Carol for Another Christmas (14 page)

Separating the spaces was an empty fireplace made of stone, not steel. The floor was wood, with Navajo rugs scattered around. There was an Easyboy chair, a wildly expensive office chair like the one Monica had (she suspected either he gave himself and Doug matching ones or the other way around), and a gigantic computer station. A stained glass lamp hung overhead, and beside the desk was an empty box with a flannel-cased pillow covered in cat fur. She remembered hearing that Wayne's only pet, a yellow cat named Bozobit, had recently died. She remembered quite a bit about Wayne, now that she thought about it. She'd been paying more attention than she realized.

The place was not littered, dusty, or dirty, which made Monica think he probably had help in to clean. The swag on the door was the only hint of Christmas, though, which was sad. Wayne had always loved Christmas. But then, he'd been counting on spending it with his mother. It was sad that he'd ended up alone in his empty house without even his cat.

But the companionship he had now was where he'd usually found it—inside his computer. He had left it on with a
Star Trek
screen saver running—the new edition, with Chakotay calling on his animal spirits to save the ship.

“Won't we be on there?” Monica asked. “How wide does this haunting spread, anyway?”

The Ghost of Christmas Present shook his head, put his finger to his lips, and pointed.

Wayne called for his e-mail. The screen scrolled down and down and down so that Monica could imagine it stretching page after page across the room if it was hard copy.

He clicked on the first message, then clicked “Read.”

With a swoosh and snap that blew Monica's hair straight back, she and the spirit found themselves in a high school gymnasium lined with sleeping bags and filled with all sorts of people in rugged clothes, rubber boots, sweaters, coats, and slickers. In the center of the room was a Christmas tree and beneath it were wrapped packages, open boxes of smoked meats, fruits, nuts, and sweets from mail-order food firms and Seattle caterers. Children were playing mostly with waterproof toys, except for the ones that were playing with the wrapping. Sitting in a corner, with his back propped up against a blanket roll, a young man sat tapping on a notebook computer. A cord snaked across the floor and over through an open door to an office telephone. “Dear Paddy,” the man wrote, as Monica could tell because she could look right over his shoulder. “This is not exactly a traditional Christmas. The floods have wiped out a good portion of the Skagit Valley, though the sandbags and crews of neighbors saved Mount Vernon. I'm getting ready to go out with one of the rowboat crews Search and Rescue and the Humane Society are organizing to look for people and animals trapped by the flood. Just wanted you to know this is one of the craziest Christmases I've ever seen. Some anonymous donor sent a big tree to the shelter, complete with presents and tons of food for the victims and volunteers. Also, the insurance companies have already been sending agents around to assess damage, and some checks have been cut already. Someone has definitely applied pressure someplace. Maybe it was that e-mail message I wrote bawling out Johansen, you figure? Thanks for your words of concern, Paddy, but Janet and the kids are fine. The kids were scared at first, but now I think they're high on the adrenaline and thrilled by the novelty, though a little worried about Patches, our dog. Gotta go catch a rowboat and try to find the critter. Happy Holidays, Ralph.”

Monica and the spirit swooshed again and found themselves back in Wayne's den. He was smiling a little as he read the letter.

“He's Paddy, right?” she asked the spirit. “He sent all those things and put the screws to the insurance companies? Either that, or he's already monitoring other peoples' e-mail and we're behind the times with Get a Life. But you'd think I'd have heard about it.”

“Oh, really!” the spirit said, sounding exasperated with her turn of mind.

Wayne clicked on another e-mail message and they were transported to a hospital. The scene was not cheerful. “Sarajevo, day four of the new cease-fire,” a woman journalist typed. She wrote of the day she'd spent watching the few doctors and nurses try to care for injured people, of how little food there was and how much despair in the wake of an ugly, debilitating war.

Monica read what the woman was writing but paid only the scantest attention to it, really. She was wandering like the ghost she resembled among corpse-like infants tied to cribs, hollow-eyed women and girls with arms the size of chopsticks and faces so emaciated you could count the teeth in their closed mouths sticking out, screaming old people missing limbs or with head injuries. The place was filthy, and the doctors and nurses couldn't even wash their hands, much less the ward.

“Get us out of here,” she said to the spirit.

The spirit himself was dismayed. Never had he beheld a less Christmassy place, even in the slums of his own London.

Then she noticed a GI standing at the entrance to the ward. He was not young and looked like he might have been a bank clerk or a real estate broker at home, which was entirely possible since many of the troops were from reserve units. A nurse looked up, furtively, afraid he'd take up her time.

“Ma'am, some of the children at home heard about the babies here and how they just lie tied in bed all day with nothing to look at and—well, I know it isn't much, but some of us who have kids or used to be teachers got classes to make origami figures. We got 'em strung into mobiles for the babies. Be glad to hang them. Promise not to get in your way.”

The nurse nodded and waved at him and he motioned for a couple of younger men, both agile and tall, to follow. They brought with them sacks of paper birds and boxes, strung with olive drab thread, and tacked or taped or tied them to the bars above the various cribs. The other children on the ward watched warily, as if expecting the figures to explode, and very slowly, some of the young ones tied to the beds began to follow the mobiles with their eyes. It wasn't Christmas—no one actually smiled—but maybe it was a little less bleak.

The older man started to leave and the nurse said, “Wait. Could we have that tape? The extra thread? Have you any tacks left?”

He gave them to her and then she did smile. “Thank you and—thank the children for us. It looks nicer.”

She turned back to bandage a stump.

Monica and the spirit were once more in Wayne's den. His head was in his hands as he read the letter from the journalist. He clicked on another.

They were on the Pacific Coast of the Olympic Peninsula. Monica recognized it from family vacations when she and Doug were children. But the town they were in was run-down, weather-beaten, water-stained, the sky full of lashing rain and sleet, the sea tossing restlessly in its sleep, vomiting mare's tails up over the highway and the flimsy-looking buildings. Houses here were mobile homes, most of them old, with thrown-together wanagins attached and weed-strewn, junk-clogged yards. In one of these a man wrote, “Paddy, as you know, the fishing for the Makah people was not good this year. And while some of us may be happy for the sake of the trees that the timber industry isn't doing too hot, it's bad news for the families here supported by logging. With the BIA cutbacks, the clinic had to close, and we may have only one teacher next year. The Food Bank brought stuff to help a lot of families, but some of it sure is weird. Who wants the artichoke hearts and hoisin sauce on their canned beans, I wonder?”

This man wasn't the only one in the trailer. Bodies slept everywhere. There had to be twenty people in there. And there was a woodstove blazing away, but Monica could see it barely heated a space two feet away from itself because it leaked most of the heat up the chimney. The wind blew through the cracks, and the man writing the message shivered. “He has money enough for a computer, I see,” she said, “for all his complaining.”

“Probably that's what they spent all their money on,” the ghost said. “Computers and other elaborate equipment. Let's look.” But they found very little else in the way of technical equipment or luxuries in any of the private homes, except for televisions, many of which were broken or had such bad reception as to be useless. Across kitchen tables and on sofas lay many beautiful pieces of artwork, however: carving, basketry, and beadwork in progress and hidden away in packages in many of the homes, waiting for the families to wake up.

Monica felt dizzy with all the traveling they had done that night, visiting the people in Wayne's computer. Not all of it was sad. The music-interest news-groups were full of parties among friends, some of the people in the book-discussion groups got new books or the loan of new books from others in their group, but usually, at the other end of the click, someone was sitting alone, typing a message to someone else they'd never met. Intellectual messages, political messages, lovelorn messages, hysterical messages, angry messages, sleazy messages, crazy messages, business messages, humorous messages, and merely chatty messages. Wayne didn't read them all. He chose only some, and most of them he answered as Paddy, but he sent kind words, funny words, soothing words, encouraging words, and stern words to many, and to a few he sent a bit more than that. Monica had never seen this side of him, and she realized how little she knew of him. Well, how could anyone have known either him or Doug, unless they were available through a computer? But she was pretty sure Doug's communication never went like this. There was a lot of the kind and generous boy she had met when his mother made her that first good Christmas after the death of her parents.

“There!” she said to the ghost. “That one's scam ming, plain as day. And there's that married guy, trying to con girls.”

“And there's the class of deaf youngsters wishing Merry Christmas to their hearing friends, and there's the young mother, who has to stay at home with her sick baby but has no funding, borrowing her friend's computer to ask for advice about her baby's illness. If it was in an orphanage, where it belongs, she wouldn't have to annoy her friend with her demands.”

“I get the point,” Monica said, hearing her own opinions mimicked back to her.

“Oh, and there's one who's being hounded by the tax collectors for debts incurred by her dead husband, who of course neglected to tell her about them. What sort of person would hound that poor widow at Christmas, do you suppose? Why, it would take someone as mean as I once was—”

“Oh, shut up,” Monica said, but she got the point.

She wouldn't have been surprised if some of the people they met weren't people she'd dunned when she was working for the government. It seemed to her they met most of the United States, half of Canada, and a good portion of the world that night over the Internet. People who owned computers, people who went to work before and after hours to use business computers, people who borrowed computers from friends or rented them at copy shops and cafés, open on Christmas specifically for their user customers. Many were lonely or desperate or desperate to help desperate people they knew. And through their computers many other people responded. There was nothing subversive about most of the groups, but she would not have been surprised to know that Senator Johansen would have been interested in the contents of their files.

Wayne was staring thoughtfully at the screen when they rejoined him in his den, and he punched a couple of keys too rapidly for Monica to see what he did, but neither she nor the ghost departed with those keystrokes.

Then he hit one more and they found themselves alone in a darkened building of concrete and wire and smelling of antiseptic, used kitty litter, and wet dog. In an office, accompanied by a brindled guardian cat of considerable fluff and importance, a woman sat typing into a Macintosh: “Dear Paddy, I couldn't bear to think of the critters alone on Christmas Eve, so I came back in to keep them company for a while. Very few people adopted pets for Christmas this year, and we had more strays than usual dumped on us. One little puppy—purebred Lab from the look of him—was dumped in the fenced yard of a woman who doesn't like dogs. Another little dog was found in the parking lot at Boeing. And I came to work a week ago to find a whole litter of kittens freezing their pencil-stub tails off in front of the door. They looked like poster kids for the Humane Society; they're so cute, fluffy, and wide-eyed. At least they were mostly weaned and only needed a little more bottle feeding. But we can't keep them too much longer.”

Monica turned to see the Ghost of Christmas Present dangling a piece of yarn for a fluffy, blue-eyed kitten in a cage to bat at. Two of its siblings dozed, but two were sitting up, one yawning, one ready to jump in.

“What is this? I'm getting guilt- tripped for Christmas? Wayne must be losing it to be spending the night this way! Why doesn't he just go back to work or something?” she complained, but her whining fell on deaf ears as the spirit was busy laughing at the kitten doing backward somersaults to catch the yarn between its pink paw pads.

Another click and they were watching as Wayne sighed and shrugged his shoulders and looked mournfully at the empty cat bed.

“Spirit, just let me out of this—whatever it is—and I promise, I'll go straight to that shelter when I wake up and get Wayne a cat. Hell, it's a big house. I'll get him the whole damned litter. But—”

The spirit shook his head and pointed. Wayne was reading another message. Monica and the spirit read over his shoulder. He was picking up a message to him from a group called Soulmates. “Aha,” Monica said. “Wayne's been courting?”

But though the message was from a woman, the tone wasn't what Monica expected.

“Hi, Paddy,” the message said. “Sorry to hear it's such a bummer for you. Sorry you couldn't make your girl see reason. You sound like a nice guy. You say you grew up with her younger brother and you think she still thinks of you that way even though you're both in your forties. That's a toughie. Maybe it's not really that. Sometimes, by the time a person has reached middle age, they've just been hurt so many times they make up reasons not to respond to someone who might care for them. She sounds lonely, from what you say. Please be careful and don't get caught up in that thing a lot of nice guys do—my husband did before he met me—of finding some total witch to romanticize about and believing she really has a heart of gold. If you hadn't told me how selfless this woman had been raising your friend after their parents died, I'd be ready to put her in the cold and heartless category. Anyway, I hope it works out for you, Paddy. Merry Christmas. LauraH@
ranier.com
.”