Miracle Creek Christmas

by Krista Jensen

  “It happens,” he said.

  Riley watched his chin as he smoothed the towel over the spot on her cheek. “Thanks.”

  “Not a problem.” He gave her his left side, inspecting his work. “I think we got it all.”

  “Great.” She looked away under his scrutiny.

  “Sorry if I upset you. I seem to do that a lot.” He took her wadded up towel and tossed it with his into the nearby trash can. “Do you want to talk more about my arms?”

  She choked on a laugh.

  He grinned. “No?”

  She shook her head. “No.” She could mention his chin, and how women dig strong chins. But she wasn’t going there.

  He backed away and grabbed the sheep figure and placed it on a set of chairs. He glanced at her, and she realized she was still standing, doing nothing.

  “If my arms are too magnificent for you, I can move to the other side of the room.”

  “I said attractive, not magnificent. I’ll try to control myself.”

  He turned away to work, but she could tell he smiled.

  Riley stretched as they finished up the first coat of paint on the last figures. Working over boards was different than painting at an easel, but she always got tight through her shoulders.

  “We have a good hour until we can start the second coat. What do you want to do?” She hadn’t thought of passing the time between coats.

  “We could go for a drive.” Mark replaced the paint lid on the can and took the brushes to the sink. “Do you have something I can wrap these brushes in to keep them from drying out?”

  She went to a drawer and found a container. “This should work. Where would we drive?”

  He set the container with the brushes above the sinks. “There’s a drive I’ve been wanting to take up Hay Canyon before the big snows hit. Haven’t made it yet this year.”

  “But it’s already dark outside. What would we see?”

  “Depends on what you’re looking for. Perspective is good.”

  Ten minutes later, they were driving up a narrow dirt road. They bounced and jostled—well, she mostly bounced and jostled. Mark managed to sit firm, his hand on the steering wheel, looking like he drove roads like this every day.

  After hitting a particularly jarring dip, Riley spoke up. “Are you punishing me for something?”

  He shook his head, smiling. “You should see this drive in the spring. You can see the whole valley greening up. Cherry trees bloom first, and pear.”

  “I remember the cherry blossoms in DC.”

  “You’ll love it. Up here you get daisies and black-eyed Susans and those purple flowers. Mom painted a ton of flowers.” Mark slowed down to make a turn. “She’d bring her camera up here when the light was good and snap away. Fall’s good, too.”

  Riley gripped the armrest. “You come up here a lot, then?”

  “A few times.” He glanced at her. “Mostly in full daylight. I haven’t been up here at night much. It’s really just a maintenance road. Power lines. We were called up here once for a small grass fire, and it became a favorite spot. But it’s been a couple of years.”

  “What made you drive up here at night?” It was barely seven o’clock, and she couldn’t see a thing past the headlights.

  “Nothing you’d like to hear about,” he said, eyes on the road.

  “Oh,” she said, knowingly. “Girls.”

  He shrugged.

  “Did your daddy know you brought girls up here, Mister Gentlemen-always-walk-ladies-to-their-cars?”

  “If he did, he didn’t let on. And it was only one girl.” The smile had left his voice. “And only once. Besides, there wouldn’t be much to look at during the day. Everything’s brown except the pines right now.” His tone brightened. “After it snows, snow­mobiles might be fun.” He glanced at her, then back to the road.

  “I’ve never been on a snowmobile,” she said.

  “Dad would say we’d have to remedy that.”

  She watched him in the glow of the lights from the dash, unsure how to respond. After another minute, the road leveled out, and he turned the truck around, backing it against the slope of the mountain and shutting the engine off.

  He leaned back in his seat and dropped the keys in the cup holder, staring ahead of him. The overhead light that had blinked on would fade soon.

  He caught her watching and turned in his seat, his back to his door, to better angle his other side to her. “Well?” he asked.

  “Well, what?” She glanced up at the overhead light and squeezed her hands together.

  “Well, this?” He waved his hand in front of them.

  She followed his gesture and looked out over the valley below them, the hills speckled with lights from the little town, then up to the mountain peaks reaching into the black night, barely silhouettes defined by faint moonlit streaks of snow at their tips, and then up further to the stars filling the sky. So many stars.

  “Snow will be coming,” he said. “It might be a while before we get another clear sky like this one. Are you warm enough?”

  She nodded. He’d made sure she’d grabbed her coat before they left.

  “I can turn the car back on if you need the heater. I don’t usually keep it running for myself.”

  “I’m fine. This is an incredible view. Is that Cashmere over there?”

  He nodded and pointed. “You can see how the Wenatchee River winds through, lights on either side. There’s the highway, of course.”

  She nodded. A highway with hardly any traffic. “Can we see your place from here?”

  “No. It’s around that way.” He waved to the east.

  “Oh, right.”

  He remained quiet.

  “So who was the girl you brought up here?” she asked, trying to make conversation and keep it light.

  He drew in a deep breath and let it go slowly. “Caylin. A girl from Wenatchee. I met her while I was home from college my junior year.”

  Riley recognized the name as the girl from the newspaper article. So much for keeping it light. “Was she . . . important to you?” Too late, she calculated in her head that they might have been together a few years.

  “She was my fiancée.”

  “Oh.” Great. She’d stumbled into his personal space. Again. “I’m sorry. Was this a special place for the two of you? You didn’t have to bring me—”

  “No, this wasn’t special. I brought her up here soon after I found it.” He shrugged.

  “She didn’t like it?”

  “Oh, she liked it, I guess. She didn’t look at the view much.” He scrunched his nose at her and smiled.

  Riley laughed, and after a moment, Mark joined her. That alone made her insides uncoil and relax.

  “So, can I ask what happened? You didn’t get married. I mean, I’m assuming you didn’t. What do I know? Did you? Get married?” She quieted, wishing she’d done so sooner. Why did she always feel like she said the wrong thing around this man?

  He quieted, too. “No. We were planning on getting married that fall, the year of the fires. She wanted a wedding in Anacortes, on the waterfront. The weather had been unusually sunny for the coast.” He shrugged. “Anyway, one day, months after the fires, after a pretty intense physical therapy session, I woke up to find my dad waiting for me. He had her engagement ring. She hadn’t been to see me for a while already. I knew it was hard for her.”

  “Hard for her?” Riley raised her brow.

  He reached for the steering wheel, gripping it hard. “It was hard. For everyone. Especially in the beginning.”

  “But, you’re not . . . it’s not—” How could she say, “Your scars aren’t that bad?” Even in her head that sounded wrong. She tried again. “I’m sure you’d come so far, in such a short time. Seems pretty heartless for her to just give up like that.”

 
“It wasn’t like that.”

  “Wasn’t it? She had you, and then she gave you up. Like when someone catches a trout but doesn’t want to touch it afterward. Like they’d rather have their seared tuna on a fancy plate than touch the scaly, rudimentary thing they’d worked so hard for.”

  It took her a split second, and the baffled look on his face, to hear her own words.

  He rubbed his chin. “Well, when you put it that way.” He glanced at her, his brow raised.

  She dropped her face in her hands. “Oh, wow. I’m sorry. I— Why do you even talk to me?” She breathed out slowly through her fingers. “You’re not scaly like a fish.”

  He laughed lightly. “What am I scaly like?”

  She lifted her face and looked at him through the hair that had fallen over her eyes. “Nothing. You’re not scaly like anything. I wasn’t even talking about you, I was talking about—”

  She watched his smile fade, then they both quieted again. She pushed back her hair and sunk into her seat. She hadn’t been talking about him at all.

  He looked back out at the view. “She was afraid.”

  “You must’ve been afraid. Did you back out?”

  “Geez, Riley, you weren’t there.”

  “No, but I’ve been there,” she muttered. He stayed quiet, and she didn’t blame him. A few minutes passed. “I’m sorry. You must have loved her a lot.”

  His brow furrowed. “I asked her to spend the rest of her life with me.” His hand relaxed on the steering wheel, and he slouched back in the seat. “But when somebody leaves you like that, you learn not to love them anymore.” He glanced at her, and she heard his words echo in her head.

  “You were angry.”

  He nodded.

  She unbuckled her seat belt and leaned forward, resting her arms on the dash, looking up at the stars, feeling her own scars. “‘You learn not to love them anymore.’ Sounds so easy.” She turned to him with a bleak smile.

  “You?”

  She nodded. “You don’t want to hear it.”

  “Try me.”

  “Oh, let’s just say I allowed myself to trust, to hope.”

  “And?”

  “Disaster.”

  “Working with your dad in California?” he asked.

  She laughed bitterly and turned back to the stars. “He was part of it, but no.” Even after all this time, emotions welled inside her like a tide she couldn’t chart.

  His silence made her keep talking. “When I was little, we made a family nativity set. The kind you’re supposed to glaze and fire in a kiln. But we just used acrylic paint. I thought it was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen when it was done.” She laughed at herself. “I barely remember what it really looked like. It was probably a mess.”

  He made a quiet sound of amusement.

  “The next Christmas, my dad stormed out after an argument with my mom, and I thought he was leaving us for good,” she said. “I smashed it. I threw every piece of that nativity on the brick fireplace while my mom cried in her bedroom. She came, but not in time.” She paused. “I remember she didn’t get mad at me. She just held me and let me scream until I couldn’t anymore.”

  She felt his hand on her shoulder, and part of her wanted to shake it off, but part of her wanted to keep it there. To keep her from falling back into that darkened room next to the Christmas tree lights that continued blinking on and off. She closed her eyes.

  “As much as I can’t remember what that nativity looked like up on our mantel,” she said, “I remember exactly how it looked smashed on the floor around my feet. That’s how this last disaster felt. I thought I loved someone—or I thought he loved me. I mean, because of my parents I’d always shied away from deeper commitment, you know?” She turned to him. “He was an actor. He said one of the things he loved about me was that I was different from the Hollywood set. In every way, shape, and form. And then, he decided that to be an A-list actor, he needed an A-list actress on his arm. But he failed to tell me, and I caught them making out in my dad’s den during my birthday party. Everyone knew. It made the news.”

  He cringed.

  “One of the pitfalls of having a famous father. My dad was furious that an actor in a movie he was working on had broken his daughter’s heart. And he may or may not have punched said actor in the nose. That also made the news. One of the pitfalls of having an Irish father.” She let out a long breath. “Now you know all my secrets.”

  He studied her, his finger tapping on the steering wheel.

  “I don’t know how you still hope like you do, Mark. I admire it.”

  After some time—a couple minutes or maybe twenty, she couldn’t be sure—he pulled his hand from her shoulder.

  “I’m sorry I asked you to help me with this project,” he said.

  She turned to him, leaning on her elbow. “I’m not.”

  “First your dad left, then your grandma passed away—both at Christmas, both tied to a nativity. I had no idea.”

  “I know. And I still chose to help you. We’ve already discussed this.”

  He frowned. “Yeah, but—”

  “But that’s all there is to it. Maybe it’s good for me. Facing my demons and all that. Right?” She smiled again, but her eyes burned with unshed tears. “Like you said, you adapt.”

  He scrutinized her, but she didn’t feel judged. “So much for taking a nice drive,” he said, a hint of humor in his voice.

  “Yeah,” she said. “Aren’t we something?”

  He smiled, then checked his watch. “I’m pretty sure that paint’s dry.”

  “Can we wait just a few more minutes?”

  He nodded. “You okay?”

  “Yeah.” She settled back in her seat. “I just want to look a little longer.”

  “Fine by me,” he said.

  She returned her gaze to the view, this time clearing her mind of her past. She hadn’t intended on sharing any of that with him. Or anyone. But it didn’t feel wrong.

  Riley finished writing instructions for the art assignment on the whiteboard as the bell rang to end last period. She felt the collective relief from the class, as tangible as the oil pastels they’d dropped back into their boxes moments before. “Remember to have your Van Gogh projects in by Friday, and don’t forget to put your names on them.” She turned away from the board. “I’m looking at you, Wyatt and Charlie.”

  The boys groaned as the triumphant sounds of school being out for the day filtered in from the hall. Charlie stopped.

  “Hey, Ms. Madigan, are you dating Mark Rivers? Because that would be awesome.”

  Wyatt chimed in. “My mom says you’re dating Mr. Gainer and that’s gonna tick off a lot of women in this town.”

  Riley gulped a breath and stuttered out a laugh. “I’m not dating anyone—not that it’s anybody’s business.”

  “Well,” Charlie said, “I think you should date Mr. Rivers. He’s awesome. Awesomer than Mr. Gainer.”

  Wyatt turned to Charlie. “Maybe she doesn’t want to be married to a guy with scars all over.”

  Charlie screwed up his face. “Dude, what does that matter? The guy is a hero.”

  “Well, if she married Mr. Gainer, they would both be heroes, because teachers are heroes.”

  Charlie slapped his hand to his forehead. “Are you even listening to yourself? If she marries Mr. Rivers, they would both be heroes, too.”

  “That’s enough!” Riley cried, glancing at the remaining students listening avidly. “Thank you for your observations on heroism, boys, but nobody is getting married. Wyatt, scars should never matter, and Charlie, Mark and I are just friends. That’s all. Now go, or you’ll miss your bus.”

  The rest of the class cast her sideway glances and muffled giggles until the room was empty.

  Riley placed her cold hands on her hot cheeks and blew
out a deep breath, attempting to ease her pounding heart. Wyatt’s mom was discussing Riley’s love life? Sixth-graders were ready to marry her off?

  She turned to the table piled with boxes of pastels and pads of smooth, clean newsprint. Like a healing talisman, she pulled a pad toward her and slid open a box. If there was anything she liked better than oil paints, it was pastels. The soft, creamy crayons could put a lot of color and texture on a page in little time, and if she ever needed to do a quick sketch of something she wanted to paint later, she preferred them over pencils. The way they glided over the paper had always been soothing.

  She grabbed a few colors and quickly mapped out a blue valley dotted with lit-up homes and highway lights, then darker foothills, snow-topped mountains, and a black-and-blue-and-­yellow-swirled sky à la The Starry Night. With the thick pastel, she scattered yellow stars over the universe, a measure of tension easing inside her.

  Last night, she and Mark had finished up the black paint on the figures in companionable silence, and this morning, he’d picked them up so they’d be out of the way—and unseen—for classes. She gazed down at the picture. Overall, the evening had been . . . great. But she still had that insistent feeling that she’d overshared. And now, that they were being observed.

  “Hey, new girl,” a husky male voice said from behind her, causing her to jump.

  She turned. “Dalton. You startled me.” She rubbed oily blue chalk off her fingertips.

  He chuckled. “I didn’t think you were the kind of woman who startled easily.”

  “Only when I’m deep in thought.”

  “Sounds dangerous.”

  “You have no idea.”

  He smiled, unperturbed, then glanced at the picture she’d sketched. “Did you do this?”

  “Just goofing around before I cleaned up.” She put the pastels away and stacked the boxes.

  “If this is goofing around, I’d like to see what you can do when you’re serious.”

  “I’m sure you would.” She had some of her serious work in her office to show the kids so they understood that she knew what she was talking about, but something kept her from showing anything to Dalton.