by Mark Teppo
Sylvia's demons had taken her beauty. Not entirely. In honest moments, you could be stunned by the shape of her nose or the turn of her hair about her collar or the movement of her jaw. But she was too tightly wound by the stress of her art to remember her grace. Edgar saw it in her. You could tell by his eyes and the way his fingers lingered every time he touched her. And he found lots of excuses to touch her. Even though they were opposites in many ways—he was gossamer to her stone—they seemed made for each other.
Terrence—Terry—wanted that same connection with Barb, but he was as limp and passive as his hands were clammy. He was having a hard time making eye contact, and most of his longing gazes were directed at her legs. Not that I could blame him for that.
Once I had made the social circuit a few times, I excused myself and wandered down the hall to find a bathroom. Locking the door behind me, I cracked open the window and stood on the edge of the bathtub. I was feeling that old tugging sensation in my chest. That magnetic pull north. I sucked in the brisk November air, reveling in how clean and pure it felt.
I didn't miss the North Pole that much, and most of the blame there could be dropped right in the NPC's lap. What I missed was the tranquility of the Residence. Even with all the hubbub of Seasonal prep, the Pole wasn't as crazy and chaotic as life down in the lower latitudes. Life was simpler with the Clauses; well, it had been until recently. Until Satan started mucking with us, and everything took on a little darkness. A little shadow that never went away.
Closing my eyes, I leaned my head against the cool tile of the bathtub wall. "It's this damn show," I muttered. All that gothic posturing was like getting verbally tongue-lashed by Mephistopheles. No wonder Faust said yes. He was hoping that doing so would shut Mephistopheles up.
I washed my hands a couple of times as if it were possible to erase the stain of the script from my hands. I threw some water on my face, trying to ignore the circles under my eyes. My face was getting older too, sprouting worry lines and crow's-feet like weeds in an untended field.
Santa had looked older too when I had last seen him in Edmonton. The job was catching up with us.
I ran into Cordelia in the hall. The passage wasn't wide enough for her to march past without one of us giving way to the other. She opted for confrontational instead, stopping dead center in the hall and staring at me, hands cocked on her nearly non-existent hips.
I let my gaze wander over the framed pictures running the length of the hall. Typical family records, both indoor and outdoor shots. Barb was in some of them, as were a number of other people. I avoided Cordelia's glare and pointed at a picture of Barb sitting on a log out in the wilderness somewhere, a picturesque mountain rising in the background.
"Who took these?" I asked Cordelia.
She was flustered by my willful avoidance of her confrontational air, and she sputtered and stuttered for a few moments, her fists kneading against her hips. "Daniel," she muttered finally. "Daniel took them."
"Who is Daniel?" I asked.
"My uncle," she said, her lips curling. "He's the family vegetable." And that got the stunned reaction from me that she had been hoping for. She flounced past with a toss of her head before I could formulate another question.
I was still in the hall when Barb found me a little while later. "We're about to sit down," she said.
I had been wandering back and forth, looking at all the pictures. Figuring out the family connections. I pointed at a picture of Barb and a sandy-haired man sporting that deep ruddiness that comes only from exposure to the sun. "Is this Daniel?" I asked.
He looked a lot like the younger version of Jack in some of the pictures.
Barb didn't even look at the picture. "It is, though you wouldn't recognize him now." She took a deep breath. "His hair is gone and he's lost the tan." She tried to find a smile, but couldn't sustain it.
"I'm sorry," I said, dropping my hand.
"It isn't your fault."
"Doesn't make me any less sorry for bringing it up."
She firmed up the smile then. "It's all right. It was a stupid accident. And there's no point in being angry about it any more. I just wish—" She stopped herself.
I stepped forward and touched her arm. "Is there food on the table?" I asked. "Is that why you were looking for me, or has Terry choked on a cracker or something? Do you need me to perform the Heimlich on him?"
"Aren't you a little short for that?" she asked. Her smile worked up to her eyes.
"Not if he is lying down."
"He's not," she said. "Lying down, or choking. He's just"—she raised two fingers to her eyes and then mimed walking around with them—"making sure I don't trip on something."
"He's very observant that way."
"So are you." She laughed lightly as I blushed. "Come on," she said. "Dinner is ready. You can flirt with me more at the table."
"What? And risk Terry's wrath?"
She favored me with a look. "If you're lucky, Cordelia will make vomiting noises," she said.
"I knew it," I said as I followed her toward the dining room. "You totally asked me here to provide comic relief."
It was all fun and flirtatious until I ended up at the kid's table. There was an awkward moment when Nancy announced that she had put my place setting at the lower table—somewhat proudly, I thought, as if she was patting herself on the back for doing something to minimize the potential embarrassment that could come from me sitting at the big people's table.
Terry looked inordinately pleased at the idea, and he might have even applauded Nancy's decision if I hadn't been staring daggers at him. Barb just shook her head and disappeared into the kitchen, and Sylvia stared at me, her long teeth gnawing at the end piece of the crusty bread. Jack had a sick look on his face, like he was worried that he was going to lose control of his bowels at any moment.
"Thanks, Nancy," I said. What else could I do?
Everyone sat, and Cordelia planted herself across the table from me. She kicked me twice in the shins as she fussed with her napkin, and I waited until she was done squirming before I launched a swift kick at her kneecap. The table bounced slightly and she squealed. "Dad!"
"Stuff it, Cor," her father said. He still looked a little green. "Whatever is going on, you probably deserved it." He tried to wink at me, but he was out of practice, and he nearly turned his eyelid inside out.
Nancy saw him jerk his head, and she immediately leaned over to stroke the side of his face. "Are you all right, darling?" she asked. Jack smiled and let her stroke his cheek.
Cordelia gave me the finger. I smiled back and asked her to pass the butter. My grip on my knife was solid.
Barb interrupted further family drama with the soup. Nancy clapped excitedly as our host brought bowls around to each of us. "I got this recipe from the cooking channel last week," she said proudly, directing her comment at Sylvia, who merely raised an eyebrow and cautiously dipped a spoon in the bowl Barb placed before her.
I'm not a big fan of soup—it's the way things float to the surface that unsettles me—but Nancy's soup was pretty good. It had a variety of mushrooms in it, along with some vegetables for color, hazelnuts, and tiny flecks of orange peel.
As my spoon started to scrape on the bottom of the bowl, I noticed there was something red down there. Not in the soup itself, but printed on the bottom of the bowl. I slurped a few more mouthfuls of soup as I checked to see if I was the only one with a mysterious message in my soup.
Apparently not. The others were slurping and scraping too.
"They were so adorable," Nancy cooed. She bounced in her seat, unable to keep a secret. "I just couldn't resist them. I found them at Pottery Barn down in the Village. You can get whole place settings."
Sylvia, for all her disdain for soup and surprises, cleared her bowl first. "I've got Dasher," she said. Edger finished next and held up his bowl for all to see the fat reindeer image in the bottom of his bowl. It didn't look like anyone I knew, but large cartoon letters spelled out COMET
beneath the prancing figure.
My spoon was suddenly very heavy in my hand as everyone started calling out reindeer names. Soon I was the only one left, and they were all looking at me. I lifted my bowl, tilting it so that the thin film of soup still in the bowl pooled near the rim. There were red splotches in my bowl, which turned out to be sparkly dance shoes on a reindeer. "You got Prancer," Cordelia sneered.
"They're just so funny," Nancy said, showing us a picture of Blitzen that characterized him as half-soused.
I excused myself, went to the bathroom, and barfed up all the soup I had just eaten.
A tiny sparrow tapped at the bathroom door. "Are you okay?" Barb asked.
"Yeah," I replied. I was sitting on the edge of the tub, resting my elbows on my knees. Barb opened the door cautiously, and when she saw that I didn't have my pants around my ankles or wasn't trying to hang myself from the shower curtain rod with my tie, she came in and sat down on the closed toilet.
I had been crying a little, and I wiped at my face as she looked at me. "I knew him," I said. "There was nothing funny about the way he died."
She didn't say anything, which was considerate because that sentence probably made me sound like a nut-job, and we sat quietly awhile. Distantly, I heard the chatter of voices from the dining room, punctuated by a squeal from Cordelia.
"One of her siblings probably touched the butter dish at the same time she did," I noted.
"Or ate a green bean funny," Barb suggested.
"She is bound and determined not to have a good time, isn't she?" I asked.
Barb nodded. "Yes, she certainly wants to be heard."
I flashed on the script. "Is that all it is, then?" I wondered. "Just wanting to be heard?"
"What do you mean?" she asked.
"The musical," I said. "It's so angry. So much frustration and rage. Is that just someone wanting to be heard?"
"It's what we do, Bernie," she said, looking at me like I should know this. "It's a way to cope with pain. I felt that way when Daniel was injured. For months. I drove away half my friends being an utter spiteful bitch. But it didn't fix anything. It didn't fix him, that's for sure. It just made me more isolated, more lonely. It eats at you, Bernie, if you let it. It eats you up and leaves you hollow."
I thought of Rudolph, who had been angry since '64. So driven, so determined to be the best reindeer to ever pull the sleigh. And it wasn't even a contest. The accident had left him so changed that he wasn't even truly a reindeer anymore. He was like those kids in the comics: an X-deer. He didn't sleep, he could fly for days, and his constitution was so strong that he could probably pull the red sled full of toys all by himself. Yet he pushed himself farther. He came back from purgatory, alone against the entire holy host. He would have gone to hell without us. And what had all that determination gotten him? At what point was he trying so hard to make happiness that he lost sight of what happiness was? Was that what had happened in Boston? I had never seen him so angry, so willing and ready to hurt someone because they threatened to speak ill of Christmas.
And now the show. It had a grip on me, like some demonic worm gnawing its way deeper and deeper into my gut. There was a part of me that wanted to pull out. Just walk away and let this show fall apart before anyone saw it.
"Why are you doing this show?" I asked Barb.
She took a moment to change gears mentally. "Originally, I needed to get out of the house," she said. "I needed to work again. I hadn't done any theater work in a long time. Daniel and I had been trying"—she shook her head—"His firm was very successful. I hadn't needed to work, and there were other things to do."
"But there's a different reason now, isn't there?"
She tucked a lock of her hair behind her ear and sat up a little straighter. "It happened at Halloween," she said. "Two years ago. We were at a party thrown by one of the partners in the firm. It was . . . we were walking back to the car. I had had more to drink than him and"—she shook her head again—"It had been a tough week for me, and normally I'm the one who drives, but that night, I'd had a few more. I hadn't been drinking for a few months, and there was no reason not to anymore, and so I had a few. Daniel was going to drive and . . ." She trailed off, her gaze on her fingers, which had gotten all tangled up in her lap. "There were some kids who were pranking the neighborhood. Egging cars. They were wearing marks, trying to pretend it was all in the spirit of Halloween. Daniel said something—I don't remember what he said, but he was like that: he would always say something—and they started throwing eggs at us. I got hit. Had egg in my hair and all over my coat. Daniel lost it. He charged them, and most of them took off running. But one kid stood his ground.
"There were patches of ice on the sidewalk. It was one of those nights that we get infrequently here, when it actually gets cold enough to freeze. There isn't much ice, and it's usually clear and slick. Daniel was running at this kid, who was throwing eggs as fast as he could at Daniel, as if that would stop him. Daniel was waving his arms and shouting, and I was crying at him to stop—just leave the kid alone—and then he slipped. One minute he was up, and the next, he was lying on the ground."
She paused, and her eyes were bright. "He hit his head on the edge of a brick wall. It wasn't much of a wall. Lawn ornamentation. But it had an edge to it, and he came down on it wrong, and it just . . . "
I reached out and took her hand, squeezing her fingers. She didn't look finished, and I didn't dare interrupt her.
"You know the story about Santa Claus, don't you?" she said after a long moment. "That urban legend about Santa Claus going to heaven and bringing back the spirit of a little girl's dead father?"
I swallowed heavily and nodded. I wasn't sure my voice would have worked even if I had tried to say anything.
"It was all over the Internet, of course. Even though the Portland newspaper made a big deal about retracting the story it had written. It only made it worse. The Internet had it, and every time someone passed it along to me, it was wilder and stranger. It was a stupid story, really, and I didn't want to believe it, but shortly after the next Halloween, the doctors told me they didn't know if Daniel was going to wake up. Ever. And I had spent the whole year hoping that he would, praying every night that I'd find him awake when I went to visit him the next day. I couldn't deal with it anymore. I needed something. I needed some way to keep my hope alive.
"I wrote Santa a letter. Just like I did when I was a kid. I wrote it out longhand, put a stamp on it, and dropped it off at the post office myself. Do you know what I asked Santa for? I asked him to bring Daniel some peace. The brick wall had fractured Daniel's skull, and some pieces had been driven into his brain. Even if he woke up, the doctors told me, it was very likely that he'd be . . . he wouldn't recognize me. He might not recognize anything. And so I asked Santa to let Daniel die."
She wiped at her face with one hand, her other hand locked around mine. "You know what?" she said. "I didn't get what I wanted that Christmas." She squeezed my fingers really tightly.
"I'm sorry," I said.
She looked at me, her eyes shining with tears. "Why?" she asked. "It's not your fault."
Well, that was probably true. Last year I hadn't been in charge. Who knows what the NPC had done about Christmas wishes like Barb's. But still . . . I was Mrs. C's special envoy, after all.
She let go of my hand finally. "You wanted to know why I took this job," she said. "Why I'm still here even though this musical is . . . is what it is. I took this job because I needed something to distract me from the daily emptiness that is Daniel's condition. I took the job because the script was everything that I was feeling at the time. All the rage and hate that is coming out of Rudolph on that stage? I know where that comes from. Those are my feelings. Not his. It was all so senselessness, this life I had been given, like a cruel fucking joke. And I was angry about living a life that was void of any hope for happiness.
"You know what the funny thing is? That's my best work up there on the stage. Out of all t
hat bile and frustration and anger, I created something amazing. I created something that has never been seen before. I made something new. And that is why I'm still here, why I'm still working on this show. Because it is about making something new. As bleak as it is, there's still hope in it."
December 7th
Since I had nothing else to do while tied to the chair in the basement, I was making my list, and checking it . . . a couple hundred times.
Erma. Definitely. I had seen her face.
Henrik. It had taken me awhile to figure out he was the meek-voiced one, mainly because it was so unlike the persona he adopted during rehearsals. But there were clues, and I put them together eventually.
Ted. At the very least, he had to know what was going on. He was only one I had told about the amount of money in the Swiss account. If my kidnappers knew, it was because Ted had told them.
Which left the one with the hand-rolled cigarettes and the dinner theater experience. Slapper. I had an idea who that was. There were only so many bitter thespians in the troupe. What I didn't know and what cramped my brain during the nearly sleepless nights I had spent in the basement so far was whether or not Barb was involved. What she had said in the bathroom on Thanksgiving kept coming back to me. Was she a better actor than any of them? Was it a carefully constructed lie for my benefit? Did she really believe that there was something extraordinary that could come out of this production?
I believed her; rather, I believed her words, because I needed something to hang on to myself. I was having trouble remembering all the lyrics to "Jingle Bells," and I was starting to worry that I was losing the Spirit.