Santa Hunk

by Mortensen, Kirsten

I know that’s how I felt.

  Warm and loved.

  In fact, I considered texting Savannah to tell her I wasn’t coming back to the apartment until the next day. It was so nice, being there with my family. Part of me didn’t want to leave.

  But I know the situation with Savannah’s folks isn’t quite the same—she’d be itching to get out of there by the time the dinner table was cleared.

  And I couldn’t abandon her on Christmas night.

  So about 5 o’clock I said my goodbyes.

  I gave my mom an extra long hug on the doorstep before I left.

  Now I’m back at the apartment, waiting for Savannah.

  I hope she likes the gift I got her.

  So it’s okay. It’s all okay.

  Because you know, inside, I’m still sad. My heart is broken …

  But I’ll make it, somehow …

  I’m going to go for a walk, now, I think, while I wait for Savannah to get home …

  A walk outside on Christmas evening in the snow …

  SAVANNAH

  Okay. That’s the end of Clare’s journal: an entry she made around six o’clock or so on Christmas Day.

  It’s up to me to tell the rest of the story …

  SAVANNAH

  I got back to the apartment and she’d left a note that she’d gone for a walk.

  She’d turned on all of her Christmas lights and she’d lit all her Christmas candles.

  It was so pretty. She really knew how to transform the place with all those lights and ribbons and statues and—what do you call it—bunting, right? Bunting. Draped on the television, draped on the bannisters, draped across the back of the couch.

  I texted her to let her know I was back.

  I put some milk in a saucepan. I wanted to make homemade cocoa from scratch.

  Ten minutes later I heard her stomping the snow off her boots inside the apartment door.

  “Hey,” I said. “I made cocoa.”

  She looked so great. She’d put on one of her favorite holiday dresses: it was red, with red and green plaid trim and a flouncy skirt. She wore red tights with it, and had knotted a scarf around her neck. The scarf was gold with a red window pane check pattern.

  She looked like a human Christmas present. The red of the dress set off her perfect skin, and I remember her cheeks were rosy from being out in the cold—so, okay, I know I’m looking back on a special evening, but I don’t think I’m exaggerating. She was a good-looking girl on her worst days. That evening, she looked stunning.

  “Let’s open presents,” she said. “I brought some of mom’s ginger cookies.”

  Normally, we were the sort of gals who just eat stuff right out of the box.

  But not on Christmas. She put the cookies on a plate. And of course it was a Christmassy plate—printed with a scene of a sleigh in the woods, with kids waving from underneath a thick fur blanket.

  I poured our cocoa into her Christmas mugs. They’re shaped like reindeer heads. The antlers are bent back to make the handles.

  We took our cocoa and cookies into the living room and sat down.

  “You first,” she said.

  So I opened her gift. It was a scarf. Very soft—I think it’s cashmere.

  “Hey,” I said. “We were only supposed to spend ten dollars!”

  “I work in a mall, remember?” She smiled at me. “When stuff goes on sale, I’m the first to know.”

  “It’s beautiful,” I said. “I love it. Now, your turn.”

  She picked up the little box I’d set on the coffee table and slowly unwrapped it.

  Very slowly!

  That was Clare—savoring every Christmas moment.

  “C’mon,” I teased her. “It’s not like you’re going to save the paper!”

  “I might,” she said. “It’s really pretty.”

  It was foil paper, the expensive kind. Green with ornaments embossed on it. I still have some, left over from that day.

  Finally she got the paper off and opened the box and lifted out the gift.

  It was a mug, a coffee mug.

  Only it wasn’t the mug I’d picked out.

  “Wait!” I said. “What?”

  She didn’t realize, at first, that anything was wrong. She was holding the mug in her hands, looking at it. Her eyes were enormous. “SAVANNAH!” she said.

  “That’s not right!” I reached for the mug. “It’s not—that’s not the right gift!”

  She noticed, finally, that I was upset. “What do you mean?”

  She let me take the mug from her hands and I stared at it.

  I couldn’t believe it.

  It was black.

  The mug was black.

  But the mug I’d picked out was bright red.

  A bright red mug with a green holly leaf printed on it, and the caption “Have a Holly Holly Christmas.”

  And the mug Clare had taken out of the box? Instead of a Christmas greeting, it was printed with a single word in white: the word BELIEVE.

  “Savannah,” she said, taking it back from me. “It’s okay. I like it.”

  “You don’t understand,” I said. “This isn’t the mug I bought for you.” I remember staring at the mug in her hands as I spoke. “And Clare, I watched them put it in the box at the store—I paid for it and watched them put a red mug in the box. And then they wrapped it, and then I took it home.”

  I stopped talking.

  Clare’s eyes locked onto mine.

  My mind whirled.

  Could I be mistaken? Was there some logical explanation for this?

  No.

  It made no sense.

  But I knew what I’d seen.

  I’d carried the mug to the counter to pay for it.

  I’d stood there and watched the clerk put it into a box and wrap it. Right there in front of my eyes!

  “Savannah.” Clare spoke, breaking my thoughts. “I—I think I know what happened.”

  Have you ever had one of those moments when something kind of clicks?

  Like … hmmm. How can I describe it …

  It’s as if there was a machine running in the background. It’s been running, humming, your entire life. And you’d long since stopped paying attention to it, long ago you’d gotten so used to it that you stopped noticing it, stopped hearing it, even.

  But then suddenly it stopped running and instead of that low hum: perfect silence.

  And for a moment you don’t know what happened. You only know that something is really, really different.

  Something had changed—and you’re baffled because you can’t quite put your finger on what it is.

  That moment, sitting there with Clare on the couch—it was just like that.

  Like suddenly everything around us was perfect silence.

  Waiting.

  And then Clare jumped to her feet.

  “He said I saw him because I believed,” she said.

  “What?” I said. “Who said that?”

  “Him. Santa!”

  And then I realized what she was talking about. The blue-eyed fantasy guy.

  But before I had a chance to react, she started talking—almost too fast for me to keep up. “I didn’t understand what he meant. He said I could see him because I believed—and what else was it? Something about doubt. That my doubt would be my test. Savannah!”

  She was clutching the mug to her chest. Now she held it up, kissed it, and turned it so that the word BELIEVE faced me.

  “He did it! He put this mug in the box! Don’t you see?”

  I stared.

  It was all far too crazy for me to do anything but stare.

  “Savannah!” Clare’s eyes were now wide open—huge. “I have to go back!”

  And before I could answer she’d darted to the door of the apartment and was pulling on her boots.

  “Clare!” I yelled.

  I was thinking I needed to stop her.

  But something stopped me, instead.

  Because there really was no rational
explanation for how that black mug could have gotten into that box.

  And for the first time, the thought crossed my mind:

  What if Clare’s Santa hunk … is real?

  “Clare—I’ll drive,” I said.

  She was pulling on her coat, but at my words she paused and looked at me. “Okay,” she said. “But on one condition.”

  I zipped up my jacket and pulled my gloves out of its pockets. “What?”

  “You have to promise me that you will try to believe, too.”

  I frowned. “What do you mean?”

  “Savannah—don’t take this the wrong way. And it’s not like I can really be sure what happened that last time, when we went to the grove together. But—”

  I nodded.

  Somehow, I understood where she was headed. “You think my being there interfered, somehow.”

  “Yes.”

  “But I don’t believe, Clare—I don’t.”

  “Just try,” she said. “I think if you just try, it will be enough.” She broke into a grin. “Because I do—I do believe. I was starting to doubt, last time, but—” She was still holding the mug, and now held it up at me, her grin widening—“now I know differently. Now I know he’s there—and he’s waiting for me, Savannah. He’s waiting for me.”

  SAVANNAH

  Twenty minutes later, we were once again entering the grove of trees.

  The air was perfectly still and sharply cold.

  The snow was deeper this time than the last time we were there. It muffled the sound of the cars that passed on Lakeshore Boulevard—just like Clare described it in her journal on December 10—so that after a few steps we couldn’t hear them at all. It felt like we’d stepped into another place, a secret place. A place that other people wouldn’t be able to enter.

  I sound like Clare now, don’t I …

  I remember it was hard work, trudging through the snow. We’d had a lot of snow that month, and it was up to our knees in places. My boots weren’t really suited for that much snow, either. Because it was so deep, the tops of my boots weren’t high enough, so bits of snow were falling down inside them. I could feel it melt into my socks, cold and wet.

  I started getting a bit cranky. Plus I was worried about tripping on branches or something buried by the snow. I remember focusing on my footing. I really didn’t want to trip and fall.

  But then I happened to look up.

  And I gasped.

  Up ahead, through the snow-laden trees, I could see light.

  Lights, to be more accurate. As if one of the trees on the far side of the grove had Christmas lights strung on it.

  “Clare,” I whispered, pulling on her coat sleeve. “What is that?”

  “It’s his tree,” she said in a low voice. “Come on.”

  We got a little closer.

  I saw that they weren’t really Christmas lights at all. They were too beautiful. Pure white, and yet somehow I also got the impression of color, of blue and green and gold. And they were turning on and off but slowly, each light dimming, then brightening again.

  I stopped walking.

  This was too weird.

  And then I saw that there was a man standing near the enormous trunk of the lit-up tree.

  “There he is,” Clare breathed.

  She started toward him.

  “No!” I said, grabbing at her coat.

  But she was too quick for me. It was like she wasn’t wading through the snow any more. She was skimming along on top of it, she was moving so quickly.

  And then she fell into his arms, and I stood there, watching Clare and this man hold each other like neither of them were ever going to let go.

  I took a few cautious steps closer.

  Then they parted slightly and I could see his face.

  And—well—Clare had been telling the truth, all right.

  He was the nicest looking man I’ve ever seen.

  Blue eyes, just like she’d said—blue eyes alive with good humor, and kindness, and … I don’t know how to explain it. It was like he knew me, knew everything about me. Yet I didn’t feel put off by that, at all. I felt completely accepted by him. I felt like: here’s someone who gets me and really, genuinely likes me.

  He was hatless. He had dark hair. And he had a beard but it was like Clare described—it was trimmed very close. So no—no big, out-of-control Santa beard. A nice, neat, Santa hunk beard …

  “Savannah, this is—well, I can’t really pronounce his name. But one of his nicknames is Santa. Santa, this is Savannah.”

  “I know Savannah,” he said. He was smiling, and now he winked at me. “I’m very glad, Savannah, that you stopped being naughty.”

  I knew instantly what he meant.

  He meant I’d finally stopped thinking he wasn’t real.

  I’d finally stopped trying to persuade Clare that he wasn’t real.

  “I—I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t know—I didn’t realize.”

  He was still smiling, and how kind his eyes were! “No need to apologize,” he said. “This is an unusual situation for all of us.” He turned his face to look at Clare, who hadn’t taken her eyes off of him. “Beings like me seldom fall in love with mortals. Once in a millennium … so when we do, we have to be very careful. Much can go wrong.”

  And then he tilted his head down so that his forehead touched Clare’s.

  And I have to say: I have never seen two people—well, one person and one whatever-he-was—who were more in love than Clare and her blue-eyed Santa.

  And then it hit me.

  She’s going to go away with him.

  “Clare,” I said.

  Because I still had that old reflex: I wanted to tell her no. I wanted to tell her not to do it.

  Selfish of me, I suppose. I didn’t want to lose my best friend.

  Or maybe I was still scared. Scared that someone might take that kind of chance—that someone might be willing to step off into the unknown …

  Clare tore her eyes off of her Santa, and looked at me.

  “Savannah,” she said. “When he asked me to go with him, last time, I was afraid. But I can’t make choices based on fear.” She turned back to the man. “I have to make choices based on love.”

  And she suddenly rushed over to me and grabbed me in the tightest hug I’ve ever felt.

  “I love you, Savannah,” she said. “Remember that always, okay?”

  “I love you too,” I whispered.

  Tears trickled down my cheeks.

  “Good-bye, Savannah.”

  And then she returned to him.

  I saw that he was wearing an enormous cloak.

  And he kind of opened it up as she approached him again, and when she reached him he closed the cloak around her.

  And then they were gone.

  There was nothing there but me and the tree with the lights.

  I stood there a moment, trying to figure out what had just happened.

  I noticed Clare’s tracks in the snow, in front of me.

  They led to a place that was a bit trampled, the way it would look if two people were standing together.

  I walked over and wiped my eyes and looked down at the trampled spot.

  I could make out the prints of two sets of boots—one from Clare’s boots, one from boots much larger than Clare’s.

  But there were no tracks leading away from that spot.

  I looked up at the tree.

  The lights were still there, but they weren’t as bright.

  They were fading away.

  “Clare?” I said.

  But I knew she wouldn’t answer.

  She was gone.

  SAVANNAH

  So there was a bit more weirdness to come, after that night.

  Because from the moment she stepped into that cloak, all evidence that Clare had ever existed suddenly disappeared.

  Well, not all evidence. Many of her things were still in the apartment: her clothes, her CDs, her make-up. Stuff like that. The notebo
ok where she wrote down her story. The newspaper articles about her being hit by the bus—which, like I said earlier, I still have. And of course, all her Christmas decorations.

  But as far as the rest of the world is concerned, Clare was never even born.

  I didn’t realize that at first.

  Honestly, at first, I was probably in shock. I wasn’t sure how to react to any of it.

  But then, the next morning, I called Clare’s manager to tell him she wouldn’t be coming in.

  I knew her manager’s name. She’d talked about him enough times! So I was definitely asking for the right guy. But when they transferred me and I said “this is Savannah Whitehall, Clare Jordon’s friend,” he was, like, “I’m sorry, Clare who?”

  He’d never heard of her.

  The guy who had hired her, who signed off on her time cards, who’d been giving her all those extra hours around the holidays—he told me I must be mistaken. No Clare Jordon had ever worked there.

  I hit Call End on my cell phone and thought, okay, that is really strange.

  Then I thought—is it possible that I was mistaken about where she worked?

  Maybe she worked at a different Abercrombie, not the Eastview Mall Abercrombie?

  So I got her purse to look through it.

  It was definitely her purse. It was the purse she’d had with her in the car the night before.

  But there was nothing in it that had her name on it. No driver’s license, no credit cards.

  I checked her cell phone. The phone I’d seen her use a zillion times.

  It was as blank as if it were brand new. No texts, no record of calls, no contact list, no apps.

  Then I started to go a little crazy. I go into her room, I start pawing through all of her stuff. And I can’t find anything—anything—with her name on it.

  I get even crazier and dig out my high school yearbook.

  There are no pictures of her.

  There used to be, I know there used to be! Like on our senior year, I had her autograph the page with her senior photo! But now—I can show you if you like, you can see for yourself.

  The senior pictures are in alphabetical order by last name. You’ll see Cindy Jacobs’ picture, and right next to it: Zach Lindsey.

  No Clare Jordon picture between them.

  Tell you what—I almost lost my mind, when I looked at that page in the yearbook and there was no Clare Jordon picture.