Линвуд Баркли - Elevator Pitch

Barbara didn’t know what to say. This hardly seemed the time for an I told you so .

Even if she could have thought of some response, someone else had something to say first.

“It is personal.”

Chris Vallins was speaking.

He was standing only a step away from Glover and looked at him as he spoke.

“Someone in this room blames the mayor for how he treated his mother. How he neglected her. How he didn’t give a shit about her.”

Vallins turned his head to stare squarely at the mayor.

“I’m that person,” Vallins said. “Mr. Mayor, you killed my mother.”

More gasps. More whispers. Everyone was wondering what the hell was happening.

Including Glover. He looked at Vallins and said, “You signed out that car. You used my name.”

Vallins nodded. “Sins of the father and all that,” he said. “Sorry.”

At which point he swiftly placed his palm flat on Glover Headley’s chest, knocking him off his feet and through the open elevator doors.

Mom? Mom? Say something. Mom. Please don’t die. Mom? Mom. Open your eyes. Look at me. Mom. Mom! I love you, Mom. I love you. Oh, Mom. No no no no no.”

Chris thinks she is dead, but then she opens her eyes again as she lies there on the floor of their tiny apartment.

“I need... I need your father.”

This hardly seems like the time to remind her that his father — her husband — is dead, and has been for a long time.

“I’m calling for help,” he says, on his knees beside her, rubbing his hand across her forehead.

He jumps up and goes for the phone, dialing 911. He quickly tells the operator their Bronx address, that he thinks his mother has had a heart attack, that she’s been complaining about pains in her chest for weeks, that she’s just come up six flights of stairs carrying bags of groceries, that they need to get here quickly.

“They’re coming,” he tells his mother, tears streaming down his cheeks. “You’re going to be okay. Just hold on until the ambulance gets here. Okay? Mom? Mom? Say something. Mom. Please say something.”

She makes a low, moaning noise.

“I’m gonna be gone for just a minute. I’m gonna run down and wait for the ambulance, show them how to get up here.”

Chris bolts from the room, runs down the hallway past the elevator with the Not in Service sign held to it with tape that has gone yellow with age. He nearly flies down the six flights of steps and is running out the front of the building as the ambulance comes screaming up the street.

Chris runs out between two parked cars and waves his arms in the air. The ambulance screeches to a halt out front and two paramedics — a man and a woman — leap out.

“This way!” Chris says.

They want to take half a second to confirm. “Maude Vallins?”

“Yes! Room seven-oh-three! Hurry! She’s still breathing!”

They grab their equipment and run in after the boy. As he heads for the stairwell door, the woman says, “Where are you going?”

She points to the two elevators in the lobby. She hasn’t yet noticed the Not in Service signs taped to them.

“They don’t work!” he shouts.

“Ah, Christ,” says the male paramedic.

Chris takes the steps two at a time, reaching the seventh floor more than a minute ahead of the other two. The paramedics enter the hall winded, sweat dripping down their temples. Chris is at the door to his apartment, waving them in.

While the two emergency workers kneel over his mother, Chris cannot stop babbling.

“The doctor’s always saying she has a bad heart and it’s really hard for her going up and down the stairs and I told her I’d do the shopping, you don’t have to do it, or even if she goes out I can carry all the bags up, you know, because it’s way too hard for her but she’s always saying she can do it, that it’s not my job, that my job is to go to school, but I could do it after school but she says no and I talked to the man, who comes for the rent, and I’ve asked him and asked him to please fix the elevators, that my mom can’t handle the stairs, that one day she’s going to have a really really really bad heart attack but he’s this total asshole and I told my mom not to pay the rent until he fixed them but she said she couldn’t do that because—”

The woman stands, turns, and asks, “What’s your name, kid?”

“Christopher.”

She tips her head toward the hallway.

“I can’t leave my mom,” he says.

“We need to talk, Christopher.”

Once in the hall, she walks him a few steps away from the open apartment door. “What family you got? Brothers, sisters? Where’s your father?”

“It’s just me and my mom. My dad’s dead. I don’t have any brothers or sisters.”

The woman’s eyes sadden. “Uncles? An aunt?”

He nods. “Fran. She’s my mom’s sister. She lives in Albany.”

“You got a number for her?”

“Does my mom have to go to the hospital?”

The woman swallows. “How old are you, Chris?”

“Twelve.”

“We’re not taking your mom to the hospital, Christopher. Maybe if we’d gotten here a little sooner...”

Chris says, “Like, if the elevator had been working.”

The woman says, “I guess we’ll never know. We need to get in touch with your aunt, tell her—”

She glances down the hallway at the sound of the stairwell door opening and closing. A young man, early twenties, dressed in a suit and tie, strides toward the paramedic.

“What’s going on?” he asks in a voice that suggests he’s entitled to know.

“That’s him,” Chris whispers.

“Him?” the woman says.

“The asshole,” he whispered.

The man is now face-to-face with the paramedic. “What’s happening here?”

“Emergency call. Heart attack. Who are you?”

“Richard Headley,” he says. “My father owns this building, among others. I’m the property manager.”

“Do you live here?” the woman asks.

Headley looks as though he’s been slapped in the face. “Hardly. I come by twice a month. Check on things, collect rent.”

“My mom’s dead,” Chris says.

Headley looks down at the boy, noticing him for the first time. “Sorry to hear that, sport.”

“If they’ d got up here sooner,” Chris says, holding back his tears, “they could have saved her. If you’d fixed the elevators. Going up and down the stairs killed her. It’s your fault.”

Headley bends down so he can look the kid in the eye. “One thing you’ll learn, when you get older, is you can’t go blaming others for your troubles. If your mom didn’t like the way things were here, she could have moved.”

He pats the boy’s shoulder as he stands back up. But he isn’t done doling out advice for the grief-stricken young man.

“We all have setbacks in life, but we move on. If there’s something you want in life, you go after it, no matter how hard it is, or how long it takes.”

These are the words Chris will always remember.

The mayor screamed, a ragged cry of pain and grief and disbelief.

“Glover!”

The name resounded through the glass-enclosed space. The crowd, transfixed in horror, suffered a brief, collective bout of heart failure, not quite accepting what they had just seen. It was all too impossible to believe. One moment, Glover was there, and a moment later, he wasn’t.