Shelter (7 page)

“Can’t,” Taylor said with a smirk. “Your daddy is too busy scrubbing toilets with his brush.”

“He doesn’t use a brush,” Spoon said. “He uses your mama’s face.”

Oh boy
.

Something behind Taylor’s eyes exploded. His face went scarlet red. I thought that maybe he was having a stroke. His hands formed fists. Spoon stood right there. He pushed his glasses back up his nose. I thought that Taylor was going to punch him. Maybe he would have, but a voice yelled, “Out of the way, coming through.”

A stretcher was heading toward us. We stepped to either side of the door. A man was on it. There were contusions on his face, but he was conscious. A few spots of blood clung to the collar of his white dress shirt. I would guess his age as early forties. Ashley’s father? A woman about the same age trailed him. Her face was ghost pale. She clutched her purse as though it could offer comfort.

She stopped, dazed. “Who are these two?” she asked Taylor.

“We, uh, found them loitering around,” Taylor said. “We thought maybe they were the perpetrators.”

For a second, Mrs. Kent stared at us as though we were pieces in a puzzle she couldn’t put together.

“These are boys,” she said.

“Yes, I know, but—”

“I told you it was a man. I told you he had a tattoo on his face. Do you see a tattoo on either of their faces?”

Taylor said, “I was just eliminating . . .” But she was already gone, catching up to the stretcher. Taylor shot another glare toward us. Spoon actually gave him a thumbs-up, as though he’d done a good job. Again, with that facial expression, you couldn’t tell if Spoon was goofing on him or sincere. Based on the mama line, I assumed the former.

“Get out of here,” Taylor said.

We headed back down the brick walk. The man I assumed was Ashley’s father was loaded into the back of the ambulance. A police officer was talking to Mrs. Kent. Two other cops were talking near us. I heard the words
home invasion
and felt my chest tighten.

Now or never.

I ran over before anyone could stop me. “Mrs. Kent?”

She stopped and frowned at me. “Who are you?”

“My name is Mickey Bolitar. I’m a friend of Ashley’s.”

She said nothing for a second. Her eyes shifted to the right, then back toward me. “What do you want?”

“I just want to make sure Ashley is okay.”

When she shook her head, I felt my knees buckle. But then she said something I never expected: “Who?”

“Ashley,” I said. “Your daughter.”

“I don’t have a daughter. And I don’t know anyone named Ashley.”

chapter 5

HER WORDS PARALYZED ME.

Mrs. Kent stepped into the back of the ambulance. The cops chased us away. When we reached the bottom of Prema Estates, Spoon and I split up and headed to our respective homes. I called the Coddington Rehab Center on my way, but they told me that my mother was in session and it was too late to talk or visit tonight. That was fine. She was coming home tomorrow morning anyway.

Uncle Myron’s car, a Ford Taurus, was in the driveway. When I opened the front door, Myron called out, “Mickey?”

“Homework,” I said, hurrying into my bedroom in the basement to avoid him. For many years, including his stint in high school, the basement had been Myron’s bedroom. Nothing in it had changed since. The wood paneling was flimsy and stuck on with two-sided tape. There was a beanbag chair that leaked small pellets. Faded posters of basketball greats from the 1970s, guys like John “Hondo” Havlicek and Walt “Clyde” Frazier, adorned the walls. I confess that I loved the posters. Most of the room was like lame retro. But nobody was cooler than Hondo and Clyde.

I did my math homework. I don’t dislike math, but is there anything more boring than math homework? I read a little Oscar Wilde for English and practiced vocabulary for French. When I was done, I grilled myself a cheeseburger on the barbecue.

Had Mrs. Kent lied to me? And why?

I couldn’t fathom a reason, which led immediately to the next question.

Had Ashley lied to me? And why?

I tried to run through the possibilities in my brain, but nothing came to me. With dinner over, I grabbed the basketball, flipped on the outdoor lights, and started to shoot. I play every day. I do my best thinking when I shoot hoops.

The court is my escape and my paradise.

I love basketball. I love the way you can be exhausted and sweaty and running with nine other guys, and yet, at the risk of sounding overly Zen, you are still so wonderfully alone. On the court, nothing bothers me. I see things a few seconds before they actually happen. I love anticipating a teammate’s cut and then throwing a bounce pass between two defenders. I love the rebound, boxing out, figuring angles and positioning myself, willing the ball into my hands. I love dribbling without looking down, the feel, the sense of trust, of control, almost as though the ball were on a leash. I love catching the pass, locking my eyes on the front rim, sliding my fingers into the grooves, raising the ball above my head, cocking my wrist as I begin to leap. I love the feel as I release the shot at the apex of the jump, the way my fingertips stay on the leather until the last possible moment, the way I slowly come back to the ground, the way the ball moves in an arc toward the rim, the way the bottom of the net dances when the ball goes
swish
.

I moved now around the blacktop, taking shots, grabbing my own rebounds, moving to another spot. I played games in my head, pretending LeBron or Kobe or even Clyde and Hondo were covering me. I took foul shots, hearing the sportscaster in my head announcing that I, Mickey Bolitar, had two foul shots and my team was down by one and there was no time left on the clock and it was game seven of the NBA Finals.

I let myself get deliriously lost in the bliss.

I had been shooting for an hour when the back door opened. Uncle Myron came out. He didn’t say a word. He moved under the basket and started grabbing rebounds and passing the ball back to me. I moved through the shots in around-the-world fashion, starting in the right corner and moving to my left, taking a shot every yard or so, until I ended up in the opposite corner.

Myron just rebounded for me. He got it, the need for silence right now. This, in a sense, was our church. We understood respect. So for a while he let it go. When I signaled that I wanted to take a break, he spoke for the first time.

“Your father used to do this for me,” Myron said. “I would shoot. He would rebound.”

My father had done the same for me too, but I didn’t feel like sharing that.

Myron’s eyes welled up. They well up a lot. Myron was overly emotional. He was always trying to raise the subject of my father with me. We would drive past a Chinese restaurant and he’d say, “Your father loved the pork fried dumplings here,” or we’d go past the Little League field and he’d say, “I remember when your father hit a ground-rule double when he was nine to win a game.”

I never responded.

“One night,” Myron went on, “your father and I played a game of horse that went on for three hours. Think about that. We finally agreed to call it a draw when we both had H-O-R-S for thirty straight minutes. Thirty straight minutes. You should have seen it.”

“Sounds epic,” I said in my flattest monotone.

Myron laughed. “God, you’re a wiseass.”

“No, no, a game of horse. You and Dad must have been party animals.”

Myron laughed some more and then we fell into silence. I started for the door when he said, “Mickey?”

I turned toward him.

“I’ll drive you and your mom tomorrow morning. Then I’ll leave you two alone.”

I nodded a thanks.

Myron grabbed the basketball and started shooting. It was his escape too. Not long ago, I found an old clip of his injury on YouTube. Myron was wearing a Boston Celtics jersey with the horrible short-shorts they wore in those days. He’d been pivoting on his right leg when Burt Wesson, a bruiser on the Washington Bullets, slammed into him. Myron’s leg bent in a way it was never supposed to. You could hear the snap even in the old video.

I watched him another second or two, noticing the startling similarities in the release on our jump shots. I started to go back into the house when a thought made me pause. After his injury Myron became a sports agent. That’s how my parents met—Myron was going to represent the teen tennis sensation Kitty Hammer, aka my mother. Eventually Myron branched out to represent not just athletes but people in the arts, theater, and music. He even repped rock star Lex Ryder, half of the duo that made up the group HorsePower.

Mom had known HorsePower. So had Dad. Myron represented them. And Bat Lady had their first album, which had to be thirty years old now, on her turntable.

I turned back to Myron. He stopped shooting and looked back at me. “What’s wrong?”

“Do you know anything about the Bat Lady?” I asked.

He frowned. “The old house on the corner of Pine and Hobart Gap?”

“Yes.”

“Wow. Bat Lady. She has to be long dead.”

“What makes you say that?”

“I don’t know. I can’t believe kids still make up stories about her.”

“What kind of stories?”

“She was like the town bogeyman,” he said. “Supposedly she kidnapped children. People claimed they saw her bringing children to her house late at night, stuff like that.”

“Did you ever see her?” I asked.

“Me? No.” Myron spun the ball on his fingers, staring at it a little too intently. “But I think your father did.”

I wondered if this was yet another attempt by Myron to bring up my father, but no, that didn’t seem to be Myron’s style. He was a lot of things, my uncle, but he wasn’t a liar.

“Can you tell me about it?”

I could see that Myron wanted to ask why, but he also didn’t want to ruin the moment. I didn’t talk to him much and never about my dad. He didn’t want to risk me clamming back up. “I’m trying to think,” he said, rubbing his chin. “Your dad must have been twelve, maybe thirteen, I don’t remember. Anyway, we walked past that house our whole lives. You know the stories about it already, and you’ve lived here only a few weeks. So you can imagine. One time, your father and I, we were young then, he was maybe seven, I was twelve or so, we went to a horror movie at the Colony and we decided to walk back. It got dark and started to rain and we walked past some older kids. They chased us and started yelling how the Bat Lady was going to get us. Your father was so scared he started to cry.”

Myron stopped and looked off. He was fighting off tears again.

“After that night, your dad was always afraid of the Bat Lady’s house. I mean, like I said, we were all creeped out, but your father didn’t even want to walk past it. He had nightmares about the house. I remember he went to a sleepover party and he woke up screaming about the Bat Lady coming to get him. The kids teased him about it. You know how it is.”

I nodded that I did.

“So one Friday night, Brad is out with friends. That’s what we used to do back then. We’d just hang out at night. So anyway, it’s getting dark and they’re bored, so one thing leads to another and the friends challenge Brad to knock on Bat Lady’s door. He doesn’t want to, but your father was not one to lose face.”

“So what happened next?”

“He approached Bat Lady’s house. It was pitch dark. No lights were on. His friends stayed across the street. They figured he’d knock and then run. Well, he knocked, but he didn’t run. His friends all waited to see if Bat Lady answered the door. But that’s not what happened. Instead they saw your father turn the knob and go inside.”

I almost gasped. “On his own?”

“Yep. He disappeared inside, and his friends waited for him to come out. They waited a long time. But he didn’t come back. After a while, they figured that Brad was playing a trick on them. You know. The house was empty, so all Brad did was sneak out the back—trying to scare them by not coming out.”

I took a step closer to Myron. “So what did happen?”

“One of your dad’s old friends, Alan Bender, well, he didn’t buy that. So when your dad didn’t show up for two hours, he was terrified. He ran to our house to get help or at least tell someone. I remember he was out of breath and all wide eyed. I was out back here shooting, just like, well, tonight. Alan told me that he saw Brad go into Bat Lady’s house and that he didn’t come out.”

“Were Grandma and Grandpa home?”

“No, they were out to dinner. It was a Friday night. We didn’t have cell phones back then. So I ran back with Alan. I started pounding on Bat Lady’s door, but there was no answer. Alan said that he saw your dad just turn the knob and walk in. So I tried that, but the door was locked now. From inside, I thought I could hear music playing.”

“Music?”

“Yeah. It was weird. I started freaking out. I tried to kick in the door, if you could believe it, but it held. I told Alan to run to the neighbor’s house and have them call the police. So Alan takes off. And just as he does, the front door opens and your father walks out. Just like that. He looks so serene. I ask him if he’s okay. He says, sure, fine.”