“You guys don’t still
believe in Santa, do you?” Wilson threw the ball to me with a smirk on his
face.
“I
guess. I dunno.” I tossed the ball, and the topic, to Carter.
Like
most days after school, we were playing in the field that lay at the heart of
our neighborhood. Basically, a large triangle of grass lying at the junction of
three different housing developments, it served as a sort of intersection and
no-man’s land between different communities. On one side was Wilson’s
development, massive homes with tiny yards. Carter and I lived on the opposite
side in a community of aging split-levels, divided between retired couples and
young families. The third end was a hodge-podge of townhomes and apartments for
those at the very beginning, or end, of adulthood. The field was a magnet for us
who lived on the edges of these developments. It drew us into it, away from
those who lived the same way we did, forming a misfit neighborhood united by an
oddly-shaped patch of grass.
“If we
aren’t supposed to believe in Santa, where do all the presents come from?”
Carter sent the hot potato back to Wilson.
“I never
got any presents from him,” Wilson passed it to me again.
As I
caught the ball, I felt tension building in my chest. Wilson always did this,
always picked an argument to make himself look better than us. I tried to put
the pressure on him, “Yeah, well maybe you’re just not good enough to get
presents.”
“That’s
what I mean,” Wilson wasn’t fazed. “It doesn’t matter if I’m good. I get
whatever I want.”
Of all
the tales Wilson Greene had woven in the field, this one was verifiably true.
Wilson made no effort to be good, and he got everything he wanted.
“Remember
last week,” Wilson rolled on. “I threw Amanda’s phone down the stairs and broke
it? Mom got her a new one. So, I said it wasn’t fair that Amanda has a new
phone and I still have my old one. Guess what I’m getting for Christmas? I get
whatever I want. I get more stuff than you guys who are good all the time.”
My mind
flashed back to last Christmas, Wilson tearing around the field on a shiny red
mini-bike. I locked eyes with Carter. Wilson had us again.
Before
we turned to name-calling, two tan streaks of fur, named Sahara and Sonora,
raced between us, barking and yelping. No two things in all creation were more
perfectly designed for one another than the Yellow Labrador and the ten-year-old
boy. Because of my brother’s health, I never had a pet. In the back of my mind,
held down forcefully and never expressed, was the desire to have one of these
brown bundles of energy as my very own, but in this particular instance that
natural affinity was tempered by an unfortunate reality. Like happy harbingers
of doom, wherever Sahara and Sonora appeared, Mrs. Cavanaugh was not far
behind.
On any
day, Mrs. Cavanaugh was little more than a massive poof of white hair perched
atop a twig-thin body, but in cold weather she wore a headband around her ears.
Above that strip of fabric, the curly white mass exploded out and over in every
direction. She looked top-heavy, and as she tottered about, I was always felt
she was just one misjudged step from toppling over. She paused as she made her
way toward us and bent in a low, teetering crouch; an ancient toadstool using a
plastic shopping bag to clean up what her dogs had left behind. She finished,
and rose with excruciating slowness. I imagined I could hear joints creaking and
muscles screaming, as her tiny body summoned all its energy to defy the grave
one more time. Erect, she gave us a detached, almost bored stare from behind
the large purple frames of her glasses. Her mouth was pinched down into a tiny,
rumpled frown.
“Hello
boys, no homework again today?”
Carter
stammered, “Yes, Ma’am. . . I mean, no. . . Ma’am. . . My parents let me do it after
dinner.”
“I
suppose play before work is the way to parent these days, but what would an old
mother of six know about it?” Disapproval was Mrs. Cavanaugh’s lifeblood, and
she expressed it to Carter with her telltale sign: an almost imperceptible
shake of the head. “And you, Mr. Werner, how is your father?”
Information
is power, and I had learned to offer Mrs. Cavanaugh as little of it as possible,
“Just fine, Ma’am.”
“Perhaps
he’s feeling fine enough to finish siding your house. An uncovered house is no
place to be when it snows. The weather is going to turn with the Holidays.”
“Oh,
he’ll get it done Mrs. Cavanaugh.”
“I’m
sure he will. The way a man cares for his home is the way he cares for his
family.” She noticed Sahara taking care of business a few yards away and
teetered off to repeat the world’s most difficult squat.
“It’s
cold out here. I’m going home,” Wilson turned toward his side of the field.
“See you suckers tomorrow.”
“Yeah,
see ya.” Carter and I turned toward our houses and started to walk home in the
fading light. “I can’t stand her,” Carter offered.
“Me
either,” I kicked at the frosty grass with each step.
We
walked together for a few quiet moments.
“But,
she’s right, you know. Your dad’s been working on that siding for a long time,
like months. It’s kind of getting embarrassing.”
It was embarrassing. “He’s been really
busy, but we’re gonna finish it this weekend. I’m helping. We’ve got it all planned
out. We’re waking up super early Saturday and we’re just gonna work until it’s
done. I get to use the tools and everything.”
“Sounds
fun.”
“You can
come and help if you want.”
“Sure,
maybe. I’ll see you at the bus stop tomorrow?” Carter angled off towards his
house.
“Yup.”
I
followed Woodland Rd. as it turned and went down a little hill. My house
appeared around the corner. It stood out from all the other split-levels with
its unique design: no Christmas lights, just the half-siding, half-plastic wrap
look. The tools and scraps laying about the yard topped it off perfectly.
Grandma was standing on the front steps.
“Perfect
timing, Nicolas! You parents called from the hospital. They should be home in a
few minutes. I’ve got dinner-“
A horn
tooted and I joined her on the steps while our old minivan drove down the
street and made the sweeping turn into the driveway. Even before it came to a
stop, we could hear James screaming inside. Grandma let out a heavy sigh.
Dad
killed the engine, hopped out, and opened the sliding door. Inside sat Mom
beside James strapped in his car seat, wailing like they’d dipped his hand in
boiling water. Dad unstrapped him and cradled my four-year-old brother like a
baby, “Nicolas, get the house door, please.”
Grandma
mustered an optimistic voice, “So, how did it go?”
“The procedure
went fine,” Mom answered. “He just had a hard time with the anesthesia and woke
up cranky. Let’s get him out of this cold and onto the couch.”
Inside,
Grandma and Mom took to blanketing and pampering James in the living room,
while Dad supervised dinner on the stove. I pulled myself onto a bar stool and watched
him work. For a long time we didn’t say anything, just listened to James’ cries
fade to whimpers in the next room. I noticed the bags under Dad’s eyes,
wrinkles at the corners, the gray flecks in his hair and beard.
“Hey,
Dad.”
“Yeah, Nicolas?”
“What
happens if we don’t get the siding up before the snowstorm?”
Dad
stopped stirring dinner and flopped back against the countertop behind him. He
rubbed his palms hard against his eye sockets, his shoulders sagged slightly.
“I don’t
even want to think about it, Buddy.” He paused, then suddenly stood up
straight, dropped his arms to his side and looked at me, “But that’s not going
to happen, is it? No sir, because, you and me, first thing Saturday morning,
are going to finish that job. Right?”
I
smiled, “Right!”
Dad went
back to stirring. I went back to watching.
“Dad?
Wilson Greene says Santa isn’t real.”
“Wilson Greene
says a lot of things.”
“He says
he never got a present from Santa.”
“If he
did, would he notice?”
“Yeah. .
. but there’s more than that. There’s a lot of stuff about Santa that doesn’t
really make sense.”
“Oh,
Really?”
“Yeah,
like how old is he? The oldest guy in the Bible is like 900, and Santa would
have to be older than that. And, even if they can fly, reindeer aren’t fast. Toys
for all the kids in the world? That’s gotta be a huge sled!”
Dad stopped
stirring again and looked straight at me. His eyes narrowed a little bit and he
quietly asked, “What are you saying?”
“I don’t know. I mean, there’s just a
lot of things about Santa that seems. . . made up.”
Dad came around the counter and sat
facing me on the other stool. He put his hands on my knees and asked, “What did
you just say?”
I uncertainly answered, “I said that
Santa was made up?”
Dad leaned in very close to me,
“Listen. You cannot talk to anyone about this, no one, until your mother and I speak with you. Am I being clear?”
“Yes, Dad.”
My father walked back around to the
stove, and I sat wondering what had just happened.
James
had been put to bed early. Mom, Dad, Grandma, and I sat and enjoyed a stir-fry
that tasted as if it had been created by an exhausted father interrupted by a
hundred questions from a ten-year-old. We were never a boisterous family, but
even by those standards this dinner was a quiet one.
Grandma attempted to kindle conversation, “Is
everyone ready for Christmas?”.
“Oh, yes. We were ready weeks ago.” Mom was proud to
be ahead of the game for once.
“Well, Nicolas does have one more thing to do,” Dad
interjected. “In fact, Grandma, I was wondering if you’d be willing to stick
around for another hour so we can take care of it.”
My mother was having none of it, “Honey, you know
that we planned well in advance for the Holidays this year because of-“
Dad leaned in close and whispered in her ear. Mom’s
eyebrows arched. She looked at me for a second, then looked back at Dad,
“You’re sure?”
“Pretty.”
“And it has to be tonight?”
“The longer we wait the more chance for complications.”
“Alright. It’s getting late. Do you have a place in
mind?”
“I think I know a spot. Mom?”
Grandma answered, “I suppose I could stick around a bit
longer.”
We drove to a strip-mall in town where the lights of
a Chinese buffet spilled from its windows, casting long shadows of light across
the dark, empty parking lot. Mom and I settled into a booth. Dad soon arrived
with three glasses of water and three egg rolls on a tray.
Mom looked at me, “Is it true?”
“Is what true?” I asked.
“Just tell her what you told me,” Dad coached.
“About Santa?”
“About Santa.”
“Well,” I began nervously, “It’s a lot of stuff;
things that don’t make any sense about Santa. Like, how old he is, where he
lives.”
“Where he lives?” Mom asked.
“We watched a movie about the Arctic in school and
they showed the North Pole. There’s nothing there. Nothing. It’s just one big
frozen ocean. Polar bears don’t even like to go there.”
“Maybe Santa has some sort of invisibility magic.”
I looked at her and raised my eyebrows.
“Ok, what else?”
“Well, I told Dad that I don’t know how old Santa is.
He’s got to be, like, a thousand years old, but not even the old guys in the
Bible lived that long.”
“Ok.”
“And then there’s the speed.”
“Speed?” Mom looked curious.
“I got a book about airplanes out of the library and
it said that fighter jets have to be super smooth, with wings shaped just right
to break the speed of sound. Santa’s sled isn’t shaped right. Even if it were,
the fastest airplane ever built, the Blackbird, would take ten hours to fly all
the way around the world. That’s a whole night, with no stops, and it couldn’t
do it anyway because it couldn’t carry enough fuel. Santa just has reindeer.”
“And you’re not buying magic.”
“I just don’t know how he does it. And Wilson Greene
said he’s never gotten a present from Santa.”
“Well, Wilson Greene says a lot.”
“Never, Mom. Wilson can be a jerk, but to never
get a present from Santa? Wilson isn’t that bad.”
Mom gave me that same in-the-eye look that Dad had in
the kitchen, and asked the same question: “So, what are you saying?”
“I don’t know. It all just seems made up.”
Mom blinked, and a little tear came out of the corner
of her eye. I looked down at the table and saw that she and Dad were holding
hands. When I looked back up, Mom turned to look at Dad and, almost in a
whisper, said, “Ok.”
Dad gave Mom’s hand a squeeze and then clasped both
of his together in front of him on the table. He leaned forward toward me and
began, “Nicolas, we are very proud of you. There is a lot with James that you
never asked for, and it isn’t fair, but you are a great big brother. The fact
that you are asking these questions means very soon you won’t be a kid anymore.
You’ll be a young man. . . I need you to know that what I’m about to tell you
is important. It is also the biggest secret in the entire world.”
“I thought Jesus was the biggest secret in the
world.”
Dad’s serious demeanor briefly melted and he laughed,
“What? No! Any church worth its salt will tell you all about Jesus whenever you
walk in the door. Jesus is not the biggest secret in the world, although he
does come into it now and again. The biggest secret in the world is Santa
Claus.”
“Santa?”
“Let me ask you this: What is Santa’s name - his real
name?”
“Easy, Nicolas.”
“Right, Santa’s known by lots of names, but his real
name, his first name, is Nicolas.”
“So, Santa’s real?”
“Absolutely.”
“But we should call him Nicolas?”
“No. . .
I mean, if you want to. . . It doesn’t really matter. Just listen. Nicolas
lived a long time ago in what’s Turkey today. He was a bishop, a church leader.
Back then life wasn’t as easy as it is now. People worked much harder than we
do and got much less from it. Many people struggled to find enough food for
their families. Nicolas always seemed to know when someone needed help in his
town. There are many stories about things Nicolas did to help people, but there
is one that is very important for understanding who Santa is.”
“Ok.”
“Where
Nicolas lived wasn’t cold like it is here. It was warm, and people liked to
sleep with their windows open. Sometimes, Nicolas would fill little bags with
money and then walk through town at night and throw the bags into the windows
of families in need. A family would wake up in the morning and there would be a
surprise present in their house. Do you see how that’s like Santa?”
“I guess, but you said he lived a long time ago.”
“Yes, Nicolas lived around the year 300.”
I stared blankly at Dad
“One thousand seven hundred years ago.”
None of this was helping me, “So, Santa is named
Nicolas and he’s over a thousand years old?”
“No,” Mom jumped in, “Nicolas never told anyone about
his presents, but people figured it out. After he died, some of his friends
decided to keep giving gifts in Nicolas’ name.”
“Ok, but then Santa is dead. There isn’t a
Santa.”
“There isn’t a Santa, Honey,” Mom was speaking
quietly and gently. “There are millions of Santa’s, maybe billions. Let your
father finish.”
Dad took over again, “That town remembered Nicolas by
giving secret gifts to people who were having trouble. The tradition kept going,
until everyone who knew Nicolas had died, but the town still gave gifts. As the
tradition spread over the years, it spread over the land too. First it was just
one town, then towns, then countries, then empires and continents. Whole
cultures set specific days named after St. Nicolas, when people would secretly
give gifts to show how much they loved each other. When the first Europeans
crossed the Atlantic and came to this continent, they brought the secret of
Nicolas’ gifts with them. Today, we celebrate the tradition on Christmas, the
day Jesus was born. It seems to fit, because Jesus inspired Nicolas to love his
neighbors so much that he gave them gifts, and because Jesus is a special gift
to all of us.”
“So, Santa Claus is really just people giving
presents to people they love, but it’s a secret?”
“Yes,” Mom nodded her head.
“When I get a present from Santa, it is actually
from. . .”
“Very often your father and me.”
“You and Dad are Santa Claus?”
“We are Santa Clauses,” Mom added, “yes, but the
gifts are given in secret. So, sometimes you get gifts from Santa that aren’t
from us. Sometimes we don’t know who they’re from. Anyone can be a Santa.”
“Can I be a Santa?”
“Sure,” Mom and Dad spoke simultaneously.
“I can give James a secret present, and then I’m
Santa?”
“Not exactly,” said Mom. “Giving gifts to people you
love is a big part of being Santa, but it isn’t what makes you a Santa. You
have to earn that.”
“Huh?”
“Remember what Dad said about Nicolas giving gifts to
people who really needed it and taking no credit for himself?”
“Yeah.”
“That’s how you become a Santa, and how you stay a
Santa. Your first gift each year, beginning with this year, must be to someone
who really needs it. The best gifts go to someone who would never expect it.”
“But Nicolas knew people who were starving. I don’t
know anyone like that.”
“And thank God for it,” said Mom, “but we all know
someone in need. We just need to think about it a little bit.”
“Who did you and Dad give your Santa gifts to this year?”
“No, Nicolas,” Mom gently scolded, “that’s a secret,
remember? You only tell others if you need their help with the present.”
“Right.”
Dad took over again. “Nicolas, this is the year you
stop believing in Santa and start being Santa. Do you understand how
important this is? Do you promise to keep the secret?”
“Yes.” Honestly, I was still
very confused.
“Ok,” Dad
was smiling, “let me ask you some questions.”
“Ok.”
“Where does
Santa live?”
“Well, any where
I guess. You never know.”
“So, he may
as well live at . . .”
It started
to dawn on me, “. . . The North Pole.”
“And how
does he get to every house in one night?”
“Well. . .
he’s already there.”
“Right,” Dad
was wearing a giant grin, “so he may as well travel by?”
Now I was
smiling too, “Flying reindeer!”
“And those
reindeer are fueled by?”
“All the
love in the world,” Mom added with her own smile.
Dad took a wolfish bite of his egg roll and leaned
back into his seat, chomping on it. He and Mom sat there smiling at me for a
few minutes.
“But,” I said.
“But, what?” answered Mom.
“Well, I can’t talk to anyone about this?”
“Correct. The only time you tell someone the secret
is when you think they are ready to become a Santa.”
“So, what do I say the next time Wilson makes fun of
me for believing in Santa?”
“Sometimes the hardest thing about knowing the truth
is the people who call you a fool because of it.”
The next
night I sat in bed, waiting for my parents to tuck me in. I could hear them
wrestling with James down the hall.
“Ow! No, Mommy!”
“Just lay still, Honey. It will be over in a minute.”
“No! It hurt me, Mommy!”
“Grab his legs. . . just hold him!”
“It hurt, Mommy! It hurt!”
“Keep him still!”
Then James’ yelling turned into a long, piercing
sequence of screams. After a few minutes, they faded into a whimpering moan,
interspersed with mumbles, “You hurt me, Mommy.”
Dad appeared at my bedroom door, looking sweaty and
pale, “James got his medicine.” He came and sat on the edge of my bed, wrapping
one arm around me, “How was your day?”
“Ok. . . Dad?”
“Yes?”
“I’ve been thinking about what you and Mom said about
being a Santa.”
“Yeah?” Dad’s face looked a little less pale, and he
smiled.
“Well, Santa’s give gifts because they want people to
know they’re loved, right?”
“Yeah.”
“I’ve been thinking about Wilson. He’s never gotten a
gift from Santa. . . There’s no Santa in Wilson’s house.”
Dad’s smile faded, “Yeah.”
Mom appeared at my door, her hair was tussled and
unkempt, and I just then noticed that James had fallen quiet. “Your brother is
asleep,” she said. “What are you two talking about?”
“Well,” Dad began, “Nicolas has been thinking about becoming
a Santa. It sounds like he might want to give something to Wilson Greene.”
“Wilson, huh?” Mom came and sat on my bed, so that I
was sandwiched between my parents. “What kind of gift might Wilson need?”
“Well, that’s the problem. He already gets everything
he wants. I don’t know what I could give him.”
Mom furrowed her brow, “If he already has everything
he wants, what makes you think you should be his Santa?”
“It’s kind of weird. Wilson’s always talks about how
great everything he has is, and how stupid everyone else is, but I don’t
believe him. He always acts proud, or even angry, but I really think he’s. . .
just sad.”
“And you thought giving him a Santa gift might make
him happy?”
“For a little bit, but then I thought that if none of
his other presents make him happy, one more from me won’t help.”
Mom reached over and stroked my ankle, “Nick,
sometimes the best present we can give a person is to just be his friend.”
“Yeah, I guess.”
“Sometimes that’s the hardest gift to give.”
“But,” Dad interjected, “that’s not how you become a
Santa.”
“I thought you’d say that,” I responded. “So. . .
I’ve been thinking about Mrs. Cavanaugh a lot.”
“Who?” Dad asked.
“The older woman who’s always out walking her dogs,”
Mom replied.
“Oh, old busybo-“
“Close enough, Darling,” Mom held a finger up to
Dad’s mouth.
“No, I know,” I said. “She’s real mean and I don’t
think anybody likes her. You said that the best presents go to people who would
never expect it. So, I thought Mrs. Cavanaugh would be really surprised.”
“What do you think she would need?” Dad asked.
“I don’t know if you’ve ever watched her walk her
dogs. Their names are Sahara and Sonora. She’s real careful to clean up after
them. She brings along plastic bags to put the poop in and everything, but
every time she bends over to clean it up, I think she’s going to die. I just
looks like it hurts. They make those things. . .”
“A pooper scooper?” Dad asked.
I laughed, hard, at that.
“Son, that’s what they’re called. It’s a real thing.”
“Really?”
“Oh, yes,” answered Mom. “Any pet store would have
one.”
“So, we could get her one?”
“I don’t see why not.”
“There are some issues,” Dad pointed out. “You want
to do this before Christmas?”
“I think so,” I said.
“Well, tomorrow’s Friday. You have school. We need
all day Saturday to finish the siding, because they’re saying this snow will be
here by Sunday, and after that. . . it’s Christmas.”
“Couldn’t I run him out on Saturday?” Mom asked.
“I could really use his help on the siding. It has to
get done.”
“That is true.”
Dad looked at me, “I can take you tomorrow night
after work. You need to be ready. Get all of your homework and chores done as
soon as you get home.”
“Ok,” I said.
“It’s official,” said Mom. “Tomorrow night Nicolas
becomes a Santa!”
With that, they tucked me in and both gave me a kiss
on the cheek. Dad left to do whatever parents do after their kids go to bed.
Mom sat stroking my hair for a few minutes.
“You are such a great little man,” She said quietly.
“You wear your name so well.”
The next day, every task at school or home was
completed as quickly as possible, and then followed by a miserable waiting. I
did not go out to the field, and left my best friend’s greeting hanging,
abandoned in the cold air by the bus stop. Even after my father arrived home
and drove me to the pet store, the choosing of the gift was a hurried, “That
one!” Finally, my family sat on the couch and watched as I, slowly, revealed
what initially looked like a silver metal post from the brown store wrapping
paper. The top end of the post curved into a handle with a plastic grip on it,
kind of like an old person’s cane or walking stick. The other end was fastened
to the back of a silver metal box, maybe just a little smaller than a shoebox.
The front of the box, opposite from where the pole was attached, was open.
Along the length of the pole running from the box to the handle were two
brackets which held a small rake against the front of the pole.
“That,” I proudly declared to my family, “is a pooper
scooper.”
James laughed, “Ha ha! Poop!”
“This is how it works.” I held the pooper scooper by
the handle, placing the box portion of it down on the floor with the open end
facing a small toy truck I had been playing with before school. I then pulled
the rake from its brackets, and used it to push the truck into the box. I
popped the rake back into place, lifted up the box by the handle, and walked
across the room, proudly exclaiming, “Poop scooped!”
“Poop scoop!” laughed James.
“Yup, Hands clean and ready for the trash!” I
declared.
“Truck no trash!” Yelled James.
“He’s just kidding, Buddy.” Dad reached out,
retrieved the truck, and handed it to James.
James giggled, “Truck no trash.”
A timer beeped from the kitchen. Mom pulled herself
to her feet, “That would be dinner. Come and eat. Nicolas, maybe you can get
that wrapped when James goes to bed.”
Dinner was a drawn out, laborious affair, in which I
was forced to methodically chew several bites of chicken and a cold, soggy,
unidentifiable vegetable, before being required to sit and watch the others
painstakingly nibble their meals bit by bit. Finally, I was allowed to help
clear the dishes and then rushed to the living room to sit by the gleaming
pooper scooper and await the arrival of my mother with the wrapping paper.
To the tune of James screaming as my parents wrestled him towards his nightly injection, I created a masterpiece of gift-wrapping. I carefully cut angles to fit around the odd curves and intersections of the gift. I applied tape generously, recklessly, to ensure no corner came loose, giving a hint of what lay beneath. In the final touch, on a flat piece of wrapping stretched across the handle, I wrote:
To: Mrs. Kavenaw
From: Santa
The rest of the evening progressed slowly. Mom and
Dad insisted we play board games until it was sufficiently late to deliver the
gift without being noticed. I don’t remember which games we played, but I
couldn’t have offered any significant competition. My mind was occupied with
Mrs. Cavanaugh and her gift. I imagined I could see her face when she opened
it. I wondered what she would think, how she would feel, as she realized
someone had thought of her.
Finally, Dad pushed back his chair and said, “It’s
getting late Nicolas, and we’ve got a lot of work to do in the morning. Get
your shoes and jacket. Let’s deliver this gift.”
Mom gave me a kiss on the forehead as we walked out
the door, and stood silhouetted by the house lights as Dad and I walked up the
hill and around the corner. I carried the scooper with both hands, careful not
to damage the wrapping. At first, our way was illuminated by the glow of the
neighborhood Christmas lights, but then we stepped off of the sidewalk to cut
the corner across the dark field toward the townhomes and Mrs. Cavanaugh’s.
Our feet crunched on the frozen grass as Dad asked,
“Hey, you know which place is hers, right?”
“Oh, yeah. We try to stay away from there.”
“. . . Ok.”
We arrived at the back of the building that bordered
the field and walked around its narrow end. I nodded at the row of townhomes
across the street, “It’s the last one, down there at the other end.” We kept
walking past doors trimmed with boughs, lights, and wreaths. There was a
glowing, inflatable Santa on the small concrete stoop beside one door, and then
Mrs. Cavanaugh’s. It had no decorations and the only light to be seen was an
intermittent bluish flashing coming from the upstairs window. Maybe she had
fallen asleep with the TV on. Dad elbowed me and held a finger up to his lips
as we approached the front door. I leaned the scooper against the wall just to
the right of her screen door’s handle, so it would be the first thing she saw
when she opened the door in the morning. She could pick it up without even
having to step outside.
And then, I was a Santa.
Dad and I walked home in silence. I did not feel as
if I had just joined an ancient society protecting the world’s grandest secret,
but as we walked home, I began to realize that I did feel differently about
Mrs. Cavanaugh. I didn’t hate her anymore. I didn’t even dislike her. Maybe it
was the warm feelings of an exciting day winding to a close, but for those few
moments, I thought of cranky old Mrs. Cavanaugh as a friend.
Back at home I quickly got into my pajamas, and
jumped under the covers of my bed, letting my chilly body warm under their
layers. Mom and Dad came to tuck me in.
“I’m so proud of you, Nicolas,” Mom said. “My little
Santa.”
“Now, go to sleep,” added Dad. “Tomorrow you’re my Santa.”
They left my door cracked open a little bit as usual,
but turned off the hall light. They were going to bed too.
I woke suddenly. The hall light was shining into my
face through the cracked door, and there was a thumping, crashing noise down
the hallway. It took me a few moments to wake up. I heard Mom and Dad yelling.
“Get him out of the bed. . . on the floor so he can’t
hit anything!”
“I need a pillow! Get a pillow under his head!”
“Roll him on his side!”
I climbed out of bed and stumbled into the hallway,
squinting in the light. The noises were coming from James’ room. I walked to
the doorway and looked in. Mom and Dad were kneeling in the middle of the floor
with James stretched out on his side between them. His whole body was jerking
and shaking. His head was resting on a pillow. His eyes were open, but all
white. A pinkish drool was coming from the corner of his mouth. His lips were
blue and his face gray. Mom and Dad were both holding him where he was, and I
could see Dad’s muscles flexing under the thin white sleeves of his t-shirt.
“How long has it been?” Mom asked.
“I don’t know. Maybe two or three minutes?”
“I can’t tell if he’s breathing.”
“I’m calling.” Dad stood up and ran past me toward
his room. A few seconds later he was back in the hall with his phone to his ear,
“. . . We need an ambulance.” Dad looked at me, maybe just seeing me for the
first time. He turned around and went back to his room, closing the door behind
him. I just caught a few trailing words, “. . . a four-year-old boy. He had
surgery earlier. . .”
I looked back into James’ room. He was now stiff like
a board. Mom had scooped up his rigid, gray body and was holding him close
against her chest. I could hear her whispered words breaking out between sobs;
she was praying. I watched until I felt a hand on my shoulder. Dad was there
again, with the phone still to his ear. He spoke into it, “. . . one second,”
and then looked at me. “Nicolas, people are coming to help your brother. I need
you to let them in.” Then he was back to the phone and walking into James’ room,
“. . . I don’t know . . . he’s shaking so much we can’t tell.”
I went downstairs, opened the front door, letting the
freezing air in, and stood looking out onto the street. Soon I could hear a
siren coming closer and closer. A police car rounded the corner, very fast,
lights flashing and siren wailing. It slowed in front of our house, the trunk
popped open and a policewoman jumped from the driver’s door almost before the
car came to a stop. She ran to the trunk and pulled out a thin red rectangular
box by its handle. Then sprinted past me into the house.
I looked
back at the street. Everything seemed normal, just like any other night, except
for the police car sitting cockeyed in the middle of Woodland Rd. with its
driver’s door and trunk hanging open, lights flashing and siren wailing to no
one. Then there was an ambulance, two men and a stretcher filled with bags.
Then another ambulance, and another police car. As the minutes passed,
pajama-clad neighbors began to appear and cluster in sporadic groups on the
sidewalk. I saw Carter’s dad sneak across the street and stoop into the first
police car. A few seconds later the siren stopped its howling, and he slunk
back to his little group. The street was silent as James came down the stairs
on the stretcher, he lay limp, a clear plastic mask over his mouth. Everyone
moved with a quiet purpose. Not necessarily fast, but somehow still quickly. No
one seemed to even notice I was there. James was already through the yard and
halfway into the back of an ambulance when Dad appeared beside me.
“Nicolas, Mom and I need to go to the hospital with
James. One of the policemen will stay with you until Grandma gets here.”
“But. . . “
And he
was gone.
The ambulance drove away with Mom and James inside
and its lights and siren on. Dad followed behind in the minivan. I went
upstairs to James’ room. Furniture had been pushed out of place and one of the
ambulance people was picking up all kinds of plastic and paper wrappers lying
around the floor. He told me to go back downstairs. I went outside, and sat
down on the front steps. The whole neighborhood was illuminated in blue and red
flashes. There were still groups of neighbors standing around looking at our
house, our hodge-podge, half-sided monstrosity. The police woman came from
somewhere, put a blanket over my shoulders, and sat down beside me.
I sat and stared. Eventually my eyes picked up something across the street. There in the grass, just at the edge of the light, I saw something move. It was small and quick, like an animal. I stared at that spot, and saw it again. There were two of them; two animals running back and forth in the dark, two dogs. As I stared, I began to make out a third form in the dark: a cloud of hair popping out over a knit headband, a frail, bent form leaning on the handle of what looked like a cane, but ended in a small, shiny box pressed down against the ground.
The next
day, Grandma drove me to the hospital. I sat for hours, slumped in a chair in
the corner of the room, pretending to read a book, but really staring over the
top of the pages at James lying in bed. He had wires and tubes coming from
under his shirt, out of his nose, and beneath tape on his arms. He lay with his
head tilted towards the window. Mostly he slept. Sometimes he just stared
blankly at the gray clouds outside. Mom and Dad moved about the room, acting
like they had important things to do. At some point in the afternoon, James’
doctor came in. Mom and Dad cornered him by the door, speaking in hushed
voices.
“Do you know why it happened?” Dad asked.
“Not exactly. It isn’t unusual for his condition. We’ve
talked about that, but I’m worried that we haven’t seen it until now, so close
after the surgery. Sometimes they’re caused by infection or fever, but at this
point I think we’ve ruled that out. I’ve reached out to some colleagues to get
their thoughts on the dosing of his medication, and we’ve got an EEG scheduled
for later today. At this point we don’t have a lot of answers. I’ll be honest,
sometimes we never know why.”
“So, what now?”
“Well, we’ve covered the big question: why this
happened. We also want to know, especially after the second one last night, how
to prevent it from happening again. There are anti-seizure medications, but I
don’t want to start one until we know how his current medication contributed to
this. We also don’t know how long he wasn’t breathing. It may have been minutes.
Was there any damage? We will need to do some more tests to check that. Until
we get some answers, I’d like to keep him here.”
“For how long?” asked Mom.
“At this point, at least a few days.”
“No. I want him home for Christmas.”
“I’d like to get him home for Christmas too, but we
just can’t take the risk until we got more answers.”
“You don’t understand,” she was trying to use her mom
voice, but it was cracked and weak, “James is coming home for Christmas.”
“I do understand,”
there was some sympathy in the doctor’s voice, “I’ve got children myself and I
would want them home too, but you’ve got a little boy with a relatively serious
genetic condition, who’s now having sporadic seizures for no apparent reason, prolonged
seizures which obstruct his breathing. We have a major winter storm rolling
into the area as early as this evening, and all of that over a holiday weekend.
I can’t send James home into a blizzard. How will we bring him back if there’s
a problem? He needs to stay here.”
The doctor left and Mom and Dad slowly meandered
around the room. I buried my face deep in the book.
“He’s going to be here for days?” Mom flopped onto
the foot of James’ bed. I didn’t have to look to know she was crying.
Dad stared out the window at the clouds for a moment,
then took a deep breath and turned back into the room, “We can do this.” He
looked at Mom, “Honey, look at me.” Mom met his eyes. “We can do this. . . The
important thing is that James gets what he needs and we are all together for
Christmas. That’s it. It doesn’t matter where we have Christmas, as long as we
are together.”
Mom sighed, “I guess. We’ll have to stay here through
the storm. I don’t know how that will work with visiting hours.”
“They’re keeping our boy in the hospital for Christmas;
they’ll make it work.”
“We’ll need some things from home, and we’ll need to
get them before the storm hits. Clothes, for all of us. . . and toiletries. . .
just stuff to keep the boys occupied. . .
maybe some of James’ stuffed animals. . . and . . . the presents. We’ll
need to bring all the presents.”
Dad turned and looked out the window again, “We’re
getting flurries already.”
I pulled
my head up from behind my improvised fort and saw a few errant flakes floating
about on the other side of the glass.
“If we
are going to do this, we need to get moving. Nicolas and I will go back to the
house, and. . .” Dad stopped talking, walked across the room, dropped his body
into a chair, and his head into his hands. “The house. . . I didn’t finish the
house.”
Mom got
up, walked around the bed, dropped to her knees in front of Dad, and pulled his
head up to look at her, “It will be ok.”
“They’re
saying forty-mile winds, feet of snow, freezing rain. It will not be ok.”
Dad drove home slowly, not saying a word. The sky was
starting to darken with the beginnings of evening, and the snow and wind had
picked up. There was a white mist blowing here and there over the surface of
the road. We turned onto Woodland Rd. and passed the field on the left. Carter
was standing along the edge of the snow-coated grass, looking up at the sky. We
waved. The van made the turn and started down the hill. Dad didn’t stop.
I yelled, “Dad! You missed the driveway.”
He stopped the van, “Sorry, Bud. I wasn’t paying
attention,” and backed up the street.
We pulled even with the driveway. Dad stopped the van again, but didn’t pull in. We sat there for a minute and then he opened his door and got out. He walked around to the passenger side and just stared at the house. I looked out of my window. There it was. It was our house in the same place it had always been, but there was no half-plastic, half-siding décor, no tools and siding scraps laying in the yard. There stood our house, fully sided, the lawn clear, with a multi-colored string of Christmas lights running along the rain gutter. I unbuckled and got out to stand beside Dad. He slowly walked into the yard and up to the front of the house. There was a Christmas card taped dead center on the front door. Dad pulled it down, read it, and handed it to me. In a thin, shaky script, it said:
To: The Werner Family
Love: Santa
Dad walked back out to the middle of the front yard,
and turning to look at the house, collapsed into the snow-dusted grass. Dad
started crying. I went and sat with him, wrapped my arms around his big torso
and together we cried out tears of joy, and fear, and mourning, and disbelief.
Four days later, I was laying in the waist-deep field
of snow that made up the heart of our neighborhood. Carter, Wilson, and I were
digging an ambitious series of bunkers and tunnels, stretching further and
further, to the point of collapse, where we’d find a fresh patch of snow and
begin again. We had just dug out a large room and were left sweaty and
breathless. As we lay there, resting, I looked over at Wilson.
“So, how was it?”
“How was what?”
“How was your Christmas?”
“Oh, good. The usual: a bunch of toys and games and
stuff. It wasn’t crazy like yours.”
“Yeah,” I climbed up the tunnel leading out of the
room and into the open air. The others followed me.
“So,
what was it like, having Christmas at the hospital?” Carter asked.
“It was ok, I guess. The food was pretty good. They
had lots of movies to watch, and all the nurses felt bad for me and kept giving
me all sorts of snacks and stickers. But, after awhile it was just boring.”
“Did Santa find you in the hospital?” Wilson was
developing that little smirk.
“Yup, he sure did.” As we talked, I looked across the
field and saw a puff of hair bobbing up and down in the trench through the snow
that marked the street. I couldn’t see the sandy streaks of fur because of the
snow banks, but I was sure they were there.
“I still say you’re crazy for thinking Santa’s some
old guy who lives at the North Pole.”
“I don’t think that. I think Santa. . .” I was
watching that bobbing poof of hair, “. . . is Mrs. Cavanaugh.”
I pulled myself to my feet and started wading through
the snow.
“Huh?” yelled Wilson after me.
I half-turned back to them, “Hey, we’re having a
coming home party for James on Friday. You guys should come.”
“Sure!” said Carter.
“Umm, both of us?” asked Wilson.
“Yeah!”
“To your house?”
“You’ve
never been to my house. You should come over. It’s the. . .white one!”
I turned back and pushed through the snow, breaking
out onto the street and running up behind the old tottering skeleton using a
pooper scooper as a cane. “Hi, Mrs. Cavanaugh!”
She turned slowly and looked at me.
“How was your Christmas?” I asked.
“There have been so many. I’d say this one was on the
better end” She looked at me through her thick, purple-framed glasses. “How was
yours, Mr. Werner?”
“It was different. . . but good.”
“I’m glad to hear it. How is your brother?”
“Better. He’s coming home on Thursday.”
“I’m glad to hear that as well.”
“We’re having a welcome home party on Friday. If you
are out with Sahara and Sonora, you should come.”
“Hmm,” Mrs. Cavanaugh seemed a bit taken aback, “You
think there’d be room for an old woman like me?”
“Mom says when you’re thankful, there’s room for all
your neighbors.”
“Thank you for the invitation, Mr. Werner. We’ll take
it a day at a time.”
Sahara and Sonora had been running circles around me
for the last few minutes. I summoned the courage to pat one of them on the
back. I was rewarded with warm licks to the face. Mrs. Cavanaugh stopped
walking and watched. After a few minutes, I looked at up at her.
“Mrs. Cavanaugh, Wilson Greene says Santa isn’t
real.”
She gave that familiar shake of the head, and said,
“Oh Nicolas, I think we both know that isn’t true.”
“Yeah, I guess. Have a good day, Mrs. Cavanaugh!”
“The same to you.”
I looked at her, and somehow her mouth didn’t see so
pinched and crumpled anymore. Then I turned and ran home to see what Grandma
had made for dinner.
