Chapter 29

Silence. The wind that had taken great glee in slapping snow and tiny pebbles of ice at the window, had abated. Stopped cold.

And it affected the room, the old house, tremendously.

The rattle of the window was gone. Countless other hisses and hums and rat-tat-tats that had sounded throughout the hallways and rooms, building on each other, to a level of cacophony, were gone.

She ran over to the window, peeked out. “There’s a crap load of snow and ice on everything. But…it’s stopped.”

It had. There wasn’t a flake in the sky.

And as the eerie solitude covered everything, another noise became apparent. Or had it been there along? No one could know.

But she heard it now. Again. Clearer. A soft, insistent, perfectly timed ticking.

She tilted her head, narrowed her eyes. “What’s that?”

And there it was again. Barely audible…but audible, nonetheless. She spoke to Eli. “It’s there again!”

“Yeah. I heard it before.”

“Eli.” This was going to be hard to say, but hell. It was a weird night. “You don’t “So you don’t think it’s…um…well you know.” She spat out the word, as he gave her a look. “Paranormal?”

His expression turned wry. “There’s no such thing as a ‘pair of normals’ here, sweetheart. It’s just you and me, and would you ever, in your wildest dreams, call us…?”

She snorted. “No. Okay. Definitely not. So where’s it coming from?”

Eli headed back to where the diary had been. Kneeling on the carpet, beside the disconnected vent work that remained around the walled up old register, he dug around, and Tish noted a slap of recognition on his face and a quick suck of air into his lungs.

“Please,” he pleaded, softly. Intoning. “Please, let it be.”

And the odd note of desire, hopefulness, hopelessness all twisted together to sound like a grown man begging for some favor.

Oh please, let him have it, she implored an invisible puppet-master. Please let him have whatever he wants. I don’t need what I want. Just give him what he does.

Every string in her body was stretched taut as she watched him poke around inside the wall. He grabbed on things, pulled. Screwed up his face in concentration. Moved over a couple of feet, repeated the whole process.

She watched as his eyebrows arched skyward, his fingers latched around something, and he drew it carefully from the rubble.

It was round, wrapped in some type of small sack, and coated in fine, pale, drywall dust. He brushed it off with quick swooshes of his work-hardened fingers and unearthed a vivid purple. He raised his eyes to hers and smiled at her, a smile of the kind she hadn’t seen for three, long years. In fact, had she ever seen one quite this vulnerable, one so openly and nakedly hoping for her approval?

“Here.” He placed it in her upturned palm, used his other hand to manually curl her fingers around the item in the velvety bag. “It’s yours.”

She looked at him. Her heart was still beating its normal rhythm, even though she’d expected it to speed up in keeping with the gravity of the moment. Yet it was like they’d flown into hyperspace. Another dimension, and all was well. Where whatever had ever been, the good, still was.

She met his gaze, the hope. The undercurrent of sure, anticipatory joy. “Wha…?”

He smiled, and for once, was happy.

Outside, a couple of lights started to blink. Green, and red. From the front of the house.

“Wha—" Tish turned toward the wash of colored light on the wall.

Eli did too, a look of puzzlement on his face, then understanding replaced it. “Huh. Just a couple of bulbs in an old string of lights around the casement window. They’ve started up.”

Still holding the precious yet unknown bundle in her hands, she spoke. “And you don’t think that’s weird?”

He shrugged. “You already said the juice in the house is wacko. First it charged your phone, then it drained it. Why shouldn’t a couple of Christmas lights come on?”

And as if to agree, a couple more joined the first two. Yellow and blue now appeared, twinkled their lights onto the snow and ice around the window and reflected inside into the room, throwing color, like a crazy kaleidoscope, everywhere around them. On the wall, and into the gaping hole they’d blasted through by sheer will. A crazy, unique, Christmas design.

But Eli’s attention was back on what he’d placed inside her hand.

His voice was low. “It’s something for you, Tish. From me.”

And with that invitation, the house could literally fall down around her, or a rogue tornado suddenly grab it off its foundation and send it whirling into the sky. Yet nothing would be as important to her as gently unwrapping the parcel he’d placed so carefully, so definitely into her hands.

She saw the golden cords, pulled on them. Tugged open the top of the drawstring bag serving as packaging. Laughed as she saw the name of the distillery embroidered on the bag. “Seagrams?”

“All my money went to get the mortgage. I did get it, you know, even though you didn’t see any of it.” He shook his head. “Just didn’t know I’d have to use it to create a weird new life doing other stuff. But here’s your gift. A bit late…but here it is.”

Warmth, joy twisted through her. “The Christmas we never had.”

“The Christmas we didn’t have then. Because…life, this old house, whatever…saved the best for last. Seems like your time capsule was right. It’s still our house.” He tucked his fingers under her chin, raised it. His whisper was soft, yet resounded through the room. “Merry Christmas, old house. And Merry Christmas, babe.”

And she didn’t know how her lips formed the words, but they did. She heard them, the hush in her voice not obscuring their clarity. “Merry Christmas, baby.”

Then he grinned, probably to get them over the solemn moment. “Now open it!”

She peered into the velvet bag as best she could, saw something shiny in its depths. Pulled it out, then stared at it. “You didn’t…”

“I did.”

She stopped, stuck, unalterably, in the moment. In the perfection of what he’d done.

“The one you loved so much that day, the one we saw in that store.”

She was speechless, having been tossed back in time. A shopping trip, her and Eli.

Arm in arm part of the time, part of the time trudging separately down the mall, jostled by shoppers galore. Not enjoying themselves overly, too many shoppers, too many packages. Too many sales advertised around them, too little money. None, actually, to spend on Christmas. They’d been grumpy but had made a pact to make the best of their immediately upcoming house rich, cash-poor status by not buying each other anything, just loving each other. Being happy in the moment. Literally happy in the moment. Giving up gifts cheerfully for the sake of the house they’d fallen in love with.

And they’d decided then and there, they’d sneak in. Spend Christmas Eve with their house, even before it was theirs. It was their gift to each other. Their real estate agent had adopted a don’t ask don’t tell policy when they’d teased her about the possibility of doing that, earlier in the week. What did it matter, they’d reasoned? It was vacant. The heat was on, though barely so, so the pipes wouldn’t burst. Why couldn’t they spend Christmas Eve there?

And after they’d signed a couple of papers, the key had appeared magically in Eli’s flat, in an envelope shoved through his mail slot. With the real estate agent’s particular perfume flowing from it.

So, okay. She’d given them that as her Christmas gift, and they trusted she’d cleared it with the owner.

So there weren’t supposed to be any gifts. A little pizza, a little wine. A lot of nookie.

Tish had made the time capsule for them privately, just before, and he—he’d done this. Bought this for her. The old brass antique clock she’d seen in the little side-street with the cobbled road. As the snow swirled around them, white against the indigo sky.

She could only manage one word, and barely that. “How?”

He shrugged. “I couldn’t show up with nothing for you, despite what we’d said. never figured I’d be giving it to you three years later.”

She stared at him, eyes wide. “You’ll think I’m mad. But…It’s like the house saved this stuff to give it to us, all these years later.”

Surprise flickered in his face, and then he smiled. “Wow,” he breathed. “I don’t actually think you’re nuts.” And just as quickly, he shifted. “Do you still love it?”

She stared at the small objets d’art, the brass bits tarnished by age, but the glass clear and unmarred, currently reflecting the psychedelic flashes of the Christmas lights their house was joyously inflicting on them. “If I said, no, do you think there’d be an upper floor tremor?”

“More like an earthquake, twelve thousand or so, on the Richter scale. But localized to the second floor.”

“I agree.” And then she answered him. This crazy night, this gift all on its own, had taught her one thing, and darned if she wasn’t going to listen. She gazed up at him, no longer trying to hide the obvious sheen in her eyes, and said everything she was feeling, though it came out in a whisper. “I love it.”