Miracle on 49th Street

by Mike Lupica

  Molly said, “Don’t want one.”

  Josh said, “You know, you really shouldn’t be in the parking lot. Everybody was sort of supposed to stay in the gym when practice was over.”

  “I snuck out early,” Molly said. “I needed to talk to you.”

  Be cool, fool, Sam had said. Don’t get ahead of yourself.

  Josh Cameron looked back over his shoulder, toward the gate, as if maybe the guard could help him out here.

  “Listen, honey, I don’t mean to blow you off.”

  “Molly,” she said. “My name’s Molly.”

  “Molly,” he said. “Nice to meet you, Molly. But, listen, I’m running kind of late. We’ve got our Welcome Home dinner later, in town, and I’ve got to get ready for it.”

  “At the Westin,” Molly said.

  “Right. So I need to get back and change and do a few things.”

  He took the Oakleys off now, as if giving her a closer look. “Do I know you?”

  Molly was the one shaking her head now. “No reason why you should.” Then, “Nice jacket.”

  “This old thing? We go way back, the two of us.”

  “To UConn. I know.”

  “Yeah, the sportswriters seem to get a kick out of it, maybe because they always think this is the year when it’s finally going to fall apart.” He shrugged. “No kidding, I don’t want to be rude, but I gotta bounce.”

  He opened the door on the driver’s side, like this was the official beginning of him saying good-bye to her and driving away.

  Blowing her off.

  He tossed the Celtics bag on the passenger seat in the front, then said, “Hey!” Like he’d come up with a bright idea. “Hey, I’ve got something for you, after all.” Winking at her. “Even though I said no autographs.”

  He opened up the back door then, pulled out a regulation size basketball, grabbed a Sharpie out of one of the pockets of the leather jacket. “To Molly—is that okay?”—not even waiting for an answer as he started writing.

  When he was done, he handed her the ball. She looked at what he’d written. “To Molly, a great fan and a new friend. Josh Cameron, No. 3.”

  Molly turned the ball over in her hands.

  Then she handed it back.

  It actually got a laugh out of him. “Now, wait a second. Nobody ever passes up Josh Cameron stuff.” He put his hands to his cheeks, trying to make himself look sad. “I must be losing it.”

  Get to it, she told herself, you’re losing him.

  “I didn’t come here for stuff,” she said.

  “Why did you then?”

  Here goes.

  “I needed to talk to you about something important.”

  He looked at his Omega James Bond watch.

  “You know what’s important to me right now? Making sure I show up for that Welcome Home dinner on time. So how about you have your teacher or your parents call the PR department and, who knows, maybe I could come speak at your school sometime.”

  Then he slid in behind the wheel and reached for the door and said, “Nice meeting you, Molly.”

  “She bought that jacket for you.”

  He turned off the ignition now and said, “Excuse me?”

  “She said she had left you crying in your dorm room when you got back that night from not making the Final Four, saying it was all your fault and you had let everybody down. And the next day she went and spent all the money she had in her checking account on that jacket and told you the next year you could wear it to the Final Four. And you did.”

  She said it word for word exactly right, the way she had all the times when she’d rehearsed it with Sam, Sam playing the part of Josh Cameron.

  He got out of the car and closed the door and got down in a crouch, so they were eye to eye. “You’re Jen’s kid, aren’t you?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “I’ve always told people that this old jacket is my good luck charm,” he said. “But I never told why. We promised we’d never tell anybody.”

  “Don’t be mad,” Molly said. “She only told me.”

  “I’m not mad.”

  “She told me she never broke promises. Even when she promised you she wasn’t ever coming back.”

  Molly was wearing a red cap Sam had given her, a Red Sox cap with “Believe” on the front, from the year they won the World Series. Josh tipped it back slightly, to give himself a better look at her. “No wonder I thought I might know you,” he said. Then he nodded and said, “So she finally did come back.”

  Molly tried to swallow but couldn’t. “She came back.”

  “Well, tell your mom she didn’t have to send you if she wanted to let me know she was back. She could’ve come herself.”

  Molly said, “No.”

  “Same old stubborn Jen. And she used to say I was the one who’d never change.”

  “My mom died,” Molly said. “Right before school started.”

  She watched as Josh Cameron started to fall backward, before he caught himself at the last second. “No,” he said. “Oh, God, no.”

  Then he said, “How?”

  “It was cancer,” Molly said. “They found out about it too late, that’s what the doctors back in London told her. Then she came home, and the doctors here told her the exact same thing.”

  He took her hands. “I am so sorry, kid. Thank you for coming out here to tell me, or I never would’ve known. I mean, I didn’t even know she got married over there.”

  Molly said, “She didn’t, actually.”

  “Oh,” he said. He ran a hand through his hair, like he was stumped, and finally said, “Well, okay then.”

  “It’s cool,” she said.

  “Well, at least I understand why you didn’t want some silly old signed ball. What you had to tell me was important.”

  “That wasn’t it,” Molly said. “At least not all of it.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  Molly couldn’t help it, she found herself smiling now, hearing her mom’s voice inside her head like she was right there with them.

  Which maybe she was.

  The idea that she was being one of the things that kept Molly going.

  “Mom said there was a lot you didn’t understand.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “She did.”

  He looked past Molly, like he was looking to some faraway place in the distance, and said, “She used to say that a lot, as a matter of fact.”

  “See, I wasn’t supposed to come…she kept saying it was a truly bad idea…” The words were spilling out of her now. “And if you know my mom—what am I saying? You did know her…you know what it was like when she said something was truly good or truly bad…”

  “Molly,” he said, “what was this truly bad idea?”

  “Me telling you that you’re my dad.”

  CHAPTER 2

  In the distance, Molly noticed some of the other Celtics players coming out of the Sports Authority Training Center.

  “No,” Josh Cameron finally said to her.

  He straightened up now, grunting a little as he did, as if doing that made his knees hurt.

  “Excuse me?” she said, acting as if she hadn’t heard him correctly, even though it was just one word in the air between them.

  No.

  “I don’t believe you,” he said.

  “It’s true!” Molly said, louder than she meant. “You have to believe me.”

  As soon as she heard the last part come out of her mouth, she knew she sounded as if she were six years old instead of twelve.

  She put her hand on the back pocket of her jeans, where she had the letter her mom had written to her, one of the letters she had left for Molly to read after she was gone. Jen Parker, who had really wanted to be a writer. Who said that she was always better at writing her thoughts down than saying them out loud.

  Molly had planned on showing him the letter, but now she wondered what the point was.

  This wasn’t going anything like she’d planned.

>   “Keep your voice down,” Josh said, looking past her to where some of his teammates, one of them the big Chinese rookie, Ming Cho, were getting into their own Navigator-type cars.

  “I’m sorry,” Molly said.

  Then thought to herself, You’re sorry? You tell him what you just told him and he basically calls you a liar and then tells you to shut up, like he’s a teacher in class, and you’re the one who’s supposed to apologize?

  Who are you, Barbie?

  Forget sounding six. She sounded like the girly girl of the universe.

  “Listen,” he said. “I’m sorry I snapped at you. I am sorry about your mom, because she must have told you I cared about her a lot once. And I’m sure that if you don’t know who—If you don’t have a dad, it must be even harder on you. But that doesn’t mean you can just show up out of the blue and lay something like this on me.”

  He looked down.

  The watch again.

  Like they were nearing the end of the game.

  Even if this was no game, at least not to her.

  She said, “Why would I lie?”

  “Only you can answer that one, kid.” He tilted his head to the side, like he was curious about something. “Tell me again how old you are.”

  “I never told you how old I was. But I’m twelve.”

  Molly actually felt like she could see him doing the math, like his face was a blackboard and he was adding. Or subtracting.

  “Junior year abroad,” he said. “She had this figured pretty good.”

  “Had what figured pretty good?”

  “The timing,” Josh Cameron said. “To make her story plausible.”

  “Her story?” Molly could feel herself clenching her fists. “You think my mom made up this story and then told me to come tell it to you after she died?”

  “It’s a good try, is all I’m saying.”

  Molly took another deep breath, through her nose, then another, slowly, filling her lungs up, emptying them, one of the exercises the grief counselor had told her about.

  She pictured herself throwing the letter at him, telling him if he wanted to really know her mom’s story, well, here it was.

  Only she didn’t.

  “It was junior year abroad,” Molly said.

  “When she left,” he said. “Saying she didn’t know when she’d be back.”

  Molly didn’t say a word, still just trying to breathe in and out.

  “Like I said,” Josh said. “I’m sorry about all of this.”

  “You’ve made that pretty clear.”

  “But there is no way in this world that Jen…that your mom…could’ve gone off to London and had a baby—what you’re trying to tell me now is my baby—and never told me about it over all these years.”

  Off to her left, Molly’s eyes tracked on all the cars pulling away from the Sports Authority Training Center, the kids probably ripping through the goody bags in the backseats, the moms driving them home with their stupid autographs and their Josh Cameron stuff.

  Molly found herself thinking of Sam. Wishing she could text message him right this minute. Everybody else thought he was just some funny-looking nerd, but from the first day, Molly had been able to see inside him. She picked up right away that he was smarter than everybody else, that he was funnier, that he always knew the exact right thing to say.

  Never once when they’d rehearsed her big scene had it played out like this.

  Josh Cameron acting as if she’d just shown up here to throw up some kind of pathetic—truly pathetic—desperation shot at the buzzer.

  “I don’t even know where you live,” he said. “Or who you live with. Do they know you came here today?”

  Molly said, “I live with Mr. and Mrs. Evans. They have a daughter the same age as me. Mrs. Evans was my mom’s best friend at UConn.”

  “You’re living with Barbara?”

  “On Joy Street. Near Beacon.”

  “Does Barbara think you’re—Did your mom tell her the same story you’re telling me?”

  Her story. They were back to that.

  The made-up kind of story is what he really meant.

  “No,” Molly said.

  “It was between you and your mom.”

  “Pretty much. She said she’d made a promise to herself that she wasn’t ever going to tell anybody.”

  “Until she was dying.”

  Molly said, “She wasn’t even going to tell then. But she saw that the older I got, the more suspicious I was about what she’d always told me about my dad, that he was a soldier she’d met when she first got to London and then he went off and got himself killed in the first Gulf War.”

  “And you started to not believe her?”

  “There was just a lot of things that didn’t add up, is all.”

  “And when you finally got her to fess up, what was her reason for never telling you the truth—what she said was the truth—about me?”

  Molly stared at him hard for a second and then said, “Because Mom said you wouldn’t have been any better at loving me than you were at loving her.”

  He slowly nodded his head. “Well, she still knows everything, doesn’t she?” he said.

  Then he opened the door to the Navigator, got behind the wheel, closed the door, started up the engine, and drove away.

  CHAPTER 3

  She called Sam from the parking lot.

  He asked how it had gone. She told him, finally saying that maybe things could have gone worse than they actually did, but only if Josh Cameron had told her she was grounded and taken away her computer privileges before he made his getaway.

  Sam said, “He really thought you had made it up?”

  “About my mom being my mom? No. About him being my dad? Yes.”

  “He’s a freak.”

  Freak being one of Sam’s favorite and most frequently used words. There were good freaks and bad freaks, depending on the situation. A mean teacher could be a freak. Bad. A rock star or a ballplayer or an actor on a TV show could be a freak. Good. Parents could go either way, depending on the situation.

  “Get back here as soon as you can,” Sam said. “Before my mom gets home from Paper and Scissors.” It was the art class for little kids that Sam’s mom taught a few days a week at the Boston Public Library on Boylston Street, a few blocks from where they lived.

  Molly said, “Has anybody called?”

  “No,” Sam said, “we’re still good.”

  “No Barbara, calling to see if I really went there after school?”

  “It’s insane,” Sam said. “She actually trusts you.”

  “What happens if she does call?”

  “I’ve got the ringer turned off on the phone and a message that says that my mom’s at work and that Jill the hated housekeeper took us over to the Public Gardens for a game of catch.”

  Sam refused, under penalty of torture, to ever refer to the hated Jill as a babysitter. He had told his mom he was twelve now and didn’t need a babysitter. So here was the compromise: Jill’s two days of cleaning the apartment were the two days that Emma would work in the late afternoon. But, officially, Jill was there to clean and not to watch Sam because that’s what housekeepers who were not babysitters did.

  “Catch?” Molly said. “As in baseball-like catch? As in you and me? There’s a better chance of me trying to teach you cricket.”

  “My feeling, as you know, is that if you’re going to make something up, make it a whopper.”

  “Yeah, with cheese,” Molly said. “We have never once played catch in the park. Trust me, I’d remember.”

  “True,” he said. “But they don’t know that. I kind of like having old Barbara think I’m a secret jock, even with this bod.”

  Sam Bloom was basically shaped like a frog, although Molly would never tell him that. Somehow he seemed to get wider as he went from top to bottom. But to Molly, he was a fairy-tale frog who turned into a prince every time he opened his mouth and either smartened her up or made her laugh.

&
nbsp; “I’m on my way,” Molly said.

  “Hurry,” Sam said.

  Molly said, “Yeah, I’ll tell my limo driver to step on it.”

  She had brought forty dollars of her secret money, just in case she missed one of the buses on the way home or took the wrong one and needed to call a cab. “If I don’t mess up, I can be there in an hour.”

  “If you’re not, I’ll stall somehow.”

  “Sam Bloom?”

  They both knew that when she went first name and last name on him, she was more serious than a trip to the dentist’s.

  “Yes?” he said, trying to sound innocent.

  “One whopper a day is enough.”

  “Mols, if I am forced to tell another lie, all I can tell you is that it will fit the occasion.”

  “That’s what I’m afraid of.”

  “Let me ask you something,” he said.

  Molly realized that just talking to him on her cell was making her feel a little better already. “Shoot,” she said.

  “Who’s got your back more than me?”

  “No one,” Molly said.

  The truth was, nobody besides Sam Bloom had her back at all.

  The Evanses lived in an old brownstone on a narrow cobblestone street. The actual address was 1A Joy Street. Molly now found that funny, just not ha-ha funny. She had told Sam once that if she did find any real joy at 1A Joy Street that she wanted to figure out a way to send up a flare.

  Sam’s apartment, closer to Kenmore Square than it was to the Public Gardens, was about a twenty-minute walk away, down Beacon. His father worked for Bank of America and seemed to be traveling all the time. His mom kept busy by working two days a week at Paper and Scissors, and another two at an exercise place called Exhale near the Four Seasons Hotel. Sam said it was full of women trying to look like his mom.

  Sam thought it was one of God’s jokes that a woman as pretty and fit as Emma Bloom would have a “lump” like him for a kid.

  “You’re not a lump, and don’t let me ever hear you say that again,” Molly told him. “One of these days everybody’s going to see how great you truly are the way I do.”

  Truly.

  A Mom word.

  Sam Bloom was alone way too much until Molly came to Boston and she and her mom took a two-bedroom sublet in the same building where the Blooms lived, thinking they could extend the lease but never even making it to the end of it….