I'll Be There

by Holly Goldberg Sloan

  It was mid-morning on prom day, and the weather was sunny and crisp as Bobby took a seat in his backyard on a lawn chair. He put on his sunglasses and closed his eyes. He was relaxed. He let his mind wander.

  When he looked down at his watch, an hour and twenty-five minutes had passed. He must have fallen asleep. He should have had coffee or a cookie or something. Bobby got to his feet and went into his house. Now he was off his schedule, and he was pissed. And his face felt really hot.

  Bobby lifted his glasses and looked at himself in the hallway mirror. He was red. He looked more closely and discovered that he had an outline from his sunglasses and he looked like a raccoon. Or the opposite of a raccoon. He looked like he was wearing a white eye mask.

  This was bad.

  He didn’t realise that the sun was so strong and that he didn’t have, how do they call it, a base?

  But he did know one thing, he now looked like a total loser.

  Bobby Ellis was driving too fast with the radio on too loud. There were two choices. Wear sunglasses to the prom. Or fix the problem. And then he heard a voice from somewhere say, ‘Pull your car over to the right.’

  Bobby answered out loud, ‘What the hell . . . ?’

  His eyes darted up to the rearview mirror and he saw a police car. Up the road, a second officer on a motorcycle was writing a ticket to a woman in an enormous cargo van.

  It was some kind of speed trap.

  Bobby slid his SUV to the kerb, and moments later a policeman had his face at the driver’s side window. ‘I’m going to need your registration and driver’s license.’

  Bobby looked the guy right in the eye. ‘I’m Bobby Ellis. I’m Derrick Ellis’s son. My mom’s Barb Ellis. Do you know my parents?’

  Bobby hoped he was striking the right tone. He didn’t want to sound like he was threatening the officer; he just wanted to get the facts on the table. His parents mattered in this town. The guy should know – right?

  Wrong.

  The officer edged down his sunglasses to get a better look at the tomato-red teenager. ‘And you’re telling me this about your parents because . . . ?’

  Bobby wasn’t sure how to answer that question. So he didn’t answer the question.

  The officer leaned closer. ‘Have you been drinking alcohol or smoking an illegal substance?’

  Bobby felt his whole body tighten. When he answered, his voice was shrill. ‘No! ’

  The officer didn’t like the intensity of the response. ‘I’d like you to step out of your vehicle.’

  Officer Duggan finished writing up the red-haired woman in the cargo van and went to assist Officer Gates, who was now standing on the kerb with Bobby Ellis. The red-haired woman in the van, clearly rattled, then put her vehicle in reverse instead of drive, and with her foot hard on the gas, backed up right into Bobby Ellis’s SUV.

  That’s how the accident occurred.

  But instead of showing him any mercy, the officers still gave him a speeding ticket and told the woman to give Bobby her insurance information while they pulled over more speeding cars to the kerb.

  It took a half hour to complete what should have taken five minutes, because the red-haired woman wouldn’t stop crying.

  Bobby’s SUV was drivable, but he was now a wreck. He hadn’t eaten since the night before, and the sunburn on his face was feeling worse every second.

  But the afternoon was sliding by. Real decisions now needed to be made. He was now doing damage control.

  He’d start with his burned face.

  Debbie Bell was sitting in a cramped room in the Utah sheriff’s station. She still had not yet seen Riddle, and she’d been in the building for three hours. She’d answered dozens and dozens of questions. She’d filled out all kinds of forms, and she’d signed affidavits attesting to her knowledge of the minor in question.

  But now there was a knock on the door, and it opened and she again saw the sheriff, Lamar Wennstrom. But this time, behind him, wearing a sweater that was too large, shoes that didn’t fit, and trousers issued from child services, was Riddle.

  Riddle pushed past the sheriff and, if there was any doubt in Lamar Wennstrom’s mind as to who she was, or whether he should release the kid to her, it was now dispelled.

  Debbie put her arms around the boy and he literally fell into her. She wasn’t a big woman, but somehow Riddle now looked so small. She had his head pressed to her chest and her hands on his hair and she was saying, over and over again, that, ‘It’s all right. It’s okay. Everything is okay now.’

  Lamar, who after thirty-one years in uniform was hardened to the world and as tough as they come, couldn’t even look. He had a lump in his throat and tears in his eyes, and it was getting hard to breathe.

  He’d sign anything now. He didn’t even need an okay from child services.

  Driving in a car would have taken fifteen hours. Driving on a Greyhound bus from Las Vegas up to where the Bells lived would take twenty-two hours, because the bus stopped constantly to pick up and drop off people. So Sam would not arrive at his destination until nine at night on Saturday.

  A middle-aged woman named Cece was the third person to sit next to him. She had packed enough food for a family of four. On her fifth attempt to get him to try one of her turkey-and-cheese sandwiches, he gave in. Once the dam was broken, she and Sam ate an entire backpack of food, which included a tin with chocolate chip cookies and a bag of caramel-covered popcorn.

  Cece never thought to ask him a question. She had a prisoner now, and as long as she kept him chewing, she could recount her divorce, the injustice of her settlement, and then the subsequent misunderstanding that took place after she’d run over her ex-husband’s foot in the driveway of the frozen custard shop.

  When Cece finally got off the bus, five hours later, she shook what looked like a packet of birdseed from the front of her smock top. Crumbs ground into the carpet under her heels as she gave Sam her daughter’s phone number. The girl was named Cameo and, according to Cece, she was going places in the world of aromatherapy. Sam promised that if he were ever in some place called Calabasas, he’d give Cameo a call.

  The Greyhound bus pulled back out onto the highway with only a dozen people on board. Most of them thought the seats were uncomfortable and that it was too bright inside to do anything other than occasionally nod off.

  But to someone who had been sleeping outside for weeks on a bed of rocks and pine needles, it was heaven.

  39

  A woman in a low-cut green top, with skin the colour of a blanket of freckles, took Bobby Ellis into the back of the tanning salon.

  She’d been concerned about the cast on his arm, so she had taped a garbage bag around the plaster and pronounced it now good-to-go. She didn’t look like the sharpest tool in the shed.

  Now seated on a small, sticky sofa, Bobby Ellis watched a four-minute instructional video that explained the spray-on tanning process.

  There were two people in the video. A man and a woman. They both wore swimsuits. Bobby picked up the remote and pressed the fast-forward button. How complicated could it be?

  Minutes later, alone in self-tanning room number 7, Bobby was swept with a wave of panic as he faced his first dilemma. Should he get the spray-on tan in the nude? He hadn’t brought a swimsuit. But they were wearing swimsuits in the video. He remembered that much. What was the right thing to do? He decided to keep on his boxers.

  Next decision, on the bench in front of him was a paper hairnet. Why was he supposed to wear that? He couldn’t remember. So he put it on. He didn’t want his hair tanned – right? But what about his ears? In or out of the hairnet? He was sweating now.

  Ears out.

  And then he remembered he’d be wearing a crown. Ears in.

  Forget the crown. His earlobes were dipping down out of the thin band of elastic. The damn hairnet would not hold.

  Ears out.

  There were little blue foot booties placed on the brown towel on the plastic bench. Again, why? And was the
towel they’d given him dark brown because it was really streaked with the stains of past tanners? An ugly thought.

  Bobby put on the booties. And then he opened the door to what looked like a portaloo and he stepped inside. A green button the size of an Oreo cookie was on the plastic wall in front of him. Was he supposed to push it? Then what? The light wasn’t good in the spray booth. He really should have paid more attention to the instructional video.

  Bobby leaned forward and pressed the green button. It sounded like an air compressor went on somewhere, and then the portaloo tanning booth literally started to tremble.

  And then an explosion of spray was fired from the wall in front of him. Cold, smelly liquid mist shot from three wall jets, starting from his ankles and moving up and down the front of his body.

  Bobby squeezed his eyes closed, but he should have done that sooner. His eyes were stinging now. Make it stop!

  And then finally, after what felt like the amount of time for an earthquake, the jets hissed off. Bobby exhaled. He couldn’t remember the next step. He tried to breathe, and he realised that he was gulping the spray-on mist. Would his lungs now be tanned? What about his throat? It was over. Right? Or was he supposed to now turn around? He wasn’t sure. Maybe there were jets on the other wall?

  And then suddenly he was being fired on again. But he had not turned. So the front of his body was being coated in the evil mist for a second time.

  He couldn’t take it.

  With his eyes shut, Bobby Ellis reached for the door handle and his hand hit the molded plastic wall instead. The wall was slick, and his hand instinctively recoiled as he lost his balance.

  Bobby hit the opposite wall, and all the while the spray was still hissing from the valves. He now had to open his eyes and, through a soup of foggy mist, he grabbed the door handle to regain his balance. The door unexpectedly flew open, and Bobby lurched forward, hitting the sharp edge of the door frame.

  It felt like a carving knife as it pierced his skin at the knee.

  The good news was that Debbie Bell was not the nurse on duty in the emergency room. The bad news was that Bobby had to have eight stitches just below the kneecap, where the broken door frame had sliced all the way down to his shinbone.

  The other bad news was that Lena Buelow, Ilisa King, and Naomi Fairbairn, who all went to Churchill High School, were also getting spray-on prom tans, and they all saw him being loaded into the ambulance.

  Since there was metal in the door frame, the emergency room doctor gave Bobby a tetanus shot, which hurt. And then he was issued a course of antibiotics, just to be safe. The physician made it clear that Bobby was not to drink alcohol, because then the medication wouldn’t work.

  Bobby felt a kind of rage as he listened to the doctor. It was prom night, for God’s sake!

  It was four o’clock by the time he finally was released, and Bobby still hadn’t eaten since the day before. He was now starting to feel weak and dizzy, and his head was pounding like someone had put a jackhammer to his temples. He hadn’t called his parents, because after they got over his injury, he knew they’d freak about the front of his damaged SUV. He couldn’t deal with that right now.

  So Bobby went to Arby’s.

  He had to get something in his stomach fast. But there was no place to park, so Bobby pulled his beloved, but now damaged, SUV to the red zone right out front. He then put up his handicapped placard on the rearview mirror. Thank God for that.

  But Bobby didn’t see the handicapped placard fall when he slammed the door shut. It dropped like a wet leaf to the floorboard, disappearing straight under the front seat.

  Inside, Bobby ordered two of the beef sandwiches. It was only when he lifted the second sandwich to his mouth that he caught sight of himself in the reflection in one of the fast-food restaurant’s security mirrors.

  His face looked like he’d been dipped in molasses. Four minutes later, while he was in the bathroom, Bobby Ellis’s SUV was on the back of Marlow Hough’s tow truck, being pulled down Franklin Boulevard to the city impound lot.

  On the second half of the trip, the bus was nearly empty. So Sam went all the way to the back and put up the armrests and stretched out on four seats.

  As he drifted off, he allowed himself for the first time to think about ringing the buzzer at the Bells’ house.

  A woman sitting two rows in front of him had brought a blanket with her. She’d taken it from an airline inadvertently on a cross-country flight once. Or so she claimed.

  The woman saw Sam when she first got on the bus and, six hours later, she was still thinking about him when the Greyhound pulled into a sleepy little town where she got off. The sun was low in the sky, and she put the royal blue blanket over Sam before she exited. He looked like he could use some comfort.

  Sam stirred but didn’t wake.

  The roar of the powerful engine, and the slight shimmy of the wide bus as it motored down the highway, had rocked him gently into a better place.

  All week Bobby Ellis had told Emily that the only place with good flowers for corsages and boutonnieres was the Green Thumb.

  So now she made a point of not going there.

  How could one place have a corner on the good flowers? Plus everything was really expensive at the Green Thumb. She’d gone online and checked.

  There was a woman named Carla who lived four doors down from the Bells in an old farmhouse from back when the whole area was just bean fields. She used to work in a flower place on Briot Street, and Emily sometimes fed her cats when she went skiing. The flowers in Carla’s garden looked more beautiful than anything Emily had ever seen.

  Emily asked Carla what to do for a boutonniere for Bobby’s tuxedo, and she told her to come over in the afternoon and they’d take care of it together.

  So Emily did. And she and Carla looked over the maze of flower beds in Carla’s bountiful garden, and Emily picked an orange rosebud with streaks of fiery red running through the petals.

  Inside the house, Carla showed Emily how to insert a wire into the rose for strength and then wrap the bottom with green tape. She then threaded a floral pin with a black pearl plastic tip through the flower and voilà, done.

  Emily told Carla she’d feed the cats next time for free, and Carla told her to forget it. She would pay.

  Walking back home, Emily thought that the rose was one of the most beautiful things she’d ever seen. She felt certain that Bobby wouldn’t appreciate the fact that it came from a neighbour’s yard.

  But the best thing about it was that she’d made it herself – and that it was such a vibrant hue of orange.

  He was orange.

  Bobby was staring in the mirror in the bathroom at Arby’s, and maybe it was the fluorescent tube lighting, but he looked like a traffic cone. No, a squash. He looked like Nemo. Or a sweet potato. A mango. A prison jumpsuit.

  Bobby Ellis splashed water on his face, but it was clear that too much time had passed since he’d been shot with whatever carcinogenic dye was fired from those hissing valves. Because this crap could not be washed off.

  And when he began to really rub his cheeks, he had another problem: underneath the stain, he was sunburned. And it now really hurt.

  Bobby rested his arm on the edge of the sink and realised that his cast was getting wet. In the horror of the orange face revelation, he’d forgotten that he had a broken arm. He stepped towards the paper-towel dispenser and felt a stabbing pain where the new stitches were now doing their job to keep the skin knitted together under his left kneecap.

  It was suddenly just too much.

  Bobby reeled around and violently kicked the wall hard and, to his shock, his right foot sank straight into the cheap drywall, which had been weakened by years of toilet-bowl splatter. Bobby now had his foot fully implanted in the wall next to the toilet. Fortunately, it was his good leg. When Bobby pulled it out, pieces of drywall plaster flung around the small bathroom.

  And he didn’t clean it up.

  40

 
When Emily got home, her father was carrying a single mattress out of the garage and heading to the back door. And he was so happy. Emily followed him into the house, moving things to make the mattress negotiation easier.

  ‘What’s going on?’

  ‘I’m putting this in the room off the kitchen.’

  No one ever knew what to call that room. Emily opened the door. ‘We’re expecting guests?’

  Her father nodded. ‘Your mom’s on her way back, and she’s bringing someone.’

  That sounded interesting. Emily still didn’t know where her mom had even gone. ‘Who?’

  Her father didn’t answer.

  The room off the kitchen had at one time been a bedroom. Then it had become a home office for her mother. But that had given way to a treadmill and random storage. Her father was now assessing the room. ‘I guess I’ll have to take the treadmill apart and get it out of here.’

  Emily stared at him. Taking apart a treadmill seemed like an awful lot of work for a guest. Even if the person stayed a week. Her father leaned the mattress against the wall and started back out to the garage. ‘I’ve gotta get my tools.’

  Emily called after him, ‘Wait – who’s coming again?’

  Her father called over his shoulder, ‘Family.’

  Emily watched him go. Duh. So it must be Aunt Jean. Everyone had a love-hate relationship with Aunt Jean.

  She was smart and funny, but she was also a talkaholic. You literally couldn’t get Aunt Jean to keep her mouth closed. And whenever someone was sick of her, you’d hear the excuse, ‘Well, what are you going to do? She’s family.’

  Hadn’t Emily heard her parents talking about Aunt Jean having some kind of health problem? Or was it financial? She really hadn’t been paying attention in the last month to anything. And that made her feel bad.

  She was going to make a big effort with Aunt Jean.

  Emily put Bobby’s boutonniere in the refrigerator and headed upstairs to shower, wondering how long Aunt Jean would be in town. She was going to put a Welcome sign in the little room before she left. It was important to make guests feel at home.