Santa Hunk (2 page)

CLARE December 8 con’t

I thought of something else I should mention, because
it might matter.

I love Christmas.

It’s my favorite holiday by far.

I have, like, five enormous boxes of Christmas
decorations.

Every year, starting around Thanksgiving, I start putting
them all out.

Savannah kinda rolls her eyes.

But she knows how I am about it.

When you decorate your place for Christmas, you
change it into a completely different world. The lights and ornaments and
ribbons and statues turn even the most dark and boring room into a fantasy
world.

And this year, I outdid myself.

I made Savannah go with me and we got this enormous
tree. And then every minute I had when I wasn’t at work I spent putting up my
decorations. I strung lights around all of our windows and doorways. I put fake
tree boughs on our bookshelves and glittery pillar candles on our table. I
grouped my stuffed reindeer collection in the corner by the television and
replaced our towels with the red and green Christmas towels.

When I was done, it didn’t look like the same
apartment.

Savannah noticed I’d bought more lights, too.

“In a month, it’s gonna be the shortest day of the
year,” I said to her. “More light is good.”

And she had to agree with me.

SAVANNAH

Okay, I just want to stick in another note right here
to tell you: I started to worry that Clare was maybe one of those people who
starts to get depressed from not getting enough sunlight.

She just seemed so
aware
that the days were
getting shorter. “Have you noticed how early it’s getting dark now?” she’d say.
She must have said it about ten times a day.

After she put up all those lights in the apartment
our electric bill doubled.

The place was blazing.

Nah, I shouldn’t say that. I’m exaggerating.

But it was a mass of twinkles, that’s for sure.

I’m not complaining. I liked the decorations just
fine.

But I was a bit worried.

I was glad when it finally got cold enough to snow.
December can be pretty dreary when there’s no snow.

But the snow finally came, and Clare’s mood seemed
to pick up again, after that.

CLARE: December 9

I also love the snow.

Thinking about it, snow does for the outside what
Christmas decorations do for the inside.

You take that dark, wet, lifeless outdoors and you
blanket it with pure white.

It’s irresistible, to me anyways.

Which is why I went downtown last week.

Was it last week?

Yeah—it was December 1, as a matter of fact. The
first day of December.

Eight days … it seems like so long ago …

I had the day off, and I decided to go out and walk
in the snow.

Well, I didn’t really
decide
.

I saw the snow through the window and I was like,
get
me out of here I need to be out in the snow!

I thought I’d go up into the city and look at the
Christmas decorations and see if they’d put up the lights, yet, on the Liberty
Pole.

Our apartment is in the South Wedge, so it’s a bit
of a walk but I had all day.

The walk starts out not very nice. The southern bits
of Clinton Ave. are okay, but when you get toward the city it gets a bit
skeevy. You go by the parole office. Then under the expressway. It was all
filthy old snow and soggy litter.

But then I got into the city and it got a little
better and started looking Christmassy.

I decided to go look at the river, so I turned left
on Court Street and stood on the bridge, looking down at the water.

The river was high, and the water looked like it was
boiling as it flowed.

I thought about Sam Patch, one of Rochester’s famous
old dead people. I was kind of obsessed with Sam Patch when I was a little kid,
I guess because I knew I wasn’t anything like him. He adored getting attention,
while I was the sort of kid who hated it if anyone noticed me.

Of course, with Sam Patch, liking attention is what
killed him. What happened is he began setting up these daredevil stunts. He
started by going over Niagara Falls—not once, but twice. Twice, because the
first time he did it, there weren’t enough people there to watch. So he did it
again, with more publicity the second time so that he’d have a bigger audience.

But even that wasn’t enough. He came to Rochester, where
we have a waterfall also. It’s not as big as Niagara Falls—the High Falls on
the Genesee River—but he must have figured that going over waterfalls was his
thing and he needed to keep doing it.

In fact, he did the exact same thing at the High
Falls that he did at Niagara Falls. He went over the falls once, and he didn’t
think enough people had come out to watch him, so he did it again. Only that
time, he didn’t make it. It killed him.

And then he became the most famous he’d ever been.

I don’t want to be famous.

But I also don’t want to be invisible.

Who does?

So anyway, after I finished looking at the river—and
thinking again about Sam Patch—I crossed the bridge to Exchange Street.

And that’s where I saved the guy from getting run
over by a bus.

SAVANNAH

It was all over the papers! I’ve saved all the
clippings and can show them to you.

But what’s peculiar is that none of the news accounts
mention anything about “Santa.”

Not a single one.

CLARE Dec 9 con’t

Everyone who has a story like this says the same thing.
“It happened so fast I didn’t have time to think. I just did it.”

And it’s true.

I remember walking down Exchange Street toward Main,
and that the wind picked up. The snowfall was heavier and the wind made it all swirly.

I love when the snow is like that.

At times it was so thick I couldn’t really make out
the buildings across the street.

It was like being back in time. It was like being in
a fantasy world.

Then the snow swirls kind of parted and like
curtains had been drawn back, I saw this African American guy.

He was walking, too, in the same direction I was,
but a little ahead of me.

I don’t know why I noticed him. Maybe because he was
having such a bad day. He was on his cell phone and at first he sounded like he
was having an argument but then his tone of voice changed and I could hear him
saying things like, “Please, baby, I didn’t mean anything by it. I love you.
Please don’t say that. I don’t have anyplace else to go. Don’t hang up.”

And whoever he was talking to must’ve hung up,
because he stopped talking. Then, instead of talking, he walked with his phone in
front of him, looking down at it—maybe he was texting or maybe he was looking
for another number, I don’t know. But I noticed also—I was a few paces behind
him—that his shoulders were shaking, and I thought to myself, the guy’s crying,
or maybe trying so hard not to cry that he’s shaking.

I felt so bad for him.

Here it was, the start of the Christmas season—the
time of year when everything is supposed to be magical—and instead, things were
going all wrong for the guy.

And I started thinking maybe I should say something
to him.

I don’t know what. Just something friendly, to try
to make him feel better.

Then all of a sudden he turns to his right—he was
still looking down at his phone—and steps off the sidewalk into the street, and
I saw two things at the same time.

First, I saw that he kind of lost his footing as he
stepped off the curb. He kind of stumbled into the street.

And at the exact same second: I saw the bus.

I think I yelled. I’m pretty sure I yelled.

But yelling wouldn’t help—there was no way he’d be
able to react in time.

And anyway, I wasn’t just yelling, I was also taking
a flying leap at the guy.

It wasn’t some conscious idea I thought through
first, like, “oh, I should try to push that poor guy out of the way of that
bus.” It was a reflex, is all. Like when you open the cupboard door and a box
of teabags falls out and you catch it without thinking.

I’m not very big but the guy was kind of tottering
on one leg so when I hit him he went flying.

And then I felt something hit me WHOMP and I was
upside down in the air and then a second later WHOMP again.

I don’t know what the second WHOMP was. Maybe when I
hit the street? Or maybe the bus ran over me?

I don’t know. In fact, I’m not even sure what
happened next or how long it was before I opened my eyes.

All I know is that when I did open them, I was flat
on my back and there was icy water seeping into my clothes.

And I was looking straight into a pair of the most
beautiful blue eyes I’d ever seen.

CLARE: December 9, con’t

“There you are,” he said to me.

I didn’t answer. And not because his words didn’t
really make any sense.

I couldn’t answer.

I had no words.

Those eyes.

I can’t describe it. They were … intoxicating. They sparkled.
But they were also so intelligent, and concerned. And there was something there,
also, that made me think we were sharing a private joke.

I didn’t want to talk. I just wanted to keep
drinking in those gorgeous blue eyes.

“You gave us a scare,” he said. “Can you sit up? We
need to get you off this wet street.”

All of a sudden I remembered the bus. I couldn’t
remember anything that had happened afterward, but I made an educated guess.

The bus had hit me.

And my next thought was: was that guy I pushed okay?

I may have muttered something to that effect—I know
I sat up then, noticing as I did that I seemed to be in one piece.

And it was like my attention had been focused in
this little narrow field of vision, but now it suddenly started to expand and I
noticed that there was a crowd of people around me.

All looking at me.

“She’s okay,” someone said.

“She’ll be fine,” said blue eyes, and as he spoke
our eyes met again and I forgot everything else. Forgot, even, that I needed to
know if the guy I pushed was okay. I just wanted to drink in those gorgeous
gorgeous eyes.

“Here,” he said. “Let’s get you to the sidewalk.”

And I noticed that he had more going for him than
just those eyes. I mean, okay, so he was manly—that strong jaw with its short,
neat beard—maybe that sounds silly. But there’s something about a face that is
manly yet also so friendly and kind.

My heart started doing excited little cartwheels.

And then he put his arm under mine and clasped me
behind the back and helped me to my feet and he felt so strong, yet so gentle.

I noticed then that people were all chattering to
each other.

“I’ve called 911,” someone was saying.

“She should be checked by an EMT,” said someone
else. “She could have internal bleeding.”

But although I could hear the words, it was as if
they were talking about someone else.

All I knew was that this man had his arm around me.

And I’d never felt anything like it. Our bodies
seemed to fit together. I could feel how strong he was—the compact, muscular
manliness of him, his arm, his torso. I leaned against him, letting him support
me. And there, like that, in that man’s arms, I knew I was fine. I knew I
didn’t need medical attention. I was fine.

“You’re fine,” the man murmured into my ear—like he
could read my thoughts?—as I took a few steps.

The little crowd parted so I could get through to
the sidewalk.

“Here,” someone said and handed a coat to blue eyes,
who spread it out on the sidewalk, and then he eased me down to sit on it.

“She should be …
dead
.”

The words were spoken in a whisper but for some
reason they caught my attention and I turned my head to look at the person
who’d said them.

It was a middle-aged woman in a knit cap. Her lips
were pursed and there was a deep worried furrow between her eyes.

And I realized that whatever had happened to me, it
had looked pretty bad.

And then I noticed, standing beside the middle-aged
woman: the African American guy with the cell phone, the one I’d pushed out of
the way of the bus.

“Hey,” I said to him. And he knelt on the street in
front of me and reached out a hand out to me, and I took it, and he had tears
in his eyes as he shook my hand.

“Thank you,” he said. “God bless you. God bless
you.”

And something about being there, like that—like, he
and I, we’d both just nearly died. This will sound funny but it was like: we’d
shared something, the two of us. We’d both stood at the doorway between life
and death—which meant we’d shared something nobody else there had shared. It
made us—not friends. But closer than friends.

I had no way of knowing who he’d been talking to
earlier, on the phone—who he’d been arguing with and sad about. But at the same
time, somehow, I
did
know. I knew it was his live-in girlfriend, and
they’d been together for years and had a kid together, and things had been
rocky for them. But they loved each other. They still loved each other, very
much.

And so I didn’t even think twice, I just spoke the
words that popped into my head. “Call back your lady friend,” I said. “Keep
telling her you love her. She’ll listen to you, I promise. She’ll hear you.”

And he didn’t even blink. He didn’t ask me how I knew
about his lady friend or act bothered that I was giving him advice about his
personal life.

He knew. He knew I was saying the right thing. So he
nodded and said. “I’m gonna do that. That’s exactly what I’m gonna do.”

And then I noticed that there was a bus driver there,
looking down at me too, and I smiled at him and the worry on his face loosened
up.

Meanwhile, the blue-eyed man was squatting on the
sidewalk next to me and through it all I was still so
aware
of him.
I’d never really believed in auras before but it was like there was an aura
around him and when I was next to him like that I was inside his aura. Even
when he wasn’t touching me. Although he did touch me. Every few moments I felt
him touch my shoulder. And he had a faint spicy smell and I turned to look at
his face again—and what a face. It wasn’t just his eyes. He was the hunkiest
man I’d ever seen. Close-trimmed beard and a mouth that looked like it would
deliver the most delicious kisses on the planet ...

And then came the wail of a siren and the ambulance
pulled up and a second later a police car.

And I thought
no, don’t take me away from
here—don’t take me away from blue eyes!

Good grief. Here I was soaking wet sitting on a curb
in the snow about to be driven to ER and all I could think about was that I was
getting all hot for some man?

Sounds incredible, doesn’t it.

And then the EMT guys were telling the crowd to move
back and one of them was asking me questions, what day was it and could I move
my toes, and he was shining a little light into my eyes, while someone else was
pushing up my sleeve and putting a blood pressure collar on my arm. And the
policeman was talking to the bus driver and the cell phone guy.

“Are you the husband?” I heard one of the EMT guys
say to blue eyes but I didn’t hear him answer and then they were lifting me
onto a gurney.

And I thought
wait! They’re taking me away—and I
don’t even know his name!

But it was as if he could read my thoughts, because
suddenly he was walking along next to the stretcher and … those eyes!

And as if the EMT guys pushing the gurney knew what blue
eyes wanted, they suddenly paused and blue eyes leaned over and whispered into
my ear.

“I like trees,” he said.

And I know. I know! That sounds like the strangest
thing anyone could say, given the situation.

But right then, in the moment, it didn’t faze me. It
seemed completely natural.

So I just nodded.

And then he said, “You can find me in the Oak Grove
in Durand Eastman.”

And he straightened up and winked at me.

And it still didn’t seem in the least bit odd.

Of course later, when I told Savannah—then, it
seemed strange. But not then, not while I was looking into those amazing eyes.

So I just grinned and nodded and a moment later I
was inside the ambulance on my way to ER.