Cecelia Ahern - The Gift

Gabe’s crystal-blue eyes bore into Lou’s.

“Is something going to happen to them?” Lou’s voice shook as he began to panic. “I knew it. I was afraid of this. What’s going to happen to them?” He ground his teeth together. “If you did something to them, then I will — ”

“Nothing has happened to your family, Lou,” Gabe responded.

“I don’t believe you,” he said, reaching into his pocket and retrieving his BlackBerry. He looked at the screen: no missed calls. Dialing the number of his home quickly, he backed out of the stockroom, giving Gabe one last, vicious look, and ran, ran, ran.

“Remember to buckle up, Lou!” Gabe shouted after him, his voice ringing in Lou’s ears as Lou ran to the underground parking lot.

With the BlackBerry on autodial to Lou’s home, and still ringing, Lou drove out of the lot at a fierce speed. Thick, heavy rain plummeted against his windshield. Putting the wipers on the fastest speed, he put his foot down on the accelerator and sped by the empty quays. The beeping of the seat-belt warning got louder and louder, but he couldn’t hear it for all the worrying he was doing. The wheels of the Porsche slipped a little on the wet roads as he raced down the back roads of the quays, then up the Clontarf coast road to Howth. Across the sea, the two red-and-white-striped chimneys of the electricity-generating station stood seven hundred feet tall, like two fingers raised at him. Rain bucketed down, leaving visibility low, but he knew these streets well, had driven up and down them all his life. All he cared about now was driving over the small thread of land that separated him from his family and getting to them as quickly as possible. It was six thirty and pitch-black since the day had closed in. Most people were at mass or in the pubs, getting ready to wrap final presents and leave a glass of milk and a plate of cookies out for Santa, a few carrots for his chauffeur. Lou’s family was at home, having an evening meal — one that he’d promised he’d join — but they weren’t answering the phone. He looked down at his BlackBerry to make sure it was still dialing, taking his eye off the road. He swerved a little as he moved over the middle line. A car coming at him beeped loudly, and he quickly moved back into his lane again. He flew up past the Marine Hotel at Sutton Cross, which was busy with Christmas parties. Seeing a clear road ahead of him, he put his foot down. He raced by Sutton Church and by the school along the coast, passed through streets of friendly houses with Christmas trees and candles in the front windows, Santas dangling from roofs. Across the bay, the dozens of cranes lining Dublin’s skyline were laced in Christmas lights.

Lou eventually said good-bye to the bay and entered the steep road that began to ascend to his home on the summit. Rain continued to bucket down, falling in sheets, blurring his vision. Condensation was appearing on the windshield, and he leaned forward to wipe it with his cashmere coat sleeve. He pressed the buttons on the dashboard, hoping to clear the glass. The ping, ping, ping of the seat-belt warning rang again in his ears, and the condensation rapidly filled the windshield as the car got hotter. Still he sped on, his phone ringing, his desire to be with his family overtaking any other emotion he should have felt then. It had taken him twelve minutes to get to his street on the empty roads.

Finally, his phone beeped to signal a call coming through. He looked down and saw Ruth’s face — her caller ID picture. Her smile; her eyes, brown, soft, and welcoming. Glad she was at least safe enough to call him, he looked down with relief and reached for the BlackBerry.

The Porsche 911 Carrera 4S has a unique four-wheel-drive system that grips the road far better than any rear-wheel-drive sports car. It allots 5 to 40 percent of the power to the front wheels, depending on how much resistance the rear wheels have. So if you accelerate out of a corner hard enough to spin the rear wheels, power is channeled to the front, pulling the car in the right direction. All-wheel drive basically means that the Carrera 4S could negotiate the icy road with far more control than most other sports cars.

Unfortunately, Lou did not have that model. He had it on order. It would be arriving in January, only a week away.

And so when Lou looked down at his BlackBerry, so overwhelmed with relief and emotion to see his wife’s face, he had taken his eye off the road and had dived into the next corner much too fast. He reflexively lifted his foot from the accelerator, which threw the car’s weight forward and lightened the rear wheels; then he got back on the accelerator and turned hard to make the corner. The rear end broke traction, and he spun across to the other side of the road, which was the deep decline down the cliff’s edge.

The moments that followed were ones of sheer horror and confusion. The shock numbed the pain. The car turned over once, twice, and then a third time. Each time, Lou let out a yell as his head, body, legs, and arms thrashed about wildly like a doll inside a washing machine. The emergency air bag thumped him in the face, bloodying his nose, knocking him out momentarily so that the next few moments passed in a still but bloody mess.

Some amount of time later, Lou opened his eyes and tried to survey the situation. He couldn’t. He was surrounded by blackness and found himself unable to move. A thick, oily substance covered one of his eyes, preventing him from seeing, and with the one hand he could move, he found that every part of his body he touched was covered in the same substance. He moved his tongue around his mouth, tasted rusty iron, and realized it was blood. He tried to move his legs but couldn’t. He tried to move his arms and could just about move one. He was silent while he tried to keep calm, to figure out what to do. Then, when for the first time in his life he couldn’t formulate one single thought, when the shock wore off and the realization set in, the pain hit him at full force. He couldn’t get the images of Ruth out of his mind. Of Lucy, of Bud, of his parents. They weren’t far above him, somewhere on the summit; he had almost made it. In the darkness, in a crushed car, in the middle of the gorse and the hebe, somewhere on a mountainside in Howth, Lou Suffern began to whimper.

RAPHIE AND JESSICA WERE DOING their usual rounds and bickering over Raphie’s country-music tape, with which he liked to torment Jessica, as they passed the scene where Lou’s car had gone off the road.

“Hold on, Raphie,” she interrupted Raphie’s singing about his achy-breaky heart.

He sang even louder.

“RAPHIE!” she shouted, punching the music off.

He looked at her in surprise.

“Okay, okay, put your Freezing Monkeys on, or whatever you call them.”

“Raphie, stop the car,” Jessica said in a tone that made him immediately pull over. She leapt out of the car and jogged the few paces back to the scene that had caught her eye, where the trees were broken and twisted. She took her flashlight out and shone it down the mountainside.

“Oh God, Raphie, we need to call emergency services,” she shouted to him. “Ambulance and the fire department!”

He stopped his brief jog toward her and made his way back to the car, where he radioed it in.

“I’m going down!” she yelled, immediately making her way through the broken trees and down the steep incline.

“You will not, Jessica!” she heard Raphie yell back, but she didn’t listen. “Get back here, it’s too dangerous!”

She could hear him, but quickly zoned out from his shouts and could soon hear only her own breath, fast and furious, her heart beating in her ears.

Jessica, new to the squad, should never have seen a sight like this mangled car, upside down and totally unrecognizable, in her life. But she had. For Jessica, it was all too familiar; it was a sight that haunted her dreams and most of her waking moments. Coming face-to-face with her nightmare, and the replaying of a bad memory, dizziness overcame her, and she had to hunker down and put her head between her knees. Jessica had secrets, and one of them had come back to haunt her tonight. She hoped to God nobody was in that car; the car was crushed, unrecognizable, with no license plate, and in the darkness she couldn’t even tell whether it was blue or black.