Vanishing Act (2 page)

2:
NEW YORK, NEW YORK

STEVIE FELT
both very adult and a little bit nervous when his mom dropped him off at 30th Street Station for the train ride to New York. It was one thing to have the independence to ride his bike pretty much wherever he wanted in the neighborhood; it was another to board a train that would drop him off smack in the middle of Manhattan. Once he was on the train, though, he began to feel a lot more confident. It was a beautiful Sunday afternoon and the heat and August humidity seemed to have disappeared just in time for the U.S. Open. The train wasn't very crowded, so he had an empty seat next to him, where he piled up the Sunday editions of the
Philadelphia Inquirer
and the
New York Times
as he read through them. He had felt quite cool buying the
Times
—even if it did cost four dollars—in the lobby of the train station.

The trip took a little more than an hour. Penn Station was a lot more crowded and, it seemed to Stevie, quite a bit dirtier than 30th Street Station. He followed his father's instructions to look for signs for the Eighth Avenue exit. “There will be fewer people lined up for cabs there,” he had said. “And the cabs are pointed uptown, which is where you're going.”

He got a cab in no time and told the driver he needed to go to 52 Riverside Drive, adding, “It's between Seventy-seventh and Seventy-eighth streets,” as he had been told to do by Susan Carol. If the driver either needed or did not need that piece of information, Stevie couldn't tell. He simply turned on the meter and began rocketing up Eighth Avenue, dodging between cars as if he was on a NASCAR track. In less than fifteen minutes, the cab pulled up in front of an elegant-looking older building. To his left, Stevie could see a small park. As he climbed out of the cab, he saw Susan Carol Anderson and a tall man who looked to be about his father's age standing on the sidewalk waiting for him. Stevie's dad had finally broken down and gotten him a cell phone for this trip, figuring it wasn't a bad idea to have one while traveling. He had called Susan Carol from the train station to say he was en route.

“Stevie, you got
tall
!” Susan Carol said as soon as he took his suitcase from the cabbie and turned to greet his two hosts. She ran up and threw her arms around him in a hug. She had her long brown hair tied back in a ponytail and was wearing what Stevie had come to think of as the teenage girl's summer uniform: a pullover shirt, white shorts, and flip-flops. The difference was that she looked a lot better in the uniform than most of the girls back home. In spite of her claim about Stevie's newfound height, she was still at least two or maybe even three inches taller than Stevie. Still, he was pleased that she'd noticed he was at least closing the gap. When they untangled from their brief embrace, she turned to the man with her.

“Uncle Brendan, this is Stevie Thomas,” she said. “Stevie, this is my uncle, Brendan Gibson.”

Brendan Gibson had the same sort of easy smile that Susan Carol did. “I know all about Stevie Thomas,” he said, pumping his hand. “It is a pleasure to finally meet you. Come on in.”

Stevie wondered what Susan Carol had told her uncle about him but didn't think this was the time to ask. Susan Carol was giving him the big smile he had seen disarm so many people in New Orleans—oh yeah, he still had a crush on her. Brendan Gibson turned around and punched buttons on the keypad next to the door and it buzzed to let them in. A few minutes later, they were on the fourteenth floor and Susan Carol was showing Stevie to a bedroom that had a view up and down the Hudson River.

“Pretty spectacular,” Stevie said as a Circle Line boat went past. He remembered taking a ride around Manhattan on one of them with his parents when he was ten.

“I know,” Susan Carol said. “I was here once before, but I was little—I think I was eight. I had forgotten how nice it is around here.”

Stevie started to laugh. Since they communicated exclusively by e-mail, he hadn't actually heard her voice for months and he had almost forgotten just how Southern she could sound.

“What's so funny?” she asked.

“Nothing.”

“Steven Thomas, don't start with me.”

He laughed again. “Jeez, Scarlett, you're starting to talk like my mother. I'd just forgotten about your accent.”

“My”—she actually said “ma”—“accent? What about
your
accent?”

“I have no accent.”

“Of course not. Northern is the way normal people talk, right? Everyone else has an accent.”

He rolled his eyes. She hadn't changed even a little bit since New Orleans. She was still very tall, very pretty, very Southern, and very smart. Too smart.

She gave him a playful shove. “Let's go find out about dinner. We have a whole week to fight.”

She was right about that. Verbal sparring with her wasn't easy. But he had to admit it was fun.

Dinner turned out to be pizza. Stevie, Susan Carol, and Mr. Gibson—who had ordered Stevie to call him Brendan—walked two blocks to Broadway to an old-fashioned pizza joint. They sat at a table and Brendan, who was the younger brother of Susan Carol's mom, told Stevie a little bit about himself. It turned out that some of Susan Carol's love of sports came from her uncle. He grew up in North Carolina but somehow became fascinated by hockey at an early age. “We had to get up at five in the morning because there were only two rinks in Greensboro and that was the only ice-time we could get,” he said. “But I loved it and stuck with it.”

Hockey and good grades got him into Harvard. He also went to law school at Harvard and worked for a big New York firm until three years earlier. “Then I got bored and decided it was time to try something new,” he said.

His new thing was, as he called it, “player representation,” which Stevie knew meant he was now an agent. He had used his old hockey contacts to get the business started, and he was now the CEO of a small company called ISM. The company represented basketball players, tennis players, and a handful of golfers.

“What does ISM stand for?” Stevie asked, picking up a third slice of the pizza, which was better than anything he could remember tasting in Philadelphia. When Gibson said ISM stood for Integrity Sports Management, Stevie must have made a face.

Susan Carol noticed. “My dad says integrity in sports management is a bigger oxymoron than jumbo shrimp. But Uncle Brendan isn't like other agents, right, Uncle Brendan?”

Brendan Gibson laughed. “Our business can be pretty dirty, I've learned that,” he said. “But we do try to do things a little bit differently. We rarely recruit big stars—we recruit young athletes who really need some help. And when they sign a contract with us, athletes agree to do a certain amount of charity work every year. How much they do depends on how much money we make for them.”

Stevie had to admit that sounded like a pretty good idea. He had been around enough sportswriters to know that most agents couldn't be trusted to give you an honest answer if you asked them the day of the week. Stevie remembered Dick Weiss, his escort at the Final Four, pointing out one big-time agent and saying, “If that guy tells you the sun will rise in the east tomorrow, bet everything you've got it'll come up in the west.”

Brendan Gibson seemed different from that. And, he figured, if he was Susan Carol's uncle, he couldn't be all bad. Plus, he was putting him up for a week.

“We've got a few clients playing in the Open,” he was saying. “We'll make plans to meet out there and I'll introduce you to some of them.”

“Anyone I've ever heard of?” Stevie asked.

“Probably not yet. There's one girl I have a lot of hope for, though, who you'd like. She's just a little older than you guys, and she isn't a star yet only because her parents have kept her in school. She only plays during the summer, unlike most teenage prodigies, who play tennis first and foremost. They won't even hire a coach to travel with her yet. They want everything low-key for her. She's jumped sixty spots in the rankings in seven tournaments this summer.”

“What's her name?”

“Evelyn Rubin. She's fifteen, she's from Chicago, and she can really play. This is her first major championship, so we're all eager to see her do well.”

“And,” Susan Carol added, “she's very, very pretty.”

“Very, very pretty, huh?” Stevie said. “Like Nadia Symanova very, very pretty?”

“Better than that,” Susan Carol said. “Symanova wears all that makeup like Anna Kournikova used to do. She's too obvious. Evelyn doesn't have flash and dash, but trust me, you'll like her.”

“When have you seen her?” Stevie said.

“She played an exhibition in Charlotte this summer that Uncle Brendan helped organize. I met her there.”

“So is she taller than I am?”

“I don't think so,” Susan Carol laughed. “I'd say she's about five five or five six.”

“I'm taller than that,” Stevie said defensively, although anything over five six might be stretching it.

“I know you are,” Susan Carol said. “Why, you're just about as tall as I am, I think.”

“Susan Carol, it's me, Stevie,” he said.

“Okay, okay,” she said. “But you are catching up—seriously.”

“And how tall are you now?” he asked.

“Um, maybe five nine.”

“And still growing,” Brendan put in, causing his niece to blush.

“I hope I'm not,” Susan Carol said, the red still in her cheeks.

“Me too,” said Stevie, and they all laughed while Stevie reached for slice number four.

Stevie went to bed with a stomachache but slept soundly anyway and was awakened at seven-thirty by Susan Carol peeking in the door to his room to say, “Rise and shine, there's work to be done.”

“Why do I think that's something your mom says to you in the morning?” Stevie said, suppressing a yawn and rubbing his eyes as he sat up.

“Close,” she said. “My dad. Now come on!”

She pulled the door closed. They left the apartment about an hour later. Susan Carol had told him that Bobby Kelleher had offered to give them a ride to the National Tennis Center as long as they got to the apartment he was staying in by nine o'clock. “It's on Forty-eighth Street and Third Avenue,” she said. “Uncle Brendan says it's too far to walk. He said if we walk over to West End Avenue, we'll catch a cab.”

Stevie was amazed at Susan Carol's whistling ability. She spotted a cab turning the corner onto 78th Street and brought it to a halt with a whistle Stevie figured could be heard in Queens. “Where'd you learn that?” Stevie said as they climbed into the back of the cab.

“My swim coach,” she said.

Stevie had a tendency to forget that his friend was a ranked age-group swimmer. Maybe he forgot because she'd had more success athletically than he had. He was hoping to make the freshman basketball team this fall but knew it was probably a long shot.

The cab ride didn't take long. The cabbie worked his way over to Central Park and then went right through the park on 66th Street, no doubt saving a lot of time. He kept going east until he reached Lexington Avenue. He turned right there and made every light until he turned left on 48th Street. He pulled up in front of the apartment building about ten minutes after he had picked them up. Stevie was a bit dizzy.

“Welcome to New York,” Susan Carol said, laughing as she handed the cabbie a $10 bill for an $8 fare.

Stevie offered to split it, but she just said, “We'll take turns.”

Stevie's dad had given him $250 in cash—telling him to use no more than $50 to buy an Open souvenir and try to get through the week without phoning home for more money. Stevie knew from his experience at the Final Four that he could easily spend the $50 on a hat and a T-shirt. Anything beyond that would undoubtedly break his budget.

Bobby Kelleher was standing in the lobby of the apartment building talking on a cell phone when they walked in the door. He waved at the doorman to indicate Stevie and Susan Carol were with him, then smiled and held up one finger to say he would just be a minute. In many ways, Kelleher was what Stevie wanted to be. He was, Stevie guessed, about thirty-five. He was fairly tall, probably about six one, and lean—unlike a lot of the sportswriters he had met. Stevie had Googled him after the Final Four and learned that he had been a star high school basketball player who had ended up going to the University of Virginia, where he had hardly played at all. One of the quotes Stevie remembered about Kelleher's college career went something like, “I was the only player in the history of the Atlantic Coast Conference to go four years without needing a postgame shower.” That would be a fairly apt description, unfortunately, of Stevie's junior high school career.