Chapter Twelve

Holly

The next morning when I woke up, I took a moment to stretch, feeling my bare skin slide luxuriously against the fabric of the sheets. I rolled over to touch Graham, but instead of finding him lying beside me I felt only his back. I opened my eyes and saw that he was sitting on the edge of the bed, his elbows rested on his thighs as he stared down at the carpet. His phone was in his hand and I wondered if something had happened while I was still sleeping. I sat up and rested my hand to his back. His skin felt warm and soft, and I leaned forward to kiss the back of his shoulder.

"Are you alright?" I asked

"Charlie called me," he said, his voice sounding shallow and sad.

"What did he say?"

"He asked me if I was going to make it to him for Christmas. He said that his mother told him that I was going to be there and that he couldn't wait to see me, but that he has been waiting and now he was worried that I wasn't going to come." Graham glanced over his shoulder at me and I could see the turmoil in his eyes. I didn't know what to tell him.

I got out of bed and started getting dressed. When I was finished, I rushed around the room packing everything as quickly as I could.

"What are you doing?" Graham asked.

"It's been fun here," I said, and lifted my eyes from my luggage to look at him, "but I think it's about time that we head out. Charlie needs you, and Santa doesn't disappoint little ones at Christmas."

That seemed to spark something in him and Graham stood, dressing faster than I had ever seen him. He reached for the smaller of his bags and I noticed him pause, looking at the bag strangely. He pulled it closer to him and lifted the flap open. His hand ran along the inside of the bag and then paused. He opened a zipper and reached into a compartment, then I heard another zipper as he accessed a further hidden section of the bag. He laughed, and I looked over, tilting slightly to try to look around him so I could see what he had found.

"What is it?" I asked.

Graham turned around.

"A Christmas miracle," he said, holding up his wallet.

"You found it! Where was it?"

"In the secret compartment that I had had made into that bag. I forgot that I had hid it in there while I was on the train to protect it from strange people wandering into my room."

I laughed and ran across the room to him, jumping into his arms and giving him a kiss.

"Congratulations," I said teasingly. "You are no longer one of the simple folk."

Graham gave me another kiss and shook his head.

"I don't know where you've been this whole time," he said, "but these people are anything but simple folk." He patted my hips and eased me back from him a step. "Come on," he said, "we've got to finish getting ready to get out of here." He paused, and I saw his eyes widen. "And I think I know exactly how we're going to do it."

There was a glint in his eye as he said that, and I didn't know if I should feel excitement or nervousness. Probably a little of both.

Ten minutes later, we were trudging through the snow toward a barn.

"What are we doing?" I asked.

"I need to see a man about a snowmobile," he said.

I paused, staring at his back as he walked away from me.

"What does that even mean?" I asked.

Graham walked up to the barn and yanked on the weathered handle. For a brief moment I was worried that the entire structure was going to come down, but the door finally let out a reluctant grown, then allowed Graham to open it. I walked forward to look into the barn. It was filled with all of the things you expect to see, discarded crates and boxes of indeterminate origin. Pieces and parts of machines and cars that seemed as though they may have never actually been a part of the structures that they were made for. Old, tired equipment that looks like it had been parked in the barn one night after a long day of work and simply abandoned and never touched again. Right in the middle of all of this, however, there were two shining, pristine snowmobiles. I gasped and rushed up to the side of one of them, resting my hands on it.

"How did you know that these were here?" I asked, looking over at Graham.

"How do you think that they got the bride and groom away from the reception so quickly? I saw Jessup bring one of these up and he drove them away on it while everyone was distracted by the party."

"Well, let's go find him and ask if we can borrow one of them."

"No time," Graham said.

"What are we going to do?"

Graham pulled his wallet out of his pocket and withdrew a small stack of bills. He set them on an old workbench and rested a hammer on top. Noticing a pad of paper and a pencil, he jotted down a note and added it on top of the money.

"There," he said. "I gave him my phone number."

He walked over to a pegboard on the wall and picked up a set of keys and then he walked over to the snowmobiles. He pushed a key in the ignition of one of them, tried it, and then moved over to the second. The machine roared to life and Graham give a triumphant laugh.

"We're just going to steal it?" I asked.

"We're not stealing it," Graham said. "I left him cash. If anything, we're renting it. He can call me and let me know the difference and I'll send it to him. Now hop on and let's go."

"We're just going to take one of them?"

"Yeah, well, we don't want to be selfish."

I laughed and climbed onto the back of the machine behind Graham. We arranged our bags around us and Graham hit the gas. I squealed as the snowmobile shot out of the barn and skidded across the snow. We drove erratically for a few seconds while Graham whooped and hollered like Cletus spinning around in the back of the pickup truck. As we straightened out and found our path along the back of the hollow in the original direction the train had been heading, I felt a hint of guilt for not saying goodbye to any of the people that we met. I told myself that I would call Rue when we got to the first place that we were going to stop and explain everything to her. Then ask her to say thank you and goodbye to everyone that we have met. I knew that it wasn't enough, but at that moment the thought of having to say goodbye to all of them myself was just too much.

I was trying so hard to cling to the bags and to Graham at the same time that by the time we found a place to stop, my arms were aching and the novelty of traveling through the snow had worn off. I climbed off of the snowmobile and looked around. Whiskey Hollow was far behind us. Around me I saw a town that, compared to the hollow, looked like a city. People were bustling along sidewalks and streaming in and out of small buildings. And nearly everyone had arms full of packages, some wrapped in various colors of shimmering gift wrap and others in plain brown paper and twine. I had the sudden impression that we had somehow traveled out of the snow globe and into a Norman Rockwell Christmas card.

"We can grab something to eat here," Graham said, "and ask them if there's a train or a bus leaving out of here today."

We walked into the first little restaurant that we saw, and I slipped into a booth. The inside of the restaurant was warm and smelled like fresh bread. As Graham walked away to find someone to ask about the train or the bus, I pulled out my phone and scrolled through all of the new contacts that I had added to it in the last few days. I found Rue's number, but hesitated to call it. I didn't know what I would say to her. Finally, I knew that there was nothing I could say. I pressed her number and pulled up a blank message.

"Rue," I wrote, "thank you for everything. Graham and I had to leave and didn't have a chance to say goodbye. I'm so glad that I had the opportunity to meet you. Please tell everyone that I said thank you and that I'll be thinking about them."

Graham was approaching the table just as I finished the message and put my phone down. I looked up at him, but the expression on his face was not as hopeful as I would have wanted it to be.

"What's wrong?"

"The owner says that all transportation is still delayed. It looks like it's going to be you, me, and the snowmobile for a little while longer."

"I guess I can handle that," I said. "It can't be too much farther until we find somewhere with real transportation."

"It'll be fine," Graham said. "Besides, Boom Boom would probably tell us that Christmas has a real good track record with people going far distances on inefficient forms of transportation."

I laughed and nodded. A waitress approached and put steaming cups of hot coffee in front of us. I unashamedly gulped some down before taking a cursory glance at their menu and making my order. Graham made his order and handed both menus to the waitress before turning his attention to me.

"So, what did you get Charlie for Christmas?" I asked.

The question seemed to spark something in Graham and his eyes lit up.

"I thought about everything that I loved when I was five years old and I got him all of those things," he told me.

"Does he like all of the same things that you did?" I asked.

Graham looked at me strangely.

"He's my son," he said. "He's going to like the same things that I did."

"Not necessarily," I said. "I'm my mother's daughter, and I'm nothing like her. And from some of the things that you told me about your father, you're different from him too."

Graham shook his head.

"I'm sure that he's going to like everything that I picked for him," he said. Then I listened as he rattled off a list of all of the gifts that he had chosen for his son. While most of them definitely sounded like things that I could see him enjoying when he was little, when I thought of the stories that he had told me about Charlie and the pictures that he had showed me of him, they didn't seem to match. I mentioned a TV show whose characters had appeared on a shirt that Charlie was wearing in one of the most recent pictures and ask Graham if you had considered anything involving that show.

Graham shook his head.

"That's just a TV show," he said. "It's just a shirt that his mother put on him."

I sat back as the waitress brought our food and settled the plates onto the table in front of us. I nodded.

"Alright," I said. "But what about movies that he likes? Or books? Does he have games that he likes to play or any Heroes that he's mentioned to you?"

Graham told me about a few of the things that Charlie had mentioned to him over the phone, but insisted that they were just things that mattered to him in those moments.

"He's five," Graham insisted. "He likes something one minute and then something else the next. The things I chose for him are part of who he is and will matter to him as he gets bigger."

I could see that Graham had convinced himself that he knew exactly what was right for his son and that he was excited about all of the gifts that he had chosen for him, but I wasn't so sure. Something that I hadn't mentioned to Graham, something that I have never told anyone, was that I had had a brother when I was much younger. I could still remember him as a five year old and the passion that he had for his favorite shows, his favorite movies, and the characters in his books and games that seem so completely real to him at the time. My heart ached thinking about him and I pushed the memories into the back of my mind where I kept them, so I didn't have to feel the pain that came when his face appeared in my mind and in my memory. I listened to Graham continue to talk, knowing that as soon as I had the opportunity, I had some Christmas shopping to do.