Christmas, Present Read online

  Christmas, Present

  Jacquelyn Mitchard

  For the two Karens

  And for Jill, who read this for pleasure

  Contents

  Dedication

  Begin Reading

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  By Jacquelyn Mitchard

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Begin Reading

  For weeks, he’d pestered himself over the fact that he couldn’t remember whether this anniversary was the fourteenth or fifteenth. He would later regret the silliness, the mulling. He might have spent more time with the girls, taken the week off from work, made enormous resolutions and gestures of consummate intimacy.

  Still, even in hindsight, a fourteenth anniversary sounded routine, neither a rung on the ladder midway toward a golden sunset nor an observation blushingly fresh and new.

  A fourteenth anniversary, like, perhaps, a forty-second birthday, didn’t seem to demand so much commemoration.

  But one more year would be a landmark! Somehow, to have survived in relative peace and periodic delight for a decade and a half—through the arid, sandy-eyed numbness of sleep deprivation after the girls’ births, the unexpected and brutal death of his mother, the long, anxious week waiting for the results of the withdrawal of a microscopic bite of tissue from Laura’s breast, Annie’s meningitis (ten days during which neither of them finished a single meal, together or separately)—seemed to confer a certain status on this marriage. A marriage of substance, which few of their friends could boast. Fifteen years of marriage in full would cry out for a slam-bang celebration. A high school reunion equivalent, a renewal of vows with Laura at the Wee Kirk o’ the Heather in Las Vegas, Prada boots, costing half a week’s pay, or a (very brief) cruise to the West Indies.

  He thought, by using a ruse, he might question his mother-in-law, Miranda, inventing some twaddle about checking Laura’s sizes (men being universally forgiven, even coddled, for ignorance in such matters). But he could not frame a question that would elicit the date from Laura’s cool and sharp-eyed mother. She was a busy realtor, a woman of few words except where they concerned post-and-beam construction or Carrara marble in the master bath. She would not burble forth, “And that was the last time Helen and David went anywhere together as husband and wife . . .” or “I’d just bought that silver Volvo . . .” or “Do you remember how adorable Laurie’s sister Angela looked; she was only a junior . . .”—remarks that could be checked against a family timeline.

  Their wedding album had been no help.

  It was inscribed with their names, the month and day—but, at Laura’s behest, not the year. For the same reason, the photos all were in black-and-white. “Color makes pictures look dated. I want this to be always new,” she’d said.

  They were married December 23, and all the women, including Laura, wore red velvet, the men gray morning clothes, with top hats—even without the help of color film, he could remember the splash they all made, like bright cardinals and sparrows against the snow. The photographer spread huge sheets of clear plastic beneath an evergreen bower for outdoor shots. Laura peeked from under the hood of a wool merino cape trimmed with rabbit fur, like a character from Little Women.

  The photos were timeless; not even a single car with an identifiable grille or body shape was visible.

  He might have asked his own mother outright, and she would have felt no impulse to chide him. She would have been moved by his diligence.

  He had missed his mother, more or less constantly, for two years, with the persistence of a low-grade fever that spiked in spring or at moments of acute need or tenderness. Laura resembled his mother in no way; she had different habits, preferences, and talents. But his wife still somehow recalled Amy, in common sense, in pure spirit. Laura still teased him about their first date: He had confessed he might never marry at all, never find a woman the equal of his mother. Amy had died of ovarian cancer, hadn’t even lived to hear Amelia, the daughter they had named for her, say her grandmother’s name.

  Ironically, in just two years’ time, if the Amelia of today was not talking, she was sleeping. Honoring his mother, he still sometimes called Amelia “Amy,” especially when he was the one putting her into her bed.

  Elliott’s mother was the one who, by offhand example, had instructed him in the custom that husbands, not wives, were responsible for the construction of the wedding anniversary.

  This seemed only fair.

  He knew that Laura assumed a titan’s share of the engineering of all the other holidays, getting up at four a.m. to wash and baste great birds—one year jollying her brother, Stephen, late, when the girls were tiny and fuddled with sleep, into appearing at the doorway to their room in red-padded plush and white rabbit fur. Even Annie, the eldest at thirteen, still remained convinced she’d once glimpsed the real Santa.

  Celebrating their anniversary was often deferred until New Year’s Eve—with school concerts, shopping, and the arrival of Laura’s three siblings, Elliott’s father, and sometimes his sister all crowding the week before the holiday. Her sisters and brother stayed with Miranda in the capacious Georgian brownstone she’d occupied alone since their father’s death, when Laura was only three. But Laura insisted everyone squeeze into her and Elliott’s tiny saltbox for a Christmas Eve feast of seafood and pasta. Laura made everything, from the pasta to the Buche de Noel, by hand, and her labors left her so drained, she could barely nibble at the elaborate annual brunch Miranda had had catered by the Palatial Palate on the following day. Elliott had a dozen photos of Laura, asleep on the couch at Christmas dinner. One year sometime soon, he often thought, he would protest; but he could not bear to interfere with the whispered traditions and sly confidences of the MacDermotts at Christmastime, when even the slightly chilly elder sister, Suzanne, and her precocious little boy seemed to loosen up. Laura’s childlike joy in her siblings was so much what Elliott hoped his girls’ relationship would someday be, he knew that it must be cherished. It was so different from the vaguely affectionate diffidence of his much younger sister, who taught drama at a vast Midwestern university.

  “Oh, hello,” Sarah would say, uncertainly, when he phoned her. “What’s up? What do you need?” They fumbled at small talk. She sent the girls gift cards for bookstores at their birthdays.

  Sarah, his mother had often said, was like their father—resolute, a survivor, self-reliant. What does that make me? Elliott wondered at the time. Wimpy? Dependent? Kindly, his mother said, noticing. Nothing to be ashamed of in a man.

  But at least, he’d had his mother’s example. How had Laura’s siblings grown so close? Laura said the four of them had intuited early on that they must be in league against Miranda’s invisible shield, become mother and father to one another or wither.

  But even out of deference to the impending gathering of the clan, he did not want to put off this one anniversary, just on the off chance he would miss The Big One So Far. In the end, two weeks before Christmas, Elliott bought Laura tickets for Cirque du Soleil, their new show Quidam, ending a two-week run at Suffolk Downs in Boston center. Laura had been a gymnast, fighting her way on vault all the way to regionals through high school, when finally and to her sorrow, she had grown to her full height. She and their middle daughter, Rory, who took gymnastics at the local YMCA, watched tapes of the fabulous previous Cirque shows. Allegria was their first favorite.

  When he handed her the tickets, along with a pen-drawn cartoon voucher of the two of them chewing a single strand of spaghetti at their favorite hideout, a Little Italy restaurant truly deserving of the name—just six tables—Laura, with her agile legs, jumped and clasped him about the waist like a monkey. I
t was a thrill to him, that was. He got a kick out of having such an agile wife, who could still do cartwheels and backbends in middle age.

  “You rascal!” she cried. “This is what I wanted more than anything else in the world! I’ve been reading about the performances every day and just longing to see one. But the tickets are so expensive!”

  “It’s hardly Paris . . . ,” Elliott joked, referring to the belated honeymoon they’d planned for the second summer (or had it been the first?) after their wedding, when he would have finished graduate school. Both school and Europe were nixed, never to be revisited, by Laura’s tremulous announcement that there’d been a hitch and they were pregnant.

  “Oh, Paris,” Laura said, “Paris is for the twentieth anniversary, when the girls are big enough to stay with Mother and take care of each other while being ignored beyond the basic necessities of life. That’s six years from now! Annie’ll be in college! And this is like a little bit of Paris, Ell! I’m so glad you got me this instead of some camisole that would make me look fat and just lie in the drawer forever.”

  Elliott breathed easier.

  It was the fourteenth, after all, He would never forget again. Never.

  In the tent, Laura reached out in the dark to clutch his hand as the hula hoop girl, ringed like an African goddess with circles of rainbow light, set first one, then three, then five circlets in motion about her hipless child’s body, at one point extending her leg straight in a standing split, a hoop gyrating around her pointed toe. Down ceiling-high cables floated masked phantoms, their bloodred robes falling away, the revealed athletes then flexing and extending their impossibly taut bodies as if they were constructed of stuff other than human flesh, were instead structures of steel and ice, covered with human fabric.

  Over her protests at intermission, Elliott bought Laura one of the shirts with the characteristic sunburst emblazoned in silver. “It’ll show every bulge, Elliott,” Laura protested.

  “You haven’t got bulges,” he’d told her, patting the modest, tender lap of flesh over her belt, which had replaced her concave contours only after she’d given birth to the girls. He grinned to himself at a bright, momentary vision of the way his wife would look later, nude, or perhaps modeling only the tight-fitting T-shirt, ivory curve of thigh against pale blue sheets, gazing up at him from under her lids, the Lady Di parody she saved only for bed.

  “At least it’s stretchy,” Laura told him, with a dubious pout. “It holds a person in.” It would have suited her, capped sleeves and nipped waist, he later decided. After a time, he would move the shirt, still in its tissue, into his own underwear drawer. He would keep the raucous, wistful tape of the background music to Quidam in his car until it snapped one day while he was driving Rory to school. He would weep, not bothering to palm away the tears, while Rory stared straight ahead, clutching her book bag.

  As they left the stadium that night, pressed congenially thigh to thigh by the determined crowd, Elliott noticed simultaneously that it was eleven-thirty and that he was drunk, only a little, from the two beers quaffed at intermission on top of the wine shared at dinner. “Take a nap,” Laura urged him. “I feel it, too; but I’m just tired. I can drive.” She rummaged in her commodious bag—Amelia’s detention slip, an open lipstick furred with cotton-swab litter, and nuggets of stale gum. “Damn,” Laura griped, “this was Elizabeth Arden. Mother got it for me.” She located her janitor’s key ring, its anchor a metal charm featuring a laminated photo of Rory’s triumphal, best-ever dismount from the beam. She kept searching.

  “I’ll get you another lipstick,” Elliott, bleary, told her.

  “I have to find some Tylenol. My eyes feel as though they’re on fire from behind,” said Laura.

  “Too much resin in the wine,” Elliott offered. “Gives you a head—”

  “There.” Laura held up a few lipsticky-red Tylenol. “They better help. It really hurts, Ell,” she told him. “I think I have a migraine.”

  “Sit a moment,” he told her. “We don’t have to be home any special time.”

  “I don’t like to leave Annie . . .”

  “She’s thirteen, Laura. You were baby-sitting half the neighborhood when you were thirteen. You bought a car with baby-sitting money, for God’s sake.”

  “I did,” she admitted, reclining her seat slightly. It was a quiet, ancient source of pride. “Okay, a minute.”

  Elliott awoke when Laura started the car. The parking lot at Suffolk Downs was empty, or nearly. He saw the hat-shaped blue-and-yellow tents billowing, and knots of the performers, gathered, smoking, looking eerily misplaced, their elaborately painted gold-and-black almond eyes shockingly adult atop their adolescent bodies. Laura had told him many of them were formerly Olympic gymnasts or ballet dancers gifted at flexibility rather than the leap or pirouette. She’d also told him that, in defiance of all logic, all dancers and gymnasts of merit smoked in order to try to stay slim and small.

  “I feel better,” his wife told him. “It’s as if it’s just pressure now, not so much pain . . . let’s get home so I can lie down.”

  “I’m sorry, sweetie,” he told her, as they entered the Sumner Tunnel, thick with Saturday-night hordes. He felt himself drifting with the pause and accelerate, pause and lurch, until Laura, in real panic, woke him.

  “Elliott,” she said, “the oil light is on!”

  “S’nothing,” he told her, “electrical glitch.”

  “The battery light is on now,” Laura said sharply, sounding like her mother. “Is that nothing also?”

  “No, that’s shit,” Elliott told her, abruptly sober and dry-mouthed, sitting up in disgust as the car softly drifted to a complete stop, and the lights dimmed, dimmed and disappeared. Laura dived to depress the triangular red emergency flashers; but they, logically, were also dead. Rolling across her, Elliott flipped the hood switch to signal distress, but the horns of cars behind them still burst into a cacophony of frustration. Elliott inched along the damp tunnel wall to peer under the hood.

  What he saw signified as much to him as it would have had he been asked to perform surgery on a brain. Since he was a boy, gathered with his friends peering into their cars’ entrails, he could never decipher the engine’s mystery even when it was pointed out to him—alternator connection or brake cable, they were all the same to him. He could fill the window-washer tank and add oil, never quite sure he’d read the message of the dipstick as confidently as other men did. To start a car by crossing critical wires was a fantasy Elliott nurtured the way other men dreamed of playing rhythm guitar for Van Halen.

  In moments, a K-9 police unit passed them, and the officer promised in passing to send a wrecker. Astoundingly, shortly thereafter, they were linked to some kind of shoving vehicle driven by a swarthy man Laura described as resembling the troll under the bridge, and shoved the quarter mile onto a verge of flat earth next to one of the elevators that ferried workers down into the Big Dig, the tunnel project that had made Boston a hell of dust and snarled traffic for what was promised to be three years and was now seven and counting. Despite cute, hopeful posters about the interesting things the excavations had turned up (prehistoric fish spines, colonial foundations), every single Bostonian except the fellow who owned the cranes was sick to the teeth of the project: Politicians had been threatened with recall, lawsuits filed, tourists headed for Cape Cod diverted to airports in Rhode Island.

  Frantically, Laura phoned home and then, squinting, punched in their AAA road service and membership numbers, as Elliott inspected the brightly lit construction shaft and chatted with the young police officer whose tiresome duty was to guard the shaft overnight against prankish teenagers and curious drunks who tended to take dives or demonstrate their ability to balance on railings.

  “The girls are fine,” she reported wistfully. “The tow truck is about half an hour away. I think we’ll freeze to death by then, don’t you? I should have worn my long coat.”

  Elliott noticed scythes of slate-colored flesh under ea
ch of her eyes, as if she had applied her eye shadow upside down. One of her eyes was alarmingly bloodshot. She worked too hard, with her small design business, trifold brochures and the occasional state-sponsored pamphlet, never failing to booster every school activity and extracurricular interest the girls lit upon—enthusiasms new each year, fragile as the life span of mayflies. “But I’m not fine. I’m knocked out. I’m going to lie down in the back until the tow truck comes. I feel bad, Ell, I feel bad. My head feels funny, beyond pain . . .”

  She worked too hard, Elliott told the young cop, whose name was, of course, Tony. His wife as well, Tony agreed with a sigh, offering Elliott an illicit Marlboro, which he accepted, the companiable and manly thing to do, though he’d quit smoking seven years before.

  Tony’s wife was a nurse at Mercy, on p.m.’s for five years. “We got two boys, four and two. We couldn’t make it without my mom and my sisters,” Tony told Elliott, shaking his head in gratitude.

  Elliott nodded, as if Miranda, or his father in far-off Boca Raton, ever had been any help to him and Laura. He thought, but would never have confided, that his father’s twice-yearly visits, accompanied by Donna, the woman from his condo complex he described as “my lady friend,” were tense affairs, not because of any lack of geniality on the part of Elliott Banner Senior, or even Donna, who brought extravagantly flowered bikinis for Laura and the girls; it was because Elliott could see plainly around Donna’s neck his mother’s wedding diamond reset in a pendant.

  Now, he strolled back to their minivan, expecting to find Laura asleep in her customary shrimp curl. What he saw instead shocked him. Laura was not given to dramatic displays, except in dire extremes. She did have a low tolerance for certain kinds of pain, often coming to him repeatedly during a given evening to show him her paper cut, as if she were one of the children. Now, she was braced with her spine arched against the rear seat, rocking, holding her temples with the flat of her hands. “Elliott,” she whispered, “I have to go to the hospital. I don’t think this is a migraine. Or if it is, I’ve never had one before.”