Carol for Another Christmas (8 page)

“Quick, Tom, get her to the hospital! Her water just broke!” someone yelled.

Monica's grandmother bustled Monica's mother into the backseat of the car while her father climbed into the driver's seat. Another woman held Monica's shoulders as she watched from the doorway. “Is Mama going to die?” Monica asked, her voice star tlingly loud in the snow-muffled air.

“Oh, shut
up
!” her mother screamed. “Drive, Tom.”

The little girl in the doorway turned an anxious face to a preoccupied aunt. Later, someone tucked her into bed under a pile of coats.

Scrooge looked at his companion, somewhat at a loss for words, ghostly or otherwise. “Astonishing,” he said. “I never married, you know, so I have no idea how such matters are managed. Still, it does seem to me that perhaps the child could have been, you might have been, that is . . .”

“Oh, nowadays they'd probably let me in the delivery room,” she said. “But that was back in the fifties. People still thought it was a little tacky for pregnant women to go out in public. Actually, that was something of a false alarm. Mom was in labor over eighteen hours with Doug. I hung out at Grandma's meantime, but Christmas sort of got forgotten because everyone was so worried about Mom and Doug.”

“And did you get the doll you wanted?” Scrooge asked.

“I don't remember,” Monica said tersely. “Can we go now?”

“Oh, I think there's a bit more to come,” Scrooge said.

“It's very clever how you manage this,” Monica said a heartbeat later when they stood at yet another door. “I mean, I not only recognize the door to the new house my folks got after Doug was born; I recognize all the little touches that pinpoint things in time.”

“Do you?”

“Of course. I knocked that chip in the paint myself when I was ten. And see the wreath? I made that in third grade.”

A wreath had indeed appeared since Scrooge and Monica had first stood at the door. It was somewhat bedraggled, with the tinsel drooping and the artificial holly lacking leaves in some places, berries in others, and the bow was much larger on one side than the other and one tail was shorter than the other. For some reason, this made it seem to Scrooge all the more Christmassy.

He opened the door while Monica was still examining the wreath. The rooms inside were quite lavish by the Victorian standards of Scrooge's day. The floor was covered with a tufted carpet, oddly in a single color. Stranger yet was the pink-flocked Christmas tree, its star slightly askew at the top, rumpled papers and open boxes beneath it. It stood before a large central window flanked by opulent floral draperies of some material that surely never came from any loom known to Scrooge. Beside this improbable tree was a small box filled with moving pictures similar to those Scrooge had observed in Monica's flat.

Directly in front of this box, Mr. and Mrs. Banks, in somewhat slovenly costumes, lounged upon a sofa with a pattern that exactly matched the drapes. Before them were arranged legged metal trays, somewhat akin to foreshortened tea carts. Some sort of food sat on sectioned rectangular metal plates upon each tray.

Both people were focused on the box, which featured a play resembling an extremely sophisticated Punch and Judy show in which a redheaded woman with a loud voice and a Latin-looking man sporting ruffled sleeves were carry ing on the traditional Pun chian dispute.

In the second room, which was divided from the first by a shallow archway, at a cherry dining table containing another of the sectioned metal plates, a small boy of perhaps five or six years sat dismembering a doll.

“That was my new Christmas talking doll,” Monica told Scrooge with no hint of childlike wistfulness. “I'd forgotten about that. Doug was irritated by the mechanical sound of her voice. He tore her apart, thinking he could improve on it. He did, but he never got the doll back together again. Hardware never was his forte actually, but the voice said ‘Mama' and ‘Bye-bye' much more clearly, even though he never got it back in the doll.”

“I suppose you were very upset,” Scrooge said, desperately trying to think what the first Christmas ghost had said to him.

“No, there I am.” She pointed to a corner behind the dining room table where a fat little girl, perhaps twelve years old, with unkempt hair, studied a game board as unblinkingly as a cat at a mouse hole. Scrooge saw something shining on her cheek, but she made not a whimper. “He gave me his Monopoly game. Mom and Dad thought he'd like it because he'd condescended to play it once with a visiting kid. But by that Christmas, he'd already outgrown it. So he got my doll and I got very good at solitary Monopoly.”

Mrs. Banks looked fondly back over her shoulder at her son and the doll. “Look at him, Tom,” she said to her husband. “Look at how intent he is on fixing that doll. I bet he'll be a great surgeon someday.”

“No way,” her husband said. “He's hopeless at golf. I took him out with me and all he wanted to do was look into the holes. About lost an eye a couple of times. The boy's dangerous. Whereas Monica's about to
own
the golf course, the way she's going with that game. I think that girl is showing signs of business sense. She asked me to buy a bond for her with the money she got from your folks. I mean to take her to the bank after the holidays and let her do it herself. She's twelve, after all. About time she learned.”

“That's all very well, but I worry about her weight. She'll never find a husband as fat as she is. I'm just glad she's learning to type so she'll have something to fall back on.”

“The way she's built, she'll always have something to fall back on,” the father said with a chuckle at his own joke. “But I wouldn't worry about it. She's still just a kid.”

“So it seems you were a person of business even as a young girl,” Scrooge said. He could not keep the approval from his voice, for although he had learned that business was not the only thing that was important, he knew that it was nevertheless necessary and practical, if for no other reason than providing one with the means to help the needy.

“Oh, I went through a frivolous period,” she said.

And as surely as if they were on a stage, the world around them shifted and they stood in a store full of dresses, along with Mrs. Banks, a bit grayer than she had been in the previous scene, and a Monica who was now a young woman, plump and pretty, flitting from one gossamer gown to the next like a bee from flower to flower.

Scrooge had accepted the changes in their surroundings easily enough so far, but he was beginning to feel a bit miffed, especially when he saw the walls fall away, the curtains become racks of clothing, the carpet change color, the dining table fade and become a sales desk, and, most dramatic of all, Mr. Banks and Doug metamorphose into short-skirted, well-coiffed saleswomen.

It seemed to him that it was all very well for such changing about to be magical and mysterious when he was the mortal being led by the ghost; but now that he was the ghost, oughtn't he to be somehow controlling all of this? Then again, how could he, since he had no idea what Monica Banks's previous life had been like?

Monica was somewhat more sanguine about it all. “Nice special effects. I detect Doug's fine hand here.”

“Madame, I assure you these are not ‘effects' as you call them,” Scrooge said sternly, despite his own doubts about their environment. “These are perfectly real supernatural manifestations, as am I.”

“Okay, okay, don't get so huffy,” she said. “I can't explain how else first Doug and then you could have haunted me or how I came to be here, inside this game of yours, so I have to accept that I am being haunted. But I'll still bet Doug custom-designed this haunting. Who else would make him look so good? He was a
brat
that last Christmas, you know. He screamed and yelled and cried and wouldn't let me play with the doll without saying that he couldn't stand it until Mom made me give it to him just to shut him up. Of course, I was supposed to get it back, but . . . We were supposed to be sharing not trading. I've hated the word
share
ever since then, I think. I never realized that. Hey, maybe you're some kind of therapist-in-costume program Doug made up after all!”

“Madam, I must again remind you that there is no doubt that your brother is dead. This must be distinctly understood, or nothing very wonderful can come of any of this.”

“Okay, okay. He's dead. But he was always tricky,” she said, looking around the dress shop as if expecting to see her brother hiding under a hem.

“Miss Banks!” Scrooge reprimanded.

“Well, he
was
tricky. I keep expecting him to pop out and say, ‘Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!' ”

“Miss Banks, if I may please call your attention to our surroundings,” Scrooge said.

The heiress to Databanks appeared somewhat giddy, however, as if she had imbibed too much Christmas punch. “Oh, hey, Ebenezer, I think you can call me Monica now. You seem to be a well-established friend of the family. I mean, you've even met my parents, right?”

“What is this place, Miss—Monica?”

“Nordstrom's, second floor, shoes, lingerie, formal wear. We're in formal wear. That's it. That's the dress I wanted,” she said suddenly, pointing to her younger self holding a red, full-skirted frock, much shorter than Scrooge thought seemly, in front of her and admiring her image in the mirror. The gown had a long panel of matching scarlet gauze that draped over the bodice to soften the neckline and made little wings to float behind it. It wasn't the sort of thing a girl would have worn in his day, but Scrooge thought Monica would look quite fetching in it and said so.

“It really was beautiful,” she said with a sigh.

At that point an adolescent version of the doll surgeon burst into the store. “Mom, there's the coolest thing at Radio Shack. It's just what I need to get my system going . . .”

“The red dress is too expensive, Monica. How about this lavender strapless? It's more suitable for a girl your age, and it's on sale as well. How much does your equipment cost, Douglas?”

“Oh, never mind!” the teenaged Monica said. “I don't need the dress. I don't have a date, anyway.”

“Well, why didn't you say so?” her mother said. “Come on, Douglas. Show me what it is you need.”

“He always got everything,” Monica Banks told Scrooge angrily. “After he was born, I didn't matter. If he didn't need anything, I could get what I wanted, but he always wanted something to feed his projects. I knew I had to get my own money, so I got jobs after school, and I opened a savings account for college. I kept my job after I graduated high school, and thought if I went to a small, nearby school, I could continue working to buy the extras I might want later.”

“Most industrious and highly commendable,” Scrooge said.

The store changed. The clothing racks dismantled and sank into the floor in froths of net and silk to reemerge as little white tables surrounded by matching chairs. The sales desk lengthened and acquired a number of spigots and other accoutrements Scooge was less familiar with. Teenaged Monica was behind the counter, her hair pulled back into a high tail, her form clad in a blue dress with a white apron. Two uniformed policemen approached the counter.

“Hi, Jerry. Hi, Mike,” she greeted them. “Having your usual?”

“Monica, honey, you better come out from behind there and have a seat,” the one she'd addressed as Jerry said to her. “We've got some bad news about your parents.”

“What?” she asked, fairly vaulting over the counter in her haste to get to the bearers of the news. “What about them?”

The policeman named Mike sat her down. “I'm afraid there was an accident, Monica.”

“Accident?”

“A pileup on the highway. The impact must have killed them at once. I'm sure they didn't suffer.”

“S-suffer? What about Doug?”

“Your brother was in the backseat, and he was unharmed. He's being taken care of.”

“Oh, okay then,” she said. “So what can I get you?” She stood up and started back around the corner again as if they had merely been passing the time of day.

“Monica—”

“Black for you, Jerry, right? And . . .” Then she passed out right there on top of the Neopolitan ice cream carton, her right hand smashing a stack of sugar cones to the floor as she slipped off the carton and fell the rest of the way, crunching the cones into the linoleum.

“I did not!” Monica said to Scrooge. “I'd never do anything so weak and irresponsible. As I recall it, I worked the rest of my shift and then collected Doug and we made funeral arrangements.”

Suddenly, from out of nowhere, an obnoxious buzzer gave a resounding flatulent noise that split the ice cream parlor down the middle. Where the floor had once been, a message that seemed to come from hell now burned in bright red letters: “Incorrect File Name or Pathway: Abort? Retry? Fail?”

“It's Doug!” she said, and yelled to the letters, “Now hear this, Brother dear! I remember that day as well as you do. Jerry and Mike came and told me about Mom and Dad and I asked about you and they said you were safe and then I went to get Jerry's coffee and I . . . I . . . I'm pretty sure I finished out the shift. Actually . . .”

The red lights glowed so brightly that Monica and Scrooge were temporarily surrounded by a blaze of red. After a few moments, it twilighted into pink, then golden, and finally, objects and people began to appear within the golden light. Young Monica, still in uniform, sat up on a couch. The policemen and three other women were in the room. Young Doug, now about thirteen, sat dry-eyed under an unlit Christmas tree, playing with a collection of wires and switches, as intent upon them as if he were rebuilding his family.