by Vicki Delany
The assembled men growled in appreciation. “So what did you do, Jack?” the oldest resident asked.
“Why, I drove them off, of course. Told them we don’t want their kind in Hope River.” He sighed theatrically. “Not that it do much good. They’ll just move on down the street and sell their drugs somewhere else.”
Selection in hand, Joanna approached the counter. She doubted if Jack would know a drug or a drug dealer if it rose up to bite him in the ass. Assuming of course that tobacco and alcohol, the most persistent drugs of all, didn’t count. But the old men were hanging on to his every word and that was probably all that mattered, to Jack at any rate.
“I hear there’s some mighty strange goings on in the woods to the south of town.” Joanna recognized the man she had dubbed Santa Claus from the search party. He bobbed his bushy white beard in emphasis.
“You live right near there don’t you, Ms. Hastings.” A man she had never set eyes on before addressed Joanna politely as she fumbled in her purse for her wallet. She probably shouldn’t be surprised that they all seemed to know who she was. She was no doubt the talk of the town. “Do you hear wild drug parties and such goings on in the night?” he added.
Joanna turned a full wattage smile on them all. “If I did, I would probably assume it was just a bunch of good old boys out for a night of drinking. Good day, gentlemen.” Shoulders back she sailed out of the store, a few scratching heads bobbing in her wake.
Christmas was coming up awfully fast. Amidst all the chaos of the last few weeks, she had barely given the holiday a thought. She glanced around her little cabin. It was definitely sparse and certainly cheerless, and a bit of decorating would help. At home Joanna had always gone all out for the Season. As well as a huge live tree, which rose up to touch the ceiling and was covered with decorations the children had proudly carried home since nursery school, she filled the house with candles and ribbons and armfuls of greenery, and the outside she draped with swags and wreathes. Evergreen boughs and stark winter branches and rosehip in clay pots lined the walkway. The children would dig the old outdoor lights out of the garage and carefully sort through them all, discarding broken ones and those with the colored paint almost completely chipped off. Then with much pushing and shoving and laughter one or the other would climb up the ladder dragging strings of brightly colored lights behind them. Inevitably the lights would sag and some would loosen and then flicker and grow dark but the children were always so excited by the display and their own part in arranging it all.
But nothing had been the same for the last few years. Christmas was just such an effort. The spirit of the season was hard to maintain in the face of Alexis’ mounting anger. Joanna tried half-heartedly, but before long Wendy and James would prefer to escape their mother’s and sister’s continual conflicts in the homes of their friends, even if it was Christmas.
She was thinking that it would be nice to decorate the cabin a bit when the electrician arrived, right on time. The broken wires were fixed and the new (second-hand) phone installed, the electrician paid and waved off, only minutes before Wendy called with the welcome news of the timing of their arrival for Christmas.
Hanging up the phone with a smile Joanna wanted to recreate some of the gaity of Christmases long past. She struggled to remember if she had seen a nursery anywhere in the vicinity.
Getting the tree should be no problem, there were plenty of tree lots to choose from. But a wreath would be nice on the front door; maybe some swags on the wall. She stepped out onto the porch and gazed absentmindedly into the woods. There were no florists anywhere near Hope River. She didn’t feel like driving for hours in search of decorations.
Her bark of laughter crashed through the silence of the late afternoon. A large chipmunk, about to venture out of her little nest under the woodpile in search of a few overlooked acorns, got such a start she thought better of the expedition and pulled swiftly back into the shadows under the porch.
Laughing at herself for a city-bred fool, Joanna gleefully rushed back into the cabin. Grabbing a sharp vegetable knife and slipping on her boots, she ran out into the woods not bothering with a coat or sweater. All the Christmas greenery one could possibly hope for right here in her own front yard.
She spent the rest of the day’s light rambling through the woods filling her arms with thick pine boughs, red dogwood branches, winter berries and all the pine cones a woman could carry. She carted load after load back to the cabin and then set off again, searching for still more. Only when it became so dark that it was impossible to distinguish a lush evergreen branch from a dead one did she stop.
The accumulated pile had assumed near-monstrous proportions. Joanna flicked on the overhead light and knelt in the snow on the porch to sort through her bounty. She selected a few of the best pieces and carried them proudly into the cabin.
She had brought most of the family’s Christmas decorations with her to the north. The memories they held were far too precious to consign to storage. Rooting through the box, she pulled out bright red and gold bows, homemade decorations and long strings of wooden beads.
She worked late into the night, tying evergreen branches into shapes and decorating them with bows and beads, dried berries and pinecones. She stopped only once to add more fuel to the fireplace. When she was finished a huge wreath hung proudly on the front door, swags bounded across the front porch and draped gracefully across the brick wall behind the fire. Tomorrow she would go to the hardware store for some clay pots to fill with more pine branches and stalks of huckleberry and dogwood to mark the entrance to the driveway.
Tired and happy, Joanna staggered off to bed. Pine needles and bits of bark, too-small cones, cut ribbon and a few broken wooden beads littered the kitchen table and spread out across the linoleum floor.
Outside the cabin a sudden wind stirred the branches on the porch and clouds rushed to cover the moon. A light snow was falling, swirled into eddies by the wind. Barely distinguishable from the night beneath the blowing snow, a thin black shape moved across the lawn to drift without sound up the old porch steps. It crossed over the broken wooden step but for once the tread lay silent. It swayed in front of the large wreath hanging in pride of place on the front door. An insubstantial shifting of the blowing snow in the air around it was all there was to mark any movement as it reached out for the cheerful red bow hanging from one side of the wreath. It hovered in the air for the briefest of moments until a gust of wind whipped up the falling snow. When the wind again died down, nothing more remained to be seen.
A large-eyed owl sitting in the nearest tree blinked just once before resuming its eternal, silent scan for a flash of movement through the dark, snow-covered woods.
“Your place looks great, Joanna, really great.” Tiffany shrugged out of her coat, still her grandmother’s cast-off, and looked about the room. “That thing over the fire is fabulous. I guess you bought it in Toronto, eh?”
Joanna grinned. “Believe it or not, I made it myself, with stuff I gathered from the woods outside my very own front door.”
“Wow. Maybe you could make something like that for us.”
“Doesn’t your grandmother decorate for Christmas? I would have thought she did. She certainly seems like the type.”
“Oh, sure. We have all kinds of plastic wreathes and dime store Santas, but nothing, you know, nothing real.”
“It’s not hard, not really. Why don’t you make one yourself? You’d be surprised at how easy it is.”
“My mom started making a real wreath once, it would have been nice but then her jerky boyfriend came over and wanted a beer and we didn’t have any in the fridge so she had to go out and get some and then she never finished it. She even had some real berries, like you have on yours.”
Joanna thought desperately for something to say. “All the more reason for you to give it a try.”
“I’m no good at stuff like that.”
“I won’t really have time, anyway,” Joanna said. “My daughte
r and her husband are coming tomorrow to spend the holidays with me.”
“Yea, I guess.” Tiffany’s shoulders drooped and the girl retreated once again into her slumped posture.
Joanna decided to ignore her and pulled a chair up to the computer table. “Let’s get started. I thought that maybe we should get into presentation software. Something that you can use to make nice-looking projects and reports for school.”
“Oh, yea, like I’m going to do reports,” Tiffany snorted.
Joanna looked up in surprise, taken aback by the abrupt 180-degree change in the girl’s mood. She had had more than enough of teenagers and their moods in her life. “Oh, stop whining and sit down,” she said sharply. “Let’s get started.”
The lesson was strained enough as it was but today of all days the computer decided to act up. They had to reboot the machine twice and Tiffany was full of disparaging comments about the state of the computer industry in general and this machine in particular.
Joanna bit her lip and held her tongue. She was accepting money to teach this girl, so she would put up with it.
At last the endless hour was over. Tiffany scrambled to the door and pulled on mitts and boots the instant they heard the tooting of Maude’s car from the road. She rushed out without a backward glance.
Joanna sighed as she pulled up the computer chair to return to her own work. Tiffany’s moods could swing like a weathervane in a hurricane and she did not intend to spend any more time or effort figuring them out.
Hours later, she looked up from the computer monitor and let out a low groan as she stretched her arms into the air and twisted her back in a futile attempt to wiggle the kinks out. Rising stiffly to go into the kitchen and make a cup of coffee, she noticed Tiffany’s long, red, hand-knitted scarf peeking out from behind a cushion on the sofa. She groaned again, and pulled the scarf from its hiding place. She hung it on the coat rack by the front door and walked into the kitchen to make her coffee.
Chapter 21
The moment she heard a car slowing down on the road and turning carefully into the driveway, Joanna launched herself down the steps of the cabin. With a squeal of joy Wendy leaped out of the car before it had come to a complete stop and ran into her mother’s arms. They hugged each other and jumped up and down in delight as Robert carefully parked the rental car behind Joanna’s Toyota and came over to join them. He kissed the air beside his mother-in-law’s cheek and said, “Why don’t you two go in and relax? I’ll bring in the suitcases.”
Joanna and her eldest daughter needed no further encouragement. Their arms wrapped around each other’s waists, they virtually danced into the cabin.
“Oh, Mom, everything looks absolutely fabulous,” Wendy gushed. “Just like when we were children. For heaven’s sake there’s the pottery Santa Claus that I made, must have been a hundred years ago.”
Joanna laughed, “Not quite, but sometimes it seems like it’s been that long.”
Wendy rushed to open the screen door as Robert stumbled up the steps, his arms laden with brightly wrapped parcels. “Where shall I put these,” he gasped. He spotted the fully trimmed tree. “Oh, never mind, I think I can guess.”
Laughing, Wendy took the presents out of his arms and placed them under the tree as Robert went out for another load.
Joanna directed her daughter’s husband to put the suitcases in the back bedroom. “Sorry, but it’s pretty cramped and there is only the one bedroom,” she apologized, aware of how inadequate the cabin might appear to others. “You can hang your clothes up in my closet. I made some room.”
She followed Wendy and Robert into the back. “You two will sleep in here, of course. I will be quite comfortable out on the couch.”
“Good Heavens, Mom, we can’t kick you out of your bedroom,” Wendy said.
“I insist. I will be perfectly comfortable out there. In fact, you will soon find that it is the only warm room in the place. I won’t suffer. Besides, if I force myself to stay awake tonight, I might see Santa Claus himself sliding down the chimney with all those presents. He comes extra early to us in the North, you know. First thing.”
Wendy laughed. “Do you remember the year we went for a drive on Christmas Eve to look at all the lights before bedtime and we saw Santa getting out of a van on our street?”
Joanna smiled at the memory. “You were starting to wonder if maybe Santa wasn’t a real person after all. That fixed you for a couple of years.”
“What,” Robert gasped in mock horror, “you mean Santa isn’t real?” He clasped his hand to his heart and rolled his eyes in despair. “My life is ruined, what else is there to believe in. Next you’ll be telling me that the tooth fairy didn’t really give me a dollar for every tooth I lose.”
“A dollar!” Wendy shrieked. “We only got twenty-five cents for a tooth. You cheated me, Mom. Pay up, now.”
With a chuckle, Joanna left them to unpack. It was great to laugh again.
Because Wendy had been unsure as to when they would be able to get out of Toronto or what the traffic would be like, Joanna had prepared a dinner that would be quick to reheat once they were ready to eat. She popped the lasagna back into the oven as Robert went out to the car for another load of Christmas presents, and put together a quick salad. She poured herself and Wendy a glass of wine and a beer for Robert, put a new log into the fire, plugged in the tree lights and finally settled back into the living room couch with a sigh of contentment.
“There seem to be an awful lot of presents here,” she said, eyeing the tree once her guests had picked up their drinks and snuggled up on the floor beside the fire. “A lot more than you would expect for just three people.”
“Some are from Dad,” Wendy said, swirling her wine in gentle circles. “He gave me presents to bring to you.”
Joanna was surprised. “Really. After all this time.” She studied the reflection of the candlelight as it danced across the ruby surface of the wine in her own glass. “I didn’t send him anything. Nor to Buffy, either.”
“Belinda, Mother, you know her name is Belinda.”
“Oh yes, right. Belinda. Sounds like Buffy to me. Well, I had better check on dinner. Be back in a sec.”
After dinner Joanna insisted on following the family custom of one present on Christmas Eve. Robert opened a tie from his mother. “She refuses to admit that I don’t wear ties and a three-piece suit to class.” He shook his head fondly as he held up the neckpiece for all to admire, a lovely black tie with a background of blazing stars and the original starship Enterprise boldly going where no one had gone before.
Wendy’s gift was from James, an extremely nice sculpture of a breaching whale.
Joanna tentatively opened one of the gifts from her ex-husband, beautifully wrapped in glistening silver paper so delicate that the box inside virtually glowed. Of all things, it was a neglig�e, a flimsy peach thing in soft drapes of silk and satin. Joanna sat back in shock and then despite herself she chuckled gently. Wendy and Robert giggled.
“Okay,” Joanna announced, trying to hide her embarrassment at the gift, “who’s for a walk in the wilds of Northern Ontario?”
Bending to pick up the empty wineglasses she failed to notice Wendy exchange quick glances with her husband.
“Tell you what,” Robert announced solemnly. “You two go out for a walk and I will do up the dishes.”
Joanna looked at Wendy in mock surprise. “Did I hear correctly? Is this a model of the modern male, or what?”
Wendy shrugged into her coat and held Joanna’s out in front of her. “Let’s go, Mother, before he changes his mind.”
The winter night was clear and cold. Every star in the sky sparkled as brightly as candles dancing dangerously on a Victorian Christmas tree. Wendy slipped her arm through her mother’s and hugged her close as they stood on the front steps appreciating the silence. Wendy blew quick little gusts of warm air out of her lungs and into the winter chill to watch her breath turn into her own personal clouds in front of her fa
ce.
Joanna laughed and in companionable serenity the two women walked up the driveway to the road.
Wendy sighed. “I still wonder about all this, your place is just so terribly isolated.”
Joanna tightened her grip on her daughter’s arm. “I like it here, dear, I really do. Isolation suits me just fine.”
“As long as you’re not running away, trying to avoid dealing with things, I mean.”
Under the cover of darkness Joanna grimaced to herself. “I am dealing with things as best I can, Wendy. As I said, this place suits me. Now tell me about your classes. How is your thesis coming along, how is Robert doing? You told me he was struggling a bit at the end of last year. I hope that everything has straightened out for him.”
Wendy took a deep breath. “Actually, Mom, he has decided to quit school and take a position that he has been offered with a mineral exploration company.”
Joanna stopped walking. “What do you mean, ‘quit school’? What about his PhD?”
“His thesis is going nowhere, Mom, absolutely nowhere,” Wendy said with a shrug, “and he jumped at the chance to take this job. So, at least for now, he won’t be finishing his PhD.”
Joanna was actually somewhat relieved: she was starting to fear that they were both turning into professional students. “Maybe that is for the best, dear, a bit of practical experience is probably just what Robert needs. What company is it? Is the head office in Toronto?”
Wendy stopped walking. Thick, light snowflakes were falling out of the black night to drape the women’s shoulders in cloaks of the softest white.
“Actually, Mom, their head office is in Toronto, but their operations are in the Yukon. That is where Robert will be working.”
Joanna nodded, refusing to take in the implications. “You won’t get a chance to see him very much, then. I hope that the company will fly him down regularly for a visit.”