Hero (11 page)

He got out of the taxi in front of the Garden marquee on Seventh, walked through the lobby with its huge color photographs of current Knick players, past the mural showing all the great Garden athletes of the past, handed his ticket to the man at the turnstiles and went up the escalator to the floor of the arena, hearing his first cheers from inside as he got closer to the game.

Usually his excitement at being at the Garden would start as soon as he walked in off the street, but not today. Today the excitement was knowing he was about to see Kate and have her see him, that he had something even more amazing to show her than a Wilson Chandler dunk.

He kept showing ushers his ticket, telling them he knew where his seat was. As he made his way down toward it, he looked up at the clock above the court, saw there were four minutes left in the first half. David Lee was at the free throw line.

When he got close, he spotted Kate’s ponytail, saw her leaning forward, all of her energy—Zach sometimes thought you could light their whole building with it—focused on her man, Lee.

Who made the first free throw.

“How’s the game?” Zach said, not waiting, sitting down next to her.

She was as startled as Zach had been by Mr. Herbert, like she was seeing a ghost.

“Whoa,” she said.

“Whoa yourself.”

“You can’t be here,” she said, eyes big.

“I know.”

“Oh, good, as long as you know.”

“Not only do I know. I can explain.”

David Lee made his second free throw and the crowd cheered. The Celtics called a time-out. The Knicks City Dancers came out to perform one of their numbers to some hip-hop music Zach vaguely recognized, music exploding from everywhere as if everything underneath the spoked Garden ceiling had turned into a giant boom box.

“You
cannot
explain how you made it all the way to the Hamptons and back by now,” Kate said over the music. “Unless you flew.”

Zach smiled and said, “I sort of did.”

Then he told her they needed to talk and couldn’t do it here. Just like that Kate grabbed her book bag from underneath her seat. And they left.

When they were down the escalators and back in the lobby, Kate said, “Okay, this is as long as I’m waiting. We’ve got some major weirdness going on here. Did you get on that bus before or not?”

“I did,” Zach said. “Walk with me and I’ll try to explain.”

They walked up to 34th Street and then started heading east, past Macy’s and Herald Square. The words came out of Zach like a blast of air. He told her about how strange he’d been feeling lately, like someone else had been living inside him. He told her about the cab dropping him off by Land’s End. Then he told her about the old man, this stranger who seemed to know everything about his dad and him. And how he was certain that the man knew even more, including about the crash.

He told her what Mr. Herbert had said about the magic.

“Magic?” she said. “Like pulling a rabbit out of your hat or a quarter out from behind your ear?”

“Not exactly.”

“Then what exactly?”

They were already to Fifth Avenue by now, ready for the long, straight shot up to the apartment.

“You said I could tell it my way,” Zach said, and he had been, trying to tell it in some kind of order, as it had all happened, knowing the whole time he was saving the best stuff for last.

“Okay, I’ll shut up,” Kate said.

“See, when I said that I flew here, I wasn’t lying. Only I didn’t take a plane or a helicopter. I started running after the old man and the next thing I knew, well, I was back here.”

“You ran all the way from the Hamptons to New York City? Please tell me you’re not making this all up,” Kate said. “That you didn’t hop off the Jitney at the airport stop and take a cab back to the city just to game me.”

Zach told her the truth. “Not my brand.”

She stared hard at him, then said, “I know.”

Neither one of them moving.

“Powers,” Kate said.

“Yeah.”

“Well,
that’s
a little unexpected.”

“You think?”

She smiled then, not the way she did when she was making fun of him
.
Just a smile that told Zach that she believed him.

It was the kind of smile that made him feel as if everything was going to be all right, even though he knew that probably wasn’t true, that nothing was going to be the same for him ever again.

“I guess that leaves me with only one question,” Kate said.

“Shoot.”

Kate Paredes smiled at him again and said, “Are you gonna have to wear a cape?”

WHAT
did his mom know about all this?

Mr. Herbert had said he was a friend of the family. If that was the truth, and who knew
what
the truth was with this guy, did that just mean Zach’s dad?

Or did it mean his mom was in on the secret, too?

But if he asked her about Mr. Herbert, he’d have to explain how he’d met the old man. Every time Zach played it out in his head, no matter how many different ways he tried to start the conversation, it didn’t end well for him.

Forget about superpowers. Zach didn’t think he had the
brain
power to carry it off. He still had to find a way, not just to ask his mom about the old man, but about what the old man had
said.

Had his dad really had powers? And if so, why hadn’t they saved his life?

Zach waited until the next morning. He and his mom were having their Sunday morning breakfast at their favorite coffee shop. They had been coming here every Sunday for years, always taking the same back booth. Zach always ordered what his dad used to call his “truck stop breakfast”: scrambled eggs and ham with a small stack of pancakes on the side and home fries. He was even allowed to have a black-and-white milk shake.

Today he was polishing off the last of his home fries when he said, “Mom, is there anything about Dad that I don’t know that I should?”

As casual as if he’d asked her to pass the salt.

She was wearing a Harvard sweatshirt that had belonged to his dad. It looked huge on her, yet she never seemed to care. She wore it every Sunday, like it was her coffee-shop uniform.

She smiled at Zach over her coffee cup.

“There’s a question out of left field.”

Zach wanted to keep it light. “You ever wonder why it’s not right field, or center?”

“No,” she said. “I never did. But this isn’t a baseball conversation, is it?”

He shook his head. “Dad,” he said.

She put her cup down and leaned forward. “Well,” she said, “I think there was a lot
I
didn’t know about your dad’s work.”

“I’m not asking about his work,” Zach said. “I know a lot of that was classified or top secret and all that. And that he was never really telling us everything, even when one of his missions was over. That’s not what I’m talking about. I was wondering if there was stuff I ought to know about, like, his
life.”

It wasn’t the first time Zach had wondered about this. Even when his dad was alive, Zach had never learned as much about Tom Harriman’s early life as he wanted to. He knew that his dad had been an orphan, raised in group homes until he finally got foster parents—Richard and Carol Harriman—about the time he was Zach’s age.

Richard and Carol had been in their fifties at the time and living in Greenwich, Connecticut. They paid for Tom to go to Brunswick Academy, a fancy private school, and saw him become a three-sport star there and president of the student body before he went off to Harvard.

The Harrimans died his freshman year at Harvard, in a car accident.

“They gave me a life,” he’d said to Zach once. “I just wish they could have seen how it turned out.”

Zach had heard plenty about his dad’s high school years, and his college years, but very little about being an orphan, the group homes, about growing up without parents. Tom Harriman had never said anything about trying to find out who his birth parents were.

Zach had asked his dad once what he’d been like as a kid. Tom Harriman just smiled and said, “Exactly like I am now, just younger.”

Zach had always wanted more. Now he
needed
more.

He asked his mom, “Did he ever tell you about when he was young?”

“No,” she said. “Usually he’d just make a joke out of it. If I tried to press him, and I
did
try to press him occasionally, he’d just say, ‘Oh, sure, beat up on the orphan boy.’ But then he
always
used humor when he wanted to keep me at arm’s length. If we’d have one of our rare arguments and he knew he was in trouble, he’d say, ‘You can’t make me go live on the street. Been there, done that.’ I know there had to have been some terrible times for him, but I couldn’t ever press him enough to get him to talk about them. Now I wish I had.”

“Me too.”

The coffee shop was emptier than usual today, quieter, so Zach tried to keep his voice low. “Did he have any
talents
he never talked to me about?”

“You mean like sports talents? Come on, you know what he was like. As far as I could tell, he could do anything he wanted to. And well. From rock climbing to high diving to running marathons. He was almost like a freak when it came to all that.”

Freak,
Zach thought.

With a freak boy. Who knew Spence’s nickname for him would be so dead-on?

“And in addition to everything else,” Elizabeth Harriman said, “he thought he was the greatest pilot on the planet.” She put sad eyes on Zach and said, “Sorry, kiddo.”

“No need to apologize.”

If she was holding back, keeping something from him, she was doing a world-class job of it.

But he stayed with it.

“Nothing out of the ordinary, though?”

“Where are we going with this, pal?”

“I’m just curious,” he said. “Didn’t you always tell me curious was a good thing? You know what they used to say about Dad: there had to be three Tom Harrimans to accomplish everything he accomplished in his life.”

“I’m just curious about where the curiosity is coming from
today
?” his mom said.

“I’m just like you, Mom. I never pressed him enough when I had the chance. So now I’m pressing
you.”

“I’ll answer you this way,” she said. “I guess I never thought he was doing anything out of the ordinary because he was so
extra
ordinary at everything.”

One last shot, like he was heaving a half-court shot before the horn sounded.

“No magic?” he said.

It made his mom laugh.

“Magic? Your dad couldn’t even do a decent card trick.”

 

Over the next few days he was barely able to focus on school or basketball or anything. All he could think about was what had happened in that field.

The field where his dad’s plane had crashed had changed everything for him.
Twice.

Zach went through the motions in his classes and with his homework. He and Kate even pulled off an A on the Addison-FDR project. And he managed not to suck in basketball, shooting the ball a little better and playing some decent defense. Maybe because he wasn’t trying so hard, or maybe because it didn’t matter as much as it had when practice had started.

He was even managing to stay off Spence Warren’s smack list. Both physical and mental. His father had told him once that bullies the world over had one thing in common: they hated people standing up to them. Maybe that’s what finally got Spence off his back—that fight in the park, even though Zach hadn’t given him much of a fight.

At least he’d
felt
like fighting. Finally fighting back.

No matter where he was or what he was doing, though, he kept waiting for that
feeling
to come over him again, the crazy one that had him thinking he was about to turn into a werewolf.

Waiting and wondering what would happen to him the next time.

Could he fly? Make himself invisible again? Could he take Spence Warren in a fair fight? Could he turn these powers, whatever they were, on and off, as easily as if he were putting his laptop to sleep?

Yet nothing new happened. Just the regulation Zach Harriman. No old wizards jumping out of the weeds like grasshoppers. No weird trips into the park at night. No urge to pick a fight with a wall, or with Spence, or scare off muggers hiding in the bushes.

“I feel like I’m in an elevator,” he said to Kate. A full week had now passed between meeting Mr. Herbert and today. They were walking home from a movie. “Stuck between floors. Not even knowing if I’m going up or down.”

She giggled. “Sounds like your normal state, if you ask me.”

“That’s supposed to be helpful?”

“Not to you, maybe. But it makes me happy.”

“Seriously,” he said, “does this make any sense to you?”

“Seriously? Yeah, I get it. You feel like your life went to a commercial break and you’re waiting for the show to come back on. Only it won’t. This whole week . . . you haven’t been able to do anything like you did getting home from Montauk? Anything out of, like,
Smallville
, Superboy?”

Zach shook his head. “The only thing out of the ordinary was staying awake for a whole science class.”

“My God, man, you
are
superhuman!ʺ

“Do you think I should head out to that field again?”

“Not really. I mean, if this really is your life now, then it’s going to happen wherever you are. Right?”

Zach nodded.

They had entered Central Park by now and were walking around the reservoir. It was starting to get dark, and the temperature had dropped about ten degrees since they’d left the movie theater.

“Sometimes I think I imagined the whole thing.”

“But that would mean I imagined it, too,” Kate said.