I filled her in on what I knew. When I finished, I said, “Can I ask you a personal question?”
“Sure.”
“Are you and Troy…?”
“No. You of all people should understand.”
“Understand what?”
“He loves basketball like you love basketball.”
And it had been taken away from him in his final year. Troy was maybe good enough to play college, get a scholarship even, and now it was all gone.
“Do you think he did it?” I asked.
“Took steroids?”
“Yeah,” I said. “He says he was set up.”
“Is that possible?” Rachel asked.
“I don’t know. You know him”-ugh-“well. I want your opinion.”
“Why do you care what I think?” she asked.
“Because he asked me to investigate it.”
Rachel’s eyes widened. “What?”
“Troy wants me to prove that the test was wrong or fixed or whatever.”
“You?”
“My reaction exactly.”
She shook her head. “Wow.”
“So?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I never knew him to cheat. He was overly competitive, for sure. He has a lot of pressure on him and, yeah, maybe he’s been acting out more. But a cheater? I don’t think so.”
Ema came out and Rachel went in. A few minutes later, Rachel exited the room. We were all going to leave together, but I told them that I needed to stay behind with Spoon for a while. They understood and started home.
I entered Spoon’s room nervously, but he immediately put me at ease. We laughed a lot. Life was funny, I thought. The most poignant moments always ended up being the most mixed. I had a great time with Spoon even while my heart broke. Laughter can be more intense when it’s blended with tears.
It was getting late, but I didn’t want to leave him. I texted Uncle Myron and explained what was going on. He understood: I’ll pick you up when you’re done. Don’t worry about the hour.
I told him not to wait up-that I’d walk-and then I turned off the phone before he could argue. Time passed. Spoon put a sitcom on the television. At some point, I realized that he had stopped speaking, which was something that never happened. I turned toward him.
Spoon had fallen asleep.
I watched him. Lots of emotions passed through me. I didn’t stop or analyze them. I just let them flow through. I felt my eyes grow heavy. I decided that I would close them for a minute, no more, and then I would make sure Spoon was okay and head home. That was my plan anyway. Rest the eyes for a second.
I don’t know how much time passed. It may have been an hour. It may have been more. I was dreaming about the car accident that killed my father, the sound of brakes screeching, the crunch of impact, the way my body flew. I saw my father lying on the ground, bleeding, his eyes closed, and that paramedic, that damn paramedic with the sandy-blond hair and green eyes, meeting my eye…
A hand touched my shoulder.
“Mickey?”
My blood went cold. I jerked awake. I was back in Spoon’s hospital room. It was dark. He was asleep. The hand was still on my shoulder. I turned in my chair and looked up at the silhouette of the nurse. Except of course it wasn’t a nurse. I knew that the moment I heard her voice.
It was the Bat Lady.
CHAPTER 16
I had a million questions to ask her.
Bat Lady kept her hand on my shoulder. The hand was bony with liver spots and thick veins. I knew that she had to be well into her eighties by now. She looked it. And I knew that I should stop thinking of her as Bat Lady. Her real name was Elizabeth “Lizzy” Sobek. Her whole family died during the Holocaust, but young Lizzy had saved a group of children from certain death in a Polish concentration camp. After that, the famous teen became a resistance fighter against the Nazi occupation.
No one heard from her again.
Most history books believe that she’d been killed during World War II.
Most history books are wrong.
“Are you okay?” I asked her.
The last time I was in her house, the sandy-haired man with the green eyes burned it to the ground. I had not seen her since.
“I’m fine,” she said.
She loomed over me, looking larger and stronger than she had in the past. Maybe that was because she had traded in her tattered, long white nightgown for hospital scrubs. The gray hair that normally flowed down past her shoulders was tied into a bun.
She made her way toward the front of Spoon’s bed and checked his chart. Her face looked grim.
“Can’t you do something?” I asked. “He can’t walk.”
“I’m not a doctor, Mickey.”
“But can’t you…?”
“No,” she said. She moved toward Spoon’s head. She reached down and smoothed back his hair. “I’m sorry.”
“That’s not good enough.”
“It never is.”
“It’s our fault,” I said.
“Perhaps.” She turned toward me. “We save many, but there is always a cost.”
I gestured toward the bed. “He shouldn’t be the one to pay for it.”
She almost smiled. “Do you want to lecture me about how life isn’t fair, Mickey?”
“No, ma’am.” I shifted in the chair. “Where have you been?”
“That’s not important.” She looked down at Spoon. “He’s meant for great things, you know.”
“So he’s going to be okay?”
“I didn’t say that.” She turned toward me. “My house is gone.”
“The paramedic. He burned it down.”
“I know.”
“He tried to kill me.”
She didn’t respond to that.
“I still don’t understand.” I opened up the drawer next to Spoon’s bed and pulled out the old black-and-white picture. “Why did you give me this?”
She didn’t respond to that either.
“You told me that it’s the Butcher of Lodz from World War Two,” I said, trying to control my anger. “But that’s not who it is at all. I mean, the body is, I guess. But the face… that’s the paramedic who told me that my dad was dead. Why did you give this to me?”
“The Butcher of Lodz killed my family,” she said.
“I know.”
“This man,” she said. “He is your Butcher.”
I shook my head. “So he’s, what, my enemy?”
She said nothing.
“And I still don’t get why you put his face on this body.”
“It was,” she said, “a test.”
“How so?”
“I wanted to see your reaction. I needed to see if you were on our side. Or his.”
“Wait, you’re not making any sense. Who is he?”
“The last time you were in my house, you went upstairs, yes?”
I nodded.
“You saw the Hall of the Rescued.”
“Is that what you call it?”
“You saw it?”
I had seen it. When I went up the stairs of the old house, the hallway had been blanketed with pictures of children and teenagers. Hundreds, thousands, maybe tens of thousands. They’d been everywhere, crawling up both walls, clinging to the ceiling. There were layers upon layers of them. Some were black and white. Some were color. There were so many of them, you couldn’t find the walls or the ceiling.
Only photographs of the children.
Missing children. Check that: rescued children.
“The pictures were burned in the fire,” I said.
“I know.”
“I still don’t get it,” I said. “What do the pictures have to do with the guy?”
“If you’d had the chance to study the hall closer,” she said, “you might have found a photograph of a sandy-haired little boy with green eyes.”
I frowned. “He was one of the children you rescued?”
“Not me,” she said.
“Then who?”
She just looked at me.
“My father?”
She didn’t answer. She didn’t have to.
“My father rescued this guy?” I opened my mouth but no words came out. I closed it and then tried again. “But now he’s my enemy?”
“He is,” she said slowly, “worse than that.”