Walter sat on the edge of his bed and watched the snow drifting down outside his window. He’d have to go out in it soon. His costume was laid out beside him, waiting for him.
He had seen the door when he pulled the hanger out of the closet. He decided to go look at it again.
In the back of the closet was a door, hidden from the casual observer. Walter had not been in there for some time. There was no reason to be. But now he pushed the clothes aside and opened it, pushing the door in and entering.
It was a larger room than one would expect from the outside. Walter had never seen another like it but he knew, from his many years, that most people had a place like this, a private space no one knew of but themselves, a room where lost and broken things collected.
There was a mirror in Walter’s room, full-length, where he saw himself as he had been decades earlier. There were half-completed manuscripts on a shelf, and another shelf of books he had meant to read. Pictures of old girlfriends hung in one corner, faded and warped. Push pins displayed travel brochures on a cork board. A few lottery tickets were posted as well.
Walter stood for a long time, absorbing his surroundings, aching. He had almost forgotten he had once wanted to be a police officer, until he saw the badge on a small table, alongside pictures of the neighborhood as it had been when he was a young father raising his kids.
He turned on the record player and set down the needle. Music filled the room, snatches of piano music he had wanted to teach himself.
Sometime later he returned from his reverie. The room was filled with the smell of freshly mowed grass and sunlight, of days sweating shirtless as a child who found the world perfectly happy.
There was a box on the floor stuffed with transcriptions of mistakes he had made as a parent, things he had said and hadn’t said. He pressed them down and then began to pile the books in. Then came the posters and the records and the pictures, the scrapbooks of things that never were and the photos albums of things that could never be. He forced them in, everything, even the mirror, and tried to pick up the box. He was afraid he wouldn’t be able to carry it. It weighed nothing at all.
He closed the door to the secret room, poured the contents of the box into a smaller, decorative one which sat on his bed beside his costume. It barely fit, but he managed to press the lid on. Then he pulled the robe on over his head.
That evening Walter stood in silence, with Christmas hymns playing softly, as the visitors to the live Nativity shuffled in and out in hushed tones. He stood beside two others dressed in extravagant robes. He was Balthazar tonight, and he held the gift of myrrh, the embalming oil, before the child who would make all things new.