Leapholes (2006)

*

Chapter
1

Ryan Coolidge did not want to go to prison.

He'd been going to prison every Saturday for the past eleven months. Without fail, his mother would wake him, she'd put him in the car, and off they'd go. He didn't like the smell of prison, didn't like the feel of prison. He didn't like the drab beige walls, the cold concrete floors, the countless pairs of dark, soulless eyes that stared out from between iron prison bars. He didn't like anything about prison.

The thing he liked least of all was visiting his father there.

"Do we have to go, Mom?" Ryan was holding up his head with his hands, elbows on the kitchen table, a soggy raft of cornflakes floating in the bowl of milk before him.

"You should want to go."

"I don't." He dropped a piece of toast on the floor. His Golden Retriever pounced on it like a half-starved wolf. It was gone in one bite, and then Sam laid his huge head in Ryan's lap, begging for more. Sam was a smart and beautiful purebred, but his table manners had gone right out the door with Ryan's dad.

"A boy should want to see his father," said Dr. Coolidge.

"I don't."

"Your father loves you."

"Well, I don't love him."

"Never say that about your father. Never. Do you hear me?"

The dog sighed, as if wondering if that next piece of toast would ever drop. Ryan stroked the back of Sam's neck.

"Did you hear me?" Ryan's mother said.

Sam sighed even louder. My sentiment exactly, thought Ryan.

"Ryan Coolidge, answer me right now."

"Yes, I heard you," he muttered, but the cry of a baby in the next room had already stolen his mother's attention. It was his little sister, Ainsley. Dr. Coolidge popped from her seat as if she'd just sat on a tack, the way she always did when Ainsley made the slightest peep. Ryan loved Ainsley, too, but lately the world seemed to revolve around her. Poor Ainsley doesn't get to see her Daddy. Poor Mr. Coolidge doesn't get to see his new baby. If it weren't for the way Sam shadowed him everywhere, Ryan would have sworn he was the invisible boy.

"Your father is a good man. Shame on you for saying otherwise." She left him with his dog in the kitchen.

Shame on me, he thought. Shame, shame, shame. Being a Coolidge was all about shame. How could you not feel shame when you'd seen your father stuffed into the back seat of a police car? How could you feel anything but shame when your family name was blasted all over the television news, when kids at school shoved newspaper headlines in your face and laughed, or when you came home from school early one day and caught your mother crying? Dads could be doctors, lawyers, or plumbers. Some dads coached football, baseball, or soccer. Whatever they did, they usually came home and sat down for dinner at night. They hugged and kissed their wives and kids and said, "So, what did you do all day?" Ryan's dad used to do all those things. But not anymore. He lived his days, slept his nights, and took his meals all in the same dreadful place, a place where a question like, "So, what did you do all day?" always drew the same answer.

Nothing. Not a thing. Nada.

So the last thing Ryan felt like doing was visiting his father. Frankly, he didn't care if he ever saw his father again. And one thing was for sure.

He wasn't going to visit him today.

Ryan paused to listen for his mother's footsteps. Silence. She was busy with Ainsley, probably changing a diaper. He gobbled up one last slice of toast, then pushed away from the table. Sam raced toward the back door. His retriever lived for these moments, just him, Ryan, and maybe a tennis ball to fetch.

"Stay," Ryan said. Sam stopped cold and assumed his most regal pose, sitting tall with shoulders back, chest out, and ears alert. Ryan was guilty of cutting his dog far too much slack at the breakfast table, but when it came to basic commands, he had taught Sam well. With just one word, Sam would "stay" all day. Ryan gave him a bear hug, which was answered with a sloppy wet lick across the chops. It was almost like a cow's tongue, but Ryan didn't mind. Sam was the one friend whose loyalty could never be questioned.

"Goodbye, boy," he said.

Sam cocked his head, as if to ask where Ryan was going.

"Don't worry, I'll be back." He glanced toward the hallway that led to Ainsley's bedroom, and a fleeting thought crossed his mind. "But just in case, you take real good care of them, Sammy. You hear?"

Sam gave him a puzzled look, but somehow Ryan was sure' he understood. Then Ryan turned and ran out the back door.

Chapter
2

Ryan hopped on his bicycle and didn't stop pedaling until his thighs were on fire.

They weren't really flaming, but it was a good burn, the same tingling sensation he got when leaving the competition in the dust at the BMX races. Ryan had the coolest bike at Central Middle School, the fastest thing on two wheels that didn't come with a motor. It was silver with dark red striping. He'd paid extra for the striping, but it was worth every penny. It was his money. He'd earned it mowing lawns. Kids used to see him speeding by and say, "Cool bike, Ryan!" Parents would look at their little ones and say, "See, children, hard work does pay off. Look at Ryan Coolidge." But now that his father was in jail, people had a different take on it.

They figured the bike was stolen.

"Move along, boy," said Mrs. Hernandez.

Ryan was sitting on the curb, still breathing hard from the ride. His sandy-brown hair was in a tussle from the wind. He was wearing his favorite basketball jersey beneath his sweatshirt, and he could feel it sticking to his back with perspiration. He looked up to see old Mrs. Hernandez standing on her front porch.

"I said, move along!" she shouted, scowling.

Ryan got back on his bike and continued down the street. It seemed that someone always had an eye on him. No one truste
d h
im. They told him to move on, get lost, beat it. They assumed he was up to no good, that he was a bad kid. It was all because of that old saying, "The apple doesn't fall far from the tree," which meant that a son (the apple) is usually a lot like his father (the tree). Ryan wanted to hop off his bike and say, "Hey, I'm not like that. I know you think the apple doesn't fall far from the tree, but the truth is, this tree was planted on a very steep hill, and when this apple hit the ground it rolled, and rolled, and kept on rolling clear into the. next county. And it didn't stop rolling until you could make a pretty good argument that my father and I were no longer members of the same species, let alone related as father and son, or tree and apple, or whatever else you wanted to call us."

But he knew he'd be wasting his breath. The apple didn't fall far from the tree, and the tree was in jail. People just figured that the apple wasn't far behind. Both of them, rotten to the core.

Ryan stopped at the traffic light. A red convertible pulled up beside him. It was a perfect day to ride around town with the top down, sunny and mild, the kind of weather people craved in south Florida. Ryan was admiring the old Mustang when he suddenly recognized the high school kid in the back seat. He tried to ignore him, but the kid spotted him.

"Hey, Coolidge!" he shouted.

Ryan refused to look.

"Are you deaf, kid?"

Ryan wished he would just go away. Teddy Armstrong wasn't the coolest kid in high school, but he sure thought he was. His father was a hotshot lawyer, a hard-nosed State Attorney who had been re-elected to his post three times. Some said he might run for Congress someday. Ryan hoped he would run, and he hoped to be old enough to vote against him when the time came. Mr. Armstrong was the man who had prosecuted the criminal charges against Ryan's father.

"Coolidge, you want to race?"

The driver revved his engine. Ryan just made a face and shook his head.

"Come on," the older boy said. "It's a fair race. A six-cylinder Mustang against you on your bike. You can whoop us. Just pretend the cops are chasing you."

The teenagers in the car roared with laughter. The light hadn't turned green yet, but Ryan couldn't take it anymore. He came down on the pedals with all his weight and sped through the red light. A truck screeched to a halt in the intersection, the driver lying on his horn. But Ryan didn't care. He had to get away from his house, from Mrs. Hernandez, from Teddy Armstrong and his father. From everybody.

Ryan was gaining speed, pedaling harder, flying down the street. His mind was racing even faster. It bugged him to no end when people said he was like his father, and no one said it more often than his own mother. To make things worse, she would always follow up by saying, "And you know Ryan, your father loves you very much." That, in turn, would lead to a conversation that Ryan could have repeated in his sleep, he'd had it so many times.

"If he loves me, then why does he lie to me?"

"Your father doesn't lie to you."

"Yes, he does. Every time I go to see him, he tells me that he's innocent."

"He's not lying."

"But he's in jail."

"Just because your father's in jail doesn't mean he did anything wrong. Sometimes innocent people end up in jail. It happens."

"But he told the judge he did it. And now he wants me to believe he was innocent? Why would he have confessed if he didn't do anything wrong?"

"I'm sure he had his reasons, Ryan. We can't stop believing in him."

Yeah, right, thought Ryan. The prisons had to be full of innocent people who had confessed to crimes simply because they had their reasons.

Stop lying to me, Dad!

A car flashed in front of him. Ryan swerved, but the car swerved with him. He hit the breaks, but he was going too fast. The rear tire slid out from under him. He released the break to stop the skid, but the momentum jerked him too far in the other direction. The front tire caught a hole or a bump or maybe it was the curb. Ryan didn't see it exactly.

All he saw was the rear end of a station wagon sliding straight toward him.

Suddenly, it was as if he were flying in slow motion. He could smell the burning rubber as the tires skidded across the pavement. He could hear the screech of metal against metal, his precious bicycle slamming into the car. He could feel the seat yanked out from under him, feel his hands leaving the handle grips. At that very moment, someone should have shouted, We have liftoff,\ because that was exactly how it felt. He was soaring in mid-air, and there was absolutely no way to stop.

Until his head hit the window.

It must have been a glancing blow, or maybe he was just lucky to have been wearing a helmet. He landed on the pavement and lay still for a moment, wondering if he were dead. But he wasn't dead, he was sure of it. He was in too much pain to be dead.

"Oh, my elbow," he said, groaning.

A man came running out of the car from the driver's side. He went straight to Ryan. Ryan looked up into his face.

"You all right, kid?"

Ryan tried to focus, but it was difficult. The man had a strange face. It was remarkably flat. Or maybe Ryan just wasn't seeing straight. "What just happened?"

The man picked him up.