by Luanne Rice
“That’s why Danny doesn’t want to add to your burden, Pa.”
“Jesus, Bridget. My burden—is that what you think it is?” He pictured Danny running for that bus. And Christy knew it was true—yes, it was. He’d heard that conversation on the porch, his two smart children, and he’d been afraid of what Danny wanted from life: afraid that Danny wanted to leave the farm. And Danny must have sensed his fear.
“He has his plans,” Bridget said now.
“What if they—” Christy began, but broke off. What if Danny’s plans included stealing the tree money? Maybe not for drugs but to go to school. Maybe it was that …
“We have to be patient, Pa. He’ll tell us when he’s ready.”
Christy listened. His daughter sounded so smart and mature, full of reason. But reason was far beyond Christy Byrne at that moment. His world had cracked in half tonight.
“When he’s ready?” Christy asked, tasting tears in the corners of his mouth. “Your brother’s barely seventeen, Bridget. I can’t be patient. Not when it comes to you and Danny.”
10
The tabloids both had the same cover story. The Post’s headline blared, GRINCH STRIKES CHELSEA! and the Daily News’s read, SCROOGED ON NINTH AVE. The photos showed Christy at his tree stand, unconsciously looking away from the cameras—his face craggy in profile, his blue eyes a portrait of lost, hopeless fatherly love. Inset, right at the top, was Danny’s last yearbook photo.
Catherine and Lizzie read the stories at Moonstruck. Both papers reported the theft and included summaries of last year’s incident—Christy’s arrest for assault, Danny’s running away, the charges being dismissed. The Post had a sidebar about teenage runaways, and the Daily News lumped the story of Danny into an ongoing series about the homeless.
“They make him sound horrible,” Catherine said, reading about Christy. “As if he beat his son last year, as if he cares only about making money. Listen to this. ‘Daniel Byrne, now seventeen, ran away last December twenty-seventh. Routinely taken out of school for the month preceding Christmas, he worked at his father’s tree stand on Ninth Avenue in Chelsea. New York City tree salesmen keep long hours, trying to earn a year’s income in one month, and neighborhood residents reported seeing the teenager working until midnight some nights.’”
She shook her head, and then Lizzie took over reading. “‘The administration of North Breton High School declined comment. But Jay LeClair, a classmate of Daniel’s, said, “Parents take their kids out of school, sure. Teachers let you make up the work. But after the wildfire, Danny fell behind. We all did that year. Danny’s smart, though. Or he was. We don’t know what happened to him, down in New York. We all thought he was going to be a weatherman. He had a whole plan to track fires and storm cells, to help the tree growers. Guess that’s not going to happen now that he’s disappeared.” ‘”
“That’s his plan?” Catherine asked.
“Never mind these,” Lizzie said, raising her eyebrow and pushing the papers off to the side. “Tell me what happened with Christy.”
Catherine’s chest tightened. She stared down at the newspaper photos. The tension in Christy’s face was terrible to see. “I told him,” she said.
“Which part?” Lizzie said.
“That we’ve been helping Danny the best we can. He saw your embroidery inside Danny’s hat.”
“Was he mad?”
“Mad, sad, upset, all of it. I just …” Catherine began. Lizzie had shoved the papers away, but Catherine pulled them back, smoothed them out, just so she could see Christy’s picture. She stared down at his face. “I just wish I hadn’t hurt him.”
“You can’t control what Danny does, or what he wants,” Lizzie said. “This is his family, his deal.”
Catherine looked up. “You should have seen the shock in Christy’s eyes when I told him. He trusted me.”
“So does Danny,” Lizzie said.
“How is it possible that two people who obviously feel so strongly about each other can be at such cross-purposes?”
“You mean Christy and Danny?”
Catherine nodded, blushing. Who else would she mean?
“That happens in families all the time,” Lizzie said. “I have it with Lucy twelve times a day. I make oatmeal, she wants Cheerios. She wants to wear her blue socks, but I forgot to wash them. She votes for us to go to the park, and I’ve got my heart set on a movie and popcorn. It’s one big nightmare of love.”
“This isn’t Cheerios and oatmeal.”
“I know. It’s the future of the tree farm. It’s a boy breaking away from his father. It’s probably a strong, silent farmer needing to say more than ten words to his kid. But I’m telling you, it is what happens in families. All families, in different ways.”
“Why is it always so much worse at Christmastime?” Catherine asked, staring at the colored lights blinking around the mirror, at the brightly painted Santa and Christmas trees decorating the diner windows.
“Because the stakes are so much higher,” Lizzie said.
“Stakes,” Catherine said. “You make it sound like a game we’re all betting on.”
“That’s exactly what we’re doing,” Lizzie said. “We’re betting on love and happiness. And on the people who matter most. We think we have it all figured out, but when someone we care about—love with all our heart—lets us down, we lose our bets. Just look at me and Lucy’s father.”
Catherine nodded, squeezing her friend’s hand. Lizzie had fallen in love with a man who lived in the neighborhood—Richard Thorndike, a banker down on Wall Street. Inspired by Brian, she had opened her heart to a man of commerce. Richard had renovated a loft on Fourteenth Street, and the multitalented Lizzie had been his decorator. He told her to design her dream loft, because she’d be living in it with him. Passionate about him, Lizzie had given him everything she had. When she got pregnant, she was overjoyed.
Richard Thorndike wasn’t; he asked his firm for a transfer to the London office. He’d been there ever since.
“Boy, I sure lost that bet,” Lizzie said. “I really should have just taken the bus to Atlantic City and put everything I had on lucky sevens. Of course I did wind up with Lucy.”
“So you won big.”
“Yeah, but I still felt so let down by love. As if the universe had somehow played me for a fool.”
Catherine stared out the window. The snow had stopped falling, and she saw blue sky showing through swiftly moving clouds. The temperature was close to zero. Craning her neck, she tried to see Christy. He stood at the stand, stoically going about his business, trying to make up what he’d lost in the theft, she supposed.
“That’s how you felt when Brian died, isn’t it? And how you feel when each Christmas rolls around, and you don’t see him?” Lizzie pressed.
Catherine thought of what Christy had said. “Maybe I’m not supposed to see him,” she said softly. “If I saw my husband’s ghost, I might want to fly away with him.”
“I thought that’s what you did want,” Lizzie said, her mouth dropping open.
“I thought I did, too,” Catherine said, staring out the window.
Danny climbed up to his secret place, looked out over the park.
Right now the sky was blue, but he knew another storm was coming. He thought about how weather was really not much more than molecules in collision; a lot like families. Blue sky didn’t always mean clear sailing, and white clouds didn’t always mean precipitation.
Penelope pulled on the cord he’d rigged up, and it rang the bell. Danny hurried down to let her in, and together they walked back up the narrow and circular stone stairs.
“Did you see the papers today?” she asked.
“How could I miss them?” he asked.
“My father is freaking out,” she said. “I am massively grounded.”
“You are?”
She nodded. “I’m supposed to be locked in the apartment, but I had to tell you. He’s probably already called the cops, Danny. They’ll b
e here any minute. You should leave if you don’t want to get caught.”
Danny took a deep breath, but just put his arm around her and stood his ground. “They won’t get me,” he said, “if I don’t want them to.”
“My dad’s going to get you fired. He claims that you misled him and the conservancy people, applied for the job under false pretenses.”
“I gave my real last name!”
“Yes, but they think your first name is Harry.”
Danny grinned, knowing that Catherine would enjoy the joke.
“Not only that, but you gave some address in Chelsea for where you live. My father’s on the board of the Central Park Conservancy. He’d never have recommended you for the position if he’d known you were a runaway.”
“But you knew,” Danny said, holding her tighter.
“I know,” Penelope smiled. “I grew up sheltered, and I’m a sucker for drama. You have such a beautiful hard luck story.”
Danny’s smile faded. “It’s not hard luck. I had an amazing upbringing. And my family is great. It’s just … we’re molecules in collision.”
“Danny, people aren’t clouds. I study earth science and physics, too. You’re not vapor, and neither is your father.”
“Just the way you said ‘hard luck.’ As if … I don’t know, as if he treated me badly or something. He didn’t. If anything, it’s the other way around,” Danny said, picturing that hurt, horrible, wrenching look on his father’s face yesterday.
“Look, I didn’t mean hard luck as in terrible treatment. I meant … you lost your mother. You come from the way-north, where I assume it’s very cold. You grew up on a farm, which includes great quantities of mud and fertilizer, and where there are no yellow cabs. That’s hard luck.”
“Yeah, no yellow cabs,” he said, stroking her blond hair as they both chuckled at her joke. Danny smelled her perfume. He didn’t know the name, but it made his knees weak.
Sirens sounded in the distance, and Danny started. Penelope ran to look out. Danny leaned against her from behind, peering through the tower window. The park spread out around them, forests and fields bounded by the city’s skyline.
Danny could never thank Penelope—or her father—enough. For most of the past year he’d had a dream job for a boy like him: clean-up kid at Belvedere Castle. Usually the position went to a student enrolled in the New York City schools, but because Danny met the qualifications and was getting his diploma through the GED, they’d made an exception.
His pay was one hundred dollars every two weeks. In return, he had to keep the information bins filled with flyers, sweep up the ones that people dropped or threw on the floor, dust the ledges, and empty the wastepaper baskets.
Belvedere Castle was designed by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux back in the nineteenth century, and it looked exactly like a miniature gothic stone castle, with arches and turrets, a graceful pavilion, and one tall tower topped with a flag. Danny had discovered that it was visible from just about any building bordering the park, including Penelope’s apartment and Catherine’s library.
The castle rose from Vista Rock, a dark cliff plunging down into Turtle Pond. The terrace attracted many park-goers, including lots of bird enthusiasts. Danny had hung around all summer and fall, enjoying especially the hawk watchers who’d gathered every morning in October to observe migrating raptors. Danny would borrow binoculars and look overhead, zeroing in on falcons, kestrels, eagles, and red-tails. He’d get a lump in his throat, wondering which birds had set off from Cape Breton.
Those hawks had seemed like harbingers of winter; if they were overhead, it meant that Danny’s father and sister couldn’t be too far behind.
He had distracted himself from those thoughts by tending to his work. From here, and from his hiding place above Vista Rock, he could keep an eye on all the trees in the park. He could stare out at the Ramble, at Stone Arch, at Tupelo Meadow. He could watch dark storms rumble down the Hudson, see the golden sun rise over the East Side. He could keep track of the weather as well as any meteorologist. For Belvedere Castle was Danny’s treasure trove.
Everyone who lived in New York City had often heard the words, “The temperature in Central Park is …” That was because the United States Weather Bureau had an outpost right there, at Belvedere Castle. Way back when they first started collecting data, in 1869, someone would take readings and telegraph them to the Smithsonian. Danny wished that was still the way! He’d give anything to be the one to read the temperature, wind speed, wind direction, visibility, air pressure, precipitation, and humidity.
Now, instead of being sent by hand, the data was taken by automated meteorological instruments. Located on the peaked roof of the castle tower and in a small fenced-in compound south of the castle, the equipment transmitted information to the U.S. Weather Bureau in Brookhaven.
Danny had ridden the Long Island Rail Road out there, back in September. He’d wanted to suggest that the bureau hire him to monitor the instruments in Central Park, supplement their readings with his own. The receptionist had smiled, giving him a form to fill out.
He’d finally met with Mr. Grant Jones in the bureau’s personnel department, who’d told him that automated weather stations were now pretty much the norm, that having meteorologists on site was very rare. Danny had offered to be a fire-spotter in Central Park, like they had in some Canadian National Parks. Mr. Jones had thanked him but said that the Park Rangers and the FDNY probably had it under control with sensors and computer monitoring. Danny had ridden back to Penn Station on the train, thinking he’d better learn everything he could about computers.
Suddenly the sound of sirens got much louder, and when Danny looked out the castle window, he saw police cars zooming through the park, up the access road. They were still a way off, and he was thankful for his tower: Belvedere meant, after all, “beautiful view.”
“Oh, God,” Penelope said, leaning to see. “My father really did it.”
“They won’t find me,” Danny said. “All they know is that I work here. They won’t come up the ladder.”
“They will,” Penelope said miserably. “My father asked where you’d been sleeping. I didn’t want to tell him, but—”
“You had to—I understand,” Danny said, his stomach plummeting but not wanting her to feel bad.
“He’d figured it out anyway, Danny. Otherwise—”
“I’ve got to go,” he said. He grabbed his knapsack, as well as Catherine’s camera and the sheaf of photos he’d taken for her project. As he did, the folder spilled open, and a handful of pictures spilled out. They were of the bells Catherine had asked him about, the carved stone bells her boss had been so intrigued by. Danny had gone back to get more shots. Now, wanting to give them to Catherine, he spent a few seconds longer than he should, sweeping them up.
“Go, go,” Penelope urged, peering out the window. “They’ll catch you!”
“Never,” Danny said, grabbing her into his arms, kissing her as if he’d never see her again.
They were in the hidden chamber just above the tower’s top level. Danny had been sleeping here for months. He had the feeling that if he stayed very still right now, the police would completely miss him. Catherine’s project was designed to make people “look up.” To Danny and his family—people who lived out in the country—looking up was second nature. To city dwellers, Danny wasn’t sure. But just in case, he shinnied up the old ladder to the very peak of the castle tower’s roof.
This was how the weatherman had done it in 1869, he thought. Climbed up the ladder, out onto the roof.
The slate tiles were covered with snow and very slippery. All he had to do was stay focused, use the castle’s stones as hand and footholds, just as he’d climbed cliffs at home. He’d done this exact thing before, on a full moon night last autumn, when two rangers had surprised him by following an owl into the belfry. Of course, there hadn’t been any snow back then… .
He suddenly heard voices, and the crackle of police rad
ios—which spurred him on. Holding as tightly as he could to the rickety ladder, Danny imagined that he was climbing a tree. Up at home, in Nova Scotia, he would swing from one branch to another. He was at home in the trees as much as any bird. His love for the trees was in his blood, passed down from his father.
And that thought—that his father had given him his love for trees, which had led to his need to know weather—gave him an instant of pause. He pictured his father’s face yesterday, so full of grief, and he realized that his dream was killing his pa.
Just then he heard a shout from the ground. He looked down—the park veered as he swayed. Had he ever climbed a tree or cliff this high before? Danny, normally fearless, felt his heart clutch. The park was lightly traveled this cold day, but he saw that a small crowd had gathered and was pointing up at him.
“Don’t jump,” he heard someone call.
Did they think he wanted to kill himself? It’s the opposite, he wanted to yell back. Love your life!
In that moment, he lost his balance. He scrabbled for handholds as he sledded through the snow, grabbing at shingles, scraping his hands as he flew over the slate’s sharp edges. His feet hit thin air, but his fingertips caught hold of a rusty old bracket bolted into the roof. That broke his slide.
Danny held on, his legs dangling free. It was okay, it was going to be fine … He would let his knapsack drop. He did—and heard it hit the ground long seconds later. His shoulders ached as he gripped the bracket, inched his body higher. If he could just get his legs up on the roof again, he could shinny up to the peak. He could pull this off—he had to. He was Harry Houdini.
But just then the rusty bracket cracked and gave way. He cried out as he tried to catch the very edge of the roof, but the ice was too slick and it happened too fast, and he heard Penelope’s scream as he tumbled past the window, off the peak of Belvedere Tower.
11
Nine-one-one received twelve cell phone calls from people walking through the park, seeing a boy preparing to jump off the tower of Belvedere Castle. No other possibility occurred to them: any other explanation for a young man balanced on the snow-covered peak of the castle’s tower in midday the week before Christmas would have seemed too fanciful.
