“I don’t believe you,” he said, reaching into his pocket and retrieving his BlackBerry. He looked at the screen: no missed calls. Dialing the number of his home quickly, he backed out of the stockroom, giving Gabe one last, vicious look, and ran, ran, ran.
“Remember to buckle up, Lou!” Gabe shouted after him, his voice ringing in Lou’s ears as Lou ran to the underground parking lot.
With the BlackBerry on autodial to Lou’s home, and still ringing, Lou drove out of the lot at a fierce speed. Thick, heavy rain plummeted against his windshield.
Putting the wipers on the fastest speed, he put his foot down on the accelerator and sped by the empty quays. The beeping of the seat-belt warning got louder and louder, but he couldn’t hear it for all the worrying he was doing. The wheels of the Porsche slipped a little on the wet roads as he raced down the back roads of the quays, then up the Clontarf coast road to Howth. Across the sea, the two red-and-white-striped chimneys of the electricity-generating station stood seven hundred feet tall, like two fingers raised at him. Rain bucketed down, leaving visibility low, but he knew these streets well, had driven up and down them all his life. All he cared about now was driving over the small thread of land that separated him from his family and getting to them as quickly as possible. It was six thirty and pitch-black since the day had closed in. Most people were at mass or in the pubs, getting ready to wrap final presents and leave a glass of milk and a plate of cookies out for Santa, a few carrots for his chauffeur. Lou’s family was at home, having an evening meal—one that he’d promised he’d join—but they weren’t answering the phone. He looked down at his BlackBerry to make sure it was still dialing, taking his eye off the road. He swerved a little as he moved over the middle line. A car coming at him beeped loudly, and he quickly moved back into his lane again. He flew up past the Marine Hotel at Sutton Cross, which was busy with Christmas parties. Seeing a clear road ahead of him, he put his foot down. He raced by Sutton Church and by the school along the coast, passed through streets of
friendly houses with Christmas trees and candles in the front windows, Santas dangling from roofs. Across the bay, the dozens of cranes lining Dublin’s skyline were laced in Christmas lights.
Lou eventually said good-bye to the bay and entered the steep road that began to ascend to his home on the summit. Rain continued to bucket down, falling in sheets, blurring his vision. Condensation was appearing on the windshield, and he leaned forward to wipe it with his cashmere coat sleeve. He pressed the buttons on the dashboard, hoping to clear the glass. The
ping, ping, ping
of the seat-belt warning rang again in his ears, and the condensation rapidly filled the windshield as the car got hotter. Still he sped on, his phone ringing, his desire to be with his family overtaking any other emotion he should have felt then. It had taken him twelve minutes to get to his street on the empty roads.
Finally, his phone beeped to signal a call coming through. He looked down and saw Ruth’s face—her caller ID picture. Her smile; her eyes, brown, soft, and welcoming. Glad she was at least safe enough to call him, he looked down with relief and reached for the BlackBerry.
The Porsche 911 Carrera 4S has a unique four-wheel-drive system that grips the road far better than any rear-wheel-drive sports car. It allots 5 to 40 percent of the power to the front wheels, depending on how much resistance the rear wheels have. So if you accelerate out of a corner hard enough to spin the rear wheels, power is
channeled to the front, pulling the car in the right direction. All-wheel drive basically means that the Carrera 4S could negotiate the icy road with far more control than most other sports cars.
Unfortunately, Lou did not have that model. He had it on order. It would be arriving in January, only a week away.
And so when Lou looked down at his BlackBerry, so overwhelmed with relief and emotion to see his wife’s face, he had taken his eye off the road and had dived into the next corner much too fast. He reflexively lifted his foot from the accelerator, which threw the car’s weight forward and lightened the rear wheels; then he got back on the accelerator and turned hard to make the corner. The rear end broke traction, and he spun across to the other side of the road, which was the deep decline down the cliff’s edge.
The moments that followed were ones of sheer horror and confusion. The shock numbed the pain. The car turned over once, twice, and then a third time. Each time, Lou let out a yell as his head, body, legs, and arms thrashed about wildly like a doll inside a washing machine. The emergency air bag thumped him in the face, bloodying his nose, knocking him out momentarily so that the next few moments passed in a still but bloody mess.
Some amount of time later, Lou opened his eyes and tried to survey the situation. He couldn’t. He was surrounded by blackness and found himself unable to move. A thick, oily substance covered one of his eyes,
preventing him from seeing, and with the one hand he could move, he found that every part of his body he touched was covered in the same substance. He moved his tongue around his mouth, tasted rusty iron, and realized it was blood. He tried to move his legs but couldn’t. He tried to move his arms and could just about move one. He was silent while he tried to keep calm, to figure out what to do. Then, when for the first time in his life he couldn’t formulate one single thought, when the shock wore off and the realization set in, the pain hit him at full force. He couldn’t get the images of Ruth out of his mind. Of Lucy, of Bud, of his parents. They weren’t far above him, somewhere on the summit; he had almost made it. In the darkness, in a crushed car, in the middle of the gorse and the hebe, somewhere on a mountainside in Howth, Lou Suffern began to whimper.
R
APHIE AND
J
ESSICA WERE DOING
their usual rounds and bickering over Raphie’s country-music tape, with which he liked to torment Jessica, as they passed the scene where Lou’s car had gone off the road.
“Hold on, Raphie,” she interrupted Raphie’s singing about his achy-breaky heart.
He sang even louder.
“RAPHIE!” she shouted, punching the music off.
He looked at her in surprise.
“Okay, okay, put your Freezing Monkeys on, or whatever you call them.”
“Raphie, stop the car,” Jessica said in a tone that made him immediately pull over. She leapt out of the car and jogged the few paces back to the scene that had caught her eye, where the trees were broken and twisted. She took her flashlight out and shone it down the mountainside.
“Oh God, Raphie, we need to call emergency services,” she shouted to him. “Ambulance and the fire department!”
He stopped his brief jog toward her and made his way back to the car, where he radioed it in.
“I’m going down!” she yelled, immediately making her way through the broken trees and down the steep incline.
“You will not, Jessica!” she heard Raphie yell back, but she didn’t listen. “Get back here, it’s too dangerous!”
She could hear him, but quickly zoned out from his shouts and could soon hear only her own breath, fast and furious, her heart beating in her ears.
Jessica, new to the squad, should never have seen a sight like this mangled car, upside down and totally unrecognizable, in her life. But she had. For Jessica, it was all too familiar; it was a sight that haunted her dreams and most of her waking moments. Coming face-to-face with her nightmare, and the replaying of a bad memory, dizziness overcame her, and she had to hunker down and put her head between her knees. Jessica had secrets, and one of them had come back to haunt her tonight. She hoped to God nobody was in that car; the car was
crushed, unrecognizable, with no license plate, and in the darkness she couldn’t even tell whether it was blue or black.
She climbed around the car, the icy rain pelting down on her, soaking her in an instant. The surface was wet and mucky beneath her, causing her to lose her footing numerous times, but as her heart beat wildly in her chest and as she found herself back in that distant memory, reliving it, she couldn’t feel the pain in her ankle as she went over on it; she couldn’t feel the scrapes of branches and twigs on her face, the hidden rocks among the gorse that bruised her legs.
Around the far side of the car, she saw a person. Or a body, at least, and her heart sank. She shone the light near him. He was bloodied. Covered in it. She discovered that the door had been smashed shut and she couldn’t pull it open, but the windowpane of the driver’s side had shattered, so at least she had access to his upper half. She tried to keep calm as she shone the flashlight inside the car.
“Tony,” she breathed as she saw the figure. “Tony.” Tears welled in her eyes. “Tony.” She clawed at the man, ran her hands across his face, urged him to wake. “Tony, it’s me,” she said. “I’m here.”
The man groaned, but his eyes remained closed.
“I’m going to get you out of here,” she whispered in his ear, kissing him on the forehead. “I’m going to get you home.”
His eyes slowly opened, and she felt a jolt. Blue eyes. Not brown. Tony had brown eyes.
He looked at her. She looked at him. Suddenly she was taken out of her nightmare.
“Sir,” she said, her voice shakier than she wanted. She took a deep breath and started again. “Sir, can you hear me? My name is Jessica; can you hear me? Help is on the way, okay? We’re going to help you.”
He groaned and closed his eyes.
“They’re on their way now,” Raphie called from above her, starting to make his way down.
“Raphie, it’s dangerous down here; it’s too slippery. Stay up there so they can see you.”
“Is anyone alive?” he asked, ignoring her request and continuing to move slowly down, one foot at a time.
“Yes,” she called back. Then to Lou, “Sir, give me your hand.” She shone the flashlight to look at his hand, and her stomach flipped at the sight. She took a moment to adjust her breathing and brought the light up again. “Sir, take my hand. Here I am, can you feel it?” She gripped him tight.
He groaned.
“Stay with me now. We’re going to get you out of here.”
He groaned some more.
“What? I can’t…em…Don’t worry, sir, an ambulance is on its way.”
“Who is it?” Raphie called. “Do you know?”
“No,” she called back simply, not wanting to take her attention away from this man, not wanting to lose him.
“My wife,” she heard him whisper, so quietly it could have been mistaken for an exhale. She moved her ear to his lips, so close she could feel them on her earlobe, the stickiness of the blood.
“You have a wife?” she asked gently. “You’ll see her. I promise, you’ll see her. What’s your name?”
“Lou,” he said. Then he started to cry softly, but even that was such an effort that he had to stop.
“Please hang in there, Lou.” She fought back the tears and then put her ear to his lips again as he breathed some more words.
“A pill? Lou, I don’t have any—”
He let go of her hand suddenly and started pulling at his coat, thumping his chest with a lifeless hand. He grunted with the effort; he whimpered from the pain. Reaching into his breast pocket, which was soaked with blood, Jessica took out a container. It had one white pill left inside.
“Is this your medication, Lou?” she asked, unsure. “Do I—?” She looked up at Raphie, who was trying to figure out how to make it down through the tricky terrain. “I don’t know if I’m supposed to give you—”
Lou took her hand and squeezed it with such sudden strength that she immediately opened the container with a shaking hand and shook the single pill onto her palm. With trembling fingers she lifted his mouth open, placed the pill on his tongue, and closed his mouth. She quickly looked around to see if Raphie had seen her. He was still only halfway down the slope.
When she looked back at Lou, he was staring at her, wide-eyed. He gave her such a look of love, of absolute gratitude for that one simple thing, that it filled her heart with hope. Then he gasped for air and his body shuddered, before he closed his eyes and left the world.
A
T EXACTLY THE SAME TIME
as Lou Suffern left one world and entered another, he stood in the front garden of his Howth home, drenched to the very core. He was trembling from the experience he’d just had. He didn’t have much time, but there was nowhere in the world he’d rather have been right at that moment.
He stepped through the front door, his shoes squeaking on the tiles. The fire in the living room was crackling, the floor below the tree was filled with presents, all wrapped with pretty ribbons. Lucy and Bud were so far the only children in the family, and so family tradition dictated that Lou’s parents, Quentin and Alexandra, and the newly separated Marcia would be staying overnight in his house. Tonight he couldn’t imagine not being with all of them; he couldn’t think of anything that would fill his heart with any more joy. He entered the dining room, hoping they would see him, hoping that Gabe’s last miraculous gift wouldn’t fail him now.
“Lou.” Ruth looked up from the dinner table and saw him first. She leapt out of her chair and ran to him. “Lou, honey, are you okay? Did something happen?”
His mother rushed to get a towel for him.
“I’m fine.” He sniffed, cupping her face with his hands and not taking his eyes off her. “I’m fine now. I was calling,” he whispered. “You didn’t answer.”
“Bud hid the phone again,” she said, studying him with concern. “Are you drunk?” she asked in a whisper.
“No.” He laughed. “I’m in love,” he whispered back, then raised his voice so that the whole room could hear. “I’m in love with my beautiful wife.” He kissed her fully on the lips, then breathed in her hair, kissed her neck, kissed her everywhere on her face, not caring who was there to see. “I’m sorry,” he whispered to her, barely able to get words out of his mouth, his tears gathering in his throat.
“Sorry about what? What happened?”
“I’m sorry for the things that I’ve done to you. For being the way I was. I love you. I never meant to hurt you.”
Ruth’s eyes filled. “Oh, I know that, sweetheart, you already told me. I know.”
“I just realized that when I’m not with you, I’m
ruth
less.” He smiled, and his mother—who’d returned with a towel and was now tearful at the scene—laughed and clapped her hands, before grabbing her husband’s hand at the table.
“To all of you.” He pulled away from Ruth but
wouldn’t let go of her hand. “I’m so sorry to all of you.”
“We know that, Lou.” Quentin smiled wobbily, emotion thick in his voice. “It’s all water under the bridge now. Okay? Stop worrying, and sit down for dinner; it’s all okay.”
Lou looked to his parents, who smiled and nodded. His father had tears in his eyes and nodded emphatically that it was all okay. His sister, Marcia, was blinking fiercely to stop her own tears.
They dried him, they kissed him, they loved him, they fed him, though he wouldn’t eat much. He told them in turn that he loved them, over and over again, until they were laughing and telling him to stop. He went upstairs to get a change of clothes before, according to his mother, he caught pneumonia. While upstairs, he heard Bud crying and immediately left his bedroom and hurried to his son’s room.
The room was almost dark, lit with only a night-light. He could see Bud wide awake and standing up against the railings of his cot, like a woken prisoner. Lou switched the light on and went inside. Bud viewed him angrily at first.
“Hey there, little man,” Lou said gently. “What are you doing awake?”
Bud just gave a quiet little moan.
“Oh, come here.” Lou leaned over the railings and lifted him up, holding him close in his arms and shushing him. For the first time in a long time, Bud didn’t scream
the house down when his father came near him. Instead, he smiled and pointed a finger in Lou’s eye, in his nose, then in his mouth, where he tried to grab his teeth.
Lou started laughing. “Hey, you can’t have them. You’ll have your own soon, though.” He kissed Bud on the cheek. “When you’re a big boy, all sorts of things will happen.” He looked at his son, feeling sad that he would miss all of those things. “Mind Mummy for me, won’t you?” he whispered, his voice shaking.
Bud laughed, suddenly hyper, and blew bubbles with his lips.
Lou’s tears quickly disappeared at the sound of Bud’s laughter. He lifted him up, put Bud’s belly on his head, and started jiggling him about. Bud laughed so hard, Lou couldn’t help but join in.
From the corner of his eye, Lou saw Lucy at the door watching them.
“Now, Bud,” he spoke loudly, “how about you and I go into Lucy’s room and jump on her bed to wake her up—what do you think?”
“No, Daddy!” Lucy yelled, exploding into the room. “I’m awake!”
“Oh, you’re awake, too! Are you both little elves that help Santa?”
“No.” Lucy laughed. Bud laughed, too.
“Well then, you’d better hurry to bed, or else Santa won’t come to the house if he sees you awake.”
“What if he sees you?” she asked.
“Then he’ll leave extra presents.” He smiled.
She wrinkled up her nose. “Bud smells of poo. I’m getting Mummy.”
“No, I can do it.” He looked at Bud, who looked back at him curiously.
Lucy stared at him as though he were insane.
“Don’t look at me like that,” he joked. “How hard can this be? Now, come on, buddy, help me out here.” He smiled at Bud nervously. Bud’s open palm smacked his father across the face playfully. Lucy howled with laughter.
Lou lay Bud down on the ground so that he wouldn’t wriggle off.
“Mummy puts him up there,” Lucy said, pointing to the changing table.
“Well, Daddy doesn’t,” he said, while trying to figure out how to undo Bud’s pajamas.
“The buttons are at the bottom.” Lucy said, sitting down beside him.
“Oh. Thanks.” He opened the buttons and rolled the pajamas up Bud’s body, in an attempt to evacuate all clothes from the area. He untaped a new diaper and slowly opened it. Turned it around in his hands, trying to figure out which way it went.
“Oh, pooh!” Lucy dove backward, her fingers pinching her nose. “Piglet goes on the front,” she said through her blocked nose.
Lou moved quickly to try to get the situation under control, while Lucy rolled around fanning the air with exaggerated drama. Impatient with his father’s progress,
Bud began kicking his legs, forcing Lou away from him. With Bud now on his knees, his rear end in Lou’s face, Lou crawled around behind him, approaching his bottom with a baby wipe. His light swipes were not helping the situation. He needed to get in there. Holding his breath, he went for it. With Bud momentarily under control and playing with a ball that had caught his eye, Lucy handed the various apparatuses to Lou.
“You’re supposed to put that cream on next.”
“Thanks. You’ll always take care of Bud, won’t you, Lucy?”
She nodded solemnly.
“And you’ll take care of Mummy?”
“Yessss.”
“And Bud and Mummy will take care of you,” he said, finally grabbing Bud’s pudgy legs and pulling him back, while Bud screeched like a pig.
“And we’ll all take care of Daddy!” she hurrahed, standing up and dancing around.
“Don’t worry about Daddy,” he said quietly, trying again to figure out which way to put the diaper on. Finally he got the gist, quickly closed the buttons on Bud’s pajamas, and put him back in the crib.
“Mummy puts the lights out so that he gets sleepy,” Lucy whispered.
“Oh, okay, let’s do that,” Lou whispered, turning off the lights so that the Winnie the Pooh night-light was again visible.
Lou hunkered down in the darkness, pulling Lucy
close to him. He sat on the carpet hugging his little girl, watching the bear of very little brain chase a honeypot on the ceiling. As Bud made a few gurgles and spurts, lulling himself to sleep, Lou knew it was his moment to tell her.
“You know that no matter where Daddy is, no matter what’s happening in your life, no matter if you’re sad or happy or lonely or lost, remember that I’m always there for you. Even if you don’t see me, know that I’m in here”—he touched her head—“and I’m in here”—he touched her heart. “And I’m always watching you, and I’m always proud of you and of
everything
you do, and when you sometimes question how I ever felt about you, remember right now, remember me saying that I love you, my sweetheart. Daddy loves you, okay?”
“Okay, Daddy,” she said sadly. “But what about when I’m naughty? Will you love me when I’m naughty?”
“When you’re naughty,” he said, thinking about it, “remember that Daddy is somewhere always hoping that you’ll be the best that you can be.”
“But where will you be?”
“If I’m not here, I’ll be elsewhere.”
“Where is that?”
“It’s a secret,” he whispered, trying to hold back his tears.
“A secret elsewhere,” she whispered back, her warm sweet breath on his face.
“Yeah.” He hugged her tight and tried not to let a sound pass his lips as his tears fell, hot and thick.
Downstairs in the dining room, there wasn’t a dry eye in the house as they listened to the conversation in Bud’s nursery over the baby intercom. For the Sufferns they were tears of joy because a son, a brother, and a husband had finally come back to them.
That night, Lou Suffern made love to his wife, and afterward he held her close to him, rubbing his hands down her silky hair until he drifted away, and even then his fingertips continued to trace the contours of her face: the little turn-up of her nose, her high cheekbones, the tip of her chin, along her jawline, then all the way along her hairline, as though he were a blind man seeing her for the first time.
“I’ll love you forever,” he whispered to her, and she smiled, halfway to her dream world.
I
T WAS IN THE MIDDLE
of the night that the dream world was shattered when Ruth was awakened by the gate buzzer. Half asleep, she stood in her nightgown and welcomed both Raphie and Jessica into her home. Quentin and Lou’s father accompanied her, keen to protect the house against such late-night dangers. But they couldn’t protect her from this.
“Morning,” Raphie said somberly as they all gathered in the living room. “I’m sorry to disturb you at such a late hour.”
Ruth looked at the young police officer standing beside him, at her dark black eyes that seemed cold and
sad, at the grass and dried muck that was splattered on her boots and that clung to the bottom of her navy-blue trousers. At the small scrapes across her face and the cut that she was trying to hide behind her hair.
“What is it?” Ruth whispered, her voice catching in her throat. “Tell me, please.”
“Mrs. Suffern, I think you should sit down,” Raphie said gently.
“We should get Lou,” she whispered, looking to Quentin. “He wasn’t in bed when I woke up; he must be in his study.”
“Ruth,” the young garda said, so softly that Ruth’s heart sank even further, and as her body went limp, she allowed Quentin to reach for her and pull her down to the couch beside him and Lou’s father. They grabbed one another’s hands, squeezed one another so tightly that they were linked like a chain, and they listened as Raphie and Jessica told them how life for them had changed beyond all comprehension, as they learned that a son, a brother, and a husband had left them as suddenly as he’d arrived.
W
HILE
S
ANTA LAID GIFTS IN
homes all across the country that night, while lights in windows began to go out for the evening, while wreaths upon doors became fingers upon lips and blinds went down as the eyelids of a sleeping home drooped, hours before a turkey went through a window at another home in another district,
Ruth Suffern had yet to learn that despite losing her husband she had gained his child, and together the family realized—on the most magical night of the year—the true gift that Lou had given them in the early hours of Christmas morning.