Pay It Forward

by Catherine Ryan Hyde

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  ARLENE

  The phone woke them. It was late, after ten in the morning. The sun streamed through the windows onto her face. She wondered how she could have slept through that.

  “Let the machine get it,” she said.

  He rolled up behind her and slid his left arm under her pillow. Wrapped his good right arm around her and laid his left cheek down against the side of her face. His chest felt warm and solid against her back. His eye patch was off, and she could feel the smooth, empty expanse where his left eye had once been. He didn’t work to keep that from her anymore. He knew she didn’t mind.

  She laced her fingers through his.

  The machine picked it up. Again. Arlene had turned the volume all the way down.

  “How’d we sleep so long?” she said quietly.

  “It’s good for us. It’s what you do to heal.”

  “Take more than a few nights’ sleep.”

  “I know.”

  “So, what’re we gonna do until seven o’clock tonight?”

  “I don’t know. Same thing we’ve done all week, I guess. Get up. Wash our faces. Eat.”

  “Cry.”

  “Yeah. That too.”

  Neither had cried much in the last twenty-four hours. It was as if they’d struck the bottom of a well. Used up all the tears, leaving an amazing emptiness inside, like a killer case of the flu. They were both tired. Bone tired. Arlene wondered at the place inside her rib cage. Wondered how an empty space could feel so heavy.

  She squeezed her eyes closed.

  “What if the baby turns out to be Ricky’s, Reuben? Sooner or later we gotta talk about that.”

  The second or two it took him to answer drew out long and frightening.

  “I was willing to sign on to raise Ricky’s last kid. Wasn’t I? And he turned out pretty good.”

  “Yeah, he did. Didn’t he? Pretty damn good.”

  And to her surprise, that heavy, empty center inside her gave up a few more tears.

  She unlaced her fingers from his, reached back, and touched his face. He pressed his right hand onto her belly, big fingers spread to cover the whole area, and held it there. As if to introduce himself.

  She could hear a honking of horns, all the way from the Camino. The intermittent red light of a flashing emergency vehicle slipped by their window.

  “Wonder what the hell’s going on out there,” she said without much genuine curiosity.

  “An accident, maybe.”

  “That must be it, yeah.”

  Reuben unplugged the phone and they fell back asleep for the remainder of the morning.

  “HOW ’BOUT WE TAKE THE GTO?”

  “Whichever.”

  Neither had a strong opinion or was interested in details.

  Reuben drove. As he backed out of the driveway, they noticed both sides of the street solid with parked cars. So close together, pushing so hard for space that they slightly overlapped both sides of the driveway, making it a tight fit to get out. And then, when he’d managed to angle straight out between them, he couldn’t find a break in traffic. Traffic. On this tiny little residential street.

  Arlene got out of the car and personally stopped the procession of cars with her body, giving Reuben a chance to back into the traffic lane.

  The GTO crawled an inch or two at a time toward the Camino. For the first few minutes they didn’t comment or complain.

  Arlene glanced at her watch.

  “Why the hell is this happening? I mean, today of all days? We’re gonna be late if we can’t get out of this jam.”

  Reuben chewed on his lower lip and didn’t answer.

  It was ten minutes after seven when they hit the Camino, only to find traffic police turning cars away at a roadblock. The main drag appeared closed to traffic. Reuben did not turn where the officer told him to. Instead he pulled up to the roadblock and rolled down his window. The sun had dipped to a slant behind the officer’s head.

  Arlene looked straight through the windshield and saw the Camino clogged with pedestrians. Not just the sidewalks, but the street itself. Hundreds, just in this intersection.

  “We don’t know what’s going on,” Reuben told the officer, “but we have to get to the memorial at City Hall.”

  “Yeah, that’s everybody’s problem,” he said.

  “These people are all here for the memorial?”

  “That’s right,” he said. “Your problem is not unique.”

  Arlene leaned over Reuben’s lap and looked into the officer’s face. “I’m Arlene McKinney,” she said.

  His expression changed. “Right. You are, aren’t you? Look, just leave your car here by the barricade and come with me.”

  Reuben turned off the motor. They stepped out into the sea of bodies and followed the uniformed officer out onto the Camino. The crowd in their immediate vicinity seemed to notice. To recognize. A silence fell, directly surrounding Reuben and Arlene, and rippled out like a wake on water.

  A path opened up to allow them through.

  They were escorted into the backseat of a black-and-white patrol car. The officer turned on his lights and siren. Through the vehicle’s loudspeaker, he asked the crowd to open a traffic lane to allow the family to pass.

  She sat straight and rigid, squeezing Reuben’s hand, staring forward through the windshield, watching the mass of bodies part, watching a ribbon of empty street form ahead of the car.

  “This crowd go all the way down to the City Hall?” Arlene asked at last, jarring the silence.

  “It goes all over town,” he said. “We got helicopters in from L.A. We got mounted police coming in with horse trailers right now. Not that there’s been any trouble. There hasn’t. We just need more personnel. Local rental company donated some sound equipment. Maybe the people in a four-or five-block radius will hear the service. Rest’ll have to read about it in the paper. Or see it on TV. We got camera crews coming outta our ears.”

  “How many people do you think we have here?” Reuben asked.

  “Most recent estimate stands at twenty thousand. But the freeway’s backed up thirty miles. It’s a parking lot. They’re still coming in.”

  THE PATROL CAR PULLED OVER at the West Mall, and Reuben and Arlene stepped out. She reached for his hand and held it. The officer escorted them through the sea of bodies. A smattering of applause rang in their ears, loudest wherever they happened to walk.

  The grassy area overflowed with media equipment. Microphones, cameras, newspeople. They occupied so much space that the nonmedia participants had to squeeze around the edges to allow space for the filming.

  It occurred to Arlene that this twenty thousand people might seem like nothing compared to the audience who saw it reported on the news or in the paper. It was all too much to take in at once.

  They reached an elevated makeshift stage, where the sound equipment had been set up. Big, heavy, rock-concert speakers stacked on assembled three-level catwalks, framing City Hall. When they stepped onto the stage, the crowd grew quiet. Then a long, steady round of applause broke out.

  Chris Chandler slipped up beside her. It felt good to see a familiar face.

  “What do you think?” he said.

  “Where did all these people come from, Chris?”

  “Well, it just so happens you’re asking the right person. I’ve been conducting interviews in the crowd. The people I’ve talked to are from”—he flipped open his notepad—“Illinois, Florida, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Bangladesh, Atascadero, London, San Francisco, Sweden—”

  “That little television thing I did went outside the country?”

  “A hundred and twenty-four countries around the world. Which is, like, nothing compared to the coverage we’ve got today. Most of these news crews are sending this out live.”

  Arlene raised her eyes to the crowd, knowing she saw only a tiny percentage. Thousands of people, crowding close to hear. A light dusk had begun to settle. They were late getting started. She looked down
at the cameras, saw them looking back. She knew by their red lights that everything, everybody was on. Watching.

  She stepped up to the microphone. The crowd waited in silence. She opened her mouth to speak. She felt slightly dizzy. The air, the inside of her head, had taken on the qualities of walking in a dream.

  “I’m not too good with words,” she said.

  Her voice shook and cracked, and the microphone amplified that, ricocheted her tension off the neighboring buildings. The strength of the sound system startled her. The leaves on the oak trees overhead shivered at the sound. All eyes turned up to her in silence.

  “I don’t even know what I’m doing up here, in front of all these people. I just came here to say good-bye to my boy.” Tears flowed freely at the sound of those words. She let them. Her voice remained steady and she talked through the moment. “I hope he can see this,” she said. “Boy, would he be proud.”

  The earth seemed to fall out from underneath her. She felt she might pass out. “I’m gonna turn this over to Reuben,” she said. “He can talk better than me. I just came here to say good-bye to my boy.”

  Reuben’s arm slid around her shoulder and held tight. Don’t ever let go, she thought. Don’t you dare ever let go.

  If it wasn’t for Reuben, and that tiny presence in her belly, she’d have nothing left worth holding on to.

  Except, she thought, maybe for this world that had come here to share this moment with her. Maybe that was something after all.

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  REUBEN

  Reuben 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.

  REUBEN RECOGNIZED CHRIS’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. Si
tting 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.

  EPILOGUE

  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.

  IN DECEMBER 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.