I&#39ll Be There

by Holly Goldberg Sloan

  Jared’s eyes were like saucers. ‘Really? Does Emily know? Does Mom know? Is he okay?’

  And then, before Tim could answer, the front door swung open and Debbie and Riddle walked in.

  42

  Emily leaned her head against the tinted bus window. How many people took a bus home on prom night? How many people had their dates walk out on them? She suddenly felt bad for Bobby. Maybe she should have stayed and told him to his face that she was leaving. But she didn’t want to cause a scene. Wasn’t it better this way?

  And then, up ahead, she could see the marquee for the Motel Six. The red neon sign that said No Vacancy was turned on. Underneath, in glowing yellow letters, she could read, We’ll leave the light on for you.

  Emily shut her eyes. She’d done the right thing.

  The bus turned at the corner and headed onto Scofield Avenue. They were passing by the old part of downtown. There wasn’t much traffic, and the bus went through a half dozen lights before stopping in front of the bus station.

  An elderly woman sitting near her stood up to get off. Emily glanced out the windshield and she could see that someone was in the shadows of the bus enclosure waiting to get on.

  But with the tinted glass and dusky sky, Emily could barely see the person.

  Checklist. Fire in the fireplace, not good. Cats, excellent. Dog, also excellent. Emily not being home, not good. Cold milk, good. Bed downstairs, not good. Bed in Jared’s room, possible. Leftover chilli, unknown.

  Within the first five minutes, they established that a fire reminded Riddle of being out in the woods, and that reminded him of Sam, and that was really not good. Emily not being home upset him. He wanted to see her.

  Riddle held the cats in his arms and tried to pet the dog at the same time, and that was also not good. But the pets were a great thing. They gave the room focus.

  The bed in the little room downstairs was concerning to Riddle because everyone else slept upstairs. Good point. He didn’t want to sleep alone.

  Did they all want to sleep together outside in a tent?

  Sam stood at the front of the bus paying his fare.

  Emily, in the back, couldn’t clearly see his face, but she could see the shape of his body and she knew.

  It was him. It was Sam.

  So she was dreaming.

  Or someone put some kind of drug in her lemonade at the prom. Bobby Ellis. Maybe even Rory.

  Because she was hallucinating. Right?

  Because what was Sam, who was dead, doing getting on a city bus?

  Was there someone else in the world who looked just like him?

  Isn’t that what people said?

  That there was someone in the world who was your twin, visually speaking. The person at the front of the bus stood exactly Sam’s height, with the exact same posture. He had his wild hair, but was skinnier. He was angular in a way that Sam wasn’t. Plus he moved in a different way. He was stiff. He was hurt.

  And Sam didn’t have a worn jean jacket, but his jeans looked like ones that Sam had worn. And then he turned, and she saw his face.

  It. Was. Him.

  And he now saw her. And he just stared right at her. Unblinking.

  Emily opened her mouth, and all that came out was, ‘I . . .’

  That was it. Nothing else. Just ‘I’. His eyes were locked with hers. He came closer and she was on her feet and she was moving towards him and finally she said, ‘Sam.’ And Sam, ‘Emily.’

  He did not expect to see her on the bus.

  He did not expect to see her wearing a beautiful dress, barefoot, holding her little sandals in her trembling hand.

  He did not expect to see that.

  He was going to find her with her family at her house, and even that made him feel afraid, like he’d fall apart. And now this.

  Now, in front of a dozen people under fluorescent lights in the aisle of a city bus, she was there.

  And she wrapped her arms around him, and even if he wasn’t real, she was never, ever going to let him go.

  The city bus route did not go by the Bell house.

  Riddle knew that better than anyone, because Riddle had memorised all the routes and had ridden the bus and thought about the bus even when he wasn’t riding the bus. He had drawn diagrams of the town and of the bus lines and he had included all of the bus stops.

  But now, looking out the front window through the gauzy, sheer white curtain, Riddle saw a city bus. And it had put on the brakes right in front of the Bell house.

  Riddle turned to the room and said, ‘The bus came here.’

  Everyone turned to look outside, and he was right.

  There was a city bus right at the kerb. And the door was opening, and two people were getting out.

  Jared didn’t care much about buses, so he went back to looking at Riddle’s hands, which were all scratched up.

  Tim Bell bent down to pick up Jared’s big picture book about frogs, which was now in danger of getting stepped on.

  Debbie, who was exhausted from the driving and the lack of sleep, took a moment to lean against the couch and shut her eyes.

  And that’s where they were when Riddle screamed.

  Sam heard his brother’s muffled scream, coming from inside the house, and it was like a razor cutting his throat. He’d heard that scream before.

  But then the heavy front door of the Bells’ house opened, and Riddle came out onto the brick walkway, and he was running.

  He was running straight to him.

  And Sam felt his knees give way and it was possible, in just that moment when he realised that he had a little brother and that this little brother was alive, that everything bad that had ever happened to him in his life was erased.

  Because he now knew that sheer joy wipes out pure pain.

  No one slept that night.

  Not Sam or Riddle Border.

  Not Emily Bell.

  Not Jared, who had never stayed up past twelve-thirty in his whole life.

  Not Debbie or Tim Bell.

  Not Bobby Ellis.

  Not Nora or Rory.

  Not Olga from the Mountain Basin Inn, but that was because she had drunk regular coffee instead of decaf served by accident at the hotel concierge desk.

  Not even Detective Sanderson, who had received a call from the Bells telling him about Sam, and who then had sat up in bed all night watching film noir and wishing that he had been born in an era where he could wear a fedora to work.

  Sam and Riddle held on to each other for what seemed like forever, and then both of them, unable to contain themselves, found their faces wet with tears.

  That got Emily weeping, and then the rest of the family joined in, except for Jared, who for some reason couldn’t stop laughing. Felix the dog barked for a solid ten minutes.

  Once they finally got themselves under control, everyone kept explaining, over and over and over again, what had happened. Then Debbie insisted, despite the late hour, that they go to the emergency room at Sacred Heart hospital and have Sam checked out.

  It was there that it was made official that Sam had broken his shoulder. The X-rays revealed that, despite everything that had happened in the intervening weeks since the accident in the national forest, the bones were well on their way to knitting back together. Only an orthopedist would be able to tell if they needed to be surgically reset.

  And so they were all squeezed into one car, because no one wanted to be separated, and they were driving back across town to the Bell house at four in the morning when they passed a limousine filled with juniors and seniors from Churchill High School who had left the after-party.

  Bobby Ellis was inside the stretch, wondering how so much could have gone so wrong so quickly.

  In the back seat of her parents’ car, Emily had changed out of her prom dress and was wearing jeans and a hooded sweatshirt from her soccer team. She’d never ridden in a limo that night and didn’t even register that Bobby might be inside the one that passed.

  An hour later, wh
en the sun rose, the sky was fiery orange, and no one could ever recall seeing it that way.

  43

  Hiro Yamada of Medford Coin had for ten years kept the valuable penny brought in by Clarence Border.

  In the second week of June, a photo of Clarence appeared online with an account of the man who had wrongly taken his two young sons and spent years on the road. Hiro immediately recognised the group.

  Hiro contacted law enforcement and was directed to Detective Sanderson, who was coordinating the legal aspects of the case on behalf of the two minors. A judge in Utah juvenile court had awarded temporary guardianship of both Border boys to Debbie and Tim Bell.

  Sam and Riddle couldn’t remember going into Medford Coin.

  But Sam remembered his mother having a penny collection. And he remembered that it was kept in a blue cardboard penny holder. That turned out to be enough identification.

  The penny, which Hiro Yamada had certified as authentic, was then put up for auction and sold ten days later for the record price of $48,202 in San Francisco.

  Detective Sanderson hung up the phone once he had the news and found himself saying, for the rest of the day, ‘Not bad for a penny.’

  Sam and Riddle wanted to split the money with Mr Yamada, but he flatly refused. His grandparents had lost their landscaping business during the forced internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. Hiro’s father had been born behind the barbed wire at Tule Lake.

  Hiro believed in returning property to rightful owners. After the story became public, the reputation of Medford Coin soared to new heights, and Hiro became a national expert on Indian Head pennies, tracking the most famous collections and acting as the sales agent in many high-profile transactions.

  Riddle had only heard Hiro’s name; he’d never seen it in print. And when he sat down with Debbie and wrote a letter and thanked him, he addressed it to Hero.

  No one corrected him.

  Sam sent Julio Cortez a certified cheque to the post office box address he’d been given. It was twice the amount that Sam had borrowed.

  Julio thought it was only fair to give the overpayment to Buzz Nast, who bought a new jean jacket and shirt when he got back from his three months herding cattle. The woman in the general-supply store who found Buzz the right size coat asked him to go with her after work for a coffee. Her name was Marla.

  Instead, Marla and Buzz went to a bar called the Golden Horseshoe.

  Eighteen days later, they drove all night to Las Vegas and got married. Marla’s dream was to raise miniature cattle. Buzz was a willing partner.

  At the end of the summer, the dinosaur hunters – Crawford Luttrell, Dina Sokolow and Julian Mickelson – turned in to the Discovery Channel ninety hours of video from their six-month expedition. The scientists all hoped that the network would see the merit in their work and continue to fund their ambitious paleontology research project.

  But it was not to be.

  The head of the network, Bernie Smeltzer, looked at a rough cut of a potential pilot for the show and said it looked dusty and boring. He passed on the programme, giving everyone involved two weeks’ severance pay.

  Three days later, an intern named Sarah Allen, who worked in the editing room, cut together the footage of Riddle being found. It caused a sensation when the new vice president of programmeming, Wei Chen, was walking down the hall and heard people squealing.

  Wei took the footage and, from it, the show The Seekers was born. The TV programme, starring the three scientists, was about discoveries of the sensational kind. Their second story was an exposé of a woman who had lost her pinkie in a boating accident and believed that it was her finger that appeared in a fish sandwich at a fast-food restaurant two weeks later. The scientists led the team doing the DNA testing to verify the claim.

  Debbie and Tim let Riddle decide if he wanted to participate in the programme. He refused to do any additional filming, but he allowed the scientists to use the existing footage.

  He then had Debbie and Tim donate the money he received to the paleontology programme at the University of Utah. Riddle hoped to one day study dinosaur bones at a very high level. He’d caught the fever.

  In Cedar City, Gertrude Wetterling locked herself out of her house one night after a bridge tournament. She had yet to master the new alarm system, which she’d installed after Clarence had stolen her jewellery.

  Gertrude tried to break into her own home by climbing a rose trellis up to the second story. The trellis was more ornamental than structural, and Gertrude fell to the ground and broke her wrist.

  Her daughter Els, who lived in San Diego, took the injury, on the heels of the robbery, as a sign. And two months later, Gertrude Wetterling was living in a retirement community with an ocean view in La Jolla, California. The woman in the unit next to her had been a professional opera singer in Italy, and she and Gertrude listened to opera every afternoon for two hours. For Gertrude, it was heaven.

  With Gertrude gone, Mrs Dairy began wearing the gemstone-encrusted Christmas tree pin to church on Sundays.

  She told the other parishioners that she’d found one like Gertrude had owned in an antique store in Skylar. Everyone admired the pin, and there were smiles all around.

  Crystal from Superior Cuts entered the before and after pictures of Sam and Emily into the annual North American Hairstyling Awards. She won second place in the nationwide contest, which was an all-expenses-paid trip to Miami to their annual convention.

  While at the convention, Crystal met Wade Vilhelmsen, who owned ten salons in the Southwest. Wade hired Crystal to be his new general manager.

  Bobby Ellis hooked up with Marylou Azoff the night of the prom after Emily walked out on him. He knew that Marylou had always liked him.

  But Marylou’s mother was relocated to Denver when she got a job promotion, and the Azoffs left town in June. Bobby said they could still be a couple even though they weren’t in the same state, but Marylou didn’t see it working out.

  Once she was gone, Bobby announced that he now wanted to be known as Robb. With two bs.

  He had a six-month, fourteen-point plan in place for a new identity.

  Debbie and Tim Bell had decisions to make.

  At first they thought that they’d simply have Sam and Riddle live with them. But their daughter was involved with Sam, and so that wouldn’t work.

  But then the penny was sold at auction, and the boys had some resources. They decided to take an inexpensive apartment near the college. Sam would be eighteen on his next birthday, and Tim Bell was in the process of arranging for him to get a scholarship into the college music programme.

  The boys wanted to be together. For now, it was a solution. Riddle walked over to the Bells’ house every morning as soon as he woke up, which was always early now. Felix took to sleeping in the boys’ apartment, so the two could be seen just after sunrise, walking across people’s lawns. Riddle didn’t like sidewalks.

  The two cats stayed with Emily.

  Late at night, several weeks later, in another state, Clarence Border lay awake in his airless jail cell, feeling the agonising pain of a missing limb. Because a foot that was no longer there was moving.

  At the same time, hundreds of miles away, Sam was in an apartment that legally belonged to him and his little brother. He was staring at the plaster ceiling, trying to fall asleep. He still assumed that it was possible that he might open his eyes at dawn and discover that the last six months of his life had been a dream. He might wake to find that his old reality would be in place.

  And then in his mind’s eye he remembered first seeing Emily. Music was playing. She sang to him, off-key, ‘I’ll be there.’

  For him and his brother, he now knew, that music was real.

  Because all you had to do, really, was be willing to use your imagination.

  And listen.

 

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