Is Anybody There? (10 page)

I knew for sure Nick hadn’t taken the sleeping bag from the garage yesterday. Whatever he’d had behind his back had been small and easily hidden. And if the bag had been in his apartment I’d have found it. Besides, why would he want it? Why would he want any of this stuff? I had to face what I didn’t want to face and what I’d begun to suspect for the last couple of days. There’d been a thief who had used my key, come into our house, and helped himself to whatever he wanted. The thief was not Nick. I’d wanted it to be Nick, for reasons of my own. It just hadn’t worked out.

I went back into the house. Better not to mention the missing sleeping bag to Mom. Not tonight. Not on Christmas Eve. I’d make some excuse for not sleeping under the tree, and I’d try to be nicer to Nick, at least until
Christmas was over. I’d try for Mom’s sake, and because I’d been unfair.

It’s hard, though, to change yourself drastically.

I heard Nick’s car drive up, and a couple of seconds later he rang our doorbell. He was carrying two packages, one small and one large and flat. The small one I’d seen before in his apartment. It was Mom’s.

“Lose your key?” I asked halfheartedly. It wasn’t as easy to hate him now that I’d seen the pictures of him with Anne and Blake.

“No. I didn’t lose it. Your Mom thought it might be better if I didn’t have a key to the house,” he said. “No problem.”

“Oh.” I’d won a victory, but I didn’t feel very happy about it.

He held out the packages. “Christmas gifts for you and your mom.”

“Oh,” I said again, stuck on the silly word. I looked at the packages without taking them. “Don’t you want to bring them when you come for Christmas dinner?”

“Your mom says you open your gifts tonight. I wanted these to be part of your opening.”

“She’s not home yet. Do you want to come
in?” My tone of voice let him know I definitely didn’t want him to.

“No, Marcus. The two of you should have your Christmas Eve to yourselves. But thanks for asking me.”

Now I felt really bad. “OK,” I said. “Well, thanks for the gifts.” I stood, not closing the door. “You know what, Nick? When that guy came and took the clock, he took my sleeping bag from the garage too.”

“He did?” Nick shook his head. “He took some weird things, that’s for sure. You know what, Marcus? I think we should stop thinking about that creep and not let him spoil Christmas.”

I nodded. “I’ve stopped.”

When Mom came, I told her about Nick and the gifts and she smiled and looked pleased. “I got him a Walkman radio from both of us,” she said. “So he can listen to his Mozart tapes while he jogs.”

“His Mozart tapes?” Was there anything about Nick that Mom didn’t know? I waited for my slow burn of resentment to start, but tonight I had to help it along a bit. “Do you know about Nick’s wife and kid?” I asked, watching her carefully.

“A bit. He doesn’t say much. He and his wife were divorced when Blake was six. His wife got custody. She was supposed to allow Nick to visit his son but she took off, illegally. Nick’s been searching for the last seven years and has never found a trace of them.”

I remembered the pile of wrapped and undelivered Christmas presents Nick had in his closet.

“She must have hated Nick a lot to have run off like that.”

“Some divorces are really bitter, Marcus. And often without much reason. It’s sad.”

“Nick was probably rotten,” I said, but that halfhearted unsureness was back in my voice.

“I don’t believe Nick would know how to be rotten,” Mom said. Then she smiled. “So? How about you and I getting Christmas Eve started?”

I shrugged. “Fine with me.”

First we went out again, driving the four blocks to Jimmy Joe’s market to pick up our fresh turkey and oysters. He keeps the turkey for us till the last minute because we don’t have room for such a big beast in our refrigerator.

“Twenty-two pounds,” he said. “And a fine figure of a bird.”

We wished each other Merry Christmas and drove home.

After Mom put the food away, she went to her room to change. I stood by the tree, staring around. I had the creepy crawlies again. There was a feeling in the room, an alien presence. I thought I saw a shadow move against the wall. “Is anybody there?” I whispered, peering into the corner.

Of course nobody was there. It was only the tree shape, dark and changing in the twinkling lights.

“Just quit it, Marcus,” I said out loud. “You’re making your head crazy. There’s nobody there. The thief has been and gone. Forget him.”

“Have you started talking to yourself now, hon?” Mom asked, coming back in the room.

“Oh, just once in a while,” I said.

She’d changed into her raspberry-colored cords and her big, loose raspberry sweatshirt. Her black hair was tied back with a pink-and-silver ribbon.

“You look very nice,” I told her, which was
what I’d said to Anjelica Trotter. But this time I meant it.

Mom fixed her creamy oyster stew, which probably tastes so wonderful because we have it only on Christmas Eve. We sat across from one another at the table and the thought of Nick upstairs, alone in his little room, drifted into my mind. I made it drift out again.

Mom pointed with her fork to the blue vase. “What happened to Miss Coriander’s roses?”

I’d pulled a few pieces of ivy from the backyard to fill the vase, but Mom is not dumb and ivy does not look or smell like roses.

“Robbie took them,” I said. “He wanted to give them to somebody.”

Mom’s eyes opened wide. “A girl?”

“Sort of,” I said.

“Oh well. I guess they went in a good cause.”

I lingered over my stew, making it last, not wanting to move on to the next part of our Christmas Eve ritual, the one where I go up to the attic and bring down the box of decorations for the tree.

Usually I don’t mind the attic. It’s half floored and we use it for storage. Where the
planking ends you can look beyond, down into the empty, cobwebby dark where dust drifts between the studs and up into the shadowy peak of the roof.

I’ve never been allowed to play up there.

“Your dad had plans for this,” Mom told me once. “We were going to have a rec room, all paneled, with a Ping-Pong table and an old jukebox. Your dad always wanted one of those jukeboxes so we could play old Donovan records and dance the way we used to. Donovan was our favorite. But of course we never got the rec room or the jukebox.”

I wished they had. I wouldn’t have minded going up into that kind of place. I don’t usually mind this one either. But the way things had been going, I wasn’t anxious to poke my head into anywhere dark and out of the way.

“Is it time to trim the tree?” Mom asked after we’d done the dishes.

“I guess,” I said. “I’ll get the flashlight.”

It wasn’t in the kitchen drawer where we keep it.

“It has to be there,” Mom said. “I saw it yesterday. You’re not looking properly.”

I was. And it wasn’t there. I checked the
next drawer, pawing through pot holders and drying cloths, and then I stood very still, staring out at the darkness beyond the kitchen window. The crazy thief had taken the flashlight, too.

“We’ll find it sometime when we don’t need it,” Mom said, and I wondered if she knew we’d never find it and why—if we were trying to protect one another from remembering that there’d been a stranger here, prowling around inside our house.

“Can you make do with my penlight?” she asked.

When I nodded she got it from her purse. “I think I’ll just come with you.” Her eyes didn’t quite meet mine.

“You’ll be sneezing all night if you do,” I said. “That’s prehistoric dust up there. Besides, all I have to do is reach in. The box is right at the top.”

As I climbed, though, she stood halfway up the attic steps, partly so I could pass the big, awkward carton down to her, and partly to make going into the attic easier for me. As I said, my mom is not dumb.

I opened the hatch and shone the thin beam into the darkness. The moving light picked up
the trunk that had been Dad’s in college, the cedar closet where Mom keeps her heavy going-to-visit-Grandma coat, the single-bed mattress, and my old rocking horse, too dear for Mom to part with. The narrow shaft was no more than a small searchlight in the sky, so skinny, so nothing, making the dark around it deeper and more mysterious.

“I thought the box was right here,” I called down to Mom. “It’s not. We must have moved it.”

I climbed up and onto the floor. There was a strange smell. What was it? Something I’d smelled before, something holy, or of Christmas. Just the smell of the cedar closet? No time to stand here, sniffing the dank air, not with the dark pressing against me and the small shuffles and creaks. There was the box of Christmas ornaments. I slipped the flashlight into the pocket of my T-shirt and was immediately in blackness except for the square of light coming through the hatch.

Around me the attic seemed to breathe … in, out, in, out.

Mom’s voice floated up. “Did you find it, Marcus?”

“Yes.” I lifted the box, stumbling in my
hurry to get out. Mom grabbed it as I eased it down the steps and immediately started to sneeze.

“See?” I asked. “It’s a good thing you didn’t come up.”

We carried the box into the living room, where the tree waited, where the dark was safely closed away.

Mom has tapes of Christmas music, and we put them on and took out the old ornaments, one by one. There were the pearl drops with half the pearling worn off … the snowflakes I’d made in third grade. Everything came with its own remembering. “Remember when Grandma bought you this little horse? And here’s the choo-choo train.”

I wouldn’t let myself even glance at the corner where I thought I’d seen the shadow move. Is anybody there? Nobody. Nobody’s there.

The music moved around us, the choir voices building and soaring to their final hallelujahs.

The angel was in her own small drawstring bag, cushioned in yellowed tissue paper. I took her out.

“Your dad used to have to lift you up to put
her on top of the tree,” Mom said.

I still needed the stool.

When I clipped her on, her wing shadow spread across the ceiling like a blessing in church.

In an hour it would be Christmas.

“Shall we open those gifts?” Mom asked, squeezing my hand.

“Yes,” I said. “But can I give you yours first?”

“I think I’ll the if you don’t,” she said. “You’ll never know how many times I was tempted to peer over and see what was behind that sheet.”

I took her arm. “Come with me and close your eyes.” I opened the door between the kitchen and garage and put on the light.

“Stay here and keep those eyes closed,” I warned as I whipped the cover off and wheeled her gorgeous, handmade custom bike close.

“Now!” I watched her face, the way her eyes widened and the joy in her smile.

“Oh Marcus,” she said. “Are you going to tell me you made this beautiful thing entirely yourself?”

I stuck out my chest. “It was nothing.”

Mom got on the bike and rode it round and round the garage, across the length and breadth of Australia. Then she stopped under the light to admire it bit by bit.

“I can hardly wait till tomorrow to try it,” she said. “Let’s ride before breakfast, OK?”

“OK.”

Before we went back in she bent and kissed the handlebars and said, “‘Bye, bike.”

Sometimes Mom does a baby thing like that, and it always makes me laugh.

“Now we’ll get your present from me,” she said. “Not that it can compare.”

She’d bought me what I’d suspected and hoped for … a complete tool set with everything in it that I could possibly need for a lifetime of bike making. Ratchets, sockets, screwdrivers, wrenches, pliers, hex-key set! The green metal carrying case had my initials in black. M.M. Marcus Mullen. Or Marcus Milardovich?

I jumped up and hugged Mom before that last thought could take hold. Then I lifted Nick’s gifts from under the tree. “He said we should open these with the rest,” I told her.

Mom read the card Nick had taped to her package and I noticed she put it safely on the mantle before she tore off the foil wrap. I remembered that it said, “To Caroline with love from Nick.”

The little plastic box inside held four tapes. A gold ribbon that slanted across the top said
DANCE TIME,
and a tag listed the tunes and the groups. I checked. “The Grateful Dead,” “Big Brother and the Holding Company.”

“Hey!” I said. “Were these the top names in your day?”

“They sure were.”

I noticed that Donovan wasn’t listed here and I decided she’d told Nick that Donovan was Dad’s and her favorite. I was glad he hadn’t tried to jump in on that.

“Here’s Nick’s gift to you,” Mom said.

It was a photograph of Mom’s Christmas bike, so glossy, so sharp, it could have been an ad from
Sports Illustrated
or
Bike World.
It had been taken since I’d put on the Campies.

“I wasn’t in on the entire secret,” Mom said, “but I knew you were getting a photograph and that it had to be a rush job. Nick spent yesterday in the lab at school, developing
it and I guess doing the framing and matting.”

“Oh.” I ran my finger around the dark-blue frame. The color was perfect, showing off the undertones in the black paint.

“
That
must have been what he was up to in the garage.
That’s
why he didn’t want me to tell you. He was taking this picture.”

I felt silly and something else. Maybe ashamed. It was his camera he’d had behind his back! I decided I owed Nick an apology.

The neat label on the back said
THIS BICYCLE BUILT BY MARCUS MULLEN AS A GIFT FOR HIS MOTHER AT CHRISTMAS.
Underneath was the date. Nick seems to label his pictures on the back, like any good photographer. Anne and Blake. Nick, Anne, and Blake.

“I like it,” I told Mom.

She nodded. “It’s beautiful. It really does the bike justice. He was going to give you a watch because he noticed you didn’t have one, but I told him that …”

“What?”

“Oh, that your dad’s watch would be yours before too long, and I asked him if he wanted to get you an inexpensive one to fill in till
then, but he said no. He never wants to intrude on special things between you and your dad.” She smiled at me in a teary kind of way and then said, “So I asked myself why should you have to wait. You’re old enough and sensible enough now. I decided you should have your father’s watch this Christmas. It’s time.”