Hero

Though he doesn’t know exactly what his father, Tom Harriman, does for the president, Zach Harriman is proud of him. Still, he misses his dad when he’s away, and he worries about him. He hurries across Central Park in Manhattan to the luxurious Fifth Avenue apartment where he and his parents live, along with cook/housekeeper Alba and her daughter, Kate. Something’s wrong; Zach can sense it.

At the apartment, everyone’s there except Dad: Mom, her eyes wet; Alba and Kate; John Marshall, the family lawyer; and two police officers. They look at him with “sad eyes.” His father is dead.

Cried out, Zach can’t sleep. He goes downstairs to his father’s office. Two walls have photos of his family and his dad with famous people; the other two are filled with books. The last time his dad was here, his father was on the phone with the president, and Zach was hurrying to go to a movie with Kate. Dad suddenly had to leave at dawn; he was gone too often, always full of promises that he’d have more time when he got back. However, he had time to watch the basketball game on TV that night. Feeling guilty, Zach turns him down, saying he better not disappoint Kate. His father understands.

Zach never sees him again.

A month later, weeks after the funeral, “sometimes Zach could go a whole ten minutes without thinking about it” (24). Adults tell him to accept the loss and move forward; even Kate, wiser than most her age, agrees, as does the grief therapist Zach sees for two weeks until he convinces his mom that he’s getting over it. What he really wants to spend time on is researching the plane crash: He’s sure it wasn’t an accident, as everyone claims.

Zach’s best friends at the Parker School, Josh Morris and David Epstein, both play with him on the basketball team. They and the rest of the school kids now treat him with kid gloves, making him feel even more alone. Even his enemy, student-body president and team captain Spencer Warren, restrains his open jealousy about brilliant, beautiful Kate and holds off with his nasty quips that Kate is Zach’s paid help. Spencer hasn’t ragged him in weeks; it’s the only good thing to come of all this.

One day after school, though, while waiting for Kate to finish theatre rehearsals, Zach finds Spencer standing at his locker, waiting for him.

The two boys are alone in the hallway. Spence starts teasing Zach again about Kate. Zach, tired of always backing down, tells Spence to shut up. Spence tells him to take it back; Zach says he sounds like a seven-year-old and says, “For a smart guy you can sound dumber than a bag of hammers” (36). Zach is surprised to hear himself talk back to his tormentor.

Kate appears and tells them to knock it off. They both insist nothing’s going on. Spence leaves; Kate realizes she left her jacket at rehearsal and hurries off to retrieve it. Zach is shaking with anger; he goes downstairs, finds an empty brick wall, and hurls punches at it. Spent, he looks down at his hands: not a scratch on them.

Senator Bob Kerrigan has known the Harrimans since his student days at Harvard with Tom. He’s running for president, and Zach’s mom, Elizabeth Townsend Harriman—director of the Townsend Foundation, named after her senator father—dives into the campaign to take her mind off the loss of her husband.

Elizabeth prepares the apartment for a small party to be attended by a select group of wealthy political donors. Senator Kerrigan speaks, and Zach and Kate admire his plainspoken talk. He urges the group to accept, as did Tom Harriman, lives of “service, courage and honor” (46). The room erupts in applause.

After the guests leave, Kerrigan tells Zach that his praise for Zach’s father is genuine and that, with Tom gone, America’s enemies may be edging closer. He urges Zach to be strong.

Asleep at midnight, Zach awakens to a loud argument downstairs between his mom and John Marshall, whom Zach thinks of as “Uncle John.” They never argue; tonight, though, John insists that Kerrigan is a phony like all the other candidates, while Elizabeth retorts that Kerrigan’s words come from “great substance.” John says it’s his duty as her family lawyer to warn her; impatient, she pushes the elevator button for him and stalks off. John, angry, looks at the framed picture of his best friend, Tom, with his arm around Kerrigan. John removes the picture, slams it down on a side table, and leaves.

To fill the empty spot left by Zach’s dad, Kate keeps Zach company when they watch the Knicks play basketball on TV. On this night, though, Kate abruptly asks Zach to tell her the secret he’s been keeping. He tries to dissuade her, but she outmaneuvers him. He confesses that he’s been researching his father’s plane crash and believes it wasn’t an accident.

Kate says it was engine failure; Zach retorts that his dad never let accidents happen, and if they did, it brought out his best, and he always got through it. Kate says she has his back, but she worries that if he pursues this, he’ll get lost in it, and she’ll never find him. He assures her that “you’d invent a new kind of GPS if that’s what it took for you to find me” (59).

Zach struggles with his anger. Researching his father’s plane crash only makes him more irate. Feeling antsy, he sneaks out down the stairs and walks here and there; he’s in turmoil but doesn’t know what it’s about. Finally, he decides to head over to Central Park. He’s never been there at night, but something urges him toward it now.

He finds himself at the 90th Street Central Park entrance, a distance he seems to have covered in almost no time. He walks up the stairs and, his eyes suddenly seeming to have night vision, spots a young man hiding in the bushes, holding something behind his back and waiting as a foolishly brave young woman jogs toward him, unknowing. Zach walks over to the bush and stares at the man, whose eyes widen. The woman says “excuse me” to Zach, who steps out of her way as she jogs out of the park.

Zach turns to the hiding man, but he’s gone. 

Back home, Zach feels amped up. He faced down a “Bad,” his father’s word for predators, and foiled a possible crime. For the next few nights, he’s tempted to return to the park, and he almost does, but his mom catches him heading for the elevator and, ignoring his lame excuses about going downstairs to talk sports with the doorman, chases him back up to his room to finish his homework.

Bored, Zach stands on his balcony and looks out at the park, thinking about how he’ll never see his father again. He remembers that they had some sort of sixth sense about each other. Tonight, he feels good about standing up to bad guys, but there’s something unfinished about his recent experience: “His dad used to go off and save the world? Lately his son just wanted to beat it up” (74).

During a practice basketball game, Zach’s timing is off, and Spence rags him about it. Zach tries to improve but can’t, and his side loses and must run sprints afterward. The coach assigns the two boys to ball cleanup, and Spence, tossing balls to Zach to put away, manages to accidentally-on-purpose hit him in the back of the head.

The new Zach decides that he won’t let Spence’s behavior go this time. He enters the park and waits until Spence walks past on his way home to his apartment on the West Side. Zach jumps out, calls Spence “the biggest pain-in-the-butt jerk our age in history” (83) and challenges him to a fight. Spence agrees, but first, he calls home to say he’s running late.

They go to a spot on a hill. Zach throws the first punch but hits air as Spence ducks and, using his football skills, drives his shoulder into Zach’s gut. Zach falls back, unable to breathe, his head hitting the ground painfully. Spence looms over him, preparing to slug him, but his phone goes off. It’s his mom; Spence apologizes to her for being late. Saving his best hit for last, he asks Zach, “You sure he was your dad?” (87).

Zach’s head aches, but otherwise, only his pride is hurt, and that, badly. That evening, working on a school project with Kate, he admits that he wants to visit the crash site. They argue about it a bit, Zach getting more heated than usual, and he realizes that it feels “as if somebody else was at the controls of his life” (92).

The next day after practice, Uncle John has tea with Zach’s mom. Zach tells them he wants to be taken to the crash site. He says he doesn’t want to do it but feels that he must. Elizabeth, who’s already been to the site, turns him down flat. John argues Zach’s side, but she’s adamant: not now, not so soon, “when the healing has barely begun” (98). Zach nods and departs. Climbing the stairs, he realizes that he’ll be visiting the crash site very soon—on his own.

Saturday morning, as Zach and Kate set out for the library and a Knicks game, Zach tells her he’s not going. Instead, he’ll visit the crash site at the east end of Long Island. Kate doesn’t like this rebellious plan, but immediately, protectively, she insists on going with him. He talks her out of it on the promise that he’ll update her constantly by phone.

The bus trip to Montauk takes three hours. There, he hires a taxi out to the end of the road, where the crash-site field meets the ocean. He texts Kate that he’s arrived; seconds later, she replies: “B careful.” He walks past some abandoned police tape, out to the scorched hole in the ground where his dad’s plane nosed into the earth.

It’s empty; there are no clues. The sky darkens, and the wind kicks up. Disappointed, Zach reaches down, picks up a clump of dark earth, says goodbye, and tosses the dirt away. A glint in the hole draws him back; he picks up a Morgan dollar, the twin to the one his dad had given him years earlier as a good luck keepsake and a shared connection. His dad said that he'd know if Zach squeezed one of them.

He squeezes. A voice says, “I’ve been waiting for you” (108).

Standing next to Zach is an old man with white hair and a beard in an oversized bomber jacket. Zach, scared, demands to know who he is. He calls himself “Mr. Herbert” and says he’s been monitoring Zach—he calls the boy “Zacman” like his father did—and that it’s time for Zach to meet him.

Zach is extremely suspicious, but Mr. Herbert seems to know all about him—Kate, Uncle John, and even Spence. He tells Zach that he tried to warn his father of the danger, but Tom Harriman became someone who began to “believe their own press clippings” (114).

He borrows the coin, and in his hand, it glows brightly. He tells Zach that he taught his father about “the magic” that Tom had inside and that Zach has it, too. He tosses the coin back and walks away.

Zach shouts, “Wait!” but the man is gone. Zach runs after him through tall grass, faster than he’s ever run, closing his eyes, feeling invisible. When he opens his eyes, he’s back in Central Park. Stunned and out of breath, he puts the coin in his pocket and pulls out his phone: It’s still 1:30 PM, the same time as it was in Montauk, 100 miles away; it was “as if he had texted himself home. As if by magic” (119).