Everyone is gone, back to the slow drumbeat of life after the holidays, to resolutions and rain, to dark mornings, mind-numbing TV and seasonal flu, to living their life.  

Not me; I’m here in this living room watching the winter sun keep time. In the corner is a small red wagon. The wagon and I are all that remain from Christmas Eve. The wagon was a gift for my grandson, along with stuffed animals, blocks, and books filled with bright-colored pictures and simple sentences. But it was too large to fit in his parents’ car, so it stays put for the time being. Everyone came to our house on Christmas Eve, the extended family and their dogs. We exchanged small gifts. We made potato soup and apple pie. Everyone got a tangerine, a lottery ticket, and a pack of gum in their stockings. It was controlled chaos. It was wonderful.

It’s quiet now, days later. There’s still the sweet aroma of the tree. Its needles were recently vacuumed from the carpet. There is the tang of cold ash from the fireplace and the scent of Lemon Pledge from the coffee table. But it’s not smells that take me back to that night. It’s the wagon.  

“Leave the wagon,” I said as my oldest daughter and her husband hurried to pack up and get home. They were tired. “I’ll get it to you. There’s no rush.” I pictured my grandson pulling that wagon filled with sand, toys, or the dog possibly. Whatever he might feel needed moving. That would be a couple of years off though. He’s only eight months old. So it sits here in the room with me, lonely, without purpose, its wheels shiny and black, a green ribbon tied to its handle.  

Across the room, there is an empty chair. On Christmas Eve, my mother sat there with my grandson in her lap. She’s ninety-four, her face round, her hair wispy and white, her cheeks flushed with excitement. He’s her first great-grandchild.

“Oh he is a little lunk,” she said as she shifted her weight in the chair for balance.  

“He’s a normal weight, Grandma.” My daughter scowled.  

My mother hadn’t chosen her words very carefully. She seldom did. She felt she was beyond the worry of social grace. Her filter, if it had ever existed, is vanquished by the indignity of ageing. But her glee was real. Holding my grandson, her gnarled arms wrapped around him like a loose length of dock rope.  

The little “lunk” is Zach. He has brown hair and chubby cheeks and ridiculously huge hazel eyes and lashes so long a small songbird might easily find a perch.

“He’s just so cute,” she said over and over as if it were too good to be true.  

No one disagreed, of course, and my daughter smiled with pride. That’s more like it, she must have thought. Between Zach and his great-grandmother, there was a look. Amazement, I would call it. Two souls related by blood, separated by nearly a hundred years of living, considered one another eye to eye. Then Zach melted into her chest. Anyone with a heartbeat would have felt the air pushed from his or her lungs at the sight of it. My mother and my grandson, one at the beginning, the other at the end, must have felt curiosity and wonder, as did I. Ten thousand bees couldn’t make honey that sweet.  

Was that real? I ask myself that question sitting here in this room now only filled with memories. Four generations gathered that night around the fire and the lighted tree and the gifts and a pack of dogs sniffing out attention. Did anyone realize that? Was I the only one to recognize the significance of that? That night we had no choice but to look forward, to feel hope. It might not seem so improbable, the sound of that. After all, there are probably lots of families gifted with enough longevity to muster four generations in one room, probably five if they had gotten an early start. But our numbers had been dwindling until Zach arrived. Death had visited early and often and we had become resigned to sadness, only finding joy in the rearview mirror. The cycle of life had become weighted toward endings, not beginnings. With Zach, that all changed. And for that hope to take the form of such a loving and sweet child was all the more wonderful. We were starting new memories. Zach demanded by his very presence that we throw off the gloom for what had been lost in favor of what we had now gained.

“He’s not sleeping through the night yet.” My daughter answered question after question. “He’s eating rice cereal and squash. No, Grandma, we will not be taking him to the play structure at the mall, too many germs. He takes two naps.” I heard her words echo off the walls and, like the flash of the camera, I wanted to freeze them in time. To hold onto the overwhelming feeling of joy in the same way one might squint against the bright sun after a long winter.  

“He looks just like you,” my mother said. She had been transformed by his innocence. Gone was her dour look from hours of FOX News fear-mongering. There was the loss of my father and two of her daughters and friend after friend and all and any sense of familiarity. She had become a detached, fearful witness to life. But not that night, Christmas Eve; she beamed with delight.  

“Can you help?” my wife asked me, brushing past in an apron. She was the one trusted to host four generations of family on Christmas Eve. She had not had the luxury of sitting back and watching.  

“Yes,” I said. I had the exquisite fortune to have married someone so caring. 

“Can you find some Christmas music? We’ll be ready to sit down to dinner in about twenty minutes. Be sure to get everyone drinks,” then she was off to the next detail. All three dogs brushed past. “Please feed the dogs and put them in the garage.”  

Now the room is hushed. I hear the drone of a distant plane and the growl of a delivery truck probably filled with returns. Gone is the laughter and conversation. There are no colored lights twinkling in the tree outside the window. There is no blow-up Santa swaying to and fro in the breeze. All boxed and stored away for Christmas to come.

So here I sit. They have all moved on, leaving me with a deafening quiet. I try to fit it all together like some large and complicated puzzle, those memories of what happened when we were here together, but struggle to remember how each piece fits. It was Zach’s first Christmas and his wagon and I are all that is left to reconstruct events, to burnish them as the shadows in the room grow longer and my changed heart beats with hope.  

I’ll hold tight to all this, to the good that came our way that night. What I saw. I will appreciate it. I will use it to push away the darkness that waits patiently at the door. I will look forward to all the weddings and births and birthdays to come. I will celebrate our good fortune, our accomplishments, our family.  

I will gather up that night, what was said and what was not said, what was tasted and seen and felt. I will save them for later. To tell Zach what he meant to all of us, how he was the start of something, necessary and good. I will gather what remains of that memory. I will put them in Zach’s red wagon and take it to him so one day he will understand how he changed everything that evening. That he helped us to see the goodness in life. When he is older, he will understand.

 

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  • Kirk Boys is a writer living outside Seattle. He holds a certificate in Literary Fiction from the University of Washington. His fiction and essays have been featured in numerous publications, including most recently Portland Magazine, Litro Magazine, and Bristol Noir.

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