Leaves (24 page)

“Dylan!”

A woman in pink, orange and yellow stood there, with her arms extended. My eyes hadn't adjusted to the light yet – or the bright colors.

I squinted. “Diane?”

“Dylan!”

Just then, a head poked out from behind Diane and looked up at me. It was a little girl.

All the air left my body.

“Diane,” I said again, having suddenly lost access to all other vocabulary.

It wasn't Laurel returning for more, or to retrieve something that she'd left behind. Seeing Diane's black wavy hair and gray eyes took me back a few years to a Chicago hotel room off Lake Shore overlooking the Odyssey cruising Lake Michigan. That had been a remarkable handful of days.

“Dylan!”

The conversation was obviously taking a little while to develop. It was understandable, considering the circumstances. Diane Sommers from Chicago and a lifetime ago was standing at my door at 3:00 a.m., extending her arms and waiting for a hug.

Pulling her close, the memories of her perfume, her bright colors, her smile and her touch began to connect the dots until completing my vague recollection of the past. We'd worked head-to-head on the marketing campaign all day, wrapping ourselves in each other all night.

I began to pull back, but Diane continued to hold me. Focusing neither on the drab hallway nor the bead of sweat forming on the back of my neck, I called to mind the lines in her face – friendly, familiar, and yet foreign.

“Is everything all right?” I said, offering another squeeze when she refused to let me go.

“It's good to see you.”

I had momentarily blanked out the fact that she had a kid with her. When Diane finally loosened her grip, I tightened the belt of my robe, conscious of little eyes staring up from our feet.

“Diane, it's great to see you. I wish I had known you were coming. I would have waited up or at least put some clothes on.”

“Oh, Dylan.”

She smiled, reminding me of the reason that we'd gotten together in the first place. Everything about Diane had always seemed bright to me.

I looked down for the kid, but she had carefully hidden behind her mother. A second later, the little girl poked her head out. She seemed tired, but she still had the energy to muster a look of discernment – either that, or she had to use the bathroom.

“Hi?” I said.

Diane knelt down to the girl. “This is Spring.”

I nearly followed Diane's crouch, then remembered my robe.

“And Spring, this is Mr. Dylan.”

“Hi, Spring.”

Spring was dressed in a yellow raincoat and red boots. She had the same wavy black hair and gray eyes as Diane. She didn't say anything, but she seemed fascinated with my bare feet.

Diane stood back up. “Is this a bad time…?”

“No, no. Come in. Let me help you with your bag.”

Spring shook her head.

Though Diane's arrival time was just a tiny bit strange, it was as good a time as any – especially since Laurel had already pulled a Houdini. I picked up Diane's single piece of luggage; a brown relic, featuring ancient travel stickers that had to be at least 30 years old. Spring toted a red backpack over her raincoat. The backpack had a duck wearing boots stitched on it. “Is it raining outside?”

Again, Spring shook her head.

“Good,” I said. Who said I couldn't make small talk with a kid?

She raised an eyebrow in my direction and I followed her inside.

“What brings you to New York at this hour?”

Diane stood there, with her suitcase at her feet. My eyes began to focus on the situation around me: the whole Laurel thing seemed like day-old bread and today's menu featured an Indian recipe I couldn't pronounce.

“This is a bad time,” Diane said. “We should leave.”

“No, no, not at all…really. I get people dropping in at this hour all the time. Would you like some wine? A cup of coffee? I have Kona.”

I played a tiny bit with fantasy in
The Journey Home,
but
Anything
is the first of my novels to have a strong supernatural element. I found this to be endless amounts of fun, though it also required me to follow lots of rules I hadn't considered before to make the magic at least reasonably believable. How many times do we hear people say, “I would do anything for you?” In this novel, I decided to take that statement for a test drive.

I had a curious feeling when I walked into Stephon's a couple of days later. This wasn't surprising, since Stephon's was a curious place, but that wasn't the source of the strangeness I sensed. Instead, it was the incongruous fact that I had a response to Stephon's even more incongruous request: to return with my greatest fantasy for Melissa. If I could remake the laws of physics, if I could wrinkle the fabric of time, I knew exactly what I would do with such power.

Of course, there were no customers in the store. Stephon always dressed well, if casually, and he had a fortune of jewelry in this small space. He had to get his money from somewhere. Was the store a front for some illegal operation? Did he think it was funny that I actually came here to shop?

Stephon offered me a friendly nod when I came in. “Good to see you again, Mr. Timian.”

“Thank you, Stephon. As promised.”

“As promised.”

“Do you have something fabulous for me?”

He smiled as broadly as his narrow face allowed. “I very well might.”

I smiled as well, getting a little excited about what was to come. “That's great. Let me see what you were able to find.”

Stephon turned and walked toward the back room. Just before he entered the doorway, though, he stopped and faced me again. “I had a request of you, didn't I?”

In some ways, I had hoped that he had forgotten. I wasn't sure I could say what I was thinking out loud. “You did, yes.”

“A fantasy for you and your fiancée.”

“That was what you requested.”

“And did you think of one?”

I suddenly felt very uncomfortable. This seemed like such an intimate thing to share with someone I barely knew. “Is this really necessary?”

Stephon's shoulders relaxed and he tilted his head to the side. He walked back toward the counter. “Of course it isn't. If you haven't come up with something or if you'd rather not tell me about it, I understand. It's just a little question I ask from time to time when I see things in certain people. I thought it might enhance this whole transaction for you.”

Why that didn't sound incredibly creepy to me, I don't know. The entire experience had become fairly surreal. Just to make things a little more Dali-esque, I suddenly found myself wanting to share this with my jeweler. My eyes landed on a silver phoenix brooch where a golden elephant had been two days before. I shook my head briskly and then looked up at Stephon.

“This is probably going to sound ridiculous to you,” I said.

“I think that's very unlikely.”

“It's pretty outlandish.”

He nodded.

“My fantasy is to be able to go back to the beginning of Melissa's life and watch her become the person she is today.”

“You mean travel back in time?”

“I guess, but not really that. I don't want to be an orderly in the nursery or her third grade teacher or anything like that. I'd just like to be able to see her. Like in a home movie, but in three dimensions and with all five senses.”

Stephon nodded more broadly now.

“It's pretty silly, huh?” I said.

“Oh no, I don't think so at all.”

A Winter Discovery
is a novella that allowed me to do two things I've really wanted to do – return to the characters from
When You Went Away
to see how they were doing four years later, and to write a Christmas story. I think I've wanted to do the latter since seeing
A Charlie Brown Christmas
when I was five or six. Going back to these characters was even more fascinating than I expected it to be. I'd been imagining what had happened to them since I finished
When You Went Away
, but now that I was committing this to the page, I needed to fill in all kinds of details, and doing so made them come alive for me in surprising new ways.

Reese woke up from the dream laughing. That was maybe the most amazing dream he'd ever had – and he'd had some pretty amazing ones. He was riding on this super fast train with snow on all sides. A bunch of kids were with him, and they were having this huge party. The train did all of these crazy loopy things – Reese was pretty sure they went upside down for a while, which turned out not to be as bad as he thought it was going to be – and everything outside became a blur.

Then, all of a sudden, the train slowed way, way down and they were in this crazy city. It took Reese about three seconds to realize they were in the North Pole. The kids got off the train, and there were elves everywhere. The elves kept talking about “the Big Guy,” and Reese just knew he was going to get to meet Santa Claus. But just when it was about to happen, he woke up.

Still, that was about as much fun as Reese had ever had while sleeping, and the whole thing just made him laugh. How unbelievably amazing would it be to get on a train like that?

Now that he was up, Reese realized that the dream was an awful lot like the movie
The Polar Express
that he'd watched with Dad and Millie tonight. Dad had read the book to him a couple of times, too, but the movie was just so real. He really wanted to be the kid in that movie.

Maybe he
was
that kid. Maybe that's why he had the dream. Maybe the dream was telling him to get outside and wait for the train to come. Sure, it wasn't Christmas Eve yet, but Reese was guessing that the train didn't only run that one day a year. Why would you build a train that incredible and then only use it on Christmas Eve?

Now that he had
that
thought in his head, Reese couldn't just lay around in his room. How horrible would it be if the train showed up in his front yard and he missed it because he was in his bed thinking about it instead of getting on it. That's probably what happened to kids all the time. The train waited for you for a little while and then it went to some other kid's house and you were out of luck forever.

That wasn't going to happen to him.

Reese got out of bed and opened his door very, very quietly. Millie seemed to hear him whenever he got up in the middle of the night. That was great if he wasn't feeling good, but he didn't want her with him right now. He was pretty sure the train wouldn't come if someone else went outside with him, especially a grown-up.

Taking super-huge care to make sure he didn't step on any of the creaky boards on the stairs, he went down to the hall closet and put on his coat, hat, mittens, and boots. The front door could be noisy, too, so he had to open it mega-slowly.

He stepped onto the porch. The train wasn't there yet, but it could show up at any minute. It was
so
quiet out here. It was never this quiet when he usually came outside to play. It was good that it was this quiet, because that meant he'd be able to hear the train coming from a long way away.

Reese walked out to the middle of the lawn, which wasn't that easy to do because the snow was really high. He said hi to the snowman he made with Dad as he went by. He still wasn't sure what they did wrong. He thought they were making a Frosty, but they just made a plain snowman. They'd have to give it another try after he got back from the North Pole.

He was standing there a couple of minutes when it started to snow. This wasn't the crazy buckets-of-snow thing from last night, just a little sprinkle. One of the flakes drifted right in front of his eyes and he caught it with his mitten and then held it up close to his face. He stared at it for a long time, not sure why he found this so interesting, but also not wanting to take his eyes off of it. As it turned out, this was another one of those non-melting snowflakes. Even though his mitten was pretty warm from being in the house, the flake just sat there.