Twelve Days

by Teresa Hill

  And Sam McRae loved her at one time. If he had once, maybe he still did, or maybe he could again.

  She wished he were still here. That she'd woken up with him beside her, the way he used to be. She wished she'd come awake to him kissing her, his big, warm body on top of hers, his body already hard with need, him slipping inside of her when she was still warm and boneless with sleep. Mornings had been like that once. That dreamlike quality. The ease of long-time lovers. The need that could come so quickly and be so strong, they'd both be in a frenzy in moments, her body shuddering and her crying out and him lying heavily on top of her fighting for air. Sometimes the whole thing seemed like a dream.

  She realized she hadn't needed him like that in a long time—in a strongly sexual way. It was like her body had been in a deep, deep sleep, her emotions frozen over, out of pure self-preservation, and now she was coming back to life.

  He'd brought her back. Him and these children.

  She felt everything now. She smiled. She laughed. She looked forward to each new day, even though the closer they came to Christmas the closer she came to the day Sam was supposed to leave.

  She had hope for the first time in ages. What a wondrous gift. Hope.

  It was going to get her through the day and maybe all the ones that came after. Hope that she could still fix this with Sam, and that maybe these children could stay.

  * * *

  They decorated the tree without Sam, popping popcorn, which Zach ate and Rachel and Emma strung onto thread to make a garland to hang on the tree. It went on first, then the lights, and then the little red balls.

  "Do you have any more ornaments?" Emma said, standing back and surveying it critically. "It looks a little empty, like it needs more."

  "We do, but they don't go up until Christmas Day," Rachel explained. It was a tradition in her family, one she would share with them if they were still here at Christmas. And then she thought about something else. "How are we going to keep Grace from pulling it all off and trying to eat it?"

  Emma frowned. "I don't know."

  "How did you keep Zach from pulling the whole tree over on himself?"

  "We didn't," Emma said. "He did that once."

  "Did not," Zach said.

  "Yes, you did. Don't you remember?"

  "No," Zach said.

  "You were little, Zach."

  He frowned up at the tree, his little brow wrinkling in concentration. Rachel could picture him lying on the floor, a decorated Christmas tree on top of him, and she started to laugh. Emma did, too, and finally Zach joined in.

  Sam came in in the middle of that and hovered in the doorway watching them, the way he often did, and Rachel wondered what it would take to draw him inside, to keep him from lingering there on the edge. She wanted him with them, always.

  "What's going on?" he asked finally.

  "I didn't pull the tree over," Zach insisted.

  "Well, that's good to know," Sam said.

  "Emma says he did that when he was little, and we're wondering how to keep Grace away from this one," Rachel said.

  The baby was napping at the moment, but she crawled all over the downstairs, fast as she could go, and she hated the playpen Rachel's neighbor, Mrs. Doyle, had brought over for them to use. So far, they'd mostly been chasing her all over the house.

  "We could confine her to the family room, with a few more baby gates, like the one on the steps," Sam said.

  "She'll hate that," Emma said.

  "Probably," Rachel agreed. Already, she hated the one on the steps. She crawled up to it, pulled herself up so that she was standing, grabbed the gate, and shook it and fussed. "We can't let her eat the tree and all the stuff on it."

  And then Rachel laughed again. She feared she had a Christmas-tree-eating toddler on the loose in her house, and they needed to cage her to keep her from pulling the tree over on herself, like Zach had one year.

  When she looked up, everyone was smiling and her house rang with laughter, just the way it had when she was a girl.

  Rachel caught a glint of light out of the corner of her eye and when she looked up, sunshine was streaming in through the diamond window. The bevels in the glass turned the light this way and that, and as the sun set the light did seem to dance across her living-room floor.

  Magic, she thought. There was magic streaming into her house on this day.

  * * *

  Sam didn't sleep in her bed that night, not that she was surprised by that. Apparently it took begging on her part to get him there, and she hadn't sunk to that level that night.

  Still, she woke on the seventh day of Christmas feeling just fine. Her youngest sister, Ann, called that morning right after Rachel got downstairs and started the coffee. Ann was the only one of Rachel's siblings who'd had the audacity to move away from Baxter, Ohio, something seen as an absolute sin in Rachel's family. Ann lived an entire two hours away. She and her husband were expecting their first child in the spring.

  They talked for a few minutes, Ann mentioning something about her back hurting and being tired all the time, and then said abruptly, "Can we talk about these things, Rach? I wasn't sure.... I don't want to make it any harder for you."

  Rachel closed her eyes and said, "I want you to be happy. I want you to have a healthy, happy baby, and I want to hear all about it."

  "Still, on Daddy's birthday, when we told everyone..."

  "I'm sorry," Rachel said. "I didn't want you to see that. I would never want to bring you down at a time like this. It's special, Annie. You've waited a long time."

  Their father had despaired of his third daughter ever settling down and having children. He'd hounded Ann and her husband mercilessly. This had been a long time coming.

  "Enjoy it," Rachel said. "Every bit of it."

  "Thank you. And I want you to enjoy the three that you have. I wish I could see them."

  "Well, if they're still here at Christmas, you will."

  "Good." Annie hesitated. "Is everything else okay?"

  "Uh hmm," she claimed. "Why?"

  "Oh, I just talked to Daddy the other day, and... You know how he is. He worries. About all of us," she rushed on.

  And right now, he was worried about Rachel and Sam. And he was taking it to the family. Damn.

  "You have enough to worry about," Rachel said. "Baby names and baby furniture. What color to paint the baby's room. How you're going to rearrange your whole life. All that stuff."

  "I know. Still, if you need to talk..."

  "I'm fine," she claimed. "And right now, I have to go. Dave Sharp has his photography equipment set up at the town square, and he's taking family photos today. I want to get a photo of the children."

  "Okay. Call me," her sister said.

  Rachel hung up thinking of calling her father and telling him everything, begging him not to say anything to anyone else about her and Sam, but it was probably already too late. She was afraid everyone knew by now or if they didn't, they soon would.

  And that wasn't her real problem. Her problem was that she had to stop hiding from it, stop pretending she didn't know, and figure out how to deal with it. But not today.

  Today she was going to have the kids' picture taken.

  Zach fussed as she and Emma dressed him up, and Emma smiled shyly as she put on her best dress, a new green velvet one, and Rachel fixed her long hair and put a Christmas-plaid ribbon in it.

  Grace was already in her Christmas outfit, a red plaid dress made along the same lines as Emma's, and they were almost out the door when Zach decided to give her a drink of grape juice from his cup. Rachel and Emma both grabbed for the cup, but none of them faster than Grace. She grabbed on to anything that came within six inches of her and the next thing they knew, she was dripping with juice and looking quite happy about it.

  Zach apologized three times, and Rachel assured him everything would be fine. They stripped Grace and washed her off and then thought about what to do. They could go buy a new dress or try to get this one clean. But t
hey were ready to go. Like Grace, Zach never stayed clean for long. They'd be pushing their luck, either way.

  "I know something we can try," Rachel said.

  She headed upstairs, Emma following her with Grace, once they'd given Zach a very stern warning to stay put and not get dirty. Rachel walked into the bedroom Emma was using. She lifted the lid of the old cedar chest in the corner, the scent alone bringing back so many memories her throat nearly closed up completely.

  "What's this?" Emma got to her knees beside Rachel. Grace stood in front of her, hanging on to the sides, patting her hands against the top.

  "My grandmother's cedar chest," Rachel said.

  "It smells funny," Emma said. "But good."

  "That's the cedar. The wood the chest is made from."

  "You have baby things," Emma said, picking up a tiny pair of booties.

  "Yes." Rachel dug through the chest that hadn't been opened in years.

  "Whose baby things? Yours?"

  "A few of them," Rachel said. Her mother had saved some of the things Rachel had as a baby for Rachel's own children.

  She came up with an old white box, fished out of the depths of the chest, and laid it on the bed. Opening it, she pulled back layers of tissue paper and found a very old, slightly yellowed, once-white gown and held it up to Grace. It was musty, and Grace wrinkled up her little nose and sneezed once, then again, then laughed. Her smile could just about light up the world.

  "She's so beautiful," Rachel said. "Let's try this on her. It's going to be long and maybe too tight through the chest. It's made for younger babies. But it just might work."

  "What is it?" Emma said.

  "A christening gown. One that's been in my family for a long time."

  They put Grace on the bed, and she immediately reached for the box, wanting to chew on it. Emma took it away, and then Grace got her hands on the tissue paper, obviously fascinated with the noise it made when she grabbed it. They took that away, too, and then Grace grabbed for the gown.

  "Maybe we should wait until we get there to put it on her," Emma suggested.

  "I think you're right," Rachel agreed, holding the gown up to her and deciding it would do, just for the picture.

  Grace rolled over and got up on her hands and knees, grinning like a wild thing set free, and lunged for the tissue paper again. Emma laughed and took it away from her again, then set her on the carpeted floor and gave her a rattle from inside the chest, which held her interest at the moment.

  "It's okay?" Emma said.

  Rachel nodded, still holding the gown, still feeling as if she might choke at any moment.

  "Why do you have all the baby things in the chest?" Emma asked.

  "Sam and I had a baby once. A little girl."

  "Oh. What happened to her?"

  "We were in an accident before she was born, and she died."

  "Oh." Emma didn't say anything for the longest time, and then she slipped her hand inside of Rachel's and gave it a squeeze. "That's why you and Sam are so sad?"

  "Part of it," Rachel said. "Probably the biggest part."

  "I'm sorry." She slipped an arm around Rachel's back and leaned against her. "I didn't know little babies died."

  "Not very often, thank God. But sometimes."

  "Do you want to tell me about her?"

  "I think I do," Rachel realized. "Her name was Hope. It was a family name, after one of my favorite great aunts. We'd already decided on the name, even though she wasn't due for another eight weeks. It was March, and we'd had sleet and snow. The roads were a mess, but I had a doctor's appointment. Sam and I were on our way there when we had a car accident."

  Rachel remembered the slow, sickening slide. The light changed, and they hadn't been going that fast. There was a firm layer of snow on the roads. Snow wasn't that hard to drive on. As long as they took it slow, they were fine. But the ice... Ice was a different story, and apparently they'd had ice overnight, a layer of it under the snow. In spots the snow had melted away, leaving just the ice. Ice was nearly impossible to manage.

  "We hit a patch of ice," Rachel said. "Just one of those things. There it was all of a sudden, right in front of a traffic light that had just turned to caution, then as we slid into the intersection, to red. Someone coming from the other direction had probably done the same thing—hit ice—and we slid into each other. We weren't going that fast, but the car we were in was tiny, and the other one was huge."

  She omitted a lot after that. Being trapped in the car. Bleeding. Knowing she was losing the baby. Sam's ashen face in front of hers, him trying to calm her, trying frantically to get her out, making all sorts of rash promises if only she and the baby would live.

  It had taken a long time for the emergency crews to cut her out of the car, and she hadn't known then but it was already too late for the baby. The force of the crash had torn the placenta loose, cutting off the baby's oxygen supply. When they finally got her to the hospital and got the baby out, the damage had been done. After that, they'd simply waited, waited for the baby to die, and wondered if Rachel might die, too. Her mother had told her all of it later, as her mother sat by Rachel's bedside and wept.

  The baby had been without oxygen for too long, and there was nothing to do but let her go. They could have kept her on the machines, but there was no point. Her brain... There was no point.

  Rachel had lost too much blood. The doctors couldn't get it to stop. She'd been outside in the cold for so long and in shock and they'd had to do something quickly, or she would have died, too. As a last-ditch effort at saving her, they'd removed her uterus, which had stopped the bleeding. It also meant she'd never have children.

  "They couldn't save the baby," Rachel said simply. "And I had some trouble afterward, and I couldn't have any more children. It was just one of those things. We hit a patch of ice on the road. That was it."

  Emma stayed there close by Rachel's side, and they watched Grace, shaking the rattle and smiling and trying to get it into her mouth.

  "I'm sorry," Emma said again.

  Rachel pulled the girl to her and gave her a big hug. Or maybe Emma gave her one. Grace sat in the corner with the rattle that should have been Rachel's daughter's, and in a little while, she'd wear the gown that should have been her daughter's, as well.

  Life went on, it seemed. She'd opened the chest she'd planned to fill with keepsakes from all the special moments in her life, as her mother and her grandmother had done before her, and she hadn't fallen apart.

  She remembered so clearly her grandmother's cedar chests. On slow winter days, when it was too cold to go outside and they'd exhausted every possibility for playing indoors, her grandmother would take them upstairs to one of her chests. They'd open them up and one by one pull things out, and her grandmother would tell them stories about each thing and the person it belonged to. Rachel always thought it an incredible sign of riches—all the memories, all the little stories. There were old dresses of her mother's and aunts'. Drawings. Report cards. Postcards. Letters. Photographs. Toys. Baby blankets. Tiny shoes.

  Rachel had long ago stopped putting mementos in her cedar chest. She didn't open it up and remember. Not until now. She supposed that was progress.

  "Do you ever wonder why God lets bad things happen?" Emma asked.

  It took Rachel's breath away. "Yes."

  "Me, too."

  "Bad things have happened to you?" she asked carefully. "Before your mother went away?"

  The girl looked so sad. "Yes."

  "What happened, Emma?"

  "We had to leave.... My father was..." she said haltingly, fighting to get out each word.

  Barely breathing now that Emma was finally giving up some of her secrets, Rachel whispered, "Why?"

  "He was bad," she said simply, as if that were all she could bare to say.

  "Bad... how?"

  "He yelled a lot." Emma looked up with frightened eyes.

  "What else?" Rachel coaxed the words out of her.

  "He scared m
e, and... and he hurt my mom."

  Oh, no. "He hit her?"

  Emma nodded, tears in her eyes now.

  "And you and your mother and Zach and the baby ran away from him?"

  "We had to," Emma said in a rush, now that she'd gotten that much out. "Mom said he would have hurt us one day if we hadn't."

  "And you believed her?" Rachel said. "That he would have hurt you?"

  "I guess.... Maybe. He scared me."

  "Then you had to get away," Rachel reassured her. "If that's the way it happened, you did the right thing."

  "You think?"

  "Yes. I'm sure."

  "I still miss him," Emma confessed. "Even after everything, I miss him."

  "That's why your mother's afraid of the police? Afraid they'll make you all go back to your father?"

  Emma nodded. "Zach doesn't know. Just me and Mom."

  "Oh," Rachel said.

  "She told me in case anything ever happened to her. In case I was the only one to take care of Zach and the baby. She didn't want us to go back." Emma started crying then. "You won't make us go back, will you?"

  "Oh, Emma."

  "I'm not supposed to let anyone take us back there, and I'm scared. I'm scared my mom won't come back and that we'll have to go back there and that he's really mad at us now."

  "Emma, I don't know what's going to happen. I don't know where your mother is or when she's coming back, and I don't know anything about your father. I don't know a lot about the law in cases like this, but I meant what I said earlier. You and your brother and the baby can stay here as long as you need to. I promise. And if..."

  She was going to say she'd protect her from her own father, but honestly, how could Rachel do that? She'd already seen how the system worked, and a biological parent's rights were so hard to break. They'd learned that with Will. Will had gone back to his biological mother, despite everything Sam and Rachel had done and everything his mother had done. What if someone decreed that these children had to go back to their biological father?

  "Emma," she began. "I... I—"

  And then Sam appeared in front of her, taking Emma by the arms and gently turning her to face him. "Emma?"

  "Yes," she whispered.

  "Don't tell us who your father is," he said.