“We could play quiet,” Sam said. “Unless you’re…like, too tired. Or too afraid.”
“Fear is not in my vocabulary,” Reese told him. “As you know, I could take you blindfolded. I took you every day last summer and sometimes twice on Sundays. As I recall, you had to move out to save what little lousy reputation you had left.”
“I don’t remember it that way,” Sam said, and Reese could hear his grin. “Anyhow, that’s pretty easy to say when you’re up on the second floor.”
“Start praying, wimp.”
“I’m on my knees,” Sam said.
Reese thought of putting on a shirt, but it was so damn hot anyway. He just jumped down the stairs by threes—what the hell was the kid doing hanging around their driveway at midnight? He was sure as hell George didn’t know anything about this. George was probably already calling the fucking FBI or the networks or both. Jesus Christ.
He ran out the door, and Sam was standing there, sunburned, in cutoffs and Reese’s White Sox jersey.
“That’s my shirt,” Reese said automatically.
“Awww, really?” Sam pretended to sound apologetic. “I thought it was a paint rag.”
“Where’d you get it?”
“I…took it when I left. I’m sorry. You can have it.”
“I don’t need it,” Reese said in a hurry, then thinking, What a complete asshole I am. “Have it. Or, have it if you beat me. So, that is, you might as well give it up now. Unless it smells.” He couldn’t take his eyes off the kid. It had been, like, weeks since he’d seen him at the jail. His dad and mom had taken Sam out twice, that he knew of, but Reese had been busy both times. And now, having spent two days in jail and many wonderful days and nights in the comfortable confines of his room except for the few moments they allowed him out in manacles to eat dinner did not make for easy surveillance of anything except Mr. Becker watering his hostas.
“Are you sure your dad knows where you are?” he asked again, checking the ball.
“You keep putting it off,” Sam said. “I think you’re scared.”
“Make It—Take It, then,” Reese said. “To eleven.”
He had played with Sam enough to know his moves, so by rights they shouldn’t have fooled him. He knew that the kid hardly ever looked at you, and that was one of his tricks. Sam had these slanty eyes, Dad’s eyes, and he would narrow them down to slits and fasten his gaze over your right shoulder, as if there were some giant bedbug behind you, all the while dribbling in figure eights low between his legs. You almost had to be drawn off. And he talked the whole time—“Man, you are sorry, you’re so sorry, which way you want me to take you? to the right? to the left?”—but it wasn’t as if his patter was directed at you, even meant to rattle you; it was just like a motor running. He made you feel like you weren’t there. And the goddamn thing was, it worked.
Sam looped right around Reese and went in for the layup. And then walked back with his arms out, punching the air, crowing, “What’s up? What’s up? You asleep? You asleep?” And Reese couldn’t help laughing.
But then, when he finally got the ball, he swore to God Sam had grown three inches in the last month; the kid was all over him, clapping his hands, ignoring Reese’s attempts to fake him out. Reese finally drove in to the left, but Sam knocked the shot down.
“That’s goaltending,” Reese said sharply, though he knew it wasn’t; the ball was nowhere near the descending arc. Of course, you had to object, just for form.
“If you gotta cheat, you gotta cheat—I don’t care, take it over,” Sam said.
“Go ahead, little boy,” Reese said then. “I’m going to go easy on you. Seeing it’s late and all.”
By the time the score stood seven–five, Reese ahead, both of them were gasping in the humid darkness. You could feel your lungs flap like wet gloves. “You got air inside?” Sam asked Reese.
“Full blast,” said Reese. “You giving up?”
“Who’s giving up?” Sam darted right and whirled, with this beautiful skyhook, which went nowhere but the bottom of the net.
“What the hell? How did you learn that?” Reese asked him. “That was your left hand.”
“I’m a man of many talents,” Sam laughed, checking the ball to Reese and going into his crouch.
“Call it,” Reese said; then, “Keep the shirt. I pissed on it in June anyhow, that’s why it was in the drawer.”
“You have to stop pissing in your drawers,” Sam said, and Reese reached under the ball, knocking it up so it just glanced off Sam’s chin.
“You got to say ‘beat,’ though,” Sam egged him on. “You’re beat, right?”
“I let you,” Reese told him, “and you know it. But let’s call it a night. Come back tomorrow for a rematch.”
That was when Sam put his hands up and pushed the wet hair up over his forehead, so it stuck straight up, like mowed grass. And took a deep breath. He didn’t move. Reese stopped, heaving and sweating, flatfooted in the driveway.
“I…The thing is,” Sam said then, “I’m not going back.”
“What do you mean?”
Sam jerked his head over his right shoulder, and there, at the end of the driveway in the dark, where Reese had not even noticed it, was a huge, battered suitcase.
“Sam,” he said slowly, “man, what are you doing?”
“My dad knows,” Sam answered, hurriedly. “I mean, we talked about it a lot last week, for a long time, and he said I have to do what I have to do, and he even knows why I came over here so late at night….”
“Which is why?”
Sam looked up at the darkened bedroom windows. “I didn’t want to have this whole big number,” he said. “You know. With your…with Beth and Pat. And, like, what if the press found out?” That killed Reese, the way he said “the press,” like he was forty years old or something. “They probably already think I’m out of my mind for going home—I mean back—I mean to George…”
“So he let you come out this late?”
“We walked down here before. A little while ago. I saw your light.”
“Okay,” Reese said, and added, almost swallowing his tongue over the words, “but, is this, like, permanent?”
Sam looked down at his feet, his mouth clamped shut, and then looked up at Reese—still, Reese thought, an inch shorter maybe—his eyes widening in the dark, as if they had no color, as if they were dark little mirrors in which Reese was sure, if he could get close enough, he could see his own pale face. “I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know. Maybe. If I can…I hope—”
Reese made a motion, stopping him, and Sam stopped, turned, and went down to the end of the driveway to get his suitcase. After a beat, Reese followed. He didn’t want to push him, but he had to move, to do something; he’d go crazy if he didn’t.
“Loser carries,” Reese said. “Fairsies fairsie.” The thing weighed a ton. “What, do you collect anvils?”
Reese rounded his shoulders, strained, hefted the handle into his right hand; and then Sam reached out and closed his own hand over Reese’s. Reese jerked; he felt the touch up his whole arm, as if the kid had pressure-pointed him.
“No problem. I can do it,” he said.
But Sam didn’t loosen his grip.
You felt like you were diving in a quarry, it was so dark. Reese had to strain to see Sam’s expression in the faint cast from that corner light, the corner around which you would walk, cross one side street, and then spot the red house, the only one on that block that wasn’t blue or gray or brown. Reese could picture it now clearer than he could the sweat-shaped brim of his Rockets hat, the feel of the wild goose pillow on Tom’s couch. The red house that was Sam’s house, now not Sam’s. Maybe. He could ask again, but the answer wouldn’t make any difference.
It was like everything. You just had to wait until morning and then count and see who was left. You had to keep walking until you figured out what was the right place, keep on searching until somebody found you. Reese looked up at the light, t
hen back at the patch of darker dark that contained his brother. He could only feel him, the sweat on his palm—the kid calluses, the strength in those oversized fingers. Reese put the suitcase down; he was shivering. It was one of those times he thought he understood the way his dad felt when his heart brought down the hammer. We should just go in, is all. But fuck, thought Reese, I have to. I have to sometime. I have to now.
“I was the one,” he said. “I was the one who let go of your hand.”
Sam shifted his feet. Reese could hear him sigh.
“Well…” Sam said.
They picked up the suitcase then, even weight, like it was a mattress, and carried it between them onto the porch.
“We’re locked out?” Sam asked.
“They don’t make a lock that can resist the charms of Reese Cappadora,” Reese said, pulling his jimmy out of his back pocket. “I get in this way half the time.” Laughing, then, they struggled into the hall. Beowulf stirred on his rug, got up stretching painfully, and clicked down the hall, chuffing his graying muzzle into Sam’s palm.
“Old dog,” said Sam. “Good old dog.” Then he noticed the stack of Beth’s bags, her suitcase and equipment. “Who’s going on a trip?”
“My mom is maybe going to Wisconsin for…a job,” said Reese.
Maybe. Now maybe not. Suitcases could be packed. Suitcases could be unpacked. You just had to wait. “You want to put that in here? We can take it up later.” They shoved Sam’s bag into the living room next to the piano.
“I could eat,” Sam said.
In the kitchen, the refrigerator’s glow was the only light. Reese flipped a piece of cheese to Beowulf, who gobbled it noisily. Sam reached around him to dislodge a Coke from the pyramid of stacked cans on the bottom shelf, and leaped back when all of them rolled. In the silence, they hit the linoleum like M-80s.
“Jesus Christ,” hissed Reese. “Wreck the joint.” They scrambled after the cans, which kept rolling out, leisurely, smoothly, one after another. One hit a corner of the baseboard, spun, and popped open. Soda geysered; Beowulf yipped. “For God’s sake,” Reese whispered, grinning, “shut up!”
The cans seemed endless, like a film strip of logs rolling down a chute.
“This isn’t your fault,” Reese gasped. “This is Dad, the master engineer of the universe. This one winter, when they were working on the restaurant, and Dad was going to save all the leftover tiles…so he spends all day getting them up in the rafters of the garage, and he stands there and shuts the garage door, and the rafters crack, and the whole goddamn ceiling….”
Helplessly, Sam spit his Coke, which only made Reese more determined to make him laugh. “And so every fucking tile, every single tile goes crashing down, one by one, on the floor of the—”
But they both heard her step.
“Vincent!” Beth called from the top of the stairs, her voice sleep-slurred but laced with a tang of panic. “What’s that noise? Are you in the house?”
Reese put his finger to his lips. “You don’t want her up,” he told Sam. “Not now. Trust me on this.” Sam reached silently into the refrigerator for a flat box of cold pizza, and Reese held up his palm in warning. “Wait,” he ordered. Sam stopped.
Beth called, “Vincent?”
“It’s okay, Mom,” he yelled. “I dropped something. Go back to bed. I’m here.”
Reese turned to follow Sam to the kitchen table. From the upper floor came a whoosh of water, a settling sound. He could feel Beth’s urgent presence recede, down the hall. They sat down at the table, and Sam delicately opened the pizza box, grimacing disgustedly at the slabs cemented to the lid. Reese went out to the kitchen for a butter knife, and stood for a moment, his ear pitched to the creak of the floorboards overhead, the soft sponge of the bed as she lay down, and then nothing but quiet, the tick and gust of the air conditioner going on, the sounds of a house, anyone’s ordinary house, at rest.
“It’s pretty ickining-say,” Sam said of the pizza. “On the other hand, I’m pretty starving.” He sat back after quickly polishing off two slices. “You think she’s asleep?”
“Probably,” Reese told him. “Hang on a minute more. And then, when you go up there, just sleep in my room. Just for tonight. So we don’t have to get out all the sheets and stuff. The whole house will be up.”
“Where will you sleep?”
“I don’t know,” Reese said. “Down here on the couch. With the Wulf. And I’m not even tired.”
“It seems kind of crummy to come along and kick you out of your bed.”
“No, really,” Reese insisted. “I’ll take first watch, okay?”
Sam smiled. “Okay.”
“I’ll walk the perimeter,” said Reese, as Sam got up, rummaged in his suitcase, and extracted his toothbrush. Always the good kid.
“Look for suspicious activity,” Sam whispered back.
“Right-o, sir, and have a good sleep. I won’t rest until the encampment is secured,” said Reese.
“Well done.”
Reese sat down at the kitchen table, propping his chin on his hands. It was a lie about being wide awake; he was dogged. He felt as though he hadn’t really slept in weeks. Overhead, the telltale complaint of his old bed sounded as Sam lay down. Reese looked out the big window, past his reflection, deep into the thick dark of the yard. Was it his imagination, or was there already a lightening out at the edge, where the lawn chairs were?
Out there at the perimeter?
He could just flop on the couch. It was unoccupied, for once. Not like the last few weeks. Dad was sleeping upstairs in their bed. Reese had no idea whether that meant he was trying to get her to stay or saying goodbye. But anyway, it meant that there was vacant real estate on the first floor, and Reese would wake up if anybody moved; he always did. He’d given his word, though. And it was only a few more hours, the tail end of one night. Night could only last so long.
Until the encampment is secured, Reese thought. Or until morning. Whichever comes first.
Jacquelyn Mitchard, The Deep End of the Ocean
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