Boy Nobody: A Novel by Allen Zadoff

Author:Allen Zadoff
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9780316199681
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2013-03-17T16:00:00+00:00

A HALF DOZEN PICTURES OF HER MOTHER ARE FRAMED ON THE DRESSER.

There are more on the wall by her bed. Some show her mother alone; others show her posed with different family members.

“Your mom’s everywhere,” I say.

Is this why she brought me here? To show me this?

“It’s good for me to have her pictures around,” she says.

People keep photos of those they love. It comforts them. I know this, but I don’t understand it. Not really.

“Why is it good?” I say.

“I feel like a part of her is here with me.”

“A part of her. Is that enough?”

“Sometimes it is. And other times—”

She picks up one of the pictures. She’s four or five years old in the photo, holding hands with her mother.

“You don’t have pictures from your childhood?” Sam says.

“Not like you do.”

One of the photos on the dresser catches my attention. Sam stands in a desert next to a young man in combat fatigues with an Uzi on his shoulder.

Not just any young man.

The same one I saw in the picture of Sam at her mother’s funeral on the computer in the school library. The soldier who seemed to be staring at her.

“Who’s this?” I say.

“Just some soldier. It was a photo op when we visited the Negev.”

“A tourist thing, huh?”

“Exactly. What’s a trip to Israel without a cool picture of a soldier with a gun?”

He’s not just some soldier. He’s in two separate photos with Sam taken at different times.

Which means she’s lying to me.

The question is why.

I pick up the photo and tension immediately forms around her lips.

It’s subtle, but I see it.

Sam is maybe thirteen or fourteen in the photo, the hint of a young girl still in her face. The soldier next to her is fierce looking. He is around nineteen. Dark complexion, curly hair.

I recognize something about him.

Maybe it’s his eyes. They’re hard, like a soldier’s.

“You’re really into that picture,” Sam says. She’s nervous. I hear it in her voice.

“You look so young,” I say.

“I was a babe in the woods. Actually, a babe in the desert.”

“I noticed that. Looks like the soldier did, too.”

Suddenly the nervousness is gone. She comes forward and takes the photo out of my hands.

“Are you jealous, Ben?”

“Of course I am. I wish I knew you back then.”

“I wish you did, too,” she says.

She puts the photo away and sits down on her bed. I sit next to her.

“All these pictures of your mother,” I say. “Can I ask how she—”

“You didn’t read about it?” she says.

“The paper and reality are two different things.”

She hesitates, like there’s something she wants to talk about, but she stops herself.

She says, “It was an accident. She was driving, and she got hit. It happened when we were in Israel.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Nothing to be sorry about. Life is like that.”

“Filled with accidents?”

“Unfair,” she says.

I think of the last time I was in my father’s office at the university. He’d gone to a meeting and left me there for safekeeping. I sat on the sofa

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