Christmas on Mimosa Lane (A Seasons of the Heart Novel)

by Anna DeStefano

  But Mallory couldn’t move or make any of those things happen. She hadn’t gone back to her place for her mother’s things. She’d barely been aware of anything going on around her as Pete had helped her into his Jeep and driven her here.

  The place inside her that had been numb ever since she’d called her grams and given up on her life with this woman felt as empty as it ever had. There were no feelings to battle back. Every emotion she’d once had toward her mother had been shoved aside years ago so Mallory could get on with her life. And they still felt hidden away, despite the anxiety of the last week and the fact that she’d rushed here to stand in this desolate place and stare at the shell of the woman who’d given birth to her.

  “She likes the tree,” Polly said in a hushed voice. She was standing next to Mallory, wearing Tinker Bell and clinging tightly to Pete’s hand.

  They’d stayed by Mallory’s side, no matter the ungodly hour or the gloom of the shelter’s poorly lit lobby. They seemed impervious to the wave of hopelessness that clung to this night. The same holiday decorations that Mallory had helped put out, mostly for the staff’s benefit so people didn’t spiral into a depression every time they showed up for work, seemed like a cruel joke now—a taunting reminder of what had never been Mallory’s, thanks to her mama’s problems.

  “It’s almost like she’s come back to wait for you,” Pete said, an eyebrow rising when Mallory turned to him. “It’s the same shelter as before. The same tree. She disappeared last Saturday. Now she’s right back where you surprised her, like she knew you’d come if she showed up again.”

  “I doubt she recognized me before.” Mallory heard and tasted the bitterness of her words. “I doubt she has a clue where she is.”

  “Something must have registered.” Pete hadn’t tried to touch her again, not after helping her out of the Jeep and then doing the same for Polly—who’d woken up finally, excited by the adventure of finding Mallory’s mommy in time for Christmas. “Otherwise, why would she return to the very same spot that she last saw you?”

  Because she’s screwed up, Mallory wanted to scream at him, just like me. Because we’ll both always be in this same spot, no matter how far away we try to wander…

  “I don’t think she ever saw me, really,” she said instead. “I don’t know what I’m doing here. All these years, she could have come home. If she’d heard I was in Atlanta, she could have asked someone on staff about me anywhere, and they’d have gotten in touch with me. She’s…”

  “Broken,” Pete said, using the word Mallory had earlier to describe Sam Perry.

  Mallory nodded. “She’ll never want to be fixed.”

  “Then don’t make this about fixing her.” He sounded sad, on her behalf. He sounded scared. “Do whatever you have to tonight for yourself, Mallory, so you can move past this, healthy and whole.”

  So they could be together, he left unsaid.

  She could see it in his eyes, though. She’d felt it in every touch they’d shared while they made love. She heard it in every fresh, hopeful, excited thing that came out of his daughter’s mouth. These two wanted to give Mallory a better Christmas, a better life, and they wanted that better place to be with them. The only real question that remained was whether or not Mallory could believe in that kind of second chance after walking away from so many others before them.

  She looked back at the lonely, lost old woman staring at the dilapidated tree. And for a crazy moment what she saw was herself. Always looking, always watching, but never belonging or having. Once more, she could keep the half-life she’d been living, or she could grab hold of the one waiting for her if she’d only fight for it one last time.

  The premonition of where she might end up if she didn’t once and for all confront this moment drew her toward her mother. A tiny hand curled around her fingers, and she found Polly there beside her, taking the lead and helping her step closer still, until they were in front of the couch. Polly pulled her down until they were sitting, the little girl putting herself between Mallory and the old woman who didn’t acknowledge them.

  “Mama?” Mallory said, hating her desperation for the word to mean something to the other woman.

  Of course it didn’t. Her mother didn’t so much as blink.

  There had been times when Mallory was a child when she’d watched her mother go for what seemed like hours without blinking or reacting to the world in any way. Mallory knew she wouldn’t be able to bear it that long now. She was already flying apart, deep inside where she wished she were still feeling nothing. Instead, screams and tears and hatred were building, because she hadn’t been able to stay away and spare herself this last reminder of how completely her mother had abandoned her.

  “Did you come back for your doll?” Polly asked.

  The woman dropped her head. She began fidgeting with a broken button on her coat. It was the only button left—the rest had fallen off. It wasn’t until a tear splashed onto dirty, weather-roughened hands that Mallory noticed her mother was crying.

  “I left her,” her mother said in a raspy, unhealthy voice that was too familiar to be anyone else’s. Her words were slurred. A faint whiff of alcohol accompanied them. “I didn’t mean to. I forget where I am, and then where I’ve been. I waked up, and she’d been gone I don’t know how long or where. Then I remembered this tree…”

  “She was here.” Polly turned to Mallory, clearly thinking they were talking about the doll and not aware of the undercurrent of meaning beneath the older woman’s words. “We’re taking good care of her. If you still want her, we could—”

  “No, she’s better off with them people who took her. She needs them more than me. She needs somethin’ better, and that never was me…”

  Polly’s hand grabbed Mallory’s again. Mallory, her head down, too, could see tears splashing on Polly’s tiny fingers. Her tears.

  “But she needs you,” Mallory said, not daring to look up. She knew what was coming, and hearing it was going to be bad enough. Seeing the emotional nothingness in her mother’s expression while she said it would destroy her.

  “She needs…more.” Her mama stood, her bags bunching on her arms where she’d hooked them at each elbow. She didn’t move away. Not yet. “She’s better off with them other people.”

  With the grandmother Mallory had never connected to. Living a better life that would never feel real. Growing into a woman herself, but always feeling like a homeless little girl.

  Mallory stood, too. She couldn’t stop herself from trying one last time.

  Please don’t go away…No matter what I have to do next, please don’t go away forever…

  She stared into her mother’s almost unrecognizable face, willing her to snap out of the haze that had long ago taken over her senses. “She’s alone everywhere she goes, Mama, just like you. She’s never with people, just like you. She’ll never have anything else, not even the Christmas she’s always wanted, because you never tried to help yourself, let alone her.”

  She was shouting, her speech becoming a full-on tantrum. She was shaking, her legs impossibly weak. And she was leaning against Pete’s strength, because he’d come up beside her. His arm curled around her waist and shifted her even closer. Her mother kept staring at the floor, at nothing, maybe at the past. Or maybe what she was seeing was whatever world existed in her mind that had always been so much more valuable to her than reality.

  Mallory’s mother reached out a filthy hand to cup Polly’s cheek. “You take good care of her now. She’s always wanted to be with you anyways.”

  Mallory swayed. If it weren’t for Pete, she’d have hit the floor.

  Those had been the last words she’d heard her mother speak, at the hospital when her mother was growing well enough to be transferred to the psych ward. Grams had brought Mallory to visit her mama one last time, because kids weren’t allowed in the psychiatric wing.

  They’d thought it would be weeks, maybe months, before Mallory would have another chance to see her mother. Her m
ama had said good-bye forever, though, just like she was now—to Grams, not to Mallory. She’d already planned on sneaking away. She’d known she wasn’t ever coming back.

  “I wanted you,” Mallory said now, when she hadn’t known to then. “I’ve always wanted you.”

  “We could invite her to our New Year’s party.” Polly rushed to Pete’s side. “We could give her the dolly back then.”

  Mallory snorted at the image that must be playing through Polly’s mind, of Mallory’s mommy coming to Mimosa Lane’s next neighbor-filled celebration, feeling welcomed and deciding she belonged there just like everyone thought Mallory should.

  “She doesn’t want her back,” Mallory said. “Do you, Mama?”

  She watched as the woman she’d rushed to see shuffled silently away, leaving behind Mallory and the life Mallory had scraped together without her—as if it were all as insignificant as the crap she carried around in her shopping bags.

  “Wait!” Polly ran after Mallory’s mama. She pulled something off Mallory’s bathrobe. It was Emma’s precious Christmas tree pin.

  “Merry Christmas,” Polly said, attaching it to the old woman’s threadbare orange coat.

  Mallory stood beside, stunned. Her breath rushed out when her mother’s hand came up to feather a soft touch across the beautiful thing. She looked down at it in wonder, then at Polly, and smiled.

  “You always were so beautiful,” she said. “The most beautiful thing in the world.”

  Then she turned and walked out of Mallory’s life all over again.

  Polly ran back across the room. “You’re not going to let her get away, are you?”

  Mallory looked at Pete instead of his daughter. “Do you want Emma’s pin back?”

  “No,” he said, gazing deeply into her eyes. His hand rubbed up and down the sleeve of her sweater. “Are you okay?”

  “Why wouldn’t I be?” Silent screams were building again. He must have heard them, because he pulled her into an embrace that she fought.

  He refused to let her go. “Do you want to go after her?”

  “Mallory?” Polly tugged at her sleeve. “She’s getting away. You have to—”

  “I don’t have to do anything!” Mallory jerked away from them both, seeing in an instant Polly’s wounded expression and her father’s desperate need to pull Mallory back and somehow comfort her. “She doesn’t want my help. She doesn’t want me. I don’t have to keep chasing after her and letting her do this to me. I came here to say good-bye for good. Nothing more.”

  “But…” Polly’s lower lip trembled. She huddled against her father’s leg. “She’s your mommy. You still have a mommy, and—”

  “And some mommies are better off gone, because they don’t care about you. And it hurts too much to keep letting them throw you away. Some families are better off broken, and no amount of wishing or sparkly Christmas pins or being a big girl is ever going to change that. Sometimes you just have to grow up and stop believing in pretty pink fairy tales that mean nothing they’re so ridiculously stupid!”

  Mallory heard the cruel, unforgivable words come out and covered her mouth with a trembling hand. But the damage was already done.

  Pete lifted a softly sobbing Polly into his arms. His stony expression mirrored his demeanor the first time he’d come to Mallory’s house on another late night when he’d confronted her as if she were a threat to his child.

  Clearly, he’d been right from the start, because this was who Mallory was beneath all the other things she’d hoped would make up for it. This shrewish, harried thing standing in the deserted lobby of an assistance shelter, railing at the world for the unfair hand she’d been dealt as a child yet refusing to let the past go—this was the woman Pete had slept with in his wife’s bed, down the hall from his beautiful, impressionable, emotionally fragile daughter. Mallory never should have allowed him to become so attached to her. He and Polly shouldn’t be there now, finally seeing the worst of her in all its ugly, uncontrollable glory.

  But she’d allowed herself to awaken to the dream of a soft, sweet world where a good man wanted to make a good place for her in his life. She’d started to believe that amid not-so-perfect families like the Lombards and the Perrys she could make for herself a holiday and maybe even a future that was light-years away from the empty life she’d known.

  But Mallory simply wasn’t made that way. And she’d led them all to this place where she was the one destroying a little girl’s belief in happy endings. The kindest thing she could do now was end this before she did any more damage.

  “I’d like to go home,” she said, turning away from them and heading outside to wait beside the Jeep.

  Pete stood in his backyard, barely feeling the freezing night as he stared at the fence separating his house from Mallory’s. The door was still ajar from Polly’s last visit next door. His daughter was sound asleep upstairs, exhausted from the emotional roller coaster of their trip into town, and sad and worried and hurt by Mallory’s reaction to seeing her mother. Pete was, too, as he stood there wondering if he would make things better or worse by barging through his neighbor’s patio door in the middle of the night the way Polly did.

  Mallory had made him let her off at the curb before he’d even pulled into his driveway. With Polly in the backseat wide awake and still making sniffling sounds, aware of everything that wasn’t being said in the painfully quiet interior of the Jeep, he’d had no choice but to temporarily let their neighbor go. It had taken him nearly a half hour to tuck his daughter into bed and make certain she was once again sleeping. Especially after she’d been gazing out her window at Mallory’s tree and they’d both seen their neighbor cut the lights on the thing.

  “She’s giving up on Christmas,” Polly had whispered, tears rolling down her cheeks. “Just like her mommy gave up.”

  It hurts too much to let them keep throwing you away…

  Pete couldn’t stop Mallory’s heartbreaking admission from replaying through his mind as he stared into the night that had begun with her in his bed, behaving as if she never wanted to be anywhere else but with him and Polly.

  What did it do to a child to feel as if she were never going to be good enough to earn her mother’s protection? To have to decide at age six to leave behind the only stability in her life in order to take care of that parent and then to believe at age twelve that she’d failed? Her mother had rejected her outright, choosing a mentally ill life on the streets rather than fighting to overcome whatever she had to, to keep her daughter with her.

  He’d thought he’d understood something of what Mallory had been through. He’d thought he could make up somehow for her inability to believe that others, given the chance, would love her differently, fully, the way her mother never had. But tonight, watching Polly’s innocent reaction to the broken interplay between mother and daughter had shown him just how vulnerable Mallory must have been at the same age. And how idealistically she must have gone into her homeless journey with her mother, believing she could save the woman if she loved her enough.

  He couldn’t stop picturing it.

  Polly, living on the streets, filthy and wearing rags. Polly, dreaming of earning her Christmas back while she took care of her mother and hoped that one day the woman would be well enough to be a mommy again. Polly, learning in the hardest possible way that the only person she could ever really depend on was herself, and that she might never fit in with anyone who believed the world worked differently.

  The real miracle was how Mallory had survived with even a rudimentary ability to enjoy life. Yet she was still trying to heal and fix people and make lives better, while she’d kept large parts of herself detached enough not to be hurt if things didn’t work out. Then she’d met Pete and Polly, and it had all come roaring back, all the longing and hope still inside her for the things she’d never found in life. The magic Pete wanted so desperately to show her.

  How did he convince her not to give up on the promises their bodies had just made to each o
ther, commitments that must seem more terrifying to her now than ever?

  A crash from next door sent him sprinting across the yard and through the opening in the fence, to find Mallory standing just outside her sliding glass door. She’d tossed her Christmas tree, lights and ornaments and all, onto the patio.

  She’s giving up, Polly had said.

  Striding closer, suddenly furious, he grew even angrier when he found Mallory watching him without a hint of emotion on her face. He wanted to grab her, shake her, force her to deal with what had happened tonight without retreating into whatever place in her mind protected her from pain and disappointment. He stopped a few feet away, on the other side of her tree, his breath misting beneath the full moon that had peeked from behind a cloud bank. It shone down on them like a spotlight.

  “You’re not giving up,” he said, the same as he had to his wife before it had become clear that him holding on would only cause Emma more pain. “What happened with your mother is tragic, and you have every reason to be upset and to need some time to deal with it. But you’re not giving up on everything you’ve fought so hard to have here. You’re not giving up on us.”

  Mallory inhaled, her features still a blank. “You need to keep your daughter away from me until I can get this place sold and move. If I price things right or luck out finding somewhere cheap to rent in the city, I should be gone by the time school starts back. Until then you’re going to have to make Polly understand that she can’t come over anymore. If you want to step inside now, you could get Emma’s pins and take them back to her. That way Polly won’t have to see me again after the awful things I said to her.”

  If he wanted to step inside?

  “You’re not moving away.” Sheer terror rocketed through Pete, announcing just how completely he’d fallen for the second love of his life, and how unprepared he was for losing Mallory, too. “You wouldn’t do that to yourself or Polly or me.”

  “I screamed at your kid tonight when she was just trying to be nice to me.”

  Mallory laughed. It sounded ugly and full of self-loathing and darker than the parts of herself she’d allowed him to see before now.