I&#39ll Be There (6 page)

Emily addressed the whole car. ‘Goodnight.’

She had the door open and was moving fast now. It sounded like more than one of them mumbled back ‘Goodnight.’ She couldn’t really be sure.

Emily entered her house to find her mother standing on the hooked rug in the entryway doing her best to not look like she couldn’t fall asleep until her kid was home. Her mom gave her a
tired smile. ‘How’d everything go?’

Emily meant it when she said, ‘Tonight changed my life.’

And then she headed up the stairs.

They had made a plan.

She was going to meet him the next night in front of the restaurant with the blue roof at seven o’clock. Sam could tell time. But it meant nothing to him. He didn’t have a watch. He
didn’t have a cell phone or a computer or anything that even displayed time. The clock on the dashboard of the truck had been broken for years and Clarence liked it that way.

Time for Sam was about the position of the sun. It was about feeling hunger in his stomach. It was about the temperature just after dawn. Time wasn’t measured in minutes or even hours. It
had a rhythm that had to do with days and seasons, animals and insects, flowers and plants.

Time was measured by the number of pages of drawings in Riddle’s phone books. It was seen in Sam’s jeans that were short since he’d grown another three inches. Very little in
his life had been predigested and explained.

Now, staring up at the ceiling at a brown water spot that looked like a cowboy boot, he was worried.

Sam pushed those thoughts away and went back to thinking about the girl. She’d just appeared on the street. She’d called out his name. She knew him. No one knew him.

She told him that her name was Emily. Emily Bell.

He could see Emily now, soaking wet, standing on the sidewalk. Because of her, he now had to organise a plan.

He would do laundry tomorrow. He’d gather up stuff and take it down to the Clean Quarter. Riddle liked laundromats. A room of working machines was his idea of heaven. Yes, they’d go
to the Clean Quarter.

He hadn’t been there in about a month. It was amazing how many days in a row you could wear something before it just grossed you out. Maybe he’d throw in the two grey towels in the
bathroom and wash them, too.

He guessed they might not just meet in front of the restaurant with the blue roof, but maybe she’d want to go inside. And then they might get something to eat. He’d only been in a
place that nice on a rare, rare occasion, and that was really only to use the bathroom.

So he’d need to have some money. He wasn’t sure how much. He’d better go to the dump early and help people unload stuff. He couldn’t risk not being able to pay for
something.

All of a sudden, everything was getting so complicated.

Emily wondered if he drove.

Since he was on foot late at night, she decided he didn’t yet have his license. She could walk to IHOP, but she’d have to leave about two hours early.

Emily suddenly wished that they’d picked someplace closer. But what she really wished was that they’d exchanged cell phone numbers and email addresses and regular addresses.

Because at this point, she couldn’t call him or even find him online to change the plan.

She could ride her bike out there, but then she’d be stuck with it. And she didn’t have a way to tell him to ride there to meet her.

She hoped he liked mountain bikes. She loved going up into the hills and riding down on the different trails that ran along the stream. It was rocky and the paths were full of turns and you had
to be in a crouch, half standing, gripping the handlebars like your life depended on it. Because it sort of did. At least the way she rode anyway.

She figured he wasn’t someone who sat inside playing video games at all hours, because he looked weathered, and those kinds of kids looked pale and sort of fidgety.

He probably did lots of sports. Maybe he played soccer.

She was glad that she was still on the school soccer team, even if she really wasn’t even a starter.

She could see him skiing. But she liked to snowboard better than ski now, so she hoped he felt the same way.

Her family only went up a half dozen times a year, but they’d gone since she was a little kid. So of course she knew her way around the different runs. But what she really liked best about
snowboarding was riding the chairlift and looking down on the snowy trees and pretending she was a bird, flying over the mountainside.

But she’d keep that to herself. Like a lot of what she felt, which could be alarming to those who didn’t see a painting and want to climb inside the picture to get to know the
people. She couldn’t help being that way.

Her mind drifted to his family. Did they like the outdoors? Did they go camping or love something like sailing? Were they a family that had a strong connection to art or some activity like rock
collecting, which was what the Schiffs, who lived on the corner, did every weekend? They were all about quartz.

Or maybe they were big travellers. She hoped that was their interest. She loved getting on planes and flying places. Maybe his family felt the same way, and maybe his parents, once they got to
know her, would want her to go on one of their trips.

She worried now whether her mom and dad would let her go.

Would they get all crazy and say it wasn’t right for her to travel with his family? Would her mother insist on calling his mother and going over all the details? She could imagine the
whole embarrassing scenario. If this all worked out, she decided she would try to keep the moms to an email-only relationship.

Emily shut her eyes and slowly let out a long sigh.

All of a sudden, everything was getting so complicated.

Every now and then, it actually occurred to Clarence that it might take the same amount of effort to do things in a legitimate way as it was to do them
his
way. But
he’d quickly push that thought aside. Because there was no denying the fact that being a thief was a lot of work.

But he was used to the struggle.

Clarence kept his vehicle registration current by peeling off a sticker from the back of someone else’s license plate. He took things from people’s mailboxes – payments, money
orders, free samples, and his favourite – credit-card bills with pre-printed cheques to cash.

He’d called himself John Smith for years. There were so many Smiths that everyone got jumbled up in the records. John Smith. One bad Smith don’t spoil the whole bunch, girl.

Some of his crimes were petty – he stole magazines from newsstands and crates of produce from the loading docks of markets. But he tackled larger offenses as well.

He went to construction sites after hours and hauled away tools and building materials. He broke into cars and grabbed purses and cell phones. He went to bowling alleys and walked off with other
people’s shoes. He took soap and toilet paper from storage cupboards in public bathrooms. He snatched dogs out of fenced yards and returned them, claiming rewards. He jacked potted plants,
firewood and spare tyres.

And then, when he could feel the net closing in on him, he’d move on. That’s why the truck was always packed. Ready when you are.

The cops had questioned him too many times to even count. He’d been taken in and held overnight in all kinds of places. Hell, there were warrants out for him in half a dozen states.
That’s why he went to Mexico. He thought he could just escape the whole damn country, but they had their own sense of justice down there. If he’d hung out any longer, he’d be
missing kneecaps – or a lot worse.

The boys gave him a story. People felt sorry for a single father. And he’d done right by them. He’d taught his kids to survive, and that was the most important thing you could give a
child. He rarely had to hit them any more.

Now that the oldest boy had gotten so big, he’d laid off that. But he couldn’t get the kid to come with him when he was working it. The boy just refused. Even when he was little.
Even if you smacked him.

The younger one was a piece of work. Who knew what he was thinking? Clarence had seen him out in a meadow when he was four years old eating grasshoppers, and that’s when he knew for a fact
that the kid was a dud. He didn’t talk much, but he could draw. Crazy-looking stuff. Too bad there was no money in that.

Sometimes the voices told Clarence that Riddle was out to get him. So he let the older boy deal with the little kid. He’d learned the hard way. Trust no one. Especially your own blood.

Clarence couldn’t imagine sticking around this place much longer. He’d scammed the rental house, and soon they’d be after him for not paying. He was only still there because
college towns had careless kids with money and lots of things that were easy picking. But he’d already had some close calls. People were too interested in his business.

Any day now, he’d get the boys in the truck and be moving on.

Bobby Ellis woke up and realised he was thinking about Emily. How messed up was that?

He knew he should have been really mad, but he wasn’t. The truth was that he hadn’t ever even really noticed her until Riley Holland, the most popular guy in their class, had pointed
out that Emily looked like the quirky girl in the commercial for mini tacos that ran during the Super Bowl.

Riley Holland had good taste. Bobby knew that. And so after Riley made the connection, Bobby started paying attention to Emily. From-a-distance kind of attention to someone.

Now he went over it all in his mind. He didn’t do anything. She was weird from the moment she got into the car. And she’d been nice to him all week at school. He’d called her
three different times, and they’d talked about homework and their friends and music and even dumb stuff like the weather. She’d listened and even added in some curious comments.

So who was that other person who got in the car last night? And why did this other person, this crazy girl, interest him more than the nice one?

How messed up was that?

Emily told her parents she was going to meet a boy named Sam who she’d met at church. This was true. She told her parents that they would meet at the IHOP on River Road.
This was true. She asked her dad if he’d drive her there and she said she’d figure out a way to get home or else she’d call for a ride. This was also true.

She told them that she was meeting him at six-thirty p.m. This was not true. She didn’t want Sam seeing her being dropped off by her father, so she was willing to wait a half hour to avoid
that. It’s not that she was embarrassed by her dad, not more embarrassed than anyone is by their dad, but, still, she was seventeen.

Sam got there early, too, because he really did not understand the time thing. It had been hard leaving Riddle, but he got him a meatball sub at Subway and a Coke. And he’d surprised his
brother with a broken clock radio with the old-style digital eyes, the kind that flopped over the numbers instead of projecting them.

Sam had taken the back off the radio so that Riddle could see the wires and the small circuit board right away. And then he told him to stay in the house and that he’d be gone for two full
drawings.

Once at the restaurant, Sam took a seat under a tree in the grass that grew in a thin strip in the parking lot. He watched as the silver car pulled up to the kerb. Inside he saw Emily say
something to the man driving – her father? – and the man smiled at her as she got out.

Even though he was in shadow, and it was dusk and he was at a distance, Emily saw him. Why could she pick him out from so far away and be so certain?

She walked over, and he got to his feet and he smiled. She smiled back and managed to say, ‘Hey . . .’

He said ‘Hey’ back.

And then they graduated to two syllables and then three and then sentences. And then whole ideas and the real expression of thought.

In every possible way, it was different from the night before in the car with Bobby Ellis. Bobby could and did, in her opinion, talk about nothing, and she found it hard to listen. Sam barely
spoke, but everything he said was interesting.

They didn’t go into the pancake house but just started to walk. There was no destination. She had so many questions but tried hard not to interrogate him.

He’d made a vow to himself that he wouldn’t tell her anything, if he could help it, about his life, but little things dribbled out.

He’d only recently moved to town. He had a brother. They called him Riddle. He was the boy she saw with him on the street at night.

Emily said she had a little brother, too. She told him that she went to Churchill High. She said she wished he went there. He said he wished he did, too. But he said he was homeschooled and
added that his father didn’t believe in organised things.

She didn’t understand but took the silence that followed to mean that she shouldn’t pursue it.

He tried to answer questions without revealing that he did not follow half of what she said. And she didn’t understand the silences and mistook his utter confusion for deep
introspection.

She decided that he was the best listener she’d ever met. She was talking about something called calculus and he thought maybe that was a medicine. She had played in something called AYSO
since she was only five. She laughed and said that even then she’d never been any kind of star.

A star at what, he wondered.

He told her that he’d lived for five months in Mexico and that they moved a lot. He talked about places he’d seen and sleeping outside and how he had once walked with his brother and
father for thirty miles in a single day when their truck broke down in the desert.

She said she loved to travel and that she was embarrassed to admit she’d hoped that his family felt the same way.

And then they were outside her house.

It was eight miles away, and Emily just naturally had gone there. She tried to get Sam to come in, but he wouldn’t. He said he had to go. He told her that he didn’t have a cell
phone, but she gave him her number and he said he’d call her.

She asked him to meet her the next day, and he said he didn’t think he could. He looked anxious now, and even though he was still there, he was suddenly far away.