Lost Boy (15 page)

“I'm glad you have it,” Mr. Starr said. “I think it's our silver bullet.”

“Isn't that to kill monsters with?” Ryder asked. “A silver bullet?”

Mr. Starr puckered his lips. “I suppose, but it's a saying that
means like your secret weapon. Something to get the job done in a big way.”

Ryder picked the TracFone up off the kitchen table.

“I think I may need you to dial Ashleigh Love for me,” Mr. Starr said as Ryder slipped the phone in his pocket.

“Your other nurse? Do you need her?” Ryder held up the phone.

Mr. Starr's face reddened a bit. “If we're going to be gone for a few days, I do need her to make some adjustments for me, yes.”

“Will she try to stop you?”

“She might try and talk me out of it,” Mr. Starr said. “But she'll do what I ask. She's too kind not to.”

“Is this . . . are you going to . . . are you okay to do this?” Ryder asked.

“Do we have a choice?”

“Mr. Starr, I . . .”

“I'll be fine.” Mr. Starr sounded mean again. “Just dial the girl, will you? 917-555-6344.”

Ryder dialed and held the phone up to Mr. Starr's ear. He could hear Ashleigh Love's voice. She did ask him not to go and Ryder got to hear all about how he needed his therapy on a daily basis to keep the blood flowing through his body and keep him from getting sick. In the end, she agreed to meet them between jobs at the train station and get Mr. Starr fixed up as best she could for the trip.

“If you're gone more than a week, you'll have to see someone down there,” Ashleigh said.

“I know that,” Mr. Starr snapped. “We'll see you at the
station, next to the Starbucks. I'll buy you a latte.”

Ryder hung up and stuffed the phone in his pocket.

“Well, you might as well start wheeling this thing. It'll save the battery. Take me to the service elevator and we'll hope the super has stayed sober enough to keep at least one thing around here working right. It's the reason the state let me stay in this godforsaken dump—that elevator, and the fact that I know for certain the landlord gets an extra three hundred a month from Social Security because of it.”

Ryder grabbed hold of the handles sticking out from the back of the chair and put his weight behind it, surprised at how easily it moved and nearly ramming Mr. Starr into the wall.

“Easy!” Mr. Starr barked.

“Sorry.” Ryder backed up, but too fast so that he bumped into a table next to his mother's reading chair. The porcelain lamp wobbled and fell in slow motion. Ryder grabbed for the shade, but the base swung into the wall, smashing into twenty pieces.

“Oh my God.” Ryder stared at the blue-and-white shards and what was left of the lamp. “It's her favorite lamp.”

“Things break,” Mr. Starr said. “Come on. Leave it. We've got a train to catch.”

Ryder did as he was told and walked away, uncertain, from the mess. Carefully, he eased Mr. Starr out of the apartment, then up the hallway, turning right toward the lift. They passed several apartments with no tenants because of water damage so severe that the floor had supposedly rotted clean through. Ryder had always been forbidden from the area. His mom said it was dangerous. At the end of the hall Ryder could see where
an original wall had been torn down, exposing the service area and the elevator's wide metal doors. On the metal frame was a round button.

“You gotta pound on it to get it to work,” Mr. Starr said.

Ryder made a fist and thumped the button. Nothing happened.

“Harder.” Mr. Starr sounded impatient.

Ryder struck it again.

“You gotta hit it like five or six times, real hard,” Mr. Starr said.

Ryder pounded on it until a little yellow light went on and he could hear the gears and cables working behind the doors. When the elevator arrived and the doors swung open, its floor was a good six inches below where Ryder stood. He looked at Mr. Starr for direction.

“You gotta back me in.”

Ryder did, and when the chair banged down onto the elevator floor, Mr. Starr only said, “Good.”

Ryder pushed the button for the first floor. The door shut, the elevator jerked, then dropped as if the cable had snapped. As they plummeted down, Ryder could only think of his mom and that he was going to beat her to heaven by two or three weeks.

The elevator banged and stopped, dashing Ryder to the floor, then rattled and bumped and started to go down again, smoothly this time.

Mr. Starr laughed. “One day it'll snap. When we get back from this, I'll have to remember to put you and your mom in my will. You can sue the landlord and the city for wrongful death. They know this thing is ready to go.”

“You should have told me.” Ryder couldn't help being angry.

“Why?” Mr. Starr chuckled.

Ryder couldn't think why exactly, because if he was being honest, he'd risk his own life to save his mom's anyway. He knew that. After all, it was just the two of them against the world, and the thought of it made him grit his teeth.

The elevator stopped and opened smoothly with an innocent little ding, as if it hadn't just tried to kill them. Mr. Starr
directed him to the back door, where a ramp had been cobbled together out of warped and graying plywood sheets and two-by-four boards. The wood bowed and crackled as Ryder rolled the chair down the ramp and he began to feel less safe than he had on the elevator, but they reached the safety of the alleyway and started on toward the subway.

The elevator in the subway smelled like stale pee. Ryder tried not to breathe through his nose and when the doors finally opened, he'd never felt so relieved to inhale the stale funky air off the subway tunnel. They rode to Penn Station on the C line. On board the subway, Ryder watched the horror flash across people's faces at the sight of Mr. Starr and he burned with shame as they looked quickly away, keeping their eyes off of him as if the sight would turn them to stone. One woman covered her little boy's face and hurried him away, into the next car. Ryder tried not to notice, but it was so obvious that he suspected he knew why Mr. Starr was so bitter.

Out on the street, it hadn't been so bad. He'd been aware of the looks, but people were moving and so were he and Mr. Starr, so he'd been able to ignore it. Here, though, crowded and locked into the rumbling metal tube, there was no escape. Ryder looked around, then let his hands slip from the chair's grips. Slowly and artfully, he moved half a step away, as if he wasn't with Mr. Starr. From his new spot he could see the twisted side of Mr. Starr's cheek and the unblinking eyeball staring straight ahead. Ryder was horrified to be there, but even more horrified with himself for disowning the man who was doing all this for him.

At Columbus Circle, two older teenage boys with long
hair and wearing crested blazers got on, but didn't look away. Instead, they stared at Mr. Starr and nudged each other with their backpacks, giggling and groaning and making horrible frozen faces of their own until they burst out laughing. Ryder boiled. There was nothing he could say, but he took hold of the chair again. He sputtered trying to come up with the right words, but none came and now the boys began to laugh at him, stuttering and pointing.

Without thinking, Ryder sprang across the subway car and poked a finger into the chest of the taller boy, stabbing it into his flesh just below the crest on the jacket pocket like a dagger. “What do you think you're staring at?!”

The boy jumped back with a yell and made a fist.

Ryder made two and his eyes blurred with fury.

“What's
wrong
with you, dude?” The whine in the older boy's voice told Ryder he had the upper hand.

“You think something's funny?” Ryder snarled. These boys were older and bigger than Ryder, but he wasn't thinking. He was on fire. “Just shut your face!”

The second boy stepped back, slipping into the crowd of people like a mouse desperate for its hole. The taller boy's red face turned purple. “You're a loon, you and Frankenstein. I'll call the cops!”

“Good. Call them.” Ryder took another step and shook a fist, still burning and really wanting a fight. The older boy jumped and squirmed back into the crowd like his friend, running and shouting about calling the cops as he made his way to the other end of the car.

Ryder looked around. Everyone stared. His brain cooled.
He let his fists drop and returned to the back of the chair where no one would look. The subway stopped and Ryder's heart galloped at the sight of the two boys in blazers rushing off toward a transit cop and pointing back his way. The cop looked over and widened his eyes at the sight of Mr. Starr, before looking up. Ryder met the cop's eyes without blinking. The cop said something to the boys and shrugged and the subway doors hissed shut and they continued on to Penn Station.

Finally, Mr. Starr spoke in a bored voice. “If you fight everyone who gets a laugh out of my face, we'll never get to Atlanta.”

“They . . .” A single angry flame burst to life inside Ryder and he clenched his fists again. “Jerks.”

“Ruby's son for sure,” Mr. Starr said.

“Why do you say that?” Curiosity doused the flame.

“When she first came to the building, every guy under the age of eighty was interested in her. There was this punk on the second floor who sold pot on the corner. Thought he was a player. He comes by your apartment. You were a baby. I hear shouting and came out—I still could get around back then on crutches. Saw your mom hit that guy with a frying pan. Ha!” Mr. Starr barked and people in the subway glanced at him, then quickly looked away. “I thought that was only in cartoons. Had a lump on his head like a pineapple.”

“I never saw her do anything like that,” Ryder said. “She takes deep breaths and counts to ten.”

“Did you ever step in dog poop?” Mr. Starr asked.

Ryder wrinkled his nose. “What's that got to do with it?”

“Do you stop and put your fist in the pile you just stepped in?” Mr. Starr sounded like he was enjoying himself.

“No. That's gross.”

“What do you do?”

“Wipe it off?” Ryder said.

“With your fingers?”

Ryder's mouth twisted into a frown. “No. On the grass.”

“Right,” Mr. Starr said. “You keep walking to get away from the smell and you wipe it off on the grass as you go.”

Ryder thought about what he was saying. “Yeah, okay. I get it. Those idiots are dog poop.”

“I'm serious.” Mr. Starr did sound serious now. “Do not do that again.”

“But . . .”

“I mean it, Ryder. You're not helping anyone.” Then his voice softened. “I appreciate that you tried to defend me, and I was half hoping you'd bust him right in the mouth. But please, if I have to be defended by a twelve-year-old boy, how do you think that makes me feel?”

Ryder shrugged, trying to understand. He gripped the handles on the wheelchair tight and glared at anyone who tried to sneak peeks at Mr. Starr as they rode along.

When they arrived at Penn Station, Mr. Starr directed him to the Starbucks. Ashleigh Love stood waiting for them with a satiny blue Yankees jacket over her nurse's uniform. She had a small duffel bag of supplies over her shoulder and wore a worried look on her face. She immediately took control of the chair from Ryder, heading toward the handicap bathroom as she chided Mr. Starr for his crazy idea.

“You can't just
go
to Atlanta,” she said. “You've got to have therapy and you've got to stay clean. You'll get an infection and
then you'll be in the hospital.”

They reached the handicap bathroom. Ryder opened the door and in they went while Ryder stayed behind, closing the door on the sound of Ashleigh Love, a buzz now as she continued to tell Mr. Starr why he shouldn't go. Ryder looked up at the big board listing the trains and found the one for Atlanta as the voices hummed back and forth from inside the bathroom.

He had no idea what they were saying, but when Ryder heard Mr. Starr suddenly shriek at her with a sound that punched right through the metal door, he stepped away. Ryder found a bench and sat down. He pulled the baseball out of his pocket, and wondered where Thomas Trent had given it to his mother. Were they out at a movie? Dinner? Maybe on a picnic blanket on some lazy summer day.