by Lucy Finn
“So you’re staying married?” I asked.
“Ah, Ravine,” she said. “You know no matter what, I’m Bobby’s girl.” Then she said they compromised. He had started making paper with her, and they were doing some gorgeous boutique rice papers right now. She said she’d go tailgating at the Penn State games next year—if she didn’t have to stay home to take care of a baby.
I gave her a big hug and thought about how lucky I was right now. It was a time when things were going so good, it almost scared me. And I saw no more lone figures in the pasture. I heard no more motorcycles in the night. I had begun to think both incidents had been tricks being played by my imagination and nothing more.
I did, however, at Gene’s urging, take the first steps in finding Jake. I called a friend of a friend in the district attorney’s office in Houston. She checked for me and found no arrest records of any Bandidos in the last fifteen months that fit Jake’s description. It was a relief to hear that. She did say a few Bandidos had been busted near Houston for selling crystal meth. At least one of them, a twenty-year-old called Dutch, had been working out a plea bargain with her office.
Dutch, she said, seemed like an intelligent kid, and he didn’t have a previous arrest record. He was motorcycle-crazy, but wasn’t a hard-ass. She thought he might be willing to talk with her. She took down the slim facts I knew about Jake—his appearance, kind of motorcycle, where he was last seen, and that he might be called Doc—and said she’d call me if she came up with anything. I appreciated that she didn’t ask why I wanted to track him down.
I spent most of my days in the office hammering out the details of my third wish. I was worried that I wouldn’t get it exactly right, and the slipup could be disastrous. Gene and I talked it over dozens of times. He felt more confident than I did that the wish would work. I started having nightmares that I’d make the wish and Gene would crumble away into dust, leaving me on my hands and knees weeping.
Mostly I spent my time giddy with happiness, grinning all the time. Gene and I rarely fought, and we laughed a lot. On a couple of occasions, he said he needed to go off by himself for a while. I guessed he was grieving for his parents and the past. It never lasted long, and later we’d pack up Brady and take off in the red Avalanche, driving back and forth from Home Depot or Lowe’s. We picked out paint and chose replacement windows, decided to install granite countertops, and bought a dishwasher in anticipation that Gene’s winking soon would no longer work to make cleanup a snap.
Around the second week of December, Gene sat me down and said he had done a lot of thinking. How did I feel about him becoming an investigator—in other words, a private detective? If I wanted to take on some criminal cases, we could work together, but he had some ideas about starting an agency. For many reasons, including the great gaps in his knowledge of the past, he wanted to be his own boss, and he had thoroughly enjoyed, he confessed, the adventures we had going after John Osterhaupt and Queen Nefertitty. I agreed the idea had merit, but I told him frankly that I was afraid to count on too much, until I saw for myself the third wish had worked. I had never wanted anything more in my life than to be with Gene. The longer we were together, the better life got.
During those halcyon days, we went to the movies at the new Cineplex downtown; we attended a play at the Kirby Theater; we even tried some early-season skiing at Snö
Mountain. Every day was a new adventure, and if I hadn’t had that dark shadow of fear about the wish hanging over my head, life would be perfect.
When the week before Christmas rolled around, I took a deep breath and decided I had to let myself enjoy the season and the sweetness of anticipating Gene’s staying with me forever. Besides, this was Brady’s first Christmas, so the three of us went out to a nearby tree farm and picked out a beautiful blue spruce. Gene “baked,” or at least he conjured up Christmas cookies and a nut roll. We went overboard buying decorations, and I even starting hoping for snow so we could have a traditional white Christmas.
On the day before Christmas, the day of Christmas Eve, I felt confident that I had all the details of the third wish nailed down. I looked over the wish as I had written it and printed it out. I planned to read it verbatim. I took it into the kitchen where Gene was painting the walls a celery green and the molding a crisp white. We sat down at the table and Gene and I reviewed the wish one last time.
He assured me that it was perfect, and he was the wish expert, so I believed him. We got champagne ready to put on ice in a bucket right before we left for my mother’s so we could celebrate privately when we returned home. We packed the Avalanche with food and presents. I went to my jewelry box and brought out my engagement ring. I put it on the table next to the candles we were going to light. And as predicted by the TV’s Accuweather forecast, it began to snow.
As the afternoon passed, I was getting increasingly nervous. Gene kept talking to me, telling me he was ready and absolutely sure about his decision. He kept reassuring me that the wording of the wish was without flaw. Finally, to pass the time, we made popcorn and decided to watch the DVD of The Christmas Story until it was the hour to make the wish. Brady was in his Bouncy Bounce having a fine time, but I kept glancing at the clock.
“Why wait any longer?” I suggested. “Maybe I should just go ahead and wish.”
“If you want to, that’s fine,” Gene agreed. “It was your idea to make the wish at six ten because that was the time I was born. It would be a symbolic re-birth, but we really don’t have to wait.”
I got up off the couch and paced. “No, we should wait. It’s only another two hours. I’m being silly. But I have this feeling that something is going to go wrong. Damn, I’m almost hyperventilating.” I walked over to the window. The ground outside was covered in a light blanket of snow. The roads must already be slippery, and I was glad I had four-wheel drive instead of the iffy traction of my BMW.
Gene came up behind me and put his arms around me. “It’s beautiful,” he said. “Merry Christmas. The merriest of Merry Christmases.”
“Yes,” I agreed and turned around to face him. We kissed and happiness filled me up so full I could have burst for joy.
It was right then that the sirens down at the firehouse began to wail. Their sound made me shiver, and Gene’s arms tightened around me. Somewhere out in that snow, someone was in trouble. When the sirens kept going, I knew it wasn’t a routine emergency. Something very bad had happened and the Kunkle ambulance crew were calling in all their volunteers. “Oh, that’s so sad,” I said to Gene. “It’s Christmas Eve, and something terrible has happened.”
Gene kissed the top of my head. “I know. I’m sorry. Let’s count our blessings,” he murmured into my hair.
Then the house phone rang. I looked at Gene and my heart started racing. I picked up the receiver. “Hello?” I said in a shaking voice.
It was Tom Metz, Cal’s nephew who was the local cop. I heard him tell me that there had been an accident and I needed to get down to Mercy Hospital right away. I tried to get my mind around his words. “Accident? Who was in an accident?”
“Ravine…it’s your mother.”
“My mother? What happened?” My voice sounded like an echo very far away. I heard Tom telling me that her truck was hit by a tractor trailer, and that it was bad, real bad. He said to get to the hospital as fast as I could.
I turned my stricken face to Gene. He had heard enough that he was already grabbing Brady’s snowsuit and getting him into it. I found my purse and coat, and we ran out to the Avalanche. “I’ll drive,” Gene said. “I’ll get us there faster.”
I nodded at him and got in the passenger side, my body trembling all over.
Gene winked and the bells I heard were sad bells. But in that wink of an eye we went from my driveway to the parking lot of the hospital. “I’ll take care of Brady,” Gene said. “You get on in there.”
I don’t remember much. I don’t remember going from the car through the emergency room door. I don’t remember screaming at
the admissions nurse. I do remember Tom walking out to the desk and saying he’d take care of this and looking at me strangely. “How did you get here so fast?” he said.
I looked at him dumbly, but Gene had walked in behind me and explained something about call forwarding to my cell phone and that we were out shopping only a few blocks away.
I hardly heard him. I was pulling at Tom’s arm. “Where is my mother? How is my mother?”
Tom shook his head. “I’ll take you to her. I have to warn you, Ravine. They have her on life support. They were waiting for you to come.”
I couldn’t believe it. I just couldn’t. He was saying my mother was going to die. I wanted to get to her. And when I did I was shocked. I wasn’t shocked so much by the respirator, the beeping machines, or all the IV lines. I was shocked because it looked as if she were sleeping. I couldn’t see any injuries. She was unconscious but I didn’t see any blood. I went over and took her hand.
“Ma,” I cried. “Ma, I love you. Don’t die, please don’t die.”
The doctor came in and I lifted my tearstained face. “What happened? What’s wrong with her?”
The doctor said in words that I heard but really couldn’t quite believe that her brain had shut down. It had been a freak accident. My mother wasn’t injured in the collision itself but the tractor trailer rolled over, spilling its contents onto her pickup. The truck’s cargo was bales of down, for comforters. They broke open and feathers cascaded over my mother’s truck and through the broken windshield into the cab. She couldn’t breathe. By the time the EMTs got to her, five minutes had passed. They found the truck driver thrown clear but badly injured. By the time they found my mother, her heart had stopped and her brain had been deprived of oxygen. They tried to revive her, but it had been too long.
“There’s no hope?” I cried. “You can’t do anything for her?”
“There’s always hope,” the doctor said in a kind voice. “But we can’t do anything except breathe for her. And at some point, you’ll need to decide to let her go. It would take a miracle to bring your mother back. I’m so very sorry. I’ll leave you alone with her now.”
I wasn’t looking at the doctor as he left. As I stood there clutching my mother’s hand, I saw that Gene had been behind him, listening to every word the doctor said. He was holding Brady and watching me intently.
My eyes were flowing with tears, and I wanted his arms around me. But I needed a miracle even more, and I mouthed the words to him: Can you?
He nodded. “You’ll have to take Brady,” he said.
“I love you, Gene,” I said.
“And I love you, but you need to hurry up and wish, Ravine.” He looked down at my mother. “You don’t have much time.” The machines had started to beep crazily and I saw something change in my mother’s colorless face.
Clutching Brady so hard he whimpered and almost unable to make my mouth form the words, I said, “I wish…I wish that my mother wakes up now, as whole and healthy as she was before the accident.”
Above the beeping machines I heard the ringing of loud, clear bells, and I watched the color come flooding back into my mother’s face. Her eyes opened. She couldn’t talk because of the breathing tube, but she squeezed my hand and her eyes told me she loved me.
And when I looked back where Gene had been standing, no one was there. Where he had stood was only emptiness. He was gone.
Chapter 18
Right after I made my wish, doctors and nurses came running into the room thinking my mother had coded. Instead she was trying to sit up. One of the nurses, a former student of my mom’s, burst into tears. The doctor looked startled, then hurried over to examine his patient. When he was finished, he shook his head. He looked at me, smiling broadly. “There’s no other explanation for it. You got your Christmas miracle.”
I had. I had gotten everything I wished for and lost everything at the same time. As John Greenleaf Whittier wrote, “For of all sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these: It might have been.”
I didn’t regret wishing to save my mother’s life. She was my mother, and I would have walked through fire for her. When they removed the respirator, I wouldn’t leave her side. I hovered next to her bed asking her if she needed anything, or holding her hand. After a few hours, she told me in a croak to go home and stop fussing about her. But I wouldn’t. I planned on sleeping in her hospital room.
Freddi arrived shortly after my mother woke up. She had heard about the accident on the scanner, and she and Bobby had driven down here as fast as they could, fearing the worst. She found my mother awake, sitting up, and telling everybody she wanted to go home. Freddi gave me a look filled with her unspoken questions. Finally, in a whisper, she asked me where Gene was.
I shook my head, and said, “He’s gone.”
Freddi knew all about my engagement ring, and that day in the mall I had even told her about my Christmas Eve plans for making my third wish come true. She understood right away what must have happened. She hugged me and said, “I’m so sorry. But I will thank Gene every day that we didn’t lose Aunt Clara.”
My throat closed up with tears, and I turned away.
Freddi took Brady home with her. I watched over my mother all night, feeling grateful beyond words for what Gene had done and yet feeling so hurt that the life we had both wanted would never be. I couldn’t bear to think about his uncertain fate. I told myself he was fine, and that he’d soon be back in Australia with his family. And Laura. Truly with all my heart I hoped he was.
When I finally stumbled, exhausted, back into my house Christmas night—Cal Metz insisted on staying with my mother after she was discharged and she insisted that was what she wanted—I called Freddi and she said she’d be right over with Brady. I walked into the kitchen. The candles stood in their holders, unlit. The unopened champagne bottle bobbed in a bucket of melted ice. And my ring—was missing.
I hurried into the living room where I had framed the picture of Brady on the pony as Gene and I stood together in the snow. Now, in the photo, Brady was on the pony and only I was squinting into the camera while I steadied him with my hand. Gene wasn’t there. I raced around the house. My beautiful legal office, my second wish, was exactly as I had left it yesterday. Nothing had changed. I headed to the second floor, taking the stairs two at a time. The robe from my first wish hung like a silken butterfly wing on the back of the bathroom door.
I barreled into the bedroom and flung open the closet. Gene’s clothes, the first few items I had bought him at Wal-Mart and lots of other things we had bought together on our trips to the mall, still hung there. I grabbed a blue chamois shirt he especially liked from its hanger. He had worn it yesterday morning. I buried my face in it. It felt stiff in my hands and smelled brand-new, as if it had just come from the store and Gene had never put it on.
Not only had Gene vanished, but every trace of him had disappeared too. I sat down on the floor with his shirt in my hands and wailed. It was truly over. My genie had really gone.
Life, as it always does, went on. Some days my arms and legs moved like a robot’s, coaxed out of inertia by the sheer force of my will. Other days I was okay. I still called my mother every few hours to check on her. She understood and didn’t sound too annoyed. At one point she asked me where Gene had gone.
“He got called back to the war. It was very sudden.” That was all I said.
“When did he leave?” she asked.
“The day before Christmas.”
“Wasn’t he with you when I was in the hospital? When I was lying there in the bed, I heard you talking with him. I’m certain he was there,” she said almost to herself. Then she asked, her voice very kind, “Have you heard from him?”
“No.” The word stuck in my throat.
My mother became very quiet. “You know,” she said at last, “F. Scott Fitzgerald once remarked, ‘Show me a hero and I’ll show you a tragedy.’” She didn’t ask about Gene again.
I carried the presents I had
bought for Gene up to the attic still wrapped in their bright paper and ribbons, and the day after New Year’s I took down the Christmas decorations and carried them up there too. And when I finally worked up the courage, I did an Internet search to see if I could find out if Gene had gotten married, or had children, or died. Hard as it would be to find out, at least I’d know he’d survived. When I found nothing, not a trace, my heart became a stone. In the darkest, grimmest part of my mind, I believed Gene had not simply vanished, but that he had died.
By mid-January I had developed a routine of work and caring for Brady. Peggy Sue had gotten her day care center up and running, and although I found it very difficult to leave him even for a few hours, I took Brady over there three mornings a week. I scheduled meetings with clients during that time. When I had a court appearance, my mother or Freddi took over babysitting duties. The rest of the time, Brady stayed with me in my office—with the dog.
Yes, I had a dog now. Tom Metz and Peggy Sue showed up in the middle of that terrible week between Christmas and New Year’s when I was wandering around the house like a ghost. They had a puppy with them. She looked like a chocolate Lab, or at least mostly one. Tom said that’s what her mother was. I suspected her father was a traveling salesman.
“An officer found her mother in an abandoned house with a litter of nine pups,” Tom explained. “This little tyke desperately needed a home.” Then he coughed and said in a quiet voice, “And you need a dog, Ravine.”
I was certain a dog was not what I needed, but Cocoa did distract me from dwelling on the way my life had gone to hell in a handbasket virtually overnight, and from worrying about Gene. Brady was immediately crazy about Cocoa, and once she arrived, he didn’t call out “Gee gee na!” quite so often, but every time he did, it still hurt my heart.
On January twenty-first, I received a phone call from the assistant district attorney in Houston, the woman who said she would ask the young Bandido about Jake.