Lakeshore Christmas (7 page)

“Who says I’m jaded on love?” he asked.

“You nearly lost your life. That must have been the last time you trusted your heart to anyone.”

“Maybe I’m a slow learner. Getting dumped at Christmas kind of became a thing with me.”

“You know what I think?” she asked, then went on without waiting for his answer. “I think you keep trying to sabotage Christmas for yourself.”

“Hey—”

“And guess what? This year, you’re not going to get away with it. This year, you’re going to have a
great
Christmas.”

“Because I get to spend it with you?” Oops, he thought, watching her face go stiff with humiliation. Wrong thing to say. “I’m teasing,” he said.

“No, you’re being mean. There’s a difference.”

“I’m sorry, okay? I really didn’t mean to hurt your feelings.”

The frames of her glasses were probably made of titanium; they looked tough as armor. “All right,” she said.

He wasn’t sure what she meant by all right. “Listen, I promise—”

“What?” she asked, every pore of her body exuding skepticism.

Good question, he thought. It had been so long since he’d promised anything to anyone. “That it’ll snow,” he said, noticing the barely detectable early flurries. “Now, there’s something I can promise.”

“The weather report said—”

“Forget the weather report. Look up, Maureen. Look at the sky.”

Maureen was about to march off to her car, eager to escape him, when she felt a shimmer of magic in the air. No, not magic. Snow. Contrary to the weather reports, the first snow of the year arrived when Eddie Haven said it would. It started with tiny, sparse crystals that thickened fast. Soon the night was filled with flakes as big as flower petals.

“Glad the snow held off until we finished,” said Eddie.

“No ‘I told you so’?” she asked him.

“Nah, you’re already annoyed at me.”

She scowled at him. “I’m not annoyed.”

“Right. Hand me that package of zip ties, will you?” He was still tweaking the light display. For someone who couldn’t stand Christmas, he sure had worked hard on the display. She wondered if he considered it a kind of redemption.

She gave him a hand, in no hurry to get home. Franklin and Eloise, her cats, had each other for company. She wondered if Eddie had any pets. Or a roommate, back in New York. She also wondered if he’d really gone dashing off for a date the other night, or if that was just her overactive imagination. She warned herself that she was far too inquisitive about this man, but couldn’t manage to stop herself from speculating about him.

As the minutes passed, the snowstorm kicked into higher gear. Thick flakes bombarded them. It was a classic lake effect storm, a sudden unleashing of pent-up precipitation. The church parking lot, empty now except for their cars, was soon completely covered. The landscape became a sculpture of soft ridges, sparkling in the amber glow of the parking lot lights.

They walked toward their cars, sounds now muffled
by the snow. She slowed her steps, then stopped. “I love the first snow of the year,” she said. “Everything is so quiet and clean.” Taking off her glasses, she tilted back her head to feel the weightless flakes on her face. Snow always reminded her of fun and exhilaration, safety and laughter. When she and her brother and sisters were little, their father used to be very quick to urge the school district to declare a snow day when the first big snow of the season came. The whole family would go to Oak Hill Cemetery, where they would make snow angels, engage in snowball fights or go sledding if there was enough of a base on the ground. No one ever remarked that celebrating the first snow in a graveyard might not be appropriate. It was Stan Davenport’s way of bringing his five kids closer to their late mother. People tended not to argue with him.

Having lost her mother at age five, Maureen was considered too young to remember, but she did. Sometimes, like when the snow was coming down in a thick and silent fury, a perfect moment would come over her. In a flash of clarity, she could remember everything—the warmth of her mother’s hands, and the way they smelled of flowery soap, the sound of her laughter, the way she liked to collapse like a rag doll in the middle of the bed Maureen shared with Renée, where she would lie with them reading
Horton Hatches the Egg
and
The Poky Little Puppy
and
Each Peach Pear Plum,
always letting them beg for one more story before snuggling them under the covers and kissing them softly.

Maureen shook off the memory to find Eddie staring at her. And although it was entirely possible that she was mistaken, she sensed a new interest in the way he was looking at her, through half-lidded eyes, with what appeared to be desire. It was the way a man regarded a
woman just before he kissed her. Which either meant she was a wildly poor reader of facial expressions, or he had unexpected taste in women.

“You okay?” he asked.

She hoped the amber parking lot lights concealed her blush. “I’m weird about snow,” she said. “So sue me.”

“I don’t think you’re weird,” he said. “Just…you look different without your glasses.”

“Everyone looks different without glasses,” she said, and put hers back on. “I’ll see you at auditions.”

“I can hardly wait,” he said.

He was speaking ironically, of course. She’d read him wrong a moment ago; she wouldn’t make that mistake again.

“Same here,” she said brightly.

“Be careful going home,” he said.

“Of course.” She got into her car and turned it on, letting the engine warm up and the defroster blow the windshield while the wipers did their work, clearing the window for a glimpse of the swirling sky. The beauty of the snow coming down never failed to take her breath away. She loved the first snow. She loved Christmas with all her heart, and she always had. It was a time of year that brought her together with friends and family, a time that filled her with hope, with the sense that anything was possible. She refused to let Eddie Haven ruin it.

He didn’t seem to know what her role was on the night he’d told her about, the night of his accident. Apparently he didn’t even realize she’d been present. It was remarkable how different her memory of that night was from Eddie’s.

Maureen had attended Heart of the Mountains Church all her life, and that year, it had been more important to her than ever. Her long-awaited, dreamed-of college
semester abroad had come to a premature and devastating end. If her family hadn’t been there for her, she had no idea whether or not she would have survived. Yet that year, and in all the years since, no one had ever asked her what Eddie had tonight:
Have you ever been that hurt by another person, so hurt you didn’t care if you lived or died?

Singing in the choir at the church that night, Maureen had lifted her voice up to the rafters and beyond. She’d known it then—there was nothing so powerful as the healing she’d found in coming home to her family. She’d always believed Christmas to be a season of miracles. The year they’d lost her mother, the miracle had happened for her father. He’d started to smile again, to live again. At a Christmas Eve potluck, he’d met Hannah, the woman he would eventually marry, the woman who would make their family whole again.

That year, it was Maureen’s turn.

She had dragged herself up from the depths of despair, and though she would never be free of the memories of her time overseas—the adventure, the romance, the heartache—she knew she would survive. That was something. When you learned you could survive the unbearable, you could take on the world.

Fortunately, taking on the world wasn’t required of Maureen. All she had to do was rethink her dreams and remake her own life.

In this, she’d had help. She wasn’t much of a believer in cosmic signs, but the world in general did seem to be sending her certain signals. Her heart broken and bleeding, she’d spent the remainder of her money on a last-minute ticket home. She’d reached the airport with only a few euro in her money belt. There, a kiosk crammed with books caught her eye.
Yes.
Her physical escape was
one thing. But her mind had needed a refuge, too. And that refuge was the most reliable place of all—between the pages of a book.

She saw nothing ironic in the notion that a mystery novel rescued her from having a psychotic break. Some people needed a prescription from a doctor. Maureen needed a trip to the bookstore. At the airport, she’d bought a mystery novel by a popular author, opened it and immediately sank into the story. While she was reading, everything else fell away and she became part of a dark and dangerous world, vicariously experiencing a fantastic series of events. When she arrived home in Avalon, she read a fantasy novel about a quest to save a forgotten world. Then she read an Edith Wharton novel because someone had once told her that when you had a broken heart, you should always read an Edith Wharton novel just to see that your heartache was not nearly as bad as it might have been. After that, she read an international spy thriller about an ancient piece of art tainted by a curse.

During the post-breakdown period, she read books the way an addict swallowed pills. She devoured stories one after the other, trying not to let reality intrude too deeply. At the end of it all, when she knew she had to reclaim her life and remake it according to a new vision, she emerged with a strong, clear goal for herself.

“You’re changing your major to library science?” asked her sister Renée.

“That’s right.”

Her father had beamed at her. “We’ve never had a librarian in the family.”

It turned out to be the perfect fit for Maureen, so perfect that she was surprised she’d never considered a career as a librarian before.

And that Christmas Eve, surrounded by family, friends
and fellow worshipers, she’d blended her voice with the others, and her heart filled up. Yes, she’d been hurt—devastated. But her spirit refused to break. Life was just too precious, and Christmas too wonderful, to be spent wallowing in misery.

From that moment onward, Maureen vowed, she was going to be all right. She was going to be—

On that night of reverence and healing, a terrific crash had exploded into her moment of revelation. All the lights in the church had gone out. Panic erupted from every quarter of the sanctuary. Women screamed and children cried. Parents gathered their families close and led them to safety. People took cover or fled through emergency exits, because at that point, no one knew what had happened.

Everyone rushed outside and saw that a fireball had smashed through the Christmas display and slammed into the building. It was not immediately apparent what had happened. Had a meteor hit?

As a blast of icy wind roared at the conflagration, Maureen could see what everyone else saw—the flaming, twisted, skeletal remains of a panel van. It was a red-hot shell, a torch, setting fire to the timber beams of the portico at the main entrance.

There was a hiss and whir as the sprinkler system engaged.

A few people leaped into action, yelling into mobile phones. A guy dressed like a shepherd used his staff to break open the fire extinguisher case, and an alarm shrieked into the night.

Kids in their angel and livestock costumes gathered in an intermingling flock.

Several people tried to get to the van, but the deadly flames held them back.

“Good Lord have mercy,” someone said. “Have mercy on those poor souls in the van, whoever they are.”

“No one could have survived that crash,” someone else commented. “The thing must have burst into flames on impact.”

Maureen’s heart lurched. To see people killed on Christmas Eve only compounded the cruelty of the tragedy.

Within minutes, sirens sounded and the emergency vehicles started to arrive. Unnatural blue and red light swept the area, smearing color across the snow.

Maureen felt drawn to the scene, although she was of little use when it came to rescuing people. Someone—a firefighter—said it was a recovery situation, not a rescue. “It’d take a miracle to survive that fireball,” said one of the EMTs.

As the meaning of that sank in, Maureen felt sick. She turned from the scene, lifting her feet high through the drifted snow. She felt oddly guilty, remembering how happy, how peaceful she’d been feeling only moments before. It was horrible to realize that while she was quietly exulting in the new direction of her dreams, someone else’s life was ending. She felt horribly connected to the event. In the sanctuary, she had wept tears of relief upon realizing she had a home to return to, a family to comfort her. She was surprised that only moments had passed since then. It felt like so much longer. She automatically did a head count of her family, finding them all present and accounted for—her dad and stepmom, somber and holding each other close. Her sisters, her brother and his family—everyone safe and sound.

Drawing her choir robe more snugly around her, she wandered through the crowd. Kids were still crying. Some people prayed. Others looked desperate to do
something, anything. Two guys were arguing about letting people back into the building. Everything had been left there—coats and purses, street clothes, car keys. Pastor Hogarth was inviting people into the reflection chapel, an annex to the church that had not been saturated by the sprinklers, which had been tripped on when someone pulled a fire alarm. He wanted to hold an impromptu prayer vigil for the unknown victims of the crash. The voices all sounded distant and hollow to Maureen, and no one spoke to her. It was as if she were invisible. Was her choir robe an invisibility cloak? The silvery fabric had been chosen by Mrs. Bickham years ago; she insisted the metallic look added a festive touch. Maureen had always thought they added a Vegas show-girl touch, but maybe that was just her. She detached herself from the crowd, heading away from the smoke and the noise.

Bloodred flashes fell from the revolving light of an emergency vehicle. This was crisscrossed by the glaring beams of searchers’ flashlights and the bluish lightning bolts of police squad cars, flooding the area and turning the snow to an eerie shifting field of color. Here and there, she could see items from the nativity scene—piles of straw and broken weathered wood, unidentifiable bits of plaster statuary and shattered floodlights.