Lost Boy (5 page)

When they got back to the hospital, his mother still wasn't out of the recovery room. Doyle took him back to the cafeteria and got a coffee for himself and a purple Gatorade for Ryder, even though he said he didn't want anything. They sat at a different table in a different corner. Doyle scrunched up his face and studied his iPhone.

Ryder sat in a daze and stared out a window at the brick wall of the building next to them. Maybe he should have listened to his mom and made friends. It wasn't that kids didn't like him, or that he didn't like them. He could think of nearly a dozen kids he talked to in school and a handful on his team he liked, like Jason, but he never really got to know any of them
well.
He had no one to talk to, no one to confide in, no one to share his anguish and to provide even a sliver of comfort. He sat mulling these things—wishing he could do them over again—until he realized Doyle was talking to him.

“What?” Ryder asked. “I'm sorry.”

Doyle held up his iPhone. “I said that I've been tweeting about your mom and people really seem to be into helping. See? I've got forty-seven retweets for hashtag Save Ruby! And I just started.”

Ryder didn't have an iPhone and neither did his mom, just plain old ten-dollar TracFones with the bare-minimum calling plan for emergencies only. He'd heard of tweeting and knew it was something rich and famous people did to voice their opinions and sell albums or theater tickets. It burned him not to know about Twitter or Instagram or any of that stuff the kids on his travel baseball team were always doing. Anger flared in his chest. Then he remembered the mean tone of the words he'd had with his mom in the minutes before she was hit. The idea that those might be the last words they exchanged flooded him with guilt.

“Is forty-seven a lot?” he asked.

“Well, I only have two hundred and five followers, so it's not a
lot
, but I think it shows that the people who do see it want to help, get it?”

“I think so.” Ryder watched an old man set down two Styrofoam cups of coffee, spilling one of them onto his wife and sparking an argument. “Two hundred thousand is a lot, though.”

“Yeah, but if I could get two hundred thousand tweets, and everybody just gave a dollar . . .” Doyle studied the iPhone screen and muttered to himself. “Maybe FDNY. That's what I need. If I can get the entire New York City Fire Department working on this, that would do it for sure.” Doyle looked up, eyes sparkling. “Right?”

“I guess.” Ryder tried not to get too excited, but Doyle McDonald's enthusiasm had already cast its spell.

Doyle began typing furiously. “Calling . . . all . . . FDNY members . . . 911 to save the life of . . . Wait.” Doyle looked up. “Do you have any photos of your mom?”

Ryder shook his head. “At home, maybe.”

“Ephotos? On an iPhone or an iPad anywhere.”

“No.”

“Hey, we can take one.” Doyle stood up. “Let's go check. Maybe she's out of recovery. If I take a picture of her and post that . . .”

“Why?”

“People like pretty women. It could go viral. Come on.” Doyle started across the cafeteria, leaving his coffee cup to stand alone at their table. Ryder grabbed his Gatorade and had to hustle to keep up.

They soon learned that his mom was out of recovery and had been moved into the intensive care unit, or ICU. A heavy nurse with curly red hair and small dark eyes stopped them at the desk.

“We're here to see Ruby Shoesmith. How is she?” Doyle asked.

“She's breathing on her own so she doesn't have a tube,” the nurse said, “but her heart rate isn't what they'd like to see.” The nurse nodded at Ryder. “Is he fourteen?”

“I'm—”

“Yes.” Doyle cut him off. “He's her son. Just turned fourteen.”

The nurse gave Doyle a doubtful look, but shrugged and let them go.

Except for the wires and the IV tube stuck into her arm, his mother looked like she did when he woke her from an afternoon nap, her lips full and peaceful with a small smile, her brow smooth above the long, dark lashes of her eyes, and her hair a soft swirl of black silk. Her color might have been off a bit, but that also could be the humming neon lights above the tilted-up bed. Other things beeped and hummed as well, monitors to tell whether or not her heart and brain were alive and kicking. Despite his worry, Ryder looked up and gave Doyle a proud nod as the fireman took out his iPhone to snap her picture.

“Can I talk to her?” He looked at the nurse who had been adjusting the monitors when they walked in.

The nurse nodded. “You can try. She's mumbled a little. Nothing I could understand. She's in and out of it. Her leg is broken and that's really painful, so we're giving her morphine.”

Doyle held up the photo on his phone. “What do you think? She really is pretty, right?”

Ryder nodded and set down his Gatorade on the counter. Doyle returned to his tweeting.

Ryder moved close to his mom. Except for the hum and beep of the machines, it seemed impossible that she was even hurt, let alone in any danger. She looked
lovely
and peaceful. He reached out, wanting to touch her, but too afraid to really do it.

“Mom?” Ryder tried to fight back his tears, but the thought of losing her crushed his insides.

Suddenly she groaned and muttered something.

Her eyes fluttered open. She looked his way, but more
through him than at him. “Jimmy?”

“Mom, it's me, Ryder.”

He felt Doyle at his side and the fireman put a hand on his shoulder. “What'd she say?”

“She said ‘Jimmy.'”

“Who's Jimmy?” Doyle asked.

“There isn't anyone.” It bothered Ryder that she hadn't recognized him. It scared him, too.

Doyle leaned close. “Ruby, I'm a friend. Is Jimmy Ryder's dad? Who's Ryder's father? We need to find Ryder's father. It's important.”

“Father?” Her face clouded over and she turned her head away with a groan. “Not my father. No.”

“
Ryder's
father? Who's
Ryder's
father?” Doyle spoke softly, but insistently.

She looked back at Doyle before shifting her blurred attention to Ryder. Her eyes filled with tears and she whispered, “Jimmy.”

“It's me, Mom. It's Ryder.” Tears spilled from his eyes and his face contorted with anguish.

“Don't tease, Jimmy Trent.” His mother's smile faded into a scolding frown.

The monitor started to go crazy, beeping loudly.

“Oh, no. I'm getting the doctor.” The nurse rushed past Ryder, then hurried out of the room.

His mother's eyes widened, then they closed.

In the flurry of activity, Ryder got swept to the side.

The bark and shout of orders was enough to unsettle him, and Ryder cried out and rushed back to his mother's bed.

The doctor glared over his shoulder. “Get that kid out of here!”

Doyle and a nurse grabbed Ryder and dragged him out. “Mom!” Ryder called, crying.

In the hallway, Doyle hugged him tight. “Shhh. Come on, buddy. She's gonna be okay. You gotta . . . think positive.”

Ryder shook his head and sobbed, “I can't think anything!”

“Hey, hey. Shhh. Come on, now.”

Ryder broke free and ran away from it all, down the hallway, through the doors, and into the stairwell. His feet slapped in a quick rhythm. Down he went, aware of the door being flung open above him and that the heavy thunk of steps was
Doyle in pursuit. Ryder reached the bottom and banged open the door. He dashed through the hospital lobby, winded from crying and running. He shoved his way through the exit.

Concrete benches crouched outside a small shadowed courtyard between the entrance and the sidewalk. Above, brown-painted metal awnings offered cover from only the most feeble weather. Ryder threw himself down on a bench and slouched with his hands jammed into his coat pockets against the cold. Vapor huffed from his mouth in great white puffs.

Scared and confused, he kept hearing his mother's voice in his head, calling out the name Jimmy Trent. Was that his father's name? He felt a sharp stab of pain, as if all the times he'd been upset about not having a father hit him at once. Fathers' night for his baseball team. Drawing a family tree in fourth grade. A teacher scolding him by asking if Ryder thought his father would approve of his behavior. There were hundreds of those moments. Spread out and alone, they were like paper cuts—annoying, but nothing to cry about. All together, it was a knife in his heart and it filled his eyes with more tears.

He sniffed and dabbed at his eyes, and after a few minutes, Doyle walked up and sat down next to him. They sat that way for a while, quiet and together as people passed them by, both coming and going.

Finally, Doyle spoke. “I've been looking for you.”

Ryder shrugged.

“If you promise to wait right here,” Doyle said, “I'll go check and see how she's doing. Okay?”

“Fine,” Ryder said.

“Fine, you promise?”

He nodded. “I promise.”

“Good.” Doyle patted his leg and got up to go. “Right here.”

Ryder suffered the entire time Doyle was gone and he could have kicked himself for not going along, but he promised he'd wait, so he did. Finally, the hefty fireman returned with a big grin. “Well, she's out of the woods. They won't be letting us in again tonight, though.”

Ryder didn't respond, even though the flood of relief made him so dizzy that he tried to breathe deeply through his nose and let it out slow. They sat quietly for a while before Doyle's phone played a tune.

Doyle checked the new text that had come in. “Hey, Chief wants to see me. Wow, on a Sunday. Want to see the firehouse?”

“No.” Ryder didn't look up.

“C'mon, kids love the firehouse. Big trucks. Chrome so bright it makes you blink.”

“I'm not a kid,” Ryder said.

“Okay,
young people
like the firehouse. You can slide down the pole. C'mon.”

“There's not a pole,” Ryder said.

“Honest to God, and you can go down it. Plus, I know for a fact that my partner—the guy you saw, Derek Raymer—has a big pot of chili like you never tasted. He won the blue ribbon at last year's Firefighters' Cookoff.” Doyle stood and held out a hand, offering it to help Ryder up. “Come on. You'll meet the chief, not that he's anything but a slab-sided blowhard, but hey, he wears the white hat so . . .”

Ryder finally nodded and stood up. They took the subway to 125th Street, then walked to a brick building that was only
about ten blocks from where Ryder lived. Two huge red doorways revealed the big trucks, resting like attack dogs with their chrome shiny enough for Ryder to see his bulging face in every spot. Men in dark blue pants and light blue shirts worked at various duties around the garage. They all cast wary looks at Doyle, as if they knew what had happened. There really was a shiny brass pole that disappeared through a hole in the ceiling.

“C'mon, kid. You can do that later. First, the chief.” Doyle nudged his shoulder and Ryder followed the fireman into the station, where he got a whiff of chili before they climbed up two flights of stairs.

The office looked like any office Ryder had ever seen, crowded with papers and desks. Since it was Sunday, the desks in the gloomy space were empty, but in the far corner, light spilled from a single office.

“This is Battalion,” Doyle explained. “Not every station is this big. We got lucky. We get to have the bosses right over our heads breathing down our necks every doggone minute.”

They wound their way through the desks and walked right into the office with the lights.

“Hey, Chief.” Doyle sat right down and crossed his legs, directing Ryder to the chair beside him with a nod of his head.

The chief looked up from some papers and glared at Doyle. “What are you doing? On a Sunday, no less.”

“Me? Helping out this kid, Chief.”

“This kid?” The chief was a tall, wiry man with a big head of gray hair that appeared to have been blown back by a storm. His skin was pale and spotted with big freckles and the whites of his tired eyes looked smoke stained. “The kid who's a witness
to an FDNY truck accident that's going to undergo a full investigation? Where's your head, Doyle?”

“Chief, everyone saw it wasn't us. It was some crazy delivery truck trying to beat the light.” Doyle sat up straighter. “Plus, he's got no one else to turn to.”

“And this Twitter thing? Using FDNY to raise money? Where's your head?
You
can't just announce you're raising money for someone.”

Ryder's stomach sank.

Doyle looked like he'd been hit with a board. “I can't?”