When the innkeeper knocked at nine, I woke easily. I felt rested even though I had only slept for a few hours. He knocked a second time. "Thank you," I said loudly enough that he could hear me through the closed door.
"An envelope came for you," he said. "I'll just slide it under the door."
An envelope for me? I imagined that the waitress had returned the tip. How she'd known I was here I didn't know, but it was a small town. Probably every resident of Gray knew about me by now.
I sat up and swung my legs over the bed, smiling because the ripped sneakers were still on my feet. I hadn't bothered to get undressed at all. Months of living in the streets had certainly changed my living habits. There had been a time that I wouldn't have gone to bed with anything on but pajamas, and not even then until I had brushed my teeth and rinsed my mouth with mouthwash. Even though I did carry a toothbrush in the breast pocket of my worn jacket, I had recently been known to go for a week without brushing, and my body had not seen the inside of a set of pajamas in almost a year.
Things certainly had changed.
I looked down at myself and knew I would have to give back the clothes that had been loaned to me. It wouldn't have been right to ruin them at the bottom of the ravine. I started to unbutton the shirt, then thought better of it. What would the innkeeper think if I went strolling out into the night in my dirty clothes? He would surely wonder why I was leaving so soon. He might even be suspicious enough to call the police. Then what would I do? No, the best way would be to change into my old clothes at the bridge, just before I took my final plunge. At least that way the innkeeper could reclaim his clothes.
I buttoned the shirt again, then wrapped my old pants around me waist, stuffing just enough of them into my belt to hold them in place. Then I pulled on my trench coat and pushed my dirty shirt inside one sleeve of my jacket. I buttoned up and modeled for myself in the dresser mirror. Yes, I did look a little thicker, but considering how my body had dwindled over the last year, I doubted anyone would find my appearance strange. I started to leave, but then thought of one more task.
I took the last of my money out and laid it on the dressing stand beside the bed. A little under ten dollars was the best I could do to return the favor, but at least it was something.
As I turned to leave I saw the envelope that had been thrust under the door. I'd nearly forgotten about the returned money. I stooped to pick it up. Written on the face was, 'To Skip', and in the upper left corner was printed, 'THE SANTA SHOP'.
Had I mentioned my name to the shopkeeper? I must have. But what could he possibly have sent to me? The flap wasn't sealed and I easily was able to pull out the single sheet of folded paper inside. The letterhead across the top read, The Santa Shop, Gray, Vermont.
The next line was, Application for Employment. The third and last line was a single question followed by a blank line to fill in. It simply read, Applicant's name? That was it. That was all there was to the Employment Application for The Santa Shop. No history of employment or addresses were requested. No references of any kind were asked for. Not even the applicant's age. It simply asked for a name? What kind of lunacy was this? Must have been just a first page, I thought. I looked at the sheet again. Almost as if in answer to my question I saw, Page 1 of 1 printed in the upper hand corner.
I laid the sheet down along with the empty envelope then I left the room. Time was short and the hiring practices of the little Vermont toyshop weren't issues I had time to dwell upon.
"Thank you again for the meal," I said as I passed by the dining room. The others were still gathered and I could hear the tourist again reciting how beautiful the views were.
"You're leaving?" came the innkeeper's voice.
"Thought I'd go for a walk."
"Better button up. It gets cold around here."
"I will."
It was dark, and the air had a biting edge even more harsh than the air in Albany. I took a deep breath and thought it might have been the freshness of it that made it seem colder. There was no smog, no acid rain, not even noise pollution. I pulled my collar tight and felt glad to have the padding of my old clothes as insulation against the night.
The walk to the river was quicker than I remembered it. Was my mind speeding my perceptions along? I thought my life was supposed to flash slowly before me just before death, but possibly that was only when the final act became irreversible. Maybe my subconscious wanted to change my mind, to make me think I needed more time to get it all straight.
"It won't work," I whispered as I approached the ravine and the bridge just beyond. "What I want isn't important. This is for Tabitha and for Derek."
I almost expected a supernatural response, but none came. The night was silent, save for the whisper of wind through bare trees and the barely audible splashing sounds that came from the sluggish black water far below.
Dreading every minute of it, I pulled my coat off and quickly traded the innkeeper's clothes for my own. The skin of my arms and legs was numb before the job was complete and I was able to pull my trench coat back on.
For the longest time, with my hands stuffed deeply into my pockets and my chin buried in the collar of my jacket, I stood there at the edge of the bridge and waited for the tremors to subside. After a while, I realized that it wasn't the cold that raced in arcs just below my flesh. It was the pulse of my own fear.
Intellectually, I had not found it hard to come to this decision. My body, however, seemed in these last few moments to take offense at the idea. I could feel self preservation ringing like an incessant fire alarm in my chest. On one level, I wanted nothing so much as to scream out for help, to find a way out of this inevitable fate my thoughts had pinned onto my body. My cruel thoughts, however, had other things in mind. I had been responsible for the death of two wonderful people. Someone had to pay for that.
I left the borrowed clothing in a pile at the edge of the bridge where it met the paved road, and I forced myself to move forward. My muscles felt weak, barely controllable. I took two then three steps. My heart pounded and my limbs vibrated. It was hard to explain but I felt as though I was placing my head in the mouth of a cannon. It became obvious that the human body was not made for self-sacrifice. The body wants to live. It will fight you to live.
The cold wind tore at me but it was nothing compared to the winds of terror that racked my insides. Internal alarms and whistles were ringing, driving gales of terror across every nerve in my body. My flesh desperately wanted to live.
I forced myself to move forward another ten feet. It appeared phase two of our body's self-defense mechanism was a lying mind. Suddenly, hundreds, even thousands of reasons for continuing to live exploded inside my head. I could hear an entire debating team presenting one argument after the other, all in favor of staying alive, all in favor of getting away from this bridge. Some of the arguments seemed reasonable, but others like, You've got to finish your Pop-TartsTM, weren't nearly so convincing.
By the time I had gone a full twenty feet more, my mind had become a raging battlefield of dialog and my body the recipient of horrific fear-chemical attacks. I struggled to keep the internal vision of the two caskets that held the lifeless bodies of Tabitha and Derek in my mind. I knew I was doing this for them, to pay for my grievous crime. As long as I kept their dead images in front of me I knew I could do this.
Suddenly, as I stood there maybe thirty feet onto the bridge now, the whistles the bells and all the shivers stopped. It was as if the self-preservation switch had been suddenly toggled back off, rendered useless by the sheer hopelessness of it all. And it was then, while my mind was silent, that I became the most tempted to turn and run. It would have been so easy to back away from my commitment, so easy to leave my dead family in the past. In this same silence, I learned that even my mind wanted to live. Life was a precious thing, not to be given up at the whim of a dream or in the heat of emotion.
"Which is why I have to do it," I told myself as I grabbed hold of the steel rail. The fr
osty cold steel burned like fire.
"I need to endure the same loss that they did," I said aloud.
A vision of them again in their last moments during the fire came to my mind. I saw her desperate struggle to reach his crib, and I watched as both of them succumbed to the thick smoke that surrounded them. I wanted to scream out for her, to scream, I'll save you, I'll save you both. But, I couldn't. No one could. No one could bring those two people who I had loved so much back to life. I had killed them as surely as if I had started that fire myself.
The scene was so clear, so horrifying, that I knew I could and would go through with this. I owed them that much. I owed them retribution for my failure to be there. I owed them my life.
I leaned out heavily and looked down into the ravine. Though a partial moon was out, its light was unable to penetrate all the way to the ice and water that I could hear swirling angrily below.
I stepped onto the lowest rung of the railing and grabbed hold of a large, vertical, steel support. The ice-cold rivets burned like hot buttons in my palm. There was a second horizontal bar above the first. And above that was the railing itself. Perfect, really, for this sort of activity, like a small ladder of death.
I took two deep breaths and lifted my other foot onto the bottom rung. I could feel the fear leaching out of me like an excised demon. In moments, my thoughts fell silent. I was an empty husk. Maybe the life, the very soul of me had already fled. Maybe all that was left was this useless, guilty body that had only one last job to do.
I held tight to the cold support and lifted my right foot to the second rung. Wind whipped across the bridge, threatening to hurl me forward into the lecherous maw of the ravine. For a fraction of a second, terror reared up inside me again. I threw my weight back against the gale and held on with a clamp-like grip, one hand on the rail and the other on the higher support.
Then, as suddenly as it had come, the wind died down again. My fear subsided but it took a while longer for my hands to relax their strangleholds on the steel. Feeling ridiculous, I hung there, half on, half off the bridge. Suddenly, the debating team returned to its task. Arguments in defense of my life swelled and roared in a chaotic swirl. I knew I was ready for this, ready to pay my penance, but still I clung to life.
I forced a vision of Tabitha and Derek upon myself again. I saw their deaths in the smoke and their dual caskets. I imagined Tabby, impatient and accusatory in her death. The debating team fled again, unable to function with the obvious gilt of the blood I had caused right before them. Finally, once again, my mind fell silent.
Now was the time to jump.
Now!
Taking one last gulp of brutally cold air, I took another step up the rail. I faced the ravine and flexed my legs for the final two steps that would carry me into oblivion.
"Wait!" The man's voice was powerful and commanding.
My body and mind were tempered for the leap. Knowing there was little that he or anyone could do to stop me; I turned my head and looked for curiosity's final sake.
Though the moon was far from full, I could see the figure approaching slowly along the bridge. His gait was slow and methodical, almost somber. He was dressed entirely in black, and the folds of a black hood hid his face. As he drew closer, the breath caught in my throat.
It wasn't a dark pantsuit he wore. The man was garbed in a robe, monk style. His hood, too, seemed to be part of the same medieval outfit. Though I wasn't an especially superstitious person, my heart pounded at the thought that this might be death himself. The Grim Reaper had come for me.
"It would be wise to step down from there," he said softly, stopping a comfortable twenty feet from me.
I could see small puffs of vapor emerge from the hood with each of his words, which relieved me to some extent. At least he was human. Possibly demented, I thought, but human nonetheless.
"Who are you?" I asked, still gripping the steel support and rail like a monkey.
"I'm you," the man said. "Or a man very like you."
"What are you doing here?"
"I came for you. I was perched in that same spot two years ago. I knew you would be here."
"How?"
"One of us always comes. It's almost a law of nature."
"You can't stop me from jumping."
"No. You're right about that. I can't. Fortunately, I don't have to."
"You mean you don't care if I jump?"
"No, what I mean is you won't jump."
I jerked my head to look out over the ravine. My body was tensed. I knew I could have done it then. Something held me back, though. I tried to recall that same vision of my wife and child, but it wouldn't come. The mystery of this man was clouding my thoughts.
I decided to continue talking. What difference would a few minutes make? I stepped down and returned my feet to the concrete and my hand from the rail, but when I tried to pull my hand away from the vertical support, the skin of my palm ripped painfully. The cold had welded it to the steel.
"You ought to warm those in your pockets before you get frostbite," the man said.
I laughed half-heartedly. "The last thing I need to worry about is frostbite."
The man pulled his hood down to reveal a clean-shaven face and worry lines that placed him five or ten years ahead of me. His hair was dark and full. There was a gentle smile on his face that reminded me of the toy shopkeeper and Barwood and even of Father Johnston....
I knew I had the keys to a mystery in my hand, but I couldn't quite fit all the pieces together just yet. The priest, Barwood, the toy shopkeeper, and now the Grim Reaper were somehow all connected, but I couldn't say how or why.
My hand darted to my breast pocket. Yes, my truck was still there. Like a little boy, I squeezed it and felt a sense of relief.
"I'll be leaving Gray tonight," the man told me. "It's my time to go."
"Yeah, mine too," I said with a chuckle. "In a manner of speaking, anyway."
"You'll like Gray," he said. "The people here are friendly, and they understand us."
"You keep talking as though we're both members of some club."
He smiled and nodded. "I guess you could say we are. You might call us The Suicide Club. Or maybe Christmas Leap Brothers would be a better term."
"You still didn't tell me who you are."
"That remains to be seen. To be honest, I'm not entirely sure of that. I only know that I'm not the same person who hung from that rail two years ago."
"Why didn't you?" I asked.
He paused and stared at me for the longest time.
"Jump, you mean."
"Yeah."
"I'm not sure I could answer that in any way that you'd understand right now, but someone just like me showed up."
"Did he talk you out of it?"
He grinned again. "No one could have talked me out of it. But he did make me think."
"Was he another one of us?" I asked sarcastically.
"Yes, he was a Santa."
"A Santa?"
"You'll know in a day or two what all this means. Jarod will explain everything."
"Jarod?"
"Yes, Jarod from The Santa Shop."
"I think I should get on with it," I said, nodding toward the railing.
"I suppose you should. We both should." He pulled his black hood back up over his head.
I reached over to grab the rail and winced as my tender hand came in contact with the steel. I tried to take my eyes from the unusual stranger, but the black outfit gave him a disconcerting aura. With the hood up, I couldn't seem to shake the feeling that he really was the deliverer of death. Maybe he had come to make sure that I did jump. Then he could steal my soul as it fled my drowned body.
As I stared at him, I realized he wore the perfect outfit for communicating with a pre-suicide victim. Who better to keep one on the edge and maybe a little too scared to die?
"I left a bag for you," the reaper said in a commanding voice, quite unlike the one he used when his hood was down. He raised
an arm to point, and the material of his loose sleeves created the illusion of a bat's wing. "There."
I looked to where he pointed and I could see the silhouette of something sitting at the edge of the road. Another trick, I thought. He could be trying to pique my curiosity, anything to keep me from jumping. Well it wasn't going to work. I didn't need to know what was in that bag. I didn't.
As he began walking toward me, his long robe dragged on the snow and gave me the impression that he was actually floating. I hurriedly stepped to the first rung of the rail, but I need not have bothered. The stranger crossed over toward the opposite railing, and gave me a wide berth. He continued on past.
Spellbound, I watched him drift to the other end of the bridge, furthest from town. He stopped and looked toward me.
"Hurry," he said. "Open the case. The children are waiting, Santa. They're waiting for you."
And suddenly the reaper was gone.
Stupidly, I stepped back down but continued to cling to the railing. I tried to piece together some reality from all this. Had he been real or simply imagined? I thought I knew for a while there, but it all felt so damned impossible.
My body shuddered involuntarily. How close had I come to an evil death? How near had I been to losing the only thing I still possessed—my soul?
I didn't know who he was. And I didn't expect that I ever would. Maybe he was just a man, but then again maybe he wasn't. My body suddenly began trembling with uncontrollable fear. My knees weakened and I fell to the concrete.
What was I supposed to do then? They were dead, and I wasn't. I didn't want to be alone, and I didn't want them to be dead.
I did the only thing I could then, I sobbed. I sobbed from the deepest most pure place in my soul. I sobbed for my family and I sobbed for myself. I sobbed for all the Christmas Eves that my family would never see, and I sobbed for all the life I had lost this past year.
I'd always known that I had to go on, but I didn't want to. I didn't want to leave them in the ground alone. And I didn't dare to go on in life without them. This suicide mission of mine had just been a way to escape the hard journey that life had taken me through. I had to get up now, I had to move on, and I had to find some justification for staying alive.
When the worst of my fear subsided, I knew that jumping was out of the question. Not only was it wrong, but I just couldn't shake the feeling that he was waiting for me down there, waiting to whisk my soul into the brutal underworld.
I got unsteadily to my feet.
What now? I thought. Where should I go? What should I do? Suddenly, I remembered the case he had left for me. I almost expected to find spiders, snakes or scorpions in there. Maybe it would be eye of newt and wing of bat.
I stumbled back to solid land, toward whatever he had left. It was a simple black suitcase, about the size of a carry-on flight bag. It stood beside the clothes that I had piled in the snow. Fearful but curious, I dropped to my knees and tipped the case on its side. There was a single zipper, which I gently pulled. When the bag didn't blow up, I unzipped it the rest of the way and lifted the flap.
The material was shockingly bright and cheerful, especially considering the gloom that I'd been experiencing over the last hour, not exactly the Christmas Eve I had originally planned. I smiled and put the red hat with white trimming on my head.
Feeling foolish, I donned the rest of Kris Kringle's outfit. There was even a pair of black boots and warm black mittens. Near the bottom of the case, I found a stick-on cotton beard and a single sheet of white paper. The black letters of the invitation were bold and clear:
DEAR SANTA,
You are welcome to visit us at Saint John's Children's Center. We look forward to seeing you again this year.
Sincerely,
The letter was signed by a dozen young hands, and at the very bottom of the page was a sentence written by an adult hand, "The presents you delivered earlier are waiting in the foyer."
I read the invitation several times and thought about Judith Ann, whom I had met at the bed and breakfast. How many needy children just like her were depending on Santa Claus to show up tonight?
I glanced back at the bridge but could see no sign of the Reaper. He hadn't even waited to see whether or not I had jumped. Instead, he had just left his case and walked away. There was nobody else to fill the suit. I had effectively been trapped into playing this part. It was either that or disappoint a group of children who I knew had already lived through more than enough disappointment.
I had to do it.
The lack of choice made me angry. No longer in control of my own fate, I felt as though a great hand had scooped me up and thrown me against the winds of my life. I stuffed the innkeeper's clothes into the empty bag and made my way back towards town. By the time I came into a view of the Main Street, my hands had thawed just enough to ache severely. In a way, it was good that the Santa suit came with gloves, otherwise, I would have been handing out children's presents spotted with blood.
I knew I could have gone back to the bed and breakfast for directions, but Gray was such a small town that I figured the children's center wouldn't take long to find. It turned out that I was right.
There were a total of five streets that intersected and ran roughly perpendicular to the Main Street. River Road was one. I had only to walk a short way down two more before I found the center. It was a two-story brick affair with a short steeple on the front. Someone had obviously been watching out for me because the front door opened as I approached.
A young brunette woman opened the door. She had the most beautiful smile. Welcome to Saint John's Children Center, Santa," she said to me. "My name is Karen. Would you come this way?"
She ushered me into a wide dim corridor with a high ceiling. A series of three incandescent bulbs barely lit our way as she led me toward the double doors at the far end of the hall. A could hear quite a bit of commotion coming from the other side of the doors.
"Good luck, Santa," Karen mouthed as she opened both doors and stepped back to make way for me. The sounds I had heard only moments before were gone. The space beyond the door was black.
I looked to my guide. She nodded and gave me that beautiful smile again, then gestured toward the blackness of the room before me.
Cautiously, I walked forward.
"Surprise, Santa!" a chorus of voices rang out.
Suddenly, bright-colored lights sprang on, illuminating one of the most gorgeous Christmas trees I had ever seen. At least twenty feet from base to peak, the tree rose up in a full and perfect cone. The lights must have been painstakingly strung around the tree's limbs because I couldn't see even one place where two lights of the same color twinkled side-by-side. Hanging from the tips of the branches were all manner of ornaments. There was everything from glittering balls of glass to paper drawings of Santa and his elves. A beautiful life-like angel doll with gauze wings stared down at me from the very tip of the twinkling evergreen.
"Do you like it?" a young voice asked from somewhere to the side of me. I had been so overcome by the sight of the tree that until now I hadn't noticed the gaggle of children that were crowed in a semi-circle around it.
"It's wonderful," I said, feeling a familiar rush of appreciation for the spirit of the season. I turned to the children and examined their ranks; they were an unusual bunch, many deformed in body. A twisted and limp arm here, a braced leg there, wheelchairs and crutches were only some of the medical accessories I saw in use. One unfortunate boy was secured tightly to a stainless steel frame that resembled nothing so much as a medieval stretching machine. His arms and legs were fully outstretched and strapped with wide black straps to the glorified bed apparatus. A male nurse was tilting the bed as upright as it would go. I watched as he locked it in place at something more than a forty-five degree angle, but quite a bit less than fully upright. The boy's dark eyes squinted, possibly with the pain of the movement, but the happy smile never left his lips.
The same amazing life-filled grins were
spread across the rest of the youthful faces as well. Even though these children had been given some of the hardest lots in life, there wasn't a Christmas sourpuss in the bunch.
"Ho, ho, ho," I said in my deepest voice, sorry only that I had been too stubborn to prac¬tice on my way here. "Meeerry Christmas!"
"Can we do presents now?" the boy from the tilted bed asked. His voice was tight, almost shrill. I looked at the wide straps that held his chest and stomach to the bed and thought it wondrous that he could speak at all.
"Of course we can open presents," I said to him, "and I bet I've got a good one for you."
"And me, Santa?" an older girl said. Her head seemed strangely out of shape, as though one side was swollen. Her left eye was puffy, as well.
"And me?"
"And me?"
"And me___"
"Ho, ho, yes," I said, hoping the man from the bridge had been truthful with me when he said the children's gifts were waiting for me. I would never ever have wanted to disappoint a single one of these children.
"I have presents for everyone."
"Are you going to open the ones we gave to you?"
"You bet I am," I said. "Opening presents is my second favorite thing to do."
"What's your first?" one of the children asked.
"Ho, ho, ho. Giving them, of course."
The children broke into a raucous fit of giggles and conversation.
Chapter Ten
Moving On
Two years later, I crouched in the bushes off to the side of the bridge. I wanted to make sure that the newest Santa didn't try to jump again. He was a good man, a forest ranger from northern Maine. His trek to the bridge had been particularly grueling. I'm told he walked more than half the way, several hundred miles in all. My predecessor had chosen him well.
It was hard to explain all the emotions that had whirled back and forth across Christmas Leap that night. But it hadn't been easy on either of us. I knew what a difficult master guilt could become, and I desperately wanted to help ease this man's pain. But I also knew that healing had to come ultimately from inside his own heart. I could only give him the direction, but it was he who had to make the journey. I felt confident that he would, and tonight the first steps had been taken.
I hadn't so much talked him down as hinted at my own story and told him how I had come to survive my own aborted Christmas Leap. When all the words had been said, I left him there on the bridge, just as I had been left those two years before.
Of course, as I'd known, he stopped sobbing after a time and went to retrieve the case I'd left. Saint John's Children's Center would soon have a visit from the newest Santa.
As we had discussed, Karen waited until she saw him walk up the drive to the children's hospital, then she drove across the bridge to meet me. I had already removed the black robe and hood and had left them in a cloth bag beside the bridge for David to pick up in a few hours.
"All packed?" I asked as I slid into the passenger's seat and closed the door.
"You bet. It's all in the back."
I pushed over right beside her and kissed her solidly on the lips. Fortunately, she hadn't started the car moving yet.
"Do we neck or do we drive?" she managed to say amid my affectionate mauling.
"All right," I said in mock sadness and pushed over just barely enough for her to turn the steering wheel freely. "I guess we drive."
"Where to, Santa?"
I took my little truck from my pocket and rolled it gently back and forth across my knee. "Albany," I said. "I think we'll pay my friend Jenny a visit."
"She sounds nice."
"She is. I'm hoping she needs a couple of partners in her corner store."
"Fine by me," Karen giggled. "But I run the cash."
...and she did for many years to come.
WITH ALL GOD’S BLESSINGS,
A VERY MERRY CHRISTMAS TO YOU!
About the Author
Tim Greaton has been writing since age seven. It is hoped that some thirty-one years later, his work has improved somewhat. His fiction and non-fiction works have previously appeared in both national and regional magazines and in newspapers across the northeast. Hundreds of pages of his advertising work are still in use on the Internet today. Tim now resides in southern Maine with his wife, three children, a dog, two cats and hundreds of ducks who stubbornly refuse to migrate. Even as you read these words, Tim is hard at work on his next novel.
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