Christmas, Present (10 page)

Authors: Jacquelyn Mitchard

Tags: #Literature & Fiction, #Contemporary, #Women's Fiction, #Contemporary Women, #Domestic Life, #Contemporary Fiction, #Literary

BOOK: Christmas, Present

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Annie tried to pretend she had been forced to visit a landmark with a group of perfect strangers.

“Dad, look at the line,” pragmatic Rory said softly. “It’s, like, a block long . . . and I’m starving . . . couldn’t we come back another time? We’re going to be here.. .” “How about never?” Annie suggested. “How about we come back never? I mean, let’s go up in the Eiffel

Tower . . . how very original!” “Look, Anna,” Elliott began.

“Ann-eeeee!” his daughter pounced. “Hello! Pleased to meet you; I’m your daughter, and I’m also, pardon me, the only one who ever thinks about her anyhow, so this whole tribute to my father’s long-lost love kind of sucks . . .”

“That’s not true!” Rory shouted. “I think about her all the time!”

“Oh, yes, little Miss Cathy Rigby? How many Sat- urdays have I had to sit on a hard bleacher seat listen-

ing to ‘Eye of the Tiger’ umpteen times while a bunch of little anorexics did their floor exercise?”

“You . . . you.” Rory glanced at Amelia. “You butt wipe, Annie! You think that because you’re the oldest, you loved her better.”

“I think I knew her! I don’t think any of you did!” “Shut up!” Elliott shouted, hideously embarrassed

for the two elderly couples who jumped and grabbed for each other’s hands. He lowered his voice. “Annie, you can stay down here and . . . and use the cell phone to call your lousy hoodlum friends”—Annie snorted—“if you want; but Rory and Amelia and I are going to go up there, and yeah, forgive me if I haven’t had . . . the heart to talk about Mom every day since she’s been gone, not because I don’t miss her but
because
I miss her like hell . . . or the time to tell you stories about her every day, partially because you’ve done everything in your power to make my life a con- stant effort to keep you out of juvenile detention.”

“Don’t blame me because you just couldn’t wait to repaint the bedroom.”

“Your mother and I had one of the best marriages I ever knew of, Annie! I hope you get lucky enough to have one as good yourself!” Elliott snapped, taking the two younger girls by their hands and taking his place at the end of the line, glancing at the lowering sun and hoping his private ritual would not have to be post- poned by Annie’s tantrum. “Try not to get kidnapped while we’re up there!”

While they waited, Elliott trying to recover his breath and reading to the girls about the history of the structure from a pamphlet, giving them each bites of the single chocolate bar he had, Annie made an elabo- rate pantomime of stomping off, inspecting a whirling kiosk of postcards, applying her lip gloss—all the while glancing at Elliott to make sure he noticed her indifference. At last, with a huge sigh, she joined them, folding her arms and facing away from her fam- ily, at the remove of a couple of yards, in the queue.

When they finally reached the top of the elaborate web, Elliott had not even the chance to take out his camera before he literally ran into a woman who was

busy trying to control her short skirt, straw hat, and carryall. “Be careful!” she cried. “
S’il vous plaît!
You’ll knock me off!”

“There are strong fences. Don’t be afraid. I’m an American,” Elliott said.

“I’m afraid of heights,” the woman confided. “I’m also an American. I’ve crept along the edge of every monument in Europe. Why do I do it? I keep think- ing I’ll conquer my fear. I never do. And I understand irrational fear. I see it in my work every day. If there had been the slightest breeze, I wouldn’t have come up here at all!”

Yet, at that moment, a brisk wind whipped her hat from her head and sent it whirling down, down, impossibly down, like a child’s paper helicopter.

“Fantastique!”
a priest standing nearby said, snap-

ping his fingers.
“Petite tournedos!”

Elliott was noticing with surprise that the woman’s hair, set free, was the same obstinate reddish hair, tex- ture and tint, as Rory’s—a genetic caprice he and Laura had never decoded, since no one in either fam- ily had ever had red or auburn hair.

The woman threw up her hands in a vain, far-too- late attempt to retrieve her hat as it sailed up and over. “See?” she told Elliott, laughing. “No breeze, any- where else, except for me! Does it serve me right? And now I have to walk
down
! And I hate the walking
down

more than the going up!”

“I’ll walk in front of you, with my girls,” Elliott offered. “Rory, my middle daughter, would walk on the parapet if I’d let her. And she could do it, too. She’s a gymnast.”

“She’s a doll,” the woman told him softly, as she turned to follow him to the mouth of the far too revealing staircase. “Except for her poor hair. Does she
hate
being a redhead?”

“Yes,” Elliott said, “but everyone else thinks it’s wonderful.”

“Umm,” the woman mused, “has she seen an orthodontist? She could have a partial retainer right now that might spare her a full set of braces later on. That should have been seen to sooner.”

“I know, I know. I just have had so much to do for them . . . I let it slip. I’m a single parent.”

“Her arch is small . . . ,” the woman commented. “Are you a dentist?” Elliott asked.

“Yes, I am,” the woman told him. “I’m a children’s dentist. Children are never afraid, you know. It’s their parents who instill the fear.” They proceeded into the line before the exit, when Elliott remembered the bag nestled in his pocket.

“I have to do something, so if you want to, you can go on,” he suggested. “I’m sorry.”

“What? Take a photo? I’ll wait.”

“Well, it’s . . . embarrassing, a little private.” “Oh, I wouldn’t want to . . . ”

“It’s my mother’s ashes,” Annie interrupted. “Well, some of them. She’s dead. Well, obviously. And she always wanted to go to Paris with Dad; but instead she had a brain hemorrhage on the Big Dig, in Boston, in our car.”

“The Big Dig? In Boston? Don’t tell me they’re still at that! I went to school in Boston,” the woman said. “I live in the Berkshires.”

“It was quite a long time ago,” Elliott said.

“On Christmas Eve, it will be four years,” Annie

corrected him. “That’s not so long. She died at five o’clock at night. I was thirteen. I’ll be seventeen in a month.”

“Christmas?” The woman removed her sunglasses and covered her eyes with one hand. “That is what is unbearable about having a family. To love and let go. At least, that’s how I comfort myself, because I’ve never had children, though I wanted them. My hus- band didn’t. And then, I imagine I didn’t want him, as a result. I’m talking too much. I always talk too much. But I suppose it’s why I do the work I do. Not because I talk too much. Children. Being with children. I don’t mean I can identify with your life. I would never suggest that not having something is the same as los- ing it. How unbearably sad. On Christmas?”

Elliott looked down and fiddled with his pockets, as if to cover up a shameful spot. “Yes,” he admitted. “We go away at Christmas. To my father’s in Florida. We’ve done okay. My mother-in-law virtually gave up her business to help out with the girls . . . we managed.”

“Her heart went to a boy who was born with his heart backwards—not Grandma’s, I mean my mom’s.

He was twelve and he was on his last legs,” Rory said, shooting Annie a triumphant look. “And her eyes went to a lady who’d never seen her baby. And her lungs . . .”

“That’s okay, Rory, that’s enough,” Elliott told her gently.

“I’m impressed by that, all of that,” the woman told Rory, seriously, without condescension. “She must have been a very remarkable woman.”

“Not really,” Rory said. “She could do back walkovers, even though she was an older lady, like you. She was nice, but Karen is a better cook, even Dad says so . . .”

“Your . . . girlfriend?” the woman asked Elliott, glancing at his left hand. He had removed his ring only two years before, on the night that Whitney, one of Laura’s friends, arranged a date for him with one of the women who worked with her at her catering com- pany. They’d had six dates. Elliott enjoyed her. Then, one day, when they were finishing a tennis match, the woman, Clare, a lively, compact brunette, tapped him on the rear with her racquet and told him, simply, she

sensed that his heart wasn’t in it—and Elliott knew she didn’t mean the tennis.

“No, Karen is the woman who helps us out,” Elliott explained, “at home. She is a great cook. She’s worked for us since Laura died. Laura was more interested in the kids and the dog, in reading instead of cleaning. She did like to iron, but it took her all day to do two shirts. We didn’t care. She could spend two hours making a giant macaroni mosaic with Amelia. And she
could
cook, Rory. Remember the Christmas cookies?”

“I remember the Christmas chocolate tree.”

“See?” Annie said sharply. “You don’t remember her.

It’s
called
a Bûche de Noel, Rory.”

“No. None of you has forgotten her,” the red-haired dentist interrupted. “Look what you’re doing here. That matters. It’s a lovely memorial. It’s wonderful you’re still mindful of her. And . . . if you don’t care too much, I’ll wait with you. All of you.”

Elliott poured thimble-sized heaps of ash into each of the girls’ hands. One by one, they opened their hands, brushing their palms as the sky darkened and the moon’s ghostly crooked smile appeared. Elliott

131

breathed slowly, out and in, then out again, no longer quite able to summon Laura’s voice or her scent, but grateful he had kept a promise he had never believed he would keep, kept it through the good grace of Laura. Then he emptied the bag, blowing gently on the last particles, dispersing them in the dusk, until they disappeared into the first twinkling of nightfall in the City of Lights. Laura was in Paris.

“I’ll walk down with you now,” Elliott said, offering a handshake, forgetting, then blushing, drawing it back. “My hand may still have . . . I’m Elliott.
Je m’ap- pelle
Elliott.”

“That’s all right,” said the dentist, reaching out, tak- ing his hand in a firm clasp. “I don’t mind. I’m Amy.”

Acknowledgments

reat thanks to my beloved cousins—the few, the odd, the Mitchards—and the days and nights in Tuscany that inspired this story. And to my family, who endured the snowy, terrifying night on the Big Dig that set the stage. And, as ever, and forever, I am nothing without Jane, Patti, Marjorie, and Cathy,

muses of all work.

About the Author

Jacquelyn Mitchard
is the
New York Times
-bestselling author of
A Theory of Relativity
,
The Deep End of the Ocean
, and
The Most Wanted
. She is also the author of
The Rest of Us: Dispatches From the Mother Ship
, a collection of her columns that have appeared in the
Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel
for more than a decade. She lives in Madison, Wisconsin with her husband and six children. Visit her at www.jacquelynmitchardbooks.com.

By Jacquelyn Mitchard

Christmas, Present

A Theory of Relativity

The Deep End of the Ocean The Rest of Us

The Most Wanted

Credits

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Adobe Acrobat eBook Reader October 2003 ISBN 0-06-058916-7 FIRST EDITION

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