Twelve Days (3 page)

With a mock growl, John stalked over to the couch and flopped down. “Maybe I should just sit here and sweat all over you?”

“Poor John,” David giggled and reached out to touch his hand before standing up. “I’ll get you a cold drink.”

“Thanks,” John muttered and watched David head for the kitchen. It never grew old hearing David laugh. He sighed and closed his eyes as the cold air became almost icy against his sweat-dampened skin.

“Christmas was always a time for wellington boots, woolly socks, and hand-knitted mittens, not barbecues and sweltering at the beach.”

David smiled, because it was all too easy to imagine John in those mittens. “Tell me about when you were little,”

he asked quietly while pouring a single cold beer.

“I remember waking up one morning and looking out through the window at the house across the road.” John smiled at the memory, opening his eyes briefly when David placed his beer on the coffee table. “The roof was all white. It was the first snow of winter just before Christmas.” He sat forward, picked up the frosty glass, and took an appreciative sip. “My mam was still alive then, so I was pretty young, but Twelve Days |
Isabelle Rowan

I still managed to force the window up a fraction, just enough to get my hands out. I ran my fingers through the snow on the windowsill, feeling it slip between them until they were completely numb.” John’s fingers followed the trail of condensation down his glass, then passed it to David. “At the time I found it really funny and I was still laughing when I ran down the stairs and out the back door. It wasn’t so funny when my mam found me out there barefoot and in my pajamas. I ended up in a hot bath with a sore backside.” He looked at David and thought about the night he saw him trying to bed down on folded cardboard in a city doorway.

“But I’m glad it doesn’t snow here.”

David nodded and sat quietly for a minute before saying, “I went to Carols by Candle Light once when I was little. My dad put me on his shoulders and I looked around to see a whole sea of flickering candles.” A smile spread across his lips and his eyes seemed to reflect those little flames. “But the thing I remember the most was being taken into Melbourne afterward to see Myer’s windows. I squeezed through the people and stood in front of the glass with all the other kids fascinated by the storybook scenes.” David gave a laugh at how the department store windows seemed so magical. “I remember staring at one window for so long my mum finally coaxed me away with the reminder that we hadn’t put out the carrots for Santa’s reindeers. But that window is still so clear to me with its grumpy Christmas pudding scowling at everyone.”

John raised an eyebrow. “A grumpy Christmas pudding, huh?”

David laughed at John’s confusion. “It was from an Aussie kid’s book where, no matter how much of the Twelve Days |
Isabelle Rowan

pudding you ate, there was always just as much as when you started so you were never hungry. He was a bad-tempered old pudding that stood on long, skinny legs and waved his stick-like arms at us while a koala in a waistcoat looked on and laughed. It was such a strange image that I couldn’t take my eyes off it.”

“An endless supply of Christmas pudding sounds pretty good, but I’m not so sure about it having a face,” John mused and leaned forward to set the beer on the coffee table.

“I think I’ve walked past the windows, but never seemed to have time to stop and look at them.”

“You need to see them,” David said with real conviction.

“At Christmas Eve there are always so many kids in their pajamas smudging their noses against the glass. I took Adam every year until it became ‘uncool’.”

“Heaven forbid he be seen doing kid things with his dad?” John asked and reached out to encircle David’s shoulders to pull him close.

David nodded and muttered, “Loved it as a kid, though.”

John’s thumb circled in a slow caress over David’s arm.

“Did he press up against the glass or ride your shoulders?”

A small, nostalgic smile crossed David’s lips as he said, “Always on my shoulders. I knew the windows he liked best because he would tug on my hair in excitement.”

The hum of the air conditioner was the only sound in the room as they sat together, lost in their own memories until David laughed and said, “Midnight.”

John frowned. “Pardon?”

Twelve Days |
Isabelle Rowan

“It was the big thing with Adam,” David explained, still smiling. “We promised he could stay up until Christmas if he went straight to sleep as soon as we got home. So midnight was the target and it seemed like every five minutes he’d be asking what the time was until the countdown of the last minute began. He fought sleep toward the end and always drifted off in the car on the way home.”

“It will be a good memory for him,” John said softly and turned his face to place a kiss on David’s hair. “Maybe you should call and talk to him about it?” It was just a suggestion, but John knew it had been a while since David had spoken to his son and, the longer he left it, the harder it would be.

“Maybe.” It was a single word spoken so quietly, John knew David was struggling again.

Nine days…

“SO ARE you ready for Christmas?” In any other circum-stance the question might have referred to plowing through Christmas card lists, wrapping presents, or finding that perfect roast, but the question was directed at David, and that changed everything. Barbara sat and watched as he stared at his hands, not sure how he would deal with it. She had been counseling David for many months now and knew he wouldn’t lie to her, but during his time on the streets he’d mastered the art of avoidance and silence. Today it looked like it would be the latter.

Twelve Days |
Isabelle Rowan

Barbara waited and it was only when it became obvious he wasn’t going to answer that she gently prompted, “David?”

He looked up briefly, then shrugged. The silence went on a little longer until he shook his head and gave a quiet, “I don’t know.”

The question had been a big one, and Barbara knew how loaded it was for someone like David. “I think I can relate to that,” she said softly. “Are you still coming in to the shelter to help Christmas Eve? I know Jamie seemed very keen, although I have my suspicions it’s more to see Brian than peel potatoes.”

David smiled and allowed his body language to relax a little once they hit a safe topic of conversation. “John is closing early. He said people need to get home at a reasonable time, so we can come in then.”

“John said
that
, did he?” Barbara grinned, eyes wide in mock surprise.

David nodded. “I think he’s looking forward to it all even though he’d never admit it.”

“You’ve been good for him,” Barbara said, and turned away on the pretence of fetching the cookie jar, but more to give David breathing space to process and accept what she’d just told him. She held the jar out to David and watched while he took a cookie and set it on the table next to his mug. Barbara saw that with a lot of the men in the shelter: sate immediate hunger, then put food aside for later when a free meal might not be on offer. Old habits died hard.

Twelve Days |
Isabelle Rowan

“What do you have planned for the rest of the day?”

Barbara asked casually, even though nothing in these sessions was a simple conversation-starter.

David frowned, but only to organize his thoughts; he’d been “scattered” lately and needed to concentrate to find his focus. “Not sure.” A long pause…. “I have a picture to draw for Jamie, for the store, and then I’m not sure.”

“What’s the picture of?”

“Mr. Toad I think,” David answered, and wasn’t going to add anything else until he saw the quizzical expression Barbara gave him. “I’ve been drawing a picture each day for Christmas.”

“Like an advent calendar?” she asked, and when David nodded she added, “Is
The Wind in the Willows
a favorite?”

“I liked it as a kid and I’ve done one scene from it, but this one is more for Jamie. He needs Mr. Toad,” David explained without going into details.

“Uh huh.” Barbara nodded, understanding that was all she was going to get on that topic. “Grab another cookie, David, that way you can have one now and save one for later. Actually, you better take two so you can share them with Jamie; I sometimes think he can sniff them out, especially when they have chocolate chips.”

David dutifully took the cookies and shoved them in his pack, still not touching the one by his mug. It was easy to see he was preoccupied as he sat staring at the conjoined rings from long-gone coffee mugs that stained the old table, shoulders hunched and hands folded in his lap.

“Do you have any family, Barbara?”

Twelve Days |
Isabelle Rowan

The question seemed to come out of the blue and took Barbara by surprise. She looked across the table, directly into David’s pale gray eyes. Talking about herself was usually out-of-bounds in the shelter, but for some reason Barbara felt David deserved an answer. “Not anymore,” she replied quietly. “I lost my only son to drugs and the street a long time ago.”

“HOW did it go with Barbara today?” John asked, handing David a newly washed plate.

“Okay.” David shrugged and wiped it with the tea towel.

“Just okay?” John pushed, willing to let it go, but learning that occasionally David needed an “out” to express himself.

“She told me that her son had been on the streets…

maybe still is. I dunno.”

John dropped a bundle of cutlery in the dish rack and turned to David. “I figured it was something like that, but I didn’t like to ask. She doesn’t know where he is?”

David shook his head. “Said she lost him.”

“Shit,” John commented quietly and pulled the plug from the sink, giving it a rinse as the last of the suds swirled down the drain.

“Yeah,” David whispered and draped the damp towel over the rack before leaning against John’s back, chin tucked over his shoulder. John pulled David’s arms around him and they just stood in silence. For all David’s struggles, Twelve Days |
Isabelle Rowan

in these quiet moments, neither needed to speak because both knew they had each other.

Eight Days…

JAMIE moved around the kitchen table, eyeing the parcel. It wasn’t his. It was addressed to John and had been delivered to the store earlier that day, and promptly put on the table to be dealt with later. Sizing it up, Jamie decided it was about the size of the old shortbread tins his Nan used to send for Christmas. The stamps were definitely from England and the postmark read “Bradford.” John had torn off the customs declaration and shoved it into his pocket. “You did that just to piss me off, didn’t you?” Jamie muttered and huffed in frustration.

“Did what to piss you off?” John said, and pretended not to know what Jamie had been doing.

Jamie winced, but knew he couldn’t deny his nosiness when his face was barely inches away from the remnants of the customs sticker. He straightened up and tried the line, “I thought it might have been for me.”

John shot Jamie a very unimpressed look, then proceeded to rinse out his mug.

“You know, you could always just open it now and it would save a lot of time and effort in the pestering department,” Jamie suggested.

“Or you could just get back to work?” John countered.

Twelve Days |
Isabelle Rowan

Jamie groaned playfully and gave the parcel a little shove. “Now what would be the fun of that?”

Normally John would take Jamie’s bantering with good nature, but the arrival of the little, brown paper-covered parcel had him on edge, and he simply wasn’t in the mood.

“Leave it, Jamie, okay?” he said, and held up his hand to reinforce his words.

“Um, yeah, sure,” Jamie responded quietly. “I’m sorry, John; you know I didn’t mean anything. Besides, looks and feels like a shortbread tin to me.” He smiled and moved away from the table.

“You’re probably right,” John muttered, although his fingers fiddled nervously with the customs declaration in his pocket.

JOHN dumped the parcel on the coffee table, but turned his back on it and wandered straight into the kitchen to make tea before he tackled what he knew it held inside. With the kettle on he looked back through to the living room. John couldn’t see either the table or the package sitting on it, but that didn’t stop his frown. His hand found its way into his pocket to pull out a small, green square of paper. John carefully unfolded the customs declaration and reread the information. Just one word next to the contents heading:
Photographs
.

The kettle whistled noisily behind him and John shoved the paper unceremoniously back into his pocket to set about preparing the teapot. It was only when he’d warmed the teapot and was leveling the scoop of tealeaves that John felt Twelve Days |
Isabelle Rowan

the knots of tension begin to ease.
We all have our own
routines
, he thought, watching his hands perform these mundane tasks. He knew his habits weren’t as extreme as David’s; he didn’t disappear into sleep or “hide” in his battered chair and sketchbook, but they were there just the same.