Til the Real Thing Comes Along (27 page)

“Back in an hour, Fred,” Rand Malcolm said to Mr. Samuels. “Taking my boy to lunch.”

Lunch at the Santa Barbara Biltmore was a chicken sandwich and no conversation. And Davey, sitting silently across the table
from his father, whose mind was a million miles away, remembered all the times he’d been in that same dining room for lunch
with his father and Lily together, and the way the waiters had fluttered all around her. And the way the chatter was nonstop,
about everything they had seen from the airplane on the way up, and about everything they were going to explore around Santa
Barbara, or about’ what they had planned for that evening or tomorrow. How happy they had all been.

This time, after lunch there was a walk on the pier together to take a closer look at the ocean. The sun was hot and Davey
wished he could take off his blazer and tie—maybe even all of his clothes and play in the surf. In the ocean. Or maybe not.
The ocean was where that brown bag was that had his mother in it. Maybe the ocean water would make his mother come alive again.
Like those ads in the back of comic books for what looked like baby sea horses,
INSTANT LIFE
, the ad said,
JUST ADD WATER
. The ocean should certainly add enough water to whatever it was in the bag to bring his mother back. Davey looked out toward
the horizon, but sadly there was no sign of his mother.

“Time to get badk, fella,” his father said, and took his hand as they walked back toward the hotel, where a limousine was
waiting to take them back to the airport.

A lot of people were waiting at their house in Hancock Park. The people had come to visit and tell his father how sorry they
were about Lily’s death. The house was filled with them. There were some faces Davey knew, like Uncle Jackie Welles and his
wife and maybe one of his ex-wives.
Two of Davey’s mother’s brothers, Uncle Phil and Uncle Pat, and some ladies who used to play golf with his mother. And pretty
Aunt Norma, who was in some of the movies with his mother and on television every now and then. And there were a few of the
men from Rainbow Paper.

Poor little Davey. At least twenty people said that. Some said it to his face when they came over to give him a hug; some
just said it behind his back but he heard them anyway. He heard every word they said: Looks just like her. What in God’s name
will Mal do with a five-year-old? Six. Turned six today. Some birthday. Poor little thing. Mal will probably remarry just
to get him a mother. Not Mal. Didn’t marry Lily ’til he was thirty-eight. God I hate to say this before the body’s even cold
but I know a woman who would be perfect for him. Who wouldn’t be? With his money? She’ll have to get in line. That poor little
boy. Look, he’s crying, and that dark-haired woman is comforting him. Isn’t that sweet? She was Lily’s laundress. Really?
Hmm. I need a good laundress. Wonder what she’ll be doing now.

Late that night he sat on his bed, wondering what would happen to him. Would his father go out and get another wife right
away? Were you allowed to do that? And would Davey have to call the woman Mother? Probably. Uncle Jackie Welles had had three
wives just since Davey was born, and a few before that, and Davey was expected to call them each Aunt so-and-so. One was Helen
and one was Arlys and one was Lulu, but Davey never could remember which was which so he was never sure what to call them.
And the funny part was that Uncle Jackie, who sometimes tried all three names before he got the right one that belonged to
whoever his wife was now, wasn’t sure either. No. Davey would refuse to call anybody else Mother. He would tell his father
that right off the bat.

No, he wouldn’t. His father was so busy all the time, and he ruffled Davey’s hair and called him “fella” on those nights when
they sat down at dinner together, and he brought him toy trucks and cars from everywhere in the world, but still it was never
easy just to go up to him and say something important like
Don’t get married to someone else,
or to ask him a question like
What was in the bag you threw off the airplane?
or
What are you going to do about me?
Davey decided he would have to think of some other way
to find out what his father’s plans were. But just as he turned on his tummy to go to sleep, the bedroom door opened. Only
a crack at first, but when Davey turned to see who was there, a voice said, “You’re awake,” and then the door opened wider
to reveal his father standing in the doorway.

“Just came to say hello,” Rand Malcolm said. His voice sounded hoarse, as if he’d been coughing a lot, or crying. Davey didn’t
answer, and his father came into the room and sat at the end of his son’s bed. He was wearing a white open shirt and carrying
a glass of wine. The light from the moon made his face look as white as his shirt, and he sat quietly for so long that Davey
thought maybe he was going to just sit there all night and never say anything. Davey was getting really sleepy, but he didn’t
know how to ask his father to leave. Finally the man spoke.

“You’ll go to boarding school,” he said.

Davey said nothing, but he was screaming inside.
No, I won’t. I want my mother back.
It wasn’t that he was so used to being with his mother. Lily had gone on many trips with his father when Davey had stayed
home with Yona and Rico, but always he could get through those times because he knew that soon Lily would come flying through
the front door, her arms already extended to hug him. She’d be carrying a shopping bag over her arm filled with dozens of
gift-wrapped goodies, and she would sit down with Davey and unwrap each one and squeal with delight as they did, as if
she
were the one who hadn’t seen each toy before. But this time she wasn’t coming back and he would have to go to boarding school.
The thought filled him with fear.

His father put the empty wineglass on the floor, got to his feet, walked to the window for a minute, and leaned on the molding
around it, looking down at the front lawn the way he had looked out of the airplane this morning. As if he wished he was jumping
instead of looking. Davey put part of the satin end of his blanket into his mouth and bit down hard on it to keep himself
from crying. What would become of him? Why was he even alive? If he could be dead, he would be able to be where all dead people
go and find Lily there. Then he remembered the brown bag. Thrown into the ocean. The deep part. Maybe he would think more
about it in the morning.

“Let’s both get some sleep,” his father said.

Davey pulled the edge of the blanket out of his mouth just long enough to say good-night

KIDNAP SUSPECTED IN MALCOLM BOY’S DISAPPEARANCE. BILLIONAIRE MALCOLM’S HEIR STILL MISSING AFTER FOUR DAYS. MALCOLM KEEPS VIGIL
WHILE HUNT FOR BOY CONTINUES.

Edie, the switchboard girl at the Los Angeles offices of Rainbow Paper, sat reading the newspapers. It wasn’t that she was
dying to keep reading those articles about the Malcolm kid. Frankly it was just that she was bored. The phones hadn’t been
ringing at all for the last few days. Probably, people were afraid to call. I mean, what was there to say about all this,
after all? The kid was gone. At first the boss figured he must have run away on account of being shook up because of the mother
dying and all. But after a while they had to rule that idea out, ’cause let’s face it, the kid is six years old. And how far
can a six-year-old run? Well, since then, police and detectives had been around every minute of every day. Asking everyone
questions, including Edie. As if she’d ever have something to do with a kidnapping, for God’s sake.

Well, if ever there was a kid to kidnap, that rich little brat was a prime candidate. The only heir to the Malcolm fortune,
and Mr. Mal feeling so vulnerable after his fancy movie star wife kicks the bucket. Well, another day another dollar, Edie
thought, yawning and looking at the wall dock. Six forty-nine. Eleven minutes and she could get out of this place. Go home
and make dinner for her kids. Eight to seven was a long day, but she shouldn’t complain. Ben, the guard, had to stay ’til
nine to lock up.

“Hiya, Ben,” Edie said as he walked by her desk.

“Edie,” Ben said, nodding, and continued on down the hall.

The sound of Ben’s keys jingling was always the signal to Davey to hold his breath for as long as he could while Ben made
his rounds in the basement of the building. The basement was where Ben always started, and where Davey had been hiding, he
wasn’t certain for how long, but a couple of days for sure. Davey already had it figured out that within about fifteen minutes
of the guard’s look-around
down there, during which Davey hid behind some big filing cabinets that the company was storing, Ben would be finished checking
the other floors. Then at last he would lock the building from the outside and go home. That was when Davey could do what
he’d been doing for the last four nights, which was to hurry up to the kitchen next to the executive dining room, tear open
the refrigerator, and eat all the leftovers from the lunch the men had eaten earlier. He worried if Lena the cook noticed
that her carefully sealed Tupperware containers had been raided, but he wasn’t worried enough to stay away from the yummy
cold lasagna or the tangy lemon chicken that he’d wolfed down the minute he was certain the building was empty.

Davey had planned to run away much farther than this. Maybe to another country, or New York or someplace… but he didn’t have
any money, and he wasn’t sure if they’d sell an airline ticket to a six-year-old, and it took him only an hour and a half
to walk from his house to the Rainbow Paper building, where nobody even noticed him come in. And there was food there, so
there was no reason to go anyplace else until he figured out what he was going to do. Only that could take forever, because
he didn’t have a choice. Boarding school. He hated his father—that was all he knew for sure. And he knew his father hated
him too. Wished he wasn’t stuck with poor little Davey, which was what everyone had been calling him since his mother got
sick. The only thing about this running away that he wasn’t sure about was just how bad it would make his father feel.

After all, if his father wanted to get rid of him in the first place, send him off to school, maybe when he found Davey’s
bed empty on Tuesday morning and Davey nowhere in sight, maybe he was glad. Red glad, and never even mentioned it to anybody.
Just went about his business, going to the office and to meetings, maybe even flying to Chicago, hoping Davey wouldn’t come
back at all. That thought made Davey’s stomach hurt, because if he couldn’t go back to his father’s house on Rossmore, where
could he go?

Today’s lunch was meat loaf and the men must not have liked it very much ’cause there was a lot left over. Davey was happy
about that because he was starving, and he washed several slices down with a Coke. While he drank he looked around the huge
stainless-steel kitchen, remembering
when Lily used to bring him to the executive dining room to “visit Daddy,” and how Lena and the other kitchen help would fuss
over him and bring him back to the kitchen later for an extra scoop of ice cream and say to one another: “Isn’t he the picture
of Mrs. M? Same red hair, same freckles. A handsome one.” And Lily would always beam and say, “Thank you. We’re a little bit
crazy about him around our house.” And the help would all laugh and smile at that. Lily. His mommy. He missed her so much.

When he’d finished his Coke he did what he always did next, and that was to tiptoe into his father’s office, sit in the huge
room—which was lit, off and on, by the neon sign on the building next door to the Rainbow Paper building—in Rand Malcolm’s
big chair behind the desk. And he would turn on the television set that sat on the shelf next to the desk. It was eight o’clock.
First he watched
Adventures of Jim Bowie.
Then he watched
The Life Of Riley.
Then he put his face down on his father’s desk and fell asleep. In his dream he was with his mother, playing in the swimming
pool, splashing and paddling back and forth the way they did lots of times, only now Davey looked around and didn’t see his
mother anywhere. She wasn’t sitting on her favorite lounge chair, or anywhere around the pool that he could see. So he held
his nose and dove underneath the water, and there she was, sitting cross-legged at the bottom of the pool, just pretty and
smiling as if that was the place she always sat. “Mom,” he told her, “you can’t sit here. You can’t just stay underwater,
because people can’t be underwater and stay alive,” and she just nodded and smiled as if to say
I know,
and then he remembered that she didn’t have to worry about staying alive because she was already dead, and he started to
cry. And he was still crying when the funny choppy music they played to introduce the eleven o’clock news came on and woke
him up.

Eleven o’clock. Usually long before this time he was back downstairs and curled up behind the filing cabinets, because he
knew that some time after midnight the all-night cleaning crew came to the offices and he had to get out before then. “Two
die, forty are injured as Springfield, Illinois, is hit by a tornado. Actress Ava Gardner sues Frank Sinatra for divorce.
And in Los Angeles, the son of millionaire industrialist Rand Malcolm is still missing. More after this.” His father. They
had just said something about his
father on television, only… He stared at the commercial and then the newsman came on and said, “Industrialist Rand Malcolm
today called the press to his Hancock Park home and asked that they help him reach the person or people who might be holding
his six-year-old son in custody.” There was Davey’s house. The house on Rossmore was on television and then there was his
father’s face on the screen. For a second, Davey wasn’t even positive it could be his father, because his face looked real
skinny and terrible. Even worse than it looked the other day when he was throwing the paper bag with Lily in it out of the
airplane.

“I want my boy back. Please, don’t hurt my boy,” he said. “You can have anything.” And his voice broke.