by Tim Green
Leslie Spanko picked it up and talked in single words. “Yes . . . Mmm . . . No . . . Yes . . . Yes . . . Okay.”
Spanko hung up and looked at Mr. Starr. “The Trents are offering you ten thousand dollars.”
“For what?” Mr. Starr asked.
Leslie Spanko thought for a moment. “To end all this. To go away.”
Mr. Starr sucked on his tongue. “No. You can tell them we don’t need ten thousand dollars. We need two hundred thousand. She can take that ten thousand and shove it right up her nose.”
“Mr. Starr . . .” Ryder was floating again. He’d felt like this so much in the past week that he began to hope it all really was a dream. He just needed to wake up.
But the feel of the desk’s smooth surface beneath his sweaty palms and the sniff from Gio as he and the nurse got up, leaving them alone with the lawyer, and the click of the latch on the door let Ryder know it wasn’t a dream and he wasn’t going to just wake up.
“No,” Mr. Starr said. “Get me out of here, Ryder. It’s over.”
“But you said . . .”
“I said it’s over!”
Mr. Starr’s shriek was as hysterical and jolting as Brooke Trent’s had been. Ryder got up and took hold of the chair. Leslie Spanko opened the door without speaking and escorted them to the elevator.
“I’m sorry,” the lawyer said with somber sincerity as she held the door so they could get in.
Then, the elevator doors closed on her face and they plummeted down.
They took a bus back to their hotel and packed their belongings. They headed to the train station and spent all afternoon there before getting on the Crescent line for New York City at 8:04 p.m. Mr. Starr didn’t speak. Ryder kept quiet too. There was nothing to say.
Without a word, Ryder helped Mr. Starr from the bathroom into his bed, then tucked the destroyed baseball into his duffel bag, climbed into his own bunk, and fell asleep to the clacking sway of the train. In the morning they ate bagels wrapped in cellophane from the dining car and Ryder tore the metallic covers off of plastic containers of orange juice. Ryder then lay back in his bunk and stared out the window at the world sweeping by. He wondered several times whether or not he could get outside the train and simply jump when they crossed one of the bridges through the mountains of Virginia, but it was just a thought. He never even got out of the bunk except to eat a sandwich in the afternoon and use the bathroom.
In New Jersey, the skyline of New York City suddenly appeared on the horizon and Ryder had no idea what he’d do when he got home besides go to the hospital and stare at his mom and pray for a miracle. He didn’t believe in miracles. He’d never seen one and he didn’t understand how people could believe in something—truly believe—if they hadn’t seen it for themselves. Still, he’d try because it was all he had left. He wasn’t even going to think about Doyle and the money he was trying to raise. Ryder knew now that Mr. Starr was right. Doyle wasn’t for real even if he had a good heart. Doyle was a wild dreamer.
And Ryder didn’t need wild dreams about FDNY fund-raising on Twitter. He needed a good old-fashioned the-doctors-have-never-seen-anything-like-it miracle.
He cried, too. A lot. He kept his face buried in the foam pillow so Mr. Starr didn’t have to listen. He knew adults didn’t want to hear that kind of thing and he appreciated everything Mr. Starr had done, even if he’d been wrong, even if they came up short.
It wasn’t Mr. Starr’s fault, after all. It was Ryder’s alone. He replayed the moments over in the park, right before the accident, the things he’d been angry about: his mom pushing him to make friends, him using the excuse of being poor and not having a phone, her throwing her lowly job in his face, and him insulting her with the idea that he’d grow up and become someone like Thomas Trent. He now knew that meant valuing cars and houses more than people’s lives.
Then he remembered pulling back from her, and her pulling him too, only she slipped and got hit by a car, breaking her ribs and leg and smashing her heart so that it would fail any day now and all he could do was watch and wait.
Everything went dark.
Ryder cried out.
The train whooshed through the tunnel beneath the Hudson River.
Ryder wondered what it would be like to have the tunnel collapse. They’d all be crushed by a million tons of water, concrete, and mud.
He wished for that. That was something that wouldn’t take a miracle, just another tragedy, another human error in calculation, or driving . . . or a stupid angry response.
Ryder climbed down in the darkness and vomited his sandwich into the stainless steel bowl of their toilet.
“You okay?” Mr. Starr asked.
Ryder washed his face and hands and went back into their compartment. “You’re talking to me now?”
“You yelled when we went in the tunnel. Why?”
Ryder didn’t even want to get into it, but he felt obligated. “I was thinking about all the things, every little thing that I could have done different on that day.”
“The day of the accident?” Mr. Starr asked.
“I could have pushed instead of pulled. I could have made a joke instead of a jab. I could have . . . I don’t know, not hit a home run.”
“Home run?”
Ryder sighed.
“Tell me about that. Tell me all the things leading up to when she got hurt.” Mr. Starr lay still. Even his eyes were motionless.
“Why?” Ryder asked.
“Just tell me.” Even his voice seemed not to move. “I think it’ll help.”
Ryder did tell. He described that day, the park, his teammates and friends, hitting that home run, even falling in the muddy grass and looking up at the clouds with his mom. He wished so badly he could go back. Telling it didn’t make him feel any better and he said so.
“I know,” Mr. Starr said. “I’ve been thinking about everything, too.”
“About how she’s gonna die?”
The train groaned and swayed and thumped the tracks.
“Yes,” he said. “About how she’s gonna die.”
They arrived at Penn Station, and Doyle picked them up. He helped Mr. Starr home and then took Ryder to the hospital.
Mr. Starr stayed in his apartment. Ryder and Doyle passed Ashleigh Love hurrying up the stairs with fresh supplies slung over her shoulder, fretting out loud about them being gone too long. Ryder said nothing, he just followed Doyle and climbed up into the passenger seat of Derek Raymer’s truck that Doyle had on loan.
Doyle was talking, fast. Ryder had a hard time paying attention to all the Twitter fund-raising talk.
“How much?” Ryder asked, his heart stung by a faint pang of hope.
“Well, forty-seven thousand.” Doyle stopped at a light, glancing over at him with a worried look. “But, you know, we’re just one huge retweet away from this thing exploding, right?”
Ryder sighed. “I don’t even know what that means, Doyle.”
“A retweet.” Doyle turned the truck. “Like someone like Carlos Beltran or Eli Manning or maybe Michael Strahan or Diane Sawyer takes my tweet and then tweets it out to their followers. They have millions. Then all of a sudden, the money comes pouring in at a really fast rate.”
“So, all you need is a retweet.” Ryder couldn’t help sounding bitter, almost bored.
Doyle nodded his head viciously, like a loyal dog.
They pulled up to the hospital and parked in the garage. They crossed the street and entered, people coming and going with no idea Ryder’s mom was about to die. He hated them and their smiles and the one who held the door for them. He hated everyone and everything and each step closer to his mother’s room he hated them more and his limbs got heavier and heavier.
The doctor was in there and the look on his face startled Ryder, heaping more fear onto his heart.
“How is she?” Doyle asked.
The doctor looked at Ryder, then Doyle, and spoke very low. “Her heartbeat is irregular and the pressure is starting to dr
op. Maybe a few more days. I’m sorry.”
The doctor went out. Doyle pulled out his phone and started to tweet, thumbs skipping over the screen in a blur, like he could somehow tweet her back to life. Doyle clenched his jaw so tight that the muscles in his cheek did a quiet dance. Ryder felt the tears coursing down his own cheeks again. He went to the bed and spread his arms over his mother, pressing his face into the hair piled around her neck. A sob tore free from his chest.
“Mommmmmm!”
Doyle let him cry for a while before he tapped him on the back and said they should probably go. Ryder was exhausted again and he let Doyle direct him out to the truck. He climbed the steps of their apartment building slowly. They met Ashleigh on the third floor, heading down at a slow, steady pace.
They seemed to startle her. “Oh, I better give you two my number. I don’t think the night nurse is scheduled to come until tomorrow. You can call if you need me in the night.”
“The night?” Ryder asked. “What do you mean?”
Ashleigh nodded. “He’s not good. I gave him some penicillin, but in his condition . . .”
“What’s wrong?” Doyle asked.
She huffed. “I told him. You can’t just go away without a nurse. He has a shunt in his intestines that has to be taken care of. The old fool. Must have hurt like I don’t know what. He said he didn’t have time for that. I don’t believe that for a second.”
She stared at Ryder and he bit the edge of his lower lip because he had no idea Mr. Starr wasn’t well or that he was in that kind of pain.
“Well.” Ashleigh shook her head and started down the stairs. “He’s on the computer now. Wouldn’t listen to me when I said he needs some sleep. If you can get him to do that, he might not end up in the hospital.”
“Hospital?” Ryder said.
“His fever is a hundred and one.” She spoke up at them from the landing below. “Any higher and that’s where he’ll be, even if I have to get an elephant gun to sedate him.”
Ryder and Doyle looked at each other and started to climb without saying anything. When they got to the top, Ryder saw light bleeding underneath Mr. Starr’s door.
Ryder didn’t say anything, he just walked past his own apartment door and knocked at Mr. Starr’s.
“Leave me alone!” Mr. Starr’s shout echoed down the empty stairwell.
“Mr. Starr?” Ryder shouted through the door. “Are you okay? It’s me, Ryder! And Doyle!”
“I’m working! Go!”
Doyle’s mouth twisted into a look of disgust. “Everything sounds normal anyway, the old grump.”
“She said ‘hospital.’” Ryder frowned.
“That’s if the fever keeps going up,” Doyle said. “He’ll be fine. He’s on medicine now. That’ll fix him up.”
Ryder nodded, but left reluctantly. When he swung open the door to his apartment he was again moved by the smells that made it seem like his mother would be walking out of the bedroom any second to greet them. He turned on the lights, but everything was quiet and the shattered pieces of the blue-and-white porcelain lamp still lay on the floor.
“Yeah.” Doyle looked at the mess too. “Got a dustpan? I can help you clean that up.”
There was a broom and dustpan in the narrow closet next to the fridge and Ryder took them out. Together, he and Doyle cleaned up the lamp.
“How about something to eat?” Doyle clapped his hands, his voice upbeat. “Can I help you put something together? You want to maybe grab something at a diner?”
Ryder looked around at the empty apartment. “What’s going to happen to me?”
“Well . . . uh . . . Let’s not go negative, right?” Doyle took out his phone and began tapping its face. “We got . . . look, another nine hundred and eighty-seven dollars in just this past hour.”
“He said two days, Doyle!” Ryder was furious. “Don’t you get it!”
“I know, but things could happen . . . like I said, a retweet could—”
“Get out!”
In the silence that followed, Ryder heard ringing in his ears from his own scream.
“Leave me alone, Doyle.” Ryder’s voice was lifeless.
“Yeah, well, you need some sleep, bud. I get it. You get some rest. I’ll stop back and check on you tomorrow. You got my number.”
“I got your number.”
“Okay, well . . .” Doyle started for the door.
“Doyle? I’m sorry,” Ryder said. “Thank you. For everything.”
“You got it, kid.” Doyle stroked his mustache and closed the door behind him.
Ryder stumbled to the bedroom, lay down on his mother’s bed with the smell of her all around him, and plunged into a dark sleep.
Ryder woke with a bowling ball in his stomach. The hurt made him heavy and dull. He had no idea what his life was about to become. In a strange way, he didn’t care. In a life without his mom, nothing would matter.
He got up and wandered into the tiny kitchen to sit on the floor.
Ryder didn’t know how long he sat, but when Doyle knocked on the door it was ten thirty. Ryder let him in, but Doyle was there to take him to the hospital. Ryder nodded and quickly changed and got his coat.
Out in the hallway, Doyle nodded toward Mr. Starr’s door. “We should probably check in on him, no?”
Ryder nodded, shuffled down the hall, and knocked.
“Working!” Mr. Starr cried out from inside. He didn’t sound angry anymore, but Ryder wondered if that was because he was sick.
“Do you need anything?” Ryder hollered.
“Working!”
Doyle sighed and shook his head. “The morning nurse probably came. He sounds fine, Ryder.”
“What work?” Ryder shook his head too. He supposed this was the end of Mr. Starr. He was obviously washing his hands of the situation. He’d done his best, Ryder had to admit that, but now it was over. Mr. Starr was going back to his life, whatever life that was. Ryder thought it strange how the whole thing with Thomas Trent didn’t even seem real. It was like the accident itself, or the shark dream with him and his mom on top of the skyscraper in the ocean. Crazy. Impossible.
“Come on.” Doyle led the way down the stairs.
They went to the hospital and sat with his mom. She didn’t move. Her skin was losing its color and Ryder imagined he heard the beeps of the machines slowing down, their rhythm off, although he wasn’t sure. Doyle had serious conversations with the staff about Ryder outside in the hallway. Ryder heard him invoking FDNY over and over again, but Ryder’s sense was that the time for him to be plugged into the system was coming soon. They’d get him.
He considered that in a distant way, as if it were happening to a character in a movie. The boy would go through the courts. The fireman would watch over him, but despite the best of intentions, the system would win. The boy would end up in a detention center, or maybe a foster home, both grim places to be. The boy would grow up, empty and cold, alone and lost.
Ryder shrugged and sighed and touched his mother’s face.
The tears were gone, anyway. He was empty. It was evening already, the sun setting somewhere beyond the buildings outside the hospital window, and it was time to go.
Doyle had a night shift to get to, but he insisted they stop at a diner because Ryder had to eat. Doyle actually got him to swallow three spoonfuls of tomato soup along with two bites of a grilled cheese before depositing him in the apartment. Ryder lay down on his mother’s bed and slept.
Ryder slept a long time and woke to the sound of screaming and pounding.
“Ryder! Ryder!”
POUND. POUND. POUND.
“Ryder!”
Ryder jumped up, his heart strangling him because he somehow knew it was news that his mother had passed. What else could it be?
He dashed past the living room widow, which was letting in the morning sun, and to their apartment door and flung it open.
Mr. Starr sat crookedly in his chair; the silver travel coffee mug he’d used to bang
the door hung loose from one twisted hand.
“Ryder!” Mr. Starr looked horrible, pale and drooping, but his eyes glowed. “We might have it! We just might have it!”
“Mr. Starr? Have what?”
“The way to save her.”
Mr. Starr tightened his lips when Ryder asked him to explain. “No. I don’t want to jinx it. Get your coat. You’re going with me. I need you there.”
Ryder grabbed his coat. The spark of hope glowed faint in the cold ashes of his heart, too weak to really stir him. Still, he knew how to obey his elders. Ryder pocketed his keys and the TracFone and began to close the door behind him.
“Wait,” Mr. Starr said. “The ball. Do you have the ball?”
“Mr. Starr, that ball isn’t worth anything. There’s no luck in that ball.”
“Get the ball.” Mr. Starr’s voice didn’t allow any argument.
Ryder went back inside, fished the wrecked baseball out of the duffel bag he’d yet to unpack, stuffed it into his coat pocket, and left.
Ryder wheeled Mr. Starr to the service elevator and down the wobbly ramp in the back, then out onto the street.
“Subway. B train. Downtown. Let’s go.” Mr. Starr’s voice quavered with excitement, even through his grumpy tone.
They took the B to Rockefeller Center, got on the elevator, went up, and came out on Sixth Avenue.
“Fifth and Fifty-Seventh,” Mr. Starr said.
Ryder crossed Sixth Avenue and headed down Forty-Ninth Street. He couldn’t even imagine where they were headed. When they got to Fifth Avenue, Ryder couldn’t help looking up at the majestic buildings, home to the fanciest stores, banks, and offices in the world. This was the center of the city, where the elite, rich, and famous came to work and play. He couldn’t help thinking of Thomas and Brooke Trent. This was their kind of territory.
His throat grew tight.
They came to a gold-gilt entrance with twisty columns, lanterns, and three alcoves above the doorway with golden statues of ladies from three hundred years ago. The gold letters said it was THE CROWN BUILDING. Next to the fancy entrance stood stores with signs that said PIAGET and BULGARI. Ryder looked up and saw that the buildings here disappeared into the blue and cloudy sky.