Pay It Forward (25 page)

R
euben lifted the microphone and pulled it up to his lips. The light had begun to fade, and artificial lights glared into his eye from the sea of cameras beneath him. He didn’t like lights or cameras or people staring, but it seemed like a minor concern now.

He opened his mouth to speak, prepared to be startled by the sound of his own words amplified into the city dusk.

“The police told me we have more than twenty thousand people here today. Some have traveled from outside the country to share this moment with us. Arlene and I—” His voice cracked slightly and he stopped. Blinked. Swallowed. “We never expected anything like this.”

Pause. Breathe. He felt light-headed and weak. What did he want to say? What needed to be said? Nothing came into his head.

What would Trevor have wanted him to say? He opened his mouth and the rest flowed easily.

“The freeway is clogged with thousands more people trying to get here. And I’m told this is going out live. To how many viewers? Millions? How many millions of people am I talking to right now?

“What made you all care so much? Why is this such a big
story? I think I know. I think you know, too. This is our world. Where is the person who can’t relate to that? This is our world. It’s the only one we’ve got. And it’s gotten so damn hard to live in. And we care. How can we not care? These are our lives we’re talking about.

“And then a little boy came along, and he decided maybe he could change the whole thing. The whole world order. Make it a decent place to live for everybody. Maybe because he was too young and optimistic and inexperienced to know it couldn’t be done.

“And it looked for a minute like it could work. So, just for a minute, all these people who care enough to be here or to watch this, just for a minute you thought the world might really change.

“And then Trevor was killed in a senseless, purposeless act of violence. And that’s shaken our faith. So now we wonder. Right? Now we don’t know if it can ever get better or not.

“But this is my question to all of you. Why are we here asking the question when we could just as easily be here answering it? Do you want a new world? Because it’s not just one little boy anymore. Look at all of us. By the time this has been in all the papers, all the news magazines, been repeated on newscasts all over the world…the twenty thousand people who made it into the city tonight, that’s a drop in the bucket. Twenty million people could hear what I’m about to say.

“So, here it is: If Trevor touched your life that much, then maybe you need to
pay that forward.
In his memory. In his honor. Twenty million people paying it forward. In a few months, that will be sixty million people. And then a hundred and eighty million. In no time at all, that number would be bigger than the population of the world.”

Reuben stopped, scratched his head, breathed. Listened for a moment to the echoing silence.

“I know that sounds kind of mind-boggling. But all it really means is that everybody’s life would be touched more than once.
Three times, six times someone might pay it forward to you. Every month or two, some miraculous act of kindness for everybody. It just keeps getting bigger. Before you could even pay it forward, someone would pay it forward to you again. We’d all lose track after a while. We’d all be scrambling around trying to find people to do good for. We’d never know for sure if we were caught up. It would just keep going around.

“The question I’ve been asked more than any other…every time I’m interviewed for television. Every time someone talks to me on the street. They say, how was Trevor’s idea received when the class first heard it? I tell them the truth. I say it was received with an utter lack of respect. It was seen as ridiculous. Because it requires people to work on the honor system, and because they say they’ll do all kinds of things, but in the end, people only help themselves. Because they’re selfish. They don’t care. They don’t follow through. Right? People have no honor.”

He stopped as if expecting the crowd to answer. Paused on the question they’d all come here to explore. The moment felt heavy in the air, a palpable energy.

“Well, then, what are you all doing here? If you don’t care. Don’t ask me if people will really pay it forward. Tell me. Will you? Will each of you really do it? It’s your world. So, you decide. I’m getting a little overwrought here. I think I need to drink a glass of water and sit down. We’re going to have a candlelight march in a few minutes, when it’s dark. So, think about it, and join us then.”

The cameras stayed on. Nobody moved. Faces watched him in silence. Applause came up like thunder, spreading down and across the street in all directions, farther than Reuben could see, farther than he knew he could be heard. The whole world, applauding Trevor’s idea.

R
EUBEN RECOGNIZED
C
HRIS’S FACE
in the candlelight.

Arlene clung tightly to Reuben’s hand.

“It’s like this,” Chris said. “It’s not exactly going to be a candlelight march. I mean, everybody brought a candle. But we’ve got, maybe, thirty-five thousand people here. How you going to march that many people? I mean, from where to where? The city’s full. So, they’re just going to line the street. Like they’re doing. And you and Arlene are going to walk. You know? They’ll open up a path for you to walk. Right down the middle of the Camino.”

“You come with us, Chris,” Arlene said suddenly, grabbing at his sleeve.

“No. No way. I don’t belong there.”

“The hell you don’t. Who do you think told all these people about Trevor?”

“I’m not family, though.”

“I’m not family by blood, either,” Reuben said. “She’s right. You come along.”

Two uniformed policemen walked on either side. Reuben slipped his arm through Arlene’s. Their candles flickered in the still night as they moved forward.

The streetlights had not come on. On purpose? he wondered. It didn’t seem to matter. On every block thousands of candles glowed, lighting up the streets like the full moon that would rise momentarily.

A thin dark ribbon stretched ahead, a path down the middle of the street, left open for them.

Here and there a hand reached out to lightly touch his shoulder or his sleeve. Round, soft moons of faces shone in the circles of each candle.

A woman reached out and touched Reuben’s hand.

“I will,” she said.

Then the man beside her said the same. “I will.”

They passed a mounted policeman on a big bay horse. Sitting
still and straight, watching. In one hand he held the reins, in the other, a candle. “I will,” he said, looking down as they passed.

It spread like a ripple along the route, echoing ten and twenty deep, like the crowd. The simple words followed them along their path, lighting up to their passing. One commitment for every candle.

Everyone said they would.

A
photographer had stationed himself on the third floor of a building along the route. He’d set up a tripod and opened the shutter for a long exposure, and caught the thousands of candle flames in two solid bands down the main street of town, with a thin dark path along the center. A ribbon of candle points stretching off into the distance, curving with the street, narrowing to a pinprick of light in the background.

It won an award for the photographer, who printed and framed a blown-up copy as a wedding gift for Reuben and Arlene. They hung it on their living room wall as proof of the Boy’s continued existence. It graced the cover of Chris’s biography of Trevor, which hit the bookstores in the summer of 1994. It appeared on the cover of three weekly newsmagazines and was quickly issued in poster form to stores all over the world, earning over $7 million for the photographer. He gave half to Reuben and Arlene, the rest to charity. Reuben and Arlene gave their half away as well.

It found its way onto the front pages of newspapers worldwide, above the special extra sections most papers added to cover
stories of reported acts of kindness. The early stories. In a few weeks the stories became too voluminous to print. In a few months acts of kindness were no longer considered news.

I
N
D
ECEMBER OF THAT YEAR,
the first holiday season they would have to spend without him, Reuben and Arlene attended, by special invitation, the National Christmas Tree lighting ceremony on the ellipse of the White House lawn.

They were placed in the front row, bundled against the cold, the new baby dressed in her freshly bought leggings and hooded coat, waiting for the moment in the president’s speech that might define why they had been invited.

When the moment came, when the president said, “I want us to all turn our attention to the memory of a very special young man,” a light was trained onto Reuben and Arlene, and a camera swung around and took a tight shot of them. Arlene turned the baby’s face into her shoulder to shield her sensitive little eyes from the light. “Trevor McKinney is not able to be with us tonight,” the president continued. “Or maybe he is here. I don’t know.” A comfortable smile. “But he left us all with a very special gift this holiday season. He wasn’t even fourteen years old yet, but he was a visionary and a hero, and I want everyone within the sound of my voice to look into your hearts and make sure you haven’t forgotten your promise to that boy. If he were here tonight I’d ask him to throw the switch and light this tree. But I’ll have to do it in his honor. In a small, symbolic way I’m going to do what Trevor did in a very big and very real way: light up the world.”

The baby began to fuss, and Reuben lifted her from Arlene’s arms and turned her to face the tree. The lights were off them now, the cameras faced away. All eyes were on the president, throwing the switch. When the tree sprang to light, a rush of
breath and sound escaped the crowd, and just as Reuben had hoped, the baby fell silent. Her eyes and mouth opened wide, frozen in a moment of pure, unguarded awe. Reuben could see the multicolored points of light reflected in her eyes.

A
FEW DAYS BEFORE
C
HRISTMAS,
Ricky showed up at their door late at night, unexpectedly, as was his way. Arlene stayed in bed while Reuben put on his robe and answered the knock.

They stared at each other in a measured silence.

“I think I got a right to see my kid,” Ricky said.

“Whose kid?”

“Look, I don’t care what you say. Blood is blood. Now come on, where is she?”

By this time Arlene was up and standing in the living room behind him in one of Reuben’s big shirts. Her face seemed unafraid.

“He just wants to see the baby, Arlene.”

“Okay, fine. Come see her.” She swung one arm wide to motion Ricky into the nursery.

They walked in together and Reuben turned on a soft light over the crib.

She lay curled on her side, knees tucked up, her thumb in her mouth. Her lips and cheeks moved in a suckling motion in her sleep. It struck a spot inside Reuben, the way it always had, probably always would. An excruciating blend of sorrow and joy, springing from who she was and from who she was not. He reached in and ran the back of his fingers over her smooth, caramel-colored cheek.

When he looked up, Ricky’s face had changed. Now he looked pale and helpless.

“Okay. I guess maybe I was wrong.” That was all he said for the moment.

“When she was being born,” Arlene said, her voice soft with respect, “Reuben’s parents came all the way from Chicago to be with us. Pretty nice of ’em to do, I thought, since nobody really knew which way it would go. They brought a picture of Reuben when he was just a baby. Just about the age she is now. I wish you could’ve seen it. Like a mirror image. Gave me goose bumps.”

Before she finished with the telling of this, Ricky had excused himself from the room. Reuben found him in the living room, sitting on the couch with his head in his hands, looking desperate and small.

Reuben took a deep breath and sat down beside him. In his peripheral vision he could see Arlene standing in the bedroom doorway. Nothing was said for the longest time.

Then Ricky spoke up in a small voice. “I hear tell Deion Sanders is gonna leave Atlanta. Go off as a free agent. Can’t say as I blame him. He wants a Super Bowl ring. He’s gonna sign with the team most likely to get him one. People figure that’ll mean San Francisco.” He laughed nervously and shifted his eyes to the ceiling. “I ain’t a superstitious man, but I tell you now…day Deion Sanders signs on with the 49ers, I got to look up at the sky and wonder if that boy don’t have some kinda pull up there.” He allowed an awkward silence. “I know I hardly knew that boy,” he said. His forehead creased. “Something about his bein’ mine. Like blood, you know? Like the part of your own life you think might actually keep going.”

They talked quietly for a few minutes, Reuben saying that life can start over out of the worst circumstances, and he wasn’t just preaching that, he’d proven it.

Ricky said Cheryl had thrown him out. “Right before Christmas,” he said. “How cold is that?” And he had no job, no place to stay, nothing to even start over from or with. Yet it was hard not to notice that Ricky wore a very expensive coat, new-looking heavy suede with a sheepskin lining. Reuben never mentioned that.

Though Ricky never said it straight out, Reuben heard some
dashed hope that fatherhood of that girl might have given him an anchor in somebody’s life. If he had been the father of the girl, that is.

Reuben listened for a while, then rose and walked to the living room desk and got the checkbook, because he remembered something that Trevor had said.

“If you help somebody you really want to help, then that’s not very big. You know? But if you’re all mad at my mom, and you helped her. That would be a big thing.”
At the time Reuben hadn’t felt that big. But maybe the past few months had stretched him, painfully so, torn him and broken him in such a way as to leave more room inside him now than before.

“Honey,” he said to Arlene, “I’m going to write Ricky a check to help him get started, okay?”

“I guess,” she said. “How much?”

“Well, we’ve got about four thousand in the bank. How about if I give him half?”

“Sure, I guess. We’ll get by.”

He left the name blank, because he didn’t know Ricky’s last name, or need to.

While he was writing it out, Ricky said, “This is a joke. Right?”

He tore the check off the pad and held it out in Ricky’s direction. Ricky half rose from the couch, not quite reaching for it, as though somehow it could hurt him.

“No, it’s not a joke. Take it.”

Ricky took it. “What’s the catch?”

“No catch. You just have to pay it forward. Do you know how to do that?”

Ricky let out a nervous little laugh. “Shoot, everybody in the country knows that by now. Maybe the whole world. Last night I had to sleep in the park ’cause Cheryl threw me out with just the clothes on my back. Guy come and stood over me in the middle of the night. I thought he was gonna roll me. Instead he looks
down and says, ‘You look cold.’ Takes this coat right off his back and gives it to me. Got to be, like, a five-hundred-dollar coat, right? Takes it off his own back. So then
he
was cold. Things like that, they’re not even a big deal anymore, you know?”

He shuffled quickly for the door, as if Reuben might still change his mind.

“Uh…” He opened the front door and paused.

Reuben moved back into the bedroom doorway with Arlene and stood with an arm around her shoulder. Not a proud or defensive posture. Just something he wanted, needed, to do.

“I’m obliged.”

“But not to us,” Reuben said.

Ricky just stood a moment, as though there must be one more thing to say, if only he knew where to look for it. Then he said, barely audibly, “Merry Christmas to the both of you,” and closed the door behind him.

Reuben kissed his little girl good night gently, careful not to wake her, before joining Arlene in bed.