I&#39ll Be There (3 page)

She was saying she’d be there.

But no one was ever there. That’s the way it was. Who was she to tell him such a thing?

It was intimate and suddenly painful. Not just for her.

But now for him.

Very painful.

For a long time Sam was certain his mother would rescue him and Riddle.

Once she realised that they were gone, she would have called the police or the fire department (didn’t they take cats out of trees?) or Mrs Holsing, his second-grade teacher. Or even the
neighbours. The ones named Natwick at the end of the street in the blue house who always waved when he walked by. People would be looking. He was sure of it.

Which of course was the case in the beginning. But his mother wasn’t the kind of woman to lead an effort. She lacked not just the determination but also the organisational qualities of
leadership. And it wasn’t her fault.

When Shelly was a baby, her mother had placed her on the kitchen counter when she came in from the market. She’d only turned her back for a moment and the small child had wiggled free of
the plastic bucket that was one of the early versions of a car seat. The straps were so complicated. Who needed them?

Shelly’s head hit the floor with a thud that sounded like a bat hitting a watermelon. She was unconscious for a full five minutes, only coming around as their station wagon pulled into the
emergency-room parking lot.

The doctors kept baby Shelly overnight and said everything was probably fine. The family couldn’t deny that she was a loving child, calm and easy to care for. But after that day, she no
longer had the potential for her father’s brainpower or her mother’s musical ability. If her mind was some kind of computer, that fall to the kitchen floor wiped away whole sections of
her hard drive.

Once Sam’s father took off with her boys, Shelly started going to a bar called My Office. The gimmick of the place was the revolving front door. There wasn’t another one in town, and
this piece of salvaged metal and glass, from a former bank building in Denver, made it appear that you were really going into a place of interest.

In reality, the inside was just the corner space of the neighbourhood mini-mall, and the only other attempt at an office setting was that a wall of dinged filing cabinets made up the bar.

Shelly went straight there from work, which got her through the hardest time of the day. Dinner hour was when she most missed her two boys, and if she wasn’t drinking, she found herself
cooking for people who no longer existed.

At My Office, Shelly always sat facing the door sipping Shirley Temples because they reminded her of the kids. But her Shirley Temples had two shots of vodka dumped in with the red syrup.

Clarence had been gone for only six weeks when she got hit. She was walking home after a half dozen sweet drinks when, according to the police report, she darted out into traffic. It was
impossible to know if it was suicide, an awkward street crossing, or both. She was pronounced dead on the scene. But they took her to the hospital anyway.

The nurse who admitted her body was the same nurse who had been there the day, over forty years before, when she had come in as an infant. The nurse had been young then, fresh out of school. Now
she was in her sixties and had arthritis in her knees.

But she remembered.

She wrote the words
Head Injury
on the form for the death certificate and at the last minute added in parentheses
preexisting condition
. She believed in full disclosure.

Six months later, the town’s local chief of police retired. The new man in charge of the department was an outsider who was all about responding to the immediate needs of the community.
With no one pressing for updates on the missing boys, the case moved lower in priority.

Shelly’s mother passed away from a stroke the following year and, after that, even if they had been found, there was no one to return the boys to. The missing Border children were an open
file that was in reality closed.

But of course Sam didn’t know that.

He imagined his mother in the old house waiting. Even in his fantasies, Shelly was never in the world looking for him. She was always sitting by the phone, staring out the window, longing for
him to come through the front door and into her arms.

With time the fantasy faded, as did his image of his mother, until when he thought of her, which was rare, she was always in deep shadows, her face unseen. As the years passed, the whole house
had turned dark and lost its shape.

But now, glued to the wooden pew in the back row of the First Unitarian Church, he felt an old feeling flooding over him. Sam’s mother was there, somewhere, reaching out to him. She was
trying to show him a way home.

Because hadn’t she played this song? Hadn’t she sung ‘I’ll Be There’ to him? Is that why he knew this music so well?

And with the connection, the knot, which was permanently twisted in his stomach, released.

Emily knew her face was flushed.

Deep red. She told her friends that when that happened, it was chemical – related to having one of her parents descended from northern Europe – and that it had to do with blood
pressure. Her best friend, Nora, read somewhere in a magazine that a red face meant a person was more likely to have some kind of throat cancer later in life.

But maybe she’d made that up.

It was confusing. But everything was now confusing.

This guy, this person, this stranger sitting in the back of the church, was causing her to feel weird. Was it him, or was it all in her? Was she feeling something real or just projecting? But
wasn’t singing one of the things that most exposed your soul? And wasn’t her soul exposed enough?

The choir joined in, harmonising with the words ‘I’ll be there’.

And then suddenly it was over.

The organ hit the last note. But instead of stepping back and taking her place in the choir, she moved through the other singers to the steps and left the sanctuary.

She went down the dark hallway that was hidden by the altar, and she opened the single rear exit door and bolted out into the harsh light.

Sam watched her flee.

He understood completely.

Hadn’t he spent his whole life running? The girl with the off-key voice and the glossy sheet of brown hair and the watery eyes was now gone.

The choir continued, seamlessly moving on to another song. But Sam was up on his feet as well. He didn’t care that the big wooden doors made noise. He pushed down on the brass bar and was
outside.

In moments he was around the back of the church and standing next to the girl who was in some kind of distress. He put one hand on her shoulder. Her eyes were all watery. He didn’t want
her to cry. If she cried, he might cry. Why would they go to that place?

But he’d learned how to make emotions go away. He was an expert at that. So why was he back here behind the church right now? He was supposed to be invisible. Right?

Right?

And then he found himself saying, ‘You’re going to be okay. Really . . . It’s all right . . .’

He was comforting her. The girl who couldn’t sing and who had been so exposed. Her choir robe parted, and she shook it off and he could see she had on black trousers that fitted over her
perfect little legs and a crisp white shirt that clung to her now small, sweaty body.

Sam suddenly wanted to scoop her up and maybe get on a motorcycle and drive away with her. Except he didn’t know how to ride a motorcycle, but he’d seen that in a movie once on TV
and the guy was wearing a military uniform and the girl knew him and she wanted to be scooped up.

And then, as she stared at him, it was all too much. She abruptly turned away.

And that’s when her breakfast of toast, eggs and bacon made its second appearance of the morning.

Because this girl didn’t know him and, if she did, she would never want to have anything to do with him. This girl had taken one long, intense look at him and that, combined with her
singing, had made her sick. He reached out and instinctively took hold of her long hair to keep it from the next retch.

He wished he had a rag or a towel or something she could use to wipe off her mouth. But he didn’t and then the side door of the church suddenly opened and a woman was standing there. She
said, ‘Emily, are you all right?’

Sam dropped his hands and released her hair and stepped away and it was over.

Broken. Done.

He turned on his heel and took off, moving fast but without running.

Away.

Away from her.

Emily looked from her mother, now heading towards her, over her left shoulder and then her right shoulder to the boy, and she realised that he was going, going, gone. That
caused a second wave of anxiety. Where was he? But more to the point,
who
was he?

And then her mother was with her, and she picked up the choir robe off the ground and she used it to wipe her daughter’s face, which was sweaty and hot.

You and I must make a pact

We must bring salvation back

Where there is love, I’ll be there.

But she didn’t know his name. She didn’t know anything.

Emily shut her eyes. In the orange and red sparkles, which were her eyelids, she saw the parking lot and the Unitarian Church. Maybe she had made it all up. She had a way of constructing stories
out of nothing. She saw expressions on people’s faces and imagined all kinds of incidents. That’s just who she was. Curious? Born with too much imagination? A little off-centre?

But then she opened her eyes, and in the distance, on the sidewalk going up the hill towards Cole Street, was a receding figure. He was real.

He had been there.

Sam went home to get Riddle. But his mind kept flashing pictures of her. The girl. With her gaze locked on him. The girl who couldn’t sing.

Riddle would make the images stop, because he had a way of bringing everything into perspective. With his grey eyes and his wheezy breath, Riddle needed Sam. Even though the brothers were only
five years apart in age, it seemed like even more – to them and to the outside world.

Where Sam was tall and lanky, Riddle was short and compact. Sam had dark hair. Riddle was pale and looked faded. Riddle understood only the detail of an object. Sam saw the big picture. And that
was important, because he could figure out what they needed to do to get through the day.

Riddle couldn’t. He spent his time drawing intricate pictures of the insides of things, strange mechanical sketches with his left hand twisted tightly around the pen. He didn’t need
blank paper to satisfy his compulsion, which was a good thing, because he rarely had any.

Riddle had an AT&T phone book from Memphis that had been with him for two years, and every single page had the details of something sketched across the original printing. There was the
inside of a radio. The grid of the back of an old truck’s radiator. A busted toaster with the bottom off. And all this was drawn on top of lists of people’s phone numbers or
advertisements for plumbing-supply places and Italian restaurants.

Riddle, for the most part, did not speak. He relied on Sam to get his ideas across, especially when it came to their father. Their father didn’t like to listen to other people, so having a
kid who was on mute most of the time suited him.

The two boys spoke with one voice – it just came out of the older kid. Clarence wasn’t a deep thinker. There was a reason he called his second-born child Riddle.

Sam walked down the dirt driveway and passed by the old truck. His father was asleep in the front seat. The truck was packed, but that’s how Clarence always kept it. He
wanted to be able to leave on a moment’s notice. And he never took the stuff they cared about with him.

When the voices inside Clarence’s head told him to expect danger, he took a blanket and slept in the front seat. He was on high alert. He often stayed up all night, finally giving in to
fatigue as the sun came up.

Sam looked in through the side window. He could tell by the angle of his father’s head that he’d be immobile for hours. One less thing to worry about.

When he got inside the run-down house, Riddle was, of course, drawing. He squinted and a half smile lit up his face when he saw his big brother. Sam stayed in the door frame and said,
‘Pizza ends or tossed tortilla chips?’

Riddle, as could have been predicted, just shrugged and wiped his runny nose. Sam answered for him. ‘We’ll hit the dumpsters and then head over to the mini-mart.’

He dug into his pocket and pulled out a handful of coins, mostly pennies. A lot of them were greenish-looking copper.

‘I scooped up change from the fountain in front of the bank. So we’ve got some choices.’

Riddle was really smiling now. He lifted a ratty-looking backpack off the floor, shoving his battered Memphis phone book inside with a pen, and the two boys started out the door.

No one knew who he was.

Mr Bingham, who was the self-appointed permanent usher at First Unitarian, thought that he was Nick Penfold. When Emily explained that Nick was in Florida at his grandmother’s funeral, Mr
Bingham only scratched his head.

Her investigation continued. No new families had joined the congregation. Mrs Herlihy in the office confirmed that. He didn’t go to Churchill High School, that much was certain. And there
was only one other high school in town.

Emily had her friend Remi drive her over to César Chávez High that afternoon, because she heard they had a Sunday basketball game that attracted a large crowd. She hung around
pretending to watch, but she literally was scanning the group, face by face. Nothing.

The next morning, she told her best friend, Nora, ‘Okay, so you know how I puked at church yesterday?’

Nora nodded but continued checking something on her phone. She didn’t look up as she said, ‘After you sang.’

‘Right. But there’s something I didn’t tell you.’

Emily shared everything. So this was surprising. Nora’s eyes lifted to meet her best friend’s. ‘What?’

Emily took a deep breath. ‘I know why I got sick . . .’