Let It Snow (The Hope Falls Series)

by Melanie Shawn

  Even now, as the panic attack was subsiding, Katie was still feeling some of the physical symptoms. Her head felt as if it were floating away, her fingers were tingling as if they were being stabbed by a thousand tiny needles, and she was being bombarded by an obnoxiously loud ringing sound. She forced herself to anchor to the sensation of the paper bag digging into her lips to ground her in reality and repeated the mantra (which, she had to admit, was kind of growing on her.)

  You can breathe. Just breathe. Breathe in and out slowly. You can breathe.

  Slowly, bit by bit, she drifted back to the present and into her body. She closed her eyes to appreciate the little sensations she was now aware of—the leather of the seat pressed cold against her back, the icy breeze from the air conditioning blowing refreshingly on her face.

  Leaning her head back against the headrest, she felt the weight of her chest rising and falling. Her arms felt heavy. Lowering them to her sides, Katie was vaguely aware that the paper bag had slipped from her hand and landed on the console beside her.

  After several minutes, her breathing returned to normal and the ringing sound in her head grew sporadic. Katie searched her memory in an attempt to identify if ‘sporadic ringing in the head’ was a normal side effect post-panic attack. She hated that these horrible attacks used to occur with such frequency that she actually had a personal database of experiences to check her symptoms against.

  Nope, she concluded, the sporadic ringing is new.

  Turning her head to take in her surroundings, she saw cars whizzing by on the interstate. She squinted against the glare of the sun, which was shining brightly down on the pavement and bouncing off the car windshields speeding by.

  Katie retrieved the paper bag and folded it up, returning it to her purse. She didn’t love the thought that she might need to keep it handy for future use, but better safe than sorry. I mean, let’s be real, she told herself. You’re less than an hour off the plane and barely starting down the highway toward Harper’s Crossing and you had a panic attack. You really think you’re getting through the rest of the weekend unscathed? Not likely.

  As she placed the paper bag inside her gigantic ‘in case of emergency’ carry-on bag, she discovered the source of the ringing.

  She felt like an idiot. On the good side, she thought to herself, is the fact that I don’t have to add tinnitus to the looooong list of symptoms that characterize my panic attacks. On the bad side? Apparently, I no longer recognize my cell phone’s ring tone.

  Picking up her iPhone, she swiped the screen to answer, saying warmly, “Hey Sophiebell!”

  “Katie, where are you? I thought you would be here by now. Was your flight delayed? I can’t wait to see you,” Sophie squealed, the words tumbling out of her mouth one over another. Katie smiled to herself. She had always thought that Sophie could paraphrase that old Army motto to adopt as her own. ‘I say more before nine a.m. than most people say all day!’

  “The flight was fine. I am on my way, and I will be there in less than an hour. I can’t wait to see you, too!”

  “Okay, hurry,” Sophie pleaded but then followed it up with the command, “but drive safe!”

  “I will. See you soon, bride-to-be!” Katie tried to cover the stress in her voice with ebullience as she said goodbye and hung up the phone.

  It’s 8:30 a.m. on Thursday morning, she thought, repeating the mental math to herself. My return flight to California is at 7:00 p.m. Sunday night. All I have to do is get through the next four days—preferably without having a nervous breakdown!—and then I can wing my way back to my lovely, safe, predictable life in San Francisco.

  Let the countdown begin.

  Katie breathed out a long sigh as she pulled back onto the highway. She needed get her head on straight and pull it together. Facts, that was what she needed to focus on. Facts had always comforted Katie.

  Fact: she wasn’t a teenager anymore. Fact: she was an adult. Fact: she could handle this.

  It had been ten long years since Katie Marie Lawson had set foot in Harper’s Crossing, the town of her childhood and her youth. She had never meant to stay away this long.

  When she originally left to California for school a decade ago, her plan had been to come back at Christmastime. Sitting at L.A.X., waiting for her flight that first holiday away from home had been her first experience with a bout of hyperventilation. She never got on the plane. The next episode occurred as she merely booked her flight that same year for spring break. That time she hadn’t even made it to the airport. It took several years to get the episodes under control, during which she refrained from making any travel plans.

  Then, after she graduated from law school at Pepperdine University, she immediately started working at Wilson, Martin, Gregory, and Assoc., a very prestigious law firm in San Francisco.

  The first three years at the firm flew by in a blur. Katie worked 80+ hours a week and even worked every holiday, including Christmas. She’d barely had time to breathe, let alone go out of town.

  Last year, even though she was on the fast track to make Junior Partner, she had taken a vacation. The plan had been to take a few days for herself—to decompress—and then head back to her hometown. She had booked her flight and the experience had been incident free.

  That was progress at least.

  Katie had then spent the first four days of her vacation in her apartment, so it was really more of a ‘staycation’—but still. She cleaned, cooked, slept, and had a Julia Roberts movie marathon.

  At the end of the four days, the morning she was scheduled to fly back to Illinois, she had been called into work because a fellow associate had come down with the flu. And well, if she was being honest, she had been more than happy to go back to work on Wednesday instead of being on a direct flight from SFO to O’Hare.

  But, she was here now. In Illinois. Headed back to Harper’s Crossing. She had done it. Because this weekend wasn’t about her—it was about Miss Sophie Hunter, who was getting married to Bobby Sloan, Jr., the youngest of the five Sloan boys. Sophie had called her, ecstatic, three months earlier to announce her engagement to Bobby and to ask Katie to be her maid of honor.

  Sophie (or ‘Sophiebell,’ which had been her nickname since Sophie was six and had decided that she was Tinker Bell) was the closest thing Katie had to a sister. And there was nothing Katie wouldn’t do for her. Other than a brief trip out to California after Sophie had graduated high school four years ago, Katie hadn’t seen her since she left home. But they always talked or e-mailed several times a week.

  Katie was an only child. She and her mom, Pam, had gone to live with her Aunt Wendy in Harper’s Crossing when Katie was four, immediately after her parents’ divorce.

  Craig, Katie’s dad, had come to visit his daughter exactly one time since she’d moved to Harper’s Crossing. It was one month after she and her mom had arrived that Craig had taken Katie to Tasty Treats for a double scoop of mint chocolate chip ice cream.

  He had talked about how much he loved her and assured her that the divorce and the move had nothing to do with her. He had also promised to see her once a month. Suffice it to say, he didn’t keep that promise.

  Katie had not seen her father since that cold October Saturday twenty-four years ago.

  Growing up, she’d always just assumed that he had stayed away because he and Aunt Wendy “did not see eye to eye,” as Katie’s mom always said (although, now, as an adult, she was leaning toward the theory that it was because he was a shitheel).

  Honestly, if Katie’s memory served, she hadn’t really seen a lot of her dad even when he and her mom were still together. It seemed to Katie that ‘pre-divorce’ it was just Katie and her mom and then ‘post-divorce’ it was Katie, her mom, and Aunt Wendy.

  She never really missed her dad. Sometimes she would miss her idea of what having a dad in her life would be like. But never the man who had fathered her. She really never knew that man, and what she had known had been unpredictable. Promising to come visit her
once a month and then her never seeing hide nor hair of him again really just seemed par for the course where he was concerned. It was just the last in a long line of broken promises that had characterized their father-daughter relationship, and—even at four years old—Katie didn’t remember being terribly surprised when the months rolled around and he didn’t.

  She had always credited the fact that she didn’t miss him terribly to how full her life had been, how utterly surrounded she was by people who loved her. Although, she would sometimes get lonely in Aunt Wendy’s house. Aunt Wendy had a full-time job and Katie’s mom usually held down two jobs just to make ends meet, so there was a lot of time that Katie had been alone with just her imagination and books to keep her occupied.

  As she made her way down the highway, a smile crept across her face because, oh boy, how that changed the summer before Katie’s seventh grade year!

  That was the summer that Sophie Hunter (aka Sophiebell) had moved into the house next door to Aunt Wendy. And right away—literally, starting immediately on moving day—Sophie had become Katie’s shadow. Not that she’d minded! Katie had loved finally having someone, anyone other than a doll, to dress up and play tea party with.

  Sophie’s dad, Mike, was a fireman and her mom, Grace, was a nurse. Katie had babysat Sophie when Mike’s and Grace’s shifts overlapped. Katie’s house felt a lot less lonely with a bouncing, laughing, full-of-life four-year-old in it. But Sophiebell wasn’t the only distraction the Hunters had brought with them when they moved to Harper’s Crossing. They also brought Nick, Sophie’s older brother and Katie’s first love.

  Nicholas Hunter was three months older than Katie and he had never let her forget it. He had sandy blond hair and the most beautiful green eyes Katie had ever seen.

  The day before school started in seventh grade, two weeks after the Hunters had moved in, Nick came to Katie’s door to get Sophie for dinner. She’d never forget that day. Before he left the porch, he looked over his shoulder, his green eyes sparkling in the sun. They were even extra green due to the fact that he was wearing his favorite Fighting Irish t-shirt. Swoon!

  He asked, “Hey, do you think you would want to be my girlfriend? It’s a lot easier to start a new school when you already have a girlfriend.”

  He then proceeded to shoot her a smile she would later come to know had gotten him anything he’d wanted since he was an infant. And with good reason—it was one helluva doozy of a smile!

  As much as Katie had wanted to act like the smile didn’t affect her, she knew the heat she felt in her cheeks meant they were bright red. No way could she hide the evidence.

  Still, that didn’t mean she had to acknowledge it. So she did what any super-cool eleven-year-old girl would have done when faced with Nick Hunter’s dreamy proposal.

  She shrugged and said, “Yeah, whatever.”

  “Sweet,” he smiled. “I’ll be here at 7:45 so we can walk to school together tomorrow.”

  He then jumped off her porch before she could say another word. She slowly closed her front door and, once it shut, started to scream and run around in circles until she fell on her couch in utter exhaustion. Katie always did lean towards the dramatic.

  Katie had no way of knowing then that the relationship she had just entered would last for the next six years of her life and end in tragedy.

  As she drove past the sign marking Harper’s Crossing city limits, Katie’s chest constricted tightly and tears stung her eyes at the thought of the senseless tragedy. The summer after Nick and Katie’s senior year of high school, Nick had been out late one night joyriding and had tragically driven his truck off Spencer Point.

  Hours later, when the police pulled the truck out of the steep embankment, they found a nearly lifeless body inside. Nick lay in a hospital bed in a deep coma for three weeks following the accident. Katie and his family were by his side every moment the hospital staff would allow them to be.

  Finally, his parents, Mike and Grace, made the most horrific decision any parent could ever have to make. They took Nick off life support.

  His funeral was held three days later, and Katie left that very same night to go stay with her grandmother in Chicago. She’d needed to escape. That was the last time she had set foot in Harper’s Crossing.

  Until today.

  Driving through the town as she took in her surroundings, Katie barely recognized it. The last time she had been in Harper’s Crossing, it contained two traffic lights and one four-way stop. Today there seemed to be a traffic light or four-way stop at every intersection!

  Katie’s eyes scanned the area where Picklers’ field had been. She was shocked to see that the field she had learned to ride her bike in when she was five, played tag in, attempted and failed to smoke a cigarette in when she was thirteen, and spent almost every Friday and Saturday night parking in with Nick after he turned sixteen and got his black Chevy truck was now a strip mall.

  Coming up to yet another stop light, Katie did a double take. The quaint, one-story hospital she had been admitted to when she had suffered from chicken pox and had a temperature of 104 at age six, had her tonsils removed when she was eight, and spent three weeks practically living in when she was eighteen, keeping her vigil beside Nick’s motionless body as he lay in a coma was now a four-story hospital that looked to be straight out of the pages of Architectural Digest. And if the exterior was any indication, it was now state-of-the-art.

  As she continued on, she mentally counted four McDonalds’, three Burger Kings, and two Taco Bells since she had entered the city limits. This was quite a contrast to her days in Harper’s Crossing, when there had only been one fast food restaurant in town—a Dairy Queen. It had been the local hang out for all the pre-teens and teens. Katie noted sadly that the Dairy Queen, which was another place that held so many of her teenage memories, had also been obliterated at some point in the past decade. It was replaced by an Office Depot.

  Then as she made the left turn onto her childhood street, she audibly exhaled in relief.

  From what she could see, nothing had changed on Harper Lane. Certainly not the houses, which were still all painted in one of three color combinations – blue and yellow, green and white, or blue and white.

  And judging by the few neighbors she saw out on their lawns, the people hadn’t changed either. Mrs. Belmont stood watering her yard in that same pink and green moo moo she had worn since Katie could remember. Mr. Peters still mowed his lawn in white shorts that were two sizes too small and black socks that he pulled all the way up to his knees, a cigarette precariously dangling out of his mouth.

  As she pulled into the driveway of her aunt’s two-story home (painted in the white with blue trim option, for that Mediterranean flair, Katie thought with a small smile), she felt a confusing combination of relief, nostalgia, sadness, and anxiety. This was it. Katie was home.

  She opened the door to her rented blue Honda Accord, took in a deep breath, and let out a cleansing sigh. The air smelled of a familiar combination: sweet from Mrs. Greyson’s beautiful flower bed and fresh from the trees that lined the street. She let her head fall back, soaking in the warming rays of sunlight. The sun in the sky may very well be the same one that shone in California, but somehow, standing in her Aunt’s driveway, it felt different. It felt comforting.

  With a renewed sense of calm, she moved to the back of the car, popped the trunk, and reached in for her suitcases. As she pulled them from the car, she was stopped cold in her tracks by a familiar voice.

  “Need a hand, Kit Kat?” the deep voice sounded from behind her.

  A shudder rippled through her body and the hairs on the back of her neck stood up. Her carry-on slipped from her shoulder and dropped with a thud on the cement driveway.

  “Jason?” she said, her voice a whisper of disbelief.

  Katie had known she would have to face Jason at some point on her trip home. He was, after all, the best man in Sophie’s wedding—which made perfect sense, seeing as how Sophie was marrying Jason�
�s little brother, Bobby. She didn’t need to possess psychic powers to foresee that their paths would cross. She’d just thought she would have had a little more time to prepare herself before she came face to face with him.

  She had also been banking on the theory that when the inevitable face-to-face occurred, she would have the buffering (protective?) shield of a room full of people surrounding them. However, that did not seem to be the case.

  Nope. Here they were. Alone.

  She stood, frozen, with her back to him, staring down at her pink and black suitcase, wishing with all her might that she could just climb into the trunk and hide. Logically she knew that plan was probably not the most mature response to this encounter—and also, shall we say, not the most subtle. Still, it was tempting. Because as the realization sank in that the extra time and buffer-people she so desperately needed to get through this encounter with Jason were not flipping forthcoming, Katie felt as though the air was literally being sucked from her lungs.

  Great. Panic attack number two. Here we go. And right in front of Jason. The hiding-in-the-trunk move was sounding better by the second.

  *

  Jason Andrew Sloan had chestnut brown hair, whiskey-colored, soulful brown eyes, and a smile that could, as her Aunt Wendy always said, “melt butter in a freezer.” He was also the first person Katie had met in her kindergarten class at Harper’s Crossing Elementary.

  23 Years Ago

  It was the first day of Kindergarten and Katie was paired up with a boy as a table buddy.

  A BOY! Could this day get any worse? The class’s first official assignment as kindergartners was to write their names on the white paper sitting on the desk in front of them and then tape it to the back of their seats.

  Katie wrote her name in all capital letters and rainbow colors and taped it on the back of her seat, just as she had been instructed to do. She was proud of finishing her assignment in time to go out for recess. She noticed her table buddy (The Boy!) had not.