Bonus Chapter First Christmas #3
Alma had made up the guest space — which was really just the office area at the back, with a daybed she had put in for our nieces and nephews when they visited, and which she had made up that morning with the heavy quilt my grandmother had pieced in 1962 and which Alma had inherited from my mother's estate and which she had been saving, all year, for this exact night.
My father saw the quilt. He sat down on the daybed.
He put his hand flat on the quilt. He did not speak.
He looked up at us after a moment.
He said, "I haven't seen this quilt since the year before your mother died."
I said, "She left it to us. We were saving it for tonight."
He said, "All right, son."
The fifth all right, son.
He got himself ready for bed. Alma and I went to the kitchen. We made hot chocolate from the powdered packets we kept in the cupboard, which were not, by any culinary standard, good hot chocolate, but which were, by every other standard, hot chocolate. We carried two mugs back to the daybed area.
He was already in his pajamas. He was sitting up against the pillows with my grandmother's quilt over his legs and a book in his hands that he had pulled from his duffel.
The book was a copy of A Christmas Carol that I recognized from the bookshelf in his living room.
It had a cracked leather binding. It had been my grandfather's.
He had read it every Christmas Eve of my childhood, out loud, to my mother and my brothers and me, in the years when I had been old enough to sit through it.
He had not, since my mother died, read it out loud.
He had, I now knew, kept reading it to himself.
He looked up when we came in with the hot chocolate.
He said, "Sit. Both of you."
We sat.
He said, "I am going to do a thing I have not done in eleven years.
I am going to read a Christmas Eve story out loud.
I am going to read it to you both. I am going to start now, even though it is not yet Christmas Eve.
I am going to start now because I am tired and I am going to fall asleep before the end of the book and I want to get through as much of it as I can before I do, and because the reading of it tonight, in this loft, with my daughter on the daybed next to me and my son on the rug — son, sit on the rug, where you used to sit — is, in my private accounting, the closest I have come in eleven years to Christmas the way it was. "
I sat on the rug.
I sat on the rug at my father's feet at the age of thirty-five years old, in the loft above my shop in Ember Falls, on the night of December the twenty-third, with Alma on the daybed next to him and my grandmother's quilt across his knees and the woodstove ticking quietly in the corner, and my father opened A Christmas Carol and began to read.
He read for an hour and ten minutes.
He read with the same voice he had used when I was eight years old.
The voice was rougher now and slower, and it cracked in the middle of the first stave and again at the part where Marley's ghost comes through the door, but it was the same voice.
It was my father's reading voice, which had been, in my childhood, distinct from his talking voice and was a thing he had reserved for the books he loved.
He read the first three staves. He paused twice to drink hot chocolate.
He paused once to clear his throat and to wipe his eyes when he got to the part where Scrooge sees Tiny Tim, because that part had always been my mother's favorite, and he had read it to her every year until the year she could not stay awake long enough to hear it.
He fell asleep, as he had predicted, in the middle of the fourth stave.
He fell asleep mid-sentence — ...the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come had silently approached — and the book lowered slowly onto his chest and his eyes closed and his breathing leveled out and he was, in the middle of a sentence, gone.
Alma and I sat there for a minute.
We did not move. We did not want to wake him. We watched him sleep.
He looked, in sleep, like a man much younger than he was. He looked like the man who had read me that book when I was eight. He looked like a man who had, just that night, found his way home to a thing he had not been able to find in eleven years and which he had now found.
Alma got up quietly. She lifted the book off his chest. She closed it.
She set it on the small table next to the bed.
She pulled the quilt up to his shoulders.
She turned off the small lamp. She put one hand briefly on his forehead — a small affectionate gesture I had seen her do with the elderly customers who came in to the shop and which she did, I realized, without thinking — and she stepped back.
I sat on the rug for another minute.
I looked at my father in the dim light of the woodstove.
I thought about him reading. I thought about him sleeping.
I thought about him at the compound in Diesel's chair.
I thought about him in the door of the loft saying daughter.
I thought about the long slow work — the same long slow work as everything — of bringing a man back from a place he had been hiding in for eleven years.
I thought about my mother.
I thought, she would have liked this.
I thought, she would have liked the daughter, and the loft, and the quilt, and the reading, and the man on the rug, and the woman on the daybed, and the snow that is, right now, starting to fall outside the window.
I went to the window.
Snow was, in fact, starting to fall outside the window.
It had not been forecast. It was the small light kind of snow that Virginia got in December if Virginia was lucky, which Virginia was not, most years, but which Virginia was that year, on the twenty-third of December, while my father slept under my grandmother's quilt with A Christmas Carol on the table next to him and my wife in the kitchen pouring out the rest of the hot chocolate and the woodstove ticking and the world doing its small quiet work outside the glass.
Alma came up behind me. She put her arms around my waist. She set her chin against my back. She said, "Beckett."
I said, "Yeah."
She said, "Look at it."
I said, "I am."
She said, "This is the best Christmas of my life. It hasn't even started yet."
I said, "Mine too."
She said, "How are you?"
I said, "I'm here. I'm all the way here. For the first time in maybe forever. I'm here."
She squeezed her arms around my waist.
She said, "Good. Stay here."
I stayed there.
We watched the snow come down on Mill Street for ten minutes.
The town was already dark — Ember Falls went to bed early in December — and the only light on the street was the streetlight at the corner of Mill and Sixth, which cast its small yellow cone of light onto the falling snow.
The snow fell. It would melt by morning.
It almost always did. But for that ten minutes, on the twenty-third of December, the town was the town in the snow, and the loft was the loft above the shop, and the man on the daybed was the man who had not been to my house in nine years and was, finally, in it, and the woman in my arms was the woman who had walked through a door I had not known I was holding open.
We went to bed late.