The long wooden pews were not comfortable. But they never were. If you want people to pay attention, it was important to keep them from settling in. Hadn’t his father taught him that?
The man in charge finally stopped speaking, and a choir stood up from a section off to the side. The singers were all ages and shapes, wearing white robes, and they looked to Sam like birds. He didn’t know the names of many types of birds, but he’d seen his share, and he felt sure that some place must have big white birds with clean feathers and hairy heads.
Then the organ again began to play, and Sam watched as a girl in the group started to weave her way through the other singers. He could see that she was his age. And he could tell, as she edged toward a microphone, that she was very nervous.
Emily was feeling all sweaty but sort of cold at the same time. This was just ridiculous. Her father, who was standing off to the side waving his right hand in some way that was supposed to be significant, was for sure not going to ever get any eye contact.
Once she got to the microphone, she seized on her strategy.
She was going to focus on the back.
The way back.
Because that’s where the people sat who checked their e-mail and monitored sports scores. The back of the church was filled with bodies that were there but not there. The nonlisteners.
Those were her people.
Or her person.
Because when she raised her eyes from the floor, she could see that today there was only one body in the last row.
Emily lifted her chin and opened her mouth and now sang directly to him:
“You and I must make a pact
We must bring salvation back
Where there is love,
I’ll be there”
She could hear herself. But not hear herself. And that was the only blessing of her day. Emily knew the song. She knew the words:
“I’ll reach out my hand to you
I’ll have faith in all you do
Just call my name and I’ll be there
I’ll be there to comfort you
Build my world of dreams around you
I’m so glad that I found you
I’ll be there with a love that’s strong
I’ll be your strength, I’ll keep holding on
Let me fill your heart with joy and laughter
Togetherness, well that’s all I’m after
Whenever you need me, I’ll be there.”
She was singing this all to a guy who she’d never seen before.
She could see that he was tall and thin. He had dark brown hair, which was wild and messy. Like it wasn’t cut right.
The person who she was singing to was tan, like he spent a lot of time outside, even though it was still late winter.
And she realized that he looked uncomfortable. Like he didn’t belong back there. Just like she didn’t belong on the platform up front.
And he was intently watching her.
Pretty much everyone was watching her.
But what suddenly mattered was only that he was watching her.
Because all that had mattered to her was watching him. And now she’d made that commitment and she couldn’t stop.
She was definitely giving the words of the song new meaning. Isn’t that what her father had wanted? A heartfelt reinterpretation?
Was she having an out-of-body experience?
Her mouth was moving and sounds were coming out, but that didn’t make sense.
What made sense was in the back row.
She could not really sing.
That was just a fact.
But it was also a fact that she was riveting. She was raw and exposed and not really hitting the notes right. But she was singing to him.
Why him?
He wasn’t imagining it.
The girl with the long brown hair had her small hands held tight at her sides and, maybe because of how bad she was, or because she was staring right at him and seemed to be singing right to him, he couldn’t look away.
She was saying she’d be there.
But no one was ever there. That’s the way it was. Who was she to tell him such a thing?
It was intimate and suddenly painful.
Not just for her.
But now for him.
Very painful.
For a long time Sam was certain his mother would rescue him and Riddle.
Once she realized that they were gone, she would have called the police or the fire department (didn’t they take cats out of trees?) or Mrs. Holsing, his second-grade teacher. Or even the neighbors. The ones named Natwick at the end of the street in the blue house who always waved when he walked by. People would be looking. He was sure of it.
Which of course was the case in the beginning. But his mother wasn’t the kind of woman to lead an effort. She lacked not just the determination but also the organizational qualities of leadership. And it wasn’t her fault.
When Shelly was a baby, her mother had placed her on the kitchen counter when she came in from the market. She’d only turned her back for a moment and the small child had wiggled free of the plastic bucket that was one of the early versions of a car seat. The straps were so complicated. Who needed them?
Shelly’s head hit the floor with a thud that sounded like a bat hitting a watermelon. She was unconscious for a full five minutes, only coming around as their station wagon pulled into the emergency-room parking lot.
The doctors kept baby Shelly overnight and said everything was probably fine. The family couldn’t deny that she was a loving child, calm and easy to care for. But after that day, she no longer had the potential for her father’s brainpower or her mother’s musical ability. If her mind was some kind of computer, that fall to the kitchen floor wiped away whole sections of her hard drive.
Once Sam’s father took off with her boys, Shelly started going to My Office. The gimmick of the place was the revolving front door. There wasn’t another one in town, and this piece of salvaged metal and glass, from a former savings-and-loan building in Denver, made it appear that you were really going into a place of interest.
In reality, the inside was just the corner space of the neighborhood mini-mall, and the only other attempt at an office setting was that a wall of dinged file cabinets made up the bar.
Shelly went straight there from work, which got her through the hardest time of the day. Dinner hour was when she most missed her two boys, and if she wasn’t drinking, she found herself cooking for people who no longer existed.
At My Office, Shelly always sat facing the door sipping Shirley Temples because they reminded her of the kids. But her Shirley Temples had two shots of vodka dumped in with the red syrup.
Clarence had been gone for only six weeks when she got hit. She was walking home after a half dozen sweet drinks when, according to the police report, she darted out into traffic. It was impossible to know if it was suicide, an awkward street crossing, or both. She was pronounced dead on the scene. But they took her to the hospital anyway.
The nurse who admitted her body was the same nurse who had been there the day, over forty years before, when she had come in as an infant. The nurse had been young then, fresh out of school. Now she was in her sixties and had arthritis in her knees.
But she remembered.
She wrote the words Head Injury on the form for the death certificate and at the last minute added in parentheses preexisting condition. She believed in full disclosure.
Six months later, the town’s local chief of police retired. The new man in charge of the department was an outsider who was all about responding to the immediate needs of the community. With no one pressing for updates on the missing boys, the case moved lower in priority.
Shelly’s mother passed away from a stroke the following year and, after that, even if they had been found, there was no one to return the boys to. The missing Border children were an open file that was in reality closed.
But of course Sam didn’t know that.
>
He imagined his mother in the old house waiting. Even in his fantasies, Shelly was never in the world looking for him. She was always sitting by the phone, staring out the window, longing for him to come through the front door and into her arms.
With time the fantasy faded, as did his image of his mother, until when he thought of her, which was rare, she was always in deep shadows, her face unseen. As the years passed, the whole house had turned dark and lost its shape.
But now, glued to the wooden pew in the back row of the First Unitarian Church, he felt an old feeling flooding over him. Sam’s mother was there, somewhere, reaching out to him. She was trying to show him a way home.
Because hadn’t she played this song? Hadn’t she sung “I’ll Be There” to him? Is that why he knew this music so well?
And with the connection, the knot, which was permanently twisted in his stomach, released.
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Welcome
Dedication
THAT WAS THEN.…
THIS IS NOW.… Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Acknowledgments
About the Author
A Sneak Peek of I’ll Be There
Copyright
Copyright
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
Copyright © 2014 by Holly Goldberg Sloan
Excerpt from I’ll Be There copyright © 2011 by Holly Goldberg Sloan
“I’ll Be There”
Words and Music by Berry Gordy, Hal Davis, Willie Hutch and Bob West
© 1970, 1975 (Renewed 1998, 2003) JOBETE MUSIC CO., INC.
All Rights Controlled and Administered by EMI APRIL MUSIC INC.
All rights reserved. International copyright secured. Used by permission.
Reprinted by permission of Hal Leonard Corporation
Cover image of girl © Elisabeth Ansley / Trevillion Images; image of meadow © Mark Owen / Trevillion Images
Cover design by Neil Swaab
Cover © 2014 Hachette Book Group, Inc.
All rights reserved. In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher is unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the publisher at
[email protected]. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.
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The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.
First ebook edition: August 2014
ISBN 978-0-316-20313-5
E3
Holly Goldberg Sloan, Just Call My Name
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