Above the screeching of tires, she heard her voice, speaking into the telephone, giving the police the information and her address. Then she stepped farther back into the dark kitchen, over on the left side, where she could not be seen through the front windows or through the glass panels that stretched to each side of the front door. She could hear both men yelling. Where was Nicholas? How could he still be asleep? She hoped that the dog wouldn’t bark and wake him, now that he’d managed to sleep through so much. She took a glass out of the cabinet and started toward the shelf where she kept the bourbon, but then stopped, realizing that she might be seen. She pulled open the refrigerator door and found an opened bottle of wine. She pulled the cork out and filled the glass half full and took a long drink.
Someone knocked on the door. Could it be the police — so soon? How could they have come so quickly and silently? She wasn’t sure until, long after the knocking stopped, she peered down the hallway and saw, through the narrow rectangle of glass, a police car with its revolving red and blue lights.
At almost the same instant, she touched something on her lapel and looked down, surprised. It was Santa: a small pin, in the shape of Santa’s head, complete with a little red hat, pudgy cheeks, and a ripply white plastic beard. A tiny cord with a bell at the bottom dangled from it. Nicholas must have gone back to the store where they had seen it on his first day home. She had pointed it out on a tray of Christmas pins and ornaments. She told him she’d had the exact same pin — the Santa’s head, with a bell — back when she was a girl. He must have gone back to the store later to buy it.
She tiptoed upstairs in the dark, and the dog followed. Nicholas was snoring in his bedroom. She went down the hall to her room, at the front of the house, and, without turning on the light, sat on her bed to look out the nearest window at the scene below. The man she had spoken to was emptying his pockets onto the hood of the police car. She saw the beam of the policeman’s flashlight sweep up and down his body, watched while he unbuttoned his coat and pulled it open wide in response to something the policeman said. The other man was being led to the police car. She could hear his words—“my car, it’s my car, I tell you”—but she couldn’t make out whole sentences, couldn’t figure out what the driver was objecting to so strongly. When both men were in the car, one of the policemen turned and began to walk toward the house. She got up quickly and went downstairs, one hand sliding along the slick banister; the dog came padding down behind her.
She opened the door just before the policeman knocked. Cold flooded the hallway. She saw steam coming out of the car’s exhaust pipe. There was steam from her own breath, and the policeman’s.
“Could I come in, ma’am?” he asked, and she stood back and then shut the door behind him, closing out the cold. The dog was on the landing.
“He’s real good, or else he’s not a guard dog to begin with,” the policeman said. His cheeks were red. He was younger than she had thought at first.
“They were going to keep that racket up all night,” she said.
“You did the right thing,” he said. His head bent, he began to fill out a form on his clipboard. “I put down about fifty dollars of damage to your wall,” he said.
She said nothing.
“It didn’t do too much damage,” the policeman said. “You can call in the morning and get a copy of this report if you need it.”
“Thank you,” she said.
He touched his cap. “Less fun than digging out Santa and his reindeer,” he said, looking back at the car, tilted onto the lawn. “Have a good Christmas, ma’am,” he said.
He turned and left, and she closed the door. With the click, she remembered everything. Earlier in the evening she had gone upstairs to tell Nicholas that she was sorry they had ended up in a quarrel on Christmas Eve. She had said she wanted him to come back downstairs. She had said it through the closed door, pleading with him, with her mouth close to the blank white panel of wood. When the door opened at last, and she saw Nicholas standing there in his pajamas, she had braced herself by touching her fingers to the doorframe, shocked to realize that he was real, and that he was there. He was looking into her eyes — a person she had helped to create — and yet, when he wasn’t present, seeing him in her mind would have been as strange as visualizing a Christmas ornament out of season.
Nicholas’s hair was rumpled, and he looked at her with a tired, exasperated frown. “Charlotte,” he said, “why didn’t you come up hours ago? I went down and let the dog in. You’ve been out like a light half the night. Nobody’s supposed to say that you drink. Nobody’s supposed to see you. If you don’t ask any questions, we’re supposed to stop noticing you. Nobody’s supposed to put you on the spot, are they? You only talk to Father Curnan, and he prays for you.”
Downstairs in the dark hallway now, she shuddered, remembering how she had felt when he said that. She had gone back downstairs and huddled in the chair — all right, she had had too much to drink — but it was she who had woken up and been alert to squealing tires and people screaming, and Nicholas who had slept. Also, she thought, relief suddenly sweeping through her, he couldn’t have been as angry as he seemed. He must have put the pin on her coat after the party — after their words in the car — or even when he had come downstairs to let Horatio in and had seen her asleep or passed out in the chair. He must have pinned it onto her lapel when the coat still hung in the closet, so she would find it there the next day. She had found it early, inadvertently, when she went out to investigate the car and the noise.
She looked at the dog. He was watching her, as usual.
“Are you real good, or not a guard dog to begin with?” she whispered. Then she pulled the cord. Santa’s face lit up. She pulled the cord again, several times, smiling as the dog watched. Over her shoulder, she looked at the kitchen clock. It was three-fifty Christmas morning.
“Come on,” she whispered, pulling the cord another time. “I’ve done my trick. Now you do yours.”
YOU KNOW WHAT
“You know what?” Julie says.
“Honey,” Stefan says patiently, “you’re not supposed to begin questions by saying, ‘You know what?’ The person you’re speaking to couldn’t possibly know what, if you haven’t asked the question yet.”
She puts on a serious face. “How many kidneys do I have?” she says.
“Two,” he says. “Why?”
“That’s what I thought,” she says. “But if you have only one, you can still live, right?”
“Yes,” he says. “Do you know someone at school who has only one kidney?”
“You know what?” she says.
“I don’t know what because you haven’t told me yet, or asked me a question,” Stefan says. He looks down reflexively to see if her shoelaces need to be tied, though she has worn red loafers for a month. They are walking across the parking lot, headed for the Safeway. He will buy whatever is time-saving: boneless chicken; stew beef, already cut into irregular little squares and triangles; bottled fruit juice instead of concentrate.
“The fact is,” she says, with her still-serious face, “somebody in my class saw a movie about kidneys, and he told us all about it. And we’re supposed to decide if we’d give a kidney if it might save somebody’s life.”
“A movie about kidneys?”
“But if they’re damaged, they’re no good. I think you have to get them from someone in your family.”