We Need a Little Christmas

by Sierra Donovan

  “Just like a car. It won’t act up in front of the repairman.”

  Liv followed Scott down the ladder. Down in the hallway, she met a khaki-shirted man with the name Russ stitched over his pocket.

  “Congratulations,” he said. “You’ve got me stumped. I couldn’t get it not to come on.”

  “What do we do?” Liv asked.

  “For right now, keep track of it. If it keeps acting up, do me a favor and write down the days and times. I’m going to talk to corporate and see if they’ll offer a replacement if it keeps happening. I should have an answer by the end of the week.” He held out a business card to her.

  “Thanks.” Liv took the business card and slipped it into the back pocket of her jeans.

  When Russ-the-repairman left, they climbed back into the attic. Liv contemplated the mini-mound of boxes. They’d gotten about halfway through. She turned to Scott. “You know, you don’t need to stay for all of this, if you’ve got something else to work on—” Why did she say if ? Surely he had somewhere else to be.

  Scott shook his head. “A bigger name on the other line? Nah. Besides, I don’t want to find out tomorrow you took a spill when no one was around.”

  “What if I knock you down the ladder and we both take a spill?”

  “Let’s don’t do that.”

  She was starting to give up arguing with him. And as the afternoon wore on, she didn’t know if going through things with Scott was actually faster, but it was easier.

  “Now, here’s something you don’t see every day.” Scott held up a white ceramic cow’s head, about the size of an orange, obviously designed to be mounted on a wall. Straight-faced, he said, “I hope I’m not treading on a sacred cow.”

  Liv grinned. “Believe it or not, I think that’s for hanging hand towels. She did the whole bathroom in cows once.”

  “And then she came to her senses?” Scott produced a furry, round throw rug with black and white spots.

  Liv remembered that rug. But seeing it through someone else’s eyes, it looked a lot more ridiculous.

  What got harder to ignore, the more comfortable she felt with Scott, was how much smaller the attic started to feel. And how much warmer. She wished, again, that she’d worn something lighter than a sweatshirt. Scott had shrugged out of his down vest some time back and rolled back the sleeves of his plaid flannel work shirt.

  She turned to the box she’d just opened. “Fishing tackle box. Ever go fishing?”

  “No. Too impatient. And I wouldn’t know what to do with a fish if I caught one.”

  Liv thought of Nammy, griping good-naturedly about the chore of cleaning the trout her grandfather used to bring home after catching them at Prospect Lake. To Liv, cleaning fish was a mystery best left unexplored, but she did know how good fresh-caught trout could taste. She remembered her whole family coming over Saturday afternoons, if her grandfather had a big day fishing, and enjoying the bounty.

  Her grandfather died when she was fourteen, a few years before her father. Those couldn’t have been easy years for Nammy or her mom.

  Moments later, she found a whole box of painting supplies—more mementos of her grandfather. The brushes, rollers, and pans all looked well used, but well cleaned, too. Liv fingered the long bristles of a paintbrush. It probably still had a lot of life left to it, unlike the user.

  She realized that it was after her grandfather was gone that Nammy had started going to the Pine ’n’ Dine regularly on Saturday afternoons, when there were no more weekend fish to fry. She wondered if the new ritual had been an effort to fill part of the hole her grandfather left behind. She wondered, twelve years later, how much her grandmother had still missed him. Things that hadn’t occurred to her at the time.

  “Hey.” The familiar word from Scott called her attention up from the rough bristles under her fingers. There were those blue eyes again, seeing more than she wanted him to see, his head tilted slightly to peer down at her face. Another are-you-okay moment.

  “Don’t say it,” Liv warned, smiling through slightly clenched teeth.

  “I didn’t.” Returning her smile, Scott squeezed her arm gently.

  It was an innocent gesture, and she knew it. So why did she feel flushed inside, as if a heater had suddenly flared up inside her stomach?

  The heater. Of course. Maybe that explained some of it.

  She edged back. “He left the heater on, didn’t he?”

  Scott lifted his hand carefully from her arm, his head cocked in a listening attitude, his eyes drifting past hers. “I can’t hear for sure. But it feels that way.”

  “I’ll go check,” Liv said promptly, and scrambled for the ladder.

  “Careful.” Scott’s voice followed her down.

  Sure enough, the heat lessened as Liv descended. Heat rises. It was a law of nature. The fact that she’d been in a small, enclosed space, just a few feet away from Scotty, had nothing to do with it.

  Liv switched off the thermostat in the hallway, leaned against the wall beside it, and took a few deep breaths. Scott was being his old self—friendly, funny, encouraging. If he’d gotten past their near miss the other night, so could she.

  Taking time for one more deep breath, she clambered back up the ladder. Like a mountain goat.

  Chapter 14

  Scott added the last box to the stacks by the trap door, raising dust motes in the waning afternoon light. “I think that about does it.”

  Liv brushed at her jeans again and nodded. “Thanks. I really killed your afternoon.”

  At least she wasn’t talking about offering him money anymore. “I’ll catch up tomorrow. No problem.”

  They could just as easily have toted all the boxes downstairs to begin with, for Liv and her family to sort through at their leisure. Scott wondered if Liv realized that. He hadn’t wanted to be the one to point it out.

  Apparently he was a glutton for punishment. He’d been on his best behavior all afternoon, and Liv seemed content to put the other night behind them. Which was good, of course.

  Somewhere over the course of the afternoon, she’d pulled her hair up behind her head into a careless knot, and the sleeves of her sweatshirt were pushed up to her elbows. All business. He had to admire the way she went about things—methodical and productive, without being too type-A about it. Once upon a time, he would have figured her for a major control freak, but she’d proven him wrong.

  Scott perched on a box to keep from bending under the too-low ceiling. He’d spent the day stooping, sitting, or kneeling; odds were he’d have a couple of good kinks in his spine by tomorrow morning. And he was still sorry to see their project end.

  An absolute glutton for punishment. He tried to focus, like Liv, on the business at hand.

  “Now,” he said, “to get these things downstairs. I figure I can go down and bring the kitchen table alongside the ladder. Then you push the boxes over to me while I stand on the ladder and—”

  He heard Liv walk toward the far wall behind him, where the trap door stood propped open. “Duh. We didn’t even think to check through this box.”

  Scott heard the slide of cardboard against the floor—then, before he could open his mouth, a loud slam.

  He wheeled around, whacking his head on the ceiling.

  Liv stood beside the closed trap door, next to the box that had served as a doorstop.

  “You didn’t.” His words snapped out ahead of his brain. “Tell me you didn’t just do that.”

  She stared at him, startled. Then her eyes went to the closed trap door as comprehension dawned. “Wait. You mean we’re locked in?”

  “I mean the handle’s broken off. Yeah. We’re trapped.”

  She stared at the rough-hewn door. Then she dropped to her knees, her fingertips digging frantically around the crevices at the door’s edges. “Is there away to pry it up?”

  She looked one shade away from panic. But at least she was thinking in terms of action.

  “Stop.” Annoyance forgotten, he joined her
by the trap door. “It’s more than an inch thick. You’ll rip up your fingernails.”

  She jerked her hands back and picked at a splinter in her fingertip. Tension came off her in waves. “Damn it.”

  Scott crouched next to her and reached for her injured hand. Without thinking, he spoke the forbidden words: “Are you okay?”

  She pulled her hand back. “No,” she said. “I’m not. I trapped us in here.” Frustration swam in her eyes. “I can’t believe I—”

  “Hey, I’m the one who didn’t tell you about the handle.” And he should have fixed it in the first place. But the blame game wasn’t a very productive hobby.

  Liv sat back on her heels, staring at the door again. “Do we have anything up here we could use? A crowbar, a slim jim?”

  “A fishing pole?” He couldn’t help it. She knew the contents of this attic every bit as well as he did.

  “Don’t make fun.” She raised her fingertips to her temples, rubbing that area in front of her jaw. “Never mind. Go ahead. This is my fault.”

  “Chill. It’s not that bad.”

  “What are you talking about? You’re mad, too.”

  “No, I was mad. You skyrocketed past me in about two seconds.”

  She closed her eyes and huffed out a long breath. Scott stared at her in fascination. She was wrapped way tighter than he was. She dug into her jeans pocket and fished out her cell phone. The small square screen illuminated.

  “No bars,” she muttered. “Of course.”

  “Okay,” Scott said. “Let’s go over what we’ve got here.”

  He rose from his crouched position, but of course there still wasn’t room to stand up straight. He went to the nearest wall and sat on the floor with his back against it, legs in front of him to give the illusion of a little more space.

  Her eyes opened to focus on him. “What are you doing?”

  “Getting comfortable. We might be here a while. And I’m a little claustrophobic.”

  “What are you talking about? You’ve been up here all afternoon.”

  “Yeah, but we were busy.” He couldn’t resist adding, “And I knew I could get out.”

  “Oh.” Liv surveyed his long legs as comprehension dawned. “Scott, I’m—”

  “Say you’re sorry again and I’ll try to stuff you out through that little window up there. Come on. Let’s hash this out.” He extended his fingers. “Plan A. We go over what we’ve got in here, see if there’s a way we can pry open the door. Plan B—”

  “That little window?”

  He shook his head. “Too high off the ground.”

  “Then on to Plan C.” Liv frowned. “No cell phone reception. Maybe we could break the little window and holler for the neighbors?”

  Scott grinned. “A little drastic. And a little embarrassing. If they even heard us, which is doubtful.” The homes on Nammy’s street, in this older neighborhood, were spread farther apart. “Your mom and sister are coming back eventually, after all. They can open the door from the other side, or get someone to help.”

  “So, Plan D.” Liv looked downcast. “We wait to be rescued.”

  “It’s probably the most likely. What time will your mom and Rachel be back from that appointment?”

  “With doctor’s appointments, you never know. They could have waited an hour before they even saw him.”

  “Okay. Let’s say, worst-case scenario, they get stuck there till the doctor’s office closes. Five, five thirty?”

  “Say five thirty.”

  “Okay, five thirty. It’s about an hour and fifteen minutes back from Fontana—”

  “Unless they hit traffic.”

  “All right. Hideous rush-hour traffic from Fontana all the way up to the mountains. And we know the weather’s good. So add, what, an hour?”

  “Okay.”

  “That puts us at—”

  “Seven fifteen.”

  “They get home, they miss us, they come up here to check.”

  “Unless they think maybe we went out to eat.”

  “You’re a real glass-is-half-full kind of gal, aren’t you?”

  She ran a hand through her hair silently.

  Lacing his fingers together, Scott extended his arms in front of him, taking comfort in the stretch, as he considered. “So. Here’s our next move. While there’s still daylight, we check through these boxes and figure out what we’ve got up here to sustain life until the rescue team arrives. And we’ll take a shot at Plan A, too.”

  Without the proper tools, Scott didn’t hold out a lot of hope for getting that door open. But he wouldn’t be worth his salt as a handyman if he didn’t give it a try. If nothing else, it would kill some time. And the very act of planning seemed to put Liv more at ease.

  * * *

  For the next hour, she impressed him.

  Now that she was done kicking herself, Liv helped Scott sort through their resources with efficiency and logic. Her ideas for prying up the trap door were pretty creative, too. In her grandfather’s box of painting supplies, she found a metal paint edger slim enough to fit into the crevice of the trap door opening. When they tried to pry the door up, however, the two-inch blade of the edger was just too short to give any useful leverage against the thick, heavy door.

  Their last attempt was more far-fetched. Liv came up with the idea of stringing a fishing hook to a pole, pounding the hook into the wood of the trap door with a shoe, then trying to reel the door up. But when they tried it, the hook came up out of the door, bringing out chunks of wood along with it. The effort was worth it just for the visual of trying to fish open a trap door. Best of all, it made Liv laugh.

  But now, just before five PM, it was getting dark. And, though Scott didn’t want to bring it up, cold. Without the sun hitting the roof, the temperature dropped rapidly. They had light, thanks to the fund-raiser candles, but the flames in the jars didn’t provide more than the illusion of heat.

  Sweatshirt sleeves pulled down, Liv hugged herself, rubbing her upper arms vigorously. “Too bad we can’t build a campfire,” she said with a wry smile.

  She’d been a good sport, all right, once she recovered from her initial tailspin. Now, if he could keep her distracted from the cold. Because the more she rubbed her arms, the more he felt like shivering, too.

  Scott held out a tin of cookies they’d unearthed from the boxes. “Pfeffernuss?”

  Liv picked one out of the tin. “Hey, I sent her these.”

  “How long ago?”

  “Last year. Or the year before.” She squinted in thought. “Last year. So how’d they wind up in a box in the attic? Unless they’re from some other year.” She frowned at the cookie in her hand.

  “I carried some boxes up for her last year after Christmas. They probably got mixed up with some of the other things.”

  Liv took a tentative bite and nodded. “Still edible.” She finished the cookie, then began an elaborate process of dusting the powdered sugar from her fingers—first rubbing her fingers together, then rubbing her fingers on her jeans. Then, with the backs of her fingers, she tried to dust the sugar from the jeans themselves.

  Liv was orderly and meticulous, but she wasn’t that obsessive.

  Scott had a fair idea why she was suddenly so fixated. They were trapped alone together in a small, dark space. He’d thought about that, too. It was pretty hard not to.

  Not in the cards, he reminded himself. But surely she knew him well enough to know he wouldn’t try anything she didn’t want to do.

  Didn’t she?

  She shifted her weight from one foot to the other, rubbing her upper arms again, casting her eyes around as if searching the darkening nooks and crannies for small talk.

  “Liv,” he said gently. “Sit down.”

  “Moving around keeps me warmer.”

  Scott sighed, remembering the down vest he’d taken off before they came up here, now lying somewhere useless in the kitchen. He stood—as much as the low roof would allow—and searched through their reserve
pile until he found the closest thing he could to a blanket: a musty white tablecloth.

  “Here.” He handed it to her. “Now, pick a spot and settle down. All that fidgeting is getting on my nerves.”

  He retreated, pointedly, a respectable distance away, where he sat back against the box of paint cans that had held the trap door open. The box provided a buffer from the cold of the outside wall. The attic ran half the length of the house; she was welcome to the rest of it, if it made her feel better. He folded his arms across his body as he sat, trying not to look too cold.

  Okay, he wasn’t above playing on her sympathy.

  Liv held the tablecloth in front of her, looking guilty. “This isn’t fair.”

  “No big deal. I’m bigger than you. More body heat.”

  If he remembered right, women were supposed to have more body heat than men, but he wasn’t going to bring that up.

  Slowly, Liv crossed the room and sat next to him against the box, draping the tablecloth over them both like a blanket. She kept her shoulder a couple of inches away from his.

  The tablecloth wasn’t all that heavy, but it helped a little. The small amount of heat radiating from Liv—or his perception of her nearness—helped more.

  Say something that doesn’t have anything to do with body heat. Or...

  Scott wasn’t often at a loss for conversation, but suddenly his mind was a blank.

  Liv drew her knees up close to her body, hugging them. “I’m really sorry about this.”

  “Want me to clobber you with a great big stick?”

  “Sorry,” she said again, then laughed.

  Into the silence, she added, “I just felt stupid. I hate feeling stupid.”

  “There’s nothing stupid about you, Liv. And it wasn’t even your fault. I should have warned you about the door.”

  She hugged her knees harder, with a tremor that was visible.

  He couldn’t stand it. “You’re shivering.”

  She rested her cheek against her knees, her head turned to face him. “And you’re not?”

  “That’s my point. You know you’re safe, right? I mean, I’m not going to grab you and—squeeze you to death or anything.”