Pay It Forward (24 page)

H
e lay naked under the covers beside Sally, watching TV. She had pulled a night shade over her eyes. He couldn’t tell if she was asleep or not.

“Breaking news from Washington,” the anchor announced to open the eleven o’clock news.

This couldn’t be it. Not with the stone face on this newsman. This is not about Trevor.

“Trevor McKinney, the boy who met with the president of the United States earlier today, has been hospitalized tonight in Washington, D. C., not far from the hotel where his family had been staying. Witnesses say the boy suffered a single stab wound as he tried to intervene in a mugging on the street outside the hotel. A hospital spokesperson reports that Trevor was admitted in critical condition and is undergoing emergency surgery. No further word on his condition is available at this time.”

Sitting straight up in bed, Chris glanced over to see Sally slip off the night shade and raise her head.

“President Clinton tonight expressed deep shock and concern for Trevor’s condition. The president has issued the following
statement. Quote. ‘It seems unimaginably sad that a boy who came to Washington to be honored for his good deeds and his dedication to promoting kindness in the world should be targeted in a senseless act of violence. My heart goes out to Trevor and his family, and my family will say a prayer tonight for his speedy recovery. We hope the rest of America will join us in a prayer for Trevor’s well-being.’”

The screen filled with the tape of Trevor’s earlier meeting with the president. Chris blinked at it, feeling empty.

He felt her hand on his arm.

He rolled out of bed. Looked for the cordless phone. Finally located it in the living room. She followed after him and drew the curtains closed. It hadn’t occurred to him that he’d been standing in front of the apartment windows naked. When he realized, he didn’t care.

He punched long distance information, 202 area code. Asked for a listing for every hospital in the Washington, D. C., area.

He hit it on the first try.

The admission desk said yes, Trevor was there. He was in surgery. The woman punched his information up on the computer.

“He’s listed as critical.”

“That’s all you can tell me?”

“For the present time, yes. I’m sorry. We’re getting a lot of calls about him.”

“Where’s his mother? Arlene McKinney. She must be there, right?”

“I’m sorry, sir, I couldn’t say.”

“Could you page her for me?”

A pause, an audible sigh. He heard the line click onto hold.

He bit the inside of his lip and waited.

He moved into the kitchen with the phone under his chin and poured three fingers of brandy. He looked up to see Sally watching quietly. They both looked away again.

Then a voice on the line. “Yeah? Who is this?”

“Arlene?”

“Who is this?”

“It’s Chris, Arlene. Chris Chandler.”

“Oh, Chris.” Her voice sounded tight and rough.

“What happened, Arlene?”

“Oh, Chris, I don’t know. It all happened so fast. He got stabbed. He saw some guys gettin’ beat up. He tried to mix in.”

“Is he gonna be okay?”

“They won’t tell us, Chris.” Her voice dissolved into sobs. “He’s been in surgery over two hours. They just won’t tell us a damn thing. They say we’ll know when they do. I gotta go, Chris.”

“Okay. Arlene? Never mind. Okay.”

The dial tone rang in his ear. He clicked the button on the phone to off.

He walked past Sally, back into the bedroom.

“You okay, Chris?”

He slipped back under the covers.

“Hey. Chris. You okay?”

“Did they say anything else about him on the news?”

“Just that they’d update his condition when they had it.”

They sat quietly through the end of the news broadcast. Then into the late-night talk shows. Chris sat awake long after she’d faded, the light from the TV screen flickering on his face, surfing channels. Watching minute-long scraps of late movies.

No updates. Programming seemed to go on.

H
E JOLTED AWAKE,
surprised he’d ever been asleep.

He looked at the clock and saw it was late morning.

The TV droned on at the end of the bed. He could hear Sally in the kitchen making coffee.

He sat up and rubbed his eyes.

On the screen, President Clinton held a press conference. Or footage from an earlier press conference was being shown.

Chris woke up just in time to hear him say that the flags in Washington would fly at half-mast today and that at noon, the country would stop what it was doing and observe a moment of silence. Edit to news anchor, who said, “On a sad final note, today would have been Trevor’s fourteenth birthday. More news after these messages.”

A
RLENE’S FRONT LAWN HAD BECOME A SEA OF CAMERAS
and news teams by the time Chris arrived. He had to park in her driveway behind the GTO. All the street parking had been taken up by television news crew vans.

He cut sideways across her front grass.

“She’s not talking to anyone,” a female anchor with stiff, perfect blond hair told him as he stepped onto the front porch.

He rapped hard on the front door. “Arlene? It’s me, Chris.”

The door peeked open and Reuben drew him inside by one elbow. Arlene lay on the couch on her side, a glass of water and a box of Kleenex close by.

“I wish they’d go away,” she said. “Can you make ’em go away, Chris?”

He sat down on the couch beside her. She patted his hand.

“Everybody cares about this story, Arlene. I’ve never seen anything like it. I’ve never seen people mobilize over one story like this.”

“It’s not a story, Chris. It happened.”

“I know. I’m sorry. That’s just the way I talk.”

“I can’t talk to all of them. It’s too much.”

“I know, Arlene. I know. Look, you don’t have to talk to any
body. But that Citizen of the Month segment is going to run tomorrow. With an update, of course. If there’s anything you want to say, I can get one cameraman in here. That’s it. Me and one camera. You don’t have to do it. But if there’s something you want to tell the public about this. They really want to hear from you.”

She sat up, wiped her eyes, and sniffled. “Like what?”

“I don’t know. Anything you want to say.”

“Well, I could just say there’s a memorial next Sunday in front of City Hall. We thought maybe even a candlelight march after. You know, if people are interested. If there are people out there who cared about Trevor, they could come and bring a candle. That sort of thing?”

“Yeah. That would be great.” Chris felt tears forming, threatening just behind his eyes. “I’ll go get a cameraman.”

T
he phone woke them. It was late, after ten in the morning. The sun streamed through the windows onto her face. She wondered how she could have slept through that.

“Let the machine get it,” she said.

He rolled up behind her and slid his left arm under her pillow. Wrapped his good right arm around her and laid his left cheek down against the side of her face. His chest felt warm and solid against her back. His eye patch was off, and she could feel the smooth, empty expanse where his left eye had once been. He didn’t work to keep that from her anymore. He knew she didn’t mind.

She laced her fingers through his.

The machine picked it up. Again. Arlene had turned the volume all the way down.

“How’d we sleep so long?” she said quietly.

“It’s good for us. It’s what you do to heal.”

“Take more than a few nights’ sleep.”

“I know.”

“So, what’re we gonna do until seven o’clock tonight?”

“I don’t know. Same thing we’ve done all week, I guess. Get up. Wash our faces. Eat.”

“Cry.”

“Yeah. That too.”

Neither had cried much in the last twenty-four hours. It was as if they’d struck the bottom of a well. Used up all the tears, leaving an amazing emptiness inside, like a killer case of the flu. They were both tired. Bone tired. Arlene wondered at the place inside her rib cage. Wondered how an empty space could feel so heavy.

She squeezed her eyes closed.

“What if the baby turns out to be Ricky’s, Reuben? Sooner or later we gotta talk about that.”

The second or two it took him to answer drew out long and frightening.

“I was willing to sign on to raise Ricky’s last kid. Wasn’t I? And he turned out pretty good.”

“Yeah, he did. Didn’t he? Pretty damn good.”

And to her surprise, that heavy, empty center inside her gave up a few more tears.

She unlaced her fingers from his, reached back, and touched his face. He pressed his right hand onto her belly, big fingers spread to cover the whole area, and held it there. As if to introduce himself.

She could hear a honking of horns, all the way from the Camino. The intermittent red light of a flashing emergency vehicle slipped by their window.

“Wonder what the hell’s going on out there,” she said without much genuine curiosity.

“An accident, maybe.”

“That must be it, yeah.”

Reuben unplugged the phone and they fell back asleep for the remainder of the morning.

“H
OW ’BOUT WE TAKE THE
GTO?”

“Whichever.”

Neither had a strong opinion or was interested in details.

Reuben drove. As he backed out of the driveway, they noticed both sides of the street solid with parked cars. So close together, pushing so hard for space that they slightly overlapped both sides of the driveway, making it a tight fit to get out. And then, when he’d managed to angle straight out between them, he couldn’t find a break in traffic. Traffic. On this tiny little residential street.

Arlene got out of the car and personally stopped the procession of cars with her body, giving Reuben a chance to back into the traffic lane.

The GTO crawled an inch or two at a time toward the Camino. For the first few minutes they didn’t comment or complain.

Arlene glanced at her watch.

“Why the hell is this happening? I mean, today of all days? We’re gonna be late if we can’t get out of this jam.”

Reuben chewed on his lower lip and didn’t answer.

It was ten minutes after seven when they hit the Camino, only to find traffic police turning cars away at a roadblock. The main drag appeared closed to traffic. Reuben did not turn where the officer told him to. Instead he pulled up to the roadblock and rolled down his window. The sun had dipped to a slant behind the officer’s head.

Arlene looked straight through the windshield and saw the Camino clogged with pedestrians. Not just the sidewalks, but the street itself. Hundreds, just in this intersection.

“We don’t know what’s going on,” Reuben told the officer, “but we have to get to the memorial at City Hall.”

“Yeah, that’s everybody’s problem,” he said.

“These people are all here for the memorial?”

“That’s right,” he said. “Your problem is not unique.”

Arlene leaned over Reuben’s lap and looked into the officer’s face. “I’m Arlene McKinney,” she said.

His expression changed. “Right. You are, aren’t you? Look, just leave your car here by the barricade and come with me.”

Reuben turned off the motor. They stepped out into the sea of bodies and followed the uniformed officer out onto the Camino. The crowd in their immediate vicinity seemed to notice. To recognize. A silence fell, directly surrounding Reuben and Arlene, and rippled out like a wake on water.

A path opened up to allow them through.

They were escorted into the backseat of a black-and-white patrol car. The officer turned on his lights and siren. Through the vehicle’s loudspeaker, he asked the crowd to open a traffic lane to allow the family to pass.

She sat straight and rigid, squeezing Reuben’s hand, staring forward through the windshield, watching the mass of bodies part, watching a ribbon of empty street form ahead of the car.

“This crowd go all the way down to the City Hall?” Arlene asked at last, jarring the silence.

“It goes all over town,” he said. “We got helicopters in from L.A. We got mounted police coming in with horse trailers right now. Not that there’s been any trouble. There hasn’t. We just need more personnel. Local rental company donated some sound equipment. Maybe the people in a four-or five-block radius will hear the service. Rest’ll have to read about it in the paper. Or see it on TV. We got camera crews coming outta our ears.”

“How many people do you think we have here?” Reuben asked.

“Most recent estimate stands at twenty thousand. But the freeway’s backed up thirty miles. It’s a parking lot. They’re still coming in.”

T
HE PATROL CAR PULLED OVER
at the West Mall, and Reuben and Arlene stepped out. She reached for his hand and held it. The
officer escorted them through the sea of bodies. A smattering of applause rang in their ears, loudest wherever they happened to walk.

The grassy area overflowed with media equipment. Microphones, cameras, newspeople. They occupied so much space that the nonmedia participants had to squeeze around the edges to allow space for the filming.

It occurred to Arlene that this twenty thousand people might seem like nothing compared to the audience who saw it reported on the news or in the paper. It was all too much to take in at once.

They reached an elevated makeshift stage, where the sound equipment had been set up. Big, heavy, rock-concert speakers stacked on assembled three-level catwalks, framing City Hall. When they stepped onto the stage, the crowd grew quiet. Then a long, steady round of applause broke out.

Chris Chandler slipped up beside her. It felt good to see a familiar face.

“What do you think?” he said.

“Where did all these people come from, Chris?”

“Well, it just so happens you’re asking the right person. I’ve been conducting interviews in the crowd. The people I’ve talked to are from”—he flipped open his notepad—“Illinois, Florida, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Bangladesh, Atascadero, London, San Francisco, Sweden—”

“That little television thing I did went outside the country?”

“A hundred and twenty-four countries around the world. Which is, like, nothing compared to the coverage we’ve got today. Most of these news crews are sending this out live.”

Arlene raised her eyes to the crowd, knowing she saw only a tiny percentage. Thousands of people, crowding close to hear. A light dusk had begun to settle. They were late getting started. She looked down at the cameras, saw them looking back. She knew by their red lights that everything, everybody was on. Watching.

She stepped up to the microphone. The crowd waited in silence. She opened her mouth to speak. She felt slightly dizzy. The air, the inside of her head, had taken on the qualities of walking in a dream.

“I’m not too good with words,” she said.

Her voice shook and cracked, and the microphone amplified that, ricocheted her tension off the neighboring buildings. The strength of the sound system startled her. The leaves on the oak trees overhead shivered at the sound. All eyes turned up to her in silence.

“I don’t even know what I’m doing up here, in front of all these people. I just came here to say good-bye to my boy.” Tears flowed freely at the sound of those words. She let them. Her voice remained steady and she talked through the moment. “I hope he can see this,” she said. “Boy, would he be proud.”

The earth seemed to fall out from underneath her. She felt she might pass out. “I’m gonna turn this over to Reuben,” she said. “He can talk better than me. I just came here to say good-bye to my boy.”

Reuben’s arm slid around her shoulder and held tight. Don’t ever let go, she thought. Don’t you dare ever let go.

If it wasn’t for Reuben, and that tiny presence in her belly, she’d have nothing left worth holding on to.

Except, she thought, maybe for this world that had come here to share this moment with her. Maybe that was something after all.