I&#39ll Be There (7 page)

For Emily, he was more than she could have imagined. He wasn’t like the other boys she’d done things with. He didn’t try to tell outrageous jokes or bore her with stories where
he was some kind of hero. He didn’t boast about stealing his parents’ vodka and drinking with friends or staying up all night to pull a prank. He didn’t take out a cell phone and
check for messages or have all kinds of attitude.

For Sam, she was like someone from another planet. Planet Contentment. She had energy and enthusiasm, and she had to have never seen what he’d seen, because she was so open and so
trusting.

Sam had no idea what the next step should be.

He was filled with confusion and, now, standing on the edge of her herringbone-brick driveway, what he wanted, more than anything, was to get away. To escape. To make all of the emotion he was
feeling simply stop.

He then reached down and took her hand and brushed it up against his lips, and he lightly kissed the inside of her palm. He then whispered, ‘I will always remember walking with you tonight
. . .’ He then let her hand go and turned away and she watched, immobilised, as he headed down the sidewalk, around the corner, and disappeared into the night air.

Sam didn’t call.

Emily heard nothing from him.

Not the next day or the next day or the next.

Emily became one of those girls. She checked her phone constantly. Neurotically. Obsessively. She was angry at him, and she was angry at herself. She literally had trouble concentrating. How had
this happened to her? Why had it happened to her? And how could she make it stop?

After the first two days, she started looking for him. She walked to the IHOP after school and sat inside, staring out the window. On her third day there, the floor manager offered her a job as
a hostess. After that, she never went back.

Emily knew Sam’s last name, but that got her nowhere. She didn’t know where he lived. He’d said he didn’t go to school. He’d said he moved a lot.

So had he left town? Even if he had to go, even if there had been some big emergency, why wouldn’t he call to tell her? Why wouldn’t he call to say goodbye? Why wouldn’t he
call to say
anything
?

The ripple effect of her disappointment hit everyone.

She and Nora got in a fight about nothing, and they were no longer speaking. Her father, clueless as to what was really going on, worried that her dark mood had something to do with making her
sing.

But her mother knew anxiety when she saw it. And her cheerful daughter was now experiencing real angst.

And then Emily woke up from a dream believing Sam had been hurt. Hit by a car. Run over in the dark walking home. That had happened to their neighbour Pep Kranitz on a trip to Nebraska and
he’d almost died.

She called the two hospitals in town and asked for a patient named Sam Smith. He wasn’t at Sacred Heart, which was where her mother worked. But he was listed at Kaiser. Room 242.

She knew it.

Emily put on a dress and bought daffodils. (Was it right to give flowers to a boy in the hospital? She wasn’t sure. And she wasn’t going to ask her mother.) When she got out of the
hospital elevator, the man at the nurses’ desk told her that room 242 was at the end of the hall.
Smith, Sam
was written in Magic Marker on a wipe board by the door.

Emily held her breath as a heavyset nurse emerged from the doorway lightly touching her arm as she whispered, ‘He passed.’

Emily stepped into the room to find a skeletal old man in the metal bed, hooked up to tubes and monitoring devices. His marble yellow eyes with cloudy blue centres were open, staring lifelessly
up at the acoustical tile ceiling.

An elderly woman was folded over the bed gripping the sheet. And then she saw Emily and she pulled herself up and wrapped her arms around the young girl’s neck as she heaved a sob. The
daffodils fell from Emily’s hands onto the bed, and she held on to the old woman and began to cry with her.

She would find out, later, that the Smiths had been together for fifty-nine years.

It was another first in Emily’s life. A dead man. A dead man named Sam Smith.

Making a connection to a person can be the scariest thing that ever happens to you.

Sam knew that now.

He’d walked around coiled rattlesnakes. He’d jumped off a train bridge to avoid an oncoming train. He’d lain in bed shivering at night with infection and no penicillin.
He’d been pulled out to sea by the current when he couldn’t swim. He’d dodged the flying fist of his father. Many, many times.

But this scared him more.

This scared him so much that he couldn’t face her again. He’d come home that night, and things had not gone well. Clarence was hearing voices and when he discovered Riddle by
himself, the voices got louder. Where the hell had Sam gone?

Once Clarence started kicking walls, Riddle took off out the back door. He ran into the nearby woods, and Sam spent an hour out there after midnight trying to find his little brother. When he
did, Riddle was shaking from the cold, hiding like a small, injured animal, which, Sam thought, of course he was.

The next morning, when Sam was feeling as if he were going to jump out of his skin if he didn’t go see her, he burned her telephone number. But that didn’t stop him from thinking
about her or where she lived.

It was a yellow house with dark blue trim. It was two storeys, made from wood, and it looked like something that you’d see in a brochure for happy people. There were flowers in the front
and a wide green lawn. Two cars without dents were parked in the long brick driveway. There was a basketball hoop attached to the big garage in the back. Wicker furniture was on the front porch,
and it had cushions that were clean.

You could tell that people sat out there in the warm months of the summer and drank lemonade or something in glasses filled with chips of crushed ice, and they probably ate homemade candy.

After three nights, Sam went there. But only very, very late at night. He knew from experience that in towns of a certain size, only drunks, thieves, insomniacs, and people who heard voices were
out on the streets once bars closed. Now he added to the list a new category: the heartsick.

Sam used alleys and side streets to get there, staying in the shadows. When he arrived, her house would be dark except for a small yellowish light that glowed downstairs behind a gauze curtain
by the front window.

He’d look up at the house and imagine what he thought was her room and he’d picture her under blankets peacefully sound asleep and he knew he’d done the right thing. He’d
kept his mess of a life away from her.

But the room he stared up at wasn’t even her bedroom. It was her brother’s. And what he also didn’t know was that most nights she, too, was awake. She wasn’t asleep under
a down comforter; she was awake thinking about him.

By the fourth day, Sam had played his guitar so much that the calluses on his fingers were cracking. He had to find something to do besides empty people’s trash and work
out new chord arrangements.

So he started to make something. At first he didn’t even know it had anything to do with her.

He’d go down to the river with Riddle and they’d gather sticks from the shoreline. Riddle liked it there. He’d look for redeemable bottles and stare endlessly at the minnows
that darted around the shallow, slimy rocks.

The tiny fish move like clouds of smoke.

But the smoke is underwater.

They stay together and turn like one thing. Because they are many things that understand the one thing.

And that is sticking together.

I do not see one of the little silver fish swimming alone. I look. But I do not ever see that.

Sam would bring bundles of river sticks back to the run-down house and he’d arrange them into shapes. There was a piece of scrap plywood in the heap of trash in the alley
and it looked like a worn heart. Now it all made sense.

Sam took small nails from one of the rusty cans of nuts and bolts and metal crap that his father kept in the back of the packed truck. He hammered the nails into the plywood so that the sharp
points poked through. Then he carefully layered the worn river sticks on top, attaching them to the points of the nails.

In the end, he’d made a heart from many, many pieces of worn wood, weathered by wind and rain, the bark long gone, with only the smooth parts touching, like limbs.

It was a heart exposed.

And then Sam couldn’t stop himself. In the middle of the night, he left it on her back doorstep.

Emily’s father was always the first one out of bed in the morning. He turned up the thermostat on the furnace, put on the coffee, and let out the dog.

And on this day, he also brought in a wooden heart, made from one hundred and seventy-eight small sticks, intertwined like brown and grey fingers.

Tim taught music composition and theory at the local college. But he’d minored in studio art when he got his degree from the University of California at Davis. He held the wooden heart in
his hands.

It was amazing.

Tim carried it into the kitchen and put it down on the wooden table. Five minutes later he was still staring at the thing when Debbie Bell came in dressed for work in her blue nurse’s
uniform. She stopped when she saw her husband. From her angle across the room, she could see only what looked like a big pile of the outdoors. She thought there might be an animal involved. Her
voice was tense, ‘What is it?’

Tim motioned with his hand for her to come closer. ‘It’s awesome – that’s what it is.’

Debbie headed for the table, her eyes widening as she came near. She stood next to her husband in awe.

And that’s where they both were when Emily entered the kitchen. Their heads swiveled in unison in her direction.

‘What?’

Her father indicated the table. ‘I think someone left something outside for you . . .’

They were blocking the view of the table. ‘How do you know it’s for me?’

Her father answered, ‘It has your name on the back.’

Her mother stepped away, and Emily could now see the wooden mass and she walked over. She looked down at the heart – at the hours and hours and hours of work that had gone into finding the
pieces of wood and then placing them together in a sculpture that could easily be in a folk-art museum. And for the first time in days, she smiled. Wide. Full. Complete.

‘Sam . . .’

Her parents exchanged a look. Was this the beginning of the end of their daughter’s trouble? Or was this the end of the beginning, and now they were on to something more?

Emily picked up the wooden heart. It was heavy, and she could barely carry it.

Her father stepped forward. ‘Do you need some help with that?’

She was standing there, but her happiness could be felt like light bouncing off the walls. ‘No. I got it.’

And as she headed upstairs to her room, she could hear her father, in a hushed tone, whisper to his wife, ‘She’s fallen for some kind of artist . . .’

So Sam wasn’t gone.

Once in her room, she’d carefully turned the wooden heart to look at the underside. Carved on a stick in the back, in the tiniest of letters, was the word
EMILY
and then
4U
.

And on the very last stick was the word
SAM
.

Emily went to school that morning and apologised to Nora, explaining that she hadn’t been a good friend, saying that she was sorry. Nora had missed her and was happy to have her back.

Emily made an effort to participate in class, and she even smiled at Bobby Ellis, who now seemed sort of obsessed with her. She gave Pierre Ruff her math homework after lunch, because she could
do it again in five minutes and apparently for him it was a struggle.

When school was done for the day, she didn’t go right home but stayed and turned in a late assignment in history.

She threw out a stack of old papers that were crunched up in her locker and ran all twelve laps that the soccer coach suggested they do as off-season training.

She was back to being herself, but with a difference: she had a secret.

He would return. She knew it. And this time, she’d be waiting.

Emily set the alarm clock on her phone for two in the morning. She guessed that would be the earliest that he’d come. And then she put on her favourite jeans and a
long-sleeved T-shirt and she climbed into bed.

Three hours later, when the alarm sounded, she woke with a start. She silently got out of bed, pulled on a sweater and her fleece-lined boots, and slipped into the hallway.

As she moved past Jared’s room, she could see Felix, the family’s nine-year-old dog, sound asleep on Jared’s bed. The dog’s legs were moving in his sleep and his tail was
twitching.

Once downstairs, Emily took a heavy, red wool blanket from the top shelf of the coat closet and slipped out the front door. She then wrapped herself up and waited on the porch recliner.

She was surprised that she wasn’t sleepy. Instead she felt just the opposite. She felt so alive. The night was cold, but spring was battling out there somewhere and winter was in full
retreat. When she exhaled out her mouth, she could see her breath as a small explosion of white air.

At first it felt like the whole world was either dead or asleep. Silence. And then she realised this wasn’t actually true. A bird was making a noise in the next-door neighbour’s
tree. Was it an owl?

And some kind of animal was chewing on something – or was it digging? – back by the garage. From far away she could now hear a train. And from another direction, a dog began to
bark.

She sat in stillness, not once checking the time, realising that she’d lived here for ten of her seventeen years, but she’d never experienced the house, the yard, or even the street
at this hour.

That’s what Sam was doing, she thought, giving her a new vision of her own world.

And then at some point, deep in her time-suspended experience of the dark serenity, she realised that the owl had stopped his rhythmic hooting. And the rodent was no longer digging.