by David Searls
And that’s when it hit him. Peter felt his heart racing and his cheeks flushing as he fought off the urge to rip away the fake beard and reveal the round, unshaven face that hid behind it.
He waited until his heart stopped pounding quite as hard. Waited until he could trust his voice. Waited until he could frame his question in such a way that it wouldn’t arouse suspicion and send the stranger running off into the night.
He cleared his throat. Thought sunny thoughts, as much as possible. Said, “Hey, have you seen a miniature train around here? A kiddy train?” Said it with as much casual afterthought and lack of concern as he could muster.
The Santa frowned at him. Took another deep drag and let the smoke leak from his mouth and nose. Those stone-dead eyes stared him down. “A kiddy train? Where? Here?”
And now Peter wasn’t so sure. Were green eyes really that unique? Iris had green eyes. So did Ava. And how much sense would it make, the whole outlandish crime his mind was conjuring? Where would this guy stash his train and hide the kids? Why would he immediately switch to a Santa suit rather than making his clean getaway? And hadn’t Peter heard the bell-ringing even while talking with the sullen train conductor? On this last point, he couldn’t be sure, since that evening’s order of events was becoming vague, muddled in his mind. The multiple beers and the bourbon shot and testicle-numbing cold maybe laying down a little mental fog.
Peter got the distinct impression that it was his turn to talk, the Santa leaking smoke from his face and staring at him. Even in his gloves, Peter couldn’t feel his fingers, but he sure as hell felt that stiff knee.
Before he could formulate words through his discomfort and confusion, the Santa said, “One piece of advice, pal.” He folded his handful of paper money and found a place in his red coat to make the bills disappear. Then he slowly tipped over his heavy witch’s cauldron of a pot and let the pennies and nickels and quarters and dimes slip silently from it. They disappeared as soon as they hit the ground, drilling deeply into the powdery carpet. The holes they created in the freshly fallen snow collapsed on the coins and more big snowflakes fell on top and in seconds all trace of the coins were gone until spring, leaving Peter to nearly doubt he’d even seen what had just happened.
“Just remember one thing. Okay?” the Santa was saying. “Things are not as they seem. Things are not as they seem. They never are.”
It hit Peter like déjà vu, chilling him as much as the evening air. And then he realized why. Uncle Buster had earlier delivered to him much the same message.
Chapter Eight
The Overlook
Taking the stairs was torture on his knee and on every rigid muscle in his body, but he remembered the elevator to be interminably slow. So Peter counted floors as he walked. The stairway was segmented by six colorful doors, each painted with an equally colorful and contrasting digit between one and six. He thought of stopping at floor four or five, but six offered the highest elevation in a hundred acres. Besides, that’s the floor he’d parked on that evening. If he spotted his children or other members of his scattered family from his vantage point, he’d mark their position and drive back to pick them up. Then together they’d seek out the remaining lost and make their way the hell out of here.
Upon finally making it up to that top floor, he opened the door and immediately felt the wind on his face. He was breathing heavily as he pulled his cap lower and hunched in his wool overcoat. After orienting himself with the Commons below, he took a position on the west wall. Here, to his far left, he could see the intersection where the kiddy train had picked up Jack and Ellie. He wondered how long ago that had been, but knew it would be useless to check the time on his phone display.
He saw nothing out front of there but a steady stream of cars and foot traffic devoid of familiar faces. He heard a bell ringing in clunky fashion and picked out Santa on a street corner nearly straight below him. A small child dropped a few coins in his heavy pot, an inconsequential offering that Peter knew would eventually hit the snowy sidewalk.
He tried to remember if the train had made any sound that he could latch onto, but felt nearly certain that it had run silent on its electric engine. That was a thought that made things worse, the small vehicle even more likely to go unnoticed by faster and heavier street traffic.
“Dad? Dad! What a relief you’re here. We’ve been looking forever.”
Peter wheeled at the voice and found a thirtysomething man approaching him in long strides. He was a good-looking young guy with a square, slightly unshaven jaw and a tousled head of dark hair with a few strands of gray at the temples.
There was also a young lady with him, bundled up in a coat, scarf and knit cap ensemble that couldn’t quite mask her prettiness.
“Thank God we found you, Dad,” she said. “Mom told us she’d lost you somewhere in this godforsaken excuse for a mall.”
Peter stared. He blinked. “Jack? Ellie?” The words sounded strange rolling off his tongue. He felt disoriented by time and context.
The two young people each took him by an elbow and gently steered him away from the concrete railing of the overlook.
Peter stared at his son. “When did you arrive from…?” Nothing came to mind as he tried to place Jack spatially.
“Chicago, Dad. I just got in. Ellie, too.”
“Yes, Chicago,” Peter murmured. “Did you take the train?”
“The train? The train, Dad? No. I flew. Like I always do. Ellie, too. She came from Scottsdale, of course. Remember? You remember. Right?”
“Of course,” Peter said.
He could tell that even through the encumbering quilted coat his daughter had a petite figure that went with her kind smile and pale green eyes as beautiful as her mother’s. And long brown hair, as he remembered it, though it was currently hidden under her knit cap.
“Did you two…come for Christmas?” Had Ava coordinated such plans with the kids without him? That seemed unlikely, though he had no memory of expecting them that year.
“No, Dad,” said Ellie. “I mean, we might as well stay now, but we came back because Mom needed us to help find you. You were missing.”
“Oh,” said Peter. “I see.” But he didn’t. The family had only been disconnected for—what?—a half hour or so. An hour? How had they made it from Chicago and out west in that length of time?
And there was something else, too. Something…
Something about a train. But no, his kids hadn’t arrived by train. They’d both come by air. They’d told him so.
Peter backed up a step until he could feel the cool outside air rushing at him from the exposed wall and its view overlooking the Commons.
Yes, the Commons. He felt a sense of urgency in getting back to whatever it was he’d been doing, but the details remained just out of reach.
The Commons.
Peter turned and brought his attention to the shoppers and the tall mall Santa and the traffic that crawled through the intersecting streets far below him. At that intersection, the view to his far left, he sought out…something.
The kiddy train.
Yes! His kids…
Peter spun. “Jack? Ellie?” He spoke their names in such a soft voice that they could barely have heard even if they had been standing where he’d left them. But they weren’t.
Of course they weren’t. His children were seven. And they were riding a miniature train that had gotten away from him because he just had to catch up with the game in a warm bar.
The Browns and Colts.
He had a hundred bucks on the outcome, after all. Cleveland getting ten.
“I’m here, I’m here! I told you I’d finish up in time.”
He grabbed the rail behind him. The woman coming his way was so loaded down with packages that she waddled slightly in her long, heavy coat.
“Ava!” he said. “Ava? Where have you—?”
She passed him. Kept walking. He followed her with his eyes, watched her stop before some long, vintage example of De
troit sheet metal trying to hide under a coat of snow. “Well?” she called out to him. “Are you going to unlock my door?”
Peter stared at his wife. Stared at the car in the parking space, a tricked-out classic Pontiac Bonneville with dual exhaust, custom cherry red paint job, big-block eight-cylinder engine under the hood. She waited. Smiled his way as she stood awkwardly under a load of packages in department store gift bags.
“Hurry up,” she called out to him. “We still have twenty minutes, so if we’re late, it’s not my fault and I don’t want to hear about it.”
She smiled. Gave him a playful wink.
Chapter Nine
6:42
Peter Craig sank an ungloved hand into a front pocket and found that his keychain contained an unfamiliar key. He inserted it into the lock and opened Ava’s door and held it open for her before slowly circumnavigating the long, powerful car and letting himself in on the driver’s side. His wife was awkwardly slinging packages into the backseat while he acquainted—reacquainted?—himself with its interior.
“It’s twenty till,” she told him. “Let’s go. Otherwise, you’re going to be blaming me for missing kickoff.”
She was wrong, though. She was rounding down, as Peter realized when his eyes caught the three hands of the analog clock in the dashboard.
It was actually 6:42, though he could make out the minute hand’s steady crawl toward the next hash mark. Soon to be 6:43.
He told Ava to buckle up as his right arm went up and over his left shoulder.
“Are you kidding me?” she said. She chuckled in a tired sort of way. Patted her belly. “Try it sometime, Peter.”
He didn’t get it. Didn’t understand what she was telling him even when she swept her coat away from her protruding belly. At the same time, he couldn’t figure out why he kept pawing a spot high on the window over his left shoulder as he spoke to her.
His lap belt? He was sitting on it, of course. Like always.
“Well, just…be careful,” he said.
“Drive carefully and I won’t have to be careful,” she told him. “We have plenty of time, so take it easy, please.” Then she gave him another easy smile.
He found the wiper knob and turned it to make the blades swipe two half-circles of clarity in the white-powdered glass. It was so cold out that the snow easily brushed away, though he had to get out and use his gloved hands to clear the back window and side-view mirrors.
Back behind the wheel he again pawed the air over his left shoulder for reasons he didn’t quite fathom. Then his hand fell to the custom four-on-the-floor stick shift. His fingers grasped the ball at the top of the stick—as cherry red as the car’s exterior—grabbed it tight and shifted it into reverse.
The long, low Pontiac crawled out of its space, its engine muttering with the threat of power. Peter put it in drive and headed toward the exit.
Funny thing, the cars in the lot were as blanketed with snow as his own had been. Funny because he’d remembered parking at the top of a six-story deck with a roof overhead that should have provided cover from the snow that now crunched under his tires. As the Pontiac prowled forward, Peter saw he was mistaken. He’d been in a surface lot, not far from an exit, and now he hit it as his radio sputtered through a long sequence of commercials for beer and Chevys and insurance agents and home improvement contractors.
“Take it easy,” Ava told him as he pressed a heavy foot on the accelerator.
Her breath vaporized in the brittle air, as did his own.
He glanced at the analog clock planted in the dash: 6:48.
“Time is passing,” he murmured.
“What?”
He shook off the question, pressed the accelerator, felt his tires shimmy on an invisible slick of black ice.
“Easy. You’ve got four lives in your hands, honey.” Ava patted her belly and smiled, a reaction he saw only out of the corner of an eye. His gaze flickered from windshield to dashboard clock to windshield to clock.
The minute hand crawled to 6:49. He could see it move, the hand, the hand sweeping faster as though eager to make up for lost time. Too fast now.
Peter eased off the gas, let the big Pontiac coast down a one-way mall access road as narrow as an alley.
“Look out, Peter! Stop!”
He didn’t need the warning. His reflexes were young and quick. He’d seen the tall man with the belly glaring from the snowy sidewalk, daring the big car to ignore the stop sign and drift through the intersection. Daring it to knock him on his fat-padded ass. Peter’s foot came down hard on the brake, four tires balking at the command. But somehow the Pontiac shuddered to a stop with only its nose hanging out over the intersection.
Ava’s breath hitched as Santa Claus slowly crossed in front of them, one padded hip lightly bumping the car’s front bumper. His cigarette dangled from his lips, insolence planted on his face like a character trait. He offered Peter a mock salute from the middle of the street as though the last several seconds had been an inside joke between the two of them.
“What the fffff—” Ava said, cutting off the profanity as she’d done ever since becoming aware of the lives her belly carried. She seemed to be taking no chance of the twins hearing one of her juicier outbursts and becoming the worse for it.
Her gaze was locked on the man in the red suit and fake white beard. Insolent Santa carried a pot and a large bell. A wreath of cigarette smoke framed a round face with bruised bags under his eyes.
Peter opened his mouth to speak, and then closed it. Something about the less than Jolly Old Saint Nick unsettled him more than he could explain. Not just the intimidating expression and the cigarette dangling, convict-style, from his mouth, but…Peter couldn’t help picturing his own kids, maybe three or four or five years from now, perched uncomfortably on the lap of glaring, smoking Santa.
As Peter drove out of the mall property, he twisted the volume button on the radio.
“Eyes on the road,” Ava murmured.
The Pontiac filled with the unmistakable rumble of an outdoor drone and the pregame banter of sports announcers.
“Who’re we playing?”
Peter knew his wife was asking only to fill the silent void. To get her mind off the weather and his driving. Her voice dueled with the throaty roar of the .424 engine under them and the whick, whick, whick of the wipers on cold glass struggling to keep up with the steady snowfall.
“Baltimore,” he said. “The Colts.”
Something nagged at him for a few seconds, but he couldn’t figure out what. Probably nothing. He felt jumpy, stressed for no particular reason. He let his eyes flick quickly to the clock again.
“Six fifty-one,” he said. Said it out loud, but really for his own benefit. He mulled the words over and over as if they held multiple layers of meaning.
Six.
Fifty.
One.
“If you’re about to blame me…” Ava said, without finishing the thought.
She didn’t have to. Peter was always meaningfully rattling off the time to her when she’d finally show up at prearranged meeting spots. But that was because she was uniformly late. He, on the other hand, was nothing if not punctual.
Peter shook his head. No, it wasn’t her. Not this time. It was…something. He pressed harder on the gas pedal.
“Be careful,” she told him. “It’s slippery. That’s black ice under the wheels. Why are you in such a hurry anyway?”
He started to respond but didn’t know where to begin, so he just let out a long, breathy sigh.
The heat had finally kicked in and the interior was working its way toward toasty.
“Please tell me you don’t have money riding on this game.”
He watched the wipers wobble over the snow on the glass. The flakes had started out as powder, but they’d turned hard sometime over the last few minutes and the blades now scraped noisily and left behind small, gritty chunks of ice.
“I knew it,” she told him into the silence. She sat quie
tly for several seconds. He could feel her hard stare. “I thought we agreed.”
His eyes swerved to the clock.
6:54.
He felt his grip tighten on the wheel, his foot pressing heavier on the accelerator, the car shimmying under him like a dancer’s hips. He had someplace to be and it was incredibly important he be there on time. He just didn’t know where or why.
“I’m sorry,” he told her quietly. Maybe referring to his gambling, his speeding, his slouchy attitude toward fatherhood… any of those would do. Or just his fucked up existence. Maybe that’s what he was apologizing for.
Somewhere in the night he heard a sound, high-pitched and distant and buffered by the snow and his dark thoughts.
Ava’s silence was killing him. “I told you I’d cut down on my gambling and I fully intend to,” he told her.
“You told me you’d stop gambling,” she softly corrected.
Okay, I’ll stop.
That’s what he told himself, but the words never made it past his lips. He was too fucking irritated with her at that moment. He was under incredible pressure. His job was a joke. And he was soon to become the family’s sole breadwinner.
So he gambled a little. Only on sports, something he knew a lot about. Fools placed bets on the random spin of a wheel or the shuffle of a deck of cards. He knew what he was doing and he won more than he lost. Usually.
He heard the high, keening sound again and now it fully broke through his thoughts. It was a train whistle shrieking in the near distance.
Peter glanced at the dashboard clock. 6:58. Jesus, it was like time was making up for, well, lost time.
“Sometimes it’s like you just haven’t grown up at all, Peter,” she told him quietly.
Pissing the hell out of him. Like he wasn’t working eight, nine, ten hours a day to try to make a damn dollar. And then very carefully placing his well-thought-out bets to augment his meager earnings. He said nothing. Kept driving.