I&#39ll Be There (21 page)

Riddle picked up a rock and slammed it down on the fish’s head, ending its life.

He stared at the glistening trout. It was beautiful. Riddle felt an ache run through his entire body, until he realised that, for the first time in three days, he and his brother would go to
sleep with a full meal.

Riddle went to check on Sam, who was sleeping. His arm, twisted in a funny way because of his broken shoulder, lay at a strange angle.

Sam had let the fire go out.

Riddle couldn’t get mad. He’d been gone for hours, and Sam was barely mobile. Riddle put the fish down and climbed the hillside.

He’d discovered that the sticks he threw on the fire that had sticky ends burned best. So now Riddle carefully examined the gnarly pine trees and found what he was looking for: a large
ball of amber tree sap.

Riddle used a rock to chip away a fist-size glob, and then he returned to the river. He picked an area in full sun, close to where he’d built the branch enclosure. He then held the glass
front of Sam’s watch at an angle in the light, aimed at a corner of the sap.

Riddle had focus. To a fault. He’d learned long ago to find his own reality. He was wired that way. And in doing that, he was patient. He had waited for ten years for a mother. He was
still waiting. So he could wait for a hot spot of refracted light.

It took fourteen minutes.

The sap bubbled, and then smoke finally rose in a single wisp.

Riddle fed it carefully, like he was tending a baby animal, coaxing it along. He added tiny bits of dry, dead wood, then larger sticks.

And an hour later, he had a roaring fire and was roasting his fresh-caught rainbow trout.

Everyone loved Emily’s haircut.

She had done it not as an act of defiance but as an act of solidarity. It had turned into an act of redefinition.

The old Emily was gone.

And this new Emily felt, with every passing day, her disappointment growing. No matter where Sam was, no matter what had happened, she believed he could figure out a way to call, even if only to
say that he was never coming back, that his life had complexity that she could never understand.

But he didn’t.

Not calling was a form of communication in its own right. She began to believe that his silence was his way of definitely telling her that they weren’t returning. Because Sam and
Riddle’s father was some kind of criminal, and maybe Sam was some kind of criminal, too.

Emily was coming to believe that everyone made choices. Sam was making his. If he called and asked for help, she would have been there. Her whole family would have been there. She’d seen
her mother’s face at night, worrying about Riddle and Sam, but these boys weren’t little children.

One of them was a young man.

As the shock of their disappearance gave way to the guilt that she hadn’t known their real circumstances, the pain of that was now turning into resentment and then loneliness. Which was
why she said yes when Bobby Ellis asked her if she wanted to go with his family to the country club for Sunday dinner.

She’d been to the club once before, but that was just to swim at Anneke Reeves’s birthday party. She’d never been in the dining room or on the terrace that overlooked the golf
course, where they served drinks and little plates of bite-size finger food before mealtime.

But it wasn’t like she’d ever wanted to go.

Emily had never even given it a thought. Her parents didn’t run their own businesses or have companies with their names in the titles.

So when Bobby Ellis said that the last Sunday of every month was the club’s all-you-can-eat seafood buffet, and that his parents always went and that he could bring a guest, she said
yes.

But she didn’t want it to be like they were going out, or hooking up, or were some kind of special friends, because they weren’t.

She told herself that over and over again.

Going to the Viewpoint Country Club didn’t mean anything. It just meant that she had to wear a dress, and it had to have sleeves, not spaghetti straps, and she had to wear shoes that
weren’t open-toed.

She’d never heard of rules like that when it came to a place to eat.

But Bobby Ellis had explained that he had to wear a shirt with a collar as well as the jacket from a suit. And all men had to always wear socks with their shoes in the dining room.

Emily thought that the men-wearing-socks rule was funny. If she wore her running shoes without socks for a few hours, they smelled as bad as her brother’s stinky high-tops.

But maybe at the country club, they didn’t realise that.

And she wasn’t going to wear her running shoes, so no one should worry.

Bobby Ellis didn’t even like seafood.

But people went crazy for the towers of plump pink shrimp and the mountain of cracked crab at the country club Sunday buffet. It seemed to Bobby Ellis to be unsanitary.

All those stubby fingers reaching in and grabbing at things. There were large trays of smoked salmon and gooey shucked oysters. There were buckets of grey clams and greenish blue mussels flown
in from another continent.

There was herring, which looked to Bobby like sliced-up filleted garden snakes lying in a creamy white pool of smelly sauce. And even though they flooded all the tables with garlic bread, to him
the whole place still reeked like a bait shop.

But just as he did with almost everything in his life, Bobby Ellis hid his true feelings and imitated the general mood of the crowd. So when they walked through the double doors with the
bevelled glass windows that had
VCC
etched on the front, Bobby turned to Emily and said in an intimate whisper, ‘They used to have lobster tails, but they’ve cut back because of
the economy.’

Emily didn’t remember ever eating a lobster tail, unless you counted the deep-fried langostino bites that she’d once had at Long John Silver’s. But those tasted just like
breaded shrimp and didn’t seem like anything fancy.

Bobby’s mother, Barb, sighed. ‘I loved those lobster tails . . .’

She seemed to really mean it, because a kind of deep sadness filled her face, which had a smooth finish, owing to her heavy application of liquid foundation. Bobby found himself feeling bad for
her, on account of both her make-up choice and the lobster.

Inside, the Ellis family (plus Guest) was directed to a table next to the windows. Bobby explained that, during the day, this was a great table because you could see the seventh green.

Emily stared outside and saw only pitch black.

A waiter came to take their drink order, and Bobby’s parents both had martinis straight up with extra, extra olives. Bobby had a Diet Coke. And Emily ordered lemonade.

The drinks came with plastic stirring sticks that each said
VCC
in gold letters on a shield the size of a postage stamp that topped the tip. Bobby had never noticed the stirring sticks
before, and it was only when Emily pointed them out that he wondered how he could have missed them once a week for his entire life.

Bobby hoped that ordering a Diet Coke didn’t make him seem like a girl, but he was used to the taste and liked it better than regular Coke. After the waiter brought their drinks,
Bobby’s parents started asking Emily questions. Bobby was cringing inside, even though on the outside he kept his usual, friendly expression on his face.

He knew that his father and mother couldn’t help it. They were a lawyer and a detective. Interrogation was their game. In their world, it substituted for all dialogue and small talk.

Since he was small, Bobby Ellis had learned to answer a question with whatever people most wanted to hear. It had a way of stopping them. But Emily didn’t know this trick, and her answers
only opened up all kinds of new inquiries.

Barb Ellis finished her second martini with extra, extra olives, and the group got up to get their buffet plates.

Bobby didn’t go because he’d ordered a chopped Salisbury steak with extra mushroom sauce from the regular menu.

He was the only one in the large dining room eating beef.

Emily was surprised at how much food everyone was taking.

Most people had at least a dozen jumbo shrimp and then equally big portions of all the other seafood crowding their
overflowing plates.

There was a long line at the cracked crab mound, so Emily bypassed it altogether.

Unlike at a regular restaurant, these people all seemed to know one another, so they chatted while they dolloped on their cocktail sauce or waited for their turn to pour creamy pink dressing
from a silver pitcher over their crab piles.

And while the eager club members were all polite, they struck Emily as too excited about everything. Her eyes moved around the dining room tables. There were little paper skirts covering the
bottoms of all the glasses. She hadn’t noticed them before. Were they to catch the drips? They were an ecological nightmare.

And then there were the pieces of fabric stretched across the lemon slices and tied with glossy yellow ribbons. Seed catchers? There was a lot of effort going into all this stuff.

But she wouldn’t be the one to point that out.

A bad shrimp can hit anyone any time.

That’s what her mother told her. It didn’t mean that they’d done anything wrong at the Viewpoint Country Club.

Emily was fine during dinner. And she felt okay for the first two hours when she got home.

But right at bedtime, her stomach began to stage a revolt.

She felt instantly sweaty, and only moments later had her head in the toilet bowl, where it remained for forty minutes. She’d never been sick that bad that fast, at least not that she
could remember.

And somehow, in the back of her mind, she felt that she’d betrayed Sam by going out with Bobby Ellis that night, and now she was paying for it.

Clarence had been in the cab of the truck for five days.

He’d emptied two brown prescription bottles of stolen codeine cough syrup. He’d drunk all the vodka. He’d eaten the saltine crackers and some rotten string cheese that Riddle
had hidden in the glove box. He’d chewed up a whole bottle of aspirin dry, like it was candy, and he’d licked the edges of four empty soda cans until he’d sliced open his
tongue.

But he now had to face the facts. He had a broken truck. And a badly broken leg. The road down the mountain led to help.

But he couldn’t walk down that road.

And his leg now had a massive infection around the exposed bone.

Even Clarence, who knew nothing about medicine, felt that the gangrene moving its pus-black fingers up his body to grip his throat would kill him if he didn’t get help.

And then he remembered that he had some woman’s stolen cell phone in the far back. The service would have long been cut off, but hadn’t he heard that the phone sent off some kind of
signal? If he pressed 911, wouldn’t that signal notify someone that there was a person in an emergency?

And then wouldn’t the authorities, the people he hated with all his heart and soul and very being, have to come check on that?

Wasn’t that some kind of law?

And so, in complete agony, he inched his way over the sticky seat and into the far back. After clawing through boxes of stolen jewellery, credit card statements he’d lifted from mailboxes
for identity theft, old baseball cards, and someone’s collection of semiprecious stones, he finally found the phone.

Clarence held it in his twitching palm. Victory.

But when he dialled 911, nothing happened. The battery had long since died.

And then something broke inside the already broken part of his soul, and he began to weep.

It was all so unfair. All of it.

So . . . unfair.

Jim Lofgren was an extreme cyclist.

He routinely rode over one hundred miles in a single day. He’d first gotten the bug after college, when he decided to commute on a bicycle and bought a ten-speed to get around Berkeley.
The ten-speed gave way to a better bike, which turned into a racer, and from there it was a lifetime of pedalling.

The more Jim rode, the more he had to be challenged. He’d ridden six hours in heat above forty degrees. He’d pedalled through rain and even snow across desert floors and up tall
peaks.

Part of the reason that he’d stopped living in a city in California and moved to Utah was to give himself access to more demanding rides.

And on this day, Jim loaded his six-thousand-dollar, carbon-body mountain bike on top of his hybrid and headed out to Manti-La Sal National Forest.

It was late spring, and most of the roads heading up into the mountain peaks were still closed off. But Jim was an expert bike rider, and experts know that ‘closed to the public’
doesn’t mean closed to them.

Jim turned off the highway onto the service road. Mount Peale loomed in the background. Jim knew the spot where the road widened and where he could tuck his car unnoticed for the day.

By the time he adjusted his helmet and clicked his feet into the pedals, soft, puffy clouds dotted the sky. A gentle breeze made the tops of the trees sway.

It was a perfect day to scale a mountain.

Riddle and Sam had been by the river for almost a week.

And for nearly every waking moment, Riddle was focused on their survival.

He caught fish, gutted their bellies with the ballpoint pen, and roasted them over the fire. A fire that he had to keep going, with Sam’s help, day and night.

During that time, they’d eaten four frogs. Dozens and dozens of cattail stalks. Toasted grasshoppers. They didn’t know the names, but they had eaten lady fern fiddleheads, the flower
clusters of fairy bells, sweet cicely, wild ginger, and licorice ferns.

Riddle had dug up the tuberous roots of plants in the soft parts of the riverbank and put them in the hot embers of the fire, just as he’d seen Debbie Bell put baked potatoes alongside her
barbecue coals.

Riddle brought back everything he could find to Sam, who wouldn’t allow them to eat the big bunches of wild oyster mushrooms, which looked like layers of soft babies’ ears. Sam
rejected the black and yellow morels and the camouflaged king bolete fungus Riddle found growing in a dead cottonwood.