Carol for Another Christmas (9 page)

Wind rattled the windows and stirred the curtains as the girl sat up. “Where am I?” she demanded.

“We're Mr. and Mrs. Christie. Your brother has been staying with us since the—accident, Monica. You're welcome to stay here, too.”

“Why should I? We have a home.”

“No, we don't,” Douglas said. “Mother and Dad rented our house. Nobody's going to rent us a house.”

“My word, did you have to go to the workhouse?” Scrooge asked. “Is that how you became as you are?” He would have endorsed such a plan in his earlier days, but since that first haunted Christmas, the very idea filled him with dread.

But the young Monica had turned angrily to her brother.

“Wanna bet?” she said. “I'm nearly twenty. I have a job. I can get another one. I have savings. They'll rent it to us, okay.”

“They wouldn't, though,” Monica told Scrooge. “We had to move into a tiny apartment. Doug was the one who went to college. He got so many scholarships that his education was covered at least. But he was only thirteen and too young to stay on campus, so we lived together in that cramped little place. And you know the hell of it? He didn't even seem to mind.

“In fact, he almost seemed to enjoy himself, even though Mom and Dad were dead and they'd given him everything,
every
thing. I realized very fast how much it took to support just the two of us and he never even seemed to care. At least I learned what I needed during that time. Security. Not the kind some boy could offer in a few years. Besides, I didn't know any boys my age, anymore. I knew I needed security right then, and I needed to get it by myself so I could count on it. I needed that something to fall back on that Mom was always talking about. Fortunately, I had taken typing and filing in school. So when I saw the ad, I had the skills.”

The scene shifted again, this time to an office, much different from Scrooge's old rooms in London. This one was more like the offices he had seen here, but much, much larger. It was so large, and so characterless, so utterly bleak and grim, that it made his old office, with its ledgers and cobwebs and the grate always too cold, seem positively cozy by comparison.

A lone woman, Monica much as she was now but without the gray in her hair, sat at a desk, one hand on a keyboard and the other holding a telephone. “I don't care if it is Christmas, Mrs. Fuentes. You did not pay your taxes this year. It's very unfortunate that your husband ran off with another woman, but the government must be compensated. You have property. Sell that. I can't discuss raising your children with you, Mrs. Fuentes, even if there are eight of them. My business is to see to it that you pay your taxes. Your husband made a great deal of money last year and, filing a joint return, you bear equal responsibility for the tax. No, I'm sorry, but that's the law. Perhaps you should have married someone else.”

Scrooge cringed to hear how much this Monica sounded like himself in the old days. She had said it was Christmas and not a single card, wreath, bit of mistletoe, or greenery brightened that efficient and ruthless place. A stern picture of some American gentleman, no doubt the president, and the flag of the United States on a pole near the entrance were the room's only ornaments.

The calls continued in the same fashion, businesslike, passionless, but stern, very stern. Ah, what the old Scrooge wouldn't have given for a clerk such as Monica Banks!

Finally the lone figure, mouth turned down, curls drooping, shoulders sloping, picked up her bag and descended the steps of the office building to the ground floor, where she waited in the rain at a bus stop.

“I was so tired I forgot the bus wouldn't come on Christmas,” she said. “Some holiday. A poor woman works all day long to put food on the table and then has to hike home because the buses use the excuse to let the lazy drivers make everyone walk.”

By this time, the younger Monica was indeed walking, block after weary block. She had an umbrella with her, but halfway across the street from the bus stop the wind snapped it inside out, and she turned her coat collar up against the weather but walked on, her shoes soaking through and rain streaming down her face. When she arrived at last at her destination, and squooshed in her wet shoes into the lobby of the apartment building, she groaned. There was an “out of order” sign on the lift, which was little more than a floor with an iron fence on three sides and a gate across the front. From sheer exhaustion, she sat down and cried, her tears almost un noticable in the general dampness of her person.

Scrooge was about to make some sympathetic remark when the door of one of the first-floor flats opened and a freckle-faced young man, perhaps a year or two older than Doug, stuck his head out. On seeing the wet, weeping Monica, he said, “Ma, one of the neighbors just saw the sign. She looks like she took a bath in her clothes. I think we need some of your special eggnog blend here.”

“I don't need
any
thing,” Monica said, using her hand to wipe the rain and tears from her face and squishily rising to her feet.

But the young man was as single-minded as she and her brother. “Sure you do, lady. A towel, for one thing.” In a moment, a merry-looking woman in a handmade holiday apron thrown hastily over what looked to Scrooge to be some sort of fuzzy dressing gown handed a cup of the frothy, creamy drink to the lad.

“Drink up, lady. It's guaranteed to put roses in your cheeks, Dad always said.”

She looked up at him uncertainly, but despite the rain, the walking had been thirsty work and she regarded the beverage with longing.

“It's okay. We're neighbors. I'm Wayne Reilly from one-oh-three. That's my mom. What were you doin' out there, anyway? It's raining cats and dogs and besides, everything's closed today.”

“Not where I work,” she said. “And the buses weren't running, so I had to walk from downtown.”

“Tough,” he said sympathetically.

But his mother, still standing in the doorway, called, “Don't leave the poor girl sitting in the hallway catching pneumonia while you yammer at her, Wayne. Ask her in. She should dry off and rest before she tackles those steps.”

“I have to get home,” she said. “I had to leave my little brother alone in the apartment and—”

“And the poor lamb will be lonely for his sister while he's spending Christmas all alone, is it?” Mrs. Reilly asked.

“Well, no, not Doug. I doubt he noticed it was Christmas, except that school's out. Actually, I'm afraid he might have figured out how to re-create the atom bomb and will blow us all up if I don't check up on him pretty soon.”

“Not know it's Christmas? What nonsense is that? You have a tree, don't you?”

“Well, no, there wasn't time, and we lost our folks a year ago and when their belongings were sold, I guess the tree sort of went with them.”

“Never mind. We have one, and Christmas is more fun with more people. What's your number?”

“Nine-thirteen.”

“Wayne, honey, run upstairs and fetch this girl's brother. What's his name? What's your name, for that matter?”

“He's Douglas—Doug, and I'm Monica. Our last name is Banks. But really, Mrs. Reilly, just a quiet—”

“I won't hear of it,” she said. “Wayne and I know all about how sad it can be the first Christmas after you're bereaved. We lost my Wilmer five years ago to a heart attack. Now, Wayne, run along—oh, and ask Monica's brother to bring some dry clothes for her with him, and shoes, too. She can put on something of mine, meantime. Got to get out of those wet things. Now then, Monica, dear, come along and we'll get you dried off and you can rest here on the couch.”

The two women disappeared into a room on the side, and when they reappeared a moment later, Monica had a towel wrapped around her wet hair and was wearing oversized woolly socks and a large argyle-patterned bathrobe in red and black, obviously the property of the late Mr. Reilly. Mrs. Reilly gently forced her to recline on the couch and tucked a hand-crocheted throw over her, then said, “I'll just run and put a few more things in the pot, and we'll have a lovely Christmas dinner together, unless you and your brother had something else planned?”

“No—”

“That settles it then.”

Young Monica fell asleep on the couch to the hiss, rattle, and bang of an accordion-shaped object draped with her wet clothing. Scrooge's companion informed him the noisy object was a steam-heating register. Above its clatter was the voice of Mrs. Reilly, singing along with disembodied Christmas carols in the kitchen. The little colored glass candles on the Christmas tree sent soft multihued beams all over the room.

“Who is that singing with Mrs. Reilly?” Scrooge asked, glad for the opportunity to do so, since he had often observed this phenomenon and wondered about it.

Monica gave him a strange look and then said, “Oh, that's right. You're not supposed to know what a radio is, I guess. It's a device that receives sound waves from a transmitter that carries them from a station. Usually music or news shows but sometimes plays. And of course ads. We never use radio, though. Too low-tech.”

“Low-tech?”

“Not technically advanced enough,” she said. “I mean, if we can do this”—she indicated the scene in which they were standing—“just carrying sound is pretty dull, isn't it?”

“But this isn't a device,” Scrooge said. “It's a haunting.”

“Yeah, yeah, sure. But there's a device behind this somewhere, let me tell you, and if it's being haunted, it's my dear, departed baby brother haunting it. By the way, where is the little dweeb? I don't remember him taking this long.”

“You're—um—” Scrooge indicated the sleeping figure on the couch.

“We seem to be seeing a lot of instances where I'm passed out for one reason or the other,” Monica complained.

Long minutes continued to tick by on the strange clock with the cat face and the moving tail that the Reillys kept in their living room. Once Mrs. Reilly looked in the living room and started to say, “I wonder where the boys—” and then, seeing Monica asleep, put a finger to her own smiling lips and retreated into the kitchen again.

After a while, the door slammed open and the boys, talking in loud voices about things that made no sense whatsoever to Scrooge, barged into the living room, waking Monica, who sat up rubbing her eyes. “Mom, we're here!”

“As if I couldn't hear you, honey! Hi, Doug. Make yourself at home and Merry Christmas.”

“Like I was telling you, Wayne,” Doug said, “if we adjust this to a lower frequency and—”

“Mom just spoke to you, Doug,” Wayne said. “Aren't you going to wish her Merry Christmas back?”

Doug looked as if he'd been jerked awake. “Huh? What? Oh, sure, uh, Merry Christmas—uh—Mom—uh—”

“Reilly,” Wayne said.

“Mom Reilly,” Doug said, obviously bungling it because he wasn't used to speaking unless it was his own idea.

“He called her
Mom
?” Monica asked Scrooge. “Our mom hadn't been dead but about a year, and he was already calling Mrs. Reilly
Mom
?”

“She seems a very motherly lady,” Scrooge observed.

“Oh, she was. I mean, I guess I could understand it if he called her that
later
because . . . well, later, even I called her Ma Reilly . . .” Monica's voice and her indignation died away as Wayne cheerfully tossed some
Popular Mechanics
magazines off a low table in front of the couch and helped his mother set the table with food. A big tureen of savory stew and steaming rolls, plus butter and jam, were the Christmas dinner.

“Why, they were too poor for a proper Christmas dinner, too!” Scrooge said.

“Oh, Ma Reilly's stew was better than any old turkey!” Monica said with the first real smile Scrooge had ever seen. “She used plenty of sage and onion, and her potatoes were done some special way so even though they were baked in the juices they were still crispy outside, and the carrots! And the celery! I didn't normally like vegetables, but hers were the best. And I have never, in the finest restaurants, tasted bread as creamy and nutty and crusty and delicious as Ma Reilly's. And oh, God, the fudge cake Yule log! Will you look at that thing? It was the most delicious chocolate I've ever had in my life.” In the scene before them now, the four people cut into a cylindrical cake topped with sprigs of green and red.

“Well, of course, most women have nothing to do but make a home all day—” Scrooge began.

“You're showing your age, old man,” Monica said. “Women work all the time now, and even then, a lot of us did. Ma Reilly did. Look at those hands!” Scrooge looked. They were small and had once been shapely but were now rough and red, with big knuckles and nails worn to the quick. “She scrubbed floors and cleaned office buildings to make a living for her and Wayne for years.”

“And paid her taxes, I hope,” Scrooge said.

Monica, hearing herself mocked, gave him a narrow-eyed frown and turned back to the apartment.

The boys talked nonstop throughout the meal, and young Monica yawned and almost fell asleep in her food. Mrs. Reilly said soothing things to her and when the dinner was over, Wayne helped her clear the table. Monica looked surprised when the Reillys dragged Doug with them to the kitchen, insisting that he help and let his sister rest. Young Monica smiled gratefully.

“I'd forgotten about that, but you know, I think that was the first time anyone ever insisted Doug do anything for my sake,” she said.

While the girl napped, the dishes were done. Once, Mrs. Reilly slipped back into her bedroom and there were rustlings and a satisfied humming of “We Three Kings” while in the kitchen the boys sang, “We Three Kings of Orientar / Tried to smoke a rubber cigar. / It exploded, it went
bang!
/ We two kings of Orientar—” Then Mrs. Reilly bustled back across the living room, with a surreptitious glance at Monica, and with a backhanded toss, deposited a present beneath the branches of the Christmas tree.