Timepiece (19 page)

“Yes?”

She turned away and I noticed that her chin quivered as she struggled to speak. As she turned back, her tear-filled eyes met mine. “So, how do you thank someone for a life?”

I wiped a tear from my cheek as I stared back into my daughter's beautiful eyes. Then, in that bittersweet moment, I understood MaryAnne's words of the gift. The great gift. The meaning of the timepiece.

“You give it back, Jenna. You give it back.” I took my girl in my arms and held her tightly to my chest. My heart, bathed in fond memory, ached in the sweet pain of separation. This is what it meant to be a father—had always meant. To know that one day I would turn around and my little girl would be gone. Finally, reluctantly, I released her and leaned back, looking down into her angelic face. It was time. Time for the cycle to begin anew.

“It's late, sweetheart. You have a big day tomorrow.” I leaned over and kissed her tenderly on the cheek. “Good-bye, honey.”

It was good-bye. To an era. A time never to be returned to. Her eyes shone with sadness and love. “Good-bye, Daddy.”

The silence of the snow-shrouded evening enveloped the moment and time seemed to stand still for just a moment. For just us.

I took a deep breath, rose from the side
of her bed, and with one last embrace walked from her room. I descended the stairway with a new lightness of understanding. I understood what MaryAnne had meant by the gift. The gift Jenna had given me had been life. That the very breath I had once given to her had come back to me in an infinite return of joy and life and meaning.

In the dimly lit entrance below, the grandfather's clock struck once for the hour, and I paused momentarily at the base of the stairway to look into its time-faded face as, perhaps, MaryAnne and David had done so many years before.

This relic will outlive us all, I thought, just as it had outlived generations before us. For within its cotillion of levers and cogs and gears, there was still time. Time to outlive all things human. Yet, in my heart, something told me otherwise. For perhaps there was some quality about love that sprang eternal—that a love like
MaryAnne's, and like mine, could last forever.

Not could. Would. This was the message of the timepiece. To let go of this world and aspire to something far nobler in a realm that regards no boundaries of time.

I glanced back upstairs as the light switched off in my little girl's room and I smiled. Twenty years after MaryAnne's death, she had bestowed upon me one last gift of understanding. I wondered if, in some unseen realm, MaryAnne was watching and was pleased that I had learned her lesson. That some things, like a parent's love, do last forever in a time and place where all broken hearts will forever be made whole. And if, in the silent vastness of a mysterious universe, or in the quietness of men's hearts, there is such a place as heaven, then it couldn't be anything more than that.

Richard Paul Evans is the bestselling author of
The Christmas Box.
He lives in Salt Lake City, Utah, with his wife, Keri, and their three daughters, Jenna, Allyson, and Abigail. He is currently working on his next novel.

Also by Richard Paul Evans

THE CHRISTMAS BOX

Simon & Schuster
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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 1996 by Richard Paul Evans
All rights reserved,
including the right of reproduction
in whole of in part in any form.

Simon & Schuster and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-In-Publication Data
Evans, Richard Paul.
Timepiece / Richard Paul Evans.

p. cm

I. Title

   PS3555.V259T56   1996

813'.54—dc20 96-6971 CIP

ISBN: 0-7432-3645-9
ISBN-13: 978-1-4391-3077-3 (ebook)