He picked up the phone and hesitantly tapped “J.R.,” still his only contact aside from “Home,” “Sara,” and “Thomas.”
“Hello?” J.R. answered on the first ring.
“Mr. J.R.?” Ryan said nervously “it’s me, Ryan.”
“Hey buddy!” J.R. yelled, completely taken by surprise. “How are you? It’s been a long time.”
“Good,” Ryan said. “Sara and Thomas are nice. You were right about them.”
An awkward pause followed the reference to J.R.’s unexplained prescience in their last conversation. Ryan wasn’t ready to divulge that he now knew about AVEX and that J.R. was on his board of directors. And J.R., from his perspective, didn’t want Ryan to think of him as an insider — or anything other than a trusted family friend.
“Have you ever met them?” Ryan asked.
“No, I haven’t gotten a chance to,” J.R. said. “But the headmistress at the orphanage told me all about them. So what have you been up to?”
“Not much,” Ryan answered out of habit. “Well, actually that’s not really true any more. I’ve been doing a lot. My nanny’s teaching me Spanish, I’m taking swimming lessons, and I’m learning fourth grade math!”
“Awesome!” J.R. said enthusiastically.
“Yeah, things are a lot better,” Ryan said, relieved he still had J.R. to talk to. It was comforting — whatever his role was with Avillage.
“You looking forward to school this year?” J.R. asked.
“Yeah. I guess. But I’m not going to know anyone.”
“So what grade are you going to be in this year?”
“Second! You knew that!” Ryan exclaimed, unaware that his meeting with the school counselor that had been rescheduled from that afternoon to the following day was to finalize his grade placement.
“That’s what I thought,” J.R. answered defensively. “I just hadn’t heard yet.”
Hadn’t heard yet? Ryan thought to himself. That’s a weird thing to say. Another awkward pause followed.
“Well buddy, it was great to talk to you. I’ve missed you. I’m gonna let you go. Let’s not make it so long till our next talk,” J.R. said, trying to wrap things up.
“OK,” Ryan said softly, now more certain than ever that his relationship with J.R. could never be what it had been. J.R. was hiding too much from him. Was he trying to protect him? Looking out for him behind the scenes? Hoping to profit from him? Ryan almost wanted to call him on it right then and there and live with the consequences — either an honest friendship or nothing — but he couldn’t bring himself to do it. He had another idea.
“And Mr. J.R.?” Ryan said.
“Yeah, buddy?”
“Thanks. For everything,” Ryan said with a sincerity and a finality in his voice that suggested this might be his last chance to say it. Whatever J.R.’s motives were, things were going better than he’d imagined they could have a few months ago; he wanted to thank him for that.
He then held the phone down slightly and yelled out, “What?… OK. Be right down.” He brought the phone back up to his ear and said, “I gotta go. Got soccer practice.”
“Soccer?!” J.R. blurted out, unnaturally alarmed.
“Talk to you soon,” Ryan said and hastily hung up the phone.
Sara and Thomas had been unable to give a coherent reason why he had been forbidden from playing soccer in the fall. And the idea to play in the first place had been all theirs. They were absolutely resolute with their decision, yet they seemed almost more disappointed than he was that he couldn’t play. Something hadn’t seemed right.
When the phone rang a few hours later, Ryan was indulging in the thirty minutes of TV he was allowed on weekdays. The caller ID popped up on the screen, “Private Caller: New York, NY.”
This is it, he thought.
Adjusting the TV volume just slightly down so as not to draw attention, but to increase his chances of overhearing something, he crept out of the living room and tiptoed toward the cracked door of Thomas and Sara’s room.
Inside he could hear a voice that was clearly Sara’s, but the words were too soft to make out. As the conversation continued though, her tone changed, and her voice grew louder.
“What?” he heard her snap indignantly. “No!… What are you talking about?… He should be playing. He’s going to a new school where he isn’t going to know a soul, but you wouldn’t sign the permission slip, God knows why!”
He could have heard most of that from the couch.
It wasn’t the one he wanted, but, slinking back to the living room, he had his answer. At least Sara and Thomas were firmly on his side, but it seemed they were the only ones. And they didn’t appear to have much more power than he did.
CHAPTER 5
“Happy birthday to you,” Sara sang blissfully off-key as she backed into Ryan’s bedroom, balancing a breakfast tray in front of her loaded with a three-inch stack of pancakes planted with 5 flickering candles, a gravy boat of warm maple syrup and a tall glass of orange juice. Thomas followed closely behind, camera at the ready, and managed to rapid-fire several unflattering pictures of a bleary-eyed Ryan just waking from a sound sleep.
Ryan celebrated two birthdays each year. One, his traditional birthday, was in March to mark the day of his birth. The other was in June to commemorate the day he’d come home from the orphanage to live with the Ewings. For lack of established celebratory vocabulary to mark the occasion, they had settled on calling this one simply his “other birthday.”
“Thanks, Mom,” Ryan said groggily to Sara, eyeing the breakfast tray. “And thanks a lot, Dad,” He sneered at Thomas. “That’s gonna be a keeper.”
“No problem, bud,” Thomas smirked. “I tried to get your good side.”
Ryan blew out the candles, as his sleepy eyes were blinded by another flash from Thomas’s camera
“Now hurry up and get dressed,” Thomas said, trying not to laugh at the pictures he was scrolling through on his digital camera. “Our tee time’s in 45 minutes.”
Sara peered over Thomas’s shoulder. “You have got to put that one on the digital frame!” she snickered, as they turned to leave Ryan’s room.
Ryan sat up in his bed and ate his breakfast as he watched the pictures scroll on his bedside frame.
Joyful pictures of his early years with his birth parents gave way to somber pictures of a melancholy 7-year-old who seemed to have aged far more than the three months that had passed between his two homes. But gradually, as the photos continued to roll on, his smile returned.
His eighth birthday had been a family affair with Sara and Thomas and both sets of grandparents in attendance. That was followed by his first “other birthday” blowout that saw his entire extended family in attendance. Ryan’s beaming face fronted a sea of first and second degree relatives, arranged by height and age behind him, curling all the way up the grand staircase of the Ewing’s foyer.
As an eight-year-old, he was pictured smiling sheepishly in a Speedo with his swim team, taking his first golf lessons (with the board’s blessing,) and soaking up the sun with his parents on vacation in Mexico. At nine, he posed behind an oversized $35,000.00 check from the E.W. Scripps Company made out to Ryan Tyler Ewing, the youngest winner in National Spelling Bee history. He had been told the money would be going into a college fund, but he figured most of it was probably heading to the Avillage board. It hadn’t really bothered him; he had way more than most kids, and that wouldn’t be life-changing money for him anyway. What had bothered him deeply though was that he’d been forbidden from defending his title the following year, without explanation.