This Christmas

by Jane Green

  Dad and Mom jumped up for hugs. When I noticed Isaac queuing up for same, I gave him a playful punch. “Down boy,” I whispered.

  But he had been noticed. Maddie put her arms around him, shaking out her elbow-length blond hair. “Isaac, you old lunatic! How the heck have you been?”

  Isaac squirmed with delight, making a sickening spectacle of himself. I had to hold myself back from miming little retching gestures, but then I was swept up in Maddie’s serial helloing, too. “And Holly! Holly!” she cried, giving me a brief boa constrictor working over. “When did you get home? What did you do to yourself to make yourself look so good?” I was still trying to decide which question I should tackle first when she swatted both away. “Oh, never mind! What do you think of my outfit?” she asked, handing the helmet to me. Becoming her Jeeves, I took it obediently and then helped her struggle out of her coat. “It matches my Vespa. You’ve got to get one, Hol, they’re just—”

  “You color coordinated with your motorbike?” I asked.

  “Very Evil Knievel of you,” Isaac said.

  She laughed and kept moving down the line. “Ted? How are you?” she asked, her brow wrinkling in concern. Obviously she had heard about the disaster in his life. Maddie was always in the know.

  At Ted’s shrug, she gave him another hug and moved down the line. She was about to throw her arms around Jason when she suddenly stopped and blurted out a laugh. “Hey—I don’t know you!”

  I zipped over. “This is Jason.”

  “Oh!” She took him in with open appreciation. I felt a wave of satisfaction. Finally someone was acknowledging my good fortune. “Wow. He’s your Christmas present to us this year?”

  Everyone chortled at her little joke.

  Isaac and I looked toward the kitchen door. Weren’t we missing someone?

  “Uh…Maddie?” I asked. She blinked at me. “Are you alone?”

  Her mouth dropped open and she gasped dramatically. “Omigosh! I completely forgot!”

  She yanked open the door and pulled in a half-frozen soul carrying two large backpacks. “Folks, this is Vlad!” She added, “Vlad drives a Harley. We toodled down together.”

  Vlad grimaced uncomfortably at us all; he looked like one of those guys who was unused to smiling. The heavy lines in the corners of his mouth were not laugh lines. Our slack-jawed response to him probably wasn’t very cheering, either. But he just wasn’t what any of us could have expected.

  For one thing, his clothes: a black leather jacket and ripped jeans. Something T-shirty and unwashed smelling underneath. Definitely not Brooks Brothers. When he took off his helmet, he revealed a black knit cap with a white skull knit onto it. Earrings circled from the top of one ear all the way around to the lobe. When he reached out to shake hands with one of us, the top of his hand revealed a hissing tattooed snake.

  My dad recovered from his instant of shock sooner than the rest of us. “Glad to have you, Vlad.”

  “Thank you very much,” Vlad said. His voice was so heavily accented there was a brief delay before everyone understood even that simple response and nodded.

  “I met Vlad at the hospital,” Maddie said. Then she let out an exaggerated shiver. “I don’t suppose I could trouble anyone for a warm beverage.”

  Predictably, three people fell over themselves to get her a cup of coffee.

  The group reassembled around the table. “Isn’t this great?” Maddie asked. “I just love Christmas!”

  I handed Vlad a cup of coffee. “Thank you very much,” he said, winking at me.

  Maddie held everyone spellbound describing her and Vlad’s adventure. Apparently they had had trouble in Delaware, which is where Vlad had intended to go, but his friends weren’t home.

  “Their house was all boarded up,” Maddie said. “So I just said, no problem, Vlad, come on home with me.”

  His friends’ house was boarded up?

  So Vlad wasn’t supposed to be here? He wasn’t a fiancé? Isaac and I exchanged bemused glances.

  “I’m so glad you did, Vlad!” my mom exclaimed brightly. “We’re glad to have you.”

  “Thank you very much,” he said.

  “Food!” Maddie’s eyes widened when she took in the gingerbread house. She cracked off a piece of wall for herself. “I’m starved.”

  “Have some, Vlad,” Mom said, shoving the partially demolished centerpiece toward him.

  Three guesses what he said.

  “Was this your family you were trying to visit in Delaware, Vlad?” I asked him.

  “Friends,” Maddie jumped in to answer. “Vlad’s from Russia.”

  Oos and ahs greeted this news flash.

  “He was trying to deliver a package to his friends, but they must be visiting family.”

  Right. I know I always board up windows before I leave for the weekend. I looked suspiciously at the backpack leaning against the kitchen cabinets by the door. The black one, not the minty blue one. Wonder what “package” he was trying to deliver.

  Isaac looked over at me. “So I’m to go on a mistletoe hunt?”

  Maddie gasped. “Mistletoe hunt? Fun!”

  “Isaac volunteered for that. I was going to take Jason out….”

  “Where?” Maddie asked.

  “Um, I’m not sure….”

  She let out a sputtering series of breaths, like a kid in a classroom bursting with the correct answer. “Yes, Maddie?” I asked in my best teacher voice.

  “The zoo!” she said, beaming a million-watt smile at us all. “Doesn’t that sound fun?”

  Standing out in the freezing cold staring at displaced wildlife, fun?

  “Sounds great!” Jason chimed.

  “You do realize there’s bad weather moving through, don’t you?” I asked Maddie. “They’re predicting ice….”

  Her blue eyes widened. “You’re right. We should probably hurry before it gets worse.”

  “Good idea,” Mom said. “You all run along.”

  “Wait.” It was Christmas Eve, and Jason and I needed some quality time. Not to mention, we had to sort out when he and I would exchange gifts. I didn’t want this to happen during the present madness of Christmas morning. “Don’t you need some help with dinner, Mom?”

  Mom waved off my concern. “No, you kids go ahead. Have fun. It’s all under control.”

  “It is?” So far I hadn’t seen any evidence of a big dinner in the making. No crown pork roast, no huge ham. Nothing.

  “Okay!” Maddie hopped up, ready to marshall us out the door. “Let’s go!”

  “Do we even know if the zoo will be open?” I asked, still dragging my heels.

  “I’ll call!” She bounded out of the room.

  I started to trail after her; then I remembered something and turned back to Mom. “I brought up the snow village from the basement, but I didn’t quite get around to putting it all together. It’s in the hallway.”

  “That’s fine,” Mom said. “Your father can take it back down to the basement this morning.”

  “Actually, I thought you might—”

  “You mean I’m not going to the zoo?” Dad interrupted, crestfallen.

  Mom rolled her eyes. “Laird, you’re going to Jeffrey’s house for drinks!”

  “Oh.”

  “Anyway, you hate the zoo,” Mom said. “You always say it’s horrible to watch those beautiful creatures all caged up, enslaved for a bunch of gawking humans.”

  I winced as I looked over at Isaac. “You wanna come gawk at enslaved animals?”

  “I’ve got to go on my mistletoe hunt, remember?”

  “Oh, right.”

  “Of course, I could come back later…say around dinnertime?”

  Isaac always had Christmas Eve dinner with us. I’d forgotten to formally invite him this year, but Mom picked up the hint. “Do come have dinner with us!” she exclaimed. “If you aren’t sick of us already.”

  “I’ll be there with bells on.”

  “And mistletoe in hand,” I reminded him.<
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  “Cool car!” Maddie exclaimed from the backseat. “I just love Saabs.”

  Jason looked pleased. I should have been, too. My choice in boyfriend was finally garnering the approbation I craved. Unfortunately, I was a little distracted at the moment. We were still huddled shivering in the car, idling in the driveway. The heater hadn’t quite kicked in yet. I swung around to ask, “Where’s Vlad?”

  Maddie looked surprised. “Inside. I don’t think this would be his thing at all.”

  “What would his thing be?”

  She laughed. “Who knows? Drive on, Jason.”

  Jason seemed happy enough to get us under way.

  “Are you two serious?” I asked Maddie, sounding like a mother hen.

  Her brow puckered at me. “Serious what?”

  “You know,” I said, “serious.”

  She looked dumbstruck for a moment, then started giggling.

  “What’s so funny?”

  “Vlad and me,” she said. “Serious. We just met.”

  “You said you knew him from the hospital,” I reminded her.

  “No, I said I’d met him at the hospital. I treated him in the ER.”

  “What for?” I asked.

  She lifted her shoulders. “He came in for a head wound…but, of course, you couldn’t see the scar through his cap.” She allowed herself a smug smirk. “Also, I did a terrific job stitching him up, if I do say so myself.”

  “When was this?” I asked, still trying to piece it all together.

  “Last weekend.”

  I freaked. “What? You just met this dude with a head wound and invited him home right off?” Which, now that I thought about it, was practically what I had done with Jason. Minus the head wound, of course.

  “It wasn’t like that. I was stitching him up, and you know, because I know a little Russian, we got to talking. And he has a motorcycle, and I have my Vespa, which had a leaky tire that he offered to fix. And then later we got to talking and decided to drive down together. I felt safer having someone with me, frankly.”

  I crossed my arms. So he wasn’t a fiancé. Which was probably a good thing, all things considered. I hated to think of my little sister going out with some nut. I’m no reactionary, but this guy looked hard core. It wouldn’t have surprised me to learn he was some kind of international drug trafficker.

  “I swear, Holly, he’s not some coke-snorting fiend.”

  I jumped. Was I that easy to read?

  Jason laughed. When I looked over at him, he explained carefully, “If he were a coke-snorting fiend, we could call him Vlad the Inhaler.”

  Maddie cracked up, then noticed I was not laughing.

  “Look at you.” Maddie gave the back of the seat a poke. “Miss Uptight. After all the skeevies you’ve been out with!”

  I flinched. “I just think you’re behaving recklessly. You show up late, and with some kind of Slavic slum boy in tow….”

  Maddeningly, she laughed off my criticism and leaned forward to give Jason an approving pat. “You must be good for her. I’ve never seen her worried about things like appearances or punctuality before. And you look great, Hol! You finally took my advice and found a good stylist.”

  That’s the trouble with family. They keep you from projecting who you want to be by reminding everyone who you actually are.

  I snapped on the radio. Ella Fitzgerald was singing “Frosty the Snowman.”

  Jason shuddered. “Oh, not this again.”

  “I love this song!” Maddie said.

  Jason grinned at her through the rearview mirror. “Your sister and Isaac spent half the trip from New York arguing about who sang ‘Frosty the Snowman’ in the TV special.”

  “It wasn’t half the trip,” I said.

  He laughed. “Just most of the way through Pennsylvania.”

  Maddie leaned forward. “That’s Holly and Isaac. They’re like an old married couple.”

  I objected violently to that characterization. “I just don’t believe in letting people walk around with wrong ideas in their heads, like Burl Ives singing ‘Frosty the Snowman.’”

  Maddie frowned. “But he did sing ‘Frosty the Snowman.’”

  Jason groaned.

  Was the world filled with people conflating their Christmas specials? “It was Jimmy Durante.”

  “Who?” Maddie asked.

  I could have cried.

  By the time we got to the zoo, the temperature seemed to have dipped another ten degrees. The air felt heavy, expectant. No doubt about it, soon there would be annoying people running around proclaiming how great it was to have a white Christmas.

  We got out and stomped around paved trails looking for wildlife, but most of the animals that weren’t huddled in their naturalized concrete enclosures and burrows looked severely pissed off at having been transported from their subtropical worlds to this frigid one. Even the polar bears pacing around their pool didn’t seem very enthusiastic about their conditions, from what I could tell, as I peered out at them through the slit created from where my scarf ended and my hat brim began.

  My phone rang, and I walked a few paces from Maddie and Jason to answer it. It was Isaac.

  “I’m at Barcroft Park,” he said. “It’s cold, and I don’t see mistletoe, and even if I did, I don’t know what I’d do about it. I think all my fingers have frostbite.”

  Whiner. “Remind me not to bring you along when I summit Everest.”

  “Everest?” He hooted so loudly I had to hold the phone away from my ear. “You get winded summiting the three flights of stairs to my apartment.”

  “Yeah, but on Everest they give you an oxygen tank and chocolate bars.”

  “I’ll try to remember that the next time you’re puffing past the second floor landing. Anyway, I just thought of something. What is this mistletoe for?”

  “It’s for me.”

  “For you and Mr. Perfect,” he said.

  What did he think? “You have a problem with that?”

  He didn’t answer right away. “How are things in the animal kingdom?”

  “Frigid. I’m here with Maddie and Jason.”

  “What about Vlad?”

  “He’s at home.” I did another quarter turn away from Jason and Maddie, who didn’t seem to be paying any attention to me anyway. “Guess what?” I hissed into the phone. “She just picked him up.”

  “I thought he was from her hospital.”

  “He was a head-wound case. Jason probably thinks I’m nuts. I promised him Norman Rockwell, and instead he’s getting drunks, quarrelsome parents, and crazy Russian dudes.”

  “So how are Jason and Maddie getting along?” Isaac asked.

  “Why?”

  “No reason. I was just looking at them together this morning. Jason looks like something she would have had made to order.”

  What was he trying to do, make me jealous? I felt a snit coming on, but instinctively my eyes strayed over to Maddie and Jason. They were in profile, pointing at some exotic variety of goat, laughing. They did look Dentyne-ad wholesome together.

  And what about Jason’s little Vlad the Inhaler joke? I had never heard him crack wise like that before. It was as if he’d been showing off a little for her.

  I shut my mind to this line of thinking. Isaac was just trying to stir something up. Although why he was being such a fiend, I couldn’t say. “I gotta go,” I told him.

  “Okay. I’ve just lost feeling in my right big toe.”

  “Are you still coming for dinner? Assuming Vlad or my brother doesn’t burn the house down between now and seven o’clock?”

  “In that case, I heard about a great Italian place we can go to,” Isaac said helpfully.

  “Comedian.”

  Jason, Maddie, and I tromped through a little more of the zoo, enjoying the relative warmth of the snake house before going to stare at the empty panda enclosure for a few moments. In all my years of living near DC, the most I’d ever seen of the pandas was the occasional glimpse of dirty
white fur visible behind a log. Today we didn’t even get that.

  “We should take a picture in front of the giraffes,” I suggested. For one thing, the giraffes were inside a heated building right now.

  “Oh, did you bring your camera?” Maddie asked.

  “No—didn’t you?”

  “I left all my camera equipment in Boston this year,” she said. “I had to travel light.”

  How could she have left her camera? She was the family’s unofficial photographer. “You always take pictures.”

  “Sorry—not this year.”

  My $200 haircut. The matching sweaters. My camera-ready boyfriend. No photos? It was heartbreaking.

  Was no one going to cooperate with my one and only perfect Christmas?

  I confess I was still in a stew when we got back to the car.

  “I guess we could stop by a drugstore and get one of those disposable kind, if you really want pictures,” Maddie said from the backseat.

  It didn’t help my mood any that I was so obviously transparent. I swung around. “I can’t believe it, Mad.”

  “Can’t believe what?”

  “You!” I said. “Ever since you were old enough to talk you’ve been the Christmas drill sergeant. Now you’ve completely flaked out.”

  “Just because I didn’t bring my camera?”

  “That—and also Vlad. Stopping at boarded-up houses doesn’t make you suspicious?”

  “I can’t believe you’re being so judgmental!” Maddie crossed her arms over her chest, which was rising and falling in angry little heaves. “I thought I could count on you of all people to understand.”

  “Understand what? That you’ve decided to stage a powderpuff reenactment of Easy Rider?”

  Maddie’s thin shoulders started convulsing, and she dashed several tears off her face. “No. That I’m trying to change.”

  “You’re changing, all right.” Changing into a nitwit.

  “I’m just trying to be more like you!” she howled, reaching for a Kleenex. She of course had a neat little packet of them in her jacket pocket.

  I gawped at her in disbelief as she honked into a tissue. Had I heard her correctly? Had she said like me?