That Old Emerald Mountain Magic

by Cara Malone

  Joy did as she asked, sitting on the edge of the tub with her back resting against the tile wall that had been warmed by the steam from the water. Carmen pulled her hips to the edge of the tub and Joy looked down at her, running one hand along the side of Carmen’s perfect face and letting her thumb linger over her plump lower lip. Then Carmen dipped her head and brought her mouth to Joy’s body.

  She had to grip the edge of the tub to stay still, to keep from slipping into the water or squirming involuntarily out of Carmen’s reach. Her tongue explored her and lit Joy on fire.

  Joy wished that they could lie together in the tub a while longer. She would have loved to slide back into the water and pull Carmen into her lap, wrapping her arms around her shoulders to protect her from the cold while they watched the snow fall outside.

  But they’d pushed their luck as it was – the Castillos could be heading back to the cabin at any moment, and once Joy caught her breath, she realized that it was time for this moment to end. There were a lot of those in her life lately, moments that she’d rather stay in but which had to end, and she pushed the thought aside as she helped Carmen out of the tub and handed her a robe from a stack at the end of the counter.

  She toweled off and then got dressed, and while Carmen was standing in front of the mirror to dry her hair, Joy came up behind her and wrapped her arms around her waist. Tomorrow was Christmas Eve, and two days later she’d be gone. There were not enough hours in the world for Joy to get her fill of this girl, but seventy-two sounded like an impossibly small number.

  “Hey,” she said, kissing Carmen just as she was about to turn on the hair dryer. “You know what we should do tomorrow after I get off work?”

  “What?”

  “We should go get a Christmas tree,” she said. “There’s a tree farm not far outside of Emerald Hill where my parents used to take me when I was a kid. We can check one more thing off your dad’s ‘white Christmas’ bucket list, and I bet your sisters would have fun.”

  “We already have a tree,” Carmen pointed out. “And so do you.”

  “True,” Joy said, letting go of Carmen and leaning up against the counter to watch her dry her hair. She turned the wet ringlets into plump curls, and when she was done, Joy said, “What if we take it to the shelter? They’ve got an artificial tree, but the thing is ancient and it’s starting to look pretty sad.”

  “Okay,” Carmen said. “I think that would be really nice. I bet my dad would be interested to get a look at the food pantry, too. I’m not sure he’s stopped thinking about your little organization conundrum since you mentioned it last night.”

  “Great,” Joy said. “My shift ends at five tomorrow. I’ll meet you at the cabin, and you just make sure it works with your dad’s itinerary.”

  Carmen laughed, and Joy pulled her into one last, quick kiss before she set about draining the tub and mopping up the overflowed water, making the bathroom look as if they hadn’t just taken one of the nicest bubble baths of Joy’s life.

  December 24

  Twenty-Three

  Carmen

  Christmas Eve was a day of anticipation for Carmen, just like it always had been when she was a kid, spending the day eagerly awaiting Santa’s arrival. This year, she wasn’t waiting for presents or even the holiday itself. She was waiting for Joy to finish her shift, anxious because the closer they got to Christmas Day, the harder it was to ignore the fact that their relationship had an expiration date that was quickly approaching.

  She spent the day attempting to distract herself from that fact, volunteering to take Marisol and Maria back to the ski slopes after lunch. They’d found an unexpected aptitude for snowblading yesterday, and Carmen decided that being on the mountain would provide ample diversion for her thoughts while also giving her parents some time to themselves for the first time since they arrived. The twins quickly outgrew the bunny hill and started clamoring to try out the next challenge, a blue square slope, and Carmen went with them a little apprehensively. She watched them take their first ride on the chair lift, following behind them and snow ploughing her way all the way back down the hill while her sisters flew fearlessly in front of her.

  They finally made their way back to the cabin around four o’clock, where Mom had cups of hot cocoa waiting to help them warm up. They got changed and the light was beginning to go yellow and muted in the sky by the time Joy pulled into the little driveway in front of the cabin. Carmen’s heart leaped into her throat the moment she heard it, and she dashed over to the door to meet her.

  “Hey,” she said. “I missed you.”

  It was an understatement, but she still paused for a moment after she said it, wondering if it was too honest. Joy just smiled at her, though, and gave her a quick kiss.

  “I missed you, too,” she answered when they pulled out of the kiss. “Is everybody ready?”

  “Yeah,” Carmen said. She led Joy into the cabin, where her family was pulling on their coats, and noticed that Joy was dressed in jeans and a heavy flannel shirt beneath her jacket. Carmen teased, “I didn’t realize we were supposed to dress for the part. I left my lumberjack clothes in New York.”

  “You do know cutting a tree down involves laying on the ground, right?” Joy replied. “I’m dressed appropriately.”

  “And I have no intention of lying on the ground,” Carmen answered. “My dad on the other hand…”

  “Ready to go full lumberjack,” he said, coming over to meet Carmen and Joy in the foyer. “Thanks for suggesting this. It’s a great tradition that our family seems to have gotten away from.”

  Mom and the twins joined the group and Joy said, “I borrowed one of the resort’s transport vans for tonight. Everyone ready?”

  “Ready,” Marisol said as Mom adjusted her scarf a little tighter around her face and she gave her a look of mild annoyance.

  They all climbed into the van, Carmen in front with Joy, then Mom and Dad, and the twins in the back. Mom leaned forward to talk to Joy as they drove, thanking her for the ski lesson the day before and telling her how eager the twins had been to get back out on the slopes again today.

  “We really should have gotten out there from the start,” she said. “We’ll have to come back again next year because I think the girls have been bitten by the skiing bug.”

  Joy glanced over at Carmen and she could read what was in her eyes – the promise of seeing each other again, mixed with a little bit of agony over the fact that Mom was talking about next Christmas, three hundred and sixty-six days away.

  Carmen reached across the space between their seats and squeezed Joy’s hand, then said, “You would have been proud of us – we made it all the way down a blue square hill and only one of us fell down. Guess who?”

  Joy laughed and said, “But you got away unscathed this time, so that’s an improvement.”

  “Hah,” Carmen said. “I didn’t fall - it was Marisol because she’s fearless and doesn’t believe in snow ploughing.”

  “I may have fallen, but it took you twenty minutes to get down the hill,” Marisol called from the back of the van, and Mom and Joy both laughed at Carmen’s expense.

  The tree farm was about a twenty-minute drive away from the resort, through the town of Emerald Hill, and just to the edge of the mountain where the ground started to level out and make way for a small, forested area. It was dusk by the time Joy pulled the van into a gravel parking lot that was lit with twinkling white string lights on poles all around the perimeter, and there were only a few cars in the parking lot.

  “Here we are,” Joy said as she came to a stop in front of a small log cabin that acted as the tree farm’s office as well as a small Christmas shop.

  Everyone got out of the van and Joy walked over, slipping her gloved hand into Carmen’s. There was a split rail fence along one side of the shop with about twenty-five pre-cut trees leaning against it, all of them already bound with twine for any last-minute tree shoppers who didn’t have the time or desire to cut their own. The shop i
tself was decorated with twinkling Christmas lights, and a delightful mix of pine and cinnamon wafted into the air as the front door opened and a man in overalls and a flannel shirt came out.

  “Hey, folks, you looking for a pre-cut tree?”

  “We’d like to cut our own,” Dad said. “Is it too late for that?”

  “Not at all,” the man said. “But it’s getting dark so you better hurry up.”

  He pointed them to the end of the fence, where about a dozen hacksaws hung from a post, and the same number of deep plastic sleds were stacked together.

  “Grab a sled and a hacksaw and have at it,” he said. “You folks been here before?”

  “I have,” Joy said. “But it’s been a long time.”

  The man nodded and pointed to the field behind the shop, where a couple acres of pine trees were growing in neat lines. He told them where they could find the different species of trees, and the prices for each, and then he set them loose to begin the hunt.

  “When you’re done, come into the shop and I’ll help you get ‘er tied to your van,” he said. “We also got ornaments and hot cocoa and fresh candied almonds if I can tempt ya.”

  The Castillos headed into the field, walking single-file through the rows of trees. There was just enough light left in the sky to let them find what they were looking for among the stout, full-branched Douglas firs and the regal-looking Norwegian spruce trees. Most of them had a light dusting of snow on them, and the walking was slow because there was at least five inches on the ground.

  Carmen linked her arm in Joy’s and they followed behind the rest of the family. She didn’t pay attention to any tree in particular, enjoying the moment instead. They lingered and fell further and further behind everyone else, and when they found themselves separated from the rest of the family by at least two dozen trees, Joy stopped Carmen to kiss her.

  “Are you having a good Christmas Eve?” she asked.

  “The best,” Carmen answered, and then she took out her phone and made Joy pose for a couple more photos, using the trees and the mountains as the background. It was a much better shot than the one she’d been trying to take when Joy came over that hill and smashed into her, and she would enjoy looking at it a lot more than a picture that was taken simply to prove a point to Brigid and her annoying new boyfriend.

  Carmen wanted as many mementos as she could get to remember her by, and she smiled a little as she noticed the number of notifications that had gone unseen since the last time she took out her phone. On any other vacation, in any other place than at the base of the magical Emerald Mountain, Carmen’s fingers would have been itching to check on her best friend and find out everything that she was missing. This place had changed her though – Joy had changed her – and it all seemed rather inconsequential to her now.

  She slid her phone back into her pocket and took Joy’s hand, and they started walking again, trying to catch up with the rest of her family. Carmen pointed out a few pretty trees here and there as they went, and Joy let her know what was wrong with each one.

  “The trunk is too crooked, it’ll never stand up,” she said about one, and, “There’s a dead branch – it’s probably got a disease.”

  “Killjoy,” Carmen said after a few more of Joy’s criticisms, knocking into her with her shoulder. “If you’re the tree expert, why don’t you pick a good one?”

  “I just have more experience at this than you do,” Joy said. “I can’t count the number of times I’ve brought a tree home because it was full and green and lovely, but the trunk was crooked and we had to spend the entire month trying to keep it from falling over. My dad got so sick of it one year that he tied the whole damn tree to the window sash.”

  Carmen laughed and was about to point out another one when they heard her dad calling from further down the row, “Get over here, girls, I think we found the one!”

  The winning tree turned out to be a seven-foot-tall Fraser fir, its branches perfectly even and green and its shape the epitome of Christmas trees. As soon as everyone agreed that it was the prettiest one on the lot – or at least the prettiest one they would find before dark settled in and made the task all the more tricky – Dad took the hacksaw and climbed under the tree.

  “Can somebody hold it steady?” he called, his voice slightly muffled from the thick needles above his head.

  “Go ahead,” Joy said, nudging Carmen forward.

  She reached into the thick branches, the needles slightly prickly even through her gloves, and grabbed onto the trunk while Dad worked the saw back and forth at the tree’s base. It took a good five minutes for him to saw all the way through, partly because Maria decided she wanted to take a whack at it, too. Then he called, “Timber!” and told Carmen to let go. The tree fell onto the sled, snow coming off it in a cloud.

  “I think we did pretty well,” Dad said with a grin, and Mom linked her arm in his.

  “It’s a good tree,” she said. “If we’re going to take it to the shelter, we’ll need to buy a stand and some ornaments.”

  “They’ve got ornaments there,” Joy said. “We can take them off the artificial tree.”

  “No,” Mom said, “we’ll leave them both up, and see what kind of ornaments are in the shop.”

  So they went back up the rows of trees and found the man in the overalls waiting for them.

  “Find a good one?” he asked.

  “I think so,” Dad said. “Can you tie it up for us?”

  Mom and the twins went inside the shop to pick out some ornaments and Carmen stood beside Joy, watching with wonder as the man lifted their tree out of the sled and took it over to a small metal box on the ground, kicking a switch to turn it on. He put the trunk of the tree on top of a vibrating metal plate on top of the box and it shook all the loose needles almost violently out of the tree, and then he carried the freshly cleaned tree over to another machine, which he fed it through in order to wrap it tightly in twine.

  He and Dad managed to get it hoisted onto the top of the van and tied it to the luggage rack with more twine, then they all went inside to settle the bill. Carmen and Joy picked out a few ornaments – Carmen was drawn to a pair of ceramic turtle doves that she set in Joy’s palm with a kiss on her cheek – and the man wrapped them all up in brown paper and packed them in gift bags. Then they thanked him and everyone climbed back into the van for the short trip over to the shelter.

  It was just past dinnertime when they got there and the people who would be making use of the shelter’s cots to stay warm overnight were helping Tyler and a few other volunteers to clean up the kitchen after their meal. Joy told Tyler about the tree that she and the Castillos had gotten for the shelter and he pointed them to an area of the great room that would be a good spot for it, near the door and the front window of the shelter. A few shelter visitors came outside to help Carmen’s dad get the tree down from the roof of the van, and then they all worked together on making room and setting up the tree.

  Joy and Carmen carefully moved the artificial tree to the other side of the great room, near the entrance to the food pantry, and Maria and Marisol followed behind them, picking up the ornaments that dropped off its limbs as they carried it. Dad and one of the visitors worked together to level the cut bottom of the new tree, then put it into the stand that they’d purchased at the Christmas shop, and Mom went into the kitchen to fetch a pitcher of water for it. Then they carefully unwrapped all of the ornaments and garlands they had bought, laying them out on a table not far away.

  The Castillos stepped aside for the shelter visitors to take over decorating the tree, and Joy sat down on the table, pulling Carmen between her legs and wrapping her arms around her waist while they watched. There were a couple of kids staying at the shelter that night and their eyes lit up as soon as they realized that they were being tasked with trimming the tree. Carmen put her hands on top of Joy’s while she watched the kids’ parents lifting them up, helping them reach the higher branches to place their ornaments.

 
; She saw one of them pick up the turtle dove ornament that she’d chosen, hanging it delicately in the center of the tree, and she leaned back to kiss Joy on the cheek. She said, “Thank you for suggesting this. It’s so much more special than a Cancun Christmas spent shopping til we drop.”

  “Thank you for thinking it was a good idea,” Joy answered, holding her a little tighter.

  After the tree was decorated and the lights were turned on, twinkling with every color and casting the room in a festive glow, Dad came over to Carmen and Joy and said, “Let’s have a look at that food pantry, shall we?”

  “Sure,” Joy said, releasing Carmen and sliding off the table.

  She took him across the room to the pantry, Carmen following behind them, and she was right about the problem – it had only been a few days, but more donations had obviously come in and the shelves were beginning to look chaotic again already.

  “Far be it for me to complain about people’s generosity,” Joy said as she walked Dad through the space and explained the issue, “but it can get pretty difficult to make sure everyone’s getting what they need and nothing’s going to waste when we can’t even keep the room organized.”

  “I see your dilemma,” Dad said, back in his pondering state with his hand on his chin.

  He walked around the room a few times, getting a feel for the dimensions of the space and reading the worn labels that Joy, or some other volunteer, had put on the shelves in an effort to fix the problem. Carmen and Joy stood in the doorway, practically watching the gears in his mind turn, until Tyler appeared in the doorway.