Sam lets go and takes a step forward. Unstable gait, his father says. Sam takes another step. Forward propulsion is compromised. Annnnd . . . he’s down.
Sam hits the ground hard. Pushing the pain aside, he hoists himself onto his elbows, dragging himself toward the chair. Okay, Teddy murmurs. He did it. He got there. Sam pulls himself onto the chair and propels himself toward the door. Winded, he removes the putty knife from his waistband, a girl’s name springing suddenly to mind. Rebecca Kirkpatrick, summer before sophomore year. She was two years older, and her family had a cabin on Lake Poetry, forty minutes north. Twice they skipped school and drove there in her yellow Jeep, where Sam would use the credit card Rebecca’s father gave her to pick the lock on the back door to the cabin.
He slides the blade of the putty knife between the door frame and the lock, recalling how it worked. Rebecca sat on the grass, rolling a joint, as Sam concentrated on using the tip of the credit card to catch the edge of the lock and push it aside, opening the door to all the wonderful things that awaited inside that room—
Well, by golly, would you look at that? Teddy from Freddy purrs as the lock clicks open. He did it. Ol’ Stats actually opened the door.
“I did it!” Sam breathes, elated, imagining the roar of the crowd. “I fucking did it.” He tucks the putty knife back into his waistband and throws open the door to a hallway, giddy. It smells overwhelmingly of the pine-scented chemical shit Albert mops his room with three times a week. Sam propels his chair down the hall, which opens into a kitchen with apple-green walls, the back wall covered in the cascading leaves of at least a dozen hanging plants. He considers stopping to search the drawers for a knife but keeps going into the living room, where a large picture window offers a view of the sky he hasn’t seen in eight days. It’s raining. He’s imagining the feel of the rain against his dry skin when he arrives at the front door, and reaches for the knob.
Strike one, Teddy says quietly to the hushed crowd.
Sam rattles the doorknob. Nononononono.
The guy locked him in. Teddy tsks. That’s some bad luck.
Sam moves quickly to the table in the foyer and opens the slim drawer. He slides his hand to the back, extracting a single key on a bright orange keychain labeled “Gary Unger, Gary Unger Locksmiths.” Sam returns to the door and jams the key into the lock. It doesn’t fit, and Sam knows exactly why. It’s not the key to this door. It’s the key to Sam’s office, the same square key Sam has on his keychain. The key Albert is not supposed to have.
“No big deal,” he tells the crowd, tossing the key on the floor and grabbing once more for the putty knife, his hand shaking. He did it once, he’ll do it again. He can taste the salty tang of the sweat on his lip as he jimmies the putty knife between the door and the frame, sliding it up and then down— Snap.
Strike two, Sam’s dad whispers.
Sam holds up the wooden handle of the putty knife; the metal blade is stuck in the door. “No,” he whispers, reaching for the blade. “Come back.” He bangs the door, attempting to free the metal edge. It’s no use.
Looks like it’s time for plan B, Teddy says.
The window. Sam slides into the living room and uses the arm of the sofa to pull himself close to the window, getting a glimpse of Sidney Pigeon’s house through the hedges at the edge of Albert’s property. There’s smoke coming from the chimney. Someone’s home.
Time’s running out.
“Shut up, Dad,” Sam whispers, focusing on his options. I can break the window and scream for help. Someone at Sidney’s house will hear me.
Is that a joke? Ted murmurs. No way anyone will hear him, all the way up here.
I can break the glass and jump out the window.
But then what? his father scoffs. Find himself with two broken legs and covered in glass shards and caught in a rosebush? That’s what I call a lose-lose-lose situation.
Sam scans the room, noticing the details. Bright-blue walls, crowded with large abstract paintings. A soft white rug. Floral couches. Admittedly not the design aesthetic Sam expected. What’s Statler doing? Teddy from Freddy whispers. He’s got five minutes to save his life, and he’s sitting there thinking about paint colors. Sam keeps going, through a series of rooms—a formal dining room with mauve walls and a large chandelier. Another sitting room, two plush chairs in front of a fireplace. Along the far wall he sees a set of pocket doors, and makes his way over to open them. It’s a library. Quite a magnificent one at that. Floor-to-ceiling mahogany shelves, a ladder on a rail. It smells like a real library, one of his favorite places that his mom took him to as a kid, and he moves slowly toward the shelves and pulls out a book. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, first edition.