“Yes, no.” She clutched her bag and shouted at her, “Didn’t I just see you walk in here with a little boy?”
The blonde took two steps away and pretended to study the pages, casting a backward glance over the crazy woman behind her. Holly brushed past her and searched the rest of the store, scouring the children’s section, asking a bewildered clerk if he had seen a ten-year-old boy in the past few minutes. Wandering the maze of aisles, Holly saw not a single child, and when she passed the blonde with the cupcake book in line at the cashiers, she convinced herself that she had been mistaken. She had conjured a mirage. How could it be Jack? He never leaves the house.
The instant she walked out of the bookstore, Holly began hearing a tapping sound, thinking at first it was just the clack of her shoes on the linoleum, but it was a far steadier sound hidden in a melody piped over the sound system. The noise seemed natural at first, part of the song, but even when the tune changed, the rhythm persisted, so softly that she thought it must be a mistake, but then the drumming intensified into the following song. She looked around at the other shoppers to see if they could hear it, too, but they were anesthetized by the general bustle. In front of the soft-pretzel stand, she saw an older man in a trim white beard who reminded her of the actor who played Kris Kringle in that old black-and-white movie Miracle on 34th Street. “I believe, I believe, it’s silly but I believe,” she whispered to herself, “and if you can’t trust St. Nick, you can’t trust a soul.” She grabbed his arm and asked, “Do you hear that?”
“Hear what?”
She pointed to the ceiling in the direction of the speakers. “That knocking sound. It doesn’t go with the music.”
He tilted his head and cocked an ear to the ceiling and listened for a couple of measures. Laying a finger against his pursed lips, he contemplated his response with detached bemusement. “I’m sorry, but I don’t hear it.”
“No, no, listen. There, just beneath the piano, like someone’s rapping on a table.” She beat out the time on the glass counter of the pretzel stand. “A code. Don’t you hear it?”
“I’m sorry, I don’t hear any secret code.”
“You’re kidding me. Like a séance. Listen: tap-tap, tap-tap-tap.…”
The man shot out his free hand and grabbed her wrist until she let go of his arm. “Look, lady, there is no tapping, just the regular old Christmas songs. Do you want me to get you something? Water? Would you like to go somewhere and sit down?”
Holly backed away. The knocking followed her as she looked for the correct exit, the one nearest to where she had parked the car. Along the way, nobody else had noticed that the sound system had run amok, that a mad drummer boy played a steady and diabolical tattoo. She fought her way outside where the music stopped, and the drumbeat faded into the wind blowing across the parking lot. While she could no longer hear it, Holly felt the throbbing pulse in her forehead. A green bench beckoned, and she sat on the cold metal and held her head in her hands, wanting nothing more than to get home and lie down in a darkened room till the pain went away. She closed her eyes and willed the ache to end.
She sensed the presence of another, a shadow hovering over her. “There you are,” a disembodied voice said. “I was hoping to catch you.”
Holly shielded her eyes with one hand and squinted at the man with the short white beard. She was alarmed to see him and thought at first that he had followed her to confess that he, too, had heard the strange tapping over the sound system, but he was holding up a bag that read Sharon’s Arts & Crafts. “You left this at the pretzel counter. I’m glad I was able to find you before you got away.” He set the bag beside her on the bench. “Are you okay?”
“Gifts for my son. He loves to draw. I don’t know how I could have forgotten him.”
He eased onto the empty spot on the bench and jumped a bit when his rump came in contact with the cold surface.
“He’s just so hard to shop for. My son. He’s ten, and you would think that a boy of ten might be the easiest child in the world, but he’s special needs, for one thing.” Her voice faltered and she choked back the urge to cry.
“And he never leaves the house.”
“I’m so sorry—”
She pressed her hand against his arm, trapping him. “Not unless we force him, of course, and there are times when we have to take him to the doctor’s or whatnot, but it’s like moving a prisoner.” She rocked back and forth on the bench, subconsciously imitating her son.
He flexed his bicep, hoping she would take the hint, but she tightened her grip. The man shifted in his seat, as though he could not decide how to gracefully flee.
“No, he was fine until a few years ago, as fine as a boy with his condition can be. On top of it he has this phobia, and it’s getting worse. Do you understand?”