A Drop of Hope

by Keith Calabrese

  Buckle out.

  Tommy had seen it before, with Wade mostly, but also Sam. He’d seen what that buckle did to his brothers’ backs. He’d seen the look it put in their eyes.

  Laying low in the storage room had seemed shrewd at first. But it wasn’t a solution. Just like Sam’s tools, he couldn’t keep hiding forever. The storm wasn’t going away.

  Sam wasn’t coming back.

  It hadn’t sunk in at the time, but his mother was right. Tommy’s brother wouldn’t be coming home to save him.

  Hidden behind his locker, along with Sam’s tools, were the letters Sam had written to him ever since he left. Two letters a week, every week. And Tommy hadn’t read a single one. He’d told himself it was because he was still mad at Sam for leaving. Now Tommy realized that wasn’t it at all. He wasn’t reading the letters because once he did, he’d know that it was true, that Sam was gone.

  Tommy was strong. He knew how to survive, how to adapt. All his life he’d had to be tough in a way that most other kids, most adults, even, couldn’t begin to understand.

  But even Tommy Bricks had his breaking point. Now everything seemed utterly pointless. You can’t wish away your lot in life. You can’t fight what you are. You can pretend for a while, but …

  When everyone expects the worst from you, sooner or later you’re going to give it to them.

  Tommy zipped up his hoodie and opened the door. It was coming down in sheets now, so hard there was a layer of mist hovering over the ground from the force of the dense rain crashing onto the asphalt.

  It didn’t matter. Nothing did anymore. Tommy was done hiding, done trying, done caring. Just done. He’d walk home in the cold and rain and if he got sick, if he got hit by a car, if his father was still home and beat him when he stepped through the door, so be it. He’d just close off the side of himself that hurt, that dreamed, that hoped. And he’d never look back.

  Then, just before he stepped out into the consuming storm, he saw them.

  Headlights.

  They were coming up the main road and inching slowly, searchingly toward the school. As they got closer Tommy could make out that they belonged to a minivan. Winston’s minivan. When it reached the front of the school, Tommy saw that Winston’s grandmother was driving.

  The minivan passed the roundabout at the school entrance and pulled into the teacher’s parking lot, where it finally stopped at the curb by a small pavilion of four covered picnic tables. The elder Mrs. Patil parked the car and got out. A tiny, wrinkled little woman, she walked purposefully to the covered tables with two bulging grocery bags of food. Winston got out of the passenger side, clumsily opened a massive golf umbrella, and scurried Tommy’s way.

  Tommy stepped out of the storage room to meet him.

  “Winston?” he said. “What are you doing here?”

  Winston’s grandmother called to them. Tommy looked over and saw that she had laid out a picnic for them on one of the tables.

  “Dude,” Winston said. “You cannot believe how desperate I was to get out of that house.”

  NO APOLOGY

  “Well?” Aunt Patty glared impatiently at Lizzy.

  “Well, what?” Lizzy said in a low, even tone.

  Aunt Patty blinked as if Lizzy had just flicked water in her face. “I think,” she said slowly, a hint of menace in the back of her throat, “that you owe Chelsea an apology.”

  “And it better be good!” Chelsea insisted with a haughty lift of the chin.

  Lizzy and her aunt shared a brief, awkward moment of confusion as to which of them Chelsea was actually addressing with this demand, before Lizzy said, “She’s the one who owes me an apology. She called my mother a lonely hag.”

  Aunt Patty shot a quick, almost scolding glance in Chelsea’s direction. Not necessarily for saying something cruel and hurtful, but rather for betraying a privately shared opinion in front of unwanted company.

  “Lizzy,” Aunt Patty said after a long, dramatic breath. “You need to understand something. You are a guest here, and as a guest—”

  “That’s right, Aunt Patty,” Lizzy cut in. “I am a guest. I’m not a pet or a doll or a servant or a conversation piece to talk about as if I’m not here and don’t have ears or feelings. I’m your guest. That means I shouldn’t have to sit quietly while she, or you for that matter, trash-talks my mom for being a working single parent. But if I’m asking too much, if you can’t do the bare minimum to make me feel even marginally welcome in your house, then for the good of us all, Aunt Patty, TAKE ME HOME!”

  FETCH, BUDDY, FETCH

  Uncle Art dropped Buddy off at the hospital, delivering him to Head Nurse MacComber, the Julia that his uncle and the fire chief had decided would be Buddy’s punishment for starting the fire in the Nature Preserve.

  “Nurse MacComber owns you now,” his uncle said. “As long as she’s happy, you and I are square. Follow me?”

  Buddy followed.

  After Uncle Art left, Nurse MacComber found Buddy a scrub shirt and temporary ID clip, and explained that he’d be tasked with any errand or chore that didn’t directly involve patients, sharp objects, or Schedule II pharmaceuticals. For the next few hours, he fetched coffee, straightened up the waiting areas, took out the trash, fetched more coffee, organized the supply closet, and fetched even more coffee.

  Nurse MacComber ran the ER, but she was quick to loan Buddy out to any of the nurses on other floors of the hospital. After one hour, Buddy was beat. After two hours, he was exhausted. By hour three, he realized he hadn’t had a clue what exhaustion really felt like.

  Then Nurse MacComber got a call and had to leave suddenly for a family emergency or something. This created a little confusion among the other nurses as to who should step in to order Buddy around. Desperate for a smoke, he slipped away from the ER but got turned around on his way outside and found himself wandering by the maternity ward.

  He stopped to get his bearings in front of the heavy glass security doors that separated the viewing area from the rest of the hospital. Looking for an exit, his eye instead caught the rows of sleeping newborns on the other side of the glass.

  “Hi there.” It was a woman’s voice, direct but friendly.

  Buddy turned around. “Um, hi,” he said. Then, pointing at the ID clipped onto his scrubs, he added, “Buddy.”

  The woman, a neonatal nurse, looked at the ID. “Well, hello, Buddy. I’m Jeanne.” She gave Buddy an appraising look, one he was sure would result in the unspoken but familiar conclusion that he was an idiot. But instead she smiled at him and said, “You like babies?”

  “Honestly, I never gave them much thought before.”

  Jeanne considered for a moment. “Come with me,” she said.

  RYAN’S PLAN

  Ryan knew one way or another Andrea Chase would link them to the Holyoke Red Diamond. And from there to the attic, Thompkins Well, and the cave. She wouldn’t stop until she had her story, until she had somebody to blame.

  That somebody, Ryan had decided, would be him.

  After dinner he grabbed his duffel bag from his closet and slipped out the window while his mom was putting Declan to bed. It was raining outside, hard in that way that means it won’t be letting up anytime soon.

  As Ryan jogged down the street, he heard thunder in the distance. When he reached Grandpa Eddie’s house, he snuck up the side opposite the driveway and hopped a low fence into the backyard.

  The first step was to break into Grandpa Eddie’s house.

  The second step was to call the police and report that someone had just broken into Grandpa Eddie’s house.

  The third step was to go into the attic and wait for the police to catch him.

  The fourth step was where it got a little complicated. With his duffel bag full of whatever was left in the attic, Ryan would make a confession. He would tell the police he’d been stealing things from Eddie Wilmette’s attic and hiding them in Mrs. Haemmerle’s garage. His plan, he would say, was to sell the items online, where c
ollectors would pay big money for sixty-year-old junk like they did on the antiques shows his mom liked to watch.

  Even that part, Ryan suspected, would be easy enough. Getting the cops to believe a South Side kid was a thief wouldn’t exactly be a tough sell, especially when they caught him red-handed in the attic. It was the next part that had to be played just right.

  Ryan would have to convince the police that Mrs. Haemmerle had been getting senile, very senile. That would explain why he could hide all the stolen goods in her garage. But then one day, he’d say, he went to check on his stash and discovered it was all gone.

  The trick would be to lead the cops into making the connection on their own, adding her senility to the stolen loot. He’d complain about what a loon she’d become shortly before her death and wonder aloud what she did with his stash. This was the part, even more than taking a false rap for burglary, that really didn’t sit well with him. But one thing would lead to another and the cops would conclude that she was the one who left the Colorforms in the library, the fire extinguisher in the woods, the sock monkey in Jack Hought’s house.

  It wasn’t a perfect story, and certain parts of it didn’t really add up if you thought about it too much. But it would be enough. People would want it to be enough.

  And no one would know about Ernest or Lizzy. Or the well.

  THE HEALING POWER OF FOOD

  There was a ton of food and Tommy didn’t recognize any of it. Winston’s grandmother poured each of them a cup of sweet tea out of a huge thermos and then set about preparing the plates. As she worked she explained, through Winston, what each dish was and how she made it when she was a girl back in her old neighborhood in India.

  Winston handed Tommy a paper plate with what looked like a slider on it.

  “This is called vada pav,” Winston said. “Basically a fried potato patty in a bun. They call it the Indian burger.”

  Tommy took the plate quizzically. It looked unlike any food he had ever had before. But, then again, he’d never been a big fan of most of the food he usually ate anyway. So when Winston’s grandmother ordered Tommy (through Winston) to eat, he ate.

  It was the best meal of his young life. He had three of the burgers and then a lentil and rice dish called khichdi. For dessert Winston’s grandmother gave them rice pudding and peanut butter cookies (which she’d never made as a girl back in India, but were Winston’s favorite).

  Like a lot of kids with Tommy’s kind of home life, he had learned at a young age how to size up people quickly. He knew Winston’s grandmother could speak English but was using a perceived language barrier to make it harder for Tommy to resist her commands. And he also knew that the food they were eating wasn’t just any food. This was working-class food. This was tortillas and rice, ratatouille, a bologna sandwich on white bread. This food was special to Winston’s grandmother; it was her food.

  It was still raining when they finished eating. Winston offered him a ride home. Tommy declined. Winston looked worried his grandmother might insist, but Tommy knew she wouldn’t. She got it.

  Instead, Mrs. Patil berated her grandson in Marathi for never bringing his friends around to the house. The little old woman then walked back to the minivan, giving the vehicle a disapproving once-over and muttering something else in Marathi (loosely translated, it was “I still miss driving my Ambassador”) as she opened the driver-side door.

  Tommy watched the minivan disappear into the night before he went back into the storage room. He left the door open so he could watch the rain.

  It could go on all night, he thought.

  But that wouldn’t be so bad. Because he wasn’t hiding now. He was just waiting out the storm.

  A CROWDED BURGLARY

  Breaking in had been a pretty good plan. There was just one problem: Someone had beaten him to it.

  Once in Eddie Wilmette’s backyard, Ryan had started to circle the house, checking the first-floor windows, when he spotted something.

  There were two people already inside the house, lurking around in the dark.

  What the … A real burglary was upstaging his fake burglary!

  Ryan’s first thought was to run back home and call the police. But his house was too far down the block.

  He looked across the street at Mrs. Haemmerle’s. He still had the spare key to her house from the flowerpot; he could call from there.

  Ryan ran across the street, up Mrs. Haemmerle’s driveway, and into her backyard. Drenched, he slipped inside and headed for the kitchen. He picked up the old phone on the wall and was just about to dial when he caught sight of a figure reflected in the kitchen window. Ryan spun around.

  It was her. The woman with long hair. The rain on the window had made her look blurry the last time he’d seen her, and now the darkness of the room was making her equally hard to discern. He could barely tell if she was really there.

  In the next few seconds a lot of thoughts raced through Ryan’s mind. This woman looked like Mrs. Haemmerle, only much younger. Which led to the natural conclusion that he was standing in the kitchen with Mrs. Haemmerle’s ghost. Though he had been operating on very little sleep or food for the last day and a half. Ryan didn’t believe in ghosts, but that thought failed to get any traction.

  He backed away toward the door just as a bolt of lightning cracked the sky and illuminated the woman who now stood in front of him.

  “Ryan?” she said, her voice soft and almost otherworldly.

  And then he fainted.

  BABY CLAIRE

  After washing their hands for what seemed like forever, Jeanne brought Buddy into the neonatal ICU. There was only one baby in the unit, a tiny girl inside a clear plastic incubator.

  “Why is she in there?” Buddy asked quietly.

  “She was born premature.”

  “You mean too early?”

  “That’s right,” Jeanne said. “So we put her in there to help her. It’s kind of like she’s still in the womb.”

  Buddy walked over to the incubator and read the tag on the side. The girl’s name was Claire. She was so small and fragile she almost didn’t look real. “Is she going to be okay?”

  “She has a good chance,” Jeanne said. “She’s a fighter.”

  Jeanne grabbed a nearby chair and pulled it up alongside the incubator. “Sit,” she said to Buddy.

  He sat, now eye level with baby Claire. She was awake, but her eyes were heavy, as if she wasn’t sure whether to go back to sleep or not.

  “Put your hand through that little hole there,” Jeanne said, gesturing.

  “Really?”

  “Newborns need all the physical contact they can get.” She took his hand. “Here,” she said. He put his hand through, his finger brushing Claire’s tiny palm.

  Instinctively the infant’s thin little digits curled around Buddy’s index finger. He gasped in surprise.

  “Pretty cool, huh?” Jeanne said.

  “… Yeah,” Buddy said.

  “All right, then,” she said, heading for the door. “I’ll come back and check on you two in a little while.”

  “Wait!” Buddy said, softly but urgently. “I mean, what do I do?”

  Jeanne shrugged. “Talk to her. Let her hear your voice. Just … be with her.”

  Buddy felt awkward, scared, and angry in quick succession, but the more he looked at baby Claire, the more he felt resolved. He wasn’t leaving.

  He wasn’t talking yet, either. Whatever he said was just bound to be stupid.

  But he could sing. He remembered a really old song his mom used to sing to him when he was little. How did it go, again? Oh, yeah.

  “You say it’s only a paper moon

  Sailing over a cardboard sea

  But it wouldn’t be make-believe

  If you believed in me …”

  TESS

  When Ryan came to a few minutes later, he was on the floor, his feet elevated and a little pillow under his head. The kitchen lights practically blinded him, but soon his eyes focused
on the young woman standing over him. And there was a man next to her.

  It was … Mr. Earle?

  He smiled down at Ryan. “You okay there?”

  Ryan nodded slowly as Mr. Earle helped him to his feet. He led Ryan to a small kitchen table and sat him down.

  “I was …” Ryan started. Wait, what was he doing? What with the fainting and the ghost of Mrs. Haemmerle and the burglars—wait, the burglars!

  “The Wilmette house,” he blurted out. “Someone’s robbing it. Now!”

  “Way ahead of you,” Mr. Earle said, smiling mischievously at the woman. Then, noticing Ryan’s confused look, he said, “Oh, I’m sorry, Ryan. This is Tess Haemmerle. Mrs. Haemmerle’s granddaughter.”

  Tess smiled warmly, as if she already knew him, and offered her hand. “Hi, Ryan. My grandmother mentioned you often. She was very fond of you.”

  ERNEST IS FED UP

  “I don’t understand,” Ernest’s mom said quietly into the phone.

  Ernest had been in the room when she’d answered her cell. It was his dad, and whatever he was saying had taken the air right out of her.

  “I can’t believe it,” she said, listening more than talking. “Okay. I will.” And she hung up.

  “What’s wrong?” Ernest said.

  His mom leaned against the kitchen counter, her hand cradling her forehead. “Nothing, honey,” she said absently.

  “Mom, it’s clearly not nothing.”

  She looked up at him with an expression of strained patience that said, Please, child, not right now.

  “Tell me,” Ernest pressed.

  “Ernest, you don’t need to worry about it.”

  “Don’t say that!”

  He knew this was the time to really lay it all out there—the secrets, the sheltering, the overprotectiveness, the stupid back seat—but the only thing he could get out was “I am not a baby, Mom!”

  Of course, it’s categorically impossible not to sound like a baby when you’re telling your mom that you aren’t one. Ernest realized as much as soon as the words came out of his mouth, and promptly ran out of the kitchen.