Lost Boy (4 page)

Ryder grabbed the knob, turned it, and swung open the door. Doyle made a small sound of surprise at the sight of Mr. Starr.

Mr. Starr glared at them from where he sat rigid and upright in his wheelchair, his big dark eyes made bigger yet by the glasses he wore. His face was frozen in a mask of discomfort, drawn down at the corners of his mouth and eyes, his head stuck in an immovable tilt that suggested either disgust or retreat. The lopsided skull beneath his pale scalp sprouted thin black strands that looked more like damp thread than hair, and both his arms seemed stuck at uncomfortable angles. One wrist was more crooked than the other.

“It's not polite to stare.” Mr. Starr's lips had all the flexibility in the world. “Even if your brain works slow. I've found most firemen have slow brains. It's not a career for the quick-witted, running into burning buildings. . . .”

Ryder shifted uncomfortably because there was no tone of joking in Mr. Starr's voice. “Mr. Starr, my mom had an accident.”

“Well, she's a careless young woman, what do you expect?”

“Hey.” Doyle put a hand on Ryder's shoulder. “I think you can be nice to Ryder. Aren't you a friend?”

“Friends?” Mr. Starr glared, unblinking. “I am relied upon in emergencies only. I don't have friends.”

“She was hit by a truck.” Doyle sounded bitter and offended. “She's in the hospital.”

“What truck?
Your
truck?” Mr. Starr's eyes burned with mean delight when Doyle winced.

“No,” Doyle said, “not my truck.”

“But your truck had a hand in it.” Mr. Starr struck the arm of his chair and kept talking. “Racing through the streets, blaring your horn, causing others to run down innocent people? I'd rather have fibrodysplasia ossificans progressiva. . . . Oh . . . I already do.”

Mr. Starr stared and Doyle obviously didn't know what to say.

“Your truck?” Ryder couldn't help asking, and he suddenly wondered if that was why Doyle was being so nice.

Doyle's mustache quivered but nothing came out of his mouth for a moment before he said, “There was an accident. Look, can you watch him for a few days while we sort things out?”

“Can he stay in his apartment with the door open and I stay in mine—with the door not wide open but unlocked—until his mother gets better so that social services doesn't whisk him away to a foster home where he's beaten or neglected? Is that what you're asking?”

Doyle gritted his teeth. “Yes.”

The mean look on Mr. Starr's face didn't change, but it never did. His eyes shifted to Ryder, and Ryder stared back, trying not to cry while he waited for an answer.

Ryder's mom always said that inside Mr. Starr's frozen and twisted body was a person who used to run and laugh and smile. She said that person didn't get to come out very much but that was because he was shackled in pain from his disease. That was the word she used, “shackled,” and Ryder knew it meant bound by iron rings and chains. So he had learned to feel sorry for Mr. Starr because he couldn't imagine being in so much pain and—like his mom—he didn't let the mean words Mr. Starr often used hurt him at all. His mom said they were like bullets from a Nerf gun and that's how he should think of them.

When Ryder saw the way Mr. Starr's eyes looked at him through their bulging lenses, he already knew what the answer was going to be.

“Ryder is a good boy,” Mr. Starr said. “If I could help him
or his mother by driving this infernal machine into the service elevator shaft, I'd consider it a bargain worthy of losing my soul to the devil himself.”

Ryder looked up at Doyle and smiled for the first time since everything had happened. “That means yes.”

“Yeah, I get that.” Doyle was still sulky. “Firemen go up and down the service elevators all the time.”

Ryder thought he could fix things when they were alone, and he could explain Mr. Starr to Doyle, then realized he should have done that
before
they knocked on the door.

“Can I be of further assistance to you?” Mr. Starr glared at Doyle again. “Would you like me to contact the mayor's office and advocate for an even better pension plan than you already have?”

“I'm trying to help, you know.” Doyle glared right back.

“Yes,” Mr. Starr said. “I do know.”

“Social services can be rough,” Doyle said. “Now I can tell the folks at the hospital that he's okay, that there's a neighbor who's a family friend who watches him all the time who he can stay with while . . . while she gets better. That's all I'm trying to do here.”

“From your face and tone, her getting better seems to be in doubt, so you also better think about something long-term,” Mr. Starr said. “If social services gets their way,
I
won't be here much longer either.”

Doyle scratched his head and reached for the door, speaking as he closed it. “Thank you, Mr. Starr. It's been a real pleasure.”

“The boy does have a father, you know,” Mr. Starr said.

Doyle looked at Ryder.

“I don't have a father.” Ryder cast his eyes at the floor. “I never saw him.”

“But he
has
a father,” Mr. Starr said.

“Who is he?” Doyle asked.

Mr. Starr shut his eyes for a moment, as if in thought.

Ryder drew a breath and held it. He had no idea what was coming.

“That, we don't know,” Mr. Starr said. “Ruby never told me. The whole thing with Ryder was very . . . traumatic. I think that's why you're standing at the mouth of a monster's lair instead of on the doorstep of an aging grandparent or a cheerful aunt.”

Ryder's heart went cold. He knew his mother talked like she had no family, but he never knew
he
was the cause. He looked up at Doyle, whose mouth sagged open. “You mean they abandoned her?”

“To the family Ruby once had,” Mr. Starr said, “she doesn't exist, really. She even changed her last name to insure there'd never be a connection. And thus, the heroic neighbor. Me. But it's a temporary solution at best. So, if Ruby is as bad as the look on your face tells me she is, you'd do well to find the father . . . not the family. Now, please go. I have things to do.”

“Come on.” Doyle tugged the back of Ryder's shirt, drawing him into the hallway.

“Thanks, Mr. Starr.” Ryder didn't know what else to say, and Mr. Starr said nothing in return as he motored up to the door and hooked it with a claw so he could swing it toward them.

The door clicked shut and they could hear the whir of the chair's motor as it took Mr. Starr back into the depths of his apartment.

“Wow.” Doyle spoke in a low tone. “Sorry for that.”

Ryder followed Doyle down the stairs. “My mom says his bark is much worse than his bite.”

“Was that his bark? I feel like I just got bit.”

Ryder frowned.

“Hey, don't worry. It'll all work out. This way I can honestly tell them you've got somebody to keep an eye on you, and you get to sleep in your own bed.” Doyle stopped on the second-floor landing and looked around, sniffing at the warm smell of spices from the third floor and the stink from the second. “Is this place safe?”

“The fifth floor is the safest because no one wants to climb the stairs.” Ryder repeated the assurances his mom had given him since he could remember.

“Yeah. Even crooks are lazy these days.” Doyle started down again.

“You sound like Mr. Starr.”

“I'm not
that
grumpy. Could you believe all that fireman stuff? If this building ever went up in flames he'd be kissing our boots.”

They reached the bottom steps and walked out into the bright afternoon sunlight, where Ryder paused and his eyes met Doyle's.

“She was trying to get me to go home. We were fighting
and I told her I was going back to the park to play ball with friends. She pulled me, but I yanked away. Then . . . she stumbled into the street.”

Doyle pressed his lips together tight, then said, “Things happen, Ryder. Trust me, I see them every day. It's got nothing to do with you.”

“The school said Mr. Starr can't be my emergency contact because he's disabled and he doesn't have a phone.”

“I get that.” Doyle tugged on his arm and they began to walk up the street toward Frederick Douglass Boulevard. “The phone part. But sometimes the rules don't fit and you have to fudge them a little. Not break them, just fudge them.”

Ryder nodded.

“Listen, I'm gonna make some calls. I've seen FDNY do some pretty gigantic fund-raisers. . . . Maybe we can raise some of the money needed for your mom's medical bills.”

“Really?” Ryder looked up and his heart thumped wildly.

“Well. Wait. I mean, I can't promise two hundred thousand . . . but I'll try, Ryder. I will. I'll do everything I possibly can.”

On Frederick Douglass Boulevard they got a cab and headed toward the hospital.

“I know you don't know your dad, Ryder,” Doyle said, “but do you know anything about him? Anything that could give us a clue? Mr. Starr is right, a neighbor with health issues is not a permanent solution, and your mom could be in the hospital for a while.”

Ryder thought for a few minutes. “I think he was a good baseball player. When I play I'm really good, and like if I hit a home run or snag a line drive, sometimes she'll say that's the
only part of me that came from my father.”

“Like he was a college player, or a pro?”

Ryder shrugged. “She never said. Whenever I ask her what she means, she closes her mouth tight and shakes her head and that's it. But I think he might have been, because my mom keeps a baseball that I think he might have signed.”

“Signed?”

“Like an autograph. I don't know.” Ryder bit his lower lip. He knew it wasn't smart to talk to strangers, but this was a fireman, and also, something about Doyle made him seem like he wasn't a stranger at all. “She keeps it hidden in the back of her closet, in a shoe box, and I never told her I found it. It says: ‘With Love for Ruby, My Gem.'”

“And what's the signature? Who signed it?”

Ryder shrugged. “I have no idea. It doesn't look like anything but some squiggles to me. You can't
read
it.”

“Well, maybe we can get some more out of her . . . if she's up for it.” Doyle turned his attention out the cab's window. The day had grown late and the traffic was thicker now. Headlights blinked on and taillights glowed red. While the earlier sunshine spoke of spring, winter reclaimed its ground, lowering the temperature in the shadows so that pedestrians turned up their collars and tugged down their hats.

Ryder looked down, staring at Doyle's boots. He wondered about firefighters' boots. He knew they sometimes collected donations in them, mostly one-dollar bills, and he wondered how many they would have to fill to make two hundred thousand dollars, and he worried that there might not be enough fire boots in all of New York City to save his mother.