Emory's Gift

  Probably I did know that, but when Nichole said it the tight grip of guilt loosened for me, just a little.

  A few minutes later, Nichole was gazing into the camera, explaining the happenings of the day before. Phillip T. Thorpe wore a different suit—a black one—with a pale blue shirt and a wide maroon tie. He stood there fidgeting as Nichole explained that the mystery of what was happening in Selkirk River had electrified the nation, which was probably something of an exaggeration, since even her own channel had refused to run a segment on what Emory had written. When she mentioned that the bear had put up an additional word, that the message was now “God Loves All,” Alecci looked angry. Then she explained that Phillip T. Thorpe was a bear expert who had witnessed the entire process, using the form of the word “witnessed” that meant “cowered behind a door and could barely see what was going on.”

  Thorpe looked nervously at the camera.

  “Mr. Thorpe, what can you tell us, in your professional opinion, about yesterday’s amazing events?”

  He swallowed and then started talking haltingly in his high, whiney voice. “I was present when the bear, affixed with a custom-made paintbrush, made markings on the wall.”

  Since Nichole had just said that, she smiled and nodded for him to get on with it.

  “The bear did, indeed, appear to write what seemed to be letters.”

  Seemed to be? His handwriting was better than mine!

  “However, the entire time, his handler, Charlie Hall, was standing nearby, giving signals to the bear. Also, Mr. Hall guided the paintbrush into the paint can, and I saw him assist the bear in writing the words. It is remarkable, really, that a grizzly would put up with it. To the uneducated eye, it’s a miracle. But what we’re actually looking at here is a trained bear. In my opinion, this animal is probably a circus beast, enlisted in a hoax far above its understanding.”

  It was so quiet I could hear branches creaking in the faint morning breeze.

  “Cut,” said Alecci. Wally shrugged the camera off his shoulder. Nichole wordlessly handed the cameraman her microphone, looking furious.

  “You could have told me this back at the hotel, saved us the trip out here,” Alecci said.

  “Charlie’s not a handler; he’s an eighth-grade boy,” Nichole said contemptuously.

  Thorpe was still focused on Alecci’s words. “What do you mean, saved a trip?”

  Alecci had his roll of paper and slapped his palm with it. “If the bear’s a phony there’s no story here. It’s over. Wally, let’s go. Nichole, you got a bag here? We’ll stop for the one at the hotel on the way out.”

  “I’ll get her suitcase,” my father said stiffly. He turned and walked to the house, carrying his head oddly.

  “But wait,” Thorpe said, confused. “I don’t understand.”

  “What?” Alecci snapped. “You don’t understand what, Phillip?”

  Thorpe looked bewildered. I figured he thought that the most dramatic thing he could say was that the whole thing was a sham. Then everyone would see him as this big expert who saved the world from some huge con job. To Alecci, though, the story of “boy invents tall tale” was not a story at all. Everything unraveled from there—if the bear was some sort of circus freak, if he had to be helped to write on the wall, then the content of the message was irrelevant. It might just as well say “Charlie loves Beth” for all anyone cared.

  Nichole had been gazing after my father, biting her lip. Now she turned to Alecci. “There’s more, more words,” she said. “I think we ought to—”

  “What?” Alecci interrupted scornfully. “You think we can keep going now? It’s over, Nichole. Get in the van, Phillip.”

  Nichole had shock in her eyes. “But this morning the court meets to decide Emory’s fate.”

  “Right. That’s a story? The Fish and Game Department bags a tame bear? Or doesn’t?” He swept his eyes across the littered landscape of our lawn. “At least before there were some people, added energy to the whole deal. Now, we got nothing.”

  My dad emerged from the house carrying Nichole’s suitcase. His face looked grim and shaken, and when he met Nichole’s eyes he gazed into them with an unreadable intensity.

  “This is sudden,” he said awkwardly.

  Alecci grabbed the bag from my dad’s hand and headed to the van. “Say your good-byes!” he called over his shoulder.

  “George,” Nichole whispered. She stepped closer to my dad.

  Dad shook his head. “It’s like you said. Your life is in Spokane, Nichole. I live here. It would never work. It’s okay. I understand.” He gave her an uneven smile. She touched his face with her open hand.

  “Come on, Nichole!” Alecci shouted from the open van door.

  I heard the rumbling of the school bus up the road, squeaking and banging its way down the hill. I ran and grabbed my books off the front porch, and when I returned, my dad and Nichole were clenched in a deep hug. My father’s eyes were pressed shut in pain. I hated to see it. My poor dad.

  He broke from the embrace, sniffing, and nodded, blinking. “Okay, Nichole. Good-bye, then,” he mumbled. He turned and walked into the house.

  Nichole turned to me and threw her arms open and I gave her a big, unreserved hug. “You be good, Charlie,” she whispered to me. Then she got in the van. Wally tossed a grin and a wave at me and I waved back; I liked Wally.

  I knew it would be the last time I ever saw Nichole, so I burned an image of her in my memory as she sat in the van, her face staring at me out the side window. It looked to me like she was crying. And then the bus was there and I was on it and headed to school, an air of unreality settling over me. The week I’d missed felt more like a lifetime.

  I had no use for any of my teachers or classes that morning. My insides were roiling, my brain buzzing with everything that had been going on. Then there was lunch, and what I would say to Beth to put my life back together. I had to do that; I couldn’t imagine anything worse than losing her.

  But between being dropped off by the bus and breaking for lunch I had science class, which meant Dan Alderton would be there, having served out his suspension for fighting as well.

  I wanted to walk in like a man, fix Dan with a glare, and invite him with my eyes to another round if he had it in him, but in truth my nerve failed me and I sort of slunk in just before the bell rang. I was focused on my desk as if there were a treasure map affixed to it, but I clearly heard Dan’s voice.

  “Hey. Hey, Charlie.”

  I pretended not to hear, another cowardly move.

  “Charlie!” He was more insistent this time.

  Okay. This was it. I steeled myself, finding some strength that had probably been there the whole time had I looked for it. I took a deep breath and turned and faced him, ready for anything.

  His smile was tentative. “Hey, Charlie. How you doing?”

  “Hi, Dan,” I said automatically.

  We looked at each other for a second, both of us with weird smiles on our faces, and then the bell trilled and I turned to face the teacher.

  Observing Dan the rest of the school year, I think I put together what happened. None of his strange hostility had been about me, really; it had been about the social pecking order, about trying to figure out where he fit in. Fighting me was supposed to earn him some currency—oddly, he probably picked me because we knew each other, so that it would seem less arbitrary. But then he made the remark about my mother that sent him into social ostracism, and then everything he tried after that just made it worse.

  And as it got worse, he hated me more and more—until we fought, that is. Because once we traded blows in science class he could lay claim to what was probably the highest badge of tough-hood a boy could earn—he was suspended from school for fighting. I’d done him a real favor.

  I wouldn’t say we were friends, after that, but we weren’t enemies, either. For a pair of junior high boys, that was almost the same as intimacy.

  When the bell rang for lunch I lowered my head an
d ignored the people who called my name in the hallway. My appearance on television still ranked me pretty high up on the list of cool, but I had only one mission at that moment, and she was sitting at her usual table when I approached.

  “Here comes the pest,” squawked the girl who had stood guard outside the girls’ room. They all glared at me with cold hostility—all except Beth, who was eating her lunch and not looking at me.

  “Beth.”

  She raised her eyes and they were hard and accusing.

  “You think we could talk, maybe? Out in the courtyard?” I implored.

  She shook her head. “I’m eating lunch.”

  Fine. I settled in on the bench seat, the girls all leaning in to hear what I had to say, eager for it.

  I took a deep breath. “I’m sorry.”

  No reaction.

  “I was stupid.”

  Beth took a sip of milk.

  “Beth…”

  Her friends were exchanging glances of deep significance. I stayed focused on Beth.

  “Look, I should have asked you to go to the dance with me. I was going to, but…” I shrugged helplessly. “I mean, the only reason I even went to the dance was to find you, to dance with you. Just you. But you were standing with your friends and I felt, I don’t know, embarrassed.” I was embarrassed now, actually, but there probably wasn’t any point in bringing that up. “And then Joy Ebert came up to talk to me. Like you do, just walked up to talk, like it was easy. And then she was the one who said we should dance, and then they played slow music, and I didn’t know what to do.”

  Beth regarded me with her clear green eyes. It was the first time she’d looked at me. I took it as encouragement.

  “I know I should have said no, or something. I didn’t think.”

  “Do you like her?”

  I bit back my reflexive answer and gave her a more truthful one. “Everyone likes Joy Ebert, Beth. She’s really nice.”

  Honesty wasn’t gaining me any points. Beth’s gaze was cooling. I remembered what Nichole had said.

  “But I was stupid to dance with her. Really stupid, and I’m really sorry. I didn’t think how it would look to you. I should have. It was wrong of me. Because when I said just now that I like her, I didn’t mean that I like her like her. I don’t love her.”

  The flock of girls froze, sensing what was coming.

  “I love you, Beth.”

  chapter

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  LIKE Emory, I had delivered my message. My face felt like it was on fire. Beth regarded me calmly and she didn’t say she loved me, but she didn’t say she didn’t, either. Seconds ticked past—long, hard seconds filled with the sound of my heartbeat and the shocked expressions of the girls, who couldn’t decide if they should start chirping or take wing. Then she said, “Let’s go out into the courtyard.”

  I had to keep from skipping as I walked next to her. We settled in under a tree that had recently dropped the last of its leaves, and for the first time Beth smiled at me. That smile filled my whole chest cavity with warmth even as it made my stomach drop. Neat trick.

  Now that I had said it, I wanted to say it again, and her expression was encouraging. I opened my mouth and at the same time heard an electronic buzz, followed by, “Charlie Hall, please report to the principal’s office.”

  Oh, no! I looked desperately at Beth, the intercom’s summons still ringing in my ears. Had I done it? Had I fixed everything? Her green eyes wouldn’t tell me.

  “You’d better go, Charlie. Probably now President Ford needs to talk to you or something,” she said lightly.

  She was teasing me; that was good, wasn’t it?

  “I guess I’d better.” I stared at her. I wanted to fall on my knees and beg.

  “So go.”

  She said it a bit coldly. I felt my shoulders start to slump. “Okay,” I muttered. I turned.

  “Oh, say, Charlie?”

  I whipped back around. I know my face was probably lit with desperate hope, but I didn’t care.

  “Your phone still working?”

  “Yeah,” I croaked.

  “That’s good,” Beth said, and now, finally, she smiled.

  Yes.

  I felt pretty much on top of the world, nodding and waving at people who called my name in the hallway, the luckiest, happiest kid at Benny H. Some of the air went out of me, though, as I turned into the principal’s office and saw my dad standing there, waiting for me. He looked grim. The principal was there and he looked grim, too, but his face had been locked in that expression as long as I’d known the man.

  “I need you to come home with me, Charlie,” my dad told me. I gulped and nodded, following him out to the Jeep. He didn’t speak until we were pulling out of the parking lot.

  “I got a call from Herman Hessler. McHenry’s lawyers didn’t get the job done. The court threw out our injunction and reinstated the original order, like we knew it would eventually. Only now it’s happening today.” My dad glanced at me. “They say we have an hour, Charlie. After that, they’ll be on our property with guns. We need you to try to get your bear to head up into the hills now. It’s our last chance.”

  “Okay,” I said solemnly. I felt ill. The day before I’d been in happy denial, willing to postpone saying good-bye to my bear day after day, but now I felt panicked and impatient. He’d delivered his message; why was he still here? A bear once more. Okay, why didn’t he go be a bear once more? He was going to be shot.

  My dad was silent and I studied him. His eyes were red and he looked exhausted. “Dad?” I said quietly.

  “Yes, Charlie.”

  “I’m sorry Nichole had to leave. She was nice.”

  My dad swallowed and gave a tight nod. We stopped at the last stoplight on the outskirts of town, and he looked at me.

  “Charlie,” he said. He bit his lip. “Charlie, I know I haven’t been that good of a father.”

  “Dad,” I gasped.

  “No, listen. I think I was too wrapped up in losing your mom to pay any attention to you. That was wrong. It’s going to change, though, Charlie. You and me, we’re all we got now. There’s nobody else.”

  “Okay, Dad.”

  We drove up Highway 206. The deputy parked across Hidden Creek Road gave us a wave as we turned off the pavement and started bouncing up the rutted dirt road to our house. I was staring off at the trees, thinking about Beth, when I heard my dad inhale sharply. I turned to see what he was looking at.

  Nichole J. Singleton stood in the driveway, two suitcases at her feet. My dad braked, turned off the Jeep, and sat there a second with the engine ticking at us, his mouth open.

  Nichole shook her head and she was crying and laughing at the same time. My dad jumped out of the Jeep.

  “This is crazy,” she said, and then they were running toward each other. I sat in the passenger seat and grinned at them through the dusty glass as they kissed. It was as good as anything I’d ever seen on television.

  McHenry had been standing with his security men in the road. Now he crossed over and opened my door. He seemed to make a point of ignoring what my father was up to, concentrating on speaking just to me. “I heard,” he said curtly. He looked at his watch. “Forty minutes.”

  “I think Emory will leave now,” I said. I felt sure of it—everything was going to be better. Everything.

  “He…” McHenry scratched his neck. “What if he doesn’t? What if he has to stay?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “What if he wants it? What if he has to be, you know, put down? Like maybe that’s part of it.”

  “Part of what, Mr. McHenry?”

  He had that same passionate look in his eyes. “I don’t know. Part of getting the message out, Charlie. Part of making a point. Like, his sacrifice.”

  It just seemed like a lot of the time McHenry would say really intense things that didn’t make any sense. “I’ll go talk to Emory now,” I said.

  But I didn’t, not right away. I felt the need t
o stall, to put off losing my bear for just a little while longer, so first I detoured to say hi to Nichole. She gave me another hug. “I’m glad you came back,” I told her, though to be truthful I had a feeling I was going to get sick of sleeping on the couch.

  Of course, that’s not exactly the way it turned out.

  I carried Nichole’s luggage in for her and then went back out to where McHenry, my dad, and Nichole were standing in the driveway. They all looked grim, and I had a feeling it was because McHenry had shared his speculation that Emory maybe wanted to be killed, that he had to be killed. But that couldn’t be what it meant to be a “bear once more,” could it?

  “I’ll go let Emory out, see if he’ll leave, now,” I said reluctantly. Nichole’s expression was full of sympathy. One way or another, this would be good-bye.

  My dad nodded. “You go on, Charlie. We’ll watch from here.”

  I swallowed and went to the side door and peered through the window.

  What I saw inside shocked me. The couch had been torn to shreds—tufts of it lay everywhere; it looked like the wispy stuff they used for the fake Santa beards at Christmastime. Cans were scattered; boxes were destroyed; a whole shelf of tools had been ripped from the wall.

  But what was most disturbing of all was Emory himself. He paced back and forth in the barn, drooling, chuffing, agitated and angry. His eyes caught mine and it was full of wild fury and he immediately charged across the floor, growling, pulling up short just inches from where I stood.

  I fell down as if he had bowled into me. I crawled backward, then scrabbled to my feet and raced around the side of the barn, yelling for my dad.

  “There’s something wrong with Emory!” I shouted.

  They all came at a run. My dad, reading the alarm on my face, motioned Nichole to stand back, then edged up to the door and peered in the window. I heard another roar, and he dropped down, dashing back over to us.

  “What’s happening?” McHenry asked.

  “George?” Nichole said, looking frightened.

  My dad was pale. We’d both just gotten a view of a very angry Ursus arctos horribilis, and it was terrifying. My dad and I exchanged stunned looks.