Second Sight

"But don't you find it just a tad bit strange?" Cliff Clayton asked his wife, Susan. Even though they were sitting knee to knee on rickety kitchen chairs, they barely could see each other through the decorated and lit pine branches. Two bushy Christmas trees, enveloping the room in a strong, eerily light, were positioned in the small living room, in opposite corners, but with their branches almost touching in the center of the room.

"Shh, she'll hear you," Susan muttered back at Cliff out of the side of her mouth.

"And you're saying you—actually we—bought her one of these?"

"Yes," Susan whispered back. "But ours was the first one—and I had no idea how small this room would be or I wouldn't have gotten one so bushy. Once I got started, I just couldn't stop. The Christmas spirit can grab you like that . . . Oh, thanks, Katie. I don't mind if I do."

Susan had suspend the sotto voce conversation with her husband to accept a handful of sugar pop cereal from a bowl a smiling girl of six was holding out to her. The girl then proffered the bowl to Cliff, who leaned out beyond the pine branches and tossed a question mark look at his wife but then, promoted by Susan, who took a small handful of the sugar pops and thanked the delighted six-year-old. Katie then turned and skipped off toward the kitchen, very pleased with her hostess abilities. The young woman Susan had befriended and then helped, Viv, was standing in the kitchen with her parents and pouring over a letter and talking in happy, animated gestures. Cliff felt something sticky slide across his forearm and turned toward a high chair that was sitting very close to his knee. A toddler, a boy, was holding out the slick, thinned-to-a-point end of a nearly devoured candy cane and gurgling his offer of a guest suck, mimicking what his sister had done with her precious sugar pops.

Cliff turned his head toward Susan, confused and wondering if they should make a bolt for it while the other adults were still occupied with that letter in the kitchen. Cliff and Susan were supposed to be at sea, steaming into Kings Warf, Bermuda, right now and enjoying a black tie captain's dinner of lobster tail and champagne.

"What's with the cereal?" he queried Susan, while he smiled at the toddler and made clear that he had no intention of depriving the boy of even one single lick of that precious candy cane. The offer made and appropriately turned down, the boy proved delighted to work on the candy cane all by himself.

"Don't ask," Susan said. And then she laughed. "Although I'll tell you later. it's what brought me together with Viv's family. I still can hardly believe that I was so forward with her—and that I ruined our plans like I did."

"You didn't ruin our plans," Cliff answered. "I was off doing worse to our Bermuda cruise plans myself."

"So, do you regret we gave up our Bermuda cruise second honeymoon to be eating sugar pops as an appetizer for our Christmas Eve dinner?" Susan asked. And her face took on a strained look. She still wasn't sure about what she'd done. She'd seen a young family in the grocery store who obviously were down on their luck and who possibly might not get enough to eat through the Christmas season even beyond having a Christmas with tree and everything. And she'd impulsively dropped her own plans to buy expensive lingerie for a second honeymoon cruise and forced her good will on this family. Even more strange, she'd done this without knowing that at the same time Cliff was using the money meant for the cruise to help the cleaning lady at his firm through a tough Christmas season as well. The upshot was that they were having their Christmas Eve dinner here with Viv's family and going on to the cleaner's house for desert.

"No, not sorry in the least," Cliff answered. "We can take the cruise later—at any time. Christmas comes only once a year. And I'm not sure I really was looking forward to that cruise at all." And having said it, Cliff realized that this was true. It was something he hadn't thought about. Now that he had given it a thought, he had to recognize that there was some other motive than a second honeymoon that had made him suggest a cruise this Christmas. He'd had to think about that—when he didn't have to stay on his toes just to keep up with the near insanity of what was happening around him right now. Viv and her parents seemed to have been finished in the kitchen and were emerging with plates of food. For right now, Cliff would have to concentrate on how to cut slabs of beef on a plate perched on his lap—and to keep it from being swept away by a swaying pine branch.

"We were just going over the letter from the literary agent again," Viv said as she and her parents entered the room, the women carrying plates of food and the father dragging two more chairs along with little prospect of finding some place in this indoor pine forest to set them down.

"I still can't believe that everything has come together like this," Viv continued. First you, Susan, with your Good Samaritan attention to me and Katie and Travis—and then this big advance arriving from a publisher and my parents, who I hadn't been in contact with for months, showing up all at the same time. Why, I don't know how such a wonderful Christmas materialized just like that . . . my parents, Susan. They told me. They told me that you called them. I don't know how to thank . . ."

"Oh, no," Susan interjected. "I should thank you. This has made my best Christmas ever, I think. And with that advance, you paid back whatever I was putting into it right away. I couldn't be any more happy."

"I know I can never do enough," Viv said. "You gave me courage . . . and hope. And my parents. Even without the advance, my life was enriched. And . . . it's not nearly enough . . . I know. But I want you to know that I'm dedicating my next manuscript to you. The novel I'm writing now is about hope."

"I don't know what to say," Susan murmured, the light from the overpowering trees gleaming in the tears forming in her eyes.

Cliff knew what to say, but he knew this wasn't the time or place to say it. The lights on the trees were affecting him too. His thought at the moment was that he was awfully glad that Viv had also gotten that $20,000 advance for her book, because he didn't want to be around and on the hook for the electricity bill being generated by the lights on these two gigantic Christmas trees.

Later in the evening Susan and Cliff regrouped on the front porch of Clarice Walker's narrow wooden house in a neighborhood both normally avoided. Cliff had come from the office and Susan from home, so they were driving in separate cars.

Susan was a little apprehensive about meeting Clarice, the cleaner at Cliff's Norton and Associates firm, Clarice had lost one of her jobs and was facing a blue Christmas until Cliff decided she deserved much better than she was getting and arranged both compensating pay for the work she did for the firm and a better Christmas for her and her family than she was anticipating. But from the moment Clarice met them at the door, one of her gourmet coconut cakes with crème filling in one hand, both Susan and Cliff were lost in her nurturing hospitality.

She and her eldest son, Maurice, and what appeared to be Clarice's boyfriend, Leroy, had just returned from a Redskins exhibition football game, where the Redskins had trounced Dallas, and the exuberance in this house couldn't have possibly been higher. Cliff had bought them the tickets as part of his effort to lift Clarice's spirits to the level of the Christmas session—and had done so with a large chunk of the cash that originally had been put aside for the second honeymoon cruise to Bermuda. But it was only now that Cliff realized it had been fortuitous that he had bought three tickets. He had intended for Clarice and Maurice to go to the game—to make up for all of Maurice's Saturday football games Clarice had missed because she had to be cleaning the Norton firm offices then—but Cliff had never intended for there to be a third ticket. It had been a slip of his finger when he was ordering tickets from the Internet that he had bought three rather than two tickets. Now, however, he could see that this had been prescient—almost as if he'd had second sight. He'd had no idea that there was a Leroy in Clarice and Maurice's scene, but he could see in how exuberant all three of them were in the experience they had shared that this had been a significant event—for all three of them combined—in their lives.

For some reason, as they were eating desert, and all talking at once, animated and happy as could be, Cliff was struck with something having occurred in what he had done for Clarice that was far greater in effect than just in what he had put into it. It had been expensive for he and Susan, yes, and it had pushed their own plans aside, but something larger than everyone assembled had happened here—and Cliff understand, without fully knowing why, that this had been more of a bonding experience for he and Susan than a second honeymoon in Bermuda and a red-lacy nightie for Susan could ever have been.

It was at that point that both Cliff's and Susan's cell phones chimed, almost simultaneously, and both were expelled out of the convivial, comfortable atmosphere of the Walker home, both in panic and consternation.

Susan was launched toward the hospital west of town. Her younger sister, Sissy, was having her baby. This wasn't supposed to happen for three weeks yet. Susan and Cliff were supposed to be safely home from Bermuda before Sissy gave birth. But it was happening now, and Susan's tearful mother was saying that it was touch and go and that Sissy was in a panic.

As Susan raced across town, it struck her that if she'd been on the Bermuda cruise now, she wouldn't be here for the premature birth and all of the dangers that entailed. And then it struck her, even harder, that it was her sister's impending delivery of a child that had made the Bermuda cruise so attractive to Susan. She had resented her sister having a baby. For the first time Susan accepted that this was so. Susan wanted a baby and hadn't gotten pregnant yet. Sissy wasn't even married—and was younger than Susan—and she was having a baby. And the whole family had been swept up in Sissy having a baby and needing their support. Susan had felt left out. So, Susan had jumped at the suggestion that she and Cliff take off for Bermuda for Christmas. And Susan had decided she needed to go out and buy herself sexy red lingerie.

"How classic," Susan muttered as she raced for the hospital. Jealousy and screaming for attention. All because she was jealous. And she'd only been saved by some force—inside her or acting on her—to think of someone other than herself in this Christmas season. Something inside her had seen what she hadn't seen and had compelled her to change her plans. And now her little sister was in the hospital—in danger—and having a first baby much too early. Susan rubbed the blinding tears from her eyes and whipped into the hospital parking lot.

* * *

Meanwhile, headed toward a hospital connected to a nursing home on the opposite end of the town, Cliff was racing at an equal pace. The night supervisor of the nursing home had called him to tell him that his father was failing fast and that he would need to come right away just in case his dad didn't make it through the night.

How could this be, Cliff, initially reasoned as he ran out of Clarice's and to his car. He'd seen his father just a while ago and he'd seemed fine. It was only when Cliff was alone in the car—alone with his thoughts and turning his driving instincts over to maneuvering the familiar roads and turns out to the nursing home, a trip he'd made a couple of times a week for over a year, that Cliff admitted that he had been fooling himself. He knew his dad was failing. He had blocked it out—especially because it was happening at this time of year. His father had been a Christmas Day baby, so Christmas had always meant something extra special around their house when Cliff had been growing up. And Christmas had revolved around his dad.

Cliff was walking into the entrance of the nursing home when the full ramifications of his self-denial hit him, and he had to sit down on a sofa in the lobby for several minutes to reason through what was racing through his mind and get control of himself before he went back to his father's room. Not only had he been into denial about his father's failing health, but he also had rebelled at listening to his father when he had tried to discuss this with Cliff—and he had gone to the lengths of planning this cruise to Bermuda just now. Not really because he and Susan just had to go on a second honeymoon right at this time—but more to flaunt the denial that Christmas was in any way a danger period for his father. Cliff was intellectually aware—just not emotionally accepting—that Christmas was a time when people in failing health often died—that they held on just to get to Christmas and then, having met—or almost met, if they just couldn't hang on long enough—that goal, they just gave up the effort and expired. And, with his father, it wasn't just because of Christmas. This also would be his dad's 76th birthday.

And, in total denial, Cliff had planned a Christmas cruise to Bermuda. His father must think he was in Bermuda now, in fact. He'd forgotten to tell him that he and Susan had changed their minds.

When Cliff reached his dad's room, which was in semidarkness, lit only by the white lights on a miniature Christmas tree on the dresser at the foot of his father's bed, under the now-blacked-out TV set attached to a shelf high on the wall above it, Cliff immediately tuned into his father's breathing. It was ragged and belabored and shallow—the sort of breathing where those listening to it suspended their own breath in the pauses and wondered, with a clutchy feeling, whether there would be another breath. A nurse was sitting beside his father's bed. She had been holding his hand, and Cliff had the wrenching feeling of self-reproach that someone other than he was doing that—followed by a flood of appreciation that the nurse was there. She looked up at Cliff with that expression of sadness-laced inevitability that everyone fears seeing and silently rose and slipped by Cliff and out into the brightly lit corridor. Cliff murmured his thanks as she passed, and her eyes lifted to his in an expression of sympathy and surprise—revealing how rarely the relatives of her charges realized she even was there.

Cliff sat on the seat the nurse had vacated, a seat warmed by her presence for who knew how long, and he took up his father's hand.

"Hi, Dad, it's me, Cliff?"

"Cliff? Cliff? I thought you were in Bermuda."

"No, Dad, We decided to stay home for Christmas. We are coming to see you tomorrow, Dad. Your birthday. We wouldn't miss that." A truth and a lie. When their plans changed, Susan and he did, indeed, plan to spend part of Christmas Day with his dad. But a lie in the claim that Cliff would not have missed being here for Christmas. He had planned, in his attempt to escape an unwanted realty, not to be here. It was just some force outside of himself—that chance locking into the problems of the firm's cleaning lady, that had intervened. Some insight that something inside himself had perhaps.

"Yes, my birthday," Cliff's dad mumbled. "Wouldn't want to miss that."

"No, we wouldn't, would we?" Cliff said. "And I'm sorry. We have a gift; I forgot to bring it tonight. Tomorrow, for sure."

"A gift?" his dad said. There was a long pause, and then, with great effort, Cliff's dad spoke again. "You know what would be the best gift, Cliff?"

"No, Dad, what would be the best gift?"

"I think most of all . . . I would like to see your mother again and visit with her. I look forward to that."

Then Cliff knew his dad truly was ready. Cliff's mother had passed on three years earlier. Cliff started to speak, but a lump in his throat prevented that for several minutes. He knew what he needed to say, though. He didn't want to say it. But say it he must. And when at last he felt he could get the words out, he did so.

"It's OK, Dad, I understand. We'll be fine. It's OK."

Just then the hour struck in the big grandfather's clock just down the corridor in the family visitation area, and Christmas Eve turned into Christmas Day.

"Merry Christmas, son," Cliff's dad mumbled in a low voice.

"Happy Birthday, Dad," Cliff answered through his tears.

Cliff sat, holding his dad's hand for what seemed like forever but was just a few minutes more, listening for those long pauses in the ragged breathing—until, at last, the pause arrived that never ended.

* * *

"He's gorgeous, Sissy. A gorgeous baby boy. A Christmas baby," Susan's mother burbled with excitement as she lifted the bawling bundle from Sissy's arms to march over to the window into the corridor from where her husband could see his first grandchild for the first time.

Susan looked down at her bedraggled, but beaming younger sister and squeezed her hand. Sissy squeezed back.

"There, now, that was worth it, wasn't it?" Susan asked. "And only about five hours longer than anyone could possibly have imagined."

Both sister's laughed and then Sissy grimaced from the pain of the exertion this required, but she smiled broadly again when Susan's face betrayed her concern.

"I don't know how I could have endured it without you being here, though," Sissy said to Susan. And then, "But wait. What are you doing here? You're supposed to be in Bermuda, aren't you?"

"We scotched that plan," Susan answered. "Some little birdie or other told me you were going to surprise us with a Christmas baby, and I wouldn't want to miss this for the world."

"What, you have second sight along with perfect skin and the world's sexiest husband?" the younger sister jabbed back at the older sister.

"Yes, something like that, I guess," Susan answered. But somehow she thought it was something much larger than that. She wouldn't question it; she'd just be mighty happy she and Cliff had been home for Christmas.

There was a tap on the window to the corridor and Susan looked up into the eyes of her husband who had just appeared there. One look into his eyes and she knew. And, second sight, or not, Susan also knew that this Christmas at home had made their bond stronger than any second honeymoon cruise to Bermuda could have done.