I'll Be There

by Holly Goldberg Sloan

  His physical pain lessened when he could fix his mind on something else. He’d learned years ago how to make this happen. And now, more than ever, this is what got him through the agony of a broken shoulder, six broken ribs, a fractured collarbone, concussion, and multiple bone bruises.

  Sam had no idea how long Riddle was gone.

  But when he again appeared at his side, he was using the old striped sweater as a large sling. Dozens and dozens of fuzzy cattails were inside. Sam watched as Riddle obsessively arranged the cattails on rows on the ground.

  And then after he’d completed his work, Riddle carefully moved his brother off the damp pine-covered earth to what felt to Sam’s broken body like the sweetest cushion imaginable.

  Clarence slowly pulled himself upwards over the rocks.

  His broken leg, a compound fracture, now stiff and swollen, was discoloured from pooled blood vessels and almost twice its normal size.

  Clarence’s collarbone was still electric, but if he held his arm folded when he rested, close to his chest, he could keep the searing jolts to a minimum.

  Any normal person would have quit. The pain. The insanity of scaling the jagged rock face. It would have been too much. But the very thing that made Clarence irrational was the same thing that kept him going.

  And the following afternoon, under a partly cloudy sky, a full twenty-four hours after they’d gone over the edge, he dragged himself up onto the gravel road.

  His truck was at a distance, stuck in the rushing water. With his last ounce of energy, Clarence stumbled into the icy, running water and drank for what felt like ten minutes. He then staggered to the passenger door, opened it, and fell onto the front seat as he lost consciousness.

  Since Clarence had always left the boys to fend for themselves, being all alone deep in the forest didn’t panic Riddle. He and Sam were survivalists even when they were in the heart of a city.

  So as Sam drifted back asleep, Riddle snapped off branches and used them to make an enclosure. He stacked them into a wall, which was nearly four feet high.

  Satisfied that they’d now be warmer at night, Riddle sat down next to Sam. He was exhausted. Riddle shut his eyes, and his fingers twitched.

  I need to make lines. I need to make the shapes.

  But I don’t have my drawing book.

  I need to make lines.

  And that was when Riddle suddenly realised that he still had a pen shoved deep in his back pocket. He took it out. Holding the ballpoint made him feel better. He stared at the print on the side.

  State Farm Insurance. Agent Dewey Danes Says Be Prepared!

  Riddle unscrewed the pen and looked at the different parts.

  It had two plastic outer pieces and a thin metal ring in the centre. There was a metal clip at the top and a small spring inside that pressed on the plastic tube of blue ink.

  Riddle pulled on the spring, and it elongated into a thin piece of curved metal. Riddle pushed the pieces of the pen from his cupped hand back into his jeans pocket. And then he curled up right next to his brother and fell asleep.

  When he woke up, several hours later, Sam’s eyes were open. He was staring up at the big clouds, hoping they didn’t hold rain.

  Riddle looked at his brother as he said, ‘I’m hungry.’

  Sam ever so slightly nodded. Riddle was talking to himself now as much as to his big brother.

  ‘I saw little fish in the water.’

  Riddle didn’t like to eat fish. But he knew Sam did. He continued, ‘I’d eat a fish sandwich. I’d even eat one with that bad sauce.’

  Riddle dug into his pocket and pulled out the pen parts and began fiddling with the uncoiled spring. Sam watched. The metal looked sharp.

  ‘Be careful with that. You could cut yourself.’ Sam closed his eyes.

  Riddle kept pulling on the former spring, which was now a piece of kinky metal. Sam opened his eyes. Riddle was still doing it. Sam was not in shape to fight about anything. He shut his eyes. Riddle sucked in his breath and said, ‘Maybe we could catch a fish.’

  Sam’s eyes stayed closed. ‘Maybe.’

  Riddle had tears in his eyes now. ‘I don’t know how to catch a fish.’

  Sam opened his eyes. When Riddle got started on something, even on a good day, it could be tough. The unsprung little metal spring had a curl on the end. Riddle was trying to straighten it. It caught the light. It was pointy. Sharp. ‘Put the pen parts away. And take this . . .’

  Sam was still wearing Emily’s grandfather’s old gold watch. It had survived the fall.

  Riddle had always been fascinated by it. He had asked many times if he could take off the back and look inside, but Sam had never allowed it.

  Riddle’s eyes now widened. ‘Can I take it apart? I’ll be careful.’

  Sam didn’t even answer. Moving his arm was too painful. The last thing he remembered for the day was feeling Riddle undo the strap.

  Riddle used a piece of the pen to pry open the back of the watch. The working mechanism was a thing of beauty. Just looking at the shiny moving parts calmed him. Now he wanted to disassemble the whole thing. Using the clip from the ballpoint pen, he was able to get the crystal off the front. He carefully placed the glass dome on the pine needles at his side and continued his work.

  Overhead, the sun was still strong. Riddle needed a drink. He got up to his feet and, using his shoe, scooped up some of the river. When he came back, water was still dripping from his chin. A drop fell on the glass crystal front of the watch.

  And then, while Riddle continued to analyse the intricate gold timepiece, the sun hit the drop of water on the curved glass. The intense light turned a tiny spot into a powerful hot point.

  One of the pine needles, dry tinder at just the right angle, began to burn. Riddle smelled it before he saw it.

  But it didn’t take long for him to realise he’d stumbled, accidentally, upon greatness: fire.

  Sam opened his eyes and as they adjusted to the darkness he saw Riddle’s face, bathed in the orange light of flames. He was in hell.

  ‘No!’

  Riddle was positively euphoric. ‘I made a fire. With the glass from the watch. Now we’ll be warm. And we can cook food! But we don’t have food. But I can find us food. I promise. Because now we have fire.’

  The next day they ate more of the white, crunchy cattail stalks and drank more of the icy water.

  But when Riddle, looking for distraction and comfort, took the parts of the pen out of his pocket, Sam again saw the uncoiled spring. And the piece of wire, he now realised, held the makings of a hook.

  Riddle understood how things worked. He’d spent his life drawing mechanical parts. So he listened to his brother. He broke off a branch from a birch tree. He then peeled off the bark into long strips. He attached the metal clip of the pen to the bark, braiding the green bark together until it was strong.

  Along the icy riverbanks, the soil was dark and rich. Riddle did what he was told and dug in the ground, finding plump, purplish pink earthworms. He carefully worked the metal spring through the body of a struggling earthworm and then fastened it to the pen clip.

  It took him most of the day, but sitting on a rock next to the water, Riddle finally caught a two-pound rainbow trout. It flopped on the shore, furious to have swallowed a dead worm with a devastating secret.

  Riddle picked up a rock and slammed it down on the fish’s head, ending its life.

  He stared at the glistening trout. It was beautiful. Riddle felt an ache run through his entire body, until he realised that, for the first time in three days, he and his brother would go to sleep with a full meal.

  Riddle went to check on Sam, who was sleeping. His arm, twisted in a funny way because of his broken shoulder, lay at a strange angle.

  Sam had let the fire go out.

  Riddle couldn’t get mad. He’d been gone for hours, and Sam was barely mobile. Riddle put the fish down and climbed the hillside.

  He’d discovered that the sticks he threw on the fir
e that had sticky ends burned best. So now Riddle carefully examined the gnarly pine trees and found what he was looking for: a large ball of amber tree sap.

  Riddle used a rock to chip away a fist-size glob, and then he returned to the river. He picked an area in full sun, close to where he’d built the branch enclosure. He then held the glass front of Sam’s watch at an angle in the light, aimed at a corner of the sap.

  Riddle had focus. To a fault. He’d learned long ago to find his own reality. He was wired that way. And in doing that, he was patient. He had waited for ten years for a mother. He was still waiting. So he could wait for a hot spot of refracted light.

  It took fourteen minutes.

  The sap bubbled, and then smoke finally rose in a single wisp.

  Riddle fed it carefully, like he was tending a baby animal, coaxing it along. He added tiny bits of dry, dead wood, then larger sticks.

  And an hour later, he had a roaring fire and was roasting his fresh-caught rainbow trout.

  26

  Everyone loved Emily’s haircut.

  She had done it not as an act of defiance but as an act of solidarity. It had turned into an act of redefinition.

  The old Emily was gone.

  And this new Emily felt, with every passing day, her disappointment growing. No matter where Sam was, no matter what had happened, she believed he could figure out a way to call, even if only to say that he was never coming back, that his life had complexity that she could never understand.

  But he didn’t.

  Not calling was a form of communication in its own right. She began to believe that his silence was his way of definitely telling her that they weren’t returning. Because Sam and Riddle’s father was some kind of criminal, and maybe Sam was some kind of criminal, too.

  Emily was coming to believe that everyone made choices. Sam was making his. If he called and asked for help, she would have been there. Her whole family would have been there. She’d seen her mother’s face at night, worrying about Riddle and Sam, but these boys weren’t little children.

  One of them was a young man.

  As the shock of their disappearance gave way to the guilt that she hadn’t known their real circumstances, the pain of that was now turning into resentment and then loneliness. Which was why she said yes when Bobby Ellis asked her if she wanted to go with his family to the country club for Sunday dinner.

  She’d been to the club once before, but that was just to swim at Anneke Reeves’s birthday party. She’d never been in the dining room or on the terrace that overlooked the golf course, where they served drinks and little plates of bite-size finger food before mealtime.

  But it wasn’t like she’d ever wanted to go.

  Emily had never even given it a thought. Her parents didn’t run their own businesses or have companies with their names in the titles.

  So when Bobby Ellis said that the last Sunday of every month was the club’s all-you-can-eat seafood buffet, and that his parents always went and that he could bring a guest, she said yes.

  But she didn’t want it to be like they were going out, or hooking up, or were some kind of special friends, because they weren’t.

  She told herself that over and over again.

  Going to the Viewpoint Country Club didn’t mean anything. It just meant that she had to wear a dress, and it had to have sleeves, not spaghetti straps, and she had to wear shoes that weren’t open-toed.

  She’d never heard of rules like that when it came to a place to eat.

  But Bobby Ellis had explained that he had to wear a shirt with a collar as well as the jacket from a suit. And all men had to always wear socks with their shoes in the dining room.

  Emily thought that the men-wearing-socks rule was funny. If she wore her running shoes without socks for a few hours, they smelled as bad as her brother’s stinky high-tops.

  But maybe at the country club, they didn’t realise that.

  And she wasn’t going to wear her running shoes, so no one should worry.

  Bobby Ellis didn’t even like seafood.

  But people went crazy for the towers of plump pink shrimp and the mountain of cracked crab at the country club Sunday buffet. It seemed to Bobby Ellis to be unsanitary.

  All those stubby fingers reaching in and grabbing at things. There were large trays of smoked salmon and gooey shucked oysters. There were buckets of grey clams and greenish blue mussels flown in from another continent.

  There was herring, which looked to Bobby like sliced-up filleted garden snakes lying in a creamy white pool of smelly sauce. And even though they flooded all the tables with garlic bread, to him the whole place still reeked like a bait shop.

  But just as he did with almost everything in his life, Bobby Ellis hid his true feelings and imitated the general mood of the crowd. So when they walked through the double doors with the bevelled glass windows that had VCC etched on the front, Bobby turned to Emily and said in an intimate whisper, ‘They used to have lobster tails, but they’ve cut back because of the economy.’

  Emily didn’t remember ever eating a lobster tail, unless you counted the deep-fried langostino bites that she’d once had at Long John Silver’s. But those tasted just like breaded shrimp and didn’t seem like anything fancy.

  Bobby’s mother, Barb, sighed. ‘I loved those lobster tails . . .’

  She seemed to really mean it, because a kind of deep sadness filled her face, which had a smooth finish, owing to her heavy application of liquid foundation. Bobby found himself feeling bad for her, on account of both her make-up choice and the lobster.

  Inside, the Ellis family (plus Guest) was directed to a table next to the windows. Bobby explained that, during the day, this was a great table because you could see the seventh green.

  Emily stared outside and saw only pitch black.

  A waiter came to take their drink order, and Bobby’s parents both had martinis straight up with extra, extra olives. Bobby had a Diet Coke. And Emily ordered lemonade.

  The drinks came with plastic stirring sticks that each said VCC in gold letters on a shield the size of a postage stamp that topped the tip. Bobby had never noticed the stirring sticks before, and it was only when Emily pointed them out that he wondered how he could have missed them once a week for his entire life.

  Bobby hoped that ordering a Diet Coke didn’t make him seem like a girl, but he was used to the taste and liked it better than regular Coke. After the waiter brought their drinks, Bobby’s parents started asking Emily questions. Bobby was cringing inside, even though on the outside he kept his usual, friendly expression on his face.

  He knew that his father and mother couldn’t help it. They were a lawyer and a detective. Interrogation was their game. In their world, it substituted for all dialogue and small talk.

  Since he was small, Bobby Ellis had learned to answer a question with whatever people most wanted to hear. It had a way of stopping them. But Emily didn’t know this trick, and her answers only opened up all kinds of new inquiries.

  Barb Ellis finished her second martini with extra, extra olives, and the group got up to get their buffet plates.

  Bobby didn’t go because he’d ordered a chopped Salisbury steak with extra mushroom sauce from the regular menu.

  He was the only one in the large dining room eating beef.

  Emily was surprised at how much food everyone was taking.

  Most people had at least a dozen jumbo shrimp and then equally big portions of all the other seafood crowding their overflowing plates.

  There was a long line at the cracked crab mound, so Emily bypassed it altogether.

  Unlike at a regular restaurant, these people all seemed to know one another, so they chatted while they dolloped on their cocktail sauce or waited for their turn to pour creamy pink dressing from a silver pitcher over their crab piles.

  And while the eager club members were all polite, they struck Emily as too excited about everything. Her eyes moved around the dining room tables. There were little paper sk
irts covering the bottoms of all the glasses. She hadn’t noticed them before. Were they to catch the drips? They were an ecological nightmare.

  And then there were the pieces of fabric stretched across the lemon slices and tied with glossy yellow ribbons. Seed catchers? There was a lot of effort going into all this stuff.

  But she wouldn’t be the one to point that out.

  A bad shrimp can hit anyone any time.

  That’s what her mother told her. It didn’t mean that they’d done anything wrong at the Viewpoint Country Club.

  Emily was fine during dinner. And she felt okay for the first two hours when she got home.

  But right at bedtime, her stomach began to stage a revolt.

  She felt instantly sweaty, and only moments later had her head in the toilet bowl, where it remained for forty minutes. She’d never been sick that bad that fast, at least not that she could remember.

  And somehow, in the back of her mind, she felt that she’d betrayed Sam by going out with Bobby Ellis that night, and now she was paying for it.

  27

  Clarence had been in the cab of the truck for five days.

  He’d emptied two brown prescription bottles of stolen codeine cough syrup. He’d drunk all the vodka. He’d eaten the saltine crackers and some rotten string cheese that Riddle had hidden in the glove box. He’d chewed up a whole bottle of aspirin dry, like it was candy, and he’d licked the edges of four empty soda cans until he’d sliced open his tongue.

  But he now had to face the facts. He had a broken truck. And a badly broken leg. The road down the mountain led to help.

  But he couldn’t walk down that road.

  And his leg now had a massive infection around the exposed bone.

  Even Clarence, who knew nothing about medicine, felt that the gangrene moving its pus-black fingers up his body to grip his throat would kill him if he didn’t get help.

  And then he remembered that he had some woman’s stolen cell phone in the far back. The service would have long been cut off, but hadn’t he heard that the phone sent off some kind of signal? If he pressed 911, wouldn’t that signal notify someone that there was a person in an emergency?