Hero (3 page)

Zach opened the door to his dad’s office, next to the den, where the two of them would watch games on the big-screen TV.

There was a huge desk in there, what had seemed to be the size of a battleship to Zach when he was younger. On the walls were photographs of his dad with famous politicians and other celebrities. One wall had nothing but photographs of the family. All of them smiling. All of them happy.

There was his dad’s Harvard football jersey mounted in a glass case, a gift from Zach’s mom.

The first varsity letter he’d gotten in football.

Two of the walls had floor-to-ceiling bookshelves built into them, with so many books Zach had always wondered how his dad fit them in here.

He could still smell his dad in here, feel him. Could still hear his voice, his laugh, the jazz music he always had going when he was sitting behind the desk.

He remembered the last time the two of them had been in here together. It had turned into perhaps the most painful memory of all.

Me,
Zach thought.
The kid who was always complaining about my dad being away.

It had been a Thursday night. A school night, of course. But both Zach and Kate had two free periods to begin their Friday morning schedule, meaning neither one of them had a class until ten-thirty. So they’d hatched a plan at dinner to go to the movies.

No big deal at the time. There was no reason to feel as if he were ditching his dad because his dad wasn’t supposed to be leaving for Europe until Saturday morning.

He’d poked his head into his dad’s office to say good-bye. His dad was on the phone and he’d held up a finger to Zach.
I’ll be just a moment.

Zach checked his cell for the time.

“Piece of cake,” his dad was saying.

The tone of his voice was pure Dad, the usual quiet cockiness Zach would hear when he talked business, even when Zach knew it was the president of the United States on the other end of the line.

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Tom Harriman said, clearly wanting to wrap things up. But sounding hot at the same time. “No, you listen to me: sometimes the ones who tell you not to fight are the ones you should fear the most. The ones who say they want me to sit something out for my own good.” Then he nodded and said, “Talk to you when I get back.”

He placed the receiver in its cradle, calmer now, and said to Zach, “Hey, big boy. You off with Miss Kate?”

“She
really
wants to see this one. Swears it’s funny.”

“That’s what your mother always tells me.” Then his face turned serious. “Listen, I might have to take off earlier than I thought. They just sprang it on me.”

Zach said, “Dad, you just got back. Now you gotta leave . . . when?”

“Dawn’s early light. The boy with two frees to start the day will be sound asleep.”

Zach didn’t say anything. But his face must have told his dad everything. Tom Harriman said, “I know we haven’t seen much of each other the past few months.”

Before Zach could respond, they both heard Kate from upstairs calling Zach’s name. The movie wasn’t starting for another forty-five minutes and they were only a ten-minute walk from the theater, but Zach knew by now that Kate operated on her own timetable.

His dad said, “So I’m guessing the Knicks-Celtics game on TV tonight is out of the question?”

“Aw, Dad, you’re killing me. But Kate
will
kill me if I bag on her now. So I’d better bounce.”

“I get it,” his dad said. “And you know why I get it? Because I’m a guy, that’s why. We’ll catch a real game at the Garden when I get back.
Many
games.”

They were words that Zach’d heard plenty of times before from his dad. Maybe once too often.

“Yeah,” he said to his dad, “sounds like a plan.”

“Next time I’m back, I promise it won’t seem like just another quick break from being gone again. Swear on our lucky coins.”

Something else Zach had heard before.

“Okay,” Zach said.

He could hear Kate in the foyer now, calling his name again. Time to go.

“You can wake me before you go if you want. I won’t mind, promise.”

“Wouldn’t think about it,” his dad answered. Zach started to move out the door, but his dad stopped him. “Hey, Zacman?”

“Yeah, Dad?”

“Be good.”

“Always, Dad. Gotta roll now, though.”

His dad was asleep when Zach got back from the movies. Gone when Zach woke up in the morning.

Gone for good.

IT
had been a full month since his dad had died in the plane crash, nowhere near Teterboro Airport. Instead, the Learjet had gone down on the eastern end of Long Island, closer to the Harrimans’ summer home in East Hampton than to Fifth Avenue.

Three weeks since the big funeral.

Two weeks since Zach had gone back to school.

Sometimes Zach could go a whole ten minutes without thinking about it.

Sometimes not.

Accepting
it, that’s what the grown-ups said he had to do. Even Kate said he had to find a way to deal with his dad’s death and start moving on, which sort of figured, since Kate seemed to know more about things than most grown-ups Zach had met.

So he was: dealing with it, accepting it, coming to terms. All the different ways of saying it he got from the grief therapist his mom had sent him to see.

Abso
lute
ly, he wanted to say to the woman, Dr. Abbott.
I think I’ve pretty much got it now. A month ago I’m strolling through the park, literally, with one life—one life and two parents—and now I’ve got another one.

The kid who’d wanted his dad to be home
more
now had one who wasn’t coming home
ever.
The kid who just wanted to be regular was never going to be regular again. The kid who didn’t want to feel so alone felt more alone than ever. Check, check, check.

Zach knew these were the things Dr. Abbott
wanted
to hear from him when she was telling him in her soft voice that it was all right for him to open up to her. But he never said any of them out loud, not in the six sessions with her he’d had in the two weeks before he went back to school. Because by the end of the second week, it was mission accomplished, at least in his mind. He’d convinced her—and his mom—that he was dealing and accepting and coming to terms enough that he didn’t need to see her anymore, at least for now.

That was key, telling them that he’d go back to therapy on the dead run if he thought he needed to. But he had other needs at the moment.

“I gotta stop talking about this now” is the way he’d explained it to his mom.

“Not talking about it every day is one thing,” she’d answered Zach. “But that doesn’t mean you get to bottle things up.”

“Mom,” he’d said. “I pretty much emptied that bottle for Dr. Abbott. If I want to talk about Dad from now on, I’ll do it with you. Or with Kate. Nothing against the doc, but the two of you are way smarter about me than she is.”

His mom had smiled then. “Kate being the smarter of the two of us, of course.”

“Didn’t say that.”

“Didn’t have to.”

She’d gone along, though. Then Zach was back in school, getting back into his normal routines, going to class, waiting for basketball to start, even throwing himself into doing his homework. Actually doing it early every day so he could get back on his computer for what he considered his real homework:

Finding out every single thing he could about his dad’s plane crash.

Which Zach believed was no accident, no matter what everyone said. There had been no evidence of terrorism or tampering. No distress call from his dad to air traffic control.

But no reason why the engines had just quit, either.

His dad would have figured something out, Zach was sure, if he’d had any kind of chance. . . .

So this was something else he hadn’t said out loud to Dr. Abbott, or his mom, or Kate.

They’d all told him to stay busy, keep occupied. Okay. He kept himself busy reading up on the crash, on planes like his dad’s, on other crashes like this one that nobody had ever explained.

When his mom would poke her head inside his door and ask him what he was working on so late, he’d say, “School project.”

“What subject?”

“History,” he’d say, and not feel as if he were lying.

Then he’d get up in the morning and he and Kate would make the twenty-minute walk up Fifth and then one block over to the Parker School. Once he was there, he would try to get through another day, even though it now felt like the Bads were with him all the time.

And the other kids at school weren’t helping, even though Zach could see them trying. He had two other buds besides Kate at school, both of them kids from basketball. Josh Morris was his best friend on the team, and its biggest player. And Zach usually loved hanging around with Dave Epstein, the team’s second-string point guard, because Dave was probably the funniest kid at Parker. Like
Family Guy
funny.

Zach loved playing ball with them, loved the fact that he was just good enough as an outside shooter and a defender to crack Parker’s starting lineup. He was always happy to see the start of basketball season coming up on him and sorry in the spring to see it end.

But even Josh and Dave didn’t know how to act around him now. They treated him like he was sick or something.

So now Zach felt like even more of an outsider at school. Even with people going out of their way to be nice to him.

Even Spencer Warren had stopped torturing him for the time being.

Zach knew in his heart that Spence—president of their class, captain of the football, basketball and baseball teams, pretty much the captain of the whole school—was putting on an act, trying to act as concerned as everybody else. Because up until the crash, Zach had always considered his relationship with Spence Warren give-and-take:

Spence gave grief and Zach took it.

Not the kind of grief his mom and Dr. Abbott were worried about. No, this was the kind of grief that kids had given other kids at school since the beginning of recorded time.

Zach had never thought about it this way until now. But after being with Dr. Abbott, he was convinced that there really ought to be grief counselors for the kind Spence gave him.

And always for the same reason.

Kate.

Spence wanted Kate for himself, simple as that. He hated that Zach and Kate were so close. He hated how much time they spent together, took every opportunity to make Zach pay for it. He told Zach over and over that the only reason the prettiest and smartest girl at Parker paid any attention to him was because her mom worked for Zach’s parents.

“Kate’s mom may be the paid help at your house,” Spence said to him one time, “but Kate is your paid help everywhere else.”

Even though Spence was bigger and stronger than Zach by a lot, even knowing a fight would get them both suspended from Parker, Zach knew he shouldn’t have let that one go. He should have thrown down right there, thrown a punch. Getting just one solid punch in would have been worth it.

Zach knew that if you took something like that and let it go, then you were going to be taking it for as long as the two of you were in school together.

But he took it anyway. The way he always had.

Just said, “Yeah, good one, Spence, you got me again,” and walked away. But not before he heard Spence say, “By the way, freak boy? I ever find out you’re telling Kate about any of our conversations about her? You go to the top of my smack list.”

Like Zach wasn’t there already.

He just kept walking that day. One more time, one more threat from Spence burning in his ears, when he wondered how he could possibly be Tom Harriman’s kid.

Tom Harriman: who wasn’t afraid of anything or anybody, probably not even at the very end . . .

But there Spence had been Zach’s first day back, all these other kids around, Kate included, putting out his hand and saying, “Just speaking for the class, sorry about your dad, dude. We all are.”

Zach’d had no choice but to shake the outreached hand. As he did, Spence had said, “I don’t know what else to say.”

“Then don’t,” Zach had wanted to say.

But he said nothing, as usual.

Since then, the only times Spence had gone out of his way to say anything nice, act like an actual human being, were when Kate was around. Other than that, he’d pretty much left Zach alone. Not such a bad thing. Maybe even the one
good
thing that had come out of this whole experience, getting Spence out of his face.

So why exactly was he standing next to Zach’s locker now, when school had been out for an hour?

ZACH
had been in the library, getting the jump on his homework, waiting for Kate to finish with play rehearsal.

Kate played sports—soccer in the fall and lacrosse in the spring. But what she really loved to do was sing. She had what Zach’s mom always described as a Broadway voice. In the fall, it seemed like she always had one of the starring roles in Parker’s annual musical. This year’s show was
High School Musical.

Zach had told her that it was just as easy for him to do homework in school, and that he’d wait for her so they could walk home together.

Only now Spence was the one waiting for
him,
saying, “What’re you doing here so late, Harriman?”

Just the two of them now. No handshakes when Zach got to his locker, no fake concern. No need for Spence Warren to do the kind of acting job that Kate was doing upstairs in the Performing Arts Center.

Lie or tell the truth?