The Most Perfect Gift

by Hubert Furey

  “I’ve thought it all through, Rachel. I know I played it dirty with you, and I deserve everything that I get. I won’t oppose a divorce or anything like that. I’ll agree to whatever financial arrangements you want. I’m not getting into that cutthroat business like the Watsons did. I love you too much for that. I love the children too much. I’ll just move out quietly and support you and the children as best I can.”

  His heart was breaking, and she knew it, but she let him compose himself. He continued, still staring impassively at the river.

  “If I could undo it, I would, but I can’t. Like you’ve often said, there’s no going back. I’ll straighten everything out as soon as I can, just as soon as I finish up here. There are still some things I have to do for her. She wanted me to take Becky to this good foster home, but I don’t know what I can do about that now. I think Social Services have beat me to it.”

  His tone had changed. He seemed puzzled. “I can’t understand it. Sarah definitely said she would leave the child with a sitter for me to pick up. That’s what she told me. I got a taxi and went to the apartment, but I got tangled up in that accident—I don’t know how long I was stuck in traffic—and when I got there, the door was locked and nobody answered. I thought she might have changed her mind and taken the child with her to the hospital, but when I arrived there I couldn’t find the child, and she had already died.”

  He paused a moment, his eyes closed, but he quickly resumed. “The shifts had changed, Sarah was dead, and nobody seemed to know anything about a child.”

  Rachel moved closer to him, feeling his brokenness. She placed her hand on his arm as she softly spoke. “The child is all right, Aaron. You don’t have to worry about the child anymore.”

  For the first time Aaron faced her, and Rachel flinched at the suffering in his eyes, the drawn, haggard look on his countenance, the surprise in his voice out of place. “What do you mean? How do you know? You didn’t know where she lived. Did Sarah phone back?”

  Rachel looked back toward the river, which swirled and bubbled noisily under her feet. She then inclined her head in the direction of the church, where the sanctuary lamp glowed through a side window, wondering how she could tell such a story, and if anyone, including Aaron, would ever believe it. “No, Sarah didn’t phone back. But I was talking to Sarah, just before she died.”

  She remembered Dr. McCready’s descriptive. “She was truly an incredible woman, Aaron. She told me about the foster home arrangements, but I didn’t follow through on them. I took Becky into our own home. She’s there right now.”

  Aaron gasped in astonishment. “You brought Becky home? What about the children? That’s impossible.”

  Rachel felt herself smile in the snow-filled night. “It was very possible, my darling. And there really wasn’t anything else to do, when it was all said and done. She had been used to a real home, and with her mother dead, it was only right for her to live with her father, don’t you think? As far as the children are concerned, I think you’re going to have a job to pry her away from them. Fastest three-minute adoption I’ve ever seen.”

  She had ended on a humorously glib note, but it had not changed Aaron’s serious mood. His tone was one of abject confusion. “I don’t understand. What about separation, divorce?”

  Rachel turned to him, reaching up with both hands to the collar of the parka, tucking it in around his neck, sheltering him from the wind. “There will be no divorce, Aaron, no separation.” She had become playful again. “You’re not getting rid of me that easily. But if you ever do it again, I’ll kill her first.”

  She was saying it to him again in fun, as she often had done.

  She took his hand and turned to leave, leading him toward the car. He stopped and looked at her, the expression on his face still confused, unbelieving.

  “I want to see to the funeral. Social Services will be paying for it, but I would like, you know . . .”

  “It’s been taken care of, Aaron. I’m doing that, too.”

  He stared at her, awestruck.

  “Come on, let’s go home. There’s been enough suffering for one day, Aaron. It’s time to begin living again. Christmas is coming, and I don’t want any more awful Christmases. Besides, we have six children again now. We’re going to have to be together even more. Come on. I’ll drive.”

  He followed her to the car, still unable to comprehend. They sat together in the car, and she looked at him, and her heart burst with tenderness. As she waited for the car to warm up, she looked toward the church once more, and it seemed to say, I am with you. Go your way now.

  Her glance lingered before she swung the car onto the broad, level road, feeling inexplicably happy within herself. At a red light she stopped, and her eyes fell on an outdoor crib clumsily arranged under a big, ungainly-looking fir tree. They were the same kind of painted figures she had seen everywhere else, arranged exactly like every other crib she had ever visited. Only this time they didn’t look lifeless and inanimate and cold and detached.

  Instead they looked warm and comforting in the midst of the cold winter snow settling around them. Rachel thought back to how the afternoon had begun with talk of gifts around the table, and how she had searched her mind for a solution to her own particular problem. She knew now what she was going to give her husband for Christmas—indeed what she had already given him—the most wonderful love one human being could ever have for another.

  It was the most perfect gift of all.

  Return to Brine Cove

  Jimmy Blanchard shivered uncontrollably, cursing himself that he had not dressed more warmly to counter the icy blasts of the northwest wind that pummelled him from every direction of the barren highlands of the Avalon isthmus. This was Newfoundland in December, and he should have known it.

  The thick woollen sweater inside the black leather bomber jacket had done well enough in the lower, wooded, sheltered country—but up here, in the open barrens! His legs burned inside the frozen jeans, which had long since ceased to offer any protection against the biting wind. The chilling, numbing cold crept down his spine, seeking out and finding every square inch of his jerking, twitching body.

  His gloves and cap were back at a restaurant in Deer Lake, forgotten in the speed of the moment as he raced to make the sole truck that was leaving. That same truck had turned into Come By Chance and dropped him unceremoniously right in the middle of the open, windswept Trans-Canada, where there was as much chance of getting another ride as there were snowballs in hell, judging by the rapidity with which traffic zoomed by him on the dry, frozen pavement.

  He was tough—he had swum in the cold salt water of Trinity Bay every summer he could remember as a child—but he was not inhuman. He kept moving his body in a rocking motion, lifting one foot, then the other, squeezing his arms tightly around his chest to trap the last remaining warmth and prevent it from leaving his body.

  Jimmy had been thumbing for over an hour, watching car after car speed by, his spirits sinking deeper as he watched tail lights disappear from view with predictable regularity. Brine Cove was still twenty-three miles away and it was getting dark, and he had hitchhiked enough around Canada to know that drivers weren’t fussy about picking up male hitchhikers after dark, especially if the word was out that this particular male hitchhiker was just released from Dorchester Penitentiary.

  His eyes followed a carful of teenagers as they appeared and just as quickly disappeared out of his vision, their silent laughter a testimony to the mood inside the vehicle.

  “On their way home from some crap university, no doubt!” He laughed bitterly. He wasn’t coming home from no university. His eyes lingered on the spot where they were swallowed up by the frozen distance, then resumed his rocking, pacing motion. He could think of better ways to spend Christmas Eve than freezing to death on the Trans-Canada Highway.

  He hunched his shoulders, buryi
ng his bare head deeper into the collar of his jacket, seeking any measure of defence against the lashing torment of the wind, taking advantage of the lull in traffic to slap his hands vigorously on opposite shoulders, trying to counteract the numbness that had already settled into his upper body.

  Maybe he should have stayed in the penitentiary. At least it was warm there, but then they don’t keep you in Dorchester a day longer than they have to. Besides, for some strange, inexplicable reason, the desire to spend Christmas in Brine Cove had been haunting him since his mother’s death the previous May. He hadn’t spent a Christmas in Newfoundland since he was fifteen. Now, twenty years later, he was returning.

  * * * * *

  The shivering continued unabated as he tried to remember that day he had run away from home. It was bitterly cold, just like this day, except that there was more snow and it wasn’t as clear. He had stood on this very same Trans-Canada, only it was on the opposite side of the road. He remembered running and thumbing at the same time, desperately doing both in his frantic effort to get as far away as possible before the police got on his trail, before certain capture and arrest.

  Break and entry annoyed a lot of people, and breaking into Dick Furneaux’s store was about the same as stealing candy from a baby. He hadn’t stolen a lot, just ten twenty-dollar bills and two packs of cigarettes, but it would have been enough to get sent to Whitbourne—and Whitbourne wasn’t where he wanted to go.

  The stupid trucker who picked him up must have had some kind of record himself. He just grinned all the way across the island, without even asking one question. The money he stole got him a ticket on the ferry, and from that day on every day was simply a repeat of the day before.

  Jimmy never got caught in his earlier years—he was too smart for that. It was only when he started serious on booze and drugs that his survival instincts deteriorated and his thinking became impaired and he began the cycle of thirty-day sentences and conditional sentences and probation and breaches of court orders and all the other stuff that became a regular part of his life. He got to the point where the jail terms didn’t bother him. They were just rests between break-ins.

  This last stretch was different, for some reason. Maybe it was the unconscious but sure knowledge that the judges were getting fed up with the repeated appearance of his face before their benches, or maybe something very deep inside him told him that the crimes were becoming more violent, more horrendous, more bloody, more repulsive even to him. Whatever it was, he had left Dorchester with the sure conviction that if he returned again, or to some other maximum-security prison, it would be for a hell of a lot longer stretch than ten years.

  * * * * *

  “Want a lift, Skipper?” He had been so taken up with introspection that he had not noticed the small Toyota slowing beside him. The man inside was speaking across the car through a window he had already rolled down. Jimmy nodded, his teeth chattering.

  “Appreciate it.”

  He sat in the small car, instinctively keeping his head down, a habit developed from years of hiding and avoiding recognition. A blast of hot air from the heater struck his freezing legs, and he felt instantaneously grateful. The driver waited until a big transport truck shot by, then surged onto the roadway, settling himself back into the seat before extending his left hand across to Jimmy as a preamble to introducing himself.

  “Jack Gregory, Tack’s Beach.”

  Jimmy paused before loosely grasping the extended hand. It had been a long time since he had shaken somebody’s hand—a long time since anybody had wanted to shake his hand. Obviously Jack Gregory wasn’t listening to the news.

  “Jim Blanchard. I was christened James, but the only one who ever called me that was my grandmother. My friends calls me Jimmy.”

  It was a cliché. He didn’t have any friends. He wondered why he was spilling his guts like this to a total stranger. Any other time he would be sizing him up, wondering where he kept his wallet.

  “You must be crazy, hitchhiking, weather like this. Heading home for Christmas?”

  “Yeah, Brine Cove. Haven’t been home in a while.” Jimmy casually glanced in the driver’s direction, appraising him in an instant. Years on the street had made him pretty good at sizing up a man’s character at first glance. He had been subconsciously assessing Jack Gregory since he got in the car, and Jack Gregory impressed him.

  There was something about this man. It was on the tip of his tongue to come back with something really sarcastic, something really cutting, like “If I had your money . . .” but the genuine concern in the man’s voice was disarming. It was vacation time. Maybe he could take a vacation from the way he was.

  He relaxed back in the seat, enjoying the soothing warmth of the car, his eyes roaming the open, rolling landscape, frozen white in every direction. In the distance he could now faintly detect the blue triangle of Colliers Bay between the headlands of black basalt. Brine Cove was just the other side of Colliers Bay Point.

  “Didn’t have much choice. Didn’t have much luck with the work. Wanting to get home for Christmas, you know how it is.” In a way it was the truth, but then he had been lying for so long that the words just formed on his tongue without thinking.

  “Yeah! Been like that myself more than once. Where you coming from, Alberta? British Columbia?”

  Jimmy stiffened at the questions, again out of instinct. It took him back to all those questions, in all those cop shops, but he checked his reaction. This man wasn’t asking like that. Jimmy wondered if he should tell him, but he continued to be vague. “New Brunswick, mostly. Not much doing up there.” Like his previous response, it was half-true.

  “Nah! You got to go to Alberta now, b’y. That’s the only place anything is goin’ on. Ontario is gone.”

  * * * * *

  The driver had focused his attention on the road ahead, slowing the car perceptibly on the steep grade of Bellevue Hill, a long, sloping incline of sheer ice. Jimmy looked at the man peering intently at the stretch of black pavement ahead, indistinguishable from the darkness that was beginning to enclose the vehicle.

  He smiled ironically as he wondered how his new-found companion would cope with the knowledge that he had picked up an ex-con, a “violent offender.” Jack Gregory probably hadn’t met too many dangerous criminals in his lifetime.

  The driver switched on the car lights, illuminating a tableau of swirling snow that reflected back the light, blinding them. He immediately flicked them back to low-beam, and Jimmy watched the two searchlight beams angle into the snow dancing about the bonnet. Jimmy felt strangely compelled to confide in Jack Gregory but, just as strangely, did not want to frighten him. The words were compulsive, jerky.

  “To tell you the truth, I just got out of jail.”

  Jimmy waited for the predictable response: the frightened look, the panic in the eyes, the hard swallowing. Jack Gregory remained motionless, still staring straight ahead, pausing only to gear down his standard shift. His voice was matter-of-fact.

  “Jail? Kidding!”

  Man, he’s either pretty cool, or a pretty cool actor, thought Jimmy. He continued on, his tone almost casual, almost as if he wanted to provoke a response.

  “Yeah! Dorchester. Just finished ten years. Three concurrent terms.”

  The driver blinked in amazement. “Well, you just didn’t exactly rob a crabapple tree, did you?”

  The response left Jimmy totally confused. Jack Gregory should have tried to smooth it over, should have tried to make it sound nice, out of fear. He was used to sizing up his prey. He could tell if his victim was weak, old, defenceless.

  Jack Gregory didn’t fit that picture. He seemed totally unafraid, totally impermeable, exuding a quiet strength that Jimmy found unnerving. Jimmy instantly became defensive, replying in confused, jumbled phrases, suddenly resenting this stranger who seemed to command the moment and wh
o struck the truth dead-on in such an offhand manner.

  The old, familiar defences of his actions leaped into his consciousness, the defences that originated somewhere in the merging of the misty reality of his past and his angered perceptions of that same reality. “Well, you know, when you look at the two-bit place I came from. We didn’t have any shaggin’ money. And then the crappy school we had . . .”

  “And then there’s the crappy government, and the crappy church, and, of course, the crappy system.” Jack Gregory was glancing at Jimmy, smiling, echoing him, mimicking his expression perfectly. Jimmy felt a flush of anger rise to his cheeks. This man was coming too close, quiet strength or no quiet strength. He didn’t like being challenged like this. Why wasn’t Jack Gregory afraid of him?

  He studied the driver again. Jack Gregory had gone back to being absorbed in his driving, chuckling to himself. Bellevue Hill was behind them, and they had once again ascended the high, open country of the barrens. It was almost dark now, and gusts of wind engulfed the car with blustery clouds of fine, powdery snow, blown from the heights to the west, at times obliterating all vision.

  Jack Gregory never flinched. Each time, the car emerged from the blinding envelopment exactly where it was supposed to be, its movements expertly controlled. Neither man spoke again until the vehicle had dipped over the rise leading down to Witch Hazel Pond.

  Jack Gregory still remained alert, his eyes never leaving the road, although his body had more visibly relaxed.

  “I dunno, b’y. I finds when I gets like that, blaming everybody else for everything that happened to me, the best way to get out of it is to look around to see if somebody else needs a lift. Takes you out of yourself. My father used to say there’s always somebody around who needs a push or a shove or a slice of bread.” He then proceeded to brake, looking in his mirror and activating his left signal. Jimmy couldn’t remember anything his father used to say. His father had disappeared across the Gulf before he was born.