“Yes.”
“That’s my only idea,” Mr. Harvey said. “I wish I could do more.”
Len felt him to be sincere.
“He’s certainly a bit tweaked at an angle,” Len said when he called my father, “but I have nothing on him.”
“What did he say about the tent?”
“That he built it for Leah, his wife.”
“I remember Mrs. Stead told Abigail his wife’s name was Sophie,” my father said.
Len checked his notes. “No, Leah. I wrote it down.”
My father doubted himself. Where had he gotten the name Sophie? He was sure he had heard it too, but that was years ago, at a block party, where the names of children and wives flew about like confetti between the stories people told to be neighborly and the introductions to infants and strangers too vague to remember the following day.
He did remember that Mr. Harvey had not come to the block party. He had never come to any of them. This went to his strangeness by the standards of many in the neighborhood but not by my father’s own standards. He had never felt completely comfortable at these forced efforts of conviviality himself.
My father wrote “Leah?” in his book. Then he wrote, “Sophie?” Though unaware of it, he had begun a list of the dead.
On Christmas Day, my family would have been more comfortable in heaven. Christmas was largely ignored in my heaven. Some people dressed all in white and pretended they were snowflakes, but other than that, nothing.
That Christmas, Samuel Heckler came to our house on an unexpected visit. He was not dressed like a snowflake. He wore his older brother’s leather jacket and a pair of ill-fitting army fatigues.
My brother was in the front room with his toys. My mother blessed the fact that she had gone early to buy his gifts. Lindsey got gloves and cherry-flavored lip gloss. My father got five white handkerchiefs that she’d ordered months ago in the mail. Save Buckley, no one wanted anything anyway. In the days before Christmas the lights on the tree were not plugged in. Only the candle that my father kept in the window of his den burned. He lit it after dark, but my mother, sister, and brother had stopped leaving the house after four o’clock. Only I saw it.
“There’s a man outside!” my brother shouted. He’d been playing Skyscraper and it had yet to collapse. “He’s got a suitcase.”
My mother left her eggnog in the kitchen and came to the front of the house. Lindsey was suffering the mandatory presence in the family room that all holidays required. She and my father played Monopoly, ignoring the more brutal squares for each other’s sake. There was no Luxury Tax, and a bad Chance wasn’t recognized.
In the front hall my mother pressed her hands down along her skirt. She placed Buckley in front of her and put her arms on his shoulders.
“Wait for the man to knock,” she said.
“Maybe it’s Reverend Strick,” my father said to Lindsey, collecting his fifteen dollars for winning second prize in a beauty contest.
“For Susie’s sake, I hope not,” Lindsey ventured.
My father held on to it, on to my sister saying my name. She rolled doubles and moved to Marvin Gardens.
“That’s twenty-four dollars,” my father said, “but I’ll take ten.”
“Lindsey,” my mother called. “It’s a visitor for you.”
My father watched my sister get up and leave the room. We both did. I sat with my father then. I was the ghost on the board. He stared at the old shoe lying on its side in the box. If only I could have lifted it up, made it hop from Boardwalk to Baltic, where I always claimed the better people lived. “That’s because you’re a purple freak,” Lindsey would say. My father would say, “I’m proud I didn’t raise a snob.”
“Railroads, Susie,” he said. “You always liked owning those railroads.”
To accentuate his widow’s peak and tame his cowlick, Samuel Heckler insisted on combing his hair straight back. This made him look, at thirteen and dressed in black leather, like an adolescent vampire.
“Merry Christmas, Lindsey,” he said to my sister, and held out a small box wrapped in blue paper.
I could see it happen: Lindsey’s body began to knot. She was working hard keeping everyone out, everyone, but she found Samuel Heckler cute. Her heart, like an ingredient in a recipe, was reduced, and regardless of my death she was thirteen, he was cute, and he had visited her on Christmas Day.
