Miracle on 49th Street (6 page)

“Will he call your cell?”

“Probably,” Sam said. “I'll just explain that we're in the players' lot hiding out by Cameron's car.”

“Hey,” Molly said, “why do you think I called it Plan C? Cameron's car. All Cs.”

“That's great, Mols. No kidding. I can't tell you how impressed I am.”

Then Molly told him to hush, here came Josh Cameron now.

He was carrying the same bag he'd had with him the day before. Wearing the same leather jacket and a yellow baseball cap.

“Way to go, J.C.,” the first guard said.

“It's all good,” Josh Cameron said.

Molly and Sam both jumped when he did the remote thing and they heard the doors unlock and the car engine start.

“Well, that scared the—” Sam said.

Molly whispered, “You don't have time to be scared. You're on.”

“You didn't tell me acting would be this much work.”

He didn't move, though. Just stayed where he was, crouched down. Molly had to admit he did look a little like a frog in that pose.

“Go,” Molly said. “Before he drives off on me again.”

And just like that, like the car alarm that had gone off a few minutes before when Terry Thompson, the backup point guard, had hit the wrong button on his own remote, Sam Bloom said, “Oh my God…Josh CAMERON!” Walking around from the back of the Navigator to the driver's side.

“Good grief, kid, you nearly scared the—” Josh Cameron stopped himself right there. “What do you think you're doing out here at this time of night?”

In the distance, Molly could hear the guard say, “Aw, man, I'm sorry, J.C. That kid gave me some story about his sister a while ago and musta snuck by me.”

“I got it, Bob,” Josh said. “No worries.”

“Don't make me go yet,” Sam said. “I have been waiting sooooo long for you.”

He sounded like Kimmy, Molly thought.

“It's official,” Josh said. “I am now going for the record of kids sneaking up on me in parking lots this week.”

Like he was talking to himself.

“I didn't mean to sneak up on you like this,” Sam said. “But I'm your biggest fan, and you've got to sign something for me. Please!”

That was Molly's cue.

“Please please please!” Sam said.

She opened the door and climbed into the backseat and, as quietly as she could, as quietly as anybody ever could, shut the door behind her.

She got her eyes just above the window, saw that Josh's back was to her, and then dove into the way-back of his Navigator.

Her ride home.

T
he papers always just said that Josh Cameron lived somewhere in the Back Bay section of Boston, which Molly knew covered a lot of territory. Nobody ever mentioned the street he lived on, not even on any of the Web sites devoted exclusively to him.

The best one, the one where Molly got a lot of her information and found out what his biggest fans were saying about him, was called SonsofCameron.com. It was modeled after a cool Red Sox site that Sam had shown her called SonsofSamHorn.com, which was named after a former Red Sox first baseman who now did some television for them and had fan postings so funny, they would make Molly and Sam laugh out loud.

SonsofCameron.com wasn't as funny, but every time Molly went to it, she thought the same thing: Daughter of Cameron, checking in.

But even they wouldn't talk about his exact address, treating it like some kind of state secret. Out of respect for the Man, the people running the site would write from time to time when somebody asked where Josh lived. For all Molly knew, Josh Cameron could have been living around the corner from the Evanses.

So she didn't know where they were going. She just stayed low, bumping along, hoping he was going straight home, wherever home was, and not out on a date for the rest of the night.

Sam was the one who had brought up the date angle.

“What happens,” he'd said during the game, “if he's meeting one of his girlfriends somewhere? Or picking her up?”

“Girl
friend
,” Molly had said, correcting him. “He's dating the girl from
Worth Avenue.
” It was a new TV show on FOX. “The icky Amanda Ross. And they're shooting right now in Hollywood, I read it on SonsofCameron.”

“Mols,” Sam had said, “I know I have to watch what I say about Mr. Wonderful, but I have a feeling she's not the only one he's dating. So, what if he goes out on a date tonight?”

Molly'd said, “Nobody ever said it was a perfect plan, Sam.”

Please be going straight home, she kept thinking now, even though it was hard to hear herself think the way he had U2 blaring on what she had to admit was a pretty amazing sound system. So amazing that Molly couldn't tell sometimes whether it was the thump of the bass she was hearing, or herself banging against the backseat.

Somehow over the music, she heard his cell phone go off.

He turned down the music.

“Hey,” he said.

Then, “Yeah, I guess it was a pretty cool way to start the season.”

Then, “Another day at the office.”

Another day at the office?

“I miss you, too, baby.”

Had to be the icky Amanda.

Then he talked to her about her show for a few minutes, though he didn't sound all that interested to Molly. Said he'd see her in a couple of weeks. Said he missed her.

Finally, “I love you, too, baby.”

He loved
her
?

Not possible, according to Molly's mom, who said he'd never really loved anybody.

They were going faster now, Molly getting thrown around even more on the curves, wondering if maybe there was one speed limit for Josh Cameron and another for everybody else. When he really gunned the Navigator into one turn—what was this, the Boston version of the Grand Prix?—Molly went hard into the side of the car, bumping her head.

Hard.

She couldn't help herself. It made her yell out, “Ow!”

With the music still down, it was Molly who must have sounded like a car alarm now.

The car swerved, throwing Molly into the opposite inside wall of the car.

“What the—” Josh Cameron yelled. “Who's back there?”

Somehow he got the car under control, slowing it down.

“Who's back there?” he repeated.

No reason to hide anymore. Molly poked her head above the seat in front of her and could see him trying to drive the car and look in his rearview mirror at the same time.

Molly stared at the eyes looking at her from the mirror now.

He didn't look happy.

She smiled anyway.

“Me again,” she said.

“Stowaway brat causes Cameron to lose control of car on Storrow Drive,” he said to himself. He was angry this time. “The media would have had a field day with that one.”

Molly stayed where she was in the way-back, afraid to get any closer to him.

He was still talking to himself, looking at the road in front of him mostly, but occasionally using the mirror to look right at Molly with a mean face.

“Twelve years in the league,” he said. “I go up against Shaq. Don't get hurt. Ewing. Hakeem. Don't get hurt. Now I almost get taken out by a pushy twelve-year-old
girl
.”

“Sorry,” Molly said, her voice sounding squeaky, the way it did when she got nervous, not knowing what else to say at the moment.

“I don't even want to know what you think you're doing, kid,” he said. “I thought we said all we had to say yesterday. I ought to call the police and let them handle this, but I'm not going to. Just tell me where Barbara lives, and I'll take you home.”

Molly didn't say anything.

“Hey,” he said. “I asked you a question.”

It made Molly think of a question of her own.

This jerk is my father?

But she had come this far. She was going to say what she needed to say to him.

“We didn't finish our conversation yesterday,” she said.

He pulled the car over. Molly could see they were on Commonwealth Ave. now, the part between Kenmore Square and the Public Garden, a little park and biking path separating the eastbound and westbound traffic. Josh Cameron turned around and looked at her. For some reason she noticed his cap, which read “Dan Bailey, Livingston, Montana.”

“No, that's where you're wrong, we
did
finish our conversation,” he said. “Maybe you didn't. But I did. It was a nice try on your part. And this is an even nicer try tonight. We need some of the guys off our bench to try as hard as you do.”

Molly rubbed the place where she'd hit her head. She could feel the bump. Josh Cameron hadn't even asked if she was all right.

Molly said, “You don't believe me because you don't want to believe me.”

He whipped off his cap then and threw it down on the backseat.

“This is getting annoying,” he said.

Tell me about it, she thought.

“Here's what I believe,” he said. “I believe you're Jen's daughter. I do. I believe she came up with a story about me being your dad, to explain why she ran off to Europe and never came back. I don't know, maybe she thought there'd be some money in it after she was gone.”

“It wasn't like that,” Molly said.

“But what I don't believe is some sneaky kid off the street showing up out of the blue and telling me I'm her father. And what I don't like is that kid hiding out in my car and nearly causing a stinking accident on my way home from the game.”

“I had to see you again,” Molly said.

Standing her ground, even though she was sitting down.

“For the last time,” he said, “either tell me where you live, or I'm going to drive around the corner to the Ritz, where I happen to be living right now, hand you over to the concierge, and have him deal with you.”

All that work getting to practice, Molly thought. And he was right around the corner after all.

Then she held up the envelope. “She wrote it all down in this letter to me, once she knew I was Googling you on my own. She said I should know the real you and not the one in the newspaper and in magazines.”

“A letter,” Josh said.

“My mom wrote a bunch of letters the last couple of months,” Molly said.

She swallowed hard now, knowing she couldn't cry in front of him but wanting to cry the way she did every single time she pictured Jen Parker in bed, propped up in front of all her pillows, her laptop actually on her lap, typing away. Her mom, who had dreamed about being a figure skater when she was Molly's age, who had been a good enough athlete and a good enough skater and a hard enough worker to have that dream, wasting away before Molly's eyes, like she was shrinking into herself.

“They're about all kinds of stuff,” she said. “Stuff that's already happened. Stuff she thinks is
going
to happen to me as I get older. This one just happens to be about you.”

She figured that would get his attention. Mom had said it always had to be about him.

She went for it now.

“You give me fifteen minutes,” she said, “I'll let you read it.”

“You sound like my agent.”

Molly said, “I didn't know I'd have to.”

She wasn't usually this sarcastic with anybody, particularly adults, but there was something about him that brought it out in her.

“You've got a smart mouth,” he said. “I wonder where you get that from?”

“My mom,” Molly said. “But just the smart part.”

H
e didn't actually live in the hotel part of the old Ritz-Carlton Hotel on Arlington Street. It turned out that there was a side of the Ritz made up of apartments, the awning in front reading “Two Commonwealth.” Josh Cameron pulled up to that door in the Navigator, got out on the street side, handed the parking guy his keys.

Molly climbed into the regular backseat and got out of the car on the street side.

The parking guy didn't notice her at first. He was talking to Josh as the two of them came around toward the entrance.

“We're goin' all the way again, Mr. C,” he said.

“Why the heck not, Lindsay?” Josh said.

Lindsay, in his cap and gray overcoat that had “Ritz-Carlton” written on the front, noticed Molly then.

“This pretty little girl with you, Mr. C?”

“Yeah,” he said, even though it sounded like more of a grunt to Molly.

“What's your name, pretty girl?”

“Molly.”

“And what's your relation to the world's greatest hooper?”

Before Molly could say anything, Josh Cameron said, “Niece.”

Niece, Molly thought.

Nice.

Then an amazing thing happened, even though she knew Josh was doing it just to get her inside. He took her by the hand.

It wasn't the way Molly thought it would be. Or had hoped it would be.

Still, she held her father's hand for the first time in her life.

The apartment, with its view of the park and the lights of the city all around it, was at the penthouse level.

But Molly thought the best view was inside Josh's apartment, not what you saw when you looked out. The longest sofa she had ever seen in her life. The widest television screen. The thickest carpet.

Some of the biggest trophies.

She didn't ask why he was living here, but he told her when they got inside.

“I moved over here while I'm having my townhouse renovated,” he said. “Lock, stock, and Mattie.”

Molly said, “Is Mattie your dog?”

“Nah, even if she treats me like a dog sometimes,” he said. “Mattie is my live-in housekeeper, day planner, den mother. I'd call her my unofficial grandmother, but she's not nice enough to be a grandmother.”

“Why do you keep her around?” Molly said.

“Because she's indispensable,” he said.

“Fascinating,” Molly said.

She couldn't help herself.

“More sarcasm?”

“You bring it out of me.”

“Your mother used to make everything my fault, too,” he said. “Why don't you just give me the letter, before your fifteen minutes are up.”

Molly didn't care how crabby he sounded, she had at least made it from the game to his car to here.

“The kitchen's that way, if you want something to drink,” he said.

“I'm fine.”

She sat down on the long sofa, which was so soft she was afraid she would disappear inside it. It was like she'd sat on some kind of cloud up at the top of the Ritz.

Josh Cameron held out his hand, as if asking her to give back something she'd swiped. “The letter.”

She stood up, walked over, and handed it to him. He handed her the remote for the television set. “Watch TV if you don't want something to drink. Or check out the view. I'll be back in a few.”

He left her in the living room by herself, wondering how many other rooms there were in this place, wondering what Kimmy Evans would say if she knew where Molly was right now.

She thought about calling Sam, but the only thing to tell him at this point was that she was sitting here in Josh Cameron's living room. So she turned on the television, volume down way low, and found the New England Sports Network channel—NESN, as it was known in Boston—and watched the highlights of the Celtics game. For the second time tonight, she saw him doing all the amazing things he'd done to the 76ers. Some of them she felt as if she were watching for the first time, like she'd missed them the first time around, even though she'd been just twenty feet away.

When the woman talking about Josh and the Celtics started showing highlights of other games, she thought about her mom's letter.

She knew what was in it. Knew practically by heart because she'd read it so many times.

Her mom told more in that letter—or maybe just told it better—than she'd ever told Molly about Josh. She started from the time they first met in the bookstore at UConn. She'd asked what a jock was doing in a bookstore, and he'd told her, “I'm not like the other ones. I'm more than a jock.” And how she'd believed that for the longest time, until she began to figure out that he had settled for being a jock because that was the easiest way for him, that was the world he could control.

She kept loving him anyway, even as she felt him slipping away from her, telling her the whole while that he loved her as much as she loved him. As much as he loved basketball.

She finally decided that he would never love anything as much as he loved basketball. Or himself. Or at least the self, her mom wrote, that the world knew.

There was a lot more to it than that.

Later, she found out she was going to have a baby. She never considered telling him, because she could tell by then that a wife and a baby didn't fit his plan—or his image—because his only plan involved the National Basketball Association.

Her mom's parents were both dead by then. She had been planning for junior year abroad, anyway, had given up on Josh Cameron asking her not to go. So she went. She went and took the money she had inherited from her own mom and dad and fell in love with London and never came home.

Jen Parker said that she had planned to tell Molly the whole truth someday, when she was older. Maybe when Molly had become the college girl. But then Jen became sick. By that point Molly had actually figured some things out on her own, even though she didn't know the real surprise until Jen told her, the day she finally admitted that the other dad was made up.

“Sometimes I would tell myself,” her mom wrote, “that Josh couldn't help loving you if he got to know you, even if he's always thought all the love in the world should be directed at him.”

She was watching a taped interview with Josh Cameron when the real thing walked back into the room.

It occurred to her that the Josh she was watching on television was the one she had hoped to meet yesterday, and the one she was still hoping to meet today, even knowing what her mom had told her about him.

It was the Josh Cameron everyone wanted to know and every kid wanted to be.

Then, Molly thought, you actually
did
get to know him.

He had the unfolded pages of the letter in his hand. He used them to point at the television screen.

“Turn me off,” he said. “Please.”

“Only because you said please.”

“Sarcasm again?”

Molly said, “I'm trying to quit.”

“I'm actually a good guy,” he said.

Molly remembered a line Sam liked to use. “Well, you play one on television.”

“I give people the Josh Cameron they want, is all,” he said. “And it's close enough to the real me.”

“Right.”

“Are you going to turn the TV off?”

Molly did.

He went and sat down in the big chair across from the sofa, one that had a UConn blue blanket draped over the back of it. Gave her the big smile from the TV Josh, as if Molly were interviewing him.

“I've got to hand it to you, kid…
Molly
,” he said. “You're good.”

“You've got to hand what to me?”

“Hey, I'm paying you a compliment. You really are good.”

Molly knew this was most definitely
not
good.

Josh said, “This thing sounds just like her. And you obviously remember everything she ever told you about me.”

Molly looked down and saw she still had the TV remote in her hand. She wanted to point it at him now.

Get the real Josh to stop talking.

Instead she said, “You think I wrote the letter.”

Not even bothering to make it into a question.

“We both know you did.” He nodded. “You took what she told you and then you came up with this version of things you want to be and
voilà
! A Dear Josh letter. Though I don't come off too dear in all of it.”

“My mom wrote that letter!”

Molly was yelling at him and didn't care.

“Right.”

“She did!”

“You say in here that she used to say that the hardest thing for me was being honest with myself,” he said. “Okay. I'll buy that. Maybe your mom was right about that. But how honest are you being, kiddo?”

Kiddo now.

Molly felt both her hands squeezing her knees now, as hard as they could. It was like he wanted her to cry. But she wasn't going to give him the satisfaction.

“Jerk,” she said.

“Nah,” he said. “I'm just keeping it real. One of us has to.”

“What's real is that I'm your daughter,” she said, yelling again. “Why don't you get that?”

“Because that's not real,” he said. “No harm, no foul. You took a shot. I've actually got to hand it to you. Not many kids your age would have had the guts to do what you've done the last couple of days.”

Molly didn't know whether it was because he was making her this mad or because she felt so helpless all of a sudden. Helpless, probably. She'd had a lot of helpless in her life lately. Whatever it was—she couldn't help herself now—she felt the tears starting to come.

Even though she only ever cried when she was alone.

She wanted to say something else, but she couldn't, feeling like a jerk herself now, barely able to catch her breath, crying like a big baby.

Josh Cameron stood up. “I'll call downstairs and have them get you a cab.”

Then he crumpled up the pages in his hand, made them into a ball, and fired it across the room and into a wood basket that sat next to an antique desk.

“Nothing but net,” he said.

That was when Molly ran.