Russell Andrews: Icarus

The day started out beautifully for ten-year-old Jack Keller. First, Miss Roebuck, his fifth-grade teacher, was out sick, which meant he had a substitute teacher, which meant he didn't really have to do much work, which meant he could do some serious daydreaming about the Knicks, particularly Willis Reed, whom he pretty much worshiped. Second: Dom was taking him to a game that night, just the two of them, and there was nothing he liked more than going to a Knicks game with Dom. Ever since he'd been four years old, which was when they first met, man and boy had connected. There was just something about the crusty old man – he kept telling Jack he was only forty-four but Jack insisted on calling him "old man" – that made Jack feel safe and protected. He was never afraid of Dom's temper, which could be terrible, or put off by his curmudgeonly nature, which could drive almost everyone else crazy. People seemed to shrink back from Dom as if they were frightened of him, but Jack never understood what it was that frightened them. Dom was thin and wiry and he used to be a boxer, so he looked tough, but a lot of guys looked tough without scaring people. They couldn't possibly know about Dom. Not the thing that Jack knew, anyway. That was a secret. A big secret. If they knew, Jack thought, they'd really be frightened. But sometimes, especially when they were together in public, he thought that maybe Dom's secret was the kind of thing you didn't really have to know. Maybe it was the kind of thing you could understand simply by looking.

Then again, it could have been the old man's arm that made everyone uneasy; people never knew how to deal with stuff like that. Jack had never thought there was anything much to deal with. Dom was just Dom, arm and all, and when they were at the Garden, he would let Jack eat as many hot dogs as he wanted – his record was four – and drink Coke, which his mom hardly ever let him do.

Third: As if all that wasn't enough, the Celtics were in town that night, so he'd actually get to see, in person, the despised John Havlicek and Bill Russell, whom Jack knew he was supposed to hate, being a Knicks fanatic and all, but whom he had to admit, although never out loud, he really kind of liked.

When he got home from school, his day stayed just about perfect, too. Billy Kruse's mom walked him home, with Billy, because they lived a couple of buildings away. Jack's mom wasn't home from work yet, which was fine with Jack because he liked being alone. He could do his homework and sneak in some TV and daydream some more. Sometimes he daydreamed about his father, whom he hardly remembered. His mom had told him that his dad was dead, that he'd died when Jack was just a baby, but lately he'd begun to suspect otherwise. He wasn't exactly sure why he didn't believe her, except it just didn't ring true. He'd heard about men who'd deserted their families or who'd gone to prison – that wasn't so uncommon in Hell's Kitchen; Billy Kruse's dad was in for three years for armed robbery – and something about the way his mom told her story made him think his dad hadn't really died, that he'd just run away. Or been taken away. Jack asked Dom about it once because Dom had known Jack's dad, had been his friend – Bill Keller had worked at Dom's meatpacking plant – and Dom said, "He's gone, Jackie. That's all that matters." When Jack had said, "Yeah, but is he dead?" all Dom said back was "Gone is gone."

At about five o'clock, his mom called and said Dom was going to pick him up in about half an hour. "Isn't it kind of early?" he asked, and she said, "He's bringing you up here to my office before the game. I want to talk to you."

"Did I do somethin' wrong?" Jack asked and his mother laughed. "No, sweetie," she told him. "I just want to see you. I have something to tell you. Something good."

"Cool," he said, and he meant it because he liked his mom, even more than he liked Willis Reed, and he liked going to her office. She was a paralegal at a law firm. The office was in a midtown skyscraper, on the seventeenth floor, and it had a great view of the East River and Queens through its oversized windows. Jack liked to go right up to the window and put his nose flat up against the glass. He'd stretch his arms out, as high as he could get them, spread his legs just as wide, pressing as hard as he could against the pane, and pretend that he was flying. Earlier that year, Miss Roebuck had taught the class about Greek mythology. Jack's favorite story was the one about Daedalus and Icarus. He even went to the library and checked out several books, reading everything he could about the boy who dared to fly too close to the sun. Jack loved the idea of making wings, then soaring higher and higher up toward the heavens. He thought about it almost every day, imagining that he was Icarus, leaving the earth behind, going higher than anyone had ever gone. Mostly he thought only of the glory, and he could see himself so clearly that it became real to him. He could feel the air rushing over his body; he could immerse himself in the silence of flight and thrill in the extraordinary freedom. But sometimes he dared to think about the fall. Like Icarus, he, too, would climb too high and his wings would melt, and then Jack could feel, in the pit of his stomach, the sensation of plummeting, of falling straight down, and the fear that overcame him would jar him out of his fantasy and he'd find himself in his room or in class, his hands shaking, his mouth dry, and his fingers clenched tightly around whatever he could grasp as if that thing were a lifeline safely tethering him to the ground.

But up in his mother's office, arms raised, there was never any fear. Just outstretched arms and cool window glass against his body. And he could be the triumphant Icarus, flying out over the river, above the whole city. Looking down at the world, climbing toward the sun…

Jack quickly finished up his homework, nothing too hard, mostly math, and changed into a pair of jeans, sneakers, his gray Knicks T-shirt, and his blue and orange Knicks jacket. Then he went outside on the stoop to wait for Dom to pick him up. Sitting there on the rough cement, he wondered what his mom was going to tell him and if the Knicks would win that night. He wondered a little bit more about his dad, too. But mostly he wondered how many hot dogs he was going to be able to eat. He decided that tonight he was going to go for a new record.

– "-"-"JOANIE KELLER WAS nervous.

She didn't understand it exactly. She knew what she was nervous about but she didn't really know why.

Possibly it was because, more than anything else in her life, Joan Keller wanted her son to be happy and she didn't know if what she was going to tell him would make him happy. If it didn't, she wasn't quite sure what she would do. Go ahead with the plans anyway? She didn't know if she could do that. Don't go ahead with the plans? She didn't know if she could do that either. Oh, God. When she thought about it like that, she guessed she did know why she was nervous.

She didn't want to think about it right now, she'd thought about nothing else for days, so she decided she'd keep herself busy and get some tiresome filing out of the way. But it didn't take her long before her brow was furrowed and her lips were moving and she was practicing exactly what she was going to say. This is nuts, she realized. He's ten years old and he's a great kid, so why wouldn't he be happy with the news? There was no reason that she could think of. No reason at all. So just tell him and hug him and kiss him and hope that he hugged and kissed her back. And, of course, he would. That's exactly what he'd do. So why be nervous? Pretty soon they'd be hugging and kissing and laughing all over the place.