Spinning
Spinning gave me a chance to write about something I’ve always wanted to address: the moment when you realize that you’re responsible for more than simply your own life. As with everything I write, I tried to look at this from a distinctive angle. The kid who changes everything for Dylan is not his, but under the circumstances, that doesn’t make his sense of responsibility any less. I had an especially good time creating the little girl Spring. I find that my kid characters are always among my favorite. Maybe someday I’ll bring them all together in one story….
From deep sleep, I heard the noise again, was unable to place it in my dream, and ran my fingers along the sheet in search of Laurel. The sound came again. It took several seconds for me to recognize it as knocking on the front door.
“Do you hear that?” I said, rolling over, hoping to glimpse Laurel’s magnificent body another time. She was gone. “Laurel?” I sat up. Still naked, I grabbed my robe and walked into the other room. It was dark and quiet. Laurel’s clothes were gone.
Three more knocks came from the door.
“Just a second.” It was almost 3:00 a.m. and everyone I knew should have been in bed – for one reason or another.
It’s Laurel, I thought. She left her panties under the coffee table or something like that.
“Coming,” I said. I checked the peephole and the image on the other side made me forget where I was. I opened the door.
“Dylan!”
A woman in pink, orange and yellow stood there, with her arms extended. My eyes hadn’t adjusted to the light yet – or the bright colors.
I squinted. “Diane?”
“Dylan!”
Just then, a head poked out from behind Diane and looked up at me. It was a little girl.
All the air left my body.
“Diane,” I said again, having suddenly lost access to all other vocabulary.
It wasn’t Laurel returning for more, or to retrieve something that she’d left behind. Seeing Diane’s black wavy hair and gray eyes took me back a few years to a Chicago hotel room off Lake Shore overlooking the Odyssey cruising Lake Michigan. That had been a remarkable handful of days.
“Dylan!”
The conversation was obviously taking a little while to develop. It was understandable, considering the circumstances. Diane Sommers from Chicago and a lifetime ago was standing at my door at 3:00 a.m., extending her arms and waiting for a hug.
Pulling her close, the memories of her perfume, her bright colors, her smile and her touch began to connect the dots until completing my vague recollection of the past. We’d worked head-to-head on the marketing campaign all day, wrapping ourselves in each other all night.
I began to pull back, but Diane continued to hold me. Focusing neither on the drab hallway nor the bead of sweat forming on the back of my neck, I called to mind the lines in her face – friendly, familiar, and yet foreign.
“Is everything all right?” I said, offering another squeeze when she refused to let me go.
“It’s good to see you.”
I had momentarily blanked out the fact that she had a kid with her. When Diane finally loosened her grip, I tightened the belt of my robe, conscious of little eyes staring up from our feet.
“Diane, it’s great to see you. I wish I had known you were coming. I would have waited up or at least put some clothes on.”
“Oh, Dylan.”
She smiled, reminding me of the reason that we’d gotten together in the first place. Everything about Diane had always seemed bright to me.
I looked down for the kid, but she had carefully hidden behind her mother. A second later, the little girl poked her head out. She seemed tired, but she still had the energy to muster a look of discernment – either that, or she had to use the bathroom.
“Hi?” I said.
Diane knelt down to the girl. “This is Spring.”
I nearly followed Diane’s crouch, then remembered my robe.
“And Spring, this is Mr. Dylan.”
“Hi, Spring.”
Spring was dressed in a yellow raincoat and red boots. She had the same wavy black hair and gray eyes as Diane. She didn’t say anything, but she seemed fascinated with my bare feet.
Diane stood back up. “Is this a bad time…?”
“No, no. Come in. Let me help you with your bag.”
Spring shook her head.
Though Diane’s arrival time was just a tiny bit strange, it was as good a time as any – especially since Laurel had already pulled a Houdini. I picked up Diane’s single piece of luggage; a brown relic, featuring ancient travel stickers that had to be at least 30 years old. Spring toted a red backpack over her raincoat. The backpack had a duck wearing boots stitched on it. “Is it raining outside?”
Again, Spring shook her head.
“Good,” I said. Who said I couldn’t make small talk with a kid?
She raised an eyebrow in my direction and I followed her inside.
“What brings you to New York at this hour?”
Diane stood there, with her suitcase at her feet. My eyes began to focus on the situation around me: the whole Laurel thing seemed like day-old bread and today’s menu featured an Indian recipe I couldn’t pronounce.
“This is a bad time,” Diane said. “We should leave.”
“No, no, not at all…really. I get people dropping in at this hour all the time. Would you like some wine? A cup of coffee? I have Kona.”
Anything
I played a tiny bit with fantasy in The Journey Home, but Anything is the first of my novels to have a strong supernatural element. I found this to be endless amounts of fun, though it also required me to follow lots of rules I hadn’t considered before to make the magic at least reasonably believable. How many times do we hear people say, “I would do anything for you?” In this novel, I decided to take that statement for a test drive.
I had a curious feeling when I walked into Stephon’s a couple of days later. This wasn’t surprising, since Stephon’s was a curious place, but that wasn’t the source of the strangeness I sensed. Instead, it was the incongruous fact that I had a response to Stephon’s even more incongruous request: to return with my greatest fantasy for Melissa. If I could remake the laws of physics, if I could wrinkle the fabric of time, I knew exactly what I would do with such power.
Of course, there were no customers in the store. Stephon always dressed well, if casually, and he had a fortune of jewelry in this small space. He had to get his money from somewhere. Was the store a front for some illegal operation? Did he think it was funny that I actually came here to shop?
Stephon offered me a friendly nod when I came in. “Good to see you again, Mr. Timian.”
“Thank you, Stephon. As promised.”
“As promised.”
“Do you have something fabulous for me?”
He smiled as broadly as his narrow face allowed. “I very well might.”
I smiled as well, getting a little excited about what was to come. “That’s great. Let me see what you were able to find.”
Stephon turned and walked toward the back room. Just before he entered the doorway, though, he stopped and faced me again. “I had a request of you, didn’t I?”
In some ways, I had hoped that he had forgotten. I wasn’t sure I could say what I was thinking out loud. “You did, yes.”
“A fantasy for you and your fiancée.”
“That was what you requested.”
“And did you think of one?”
I suddenly felt very uncomfortable. This seemed like such an intimate thing to share with someone I barely knew. “Is this really necessary?”
Stephon’s shoulders relaxed and he tilted his head to the side. He walked back toward the counter. “Of course it isn’t. If you haven’t come up with something or if you’d rather not tell me about it, I understand. It’s just a little question I ask from time to time when I see things in certain peopl
e. I thought it might enhance this whole transaction for you.”
Why that didn’t sound incredibly creepy to me, I don’t know. The entire experience had become fairly surreal. Just to make things a little more Dali-esque, I suddenly found myself wanting to share this with my jeweler. My eyes landed on a silver phoenix brooch where a golden elephant had been two days before. I shook my head briskly and then looked up at Stephon.
“This is probably going to sound ridiculous to you,” I said.
“I think that’s very unlikely.”
“It’s pretty outlandish.”
He nodded.
“My fantasy is to be able to go back to the beginning of Melissa’s life and watch her become the person she is today.”
“You mean travel back in time?”
“I guess, but not really that. I don’t want to be an orderly in the nursery or her third grade teacher or anything like that. I’d just like to be able to see her. Like in a home movie, but in three dimensions and with all five senses.”
Stephon nodded more broadly now.
“It’s pretty silly, huh?” I said.
“Oh no, I don’t think so at all.”
A Winter Discovery
A Winter Discovery is a novella that allowed me to do two things I’ve really wanted to do – return to the characters from When You Went Away to see how they were doing four years later, and to write a Christmas story. I think I’ve wanted to do the latter since seeing A Charlie Brown Christmas when I was five or six. Going back to these characters was even more fascinating than I expected it to be. I’d been imagining what had happened to them since I finished When You Went Away, but now that I was committing this to the page, I needed to fill in all kinds of details, and doing so made them come alive for me in surprising new ways.
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 thinkin
g 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.
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