Lost Boy (7 page)

He shook his head to break the daze. As he felt around in the box again, his hand swiped at something else at the bottom, something he hadn't told Doyle about, or Mr. Starr. Something he wasn't going to tell anyone about, even though it might hold some clues to finding his father.

Ryder picked the box up out of the closet and brought it over to his mother's bed. He sat down and the wood frame creaked beneath him. He looked at the dusty box for a minute, trying to decide. The letter made him terribly uncomfortable. No one wanted to see, hear, or read about his parents getting mushy, and this letter was mushy for sure. The first time he'd read it, it gave him the strangest feeling. He hadn't even been sure it was from the man who was his father. He hoped so. Certainly the squiggle of a signature was similar to the one on the baseball.

Ryder took the letter out from the bottom of the box and unfolded it. His fingers rasped against its brittle surface and the paper complained. He took a quick safety glance at the door, even though his mother was in the hospital. He
never
wanted her to know he'd read a letter like this.

It talked about her legs
and her hair, her eyes and her lips
and kissing. Mushy beyond belief. Sappy like maple syrup, sticky and sweet and messy. Ryder felt his cheeks grow warm, but there was a part of the letter he needed to see again. It had been years since he'd read it and he had to be sure the ending of it wasn't just wishful thinking in his mind. He focused on the last two sentences, written in a script he could only just decipher.

You are my beginning and my end, dearest Ruby. Nothing could make me stop loving you, and so I always will, now and forever. . . .

Yours worshipfully,

And then the signature that might or might
not
be “Jimmy Trent.” It could just as likely be “Bartholomew Cubbins,” so vague were the squiggly lines. The words proved something to Ryder, though. They told him that whoever wrote it was worth finding, because if what he said was even partly true, this man loved his mother dearly, and likely still loved her, even if he'd lost touch with her over the years. And, Ryder knew instinctively, if the man loved her even a fraction of that, he'd
have
to help save her.

Ryder returned the letter and hurried back to Mr. Starr's with the ball clutched tight in his hand.

“What took you so long?” Mr. Starr asked.

“It was under some things.” Ryder raised the ball up in front of the wheelchair.

“Hold it closer.” Mr. Starr's lips moved as he read, and the inscription made him snort. “Well, it could say Jimmy Trent,
not that that means anything. It could say Kris Kringle.”

Mr. Starr looked away from the ball, out the window at the flare of orange where the sun was setting behind the building across the street.

“What do we do now?” Ryder asked after a pause.

“I didn't mean to bore you.” Mr. Starr made a sniffing noise, which was strange to hear since his face didn't move when he did it. “Let me get to work. You can stay right here and watch. You look wiped out.”

“I am.” Ryder stifled a yawn.

“Rest. You'll have to fix your own dinner later.”

“I can,” Ryder said.

“Tonight, you can stay on my couch if you like, or you really could just stay in your own place if you locked yourself in. I'd be right here. Obviously. It's up to you.”

Ryder sat down on the couch, a velvety purple thing pushed against the low wall between the living room and the kitchen. The floors were bare and cold and Ryder suspected that made it easier for a wheelchair. “Is this couch from before?”

The wheelchair buzzed
across the floor and stopped right in front of Ryder. “I kissed a lot of girls on that couch.”

Ryder wrinkled his nose
and couldn't help thinking of the letter in the shoe box. He didn't like talk of such things.

Mr. Starr's mouth curled into a twisted smile. “Oh, I was no looker. A girl like your mother never would have given me a second thought, even in my heyday. But there's a cover for every pot and I sampled my share of covers.”

“I'm not really into girls all that much.” Ryder scooted to the edge of the couch.

“Good. You will be smitten sooner than is good for you.”

“How soon?” Ryder eyed him suspiciously, searching for signs of a joke.

“Soon enough.” Mr. Starr buzzed the chair backward and came to rest in front of the naked window. There was a pair of binoculars on the ledge, but he didn't pick them up.

“Smitten?”

“Goo-goo ga-ga. Silly. Distracted. Bananas. Con
sumed
.” Mr. Starr moved the chair closer again, to study Ryder's face. “For a pretty face, men do things they never thought they'd do. You know Helen of Troy? The face that launched a
thousand ships.
Tens of thousands of men, off to war, slaughtered because of a woman. That's smitten. Doyle is smitten.”

“Doyle?”

Mr. Starr narrowed his eyes. “You think he wants to be the dad of somebody else's twelve-year-old kid? Firemen see car crashes every day. They don't stop everything and play the hero for some four-hundred-pound lady with no teeth and a hyena laugh. It's your mom. You never noticed how she does that to people?”

Ryder did know. He thought of the word “worshipfully” and gave Mr. Starr a startled look. “But why would Jimmy Trent not stay with her? Because of me?”

“She could launch a thousand ships. Maybe ten thousand,” Mr. Starr muttered to himself as if he hadn't heard Ryder, then he buzzed his chair over to a desk that had been pushed up against the wall away from the window and the couch. “Oh, dang it. Let me get to work. You should close your eyes.”

A computer sat atop the old wooden desk and, using the
jerky motion of his right arm, Mr. Starr managed to press something that brought the screen to life. With a wide sweep, he brought what looked like a microphone on the end of a bendable metal neck so that it stayed within inches of his mouth. He dropped his twisted hand onto a touchpad. Using the combination of a hooked finger on the pad and words he muttered into the microphone, he began to navigate the Web in search for Jimmy Trent.

Ryder leaned over and curled his legs up on the couch. He put his head onto a velvety crimson pillow that matched the cushions on the couch. He was exhausted, and he did close his eyes. As he drifted off, he let his fingers travel up and down the laces of the signed baseball as he filled in more of the blanks of Jimmy Trent, the man he imagined was his father.

Ryder woke up to the sound of keys rattling in the door. The room was now dark, but for the glow of the computer screen. Ryder bolted up in a bit of a panic. For a brief moment, the intensity of his nap made it seem like the whole thing might have been a dream, but the lights went on and a nurse waddled in.

“Oh! Who are
you
?” she asked, startled.

Ryder blinked. The look on her face told him he wasn't welcome. Naturally shy, he had no words. “Uhhhh.”

Mr. Starr whirred around in his chair to face the nurse. “Do you think because I'm entombed in this wreck of flesh and bone that I'm not allowed guests? This is my nephew. His name is Ryder.”

Ryder sat silently, absorbing yet another lie about who and what he was with an impassive face.

“Say hello,” Mr. Starr barked so abruptly that both the nurse and Ryder said hello at the same time.

“I'm Amy Gillory.” The nurse wore a white uniform that barely contained her stout figure, and her arms seemed too short for the barrel of her squat body. Her hair was bluntly cut and dyed a purple-pinkish color. She had big brown eyes set in a doughy white face, and thick, painted lips.

Ryder shook her hand.

“He's shy.” Mr. Starr started his wheelchair across the room toward the short hallway that led to an oversized bathroom. “Let's get this over with.”

Ryder watched them disappear behind the bathroom door and sat silently, listening to the sounds of water being drawn and washcloths being dipped and wrung out. After a while, Amy Gillory came out in a flurry. Ryder craned his neck around and looked through the opening into the kitchen. On the kitchen counter just inside the front door, the nurse had left a premade dinner tray. She stuck that into the microwave and it hummed while Mr. Starr appeared, whirring along in fresh clothes with his thin strands of hair plastered to his misshapen skull. The intensity of his glare suggested that he didn't like whatever had happened behind the bathroom door, but he said nothing.

When the chair came to a stop in front of the couch, Ryder shifted in his seat. “Do you need me to do something?”

“Can you fix yourself something to eat?” Mr. Starr whispered so the nurse couldn't hear him.

“SpaghettiOs.”

“Do you like SpaghettiOs?”

“Yes, would you like some?”

The microwave beeped from the kitchen and the nurse appeared, unfolded a small tray stand with one hand, and expertly set down Mr. Starr's dinner as she plunked herself
onto the other end of the couch.

“I have this.” Mr. Starr flicked his eyes at what looked to Ryder like a kind of glorified school lunch. “You go have something to eat with the neighbors, and then come back.”

Ryder scooted off the couch and addressed the nurse. “Nice to meet you.”

“Yup.” She didn't even look his way as she spooned a dollop of applesauce into Mr. Starr's mouth, letting her own mouth hang open as she did so, just the way Ryder had seen people feed babies. He wondered why Mr. Starr had to be fed when he could obviously use a computer. Then he realized it was because his elbows wouldn't bend far enough to allow his hands to reach his face.

He got out of there and went back to his empty apartment. He heated up some SpaghettiOs in a pot to have with a glass of milk and two slices of bread thick with soft butter. When he cleaned up and returned to Mr. Starr's, the nurse was gone and he was back at the computer.

“Well, we know you can sleep on the couch without any problems.” Mr. Starr worked the touchpad without looking back. “But I want you to get some sheets so your drool isn't all over the place. I drool enough for a classroom of boys, but that's my prerogative. Here . . . look at this.”

Mr. Starr gave the computer keyboard a final stroke with a crooked finger and tilted his entire upper body to study the screen from a new angle. Something in his tone suggested great importance.

Ryder snatched his signed baseball up off the couch and clutched it as he crossed the room. “Did you find something?”

“Well, something, I guess. Auburn, New York, is full of Trents, see them?” Mr. Starr angled his head toward the screen.

Ryder looked at the list on the screen, jittery.

“But no Jameses or Jimmys to be found,” Mr. Starr mumbled. “I even made some phone calls.”

Ryder's heart sank. He was silent for a minute before he spoke. “You can use that thing to call people?”

“It's the internet, you can use it to perform robotic surgery on someone in Australia, of course you can use it to call people, not that I call people. The people in my life are . . .” Mr. Starr blew air out his nose.