The Gift

by Cecelia Ahern

  “It’s the twenty-first. Same date as the office holiday party,” she whispered loudly, covering the handset.

  “Change it then,” he said as he went into his office to pick up his briefcase, then walked back out while wrapping his scarf tightly around his neck.

  “The office party?”

  “No,” he said, wrinkling his nose up in disgust. “My father’s party.”

  He caught Gabe’s eye and saw a judging, accusing look. Once again it stopped him in his tracks. “No, actually, don’t,” he backtracked quickly to Alison. “I’ll figure it out.”

  Gabe gave him a curious smile at that.

  “Okay, I’m off.” He finally broke his gaze with Gabe and power walked to the elevator, phone to his ear. Lou held Gabe’s cool stare as the doors closed and the elevator slowly descended. A few seconds later it reached the ground level, and as the doors opened Lou caused a jam as he froze at the sight before him. While irritated people trying to get off snapped at him to move, eventually pushing passed him, Lou didn’t even notice. He just stood there, staring at Gabe, who was a few feet in front of him.

  Even as the elevator crowd cleared and headed out into the cold of the city, Lou remained alone in the elevator, his heart skipping a few beats as he watched Gabe standing by the security desk, the mail cart beside him.

  Before the elevator doors closed again, trapping Lou inside, he slowly disembarked and made his way toward Gabe.

  “I forgot to give this to you upstairs,” Gabe said, handing Lou a thin envelope. “It was hidden beneath someone else’s stack.”

  Lou took the envelope and didn’t even look at it before crushing it into his coat pocket.

  “Is something wrong?” Gabe asked.

  “No. Nothing’s wrong.” Lou didn’t move his eyes away from Gabe’s face. “How did you get down here so quickly?”

  “Here?” Gabe pointed at the floor.

  “Yeah, here,” Lou said sarcastically. “The ground level. You were just on the thirteenth floor. Just less than thirty seconds ago.”

  “I thought there was no thirteenth floor,” Gabe responded coolly.

  “Fourteenth, I meant,” Lou corrected himself, frustrated by his gaffe.

  “You were there, too, Lou.” Gabe frowned.

  “And?”

  “And…” Gabe stalled. “I guess I just got here quicker than you.” He shrugged, then unlatched the brake at the wheel of the cart with his foot and prepared to move. “You’d better run,” Gabe said, moving away, echoing Lou’s words from the morning. “Things to see, people to do.” Then he flashed his porcelain smile, but this time it didn’t give Lou the warm fuzzy feeling it had earlier. Instead, it sent torpedoes of fear and worry right to his heart and straight into his gut. Those two places. Right at the same time.

  CHAPTER 8

  The Quiet Life

  IT WAS TEN THIRTY AT night by the time the city spat Lou out and waved him off to the coast road that led him home to his house in Howth, County Dublin. Bordering the sea, a row of houses lined the coast there, like an ornate frame to the perfect watercolor, windswept and eroded from a lifetime of salty air. In each house, at least one window with open curtains twinkled with the lights of a Christmas tree. As Lou drove, to his right he could see across the bay to Dalkey and Killiney. The lights of Dublin city twinkled beyond the oily black of the sea, like electric eels flashing beneath the darkness of a well.

  Howth had been the dream destination for as long as Lou could remember. Quite literally, his first memory began there, his first feeling of desire, of wanting to belong and then of belonging. The fishing and yachting port in north County Dublin was a popular suburban resort on the north side of Howth Head, fifteen kilometers from Dublin city. A bustling village filled with pubs and fine fish restaurants, it was also a place with history: cliff paths that led past its ruined abbey, an inland fifteenth-century castle with rhododendron gardens, and lighthouses that dotted the coastline. It had breathtaking views of Dublin Bay and the Wicklow Mountains, or Boyne Valley beyond; only a sliver of land attached the peninsular island to the rest of the country…only a sliver of land connected Lou’s daily life to that of his family. A mere thread, so that when the stormy days attacked, Lou would watch the raging Liffey from the window of his office and imagine the gray, ferocious waves crashing over that sliver, threatening to cut his family off from the rest of the country. Sometimes in those daydreams he was away from his family, cut off from them forever. In nicer moments he was with them, wrapping himself around them like a shield.

  Behind the landscaped garden of their home was land — wild and rugged, covered by purple heather and waist-high uncultivated grasses and hay — that looked out over Dublin Bay. To the front they could see Ireland’s Eye, and on a clear day the view was so stunning, it was almost as though a green screen had been hung from the clouds and rolled down to the ocean floor. Stretching out from the harbor was a pier that Lou loved to take walks along, usually alone. He hadn’t always; his love for the pier had begun when he was a child, his parents bringing him, Marcia, and Quentin to Howth every Sunday, come rain or shine, for a walk along the pier. On those family days, Lou would disappear into his own world. He was a pirate on the high seas. He was a lifeguard. He was a soldier. He was a whale. He was anything he wanted to be. He was everything he wasn’t.

  Yes, Lou still loved walking that pier, his runway to tranquillity. He loved watching the cars and the houses perched along the cliff edges fade away as he moved farther and farther from land. He would stand shoulder to shoulder with the lighthouse, both of them looking out to sea. After a long week at work, he could throw all of his worries out there, where they’d float away on the waves.

  But the night Lou drove home after first meeting Gabe, it was too late to walk the pier. Driving past it, all he could see was blackness and the occasional light flashing on the lighthouse. And besides, the village itself wasn’t its usual quiet hideaway. So close to Christmas, every restaurant was throbbing with diners, Christmas parties, and annual meetings and celebrations. All the boats would be in for the night; the seals would be gone from the pier, their bellies full with the mackerel thrown to them by visitors. Lou continued on the black and quiet winding road that led uphill to the summit and, knowing that home was near and that nobody else was around, put his foot down on the accelerator of his Porsche 911. He lowered his window and felt the ice-cold air blow through his hair, and he listened to the sound of the engine reverberating through the trees as he made his way. Below him, the city twinkled with a million lights, spying him winding his way up the wooded mountain like a spider among the grass.

  Suddenly he heard a whoop, and then, looking in his rearview mirror, cursed loudly at the police car that came up behind him, lights ablazing. He eased his foot off the accelerator, hoping he’d be overtaken, but to no avail; the emergency was indeed him. He turned on his signal and pulled over, sat with his hands on the steering wheel, and watched the familiar figure climbing out of the police car behind him. The man slowly made his way to Lou’s side of the vehicle, looking around as he did, as though taking a leisurely stroll.

  The man parked himself outside Lou’s door and leaned down to look into the open window.

  “Mr. Suffern,” he said without a note of sarcasm, much to Lou’s relief.

  “Sergeant O’Reilly.” He remembered the name right on cue and threw him a smile, showing so many teeth he felt like a tense chimpanzee. “We meet again.”

  “Indeed. We find ourselves in a familiar situation,” Raphie said with a grimace. “But I do enjoy our little chats. How is your new secretary coming along? Last month you were racing to the office because she had made a mistake with your schedule.”

  “Alison. Yes, she’s doing just fine.” Lou smiled.

  “And Cliff, how is he? You were racing to the hospital the time before that.”

  “Still not good,” Lou said somberly.

  “You have his job yet?” Raphie asked softly.


  “Not yet.” Lou smiled again.

  “So what’s the emergency tonight?”

  “My apologies. The roads were quiet, so I thought it would be okay. There’s not a sinner around.”

  “Just a few innocents. That’s always the problem.”

  “And I’m one of them, Your Honor.” Lou laughed, holding his hands up in defense. “It’s the last stretch of road before getting home, and trust me, I only put the foot down seconds before you pulled me over. Dying to get home to the family. No pun intended.”

  “I could hear your engine from Sutton Cross, way down the road.”

  “It’s a quiet night.”

  “And it’s a noisy engine, but you just never know, Mr. Suffern. You just never know.”

  “Don’t suppose you’d let me off with a warning,” Lou said, trying to work sincerity and apology into his best winning smile. Both at the same time.

  “You know the speed limit, I assume?”

  “Sixty kilometers.”

  “Correct. You were fifty above that.”

  Lou bit down on his lip and tried his best to look appalled.

  Without another word the sergeant bolted upright, causing Lou to lose eye contact and suddenly be staring at the man’s belt buckle. Unsure of what the sergeant was up to, he stayed seated and looked out the window to the stretch of road before him, hoping he wasn’t about to gain more points on his license. With twelve as the maximum before losing his license altogether, he was perched dangerously close with eight. He turned and peeked at the sergeant and saw him grasping at his left pocket.

  “You looking for a pen?” Lou called, reaching his hand into his inside pocket.

  The sergeant winced and turned his back on Lou.

  “Hey, are you okay?” Lou asked with concern. He reached for the door handle and then thought better of it.

  The sergeant grunted something inaudible, the tone suggesting a warning of some sort. Through the side-view mirror, Lou watched him walk slowly back to his car. He had an unusual gait. He seemed to be dragging his left leg slightly as he walked. Was he drunk? Then the sergeant opened his car door, got inside, started up the engine, did a U-turn, and was gone. Lou frowned. His day — even in its twilight hours — was becoming increasingly more bizarre by the moment.

  LOU PULLED UP TO THE driveway feeling the same sense of pride and satisfaction he felt every night when he arrived home. To most average people, size didn’t matter. To Lou, size most certainly did matter. He didn’t want to be average, and he saw the things that he owned as being a measure of the man that he was. He wanted the best of everything. Despite being on a safe cul-de-sac, one of only a few houses on Howth summit, he’d arranged for the existing boundary walls to be built up higher, and for oversized electronic gates with cameras to be placed at the entrance. The lights were out in the children’s bedrooms at the front of the house, and Lou felt an inexplicable relief.

  “I’m home,” he called as he walked into the quiet house.

  There was a faint sound of a breathless and rather hysterical woman calling out from the television room down the hallway. Ruth’s exercise DVD.

  He loosened his tie and opened the top button of his shirt and kicked off his shoes, feeling the warmth of the underfloor heating soothe his feet through the marble as he walked to the hall table to sort through the mail. His mind slowly began to unwind, the conversations of various meetings and telephone calls from the day all beginning to slow. Though they were still there in his head, the voices seemed a little quieter now. Each time he took off a layer of his clothes — his overcoat flung over the chair, his suit jacket on the table, his tie onto the table but slithering to the floor — or emptied his pockets — his loose change here, his keys there — he felt the events of the day fall away.

  “Hello,” he called again, louder this time, realizing that nobody — his wife — had come to greet him. Perhaps she was busy breathing to the count of four, as he could hear the exercise-DVD woman in the television room doing.

  “Sssh!” he heard coming from the second level of the house, followed by the creak of floorboards as his wife made her way across the landing.

  Being silenced bothered him. Throughout a day of nonstop talking, of clever words, of jargon, of persuasive and intelligent conversation — deal opening, deal development, deal closing — not one person at any point had told him to Sssh. That was the language of teachers and librarians. Not of adults in their own homes. He felt like he’d left the real world and entered a church. Only one minute after stepping through his front door, he felt irritated. That had been happening a lot lately.

  “I’ve just put Bud down again. He’s not having a good night,” Ruth explained from the top of the stairs in a loud whisper. Lou also didn’t like this kind of speech. This whispering was for children in class or teenagers sneaking out of their homes.

  The “Bud” she referred to was their one-year-old son Ross. This nickname came about after their five-year-old daughter Lucy overheard Lou affectionately call her new baby brother buddy or bud, and understood it to be his name. Despite their initial corrections, Lucy’s conviction remained and so, unfortunately for Ross, his nickname of Bud seemed to be sticking around.

  “What’s new?” he mumbled while searching through the mail for something that didn’t resemble a bill. He opened a few and discarded them on the hall table. Pieces of ripped paper drifted onto the floor.

  Ruth made her way downstairs, dressed in a velour tracksuit-cum-pajamas outfit — he couldn’t quite tell the difference between what she wore these days. Her long, chocolate-brown hair was tied back in a high ponytail, and she shuffled toward him in a pair of slippers — the noise grating on his ears.

  “Hi.” She smiled, and for a moment the tired face dissolved, and there was a glimpse, a tiny flicker, of the woman he had married. Then, just as quickly, it disappeared again, leaving him to wonder if that part of her was there at all. Then she stepped up to kiss him on the lips.

  “Good day?” she asked.

  “Busy.”

  “But good?”

  The contents of a particular envelope took his interest. After a long moment he felt the intensity of her stare.

  “Hmm?” He looked up.

  “I just asked if you had a good day.”

  “Yeah, and I said, ‘Busy.’”

  “Yes, and I said, ‘But good?’ All your days are busy, but all your days aren’t good. I hope it was good,” she said in a strained voice.

  “You don’t sound like you hope it was good,” he replied, eyes down, reading the rest of the letter.

  “Well, I did the first time I asked,” she said evenly.

  “Ruth, I’m reading my mail!”

  “I can see that,” she mumbled, bending over to pick up the empty, torn envelopes that lay on the floor.

  “So what happened around here today?” he asked, opening another envelope. Another piece of paper fluttered to the floor.

  “The usual madness. Marcia called a few times today, looking for you. When I could finally find the phone. Bud hid the handset again, the battery went dead, and it took me ages to find it. Anyway, she needs help with deciding on a venue for your dad’s party. What did you tell her?”

  Silence. She patiently watched him reading the last page of a document and waited for an answer. When he had folded the papers and dropped them on the table, he reached for another envelope.

  “Honey?”

  “Hmm?”

  “I asked you about Marcia,” she said, trying to keep her patience, then proceeded to pick up the new pieces of paper that had fallen to the floor.

  “Oh yeah.” He unfolded another document and became once again distracted by the contents.

  “Yes?” she said loudly.

  He looked up and gazed at her, as though noticing for the first time that she was standing there. “What were we saying?”

  “Marcia,” she said, rubbing her tired eyes. “We’re talking about Marcia, but you’re busy, so…” She
began making her way to the kitchen.

  “Oh, that. I’m taking the party off her hands. Alison’s going to organize it.”

  Ruth stopped. “Alison?”

  “Yes, my secretary. She’s new. Have you met her?”

  “Not yet.” She slowly made her way back toward him. “Honey, Marcia was really excited about organizing the party.”

  “And now Alison is.” He smiled. “Not.” Then he laughed.

  She smiled patiently at the inside joke that she didn’t understand.

  Lou looked away. He knew that Marcia had loved organizing the party, that she’d been planning it for months. But in taking it out of her hands he was, in fact, making it easier on himself. He couldn’t stand the twenty calls a day about cake tasting and whether or not he’d allow three of their decrepit aunts to stay overnight in his house or if he’d lend a few of his serving spoons for the buffet. Ever since her marriage had ended, Marcia had focused on this party. Maybe if she’d have given her marriage as much attention as she did the bloody party…Taking this off her hands was a favor to her and a favor to himself. Two things accomplished at once. Just what he liked.

  Ruth took a deep breath, her shoulders relaxing as she exhaled. “Your dinner’s ready.” She began to move toward the kitchen again. “It’ll just take a minute to heat up. And I bought that apple pie you like.”

  “I’ve eaten,” he said, folding the letter he’d just finished and ripping it into pieces that fluttered to the floor. It was either the sound of yet more paper hitting the floor or his words that stopped her, but either way she froze.

  “I’ll pick the bloody things up,” he said with irritation.

  She slowly turned around and asked in a quiet voice, “Where did you eat?”

  “Shanahan’s. Rib-eye steak. I’m stuffed.” He absentmindedly rubbed his stomach.

  “With who?”

  “Work people.”

  “Who?”