A Lot Like Christmas: Stories

by Connie Willis

  “You go bring the car around,” B.T. said, and Mel clattered down the metal mesh steps and ducked across the parking lot to the car.

  The emergency room door opened and two men stood in its light for a moment, talking to someone.

  Mel jammed the key into the ignition, switched it on, and pulled the car around to the side of the hospital, where B.T. and Cassie were working their way down the last steps.

  “Come on,” B.T. said, grabbing Cassie under the arm, “hurry,” and hustled her across to the car.

  A siren blared. “Hurry,” Mel said, yanking the door open and pushing her into the backseat, slamming the door shut. B.T. ran around to the other side.

  The siren came abruptly closer and then cut off, and Mel, reaching for the door handle, looked back toward the entrance. An ambulance pulled in, red and yellow lights flashing, and the two men in the door reached forward and took a stretcher off the back.

  And this is crazy, Mel thought. Nobody’s after us. But they would be, as soon as the nurse saw Cassie was missing, and if not then, as soon as Cassie’s sister got there. “I saw two men push a woman into a car and then go peeling out of here,” one of the interns unloading that stretcher would say. “It looked like they were kidnapping her.” And how would they explain to the police that they were looking for the City of God?

  “This is insane,” Mel started to say, reaching for the door handle.

  There was a flyer wedged in it. Mel unrolled it and read it by the parking lot’s vapor light. “Hurry, hurry, hurry! Step right up to the Greatest Show on Earth!” it read in letters of gold. “Wonders, Marvels, Mysteries Revealed!”

  Mel got into the car and handed the flyer to B.T. “Ready?” he asked.

  “Let’s go,” Cassie said, and leaned forward to point at the front door. Two men in navy blue suits were running down the front steps.

  “Keep down,” Mel said, and peeled out of the parking lot. He turned south, drove a block, turned onto a side street, pulled up to the curb, switched off the lights, and waited, watching in his rearview mirror until a navy blue car roared past them going south.

  He started the car and drove two blocks without lights on, and then circled back to the highway and headed north. Five miles out of town, he turned east on a gravel road, drove till it ended, turned south, and then east again, and north onto a dirt road. There was no one behind them.

  “Okay,” he said, and B.T. and Cassie sat up.

  “Where are we?” Cassie asked.

  “I have no idea,” Mel said. He turned east again and then south on the first paved road he came to. “Where are we going?” B.T. asked.

  “I don’t know that, either. But I know what we’re looking for.” He waited till a beat-up pickup truck full of kids passed them and then pulled over to the side of the road and switched on the dome light.

  “Where’s your laptop?” he asked B.T.

  “Right here,” B.T. said, opening it up and switching it on.

  “All right,” Mel said, holding the flyer up to the light. “They were in Omaha on January fourth, Palmyra on the ninth, and Beatrice on the tenth.” He concentrated, trying to remember the dates on the sign in the hospital.

  “Beatrice,” Cassie murmured. “That’s in Dante, too.”

  “The carnival was in Crown Point on December fourteenth,” Mel went on, still trying to remember the dates, “and Gresham on January thirteenth.”

  “The carnival?” B.T. said. “We’re looking for a carnival?”

  “Yes,” Mel said. “Cassie, have you got your Bartlett’s Quotations?”

  “Yes,” she said, and began rummaging in the emerald green tote bag.

  “I saw them between Pittsburgh and Youngstown on Sunday,” Mel said to B.T., who had started typing, “and in Wayside, Iowa, on Monday.”

  “And the truck spill was at Seward,” B.T. said, tapping keys.

  “What have you got, Cassie?” Mel said, looking in the rearview mirror.

  She had her finger on an open page. “It’s Christina Rossetti,” she said. “ ‘Will the day’s journey take the whole long day? From morn to night, my friend.’ ”

  “They’re skipping all over the map,” B.T. said, turning the laptop so Mel could see the screen. It was a maze of connecting lines.

  “Can you tell what general direction they’re headed?” Mel asked.

  “Yes,” B.T. said. “West.”

  “West,” Mel repeated. Of course. He started the car again and turned west on the first road they came to.

  There were no cars at all, and only a few scattered lights, a farm and a grain elevator, and a radio tower. Mel drove steadily west across the flat, snowy landscape, looking for the distant glittering lights of the carnival.

  The sky turned navy blue and then gray, and they stopped to get gas and call Cassie’s sister.

  “Use my calling card,” B.T. said, handing it to Cassie. “They’re not looking for me yet. How much cash do we have?”

  Cassie had sixty and another two hundred in traveler’s checks. Mel had a hundred sixty-eight. “What did you do?” B.T. asked. “Rob the collection plate?”

  Mel called Mrs. Bilderbeck. “I won’t be back in time for the services on Sunday,” he told her. “Call Reverend Davidson and ask if he’ll fill in. And tell the ecumenical meeting to read John 3:16–18 for a devotion.”

  “Are you sure you’re all right?” Mrs. Bilderbeck asked. “There were some men here looking for you yesterday.”

  Mel gripped the receiver. “What did you tell them?”

  “I didn’t like the looks of them, so I told them you were at a ministerial alliance meeting in Boston.”

  “You’re wonderful,” Mel said, and started to hang up.

  “Oh, wait, what about the furnace?” Mrs. Bilderbeck said. “What if the pilot light goes out again?”

  “It won’t,” Mel said. “Nothing can put it out.”

  He hung up and handed the phone and the calling card to Cassie. She called her sister, who had a car phone, and told her not to come, that she was fine, her knee hadn’t been sprained after all, just twisted.

  “And I think it must have been,” she said to Mel, walking back to the car. “See? I’m not limping at all.”

  B.T. had bought juice and doughnuts and a large bag of potato chips. They ate them while Mel drove, going south across the interstate and down to Highway 34.

  The sun came up and glittered off metal silos and onto the star-shaped crack in the windshield. Mel squinted against its brilliance. They drove slowly through McCook and Sharon Springs and Maranatha, looking for flyers on telephone poles and in store windows, calling out the towns and dates to B.T., who added them to the ones on his laptop.

  Trucks passed them, none of them carrying Tilt-A-Whirls or concession stands, and Cassie consulted Bartlett’s again. “A cold coming we had of it,” it said. “Just the worst time of the year.”

  “T. S. Eliot,” Cassie said wonderingly. “ ‘Journey of the Magi.’ ”

  They stopped for gas again, and B.T. drove while Mel napped. It began to get dark. B.T. and Mel changed places, and Cassie got in front, moving stiffly.

  “Is your knee hurting again?” Mel asked.

  “No,” Cassie said. “It doesn’t hurt at all. I’ve just been sitting in the car too long,” she said. “At least it’s not camels. Can you imagine what that must have been like?”

  Yes, Mel thought, I can. I’ll bet everyone thought they were crazy. Including them.

  It got very dark. They continued west, through Glorieta and Gilead and Beulah Center, searching for multicolored lights glimmering in a cold field, a spinning Ferris wheel and the smell of cotton candy, listening for the screams of the roller coaster and the music of a merry-go-round.

  And the star went before them.

  The snow started at 12:01 A.M. Eastern Standard Time just outside of Branford, Connecticut. Noah and Terry Blake, on their way home from a party at the Whittiers’ at which Miranda Whittier had said, �
�I guess you could call this our Christmas Eve Eve party!” at least fifty times, noticed a few stray flakes as they turned onto Canoe Brook Road, and by the time they reached home, the snow was coming down hard.

  “Oh, good,” Tess said, leaning forward to peer through the windshield, “I’ve been hoping we’d have a white Christmas this year.”

  At 1:37 A.M. Central Standard Time, Billy Grogan, filling in for KYZT’s late-night radio request show out of Duluth, said, “This just in from the National Weather Service. Snow advisory for the Great Lakes region tonight and tomorrow morning. Two to four inches expected,” and then went back to discussing the callers’ least favorite Christmas songs.

  “I’ll tell you the one I hate,” a caller from Wauwatosa said. “ ‘White Christmas.’ I musta heard that thing five hundred times this month.”

  “Actually,” Billy said, “according to the St. Cloud Evening News, Bing Crosby’s version of ‘White Christmas’ will be played 2,150 times during the month of December, and other artists’ renditions of it will be played an additional 1,890 times.”

  The caller snorted. “One time’s too many for me. Who the heck wants a white Christmas anyway? I sure don’t.”

  “Well, unfortunately, it looks like you’re going to get one,” Billy said. “And, in that spirit, here’s Destiny’s Child, singing ‘White Christmas.’ ”

  At 1:45 A.M., a number of geese in the city park in Bowling Green, Kentucky, woke up to a low, overcast sky and flew, flapping and honking loudly, over the city center, as if they had suddenly decided to fly farther south for the winter. The noise woke Maureen Reynolds, who couldn’t get back to sleep. She turned on KYOU, which was playing “Holly Jolly Oldies,” including “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree” and Brenda Lee’s rendition of “White Christmas.”

  At 3:15 A.M. Mountain Standard Time, Paula Devereaux arrived at DIA for the red-eye flight to Springfield, Illinois. It was beginning to snow, and as she waited in line at the express check-in (she was carrying on her maid-of-honor dress and the bag with her shoes and slip and makeup—the last time she’d been in a wedding, her luggage had gotten lost and caused a major crisis) and in line at security and in line at the gate and in line to be de-iced, she began to hope they might not be able to take off, but no such luck.

  Of course not, Paula thought, looking out the window at the snow swirling around the wing, because Stacey wants me at her wedding.

  “I want a Christmas Eve wedding,” Stacey’d told Paula after she’d informed her she was going to be her maid of honor, “all candlelight and evergreens. And I want snow falling outside the windows.”

  “What if the weather doesn’t cooperate?” Paula’d asked.

  “It will,” Stacey’d said. And here it was, snowing. She wondered if it was snowing in Springfield, too. Of course it is, she thought. Whatever Stacey wants, Stacey gets, Paula thought. Even Jim.

  Don’t think about that, she told herself. Don’t think about anything. Just concentrate on getting through the wedding. With luck, Jim won’t even be there except for the ceremony, and you won’t have to spend any time with him at all.

  She picked up the in-flight magazine and tried to read, and then plugged in her headphones and listened to Channel 4, “Seasonal Favorites.” The first song was “White Christmas” by the Statler Brothers.

  At 3:38 A.M., it began to snow in Bowling Green, Kentucky. The geese circling the city flew back to the park, landed, and hunkered down to sit it out on their island in the lake. Snow began to collect on their backs, but they didn’t care, protected as they were by down and a thick layer of subcutaneous fat designed to keep them warm even in subzero temperatures.

  At 3:39 A.M., Luke Lafferty woke up, convinced he’d forgotten to set the goose his mother had talked him into having for Christmas Eve dinner out to thaw. He went and checked. He had set it out. On his way back to bed, he looked out the window and saw it was snowing, which didn’t worry him. The news had said isolated snow showers for Wichita, ending by mid-morning, and none of his relatives lived more than an hour and a half away, except Aunt Lulla, and if she couldn’t make it, it wouldn’t exactly put a crimp in the conversation. His mom and Aunt Madge talked so much it was hard for anybody else to get a word in edgewise, especially Aunt Lulla. “She was always the shy one,” Luke’s mother said, and it was true; Luke couldn’t remember her saying anything other than “Please pass the potatoes” at their family get-togethers.

  What did worry him was the goose. He should never have let his mother talk him into having one. It was bad enough her having talked him into having the family dinner at his place. He had no idea how to cook a goose.

  “What if something goes wrong?” he’d protested. “Butterball doesn’t have a goose hotline.”

  “You won’t need a hotline,” his mother had said. “It’s just like cooking a turkey, and it’s not as if you had to cook it. I’ll be there in time to put it in the oven and everything. All you have to do is set it out to thaw. Do you have a roasting pan?”

  “Yes,” Luke had said, but lying there, he couldn’t remember if he did. When he got up at 4:14 A.M. to check—he did—it was still snowing.

  At 4:16 Mountain Standard Time, Slade Henry, filling in on WRYT’s late-night talk show out of Boise, said, “For all you folks who wanted a white Christmas, it looks like you’re going to get your wish. Three to six inches forecast for western Idaho.” He played several bars of Johnny Cash’s “White Christmas,” and then went back to discussing JFK’s assassination with a caller who was convinced Clinton was somehow involved.

  “Little Rock isn’t all that far from Dallas, you know,” the caller said. “You could drive it in four and a half hours.”

  Actually, you couldn’t, because I-30 was icing up badly, due to freezing rain which had started just after midnight and then turned to snow. The treacherous driving conditions did not slow Monty Luffer down, as he had a Ford Explorer. Shortly after five, he reached to change stations on the radio so he didn’t have to listen to “those damn Backstreet Boys” singing “White Christmas,” and slid out of control just west of Texarkana. He crossed the median, causing the semi in the left-hand eastbound lane to jam on his brakes and jackknife, resulting in a thirty-seven-car pileup that closed the road for the rest of the night and all the next day.

  At 5:21 A.M. Pacific Standard Time, four-year-old Miguel Gutierrez jumped on his mother, shouting, “Is it Christmas yet?”

  “Not on Mommy’s stomach, honey,” Pilar murmured and rolled over.

  Miguel crawled over her and repeated his question directly into her ear. “Is it Christmas yet?”

  “No,” she said groggily. “Tomorrow’s Christmas. Go watch cartoons for a few minutes, okay, and then Mommy’ll get up,” and pulled the pillow over her head.

  Miguel was back again immediately. He can’t find the remote, she thought wearily, but that couldn’t be it, because he jabbed her in the ribs with it. “What’s the matter, honey?” she said.

  “Santa isn’t gonna come,” he said tearfully, which brought her fully awake.

  He thinks Santa won’t be able to find him, she thought. This is all Joe’s fault. According to the original custody agreement, she had Miguel for Christmas and Joe had him for New Year’s, but he’d gotten the judge to change it so they split Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, and then, after she’d told Miguel, Joe had announced he needed to switch.

  When Pilar had said no, he’d threatened to take her back to court, so she’d agreed, after which he’d informed her that “Christmas Day” meant her delivering Miguel on Christmas Eve so he could wake up and open his presents at Joe’s.

  “He can open your presents to him before you come,” he’d said, knowing full well Miguel still believed in Santa Claus. So after supper she was delivering both Miguel and his presents to Joe’s in Escondido, where she would not get to see Miguel open them.

  “I can’t go to Daddy’s,” Miguel had said when she’d explained the arrangements, “Santa’
s gonna bring my presents here.”

  “No, he won’t,” she’d said. “I sent Santa a letter and told him you’d be at your daddy’s on Christmas Eve, and he’s going to take your presents there.”

  “You sent it to the North Pole?” he’d demanded.

  “To the North Pole. I took it to the post office this morning,” and he’d seemed contented with that answer. Till now.

  “Santa’s going to come,” she said, cuddling him to her. “He’s coming to Daddy’s, remember?”

  “No, he’s not,” Miguel sniffled.

  Damn Joe. I shouldn’t have given in, she thought, but every time they went back to court, Joe and his snake of a lawyer managed to wangle new concessions out of the judge, even though until the divorce was final, Joe had never paid any attention to Miguel at all. And she just couldn’t afford any more court costs right now.

  “Are you worried about Daddy living in Escondido?” she asked Miguel. “Because Santa’s magic. He can travel all over California in one night. He can travel all over the world in one night.”

  Miguel, snuggled against her, shook his head violently. “No, he can’t!”

  “Why not?”

  “Because it isn’t snowing! I want it to snow. Santa can’t come in his sleigh if it doesn’t.”

  Paula’s flight landed in Springfield at 7:48 A.M. Central Standard Time, twenty minutes late. Jim met her at the airport. “Stacey’s having her hair done,” he said. “I was afraid I wouldn’t get here in time. It was a good thing your flight was a few minutes late.”

  “There was snow in Denver,” Paula said, trying not to look at him. He was as cute as ever, with the same knee-weakening smile.

  “It just started to snow here,” he said.

  How does she do it? Paula thought. You had to admire Stacey. Whatever she wanted, she got. I wouldn’t have had to mess with carrying this stuff on, Paula thought, handing Jim the hanging bag with her dress in it. There’s no way my luggage would have gotten lost. Stacey wanted it here.