They went at dusk, when the streetlights were coming on along Thirty-first Street and the snow had turned blue in the shadows. The bakery was closed, its windows dark except for the little electric candles on the sill. A narrow door beside it led to the stairs to the apartment above, and there was a light on up there, and the sound of a radio, and somebody laughing — a child, high and sudden.
Gina carried the box. Graham had insisted. They had fought about it, briefly and happily, all the way down Lowe Avenue — "You carry it." "No, you carry it, you bought it." "You hunted it." "I didn't hunt it, I made one hundred and six phone calls and found tube socks" — until finally he had stopped under a streetlight and put it in her arms and closed her gloved hands around it with his own and said, "Gina. Your father's rule. Win it first, figure out who needs it later. You figured it out. It's yours to give." And she had not been able to argue with that, which was a new and not entirely comfortable experience.
They climbed the stairs as quietly as two grown adults can climb old wooden stairs in winter boots, which is not very. She set the box on the mat outside the door. Under the ribbon, where Dot's card had been, there was a new one now, in Gina's handwriting, which she had written at her mother's kitchen table with Graham reading over her shoulder:
FOR ROSALIE. TO KEEP THE BAD DREAMS AWAY. LOVE, SANTA (AND A FRIEND OF SAL'S).
Gina looked at Graham. He looked at her. In the dim stairwell his glasses caught the light from under the door.
"Ready?" she whispered.
"I've never done this."
"It's easy. You ring it, and then you run. Don't look back."