On Christmas morning, Cole woke to the toasty warmth of the heater running all night in our apartment. He tossed back the covers and in no particular hurry slipped on his Union Jack track pants and signature black and yellow athletic shirt.
Drawing back the curtains, he found a perfectly white Christmas in New Marais. Snow rested at least a foot and a half on the roads and front porches of homeowners. Already children had started to swarm the streets running and jumping in the white powder that was most likely their first experience with snow in their lives.
He wasted no time grabbing his courier jacket and heading to the roof access. There was just as much powder here than on the streets, and to see New Marais in such a seasonal blanket made him proud. The temperature was just cold enough to sustain the snow; in the high twenties. But no one willingly outside seemed to care since they were dressed in three layers of their usual winter attire. Anyone else was sheltering themselves inside their homes where it was warm.
Cole seemed absolutely transfixed when I went onto the roof. He didn't even hear the door open. I couldn't resist wadding together a snowball and chucking it at him, landing a hit on his shoulder and spreading powder all over his jacket.
"Merry Christmas, brother!"
"Merry Christmas, Zeke," he returned, hardly caring about being a target for snowballs. "Feels like home, doesn't it?"
I watched as a group of kids ducked behind parked cars to take cover from enemy snowballs while firing their own. "Nah. It's a hell of a lot more fun here. It is Party City after all."
Then I finally noticed exactly what he was wearing compared to myself—dressed in a thick coat and bomber cap. "Shit, man, you're not cold?"
"Nope," Cole charged his arms with electricity. "I'm insulated."
The two of us took in the scene one more time. Never had New Marais ever looked more peaceful.
Softly, he asked, "You think she'd be proud?"
I didn't have to ask who he was referring to. There was only one person he had ever cared about enough to worry what she thought about him.
"She always was proud of you, brother. And nothin' in the whole world would ever change that."
He seemed satisfied with this answer as he smiled peacefully and for a moment an appeared to have found peace.
"Hey, I'm gonna head for the church and check on Lilly," said Cole once he resolved his thoughts. "You sure you're okay with picking up Connor?"
"Absolutely," I nodded. "We don't want him walking halfway across town in the snow right out of the hospital, right?"
"Thanks, man. I appreciate it."
That was something that was going around a lot lately: Appreciation.
I guess it had only taken me a while to get used to it. A "thank you" had felt hollow coming from Cole for a while. Then since I saved him from Bertrand's cage his words had more weight to them, like he couldn't take me for granted anymore. After my royal screw up in Empire, I guess I didn't feel like I deserved it. But now it was starting to feel good again.
Then he turned and leaped off the building, landing on the snow-covered sidewalk without even flinching. Admittedly, it made me jealous. Going up and down stairs never sucked so much in my life.
After going down those god-forsaken steps I climbed into the truck I had previously "appropriated" from the militia and painted over to hide their emblem, turned the key and drove through the slush to the hospital.
I parked in a space reserved for picking up patients. Walking inside and approaching the counter I told the receptionist that I was there to retrieve Connor Williams. Then I took a seat in the waiting room, spending my time admiring the enormous fish tank in the lobby until they brought him down the elevator in a wheelchair. It pleased me as much as it had Cole to see him alive and in the flesh. I quickly introduced myself as Cole's friend and the nurse helped him into my truck.
"So you are Cole's friend?" he asked as we left the parking lot.
"Sure am. I was actually the one who found you by tracking down the guy responsible."
"Then I can't repay you enough, Zeke. ...May I call you Zeke?"
"It's better than Jedediah." This made him laugh. "Cole's takin' real good care of your daughter. He hasn't talked about anything else since he found her. You should've seen the look on his face when he came home after meeting you."
He smiled and remained silent for a moment, taking in the beauty of the snow blanketing the streets. "I wonder why he was so interested in her."
Even after Cole insisted he was doing it for the girl and not himself, I was still pretty sure Trish was still a more viable reason for his behavior. But he wasn't about to tell the father that.
"He's a hero through and through. This town respects him for a reason."
He seemed satisfied by this answer.
Then he looked at me with sheepish eyes. "How hard do you think it'd be to find an open store?"
"Besides a convenient store, you mean? There's a nice one over on Gaffney street across from the pier. What do you need?"
"A last-minute Christmas gift."
Back at the church, Cole arrived just in time to watch Lilly and the other homeless take-ins open the presents that had been donated to them. Much of it was clothes, money and gift cards or coupons for food. At the sight of him, Lilly left her current present half unwrapped and ran to hug him.
"It's snowing!" She exclaimed joyfully. "You were right! Santa does exist!"
"Of course he does," Cole kneeled to take her gently by the shoulders. "He's no less real than you or me. So, did he bring you any clothes to play in the snow?"
Lilly confirmed and skipped back to her pile of presents and showed him her collection of new coats and jackets. He watched her go back and forth between them, deciding which one she wanted to wear on the momentous occasion.
Not long after she had picked out her pink coat with white fur on the collar, I walked in with Connor as Cole had begun to close the zipper. He grinned as he saw us come in looking past her shoulder.
"Hey, I bet you my present is better than snow." He whispered to her.
"I bet not," she joked.
"Oh yeah? Turn around and see for yourself."
She did as she was told. When her eyes met her father's they lit up brighter than the North Star. A smile grew on her face bigger than Santa's bag on Christmas Eve.
"Daddy!" She ran to him as fast as her small legs could carry her. Connor lowered himself to one knee and took her into his arms. As the two laughed in joyous unity, he twirled her around in the air before embracing her again. "I thought I'd never see you again!"
"Neither did I, baby girl," he admitted. "It's all thanks to Cole and his friend I was able to find you."
Then he looked to Cole, tears welling in his eyes out of pure euphoria. "Thank you," said he in a quivering voice. "Thank you so much. If there's anything at all I could do-"
"You don't need to repay me," Cole replied before the obligation made it past his lips. "Seeing you two together is rewarding enough."
The man accepted this answer with humility.
Looking back at his daughter he asked, "Did you already open all your presents, sweety?" She answered affirmatively. "Then it's a good thing I got you a present of my own."
From behind my back, I pulled a present into her sight, wrapped in red paper with a white bow containing the gift Connor had gotten on our way there.
She opened it excitedly to find a fluffy white teddy bear inside wearing a scarf and Santa cap. She gasped and hugged it like it was the best gift she had gotten for Christmas. "It looks like Snowball!"
"Maybe it is Snowball," said her father. "I bet you he was hiding from those mean men and was looking for you, too. Like me."
After embracing once more, Connor encouraged Lilly to proceed outside and join the other kids outside.
Lilly's face was lit all aglow as she took her first glance at the city covered in snow. The night before had given her only a small taste of what a real white Christmas was like. Now it was right before her eyes, like a dream come true.
To her, snow had always been some sort of far away concept, conceivable only by listening to Christmas music or watching holiday cartoons. It was something that only existed in fantasy.
And watching her jump up and down without missing a beat at the sight of real-life snow was enough to make a guy's heart melt.
"Go have fun, baby girl," Connor said warmly. "Build a snowman and make snow balls-just like you see on TV."
Without a second to lose Lilly went to work gathering snow in the courtyard, shoveling it up into a mound. Once she had a large enough pile, she took more into her hands and stacked another smaller mound onto the first. She did this until she had three stacks of snow.
Obviously, she was trying to make her very first snowman. But it had turned out to be more of a snow-block man. Each of her three sections were more square-shaped than rounded.
She was obviously dissatisfied, seeing her creation come out so different from what she had seen in pictures and movies. Being from the south without any snow put her at a disadvantage. She never had the opportunity to refine her snowman crafting much less practice at it at all.
Her father then consoled her and then proceeded to refine the uneven edges of the snow man's face and body.
"Next we need to give him a face. Let's go back inside and find a carrot and parts for his eyes and mouth."
Cole and I stayed outside while they went in to retrieve the snowman's notorious nose and smile. Looking at him and I could tell that nothing could have made him happier than to see Lilly happy and with her family once more. It wasn't about the snow and presents, it was that she was able to enjoy those things with her father.
It made me think, then, that she really was lucky to have met Cole. Most kids only appreciate the material gifts; what Santa would bring them Christmas morning. Lilly, being so young, had something much dearer given to her for Christmas and she was able to see that no toy or coat could outdo the blessing that Cole had given her.
"You think this is how she felt all the time, Zeke?" He looked to me for an answer. When it took longer than he wanted for me to understand what he meant, he clarified, "Trish, when she spent all her time during the holidays helping people."
"I'd like to think so," I agreed.
"I used to get so mad. I'd do everything to make sure the apartment was decked out with Christmas stuff, that we had a decent meal, that she had the best that I could afford to give her. And she hardly seemed to notice it. I just couldn't understand how she could be so happy spending all her time with people who couldn't do anything for her."
He paused and took a breath of cold air.
"Now I understand that she loved giving more than getting, even if all she could give was her time and attention."
"Hey, man. I know for a fact that she loved that stethoscope you gave her-the one with her name on it. She took it to work with her every day, had it on her neck all the time."
I must have said something that he didn't agree with because his smile dimmed just a bit.
Then I remembered that the day she had grabbed all her stuff from our apartment she had left it sitting on the table in the living room. He had come home that day, saw it and threw it against the wall.
If we still had an apartment to go home to it would probably still be behind the couch.
"Hey, uh… speaking of girls, where are Nix and Kuo? You'd think Kuo wouldn't sleep in on a day like this."
Cole saw that I was trying to distract him from the afterthought of Trish and followed my lead. "Nix won't be coming. It's better that way. And Kuo deserves to sleep in. She's been working hard enough as it is."
A moment later, Lilly and Connor returned with a plate of chocolates that one of the volunteers had baked and a single carrot. Together they shaped the candies into two eyes and a curved smile in place of stones, seeing as how finding stones under the snow would be troublesome. The father said warmly that she could eat them when the snowman started to melt.
Next Lilly ran to the nearest tree and searched for a couple of separated sticks of moderate size, then returned and placed them on the snowman to serve as his arms. She stuck several more chocolates down the center of his torso as buttons for a pretend shirt made of snow. Finally, she took the scarf from around her neck and wrapped it around its shoulders.
"What about his hat, Daddy?"
"Go inside and see if you can borrow one of the Reverend's hats, sweety. Then we'll see if Frosty will start dancing for you."
The girl skipped back inside with an excited giggle.
"Do you think Kuo can make snowmen come to life?" I asked my friend.
"Who knows. We'll find out when she gets here."
Lilly returned with a dark brown fedora and placed it on the sculpture's head. Although the hat wasn't magical and the snowman didn't begin to sing, she was just as happy to see her first snowman finished and spherical like she wanted.
When her father asked her what she wanted to do next, she only flopped to the ground and spread her arms and legs out and in again, making the shape of an angel in the snow. The whole time she never stopped smiling once.
She must have learned such a simple sense of joy from him because he, too, fell to the ground and made his own imprint in the snow.
"Daddy, make another one!"
When they both had made two angels each, she started to draw with her fingers extra details into the snow, making each of her two figures look like a boy and a girl respectively. She then moved on to the larger angels and added masculine and feminine features to those as well.
"Who are they supposed to be," asked Connor.
"That one's me, and that's you." Lilly pointed to the small female angel and the larger male. Then she drew his attention to the "boy" angel, "That's Jesse," then the woman, "and Mama."
Cole and I glanced at the father. We had expected him to be uncomfortable with her declaration, if not break down into tears.
Instead, he grinned just as warm as ever and said, "If that's supposed to be Mama, she needs her hair to have more curls in it, remember?"
His resolve was impressive and something to be admired. He wasn't even going to let the loss of his wife and son get in the way of being happy with his daughter.
The same could be said for Lilly.
Suddenly a glob of snow hit her in the shoulder.
"Hey, Lilly," called one of the other kids who had taken refuge in the church. "Think fast!"
The boy tossed another snowball at her. Lilly laughed as powder flew in her face.
She took a handful of snow and patted it into a ball before giving it a good toss at him, getting him on the thigh.
At the sound of Lilly and her new friend laughing and giggling as they pummeled each other with snow, the other children rushed outside and engaged in the war of flying snowballs in a total free for all.
The children took shelter behind walls, railings, pylons, and sculptures, running all around the courtyard trying to find a safe place to throw their snowballs from without getting hit themselves. Somewhere in the middle of all the chaos a car alarm could be heard, followed by irritated griping of an adult. A snowball had been packed with enough ice to set off the alarm without doing any real harm.
Watching the kids have so much fun stirred up a reminder of snowy days back up in New York. It had always been me and Cole versus the world. And that was largely in part due to me always coming up with what pranks to pull on the neighborhood kids on Christmas morning.
Once Cole and I spent a whole night trying to snowboarding the school bully in his house by piling up so much snow at the doors he had to crawl out of the window. And there may have been some snow "accidentally" thrown into his brand new Firebird he had gotten as an early Christmas gift from his rich uncle.
And certainly, you can imagine that nobody wanted to be on our side during snowball fights.
I took a handful of snow into my hands and rolled it into a ball. I glanced at Cole, checking to see if he had noticed me. He was too busy watching the children to tell I was up to anything mischievous.
Just as I was about to pitch it at him, Cole was hit was a large wad of snow that hadn't even been shaped into a ball on the side of his face. He dusted off his check and neck then looked right at me.
"Come on, Zeke. That's a little much, don't you think?"
"That wasn't me, Cole."
He peered at the snowball in my hand like I had outright lied to him.
Next thing I knew, I was the one covered in snow all across my back. I turned to see who had done it, but I found no one there.
What I did find was more snow pelting me harshly in the face.
With all the festivities I didn't even notice how much the wind had picked up. It had gotten strong enough to almost require me to focus on my balance.
And it carried more and more snow the faster it blew.
"Is it supposed to be doing that?" I asked my friend.
"No. I told Kuo just to make it a light snow."
Even as we spoke I could feel the air chill more and more and the snowfall began to cloud my sight.
What he had intended to be a casual snowfall turned into an instant blizzard.
"Something's wrong. We gotta get all the kids back inside." I had to raise my voice just to hear myself talk.
We rounded up all the children and directed them back into the church. Thankfully none of them complained about ending their snowball fight early and were glad to get out of the cold.
"What's going on, Cole," asked Connor. "I thought you said it wasn't going to get this bad."
"It's going to be alright. Kuo's probably just having a little difficulty keeping it steady."
"Not to be rude, MacGrath," said the Reverend, "but if your friend can't control her powers you shouldn't have taken the chance asking her to do something so bold."
"She just needs a little coaching, that's all. Just stay inside where it's warm. I'll be right back."
"I'll come with you brother," I volunteered. "In a storm like this, it ain't safe to go by yourself."
He agreed and we headed off into the blizzard. At first, we thought it would be an easy fix. But we never suspected that this was going to be New Marais' worst Christmas on record.