Emory’s Gift (15 page)

“Hi,” I gasped, which felt like it was going to be the last word I’d ever be able to utter. Neither of them responded. Tim nodded at me, though.

Now we were facing the hill from the back side of it, climbing up at an angle that felt almost as steep as the road to my house. I kept pounding my feet. When I glanced back at the top of the hill, Mike and Tim were twenty yards behind.

They beat me by finding some amazing strength at the end of the race and pouring on the speed. I didn’t have anything left. I was, I now understood, a plodder, a person who put my feet down at the same rate whether I was going uphill or down. When they stormed past me, I didn’t increase my pace by a step, pulling in third in the race.

Mike put his hands on his knees, wheezing, while Tim walked in circles, his face in a taut grimace. I turned and looked back at the rest of the class, who were one by one popping up at the top of the hill holding their sides as if they’d been pierced by spears.

I felt a slap on my back. Tim was nodding at me, grinning, still not capable of speech.

“Good job, Hall,” Mike panted.

I couldn’t have been happier if they’d picked me up and carried me around on their shoulders.

Coach Briggs was pretty impatient with our performance. He called us girls and asked us if we’d taken a nap somewhere along the line. He said he’d called the police and put in a missing persons report. He said we were supposed to run the course, not play hopscotch the whole way. He asked if we were worried that we’d get mud on our party dresses if we ran too hard or if we’d stopped to put on lipstick somewhere in the whole process.

Through this whole tirade, the boys in gym class winced and moaned with the pain like they were having dental surgery. “Kappas. Humphrey. You guys can hit the showers. Everyone else, drop and give me twenty.”

The boys all groaned. I moved over to find a place to do my push-ups.

“Not you, Hall,” the coach said. “You hit the showers, too.”

I couldn’t keep the grin off my face as I headed toward the locker room. Coach Briggs’s eyes had regarded me without warmth and his expression was as severe as it always was, but I basked in it.

It felt like love.

The class before lunch was science, the only one I shared with Dan Alderton that semester. As I listened to the teacher explain photosynthesis I could feel Dan’s eyes on me and wished he could have been in gym. I had the probably foolish thought that if he had seen me cross the finish line just a few steps behind Mike and Tim it would somehow put an end to the odd dispute between us.

I would be seeing Beth at lunch. I’m sure that there was something in the lecture that I paid attention to, but for the most part my focus was on the clock, which doled out each minute in such a miserly fashion I wanted to yell at it.

I think Dan tried to say something to me as the class ended, but I was in a hurry. I dumped my books in my locker, then ducked into the boys’ room to make sure my hair was still combed. There was nothing lodged in my teeth and my face hadn’t grown any zits since breakfast.

I loaded up my lunch tray and wandered out into the lunchroom. I spotted Beth across the room and my heart sank; she wasn’t alone. Sitting with her were several girls—if I went over there I’d be sitting with a whole group of seventh-grade females. I’d be the only boy and the only eighth grader. Everyone would be watching. It would be awful.

“Hey, Charlie!” Tim Humphrey called. He nodded toward a seat next to him.

Tim sat at the table occupied by the popular eighth graders. The prettiest girls, including Joy Ebert, would often be sitting there, though at that moment it was just a bunch of guys. It seemed utterly impossible that he was suggesting I sit with him. Was he talking to someone else?

I approached hesitantly, setting my tray down.

“You going to try out for cross-country this year?” Tim wanted to know.

“No,” I said automatically.

“Why not?” he asked, puzzled.

I lowered my eyes. The truth of it was that joining in team sports or doing anything fun like that felt like it would somehow be a betrayal of Mom. Bit by bit I was letting go of this attitude, but it was still by and large my ethic. “I don’t know.” I shrugged. “Maybe I will. I never thought about it.”

“You should,” Tim said. “I was wiped out today in gym, but you looked like you could keep running.”

All the way across the room, I could feel Beth looking at me. I knew if I turned our eyes would meet.

“Um…,” I said. Tim looked at me questioningly. “I sort of said I’d sit with a friend of mine. Some friends,” I told him.

He shrugged. “Sure.”

I’ve come to conclude that for every person like me—people who found junior high to be a nuanced, torturous negotiation, with inviolate rules and devastating punishments—there were students like Tim, who went through it all as if it were just normal school, with no rigid hierarchy and no social regulations. At the time, though, I believed we all subscribed to the same code and that surely Tim understood the significance of me leaving his table when I’d just been granted a free pass. Had I played it right, I might have eaten lunch there the next day, and then the next, and I’d be popular and happy.

But Tim gave no sign and I was drawn by a power far greater than anything I’d ever encountered. I carried my tray across the room, sure that everyone was whispering behind their hands about me.

The space across from Beth was unoccupied, and I sat down. The rest of the girls at the table instantly went quiet. “Hi,” I said.

“For a minute there, I thought you forgot,” Beth said.

“Oh, well, Tim just wanted to know if I was trying out for cross-country. You know. Tim
Humphrey.
”

“I know who he is,” she replied, ignoring my whole point, which was that I hung out with popular kids.

I was introduced to Beth’s friends. I miserably mumbled my way through a greeting to each one. They were all perfect examples of why seventh graders didn’t belong in junior high—gaunt, sticklike girls for whom puberty was only a concept in biology class. I lost track of their names because they all looked the same, though their expressions and quick head movements reminded me of birds. They cut their eyes back and forth at each other, grinned, and then sat back as if expecting me to entertain them.
What,
I wondered,
am I doing here?

Beth turned to her friends. “Charlie,” she told them, “is a man with a mysterious secret.”

“What is it?” one of them immediately chirped.

“Well, it’s a secret,” Beth responded. “If we all knew it, we’d have to call it something else. Like ‘common knowledge.’”

The girls all cackled and clucked and pecked at their food. I focused on my lunch as if I’d never in my life seen anything more fascinating.

“One time Charlie and his parents came out to our ranch to ride horses and I spied on him from the hayloft. Whenever he looked up, I’d drop down behind the window. But he knew I was there. It was the first time we ever saw each other.”

I was astounded. “That was you?” I blurted before I had a chance to think. But that meant that I had seen Beth when I was in fourth grade. I remembered a little girl’s face popping up and down like a monkey when we were mounting our horses.

The girl who’d asked about my secret had something else to say: “I’m really sorry about your mom.”

When people said this to me they usually wore exaggeratedly sad expressions, like this girl now, or they looked a little afraid. At first I was convinced that the people with the sad faces were attempting to tear off a piece of my grief for themselves, to become uninvited participants. Now I figured they
were
sad, probably. The fear, though, I was still trying to figure out. Were they afraid of my reaction, that I would burst into tears and embarrass them? Or maybe they were worried it could happen to them, that they, too, could lose someone who should never, never be lost.

I looked up at Beth’s eyes and saw warm sympathy, just the right amount, and no fear at all. It made my stomach drop inside me as if I were on the Tilt-A-Whirl at the Boundary County Fair. Kay had never made me feel like this. There was just something about this girl.

Beth was waiting for me after school and we walked to her house together. It was as if she were my girlfriend, or wanted to be.

If I thought about Emory or my father’s injury or anything else but the green-eyed girl from seventh grade that day, I simply don’t remember it. When we entered the Shelburtons’ house, Beth’s mother told me my dad had been released from the hospital. She had me pack my things and she drove me home, but it wasn’t like I skipped out of there full of joy. The only thing that made the ride bearable was that Beth sat in the front and talked to me over her seat the whole way.

I almost lacked the willpower to unbuckle my seat belt in the driveway. “Bye, Charlie,” Beth said simply. I grunted in response, like a weight lifter doing a clean and jerk.

“Wait here; we’ll be right back, Beth,” Mrs. Shelburton said.

My dad came out of the house and stood and talked to Mrs. Shelburton as I hovered nearby with my suitcase, miserable because Beth was still in the car and I could have stayed with her but instead had elected to get out and now it would look stupid if I got back in. As Mrs. Shelburton backed away, she waved at my dad and I waved at Beth.

“Charlie.”

I turned to look at my dad. He looked a little frail, somehow, and I flashed back to how he’d appeared in the hospital bed. I was glad I didn’t need to see him like that anymore.

“You did a good job on the pole barn. I can’t even tell where there was blood,” he told me.

I nodded. We stood there, a slight breeze whistling in the pines, until it seemed to occur to both of us at the same time that the pause in conversation had lasted too long.

I put my stuff away in my room. “I think I’ll go down to the creek,” I said to my father.

“Charlie?”

I looked at him.

“What is my Polaroid camera doing out?”

chapter

SEVENTEEN

MY mom had given him the camera. The first time I was allowed to use it myself was to take an instant picture of her the night before her first session of chemotherapy. She put on a nice dress and did her hair all up and wanted a photograph of her with, as she put it, “all my hair intact.” So I knew how to use it, but it was my dad’s and I wasn’t supposed to touch it without permission.

“Oh. I had been planning to take pictures of the pole barn before I laid on a new coat of paint.”

He nodded. “Well, put it back then.”

I did as he said and then went down to the creek. There was no sign of the bear anywhere. I yelled, “Emory!” a few times but didn’t want to shout it too loud for fear my dad would hear me and wonder what I was up to.

When I climbed the hill back to our house there was that stupid Chevy Vega in the driveway. I went inside and Yvonne was sitting in our living room holding a drink in one hand and an unlit Virginia Slim in the other.

“Charlie!” She carefully set her drink down and stood up.

I didn’t know what she expected me to do: run over and hug her? I shied away, standing close to the opposite wall. “Hello, Miss Mandeville,” I said stiffly.

My dad came out of the bathroom. He looked startled, maybe even guilty, when he saw me there talking to the grocery lady. “Hi, Charlie,” he said.

The three of us stood for a minute. Finally my dad pulled a lighter from his pocket to set flame to the tip of her cigarette.

Why did he have a lighter all of a sudden?

“I came over to see how your dad is feeling. You had us scared half to death, George,” Yvonne said.

I wasn’t scared,
I thought to myself.

Dad and Yvonne settled into some chairs and I went back to my bedroom and closed the door. My chest was tight, as if I’d just run cross-country. My dad had lied to me. He said he didn’t like her, and now here she was. She sent him loving flowers in the hospital and probably visited him more than I did.

I love you,
the card had said. That was a lot more serious than
Love, Yvonne.

I decided that if she stayed for dinner I’d pretend to be sick again. Maybe my father would conclude I was allergic to her and tell her she couldn’t come over anymore.

A few minutes later, though, I heard her get into her car and drive off. I went out to help my dad with dinner. He seemed to want to say something to me, but of course he didn’t.

When I went to bed that night I reached into my sock drawer and pulled out a small cigar box I’d had for a long time. I kept stuff in it that I imagine no one would ever find of any value but me, stuff I’d found, mostly, like an arrowhead and the perfectly preserved skull of a small snake. I had a new item in there as well.

I hadn’t lied to my father. I’d gotten the Polaroid camera out because I’d been planning to take a picture of the pole barn before I’d painted over it; that much was true. In matter of fact, I
did
take a picture of the pole barn before I painted over it. I turned the Polaroid over in my hands now, reading the mysterious words.

I, Emory Bain, pvt. 3
rd
regt., inf. of GR Mich, May 1862 pursued rebels at Chickahominy, wounded, took fever, now returned. I have a message.

Gazing at those words, I had, for the first time, the sense that my life was undergoing a profound change and that as a result, when I told the story of Charlie Hall people would no longer look at me with solemn eyes and say,
I’m sorry.

On the bus the next morning I sat close to the front, as usual, marooned by my first day’s choice in the middle of a field of seventh graders. From where I sat I could monitor what was going on behind me by looking into the huge mirror hanging over the driver’s head, which was how I noticed Dan’s friend Jerry stealthily making his way forward, moving from seat to seat even though you weren’t supposed to get up when the vehicle was moving. At the next stop, just as the bus was lumbering to a halt, he darted forward, sliding into the seat next to me.