A Holiday to Remember

by Lynnette Kent

  “Oh, my God.” She covered her face with her hands. “The girls must be distraught.”

  “What about you? Do you remember the dream? Do you remember waking up?”

  Jayne kept her face hidden as she struggled with the question. If she told him about the dreams, the confusion and the fear, would he use them against her? Would he insist she was discovering her “real” self—Juliet Radcliffe?

  Could he be right?

  “I saw trees.” She took a deep breath, letting her hands fall into her lap, but keeping her eyes closed. “All kinds of evergreens, thousands of them. No snow on the ground, just dark earth and that piney, woodsy smell.

  “Then there was only one tree, not in the woods but in a room with mirrors on the walls, and a shiny dark floor. The tree was decorated for Christmas, with white lights and silver icicles.”

  “Okay.” Chris leaned forward to take her hands in his. “What else?”

  “I—I’m not sure. I was waiting for…something. Something I’m afraid of. I can’t find a door or a window, can’t get away. All I can do is sit and wait.” She opened her eyes to look at him. “That’s all.”

  “That was the dream?” When she nodded, he asked, “Was waking up still part of the dream?”

  “Maybe.” Jayne pulled her hands free to massage her eyes with her fingers. “I—I’ve had these moments when I wasn’t…well, oriented is the technical term. For a few seconds, I feel as if I’m somewhere else.”

  “This afternoon on the path?”

  Jayne shrugged. “A couple of other times, too. And the strange dreams.”

  She waited for him to take advantage of her confession, but he sat without speaking, staring at the floor between them, for a long time.

  “I don’t recall much about my life,” she found herself saying into the silence. “I remember things my grandmother told me about my family, my childhood. But when I try to search for—for my own memories, I come up against a barrier, like a blank wall.”

  Chris got to his feet and went to put more logs on the fire. “Does this wall exist at a particular point in time? Does it have a before and after? For instance, do you remember last week?”

  “Of course.”

  “Last year?”

  “Yes.”

  “Ten years ago?”

  “Ten years ago, I was a freshman in college. That was just after my grandmother died.”

  “How old were you then?”

  “Twenty. I started later than usual,” she explained, before he could ask. “I developed meningitis when I was eighteen, and nearly died. It took me a couple of years to recover enough to go to school.”

  “You remember being sick?”

  “I remember waking up from the coma with my grandmother by the bed.”

  “In a hospital?”

  “In her house. They had sent me home to die, she said. That I woke up at all was a miracle.”

  “Ah.” He turned back to the fire, pushing the logs around with the poker even though the blaze was going well.

  “What does ‘Ah’ mean? What are you thinking?” When he didn’t answer, she forced her stiff and aching self off the sofa and went to stand beside him. “It’s my brain. My life. What should I know?”

  Still, he didn’t look at her. “I’m not sure. You had a bad fall this afternoon—that’s enough to be worried about. You’ve been under a lot of stress. I think…I think you should let this go until we get out of here. Then maybe you can talk to somebody about what’s going on.”

  “‘Somebody’ as in a therapist? Doctors?”

  He shrugged both shoulders, and winced. “Maybe.”

  “You don’t get to be a therapist without taking therapy, Chris. None of this came up in my training.”

  “Maybe you needed—what’s the word?—a catalyst.”

  “You?”

  This time he shrugged only the good shoulder.

  She grabbed the arm with the poker to keep it still. “You’ve been pushing me for days to remember something I don’t. Now, suddenly, you want me to get counseling? When the snow melts?”

  Without shaking off her grasp, he returned the poker to the stand. Then he faced her directly and cupped his hands around her upper arms.

  “You’re right. I barreled in here thinking I knew what was going on. But…” He pulled in a deep breath. “Things are much more complicated than I realized. I don’t think there’s an easy answer anymore. Or even a right answer.”

  He lifted a hand to run his fingers lightly over her scraped forehead, along her temple and the line of her jaw. After hesitating a second at the point of her chin, he brushed the pad of his thumb over her lips.

  His blue gaze met Jayne’s. “We have a HanYuleMasZa celebration to endure and seven girls to entertain until the power comes on. I’m willing to let the problems of the past rest for now. If you can.”

  He’d conceded the battle. She wouldn’t have to defend herself any longer. Chris was willing to accept her as Jayne, not Juliet. And he touched her as if Jayne meant something to him. As if Jayne was the woman he wanted.

  But the questions he’d asked, the discrepancies he’d forced her to acknowledge, couldn’t be ignored. Jayne realized she needed to discover the truth about herself and her life. Somehow the present and the past would have to be reconciled before she could be sure of who she was.

  But not right now. “I can do that,” she assured him, with a slight smile. “Something to eat and a good night’s sleep seem like enough to manage for one night.”

  “Don’t forget KwanChrisHanYule.” He grinned at her.

  She sighed. “I only wish I could.”

  AFTER A DINNER of skewered hot dogs followed by s’mores for dessert, the girls worked awhile longer on their holiday preparations, but none of them required the least prompting to change into pajamas and settle in the library for an early bedtime.

  Chris had no intention of continuing his story tonight, even when the usual requests for more started. “Let’s take a break,” he suggested. “I’d like to hear some of your stories.”

  From Monique’s loud, “No way,” to Sarah’s doubtful frown, they all rejected that idea.

  “Not the bad stuff. You must have had some good times in your lives. Can you think of one to talk about?”

  When he glanced at Jayne, the expression on her face knocked the breath out of him. That smile, the one he’d wanted to see, beamed at him from across the room. He read pride in her gaze, affection and maybe love. At least she loved what he’d just done. That was a great step toward the real thing.

  Before they turned their flashlights off, each girl told a story of her own. Monique had them all cheering her play-by-play basketball win. Taryn told about a séance where she’d spoken to her dead grandmother, and none of the girls expressed the least doubt. Beth’s Bat Mitzvah disaster story made everyone laugh. Selena talked about finding a stranded whale on a California beach, and the girls cried when they learned the animal couldn’t be saved. Chris had to blink his eyes a couple of times to see clearly after that one.

  Haley gave them a funny account of her first ice-skating lesson at Rockefeller Center in New York. Yolanda described watermelon seed spitting contests in Baton Rouge in the summertime and the ribbons she won each year.

  Sarah’s turn came. She paused for a few seconds, then said, “My story is about how I got stranded in the middle of a blizzard with six people I didn’t like very much.”

  The girls around her stirred. Several of them glanced at Jayne in protest.

  But the headmistress kept her gaze on Sarah and didn’t lose the smile she’d been wearing when the last story ended.

  “From what I knew of them,” Sarah continued, “they were all hard to get along with. One of them was just a brat, a weird new girl who couldn’t get along with anybody. The Jewish girl was always bragging about how rich she was and how she could have anything she wanted.”

  Taryn had buried her face in her pink bunny. Beth burrowed into her sleep
ing bag and turned her back on everyone.

  “The two black girls acted like everybody else was putting them down because of their race, when really people didn’t want to be with them because they just didn’t cooperate. The girl from California acted pretty much the same, in Spanish. And the girl from New York thought everybody else was stupid because they hadn’t grown up in ‘The City.’”

  Now even Chris looked to Jayne for intervention, because the big library suddenly felt like the interior of an iceberg.

  “But the most amazing thing happened when the power failed.” Sarah hugged her knees to her chest. “Suddenly, we were in trouble. No heat, no lights, no way to cook except over the fire. There was some complaining at first, some arguments.

  “But gradually, everyone started to cooperate. Nobody cared much where they’d come from anymore, or what problems brought them here. What mattered was being able to take care of ourselves…and each other. We all wanted to be warm, we all wanted to eat. So we all started doing what had to be done. Together.”

  She looked at each of the other girls in turn, even to the point of getting up and walking over to kneel in front of Beth.

  “So from now on, whenever somebody asks me to think about the good times in my life, the memories I want to keep forever, this week will be at the top of my list. The week when I learned how to love every single one of the girls I thought I didn’t like.”

  Chris found himself blinking his eyes again, especially when all of the girls piled on top of each other in an effort to share hugs. A long time passed before they all felt satisfied they’d given and received enough love.

  Sarah stood up again. “Something else I learned this week—what being an adult and taking responsibility really means. I hope I can face tough situations with the same strength and kindness and imagination that Ms. Thomas and Mr. Hammond have shown us this week.”

  All the girls rose then, and gave a standing ovation. Jayne let her tears show but, being a guy, Chris blinked his back. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d cried so often.

  Then he realized he could remember when he’d cried like this. But he didn’t want to think about the past tonight.

  So he grinned at their applause and said thanks, then went outside to bring in more logs. He stood for a while by the woodpile, hoping the girls would be asleep by the time he went back. And he noticed a change in the air, a softness that predicted warmer temperatures and melting snow.

  Even Jayne had fallen asleep when he returned to the library. He set his logs down as quietly as possible and fed the fire to be sure they’d be warm all night.

  Then, because he thought he’d earned it, Chris settled into one of the armchairs. With his feet stretched out on the ottoman and his head wedged at just the right angle into the soft corner, he closed his eyes and spent the night with seven girls. And one woman.

  Which was why they were all awakened the next morning by the sound of someone knocking on the glass panes of Emmeline’s garden doors.

  “I CAN’T BELIEVE YOU’VE been trapped up here for four days without power.” Steve Greeley shook his head and took another gulp of coffee. “Drinking only instant coffee.”

  The deputy grinned at Jayne and she was forced to smile back, though every cut and bruise on her face protested. “We’ve been pretty comfortable, overall. The fireplace made all the difference, of course.”

  Steve had driven his snowmobile from town to check on Jayne and the girls, as promised. Ron Pruitt, another member of the Ridgeville sheriff’s department, had come with Steve on his own snowmobile. She and Chris had brought the men into the kitchen, where the girls had made an appearance before asking if they could go back to bed and get warm again.

  “Having somebody who knows how to cook on the fire must’ve helped.” Ron commented. “Not many people have that skill anymore.”

  Jayne nodded, pretending to sip her coffee. The truth was, she didn’t know what she’d done in her childhood. Listening to the girls’ stories last night had demonstrated exactly how little she remembered of her own life.

  “It’s too bad you got hurt, though.” Steve studied her face, which the mirror had already told her looked like a mask from the latest horror film. “I think you should see a doctor. Right away. And the girl with the hurt wrist needs to go down with us, too.”

  A glance at Chris showed him completely outside the conversation. He sat back in his chair at the kitchen table, drinking his coffee and looking as if his thoughts were a thousand miles away. With his background, they probably were.

  She turned back to Steve. “I agree that Haley should have her wrist examined. We’ve kept snow on it, but there’s no question that it’s still swollen. I can’t leave, however. At least, not unless all the girls can go, too.”

  “Well, we can’t carry seven girls plus you and…” His wary look at Chris reminded Jayne of two dogs in the presence of a single bone. “…and Mr. Hammond, here. The weather’s warming up, though. Couple of days, this snow will really start to disappear. Joe Garber told me he’d have the highway plowed up this far by late tomorrow afternoon.”

  “The school has a contract with the county to plow our drive, as well. Did he mention that?”

  Steve scratched his head. “Uh…no. I’ll have to remind him.”

  “I’d appreciate it. Now, what about the electricity? Has power been restored to Ridgeville?”

  He pulled a big frown. “Should happen in the next day or so. Big transformer got taken out by a tree—huge sucker, and the power company needed this long to get it cut up and hauled away so they could reach the wires. I saw at least five downed lines on the way up here. I’d say it’ll be several days, if not weeks, before you get power this far into the mountains.”

  Jayne fell back in her chair. This was not what she wanted to hear.

  “Have you checked on everybody in town?” Chris spoke for the first time. “My granddad lives out River Road. Has anybody been there?”

  Ron chuckled. “We didn’t get out there before he got into the office in town, raising he—Uh, raising Cain about you heading up here and not coming back. Feisty old geezer.”

  Chris blew out a deep breath. “Feisty. That’s Charlie.”

  After slurping the rest of his coffee, Steve got to his feet. “Okay, Ms. Thomas, I think we should get you and that student of yours down to the doctor. We each can take one of you.”

  Jayne stood, too, careful to keep weight off her injured knee and trying to ignore the stiffness in every other muscle.

  “I can’t leave, Steve. There are six other girls here.”

  “Hammond can—”

  “No, he can’t. I am responsible for these students. I can’t leave them in someone else’s care.”

  His eyes narrowed, but he nodded. “Okay, if you insist. We’ll take the girl, I guess.”

  “And do what with her, once she’s seen the doctor? She’s with me because she couldn’t go home. Her parents aren’t in Ridgeville. You would have to bring her back.”

  “Oh, yeah.” He thought for a minute, then brightened. “We’ll take you both down and bring you both back.” Before Jayne could correct him, he found the answer himself. “But that leaves the other girls here with Hammond.”

  Then he grinned. “So we’ll just take him back with us.” He turned to the man in question. “You can check on your granddad yourself.”

  Jayne stared at Chris, and after a moment he lifted his gaze to stare back. As much as she hadn’t wanted him to stay at the beginning, she didn’t want him to leave now. They—the girls and she—needed him.

  But perhaps he needed to go. If he’d come to Ridgeville to see Charlie, then he was wasting time he wouldn’t get back.

  “Maybe you should—” she began.

  “I can’t—” he said at the same time.

  They both stopped. Then Jayne, being selfish, motioned for Chris to continue.

  He gave her a half smile, then looked at Steve. “Jayne should see a doctor, but you’
re not going to get her away from these girls without dynamite. There are…liability issues involved, you know.”

  From his furrowed forehead, Jayne thought perhaps Steve didn’t know.

  “If I leave,” Chris said, “Jayne will have sole responsibility for seven lively kids. She’s not in any shape to carry wood, stoke the fire or deal with urgent repairs that might come up. I think the students and Jayne will all be safer if I stay.”

  “But—” Steve began.

  “Since Jayne can’t leave, I think Haley should stay with us. Her wrist will wait another couple of days. Maybe you could point out to the snowplow guy that there’s an injured kid up here who needs help. That should be incentive. And I’ll give you a note for Charlie.”

  Jayne almost laughed aloud at Steve’s frustrated expression. Instead she put a hand on his arm and marshaled a grateful smile. “I appreciate the effort you made to check on us. That’s above and beyond the call of duty, I think.”

  Now both deputies blushed bright red.

  “If you don’t mind, I’ll give you a list of phone numbers for the girls’ parents. If you would call them all and reassure them that we’re fine and will be down in town as soon as the roads are clear, I would be even more grateful.”

  She gave Steve the list and then, using her headmistress experience, talked the deputies into their coats and walked them down the hallway to the outside door where they’d parked their snowmobiles.

  As Steve stopped to protest once more, Jayne leaned up and kissed his cheek. “Thank you so much,” she said in a low voice. “Have a safe trip back.” She squeezed his arm and, at the same time, urged him out of the building.

  Standing in the doorway, she waved as they gunned their engines, and again as they wheeled around before disappearing down the drive.

  When she shut herself inside, she found Chris standing in the hallway, arms crossed over his chest, his handsome face marred with a scowl. “Was the kiss necessary?”

  There was, Jayne thought, a distinct tint of green in those blue eyes. She managed a small, flirtatious shrug. “It’s all he gets.” Then she stepped past Chris and went to see if the girls planned to spend the entire day in their pajamas.