A Fantastic Holiday Season: The Gift of Stories (15 page)

She unnerved him. He recognized that.

The lights of the Eiffel Tower did not comfort him, so he walked to Notre Dame. He checked his phone—no calls, of course—but its clock told him that it wasn’t yet midnight.

Well-dressed worshippers walked behind the large Christmas tree near the entrance. The blue lights decorating the tree startled him as they had from the beginning; he was still used to red and green and white. But Paris preferred blue—all along the Champs-Elyéese, near Les Halles and in the Place de la Concorde—so very much blue.

Blue Christmas.

He almost walked around the gigantic tree himself. He could hear choral music on the night air, the harmonies pure and clear. He hesitated.

History waited for him in there, that sense of time standing still. Midnight mass at Notre Dame on Christmas Eve had to date back hundreds, maybe even a thousand years.

But it wouldn’t satisfy him. Christmas Eve mass wasn’t his tradition, wasn’t something he really believed in, wasn’t something that would touch his heart.

Like the brush of cool fingers as they touched the edge of his coat.

The man who owned this 
…

How had she known?

He turned, looked back down the street toward the Cluny Museum, which was impossible to see from here. He only had a sense of it, knew that it wouldn’t be open, maybe not even lit. It had looked surprisingly dowdy compared to the show the rest of Paris put on in the holiday season.

But he wasn’t looking at the museum. He was thinking of the Metro station. By the time he walked back, it would be closed. She would be gone.

Or would she?

He shook his head slightly, and stood, hands in his pockets, staring at the tree and the massive cathedral behind it.

This moment was almost magical enough for him. The music, the blue lights, the worshippers crossing the ancient stone, going under the ancient arches.

He took one step forward, and a hand slipped through his arm.

He looked to his side. She was there. She wore a black coat now over her black dress, with what looked like fur trim on the wrists and neck. She looked up at him and smiled.

“I do not go into such places,” she said. “They make me crazy.”

Then, she patted his arm, slipped away, and walked toward the tree. Its blue lights fell across her features, altering them, making her look almost two dimensional, like the old computer images. Her fingers rose toward the branches, brushing them like she had brushed his coat.

She stepped back.

Worshippers went around her, as if she were giving off a force field. One or two frowned at her as they went by. Others gathered their coats tightly around themselves and shivered.

He watched, not certain what she was doing.

The choral music flowed high above them, the harmonies unearthly.

She came back to him, slipped her arm through his, and said, “Let’s go.”

They walked through the quiet city. The lights made it seem like it had been abandoned mid-party. The scents of cigarettes and perfume followed them, and eventually, he realized it wasn’t just his coat. The scents also came from her.

When they came to the Institut de France, illuminated in white, they turned toward the Pont des Arts bridge. In all of his time in Paris, he had never seen the bridge empty—no humans at all.

The benches in the center bore no kissing couples, the wooden slats looked slick and lonely. The day’s padlocks remained on the railings, bearing the names of lovers, of happy couples and important dates. No one had cleared them off yet, and he wondered if anyone would over the holiday.

She led him up the bridge, her hands wrapped around his arm. The Seine reflected lights, mostly blue, from the holiday itself.

“You said you know my coat,” he said, because he couldn’t stand the sound of his heels on the wood. It sounded as lonely as he felt, even though he was walking with a beautiful woman in the most beautiful city in the world.

She led him to one of the benches, and ran her hand across it. Then she rubbed her fingers together as if testing whether or not they were wet.

She sat, then patted the wood beside her. It looked surprisingly dry.

“Your coat, like everything else in this city, has a past,” she said softly. “It called to me.”

He frowned, wishing she could be clear, maybe afraid that she was clear.

“It is why I watched you in the Metro,” she said. “I had forgotten the coat.”

Then she shook her head.

“I had forgotten the solstice. I have slept for so long.”

He frowned at her. She smiled at him. The light again played on her face, only this time, it was golden light reflected off the water and the buildings on either side of the bridge. The Louvre cast the most light. Perhaps, he thought, it should, since it gave the bridge its name.

The random thoughts, his emotional distance, the remaining loneliness, they still surprised him. This beautiful woman, for all her odd talk, should have intrigued him more.

But he didn’t understand her, almost as if she were speaking a different language and he only caught every other word.

“I wanted to believe I was used to iron,” she said, “and then it trapped me.”

She leaned her head on his shoulder for just a moment. He expected warmth. Instead, he got more perfume, more cigarettes.

“You freed me, you know.”

“What?” he asked.

She shook her head. “My people—this was our holiday. Mid-winter. We celebrated with lights. We put greenery in our homes. We danced, and feasted, and made love …”

He shuddered. He shouldn’t have shivered when a beautiful woman spoke of sex.

“Then we lost our homes, our forests, and came Paris.” She ran a hand along his coat. “The man who owned this, he is dead now.”

Alex had supposed that much. Coats like this didn’t end up in thrift stores by accident.

“He died defending me. My family, we hid in those tunnels, because the Germans, they decided to do what they had always done. Take us, destroy us, make us into something more like them.” She nodded toward the road they had just walked on. “Like that cathedral, with one of our trees outside.”

She really was crazy. Germans, dead men, trees. She seemed to be conflating World War II with the Christian Church slowly taking over the pagan celebrations and making them part of the liturgy.

She made him nervous.

But Alex had to ask. “He died defending you?”

She nodded, then looked at Alex, tears in her eyes. “He had a pistol. He held the Germans off while my family and I escaped into the ghost tunnels. We were to leave, but the iron, it held us prisoner, changed us, trapped us. Like rats. That is how I first saw you, through the wall. I thought you were him.”

God, what was he to do with her? She was against the church, so he couldn’t take her to the priests there for help. And he had no idea what other place might take her in. He wasn’t even sure where the homeless shelters were—if there even were homeless shelters in this city.

She clearly had escaped from somewhere—an institution, a caregiver. Someone had to be looking for her, right?

There were several hospitals close to here, one near the Louvre itself. He wondered if he could get her there. He had never had cause to use any of the medical facilities in the city before.

“But you are not him, are you?” She brushed at his coat, as if she were removing lint. “You are not even his reincarnation. Mortals have such short lives.”

Alex couldn’t help himself. He engaged. “What are you, if not mortal?”

Her smile was sad. “We are so lost you no longer recognize us.”

She swept her hair back, then cupped his cheek. Her touch was cold.

“Lonely man,” she said. “You believe forever lonely.”

He tried not to move, not to betray anything with his expression. How had she known that? Was it that obvious?

It probably was. He was alone on Christmas Eve, after all. He was American. He clearly didn’t belong.

It didn’t take much to figure out that he was lonely, that he had no one to spend his time with.

“Because you freed me,” she said softly, “I owe you.”

“I don’t understand,” he said, “how did I free you?”

“You saw me,” she said. “As me, not as what I had become. To most, I was a creature. To others, the ghost of a woman they once loved. But to you, I was myself. You saw only me.”

She flattened her palm on his heart.

“It is because you have no woman and lost no woman that you saw me. It is your sadness that brought me back to life.”

Like the station itself
, something whispered in his head. He didn’t like that thought. It made him uncomfortable. But, then,
she
made him uncomfortable.

“So,” she said, “a gift to you.”

She placed her red lips against his forehead. They were cold, like the rest of her.

And then, oddly, his heart lifted. Like it used to do when he was a child, when his parents were alive.

His mother used to say,
Your heart has wings
.

It had wings now.

“Sometimes,” the woman before him said, “hearts shatter. They must be repaired before they work again.”

Then she placed her chill forefinger under his chin, lifted his head slightly, and kissed him on the lips.

“I thank you,” she said—and disappeared.

He sat on the bench for a long time. Bells rang all over the city for midnight mass—Christmas Eve mass.

She had been an illusion, a figment of his overheated imagination.

He had himself convinced of that by the time he finished the long walk back to his apartment. A Christmas Eve hallucination. An undigested bit of beef, as Scrooge once said of Marley’s ghost.

Who turned out to be real enough.

Alex shuddered, not certain why he was so very cold. It was warmer in Paris on Christmas Eve than it usually was in Chicago on Christmas Eve. There, he would not have walked the center of the city in a coat, without a hat or gloves.

He took off the coat, and hung it on the built-in coat hanger near the door. Then he walked into the bathroom to wash the chill from his skin. He turned on the overhead light, and saw his face in the mirror, cheeks rosy from the chill, skin a bit too pale.

But that wasn’t what caught his eye.

What caught his eye was the bright red lipstick print on his forehead, with traces of the same lipstick on the side of his mouth.

She had been real.

And she had disappeared as if she had never been.

Oddly, he didn’t return to the Cluny-La Sorbonne Metro station for nearly a year. If asked, he would not say that was by design. He still used the Metro—maybe more than he had before—but he no longer wandered into the stations by himself, no longer stood waiting for midnight trains to whoosh by him on the way to something much more important.

He had important things to do now. A wife, an infant daughter, newly born. The City of Light had become a city of warmth for him.

He ended up in the Cluny-La Sorbonne by accident on the Winter Solstice, a bouquet of winter flowers in his hand, a bottle of wine under his arm. He had been distracted; he got on the wrong train, which brought him here.

He had already called his wife to apologize for being late. His wife, so lovely, so French. She had no family either, so she helped him make one. They had met on New Year’s Eve. He hadn’t planned to go out, yet he couldn’t stay in. He’d never been in a world-class city on a world-class holiday. It seemed churlish to avoid the celebrations.

And he didn’t want to seem lonelier than he already was.

He had stumbled into her. Truth be told, he worried for a half second that she was the crazy woman from the Metro, but his wife was not tiny or crazy. She was tall and blonde and sensible. She filled his arms, and somehow, she filled his heart—the heart he once thought untouchable.

Maybe it had healed. Or maybe …

That sensation of wings returned to him whenever he thought of that moment on the Pont des Arts. A gift, the strange woman had said. A gift he had told no one about.

He was the only person inside the Cluny-La Sorbonne. The birds mosaic flew overhead. The signatures glistened. And then the announcement sounded. The station had closed. Only one exit remained open.

He turned toward the wall, expecting rats.

But there were none.

His breath caught.

He wanted to believe the city had gotten rid of them.

But he had looked up old legends in the past year. Stories of Faerie. Trapped by iron, forced to change shape in their prison. Industrialization destroyed their habitat, just like the church had stolen their power.

The Germans had searched for them. Hitler believed magic would become one of the weapons of the Third Reich. If the Faerie existed, they hid.

And sometimes, all it took was something simple to destroy a curse.

Like a man, looking at a woman, and seeing her for who she was.

Alex shook his head, smiled at his fanciful nature. His wife said he was a dreamer. Perhaps he was.

Now.

He pulled one of the white roses from the bouquet. He knew the strange woman was no longer down here, just like he knew the rats were truly gone. But he needed a token anyway.

He placed the rose on the bench near where he had first seen her.

Whoever she was, she had touched him. She had made him see a future he didn’t want, one of lonely Christmas Eves that extended forever, like the Metro tunnels, midnight trains running with no one to board them.

He might have seen her, but she saw him as well.

And because she had, he saw himself more clearly.

That vision, that moment, led to this one.

“Thank you,” he whispered—and then walked to the exit, holding flowers for his wife, wine for their celebration, and a little bit of hope, in the wings of his heart.

***