The kid wasn’t real to him. That was the fact. No one was real to Jackson Blum but Jackson Blum. He was a plague. He was Ebola. But they had found a vaccine for Ebola. There was no cure for Blum.
He leaned back, let the back of his head press against the cinder block wall. His past and his present were lost, but it was the future that haunted him tonight.
He had lost Martin in the Cape Cod Mall once, years ago. The boy had been six years old. Marjorie had left him in his father’s care for a few minutes while she did some Christmas shopping at the toy store. Blum had looked away for a second, distracted by one of those shiny new cars they parked in the middle of the concourse. When he looked down Martin was gone.
Bewilderment turned to fear and fear turned to panic as he ran from store to store, asking everyone, “Have you seen a little boy with brown hair wearing a blue down parka?”
He remembered standing still among the rushing crowds, feeling a dark door opening, showing a view of his future, a future without Martin, where he had let his son disappear forever because of a moment’s inattention. It had been the most frightening moment of his life. It lasted fifteen minutes.
The security people found Martin wandering around the Sears store at the far end of the mall, chatting with a clerk in the luggage department, happily oblivious to the uproar he had caused.
This was so much worse. Martin was truly gone now, he was never coming back and the guilt and the misery would never end. Connor McKenzie was right. He would have his whole life to contemplate the unbearable vileness of his behavior. Jail would be a holiday cruise compared to that.
Past, present, future—all gone.
He found himself crying and he couldn’t stop and he hated his self-pitying sniffles most of all. He finally fell asleep, curled into the fetal position, hands caught between his legs, knowing that sleep was the best he could hope for now, and dreading the morning.
He was awakened near dawn by his cell door opening. The young policeman who processed him out of custody explained: apparently Marjorie Blum had called his lawyer, who had swung into action and awakened Judge Tobias Renninger. Something extraordinary had happened, but Blum couldn’t discover what it was. The judge must have found it convincing, though. He had rolled out of bed, gotten dressed, and driven down to the station personally to expedite Blum’s own-cognizance release, pending a bail hearing on the following Monday.
“This man is no more of a flight risk than I am,” the judge had told Barnaby Toll, the Christmas Eve duty officer. “And good God, man, it’s Christmas.”
Toll called him a cab, and Blum staggered out into the icy clear dawn to wait for it. He had no coat and he was shuddering with the cold when the cab finally pulled up. A fat grizzled islander, working on Christmas morning. The man probably had no family, no one to go home to. Welcome to the club.
The house was dark when they pulled up on Pleasant Street. Blum gave the driver the last of the cash in his pockets—a fifty-dollar bill, twice the cost of the ride. Normally, he would have stood on the frozen street shivering while the man counted out the exact change. Giving a tip was letting yourself be taken advantage of, it was legalized theft, it made people weak and lazy, dependent on handouts, expecting something for nothing. How many times had he given that dreary lecture?
Not anymore.
“Keep it,” he said now, and let himself into the warm dark house, with no sound to greet him but the low roar of the furnace.
“Max? Marjorie?”
There was no response. The house felt empty. He checked the bedrooms. He was alone. Where were they? Where had they gone? What was happening? He pulled his cell phone out of his pocket. It still had some charge but he found he was afraid to make a call. He didn’t want to know where they’d gone, or why they had deserted him this morning. He didn’t want to hear the bitterness and accusation in their voices. Maybe it was better this way.
He walked into the living room and lowered himself onto the couch. He had slept badly in jail, a ragged shallow nap, nothing more. He was exhausted but he dreaded the sight of his own bedroom. It was a ghoulish museum of a life gone extinct. The couch was neutral territory.
He sat staring straight ahead, while the light grew outside the big windows and morning advanced on the broken world, waiting for a reason to get up.
***
His family was flying home from Boston.
Ten minutes after the police had taken Blum away, the landline in the kitchen had rung—an actual ring from an earlier decade, just like the old rotary dial phone itself, kept on a kitchen counter for emergencies only, for the moment when power lines and cell phone towers came down in a hurricane or a war.
Marjorie picked up the bulky handset and heard Connor MacKenzie sobbing with joy.
“They brought him back! They brought him back! He was dead for three minutes but they brought him back!”
At first Marjorie couldn’t absorb the news, any more than she had been able to absorb the news of Martin’s death less than half an hour before.
“Martin…he’s alive? How—it…I don’t understand.”
Max was at her side instantly. “What did he say? What’s going on?” He grabbed the phone. “Connor? Is that you? What happened? Is Martin okay?”
“They used the defibrillator. He threw up over all of us, but he’s okay. He ran outside after he took the pills and collapsed in a snowbank. He was, like…frozen, basically, and the doctor said that may have saved him. I don’t know, I just know he’s okay. He’s asking for you and your mom. Can you come here?”
They booked a private jet on zero notice for close to twenty-thousand dollars. On the way over, Max confessed to his own crime. He and Lizza, belatedly investigating her father’s death, had found and stolen Ted Coddington’s suicide note. They had kept it as a secret they might use, or weaponize, someday. And that day had come. Bitter and furious, Max had said nothing when the police dragged his father off to jail.
But Martin was alive and whatever else Jackson Blum might be, he was not a killer.
The reunion at the hospital was tearful, the flight back was jubilant.
Jackson Blum was still sitting on the couch when he heard the car doors slam and the steps outside and the front door swinging open. He stood to face the delayed judgment of his family, ready for the full force of their sorrow and their hate, bullets from a firing squad. He had been justly convicted, he deserved the execution. All he could do now was accept it with dignity.
He turned and saw his older son, weak and pallid, standing in the hall, leaning against the door casing.
Martin attempted a crooked smile. “Hi, Dad.”
“Martin?”
Was he hallucinating? Had he finally gone mad?
“They saved me, Dad. The doctor said, ‘Good thing you weren’t living in the nineteenth century. Or in Roxbury.’ They shocked me and pumped my stomach and gave me saline and I don’t really know what else. They wanted to keep me overnight but Mom was like “No way! My boy is coming home.”
“Oh, my God.”
Blum lurched across the room and gathered his son into a crushing hug. “I’m sorry, Martin. I’m so sorry.” He was crying, soaking Martin’s shirt. The boy held him tight.
“It’s okay, Dad. It’s okay.”
“I can change. I can be better. Please…give me a second chance.”
“Well…technically, it would be like your fiftieth chance. But it’s the first one you’ve ever taken, so—sure.”
Blum pulled himself together. “Is Connor here? I want to see him. I want to welcome him into our home, wish him Merry Christmas, tell him I’m sorry, let him know—”
Connor appeared behind Martin, smiling. “Merry Christmas, Mr. Blum.”
“Jackson, please—Jack. Anything you want to call me, but not Mr. Blum.”
“Jack. I like the sound of that. Merry Chris
tmas, Jack. Marjorie tells me the dough is in the refrigerator, and we should get started on the sticky buns.”
Max and Marjorie joined the hug and Blum said softly to them, “There’s so much I can’t fix, so much I’ve done wrong to so many people—” He stopped short.
Max pulled away a little. “What?”
“I have to go!” Jackson announced. “I’ll be back soon. Before the sticky buns are out of the oven. Just—wait for me.”
He lurched out of the living room, grabbed his coat off the hook in the hall, snatched his car keys off the little table by the front door and flung himself outside into the bright cold empty morning. No one was out and about. Everyone was indoors, opening presents.
He stopped for a moment, taken by surprise. Snow had started to fall. He tilted his face up to the sky and let the cold flakes touch his skin. Snow! He walked to the car feeling an absurd extravagant elation, climbed in, gunned the engine and pulled out into Pleasant Street. He slowed down—no rush. He had actually been arrested for speeding on Christmas morning a few years ago, driving to his store to pick up a forgotten present. The last thing he wanted to see now was police flashers in his rearview mirror. Staying under the speed limit, it still took him under five minutes to reach Homer Boyce’s cottage off Fairgrounds Road.
Homer was eating cold cereal in his bathrobe when Blum knocked. Homer opened the door and gaped at his visitor, speechless. He couldn’t have been more surprised if it had been the newly elected President standing there. But he had some choice words for POTUS. To Blum all he could say was, “How…it…what are you doing here?”
“I won’t stay long, Homer. I just wanted to ask you to stay on at your store. I’m lowering the rent, and I’ll be paying the utilities this year. If you’d consider the idea.”
“But—I don’t…why? Why would you do that?”
“Nantucket needs your shop, Homer. You said it yourself—where else can someone buy a thimble in this town?”
“You rented the space to some jewelry store.”
“I’m breaking the lease.”
“They’ll sue you.”
“I’ll sue them back.”
“You’ll lose.”
“Probably. I’ll have to pay them some money. I can afford it.”
They stared at each other.
“Are you serious?”
Blum clasped his tenant’s hand and gripped his shoulder. “I have never been more serious in my life. And yet I feel positively giddy. Merry Christmas, Homer. And a very happy New Year.”
The next stop was the most important one. He drove further on Fairgrounds Road toward Surfside Road. He had the streets to himself. His mind was a blank. For once he didn’t want to organize his thoughts or “prepare his remarks”—that was how Chief Kennis had put it.
He reached the little house on Third Way, parked in the dirt by the front door, climbed out of the car and knocked hesitantly. No response. He knocked louder and finally a tousled-looking Arnold Sprockett came to the door, with a mug of coffee in his hand.
“Arnold! Merry Christmas!”
“Mr. Blum?”
Blum saw the flash of fear and guilt on Arnold’s face. Of course! He had demanded that the poor man work at the store this morning, and now he’d been caught playing hooky!
“I’m going in to work soon, sir, I just—”
“No, you certainly are not! Not on Christmas morning.”
Blum pulled him into a clumsy embrace, and it was all he could do not to spill his coffee.
Blum squeezed his shoulders, moved him aside, and strode into the house. “Nat? Are you here?” The boy was sitting on a chair in the living room, his leg in a cast. “You’re having surgery, Nat. Tomorrow! As soon as we can schedule the operation.”
Arnold had followed him inside. “But you said—the loan—”
“Forget the loan. I’m paying for everything—the operation, the rehab, everything. And we’re getting the best orthopedic surgeon in New England! Price is no object.” He took his clerk by the shoulders. “Can you forgive me, Arnold? Can you forgive me? I said horrible things to you, unfair, mean-spirited, dreadful things. And I’ve never given you the credit you deserve. I couldn’t run the store without you, and everyone in the world knew that but me. I’m doubling your salary next year and I want you to think about a partnership. A real stake in the business. Anyway…I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to intrude on your morning. But I wanted to see you and let you know about the operation…and—I guess…just say Merry Christmas. And Happy New Year.”
Nat looked up from the gift book he was reading, pulled away from Bob Cratchett, Tiny Tim, and the Christmas turkey, feeling a delicious shiver of recognition as life and art twined together and his future opened in front of him like the last door on his Advent calendar.
There was only one proper thing to say. “God bless us, every one.”
“Yes, indeed! Well put, young man! God bless us, every one.”
Chapter Thirty
Christmas Morning
It was our first Christmas Eve together in the little house on Darling Street and I had been a little nervous about it—Sam in a new house with a new family, my kids dealing with a new step-sibling (for lack of a better word), and a new woman in my life. It could have turned into a nightmare, especially since this was my year to have the kids on Christmas morning. My kids adored Sam and were at least getting used to Jane. Carrie and Tim had even done the dishes after Christmas Eve dinner, though with a little too much ceremony. I thought of my old LAPD pal Chuck Obremski, laughing about some recent Academy graduate’s unnecessary overtime or exhaustive prep for a two-minute court appearance—“He’s gotta be the hero!”
But we all knew that Jane was the hero of this little story. Sam cleared the table and wiped down the countertops, and the three of them working together finished the chores in less than fifteen minutes.
“Many hands make light work—that’s what Grandma always says,” Carrie pointed out.
“Just for the record,” I pointed out, “She also says ‘Fuck the neighbors’ and ‘Dream girls don’t go to the bathroom.’ Hey, she didn’t want me to be embarrassed about the kids on the block seeing her teaching me to ride my bike, or their parents sneering at the peace stickers on her VW bug. And she knew my tendency to…idealize my infatuations.”
“Do you idealize me?” Jane asked sweetly.
“I try. But you always exceed my fantasies.”
“Awwww,” Carrie said.
“Ick,” Sam said.
“I think it’s nice,” Tim said.
“Omigod, just stop!”
I lifted my hands. “Enough. Please. It’s Christmas Eve.”
“And I was Santa’s daughter.”
“In a play,” Tim pointed out.
“I lived the part. I patted a big dog with reindeer antlers yesterday and I even asked a little boy what he wanted for Christmas.”
“What did he say?” I asked.
“He wanted one of those remote-controlled fire trucks with a siren, Dad. You would have been so proud—I told him it would make his parents crazy. He just grinned. It was scary.”
We watched my all-time guilty pleasure holiday movie, White Christmas, and went to bed early, the corniest song still running through my head.
“We’ll follow the old man, wherever he wants to go…”
I sometimes fantasized about my own troops singing that song to me at a retirement party, but I was no Dean Jagger. I did get my White Christmas, though. Show was falling steadily when I woke up and the world outside my window was frosted like a cake.
Sam led the charge waking us up and we were all downstairs attacking the presents by six-thirty in the morning. The plate of cookies he had left for Santa showed one discreet bite taken from one cookie, with a note: “More than a million cookies tonight! I only nibble t
he best ones. Thanks, Santa.”
“Mine was one of the best,” Sam crowed.
“Hello, I helped a little,” Jane said.
“Yeah, just the recipe and the mixing and the baking parts,” Carrie added.
“I mixed!” Sam protested. “I creamed the butter and sugar together.”
“I’ve always loved the sound of that,” I said.
“Want to try one?” He brought over the plate. I took a half-moon of vanilla shortbread, chewed thoughtfully and nodded. “Santa has good taste.”
Only Sam had a stocking—Miranda insisted on filling the ones for my kids, on which her mother had embroidered their names. They never left her house, which was fine with me. I didn’t have her microscopic eye for detail. She collected for the stockings all year—miniature high-bouncing superballs and china animals, exotic candies and cast-iron toy cars, sets of French colored pencils and packets of paper-thin beef jerky from some Midwestern farm. I’d hear about the new batch of treats tomorrow. For now we attacked the big stuff—Billy Delavane’s Victorian dollhouse for Sam; a stop-motion animation kit for Tim, with weird creatures sporting flipper feet and propeller hands, complete with miniature camera and software; a full-length quilted down jacket in black for Carrie, who was always cold in the winter. This one was rated for sub-arctic temperatures and also looked great on her. Jane found them cool lunchboxes—vintage Gilmore Girls for Carrie, classic Beatles for Tim. Jane gave them smart wool socks; I found them good lined gloves, hoping winter would eventually arrive. I got Tim a clear fiberglass sled; Jane got Carrie the earrings she had been coveting from Le Souk. As for the grownups—I’d found a complete set of Jane’s beloved Nancy Drew books, which she matched with the new Lee Child and a full bells-and-whistles Breaking Bad DVD collection. I got a cashmere turtleneck; she got the flannel PJs she coveted.
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