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The bitter cold bit Peter’s face. He’d left the bedroom window open and it had snowed. He’d been expecting it to rain. Or was the rain due last week? Time had no real meaning any more; it drifted along even as it felt frozen in place. One day glided into the next, and the only thing that really changed was the weather outside. He liked listening to the rain through an open window; the steady thrum of the water on the trees outside could send him off to sleep even when he was at his most anxious. Perhaps it will rain later, he thought.

Sliding out from beneath the covers he was careful not to interfere with Becka’s side of the bed. That wouldn’t do. He’d wrinkled it just the other week and that had set him back for the whole day. So now he was very careful not to disturb it. It was better that way. 

Wincing at the wooden floor he wondered why he had forgotten to wear socks, though he never did, and if asked would say that he hated them. It always annoyed Becka, seeing his sweaty footprints on the sandy kitchen tiles at the height of summer. It would have cost him little, he realised now, and it was a stupid thing to be so stubborn about.

He pulled the curtains open and inhaled sharply at the landscape. They lived in the country amid acres of fields, each of them bearing the seeds of winter on that morning. They were smooth and rolling as if some divine artist had with one perfect stroke covered them all with the most pristine white paint. Even now his first instinct was to tell Becka it had finally snowed on Christmas–in his torpor he had forgotten the day–but as he glanced smiling over his shoulder the empty room blew the spark of joy away. Becka was gone. All the perhapses and what ifs and shoulda, woulda, couldas in the world couldn’t change that. He turned his head from the majesty outside and left the curtains half drawn. 

Plodding along the carpeted landing he was struck, more so than usual, at how silent the house was. Jeremiah’s door was ajar. The bleak morning light blasted straight onto the bed, a rickety pine thing built by some ancestor that Peter had been too cheap–too broke, he reminded himself now and then–to replace properly. Dust swirls and flakes danced in the sunlight. The curtains had been left open. They probably always would be, frozen in time.

Peter hadn’t set foot in it for nigh on two years. He paused at the saddle board, hand hovering an inch from the painted wooden door. It was yellowed and faded. He had always meant to repaint it. He stood there, perfectly still, for perhaps five minutes, not sure what he was trying to do or if he was really thinking anything. Then, with a sigh, he turned and headed downstairs, his knuckles white from gripping the bannister as he picked his way down, down, down.

As he went toward the kitchen he kept his eyes rooted on the floor in front of him lest he catch sight of the long hallway wall. Scores of eyes watching him, judging him, from an acre of awards and photographs, of trips and stage shows and award ceremonies and Christmases long past. Peter’s own awards formed an afterthought near the skirting board: employee of the year (three times), special commendations, industry awards for his skill at helping companies save time doing whatever it was they needed to do. But he was only in one photograph, holding a newborn Jeremiah and looking shocked and confused as if he had had no warning that a child was on the way. All the others were of Jeremiah, or of Jeremiah and Becka, or of the two of them with extended family. “Daddy’s too busy,” they’d say to a crestfallen Jeremiah every time he told them about some forthcoming presentation or new achievement as the commendations mounted and he grew and excelled. “I’ll be at the next one, I promise,” Peter would say, so often it became a hollow ritual. “I just don’t have time,” he would add sometimes for colour, though it never filled the emptiness between them. Eventually, Jeremiah stopped asking. The emptiness turned to a quiet divide that Peter saw widening day by day, week by week, but felt powerless to bridge even as the pain of separation broke his heart. “You need to make an effort,” Becka would say, one of the few subjects on which she truly admonished him. And he always promised he would, when he had the time. But when Jeremiah grew old enough to go to college, he chose the one furthest from home and had never come back, except at the end, when they all finally accepted that this time Becka wasn’t going to get better. 

Cancer. Esophageal. Inoperable. Spread throughout her body.

She declined rapidly after seeing him, as if she had been holding on long enough to see her son one more time. Peter and Jeremiah had stared through each other over her as she slipped into unconsciousness until eventually even the soft rise and fall of her chest stopped. Nothing passed between them in that look. No sympathy, no horror, no half-remembered anecdotes of times well spent. Each man was staring into the abyss of the other.

Four years had passed since the funeral, since Peter and his son had shaken hands awkwardly as Jeremiah got into his car to head back north to Belfast. Just a few messages, Christmas cards, and an occasional photo passed between them. Jeremiah had a life in Belfast now, a job, a fiancée, a child on the way. There was nothing left for him in Cork. Those were his last words to his father before that handshake. There was no malice in them, no sweet long-awaited revenge. Just simple, matter of fact, and to the point. Life had moved on. Peter had been too busy to see it happening.

“Well you’re not busy now, are you?” said Becka from the other side of the kitchen table, perched sideways as always as she read a newspaper. The sunlight caught on her silvery tresses as she peered at him over her bifocals and they smiled at each other for a moment until he blinked and she, like the sunlight, was gone.

Peter put his head in his hands and wept.

 

The afternoon brought no thaw. If he had eaten he didn’t remember doing so.  Peter sat in the bay window, an unexamined book lying carelessly in his lap, as he glared out at the pristine frigid world around him. If any of the neighbours were home they were doing their best to keep still. Perhaps they too were frozen in place, he wondered with half a smile. There wasn’t a light in the neighbourhood lit up for Christmas, he realised.

A robin hopped onto the windowsill. Becka had been fascinated by them, even before one swooped in and stole a crust off his sandwich on their first date all those years ago, a hastily organised walk and bite to eat on the waterfront in Cobh. Peter held his breath, not wanting to scare it away. It cocked its little head and stared at him even as it hopped in place as if to keep warm, its red breast a little fiery furnace shining brilliantly against the world’s white canvas. It sang a little song with passion like an aria.

It tapped the window once, twice, a third time, again and again in sequence. Tap-tap-tap, tap-tap-tap, tap-tap-tap. Becka’s ring tone had been like that, a buzzing little tap-tap-tap. Jeremiah had adopted it after she died. Somewhere in the dim recesses of Peter’s mind something stirred, something he couldn’t put into words, something he, perhaps, couldn’t even fully understand. And then, nodding as if it was satisfied it had made its point, the robin blasted off into the sky to join its fellows as they passed over the house in a great arc. “Happy Christmas,” Peter said softly, allowing himself to breathe again. He closed the book, a battered leatherbound edition of Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons, and drummed gently on the cover while breathing in the stillness of the coming evening. Already the sun was starting to wind its way down to sleep. Had he truly been sitting there so long?

The little bird’s song ran through his mind as he dropped the book on the nearest chair, the one Becka liked to nap in during winter. “Well you’re not busy now, are you?” he heard her say one more time. 

Peter shuffled upstairs and sat on his bed. Rubbing absently at the side of his nose he looked at his watch: 13.12. Jeremiah ate in midafternoon on Christmas, as his mother had. Digging his phone out of his pocket he keyed in a number he knew by heart though he had never rung it. He felt Becka sitting on the bed behind him, heard the rasp of her filing her nails. “Go on,” she said sternly. “You know what to do.” Perhaps there was still some small chance, Peter thought, even as he left his finger hover over the call button for five, six, then seven minutes before he closed his eyes and pressed.

A distant electronic ping sang out again and again, his mind’s ear replacing it with the sound of tap-tap-tap, tap-tap-tap. Then, so abrupt it forced him to take a breath, somebody picked up.

“Dad?” Jeremiah’s voice was cautious but worried.

“Hello Jeremiah.”

“Is… is everything okay?” 

Peter’s eyes moistened at the note of genuine concern. “Okay? Oh yes, yes, everything’s okay. I was just here and, well, I saw the time and I just, well, really I just wanted to say merry Christmas.”

There was a half-pause. “Merry Christmas, dad.”

For a soundless moment, Peter wondered if that chasm of separation wasn’t as wide as he thought. “Listen, Jeremiah, I’m sure you’re busy and–”

“No, wait, wait.” There was a whispering on the other end and Peter realised he was on speaker, another of Becka’s habits that Jeremiah had picked up. “Dad? Are you still there?”

“I am, yes.”

 “Go to video there for a sec.”

He heard the phone fumbling on the other end and then a bemused Jeremiah was on screen next to a smiling brunette. “Dad, Samantha, Samantha, dad.”

“Hello Jerry’s dad,” Samantha said, laughing. “I’m glad to finally meet you. Or kind of meet you, anyway.” She had a warm, carefree laugh. Peter smiled at it. “Jerry talks about you all the time,” she added, pucking her future husband affectionately on the shoulder as he smiled awkwardly.

“Does he now? Well you’ve heard all the bad bits so,” said Peter, laughing in spite of himself.

“Oh no, not at all, nothing like that.”

“He has his mother’s good manners then.”  

“Listen, dad, we were just about to eat but it’s only the two of us. Do you want to, maybe, stay on the call and sort of eat with us?”

“You have that phone holder for work,” Samantha said quietly to Jeremiah. 

“I have a long phone holder for work,” Jeremiah said to Peter. “I can clamp it on to the table.” He hesitated, eyes going wide with apprehension.

Peter hesitated himself for a moment, then committed. “I’d love to. I’m snowed in right now. I have all the time in the world.”

“And you’ll have to come up to see us after Christmas,” said Samantha. “You’ll be a grandad in January after all!”

“Uh, yes, yeah actually,” said Jeremiah. 

“Sounds wonderful,” said Peter. 

Behind him, the sound of Becka filing her nails disappeared, leaving in its stead the slow release of years of tension in Peter’s chest. On the windowsill, catching the full force of the early afternoon light, the ice began to melt.

David O’Mahony is a writer from Cork, Ireland. He has had more than 25 stories published across the globe, with his work appearing in the US, Canada, Australia, India, and Thailand. He has written non-fiction at irishexaminer.com, where he is assistant editor.