Miracle on 49th Street (2 page)

“At the Westin,” Molly said.

“Right. So I need to get back and change and do a few things.”

He took the Oakleys off now, as if giving her a closer look. “Do I know you?”

Molly was the one shaking her head now. “No reason why you should.” Then, “Nice jacket.”

“This old thing? We go way back, the two of us.”

“To UConn. I know.”

“Yeah, the sportswriters seem to get a kick out of it, maybe because they always think this is the year when it's finally going to fall apart.” He shrugged. “No kidding, I don't want to be rude, but I gotta bounce.”

He opened the door on the driver's side, like this was the official beginning of him saying good-bye to her and driving away.

Blowing her off.

He tossed the Celtics bag on the passenger seat in the front, then said, “Hey!” Like he'd come up with a bright idea. “Hey, I've got something for you, after all.” Winking at her. “Even though I said no autographs.”

He opened up the back door then, pulled out a regulation size basketball, grabbed a Sharpie out of one of the pockets of the leather jacket. “To Molly—is that okay?”—not even waiting for an answer as he started writing.

When he was done, he handed her the ball. She looked at what he'd written. “To Molly, a great fan and a new friend. Josh Cameron, No. 3.”

Molly turned the ball over in her hands.

Then she handed it back.

It actually got a laugh out of him. “Now, wait a second. Nobody
ever
passes up Josh Cameron stuff.” He put his hands to his cheeks, trying to make himself look sad. “I must be losing it.”

Get to it, she told herself, you're losing him.

“I didn't come here for stuff,” she said.

“Why did you then?”

Here goes.

“I needed to talk to you about something important.”

He looked at his Omega James Bond watch.

“You know what's important to me right now? Making sure I show up for that Welcome Home dinner on time. So how about you have your teacher or your parents call the PR department and, who knows, maybe I could come speak at your school sometime.”

Then he slid in behind the wheel and reached for the door and said, “Nice meeting you, Molly.”

“She bought that jacket for you.”

He turned off the ignition now and said, “Excuse me?”

“She said she had left you crying in your dorm room when you got back that night from not making the Final Four, saying it was all your fault and you had let everybody down. And the next day she went and spent all the money she had in her checking account on that jacket and told you the next year you could wear it to the Final Four. And you did.”

She said it word for word exactly right, the way she had all the times when she'd rehearsed it with Sam, Sam playing the part of Josh Cameron.

He got out of the car and closed the door and got down in a crouch, so they were eye to eye. “You're Jen's kid, aren't you?”

“Yes,” she said.

“I've always told people that this old jacket is my good luck charm,” he said. “But I never told why. We promised we'd never tell anybody.”

“Don't be mad,” Molly said. “She only told me.”

“I'm not mad.”

“She told me she never broke promises. Even when she promised you she wasn't ever coming back.”

Molly was wearing a red cap Sam had given her, a Red Sox cap with “Believe” on the front, from the year they won the World Series. Josh tipped it back slightly, to give himself a better look at her. “No wonder I thought I might know you,” he said. Then he nodded and said, “So she finally did come back.”

Molly tried to swallow but couldn't. “She came back.”

“Well, tell your mom she didn't have to send you if she wanted to let me know she was back. She could've come herself.”

Molly said, “No.”

“Same old stubborn Jen. And she used to say I was the one who'd never change.”

“My mom died,” Molly said. “Right before school started.”

She watched as Josh Cameron started to fall backward, before he caught himself at the last second. “No,” he said. “Oh, God, no.”

Then he said, “How?”

“It was cancer,” Molly said. “They found out about it too late, that's what the doctors back in London told her. Then she came home, and the doctors here told her the exact same thing.”

He took her hands. “I am so sorry, kid. Thank you for coming out here to tell me, or I never would've known. I mean, I didn't even know she got married over there.”

Molly said, “She didn't, actually.”

“Oh,” he said. He ran a hand through his hair, like he was stumped, and finally said, “Well, okay then.”

“It's cool,” she said.

“Well, at least I understand why you didn't want some silly old signed ball. What you had to tell me
was
important.”

“That wasn't it,” Molly said. “At least not all of it.”

“I don't understand.”

Molly couldn't help it, she found herself smiling now, hearing her mom's voice inside her head like she was right there with them.

Which maybe she was.

The idea that she was being one of the things that kept Molly going.

“Mom said there was a lot you didn't understand.”

“Yeah,” he said. “She did.”

He looked past Molly, like he was looking to some faraway place in the distance, and said, “She used to say that a lot, as a matter of fact.”

“See, I wasn't supposed to come…she kept saying it was a truly bad idea…” The words were spilling out of her now. “And if you know my mom—what am I saying? You
did
know her…you know what it was like when she said something was truly good or truly bad…”

“Molly,” he said, “
what
was this truly bad idea?”

“Me telling you that you're my dad.”

I
n the distance, Molly noticed some of the other Celtics players coming out of the Sports Authority Training Center.

“No,” Josh Cameron finally said to her.

He straightened up now, grunting a little as he did, as if doing that made his knees hurt.

“Excuse me?” she said, acting as if she hadn't heard him correctly, even though it was just one word in the air between them.

No.

“I don't believe you,” he said.

“It's true!” Molly said, louder than she meant. “You have to believe me.”

As soon as she heard the last part come out of her mouth, she knew she sounded as if she were six years old instead of twelve.

She put her hand on the back pocket of her jeans, where she had the letter her mom had written to her, one of the letters she had left for Molly to read after she was gone. Jen Parker, who had really wanted to be a writer. Who said that she was always better at writing her thoughts down than saying them out loud.

Molly had planned on showing him the letter, but now she wondered what the point was.

This wasn't going anything like she'd planned.

“Keep your voice down,” Josh said, looking past her to where some of his teammates, one of them the big Chinese rookie, Ming Cho, were getting into their own Navigator-type cars.

“I'm sorry,” Molly said.

Then thought to herself,
You're
sorry? You tell him what you just told him and he basically calls you a liar and then tells you to shut up, like he's a teacher in class, and
you're
the one who's supposed to apologize?

Who are you, Barbie?

Forget sounding six. She sounded like the girly girl of the universe.

“Listen,” he said. “I'm sorry I snapped at you. I am sorry about your mom, because she must have told you I cared about her a lot once. And I'm sure that if you don't know who—If you don't have a dad, it must be even harder on you. But that doesn't mean you can just show up out of the blue and lay something like this on me.”

He looked down.

The watch again.

Like they were nearing the end of the game.

Even if this was no game, at least not to her.

She said, “Why would I lie?”

“Only you can answer that one, kid.” He tilted his head to the side, like he was curious about something. “Tell me again how old you are.”

“I never told you how old I was. But I'm twelve.”

Molly actually felt like she could see him doing the math, like his face was a blackboard and he was adding. Or subtracting.

“Junior year abroad,” he said. “She had this figured pretty good.”

“Had what figured pretty good?”

“The timing,” Josh Cameron said. “To make her story plausible.”

“Her
story
?” Molly could feel herself clenching her fists. “You think my mom made up this story and then told me to come tell it to you after she died?”

“It's a good try, is all I'm saying.”

Molly took another deep breath, through her nose, then another, slowly, filling her lungs up, emptying them, one of the exercises the grief counselor had told her about.

She pictured herself throwing the letter at him, telling him if he wanted to really know her mom's
story
, well, here it was.

Only she didn't.

“It
was
junior year abroad,” Molly said.

“When she left,” he said. “Saying she didn't know when she'd be back.”

Molly didn't say a word, still just trying to breathe in and out.

“Like I said,” Josh said. “I'm sorry about all of this.”

“You've made that pretty clear.”

“But there is no way in this world that Jen…that your mom…could've gone off to London and had a baby—what you're trying to tell me now is my baby—and never told me about it over all these years.”

Off to her left, Molly's eyes tracked on all the cars pulling away from the Sports Authority Training Center, the kids probably ripping through the goody bags in the backseats, the moms driving them home with their stupid autographs and their Josh Cameron stuff.

Molly found herself thinking of Sam. Wishing she could text message him right this minute. Everybody else thought he was just some funny-looking nerd, but from the first day, Molly had been able to see inside him. She picked up right away that he was smarter than everybody else, that he was funnier, that he always knew the exact right thing to say.

Never once when they'd rehearsed her big scene had it played out like this.

Josh Cameron acting as if she'd just shown up here to throw up some kind of pathetic—
truly
pathetic—desperation shot at the buzzer.

“I don't even know where you live,” he said. “Or who you live with. Do they know you came here today?”

Molly said, “I live with Mr. and Mrs. Evans. They have a daughter the same age as me. Mrs. Evans was my mom's best friend at UConn.”

“You're living with Barbara?”

“On Joy Street. Near Beacon.”

“Does Barbara think you're—Did your mom tell her the same story you're telling me?”

Her story. They were back to that.

The made-up kind of story is what he really meant.

“No,” Molly said.

“It was between you and your mom.”

“Pretty much. She said she'd made a promise to herself that she wasn't ever going to tell anybody.”

“Until she was dying.”

Molly said, “She wasn't even going to tell then. But she saw that the older I got, the more suspicious I was about what she'd always told me about my dad, that he was a soldier she'd met when she first got to London and then he went off and got himself killed in the first Gulf War.”

“And you started to not believe her?”

“There was just a lot of things that didn't add up, is all.”

“And when you finally got her to fess up, what was her reason for never telling you the truth—what she said was the truth—about me?”

Molly stared at him hard for a second and then said, “Because Mom said you wouldn't have been any better at loving me than you were at loving her.”

He slowly nodded his head. “Well, she still knows everything, doesn't she?” he said.

Then he opened the door to the Navigator, got behind the wheel, closed the door, started up the engine, and drove away.