A Winter Discovery (2 page)

Chapter Three

In stock

The mall was far more crowded than Gerry had expected it to be. Didn’t other people have trouble shoveling out of their driveways? Didn’t they realize they could buy everything they were shopping for online, and that they could probably spend less doing so? Over the past five years, Gerry had become fully committed to internet shopping, having launched an online specialty goods retailer that now did business in more than forty countries. Yet here he was, with seemingly the entirety of Suffolk County, buying presents for seemingly every person they’d ever met.

“Everything we needed really was just a mouse click away,” he said to Ally as they navigated through the crowds at Aeropostale to get shirts for two of her cousins.

“It’s not the same. Christmas shopping isn’t supposed to be mannered.”

As Gerry reached for a polo, another shopper snatched it away as though it were the last lifeboat on the
Titanic
. “I think I might have been okay with mannered.”

Ally kissed him on the cheek. “Don’t be ridiculous. This is fun. This is part of the whole getting-into-the-season thing. Besides, Reese wouldn’t have had nearly as much of a good time watching you buy everything on your computer.”

Gerry glanced over at his son who was, at this moment, engaged in an animated conversation with a cutout of Santa Claus. Earlier, he’d climbed on top of a huge Christmas tree ornament, sung along with a group of electronic elves, and exchanged high-fives with a guy in a reindeer suit. Going to the store at this time of year was like one extended Christmas morning for him.

“Yeah, I just wish he’d use his imagination a little more. I was really glad to see that he didn’t get too upset when the Frosty we built didn’t start moving around.”

“Resilient kid. I thought I timed the hot chocolate announcement particularly well there.”

“That
was
a master stroke. How did you know he thought we were building a living snowman?”

“Are you kidding? I think the people on the next block knew. Reese is not exactly quiet in his enthusiasms.”

The boy was now making swooping motions with his hands to the cardboard Santa. Gerry assumed they were discussing flight patterns. “No, he’s not. So, do you think he’s going to tell Santa what he wants for Christmas?”

Ally tipped her head in that direction. “If he does, then we should definitely eavesdrop. We’re running out of time.”

Over the past month, both Gerry and Ally had bought a variety of stocking stuffers for Reese – everything from packs of baseball cards to DVDs to action figures. A decision on his big present had eluded them, though.
It wasn’t that they couldn’t figure out what Reese might like
; it was that they needed to winnow down the choices from the great range of things that excited him. Did they address his growing love for sports (Gerry lobbied for a multi-game ticket plan to Yankee Stadium, but Ally suggested that the gift would be more appropriate for the
other little boy
in the household)? Did they try to encourage his interest in music? Of late, he’d been showing increasing fascination with crafts. Was it time to explore that further? Was he too young for a video game system? Even if he wasn’t, did they really want him to have one at this age? A remote controlled car? An e-reader? A silver tea set? Nearly anything could be a good choice, while at the same time nothing seemed to be the perfect choice.

Ally found some shirts she liked and managed to defend her turf against anyone seeking to grab them out of her hands. Now all they had to do was wait in a line that was at least fifteen people deep, so they could pay for the gifts. Reese was still chatting up Santa, so Gerry kept an eye on him while Ally went to the cash register.

Then they were on to EB Games to find presents for Zak and Sara, the kids of Gerry’s best friend, Tate. Tate had moved to Seattle more than five years ago, leaving his kids with his ex-wife for most of the year. It was something Gerry had never been able to reconcile, even after all this time, but Tate didn’t seem capable of dealing with it any other way. Gerry thought Zak and Sara were surprisingly mature for their ages and he’d had a number of thoughtful conversations with them when Tate brought them around. Still, they were twelve and ten, and they loved their games.

When Gerry asked Tate for a recommendation, Tate suggested a first-person shooter game for Zak and a role-playing fantasy for Sara. Neither of those seemed like great choices to Gerry, so he decided to do his own research. He found a dance game for Sara because she was in her third year of hip-hop lessons, and she was quite good. He found a copy of the game as soon as they got to EB.

He couldn’t find the monster truck driving game he’d decided on for Zak, though. When he finally got the attention of someone who worked at the store, he asked about it.

“We’re having a really tough time keeping that one in stock,” the clerk said. “You know what we can do, though? We can order it for you from our website and have it shipped directly to your house. It’ll definitely get there in time for Christmas.”

Gerry turned toward Ally with an expression that made it clear the irony of this was not lost on him.

“That’s not the point,” she said, giving him a soft shove.

Chapter Four

Maybe he was that kid

Reese woke up from the dream laughing. That was maybe the most amazing dream he’d ever had – and he’d had some pretty amazing ones. He was riding on this super fast train with snow on all sides. A bunch of kids were with him, and they were having this huge party. The train did all of these crazy loopy things – Reese was pretty sure they went upside down for a while, which turned out not to be as bad as he thought it was going to be – and everything outside became a blur.

Then, all of a sudden, the train slowed way, way down and they were in this crazy city. It took Reese about three seconds to realize they were in the North Pole. The kids got off the train, and there were elves everywhere. The elves kept talking about “the Big Guy,” and Reese just knew he was going to get to meet Santa Claus. But just when it was about to happen, he woke up.

Still, that was about as much fun as Reese had ever had while sleeping, and the whole thing just made him laugh. How unbelievably amazing would it be to get on a train like that?

Now that he was up, Reese realized that the dream was an awful lot like the movie “The Polar Express,” that he’d watched with Dad and Millie tonight. Dad had read the book to him a couple of times, too, but the movie was just so real. He really wanted to be the kid in that movie.

Maybe he
was
that kid. Maybe that’s why he had the dream. Maybe the dream was telling him to get outside and wait for the train to come. Sure, it wasn’t Christmas Eve yet, but Reese was guessing that the train didn’t only run that one day a year. Why would you build a train that incredible and then only use it on Christmas Eve?

Now that he had
that
thought in his head, Reese couldn’t just lay around in his room. How horrible would it be if the train showed up in his front yard and he missed it because he was in his bed thinking about it instead of getting on it. That’s probably what happened to kids all the time. The train waited for you for a little while and then it went to some other kid’s house and you were out of luck forever.

That wasn’t going to happen to him.

Reese got out of bed and opened his door very, very quietly. Millie seemed to hear him whenever he got up in the middle of the night. That was great if he wasn’t feeling good, but he didn’t want her with him right now. He was pretty sure the train wouldn’t come if someone else went outside with him, especially a grown-up.

Taking super-huge care to make sure he didn’t step on any of the creaky boards on the stairs, he went down to the hall closet and put on his coat, hat, mittens, and boots. The front door could be noisy, too, so he had to open it mega-slowly.

He stepped onto the porch. The train wasn’t there yet, but it could show up at any minute. It was
so
quiet out here. It was never this quiet when he usually came outside to play. It was good that it was this quiet, because that meant he’d be able to hear the train coming from a long way away.

Reese walked out to the middle of the lawn, which wasn’t that easy to do because the snow was really high. He said hi to the snowman he made with Dad as he went by. He still wasn’t sure what they did wrong. He thought they were making a Frosty, but they just made a plain snowman. They’d have to give it another try after he got back from the North Pole.

He was standing there a couple of minutes when it started to snow. This wasn’t the crazy buckets-of-snow thing from last night, just a little sprinkle. One of the flakes drifted right in front of his eyes and he caught it with his mitten and then held it up close to his face. He stared at it for a long time, not sure why he found this so interesting, but also not wanting to take his eyes off of it. As it turned out, this was another one of those non-melting snowflakes. Even though his mitten was pretty warm from being in the house, the flake just sat there.

For some reason, the snowflake made him start thinking about his mom again. What was that about? He thought about her a lot, anyway, but snowflakes just made her jump into his head these days. It would have been cool to talk to her about snowflakes or Frosties or trains that took you to the North Pole. Dad had told him once that Mom was really into Christmas, so she probably would have been really excited about this stuff. Maybe even as excited as he was about it.

He got that goopy feeling again while he was thinking about his mom. It made him feel really warm, like he was sitting by a fireplace or something. Even if he was feeling warm inside, though, it wasn’t melting the snowflake. That just stayed the way it was on his mitten, which was really good, because he liked having the company.

Just then, he felt an arm around his shoulder, and, when he looked up, Millie was standing next to him. He hadn’t even heard her walking through the snow to get to him.

“What’cha got?” she said, nodding toward the mitten that he was still holding out in front of him.

Reese looked to where she was looking. “Very cool snowflake. The kind that doesn’t melt.”

Millie leaned closer to his mitten. “It doesn’t melt?”

“Nope? I’ve been holding it for a really long time.”

Millie tilted her head and nodded. “That’s quite a snowflake.”

Reese nodded along with her.

“You know,” she said, “it’s not the best idea in the world for a six-year-old to be standing out in the snow by himself in the middle of the night.”

Reese looked down the street. “I was waiting for the Polar Express.”

“Doesn’t that only come on Christmas Eve?”

“That’s what a lot of people think, but I don’t think so.”

“Hmm.”

Millie didn’t say anything after that, so Reese went back to looking at the snowflake.

“It’s still not really a good idea for you to be standing out here at one-thirty in the morning.”

Reese looked up at Millie again, and she gave him one of her understanding smiles. He shrugged.

“However,” she said, “we still have a couple of those apple cider donuts left. While it wouldn’t be very responsible of me to let you stand outside at one-thirty in the morning, I think it’s completely responsible of me to let you eat a donut before you go back to bed. What do you think?”

Reese looked down the street in both directions this time. For some reason, he’d been thinking that the train would come from the right, but it could definitely come from the left, too.

It probably wasn’t coming at all now, though. He was just guessing that part about the train coming on days other than Christmas Eve. And, anyway, it wasn’t going to show with an adult out here.

He offered Millie an understanding smile of his own. “Donut sounds good.”

She squeezed his shoulder and said, “Come on, let’s go inside.”

As they turned to go, Reese took one more look at the snowflake. Since it was a non-melting flake, he could take it into the house with him, but then it would be lonely. Instead, he blew it off his mitten and watched it flutter to join its friends on the ground.

Chapter Five

Some of my best friends are elves

Fortunately, the weather didn’t wind up impeding Tanya’s return from school. It hadn’t snowed hard in a couple of days,
Tanya’s flight landed a few minutes early, and her roommate’s mother was there to bring the girls home. Tanya had been in the house for about a half hour, had unpacked (which likely meant dumping an enormous pile of dirty clothes of the floor of her room), and was now sitting in the kitchen with Gerry while he prepared a welcome-back paella.

“I’m sure I
passed
,” she said, describing her statistics final. Tanya was an excellent student – she’d gone into the semester with a 3.6 GPA – but math was not a strength. If she could have avoided that part of the curriculum entirely, she would have, but the school required her to complete at least one math class to graduate. “I’m just telling you it’s not gonna be pretty.”

Gerry sautéed onions and garlic in his eighteen-inch paella pan and prepared to toss in chunks of chicken thighs to brown. “You were essentially expecting that, right?”

“I just don’t understand why I couldn’t take the class pass-fail. It could wind up killing my chances of getting an honors diploma.”

“Well, if they only gave you grades on the classes you knew you could ace, the GPA wouldn’t have much value, would it?”

“Hey,” Tanya said, her voice rising, “you’re supposed to back me up on this stuff.”

Gerry walked over to where Tanya was sitting and gave her an over-the-top sympathetic hug. “My poor, poor baby! Do you want me to call the school and yell at them for you?”

“Sarcasm isn’t your most attractive trait, Dad.”

Gerry laughed and checked on the chicken before he started slicing linguiça. “So what are we talking about, a D?”

Tanya startled. “A D? No, jeez! I don’t know, maybe a B-minus. I had a B-plus average in the class going into the final.”

Gerry tipped his head toward his daughter. “You’re wringing your hands over a possible B-minus?”

“Are you telling me I should set the bar lower?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“Then what’s your point?”

Gerry resumed slicing. “No point. Never mind.” He decided to switch tack and ask about Tanya’s roommate. “How’d Shauna think the semester went?”

“Are we talking classes or hookups?”

Gerry had always found the term “hookup” offensive, never having had any taste for casual sexual relationships. He and Maureen had started dating in their sophomore year of college and he hadn’t been a “player” before then. “Is she still, um,
dating around
?”

“She and Greg stayed together for three weeks. If they made it to a month, I was gonna get her a trophy.”

Gerry found it a little creepy to think about his daughter’s friends having sex. He supposed it was similar to the creepiness they felt if they ever thought about him and Ally together. At least in Shauna’s case, Gerry hadn’t met the girl until she and Tanya started rooming together a few semesters ago. Last summer, Laurel, a girl he’d known since she was a preschooler, came to a barbecue at the house with a boyfriend, and made out in the back yard for most of the party. Gerry was tempted to stay inside that day.

“Okay, how’d her classes go?”

“Classes? Fabulous, of course. She’s a certifiable genius.
She
doesn’t have trouble with math.”

Gerry shook his head and went back to the pan to turn the chicken. “And Ron?”

“Wow, Dad, I’ve been home this long and this is the first time you’ve asked me about him. I should call Guinness.”

Tanya has been dating Ron, a senior at the University of Wisconsin, for nearly a year. He was her first serious boyfriend since her near-disastrous relationship with Mick that had led to her leaving home at sixteen and nearly disappearing from the family. Fortunately, Ron seemed nothing like Mick, as evidenced by Tanya’s being in the kitchen now.

“I’ll take that to mean that he’s still bringing you flowers every weekend.”

“He missed a weekend in early November. I nearly booted him out on his butt.”

“He has no idea how lucky he is.” Gerry tossed the linguiça into the pan and then turned back to Tanya. “Is he trying to line up a job?”

Tanya sat forward in her chair. “He has something like five networking interviews set up for the break. He even has one in Syosset at the end of December.”

Syosset was only a little more than a half-hour from their home. “Ron’s going to be around?” Gerry said.

Tanya grinned. “Well, there’s around and then there’s
around
.”

“Does
around
involve his finally shaking your father’s hand?”

Tanya fixed him with her eyes. “Will you be good?”

Gerry held up his hands. “When have I ever not been good?”

Tanya smirked. “Dad, really.”

Gerry had been openly contemptuous of Mick from the moment he’d met the older boy.

“I’ll be very good. Ron brings you flowers.”

Tanya’s expression softened. “Then maybe I’ll let you make him dinner.”

Just then, Reese walked into the kitchen and hugged his sister. It was the fourth time Gerry had seen him do that since Tanya had come home.

Reese sat in the chair next to her. “How much do you know about elves?”

Tanya turned to face him. “Quite a bit, actually. Some of my best friends are elves.”

The top of Reese’s head practically came off. “Really?”

Tanya seemed to realize that Reese was likely to take her seriously on this topic. “I might be exaggerating a little. But I know quite a bit about them.”

“So you know about the workshop?”

Tanya’s eyes grew large. “Definitely.”

Reese got up on his knees to get closer to her. “If I asked for a sleigh, could they make one for me?”

Gerry’s ears pricked up. He and Ally were still no closer to deciding on Reese’s big present.

“A sled?” Tanya said. “Yeah, sure.”

Reese shook his head briskly. “Not a sled, a
sleigh.
Like Santa’s sleigh.”

“You mean with reindeer and stuff?”

Reese scoffed. “You can’t
make
reindeer.”

Tanya pretended to slap herself on the side of the head. “Right, of course. Do you really want a sleigh?”

“Could be cool.”

“What would you do with one?”

Reese sat back. “I don’t know. Sit in it. Fly around.”

Gerry nearly burned the linguiça focusing on this conversation. Now he turned back to the pan and lowered the heat. He needed to get Tanya off the hook.

“You know, I was reading something about this online just the other day,” he said. “They were saying that if you wanted stuff like that you needed to get your letter to Santa in super-early. Right after Halloween, or something like that. It turns out that it’s a special order.”

Reese lowered his head. “Yeah, I had a feeling.”

Gerry glanced over at Tanya, who’d put a hand up to her heart. “You know what, though, Reese? The elves can make just about anything else, and there’s still plenty of time.”

Reese brightened. “You think?”

Tanya stood up. “No question about it. Let’s talk about it and put together a plan. Meanwhile, you know what? I haven’t seen your room since I got back. I’ll bet you have all kinds of new stuff in there.”

“Wanna see my new Uglydoll?”

Tanya gasped in feigned excitement. “You have a new Uglydoll?”

“Come on; I’ll show ya.”

They ran off to Reese’s room and Gerry tossed the rice in the paella pan, feeling supremely thankful that his two kids were in one place again.