I&#39ll Be There (10 page)

And that meant that if Hiro bought 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.

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.

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, but 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.

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.