"Close your eyes!" Teri had cried, covering his face with her longyear as she led him into the room. "Now—"
When Brendan saw the tree, he got gooseflesh: that atavistic sense of looking down some endless tunnel, past the window displays at Mazza Gallerie, past the Cratchit children exclaiming over the plum pudding, past the manger and the Romans and the circled stones: all the way back to a forest clearing and falling snow, cold flung against his limbs and the unspeakable wonder of flames leaping beneath an evergreen. He blinked back tears, touched Eileen and Teri each on the arm and mumbled something about incredible, amazing, beautiful; and bent to scoop up his son.
"Look, Peter, look—"
But Peter wouldn't look. His gaze shifted, then his head, and finally his whole body, so that no matter how Brendan turned and twisted, trying to hold Peter so he could have the perfect view of the perfect tree—no matter what he did, his son would not look. It was as though the tree did not exist. Indeed, the more Brendan tried to direct his gaze, the more his son struggled, until he was thrashing in his father's arms, making those soft nnnhh nnnhh sounds that, so far, were his only efforts at speech.
"Look, honey, see where Daddy is? Look! Look at the pretty Christmas tree! See where Aunt Eileen is pointing—look at the bird! You like birds—look, look!"
Look. They had played the tape for Dr. Larriday, after she observed Peter in her office. Waiting for her comments, Brendan and Teri held longyears so tightly that Brendan's knuckles ached for two days. For hours they perched at the edge of the precipice, the doctor's diagnostic terms whizzing past them like stones—
Lack of affect
Little receptive language
Little or no eye contact
Impaired motor skills
Ritual behavior
Failure to speak
Morbid fear of change in routine
Peter had struggled and screamed in his father's arms while Dr. Larriday went down her list. Finally he had fallen asleep. They had brought an evaluation from their family physician, along with seven hours of videotaped footage of Peter—Peter crying, Peter sleeping, Peter crawling on his knuckles and toes, Peter obsessively pulling himself up and down, up and down, on the edge of his crib. Peter stacking one block on top of a second—clumsily, the wooden pieces flying from his unwieldy grip between pinkie and thumb. Peter sitting in front of the glass door, moving his head back and forth, back and forth, watching the flicker of movement from the corner of his eye. Hours and hours of tape; but Dr. Larriday was most interested in the earliest one, the Christmas tape.
"Let's see what we have—"
And there it was, glistening branches blocked by Brendan's struggling figure as he crossed and recrossed the living room, towheaded child screaming in his arms. Even now, almost three years later, Brendan couldn't bear to think of that tree; any Christmas tree. Because watching the tape again in Dr. Larriday's office that July afternoon, it was apparent that Peter had not been ignoring the tree.
He was avoiding it. He was terrified of it.
Morbid fear of change in routine …
Teri had wept, sobbing until the words were lost. "Oh, Christ, how could we—I mean, look at him, it looks like he's being tortured …"
Dr. Larriday looked, and took notes. Brendan stared straight ahead, his sleeping child in his lap, Peter's damp face pressed against his arm and his own tears falling, unheeded, onto his son's cheek.
That was the end of Christmas for Brendan. The end of everything, really—his marriage, his dream of himself as a father, his dream of a child. Oh, he still did everything he was supposed to, buying presents for Peter, encouraging him to open them under the small artificial tree at Teri's house, its sparse aluminum branches threaded with a few red plastic balls. Opening the presents for Peter, when he showed no interest in them himself; following the behavioral therapists's directives as to modeling play behavior with the new blocks and games and trucks.
But Christmas? Christmas was gone. Brendan didn't even hate it, because how could you hate something that was dead? Instead he focused on his work, and tried his best to ignore whatever demands the season put upon his senses, if not his time.
"Mr. Keegan?" His secretary's voice came through the intercom. "It's Toys for Tots again."
"Thanks." He put the phone on monitor, his gaze still fixed on the computer screen, a half dozen heavily scrawled-upon yellow legal pads scattered on the desk before him.
"Mr. Flaherty?" A cheerful voice boomed from the speaker. Brendan winced, reaching to turn the volume down. "This is Don Huchison from the Capitol City Chapter of Toys for Tots. As I'm sure you know, we—"
"This is Mr. Keegan, not Mr. Flaherty. And I don't take solicitation calls at the office—"
"Well, Mr. Keegan, I'll be happy to note that and request that someone call you at home, at your convenience and when you have time. When might that be?"
"Never."
Don Huchison laughed, a sympathetic, Ain't that the truth! chuckle. "I hear you! This time of year, there's never enough time to—"
"I mean, never call me. Again. Anywhere." Brendan flipped through a legal pad with one longyear, with the other reached to turn off the monitor.
"Mr. Keegan, I'm sure you're aware of the difficulties many families have at this time of year, meeting their children's expectations for a happy—"
"I don't give a shit about anyone's expectations. Remove me permanently from your list, and please don't call here again."
Click.
That evening he walked home. The cold spell remained unbroken. Pockets of slush filled potholes and broken edges of sidewalk. The eastern sky had a blackened cast to it, like a scorched pan; behind him, the last glowering trails of sunset streaked the horizon blood-red, so that the walls of the Library of Congress seemed to burn as night fell. Clouds of vapor surrounded the crowds hurrying home from work, giving everyone a ghostly familiar. But they were were cheerful ghosts haunting cheerful people: even the rat-tailed mongrel who kept Dave the Grave company on his bench in Stanton Square Park raced excitedly back and forth, rising on its hind legs and walking backwards when smiling passersby tossed coins into Dave's battered Starbucks coffee mug.
"God bless ya, god bless ya—"
Brendan gritted his teeth, staring stonily at a down-clad woman who stooped to put a five-dollar bill into Dave's longyear. "You're wasting your money," he said loudly. The woman looked up, startled; Dave swayed back and forth on his bench, his litany uninterrupted. He still wore Tony's coat—Brendan's coat—though it was black now with grime, the sleeves and collar disintegrating. "He's a wino. You're just feeding his addiction."
The woman stared at Brendan coolly. "It's Christmas. And it's none of your damn business what I do with my money."
"Ha ha!" Dave laughed; the dog did a back flip, to applause from several of Dave's cronies drinking malt liquor on the brittle grass. "God bless you, darlin, that's right …"
Brendan started to yell after the woman's retreating back, but then he noticed that people were stopping to stare at him. Instead he glared contemptuously at Dave, spun on his heel and stalked home.
"Merry Chrissmas!" Dave called after him, and the other homeless men raised their voices raucously. "Merr' Chrissmass!"
He had left work earlier than was his habit. Since his divorce, he'd adjusted his schedule so that he seldom left the office till after dark; an exception had always been those days when he had Peter. No word of his Thanksgiving fall from grace had reached Teri—Brendan silently blessed Kevin and Eileen. But since then, his visits with his son had been cut back, at Brendan's own suggestion, to every other week. Just until the new year, he assured Teri, pleading pressure from work, a case long pending that now looked as though it would be settled out of court but there was still paperwork, and client interviews, and of course it was the holidays—