by Mike Lupica
But he was getting better. Mike kept telling him that, and Tommy could feel it, too. His last time down he cut back and forth across Danforth, pretending he was a snowboarder and not just a skateboarder.
“The dude himself!” Mike shouted from the top of the street.
When Tommy came back up this time, even Greck gave him a reluctant high five.
“Next weekend when I have my new board, you can try,” Tommy said.
“Um, that would be a no-can-do,” Greck said.
Tommy asked if Mike wanted one more ride. Mike said he was done. They decided to head back.
When they got home Tommy yelled up to Em to tell her they were back. No response. “She’s probably wearing her new headphones,” Tommy said. He told Greck to go up and check on her.
“Why do I have to?” Greck said.
“I think she still likes you, unlike me,” Tommy said. “Then you can come back down and make a sandwich.”
“It has been a couple of hours since I had anything to eat,” Greck said.
Greck headed up the stairs, saying in a loud voice, “Em, it’s me, the brother you wish you had.”
Tommy and Mike were in the kitchen when Greck came walking in. He didn’t look happy.
“No luck?” Tommy said.
“No nothing,” Greck said.
“What are you saying?” Tommy said.
“I’m saying she’s gone.”
TWENTY-FOUR
TOMMY CALLED HIS MOM first thing, not wanting to waste a second, and told her Em wasn’t in the house and he didn’t know where she’d gone.
“She didn’t tell you she was going out?” his mom said.
Tommy swallowed hard. “We were skateboarding a couple of blocks away. We weren’t gone that long, Mom, I swear.”
“But she was still in her room when you went out?”
“Yes.”
“Is her phone in her room?”
“No.”
“Then maybe when I get home we can track her with that,” his mom said.
“Mom, will you be home soon?”
“Ten minutes away if I keep walking,” she said. “But I’m going to run.”
She hung up.
“We shouldn’t have left her alone,” Greck said.
They were all standing in front of Tommy’s house, waiting to see his mom come up the street. Tommy had never wanted to see her more in his life.
“But she’s never done anything like this before,” Tommy said. “All she really wants to do now is be in her room.” He paused and added, “Alone.”
They had talked about searching the neighborhood, but they didn’t know how long Em had been gone or which way she might have went. So they waited for Tommy’s mom to come back and tell them what to do.
Mike shook his head. “I should have left my stupid board at home.”
“It’s not your fault,” Tommy said.
It’s mine, it’s mine, it’s mine.
His mom came sprinting up their street a couple of minutes later. She was out of breath, but trying to act like she was calm and in control at the same time. But the look in her eyes told Tommy something different.
She was scared.
Which made Tommy more scared than he already was.
She looked at Tommy, as if reading his mind. “We’ll find her. I’m sure there’s a simple explanation for this. She’s probably just at a friend’s house.”
Tommy’s mom said she wasn’t going to panic and call the police. She said she’d been trying Em’s number, even as she ran home, but the calls went straight to voice mail, same as Tommy’s had. It meant she’d turned off her phone, or her battery had died.
Greck and Mike didn’t want to get in the way, so they told Tommy they’d see him later and that they hoped he found Em real soon. Tommy and his mom went inside and sat down at the kitchen table. Tommy’s mom used Em’s Apple ID for her iPhone and tried to track it that way, but after a minute she shook her head and said, “The last location is here.”
“Would Em know we could track her phone with yours?” Tommy said.
“It’s why I have her ID,” his mom said.
“You think she turned it off on purpose,” Tommy said, “so we can’t track her right away?”
“I don’t know what she’s thinking,” his mom said. “And I don’t know where she is.” She stared at the phone in her hand. “I just know that she’s ten and possibly on her own.”
Tommy said, “Are you going to call the police?”
“Let me call all her friends who live nearby first,” she said. “I don’t want to panic. Just because she’s not here doesn’t mean she’s missing.”
One by one she called Em’s friends from the neighborhood, trying to keep her voice from sounding frantic, just asking if Em was there. She called Kristen. Ella. Katie.
“Is Em there by any chance?” she kept saying. “Her phone must have died.”
None of them had heard from her in the past couple of hours. Every time she thanked one of the girls and disconnected the call, Tommy felt as if he’d been punched in the stomach.
Tommy’s job was to keep trying Em’s phone while his mom made her calls. But it kept going straight to voice mail.
Suddenly his mom put the phone down in front of her and looked at Tommy. “Is her bike here?”
Tommy hadn’t even thought to check. He just assumed Em had walked out the front door and kept walking.
He ran to the garage.
Her bike was gone.
He went back to the kitchen and told his mom.
“If she took her bike,” his mom said, “that means she had a destination. But what destination?”
Then she was silent. Tommy waited to see what she wanted to do next.
She tried Find My iPhone again, but still nothing. She called Em’s friends who lived a little farther away, a couple of them in Allston, one in Cambridge. Heather. Allison. Julia. Annie.
Nothing.
“She’s ten,” Tommy’s mom said again. He was afraid she might lose it and start to cry. She’d worked so hard to hold the family together since his dad had died, but now he was worried she’d reached her limit.
That this was finally too much.
“I’m calling the police,” she said. “I don’t know what else to do, and I can’t wait any longer.”
“They’ll find her,” Tommy said.
“It’s a dangerous world,” she said, “even in our corner of it.”
She squeezed her eyes shut and then opened them. They were red. “If it gets dark and we still haven’t found her . . .” It was as if she didn’t even have the strength to finish her thought.
“I have to call them now,” she said, as if talking to herself.
But as she reached for her phone, it rang, the old-school ring that she liked—she said it reminded her of a simpler world.
She listened to the voice at the other end and said, “Oh, thank God!”
“Somebody found her?” Tommy said.
His mom nodded, holding up a finger, continuing to listen. But smiling now.
“We’ll be right there,” she said.
She put the phone down, let out a deep breath, and looked at Tommy.
“That was Uncle Brendan,” she said. “She’s at the firehouse.”
TWENTY-FIVE
ONCE LITTLE LEAGUE BASEBALL ENDED for Tommy and the regular lacrosse season ended for Em, their dad would take them to the firehouse, Engine 41, Ladder 14, on most Saturday mornings.
Em was good enough to play on an elite lacrosse team and travel around Massachusetts and even to Rhode Island for games, all summer long. But she said she didn’t want to.
When their dad asked why, she said, “It would feel like a summer job. And I don’t love lacrosse the way I love soccer.”
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bsp; Dad said that was fine with him; he was never all that comfortable with other girls swinging a stick in the direction of his own baby girl.
“I’m not your baby girl anymore,” Em said.
It was part of one of their little routines.
“You keep telling yourself that,” he told her, and then he would scoop her up with one strong arm and be twirling her over his head before she knew it.
They didn’t go every Saturday morning to the firehouse, and sometimes they didn’t stay long, before they’d go to IHOP for breakfast. But after a while it was as if they knew every inch of the place, the lockers and the room where the firemen hung out. One room had a TV, a pool table, and a Ping-Pong table. There was even a sliding pole like the kind you saw firemen sliding down in the movies or on television. It took you down to where the engines were located on the ground floor, ready to go when it was time for them to go fight another fire.
One Saturday morning at the firehouse Em said to their dad, “This looks like a rec room on top of a garage.”
Patrick Gallagher laughed and said she was right, that’s exactly what the place looked like. Then he took pictures of Em, standing on the side of one of the engines or behind the wheel or wearing his helmet, even though it was way too big for her.
Tommy remembered when they got home that night she said to him, “Best field trip ever.” She looked as happy as if she’d scored the winning goal in soccer.
One time Tommy’s dad said to him, “I think she likes going to the firehouse more than you did at her age.”
“You’re telling me I don’t like hanging out with the guys?” Tommy asked.
“I know you like it,” his dad said. “But I see how bored you get, except those times when the alarm actually sounds.”
His father never took them to the place he referred to as “41 and 14,” like he was calling out a snap count, when he was on duty. But they had been there a couple of times when the alarm did sound, and they had stood in a corner, their dad’s hands on their shoulders, as they watched a different kind of fire drill than the kind they had at school, happening right in front of their eyes.
“There’s just not enough action for you, usually,” his dad said.
“The action is where the fire is,” Tommy said.
“That’s my real office,” his dad said.
“Maybe I do get a little bored sometimes,” Tommy said.
“Em never does,” his dad said.
Before long, in the weeks before school was going to start, Em wanted to go every single Saturday that her dad wasn’t working, whether Tommy wanted to tag along or not. If their dad wanted to hang around for a little while and shoot a game of pool, she’d quietly sit in front of his locker and read a book, or play a game on her phone.
If the guys went downstairs to clean the truck, she’d help them put a good shine on it.
“Why do you like being there so much?” Tommy asked her.
“I like being with Dad and he likes being at the firehouse and that’s good enough for me.”
“Do you want to be a firefighter when you grow up?”
“What, you think I couldn’t? Daddy told me there are plenty of women firefighters, and then I looked it up. But I don’t want to be one.”
“And why is that?”
She gave him a long look before she finally said, “I’m afraid of fire.”
“But you still like coming here.”
“There are no fires here,” she said.
By the time summer vacation ended, Tommy had stopped going to the firehouse at all. It had become strictly a Dad and Em thing, and he was cool with that.
“Sometimes,” Tommy’s mom said to him one day while they were waiting for his dad and Em to return from the firehouse, “I think she’s as happy being there with him as she is when he’s up in the stands watching one of her games.”
“Why? She knows how dangerous it is when the doors open and that truck pulls out and everybody can hear the siren.”
“I know,” his mom said. “But she’s never seen him get on that truck. As long as she’s with him, she feels safe.”
“I’m still not sure I get it,” Tommy said.
“I do,” his mom said. “It’s not just that she feels safe when she’s there with him. In Em’s mind it’s the place where she can be the thing she most wants to be in the whole world.”
“What’s that?”
“Daddy’s little girl.”
TWENTY-SIX
TOMMY HADN’T BEEN ANYWHERE near the firehouse since his dad had died.
Even now he didn’t want to go back inside, go underneath the red signs for “Ladder 14” and “Engine 41” and through the garage doors and up the stairs to where Dad’s locker still was, because when he got to the top of the stairs his dad wasn’t going to be there.
But he didn’t have to go inside, because Uncle Brendan and Em were standing out front when Tommy and his mom got there. They were a few yards away from the small shrine to Patrick Gallagher that his mom had shown him pictures of. There were candles still lit two weeks after he died, along with photographs that friends had left, and Mass cards and sympathy cards and handmade posters thanking Tommy’s dad for his courage and service.
It was nice that people had done that, and were still coming by to leave things. But Tommy didn’t want to get too close to that shrine, either.
If he wanted to light a candle for his dad, he’d do it in church.
Uncle Brendan told them they’d found Em sitting behind the wheel of Engine 41, which looked even bigger than Tommy remembered, but still looked brand-new.
“One of the other guys thought he’d dropped his phone in there,” Brendan said, “and found her curled up in the front seat.”
“How did she slip past everyone?” Tommy’s mom said.
“She’s Em, Mom,” Tommy said. “Nobody’s quicker than her.”
“And,” Uncle Brendan said to them, “it’s not as if she doesn’t know her way around here.”
Em just stood next to him, not saying anything, not acting embarrassed or looking guilty, staring out at the street, as if she just wanted to get past whatever was going to happen now that her mom was there.
To their mom’s credit, she didn’t overreact, or lose her temper, or do anything that would embarrass Em. She just leaned over, hands on her knees, and quietly said to Em, “Honey, what were you thinking? You scared us all half to death.”
“I was thinking that I wanted to come over here,” she said. “And I wasn’t scared at all.”
“All you had to do was ask and I would have brought you over anytime you wanted to come,” his mom said.
“I didn’t want to come with you,” Em said. “I just wanted to come by myself. I wasn’t planning it or anything. I just decided. And then I went and got on my bike.”
“Without telling anybody.”
“There was nobody to tell.” Her eyes shifted to Tommy and then back to her mom.
“It was my fault,” Tommy said. “I never should have left you alone.”
“I’m always alone, Tommy. And I could have done this even if you’d been in the house.”
“Em, I would have ridden over here with you if you’d asked.”
“Right.”
“I would have,” Tommy said.
His mom turned and put up a hand, then turned back to Em. “Tommy was just as worried as I was.”
“Sorry,” she said.
“If you want to come back again,” their mom said, “I promise I will bring you. Or Uncle Brendan. Or even Tommy. But you have to be with one of us. Okay?”
“Okay,” Em said.
“Are you ready to go home?”
Em nodded.
“Is there anything else you’d like to see?” Uncle Brendan said to her. “Or anything of your dad’s you’d like t
o take? A lot of his stuff is still in his locker. None of us has touched it.”
Em shook her head.
“Why did you come, sweetheart?” Uncle Brendan said to her.
Em didn’t answer him right away. She frowned for a second, as if her teacher had called on her in class and she was searching for the right answer. Finally, she nodded.
“At the church,” she said, “everybody talked about Daddy’s spirit, and how his spirit will never go away. I wanted to see if I could find it here.”
“Did you?” Uncle Brendan said.
“No,” Em said. “He’s just as gone here as he is at home.”
Uncle Brendan hugged her and told her that he loved her and that she could come here anytime.
Em told him to thank everybody for being so nice to her. Then she said to her mom, “Can we go home now, please?” Without another word she walked toward the car.
“She used to be so happy here,” Uncle Brendan said. “Now that’s just about the saddest little girl I think I’ve ever seen.”
TWENTY-SEVEN
WHEN THEY GOT HOME, Em went straight back up to her room. Uncle Brendan, who drove around in an old Ford truck, said he’d drop off her bike later.
Tommy went into the living room and turned on the television, willing to watch any college football game that was on—he didn’t even care who was playing. After a few minutes his mom came in, carrying a cup of tea in her hand, and sat next to him on the couch.
He muted the game. If his mom wanted to talk, he would talk as long as she wanted. He knew that Em was right, she could have snuck past him and gotten out even if Tommy had been in here watching a game. It didn’t change the fact that he still blamed himself for what he’d put his mom through today.
“There’s a part of me,” his mom said, “that’s almost as relieved that she got out and did something as I am that we found her as quickly as we did.”