Silver Bells by Luanne Rice

Author:Luanne Rice
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780553900859
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2004-10-26T04:00:00+00:00

That night Catherine was late leaving work. She hoped that Danny would show, but he didn't. She took her time walking through the snow to the subway. When she got off the train in Chelsea, she walked slowly down Twenty-third Street. Slower and slower as she got closer to Christy. In contrast to her pace, her heart sped up. At the sight of him, she stopped dead.

“I saw him,” Christy said to her.

She spied him holding the hat Lizzie had given Danny, and her stomach dropped.

“How did you get that?” she asked.

“It fell off his head as he ran away from me. He doesn't want to see me. He practically broke his neck running for the bus.”

“The bus?” she asked, noticing how strongly he gripped the hat, his fingers digging into the brim, as if for dear life.

“Right over there,” Christy said, gesturing through the veil of snow, at the stop across Ninth Avenue.

“Can you come with me?” she asked. When he didn't respond—he seemed so numb, as if in a dream—she slipped one of her hands into one of his and pulled gently.

He followed her, just left his tree stand the way it was, the string of lights twinkling in the cold night air. They made their way down Ninth Avenue, onto Twentieth Street. Her pulse racing, she didn't know what she was going to do or say—she only knew that he was hurting badly, that she had to be with him right now.

Underfoot, the snow was turning icy. Catherine slipped, and Christy caught her. They held on for a minute, standing under a streetlight. His arm was around her; when they started walking again, he didn't let go. Danny's hat was in his other hand.

They climbed her front stairs, and she unlocked the door and turned on lamps. The house was warm, the wood floors gleaming. Christy stood in the front hall, looking around, still holding the derby.

“You can put it down,” she said, but he wouldn't let go.

“It's all I have of him,” he said.

Catherine shook her head. “That's not true,” she said. “You know it's not.”

Christy looked down at the hat. “Once when Danny was a baby, he had a fever. It got very bad—nothing we did brought it down. We live far away from the hospital, but I drove him there, him and his mother, as fast as I could. The doctors weren't sure what it was, so they kept him overnight. Mary stayed. When I got back home, I found his teddy bear. I thought . . . I thought I'd never see my son again, that his teddy bear was all I'd have of him.”

“And now you feel that way about his hat,” Catherine said.

Christy nodded. He couldn't take his eyes off the derby, even when Catherine walked over to him and stood there.

“It's all I have of him,” Christy said again, this time his voice breaking.

Catherine gently removed the hat from his hand, laid it carefully on the hall table. He was trembling—she felt him shaking through his heavy brown canvas jacket with its leather collar.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.