a trash can in the cold, damp air. Since he went outside to play his guitar most nights, his father didn’t question why he got up and slipped out in the dark.

  Talking in whispers, she went over her day and he went through his, careful to omit what were usually the dramatic parts – Riddle’s three-hour, non-stop nosebleed, his father’s entrance at four a.m. with armloads of someone else’s dry cleaning. He didn’t talk about his two hours at the dump unloading a truck of old acoustical ceiling tile, containing (unknown to him) asbestos.

  He told her about walking to the lake and catching a fish that Riddle insisted they put back (but which he would have otherwise fried up and eaten).

  He told her about playing his guitar and writing new songs. He talked about reading a book (taken from a pile in a brown paper bag left on the kerb a mile from his house) about a group of people who travelled around the country on a bus.

  She told him little stories about people, friends, even strangers who she’d come in contact with that day. She whispered confidences, and secrets, never knowing that while he told her small things, bits of the puzzle, he was keeping her away from his real story.

  It wasn’t soccer season, so the varsity team wasn’t allowed to actually practise. Instead they met three times a week and ran around the track doing endurance and sprint work. They weren’t supposed to even touch the soccer ball.

  But of course they did. After an hour of hideous running, they did thirty minutes of informal scrimmage. Emily wasn’t a standout, but she had enough speed and footwork to keep her side of the field from collapsing.

  On Tuesday, Sam had said he would try to meet her when practice was over, but he showed up fifteen minutes early. He stood at a distance, leaning into the shoulder-high chain-link fence.

  Haley Kolb, playing forward, saw him first. Jane Mann was passing to her, and then Haley’s eyes fell on Sam and she completely whiffed the ball. When you propel your whole body forward to kick, you’re supposed to hit something.

  But Haley regained her balance and stumbled backward, thinking to herself that she was so uncool. She’d had a boyfriend for seven months now. She didn’t even really look at cute boys any more.

  But this was an exception.

  This guy was some kind of vision. He wasn’t like anything in their whole town, that’s for sure. Maybe he was part of some undercover reality TV show, and he was put there, staring at them, to judge their reactions. Great. Now she’d look like a total dork on national television.

  Haley jogged over to Emily. They both were covered in sweat. Haley said breathlessly, ‘Don’t look right away, but leaning against the fence behind you is maybe the cutest guy to ever set foot in the state.’

  Emily’s head instantly swivelled.

  Haley tried not to shriek, but it came out that way. ‘I told you not to look!’

  Emily smiled, and then as Haley watched, she ran across the field straight at the Vision in a Plaid Shirt.

  With Haley immobilised, the other players stopped running.

  Twenty-one girls now watched, dazed, as the boy/man/god put his arm on Emily’s shoulder, drew her near, and with the old chain-link fence between their two bodies, gave her the sweetest kiss any of them had ever seen.

  The next day, despite the fact that Emily was a junior, and despite the fact that she was one of the weaker players, the team voted her captain for the following season.

  The other soccer players weren’t the only ones who couldn’t take their eyes off Emily and Sam that afternoon.

  There was another person watching as the two seventeen-year-olds pressed against the zinc-coated mesh wire. Another person stood, dumbstruck, at a distance, dazed from the sight.

  Bobby Ellis.

  Did Emily know that this guy lived in a junky house, a shack really, on Needle Lane? Shouldn’t Bobby warn her that the neighbourhood out there was shady?

  Did she have any idea who this guy even was?

  Bobby made a decision that he had to find a way to tell her without looking like he cared.

  Debbie and Tim, in the car coming back from one of the college classical music concerts that Tim supervised, had to acknowledge that the Sam Situation was beginning to wear them both down.

  Debbie let out a sigh that sounded like real defeat. ‘We can’t forbid her from seeing him. She’s seventeen.’

  Tim nodded his head. ‘And besides, that would just bring them closer together.’

  Debbie mulled over the options. ‘So we need a new strategy.’

  Tim looked at his wife. ‘Meaning?’

  Debbie was thinking out loud now. ‘We should include him completely in our lives.’

  Tim turned his full attention back to the road. ‘Reverse psychology?’

  ‘No. It’s human nature. If something’s really wrong with him, which we know is the case, we’ll be able to identify it. We can’t fight without weapons. We need more knowledge. We need to be able to point out his specific problems.’

  Now it was Tim who was nodding. He could do this. He had to do something. His daughter, with her new failure to communicate, was making his home life miserable. Who knew she was the emotional centre of the place?

  When they got back to the house, Debbie and Tim told Emily that they’d been unfair. They said they were happy she was seeing someone that she cared so much about. They wanted him to now be part of the family.

  Emily didn’t believe them, but she kept that to herself. They lived in a house that functioned harmoniously. Her father, after all, taught music. None of them could stand real discord.

  So when Sam came over the following afternoon to see her, Tim Bell, with the new spirit of getting to know the kid in order to gain the upper hand to rid him from their lives, offered to take the tall teenager down to the cellar and show him his office.

  Sam didn’t want to go with the guy, b
ut he didn’t have much choice, as he suddenly found himself sandwiched between both of Emily’s parents, who ushered him straight down the steep stairs to the cellar. He’d spent half his life in underground places. And he knew they could be a trap.

  But Tim Bell’s basement wasn’t a torture chamber, it was a recording studio. A dozen different instruments were scattered around the room, which held an enormous collection of CDs. Computer equipment and books took up the rest of the space.

  Tim’s own family wasn’t very interested in his lair. But Sam was. He’d never seen anything like this place.

  Tim Bell, adopting the professorial mode he used in the classroom, began talking about doing music notation online, composing on the computer, and using the electronic keyboard. Sam listened, understanding about every third word, but his eyes were glued on the lone guitar resting on a stand in the corner of the windowless space.

  Emily impatiently remained on the last stair. She hadn’t officially even set foot into the room. She finally interrupted her father’s mini-lecture to say, ‘Thanks for showing us, Dad . . .’

  She then gave Sam the international look for Let’s get out of here. Only, he must not have known the look, because he turned to Emily’s father and asked, ‘Would it be okay if I checked out your guitar?’

  Tim Bell gave up on the software lecture. His eyebrows lifted in what could only be called suspicion.

  ‘Do you play?’

  Sam nodded, managing to say, ‘I just sort of taught myself . . .’

  Tim Bell went across the room and retrieved his prize possession, his Martin Marquis Madagascar. It was made of rosewood, it cost more than anything else in their home, and it was Tim Bell’s pride and joy.

  Debbie Bell suddenly looked nervous. So did Emily.

  But what could Sam do with the guitar? Drop it? He wasn’t clumsy; in fact he had a real grace to the way he moved. At least Emily thought so.

  She glanced over at her father, who now looked anxious as he took the guitar by the neck and handed it, reluctantly, to Sam.

  Sam had never held anything this valuable before. He seemed to get that much of the equation. He reached out to hand it back to Tim Bell, and Emily exhaled. She didn’t realise that she’d been holding her breath.

  Sam mumbled, ‘It’s amazing. Really. Thank you.’

  Tim Bell solemnly nodded. And then, softening, he surprised himself by saying, ‘Go on. Try a chord or two.’

  Sam was now caught. Should he give it back? Or should he check it out? What would please this intense man wearing round wire glasses and corduroy trousers – trying or not trying?

  It was impossible to know.

  So Sam did what he was actually dying to do. He took a seat on the arm of the small sofa behind him, positioned the guitar in his lap, and he started to play.

  13

  Sam’s musical education, if it could be called that, began at five years old, when his grandmother had taught him basic chords on a four-string guitar.

  Once Clarence had plucked him and his brother from the plastic wading pool in the backyard and tossed them in the truck never to return, it would be a year before he’d hold another musical instrument. But when he did, he knew it was his salvation.

  An old man who lived below them in an apartment house in Spokane played slide guitar. He was blind and made his mark on the world with his instrument. From the second Sam heard him, he was hooked on old acoustic blues.

  When Clarence pulled the truck out of Spokane four months later, eight-year-old Sam had a beat-up guitar in his possession, a gift from the blind blues man.

  It was the only thing he’d kept with him all these years, and he played it every day. For hours and hours. So while other kids were occupied with Little League or Nintendo, Sam Border, now known as Sam Smith, became proficient enough to play any song he heard on the radio and any song he heard in his head.

  He didn’t break a sweat playing school-yard kick ball, but he broke a sweat slamming the strings.

  And now, in the basement of the Bell house, he shut his eyes and he let himself go.

  When Sam stopped playing, a full nine minutes later, Debbie Bell was leaning against the far wall, immobilised.

  Emily was now sitting in a chair next to her father, who was trying as hard as he could to hide the fact that the tears in his eyes were in danger of spilling down his cheeks.

  For eighteen years, Tim Bell had taught advanced music classes at Baine College. He was now, at the age of forty-four, the head of the music department.

  And he’d never had a student as talented as the kid sitting on his sofa.

  Tim Bell drove him home.

  Or to what he thought was his home.

  Sam didn’t lie, but he asked to be dropped at the kerb four blocks from where he actually lived.

  Tim Bell tried to give Sam his mountain bike, which was in the garage and something he never used, but Sam explained he’d never learned to ride a bike. Jared thought that was a bigger deal than the way Sam played guitar.

  Now Sam sat with Emily in the back seat with Jared up front while Tim showed him the bus route and how to catch the number four bus over on Hilyard and how it would end up only two blocks from where the Bells lived.

  Neither of Emily’s parents wanted him walking an hour each way just to see their daughter. Not any more.

  Debbie Bell kept an extra cell phone in the glove box of her car, always charged, for emergencies. She worked, after all, in a hospital, and she knew firsthand the crazy things that happened to people. She went out and retrieved the extra phone and before Tim took Sam home, Debbie gave it to him.

  She didn’t like the idea of him not being reachable. Emily tried not to laugh, and Debbie mistook this for simple enthusiasm.

  In the driveway, when Sam took Emily’s hand, he slipped her old phone back to her. And the world no longer felt against them.

  Everything changed after Sam played her father’s guitar.

  Her mom and dad went from the Haters to the Supporters. That night, after they dropped him off, Emily stood in the hallway behind the closed kitchen door and listened to her parents talk. Her dad’s voice was fast-paced and excited.

  ‘He’s a complete natural. An original. An innovator. He’s got finger speed like a young Jimi Hendrix. He’s got blues technique like Ry Cooder. He’s some kind of prodigy!’

  Emily could picture her mother’s head bobbing up and down, because she was enthusiastically agreeing. ‘He’s a real musician . . .’

  Her father jumped back in, ‘No, he’s more than that. I don’t know how Emily found this kid. I don’t know where he came from. But he’s going places!’

  Her mother’s voice now sounded as if she were trying to calm him down. ‘Well, right now he’s just a kid. He’s —’

  But her father interrupted. ‘I want him at the music department at Baine! He’s homeschooled, so he’d just need to take the GED. He’ll have no trouble passing and then —’

  Now it was her mother who was interrupting. ‘Tim, you’re getting ahead of yourself. You have to find out if Sam’s even interested. And homeschooled kids usually have parents with strong opinions about their education. You’ll need to speak to his father. You’ll —’

  But Tim Bell would hear none of it. He had a vision for Sam Smith’s musical future.

  Emily walked away from the door.

  Her father had big plans for her boyfriend. Maybe being a Supporter was going to cause more problems than being a Hater.

  Riddle, more than anyone, understood change. And so he knew that Sam was changing before Sam did.

  Riddle was outside staring at a line of ants moving into a small hole in the claylike, rust-coloured earth. Behind him, sitting in the weeds, Sam was talking on a cell phone. But Riddle couldn’t hear him. And he didn’t want to hear him.

  He comes and he goes now. But when he’s here, he’s far away. So even when he comes back to me, he’s part gone.

  I follow where I can follow, where he will
let me follow. Like the ants follow in the line.

  Because Sam is the only one who matters.

  And if I lose my Sam, there will be nothing for me.

  Riddle lowered his head and his left ear pressed hard into the clay earth. It felt wet and cold. But from this angle, he could really watch the ants move.

  They were on his level now. And this close, they seemed blind, feeling their way forward with probing antennae, using smell and feel and taste.

  Riddle remembered that Sam had said that ants march to find food. He remembered that they steal from other ants and capture ant slaves. He squinted past the now-large ants to his now-small brother in the distant background.

  Has someone captured my Sam?

  Is he now a slave?

  The Bells wanted to meet his father.

  Not possible.

  There was nothing in the world that could make that happen. They could ask and ask and ask, but no. Never. Ever.

  His father ruined everything. Always.

  Forever.

  Was her father now going to ruin everything?

  Tim and Debbie Bell shifted to wanting to meet his brother. They asked and asked and asked. And finally he said he’d consider it. And then eventually, worn down from their persistence, he agreed.

  Maybe meeting Riddle would explain things. They’d know then that his life wasn’t all about him.

  And maybe they’d understand and stop asking the questions. It was hard enough when she asked the questions.

  If it weren’t for Emily, he’d throw the cell phone and the gold watch onto their front lawn and never look back.

  What was better, eating together at a restaurant or staying at home?

  Where would they feel more comfortable?

  Emily settled on her house. It would be harder to keep her father under control, harder to keep him from dragging Sam down to the basement to get into music, but this was supposed to be about meeting Sam’s little brother, and her father would just have to focus on that.

  The night after Sam had played her father’s prize guitar, everything switched. Her dad now acted like the kid with the crush, and she was the parent. Emily had to tell him to back off, to go slow. She had to tell her dad that he was overwhelming the situation.