A Fantastic Holiday Season: The Gift of Stories (5 page)
Read A Fantastic Holiday Season: The Gift of Stories Online
Authors: Kevin J. Anderson
“Except for Elfis,” I said.
“Some nuts are harder to crack than others, but a few days of shoveling out the reindeer stables usually makes them a little more cooperative.”
Moving with supernaturally swift footsteps, Santa stalked around the factory floor, grabbing the cowering hench-elves one by one and stuffing them into his sack, which was obviously much larger inside than it was on the outside. It needed to be. How else could it hold a world’s worth of toys?
With the bulging, squirming load over his shoulder, he turned to Robin, McGoo, and me. “I’ll let you free the children.” He turned to the shackled waifs on the now-still production lines. “Ho-ho-ho! Have you all learned to be nice instead of naughty?”
A chorus of the enslaved kids affirmed that they had indeed learned their lessons. Some, including Buddy, even volunteered to do community-service work up at the North Pole—after they recovered back home with their loving families.
Santa went to the coal furnace, shifted his heavy sack. “I won’t forget you on Christmas morning, Mr. Chambeaux. Or you either, Ms. Deyer, or Officer McGoohan. And now, Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good”—he pushed down his black glove so he could double-check the time on his wristwatch—“a good night.” He tossed the squirming bag ahead of him into the mouth of the furnace, touched the side of his nose, and vanished up the smokestack.
“Elfis has left the building,” I said. “But the kids are still here.”
The three of us spent the better part of an hour freeing the natural and unnatural children from their shackles. When Robin unlocked his chains, Buddy Tannenbaum threw himself into her arms. “Thank you, thank you! Can you take me back to my Mom and Dad now?”
“You’ll be home for Christmas,” I promised.
For a lot of families, it would be a happy holiday season, except perhaps for those who had ordered their gifts from Elfis Industries and were expecting delivery by Christmas Eve Eve.…
While McGoo called for backup to shut down the factory and secure the crime scene, Robin took down names and developed a plan to reunite the kids with their parents. I called the Tannenbaums directly, and Buddy’s parents rushed right down. It was a wonderful reunion, with the werewolf kid nuzzling his parents and promising he would be good.
10
It was Christmas morning in the Chambeaux & Deyer offices—and we found surprise gifts waiting for us, brightly wrapped in colorful paper with holly leaves and berries, wreaths, and little snowmen. Since we didn’t have a chimney, Santa could only have delivered the presents by breaking-and-entering, but I wasn’t going to press charges.
“Looks like Santa was true to his promise,” I said.
Grinning, Sheyenne brought the gifts into the conference room. “If you can’t trust Santa to keep a promise, who can you trust?”
I hadn’t put anything on my wish list, but Santa Claus was supposed to know exactly what a person wanted or needed. I had to admit I was curious.
“You first, Robin.” I nudged the thin, rectangular box with her name on it. As a lawyer, Robin tried to remain cool and businesslike, but I could see the sparkle in her brown eyes as she tugged the ribbon aside, and politely worked at the tape. When she couldn’t get it unwrapped, she used a letter opener to slash the paper with all the finesse of a well-practiced serial killer.
Inside was a single yellow legal pad and a sharpened No. 2 pencil. Her excitement dimmed, though she remained smiling. “I can certainly use these. And not every lawyer gets to use a pencil and legal pad from Santa himself.”
“There’s a note,” I pointed out.
Robin pulled a slip of holly-fringed stationery from behind the second yellow sheet, skimmed the hand-written note, then read aloud as her smile grew. “‘I don’t normally give magical gifts—I don’t want to establish a present precedent, but I am so grateful for your efforts. After checking my list and the footnotes I made throughout the year, Robin, I know that your work delights you more than anything else. This special legal pad will never run out of paper, and the enchanted pencil will take notes for you so you can have your hands and mind free to concentrate on your client. Ho-ho-ho, best, S.C.”
Robin’s smile was wide. “I can’t wait to try it out!”
Excited, Sheyenne picked up the box with her name on it. She used her poltergeist abilities to undo the bow, pull the ribbon aside, and then, giggling, ripped the wrapping paper to shreds. She opened the box to find an envelope inside—with both our names written on it.
“It’s something the two of us can use, Beaux!” With luminous fingers, she opened the flap of the envelope to find an embossed, official-looking certificate inside. “Oh! An all-expense-paid romantic weekend for us at the cozy North Pole Winter Wonderland Bed and Breakfast! Off-season only, it says.”
“Now that has definite possibilities,” I said, imagining a wonderful time away with my girlfriend. We would have to be creative to overcome the supernatural difficulties that precluded us from touching, but I was up to the challenge.
“Open yours, Dan.” Robin handed me the very small box with my name on it.
Judging by the size, I thought it might be a new pair of cufflinks or a tie clip, but who was I to doubt Santa’s wisdom or imagination? Zombie fingers are not the most adept at unwrapping small gift boxes, and Santa’s elves had used way too much tape, but I managed.
I opened a hinged, velvet-covered box to reveal a small plastic cylinder labeled “Magic Lip Gloss. Use Sparingly.” I wasn’t disappointed so much as confused, not sure what Santa had been thinking. “Lip gloss?”
Sheyenne made a delighted sound and snatched the tube out of the box. “I think it’s for me, Beaux—and that means it’s for you.” She popped off the cap, extended the lip gloss, and applied it to her widening smile. “A special film for my ghostly lips that might just allow a kiss.…”
She leaned closer, but I told her to wait. “Just a minute, let’s do this right.” I slipped a hand into my jacket pocket and withdrew the wadded and prickly tumbleweed ball of the McMistletoe artificial substitute that Elfis had been trying to bring to market. I raised it up over my head. “This is supposed to be as good as mistletoe.”
Robin was skeptical. “With all the quality that we’ve come to expect from Elfis Industries?”
Sheyenne’s lips glistened invitingly from the magic lip gloss. Under the McMistletoe, she came very close, and her ectoplasmic lips brushed against mine. Yes, I definitely felt a warm tingle.
“I think it works just fine,” she said.
***
Look past the tinsel, trimmed trees and wrapping paper, and you’ll see holidays are bound by family. Secrets, tricks and lies can break these bonds, however, in ways no festive Holiday dinner can mend.
Nina Hoffman’s supernatural tale deftly explores such a tangled web of familial tension, and shows that “close knit” can have several—sometimes ominous—meanings.
—KO
Close Knit
Nina Kiriki Hoffman
“Come on, Melly. Let me spend Christmas day with you and the kids,” Leo said into his cell phone. “I promise I’ll bring presents, and I won’t bring any of our regular arguments.”
“What, you have a whole new set?” asked Melissa from the house they used to share on the other side of town.
Leo leaned back against the frilly-shammed pillows his mother had layered against the bed’s headboard in what used to be his childhood room. His mother took cushions to an extreme. There was so much padding in his parents’ house you often couldn’t find the furniture beneath.
Since he moved out at eighteen to marry Melissa, his mother had turned his old room into a guestroom for someone who loved ruffles, country patterns, the scent of lavender, and no actual contact with dirt. Leo didn’t like any of those things, but his room was the one his mother turned into a guest room. His older brother Rick’s room had become a sewing room, and his older brother Andy’s room had turned into a study for his dad. When he moved back in following the separation, he ended up in his new old room.
In his parents’ house, he was in his mother’s power, which made it hard to move out.
He had been hoping the split with Melissa was temporary, hoping he’d move home to her and the kids in a week. It had stretched into months.
If he couldn’t go home, he needed to get out of his parents’ house and live somewhere else.
Live alone. Oh, God. When he considered the prospect, the world went dark behind his eyes. He thought of his middle brother, Andy, the one they had made unmentionable after his suicide. Andy had lost his wife in childbirth, and then himself. The bond had been too strong for Andy to survive without his wife.
“I will sign a pact of nonaggression,” Leo said. “Please, Melissa. You know you can trust me.”
“Well,” she said, and let the silence stretch. “My folks are coming for Christmas dinner at two in the afternoon. Can you be gone by then?”
“Do they hate me that much?”
“I just don’t want to stress about this!”
“Okay. If I can have the morning with you and the kids, that’d be great.”
“All right. See you around eight a.m.”
“Roger that. Thank you, Melissa. Thank you.”
“Don’t screw this up, Leo.”
“I won’t.”
She hung up. He set the phone on the bedside table and sank back against the pillow mountain. He only got to see his three kids once a week, and they kept changing while he wasn’t there to see it. He never saw Melissa at all, only talked with her on the phone.
Christmas Day, he’d have another chance to collect the threads of family and reclaim his power.
In the meantime, he’d have to survive life among the marshmallows.
Leo had done what his father told him. “Don’t pick the most beautiful, the most talented, the smartest, the most ambitious,” Dad had said. “Find someone who doesn’t have big dreams or plans.”
Leo picked Melissa when they were in tenth grade. Melissa was a nice, quiet girl, no great beauty, but pleasant and pretty and thoughtful. He supported her, spent time with her, spun the bond to draw her to him. She smiled and came into his embrace.
He’d proposed when they were at the top of a Ferris wheel at the county fair their senior year in high school. He reined in all his family magic to let her make the choice without him pushing her into it. That wasn’t something his father had told him to do.
Sometimes he wondered what his mother would be like if she got away from home and her husband.
Melissa thought about his proposal for a whole revolution of the Ferris wheel; she accepted the engagement ring when they reached the height again and could look out over the fairgrounds and the town, their present and future. The memory of the sweetness of their kiss, another few revolutions of the big wheel, wrapped up in each other and apart from the world around them, still warmed him.
They married right after high school. She had warmed and blossomed in his love, grown into skills that served them both well. She was a fine cook and a wonderful mother; she was skilled, too, at making comfort in every room of the house.
He had not made the mistakes of his older brother, Rick, who had chosen powerful, interesting women to wed. Rick had never established a good bond with his first wife—she was too strong-willed, too artistic, too self-motivated. They divorced after two years. Rick married another artist and lost her, too. He was on his third wife, unheard of for men in the Yates family. With each marriage, Rick’s family magic grew weaker. Dad was sure Rick’s third marriage would fail as well, though Leo liked Cassandra, Rick’s current wife, a lawyer.
Leo worked for a courier service, shuttling blood samples from doctors’ offices to labs, lumber from home improvement stores to construction sites, legal papers from lawyers to lawyers, vegetables and fruits from farms to restaurants. He spent all his time stitching things together.
His home had been the seat of his power, where he went restore himself. His family was his highest priority. He loved his children so fiercely his heart hurt, and he loved Melissa to death. She was his hearth, his place to rest in warmth and comfort after a day spent with unconnected people.
He wasn’t sure when things began to unravel. Last summer, though, Melissa had kicked him out, and to his surprise, his family magic hadn’t been strong enough to change her mind.
Leo and Melissa had managed their separation without involving lawyers or counselors. He spent time with each of his kids once a week.
Saturday afternoon, he picked up his oldest daughter, sixteen-year-old Piper. He parked at the curb and called her cell phone to let her know he was outside. “Okay,” she said, sounding harassed. It was fifteen minutes before she slumped out of the house, her slender body disguised in a long-sleeved blue t-shirt under black corduroy overalls, one strap hanging, and a little white skull and crossbones pin attached to the other strap. Her red-brown hair hung in curly, uncombed spills. Her narrow face was flecked with dark freckles, and her red-amber eyes stared past him as she slung her backpack into the back seat and climbed into the car.
“Can we go to the movies, Dad?” Piper asked as she buckled her seatbelt.
“What do you want to see?”
She named the latest blockbuster adventure movie. Gun battles, explosions, car chases. Not his idea of a good time, but hey.
He sighed and agreed. He didn’t know how to talk to Piper anymore. Ask her about school and she shrugged. Ask her what she was interested in, and she shrugged even higher. Ask her about boys, and she said, “Forget it.”
Ask her about how she was doing since he left the house, and receive silence.
Melissa said Piper was going through a phase.
Leo bought popcorn and soda and sat through a lot of flash and noise beside his daughter. No talking during the movie. Afterward they went to Applebee’s for dinner.
He had been holding his family magic in a nest around his heart, the tendrils tight-furled. As he watched his daughter eat prawns and salad, he unfurled the tendril that used to connect him to her, and let it touch her again. He couldn’t maintain these connections over distance for prolonged times, and he didn’t want to hurt his wife or children by trying.
Piper relaxed. She put down her fork and sat back and looked at him. She didn’t smile, but her eyes softened.
“How are things at home?” he asked.
“Daaaad,” she said.
He touched his breastbone, the place where he connected to his family.
Piper closed her eyes, then opened them. “When are you coming home?”
“Your mom and I need to work it out, Piper. I hope we can, but I still don’t know what I did wrong.”
“Well … you don’t listen very well, Dad. Mom wants to do other things than just keep house and take care of us. She bought paints and set up the guest room as an art studio. Like, she has no clue how to paint, but she’s doing it anyway, and it makes her happy. She joined some club. Like, a book club or something? They meet at the bookstore? And people come over to play cards.”
Leo sat back. He felt like he’d been punched in the stomach.
“She could still do that with you at home, if you didn’t, like, smother her.”
“Okay, Piper. Thanks. Thanks for telling me.”
“Yeah, and I thought I was good at shutting up.” She frowned ferociously. “This sucks.”
Leo stroked his breastbone, relaxing the nudge to talk he’d put on her, but not letting go of the connection.
They walked the mall after dinner. He needed to find her a present for Christmas; he pinned his hopes for the future on Christmas morning. He tried to watch what she looked at while they were window-shopping, but her preferred mode was stealth and secrets, so whenever she noticed him noticing, she looked somewhere else.
She hugged him when he dropped her off at the house, and he gently pulled his connection back inside, then sat in the car parked at the curb.
He and Melly had bought the house when she was pregnant with Piper. They had looked at a lot of houses when they knew it was time to give up apartment living and make room for kids. This one had a master bedroom with its own bathroom, and four other bedrooms.
“You think we’re going to need all these rooms?” Melly had asked. “I’m not having twins, you know.”
“I know,” he said, “but who knows what the future holds?” and she had laughed, and they made a down payment.
The house had been in terrible shape when they bought it. He’d really enjoyed working on it, weaving nest magic into plumbing and electricity, spackle and paint, floorboards and linoleum. He asked her about color choices and textures, and followed her taste in everything.
They had been happy here together.
The light was on in the living room behind the blue curtains. He imagined the three kids and Melly curled up on the couch, watching TV together.
But there were other cars in the driveway. Maybe this was a game night, and Melly was at the dining room table with people he didn’t know, enjoying herself.
He wanted to reach out to her. Just the lightest touch, and he would know how she felt, and maybe what she was doing. When he was still living at home, that knowledge had buoyed him through his days.
He hadn’t known how she felt, though, when she was working her way up to kicking him out, despite their constant connection. How had he missed it?
He stared at the light behind the curtains. Life was going on inside without him. He couldn’t reach out to Melly. He didn’t feel he had the right anymore.
He clenched his hands against his breastbone, then started the car and drove to the library. He read magazines until closing, putting off the return to his parents’ house as long as possible. He read through the newspaper, too, looking at apartment listings and fantasizing about renting his own place.
Ultimately, his mother’s pull was too strong. Over the fifty-two years of his parents’ marriage, the family magic had mostly shifted from his father to his mother, since she wanted and used it more. A constant bond between two people was also a conduit for power; it ended up going both ways if it lasted long enough.
“Is that you, Leo?” his mother called from the living room as he came in the front door. Even the foyer was somehow pillowy, maybe because she had hung pastel quilts on the walls. That lavender scent was heavy all through the house.
“Who else?” Leo said. He sighed and stepped through the foyer.
Father was in his study with the door closed, but Mom was in the living room watching the Food Channel and lying in wait. He wished he’d never moved back in. A week he could stand, but months.…
In the living room, his mother, trim and gaunt-cheeked, stiff in her beige Nordstrom’s loungewear, sat upright on the couch, slippered feet together, back straight, though the cushions slumped behind her, inviting relaxation.
She muted the TV and said, “I made dinner. I set a place for you. If you’re going to miss dinner, you need to tell me.”
“Mom, you knew it was my afternoon with Piper.”
“Afternoon ends before eight-thirty, Leonard.”
“We ate at Applebee’s after the movie.”
She breathed out loudly through her nose, then said, “Well, now that you’re home, we can have checkers.” She flexed her family magic, crushing his resistance.
He spent the rest of the evening on a frilly chair at the game table in the living room, losing every game.
Sunday, he stopped by Melissa’s house to pick up Kaylee, his eleven-year-old daughter, and Riley, his fourteen-year-old son, who both wanted to go to the Natural History Museum. They were on the sidewalk in front of the house when he pulled up. Kaylee, short, blond, and blue-eyed, expressionless in a way he wasn’t used to, was bundled up in a big bone-white sweater, jeans, and fleece-edged brown Ugg boots. Riley, taller, thin, with shaggy blond hair and clear brown eyes, wore jeans and a black hoodie with white skeleton bones on it. His shoulders hunched.
Leo put his fist to his chest and let himself connect to his kids. They came to the car and climbed in, Riley in the front seat next to Leo, and Kaylee in the back. She always rode in the back, it occurred to him. He watched her in the mirror, and felt her in his chest. She seemed to have a big square box inside her, with a tight shut lid that she guarded. He glanced at Riley and listened to what his connection told him about his son. Riley was mixed up, full of something he wanted and feared to say.
If Leo pushed energy through the link, he could get his kids to open up. In the past, he hadn’t hesitated. This time, he held back.
They had visited the Natural History Museum countless times. Kaylee’s favorite exhibit was the bird nests, old glass-topped cases in a huge room with many, many bird nests in each, most with eggs in them. She loved the different colors of the eggs, some blue, white, yellow, teal, some with spots and freckles, some plain. There was a hummingbird nest on a loop of rope, and some of the shorebird nests were just a couple twigs on a flat rock. Kaylee could contemplate nests for hours. Leo listened in just a little. She imagined herself inside the eggs, with a giant, feathered mother or father resting against her and keeping her safe and warm.
