The White Christmas Inn

by Colleen Wright

  Luke looked at Trevor’s hand for so long that Hannah was afraid he might actually refuse to shake it. Finally, though, he clasped Trevor’s hand back.

  “What are you doing here?” Luke asked as they shook.

  Trevor grinned and put his arm around Hannah, squeezing her to his side as she looked down, unable to meet Luke’s eyes.

  “I’m here to marry my girl,” he said. “I’m a little late, but I made it.”

  For good measure, he kissed Hannah’s cheek. When she glanced at him, still in shock, he was looking from her to Luke with a smile that seemed to be trying to apologize for being so charming, while at the same time saying that he couldn’t quite help it.

  Luke watched Hannah for a long moment, then resettled his bag on his shoulder. “Well,” he said. “Good luck.”

  “Thanks, man,” Trevor said.

  Hannah ducked her head again.

  “I’m gonna go,” Luke said.

  “Good to see you, man,” Trevor said. “Drive safe. It’s crazy out there.”

  Hannah watched as if frozen while Luke walked out the door without another backward glance.

  But when the door thumped shut behind him, something snapped in her.

  She pulled away from Trevor and crossed her arms over her chest.

  “Who was that?” Trevor asked, glancing back over his shoulder.

  “What makes you think we can still get married today?” Hannah asked.

  This, finally, drove the grin from Trevor’s face.

  “Babe,” he said. “I know. I messed up.”

  “Is that what you did?” Hannah said.

  Trevor shook his head and pushed his hair back, his standard move in moments when he was distressed. “I spent all day thinking about it yesterday. It’s just such a big step, you know? I just didn’t know if I was strong enough to take it. You’ve always been the strong one,” he said, stepping forward to take her hands. “But that’s what made me realize,” he went on, the grin creeping back onto his face.

  “Realize what?” Hannah said.

  Trevor stepped forward to gather her in his arms again. “I can’t live without you, babe,” he said. “It was the biggest mistake of my life, thinking I could. But as soon as I started thinking about life without you, I just knew—I can’t do it. I’ve told you that a million times, but now I know it’s true. So as soon as I heard the roads opened up, I got in my car and started driving, and—”

  By this point, Hannah had begun to squirm so insistently that he finally released her, but without breaking his earnest eye contact, or the cadence of his speech. “—and here you are,” he said. “And here I am. Everything’s still here. Nothing’s really changed. I say, let’s do it. Let’s get married, babe.”

  “Everything’s not here,” Hannah said. “The caterer couldn’t get through the storm. The minister didn’t come.”

  “Well, we’ll get another one,” Trevor said. “They’ve got to have some minister out here who’s crazy enough to marry us.”

  Hannah stared at him.

  “You’ve got your dress, right?” Trevor said.

  Hannah nodded.

  “That’s all I want,” Trevor said, as if it was the simplest thing in the world. “Just you in your dress, and that’s everything I’ll ever need.”

  He grabbed her hand, kissed her cheek, and drew her to him tenderly.

  Out of the corner of her eye, Hannah saw a flash of Luke’s jacket as he headed for his truck.

  “Come on, baby,” he said tenderly. “What do you say? Let’s go tell everyone. It’ll be a Christmas present they’ll never forget.”

  At the thought of Trevor appearing in the dining area, grinning that same grin at her parents, the words Hannah had been searching for finally sprang into her mind.

  “It’s not all I need,” she said.

  Trevor looked at her, surprised. “What do you mean?” he asked.

  “You’re not the only one getting married, Trevor,” Hannah said. “You’re not the only one who gets to say whether it happens or doesn’t.”

  “But you wanted to marry me,” Trevor said. “I’m the one who wasn’t sure.”

  “That was true two days ago,” Hannah said.

  Trevor looked around, like he was trying to figure out if someone was pranking him.

  “What happened in the last two days?” Trevor said. “Did something change?” He took her hand again. “Because I didn’t,” he said.

  Hannah didn’t know whether to laugh or scream. But in a flash it came to her that Trevor wasn’t lying. Even though he’d been the one to break off the engagement and then show up saying the wedding was back on, he was no different than he’d ever been, always up and down, never sure what he wanted.

  Gently, she pulled her hand free from his.

  “You know what?” she said. “Maybe nothing changed. Or maybe I’m the one who did. But in any case, we’re not getting married. Not today, and not ever.”

  “Babe,” Trevor began, but she was already pushing past him, out the front door to the porch, where she stood in the glittery snow that had dusted back onto the blue-painted slats after someone cleared it, scanning the yard for Luke’s truck.

  But by the time she got there, the yard was already empty.

  Luke had gone without leaving a trace, not even the faintest rumble of his truck engine vanishing into the distance.

  “SHHH!” ADDISON SAID, IN a voice loud enough to wake anyone still sleeping in the top two floors of the inn. “She’s sleeping!”

  “No, she isn’t,” Bailey said triumphantly, as Molly’s eyes fluttered open.

  Instantly, Molly shut them again.

  She wasn’t typically an early riser, or a fast one, and she hadn’t exactly gotten a full, peaceful night’s sleep.

  Experimentally, she tried turning her head away from the girls, toward the opposite side of the bed, and pretending to fall back into a deep slumber. She hoped that if they padded quietly away, she actually might.

  For a moment, both girls fell silent.

  Then she could hear shuffling, and finally the patter of feet from the side of the bed where they’d originally woken her, around the bottom, to the other side, where they came to a stop, presumably the better to observe the progress of this last bout of sleep.

  By now, Molly was wide awake, but still kept her eyes closed as she struggled not to burst into laughter, which would be a dead giveaway to the girls that she had been faking.

  “She wants her present,” Bailey stage-whispered.

  “Maybe she wants to sleep,” Addison said. Her tone conveyed the clear message that older sisters always knew things that younger sisters hadn’t thought of yet.

  “Would you want to sleep, or to have a present?” Bailey asked.

  In the silence that followed, while Addison apparently debated the merits of this question, Molly managed to turn her head away from the girls again in a way that she hoped was convincingly sleepy.

  For an instant, both girls fell silent, and Molly could almost feel the way both pairs of eyes must have fastened on her, watching like tiny, very cute hawks, for any sign of wakefulness on her part.

  “Well?” Bailey whispered, while apparently poking Addison, which evoked an indignant “Hey!” and a brief scuffle.

  “I’d rather have a present,” Addison said. “But Daddy would rather sleep.”

  “Daddy always wants to sleep,” Bailey complained.

  This time, Molly couldn’t resist the smile that came to her lips at the idea of the girls stalking Marcus this same way, morning after morning.

  With a big, theatrical groan, she stretched, rolled over, and opened her eyes on the girls.

  “Well, girls,” she said. “Good morning.”

  For a moment, both girls looked at her wide-eyed. Then Bailey began her familiar dance, bouncing on her toes in celebration of the fact that Molly had decided at last to greet the day. “You’re awake!” she sang, then turned to her sister with the next verse: “She’s
awake!”

  But Addison, with her superior wisdom and knowledge, wasn’t about to be taken over by rejoicing so quickly. “It’s Christmas,” she announced to Molly, in a slightly disapproving tone, as if she couldn’t quite believe that any functioning adult would have let this crucial detail slip their mind, even in the first seconds after waking.

  “Is it Christmas?” Molly asked in a slightly teasing tone. “Then there’s going to be a lot of excitement this morning. Maybe we should all go back to sleep for a few hours, to make sure we get enough rest to enjoy it.”

  She closed her eyes again, but when she opened them, seconds later, Addison was grinning at Molly’s joke, and Bailey was clambering onto the bed itself.

  As Molly sat up and the mattress rocked slightly, Bailey lost her balance and tumbled, giggling, into Molly’s arms.

  “Well,” Molly said. “Merry Christmas to you!”

  “Merry Christmas!” Addison crowed, tossing a sheaf of paper on the bed.

  “We made you a present,” Bailey confided, curling up in Molly’s lap.

  “A present?” Molly said. “You girls didn’t have to do that!”

  “We used your pencils,” Addison said, pushing the paper out of her way, toward Molly, and climbing up on the bed to join them.

  From Molly’s lap, Bailey stuck out her foot and dragged the stack of pages toward her with her toes. “Toes are like hands,” she said. “They’re just as good.”

  But before she managed to get it within reach of her actual fingers, Addison pounced, collected the pages into a rough approximation of a manuscript, and handed them to Molly with a high degree of ceremony.

  “We wrote it ourselves,” she said. “This morning.”

  Molly looked down at the cover, a charming rendition of what was clearly recognizable as the inn, complete with its green shutters and white siding, perched on the top of a snow-covered hill.

  “Oh my goodness,” she said. “This is beautiful.”

  “Read it!” Addison commanded, snuggling in under Molly’s arm.

  “You wrote all this?” Molly said, flipping through the pages, and realizing the girls had used up almost twenty of her drafting sheets. That wasn’t any kind of a problem—she just couldn’t believe how much work they had done.

  “I wrote it,” Addison said. “Bailey helped with the drawings.”

  “I’m going to be an artist,” Bailey said with an impish grin. “Like you.”

  She tapped with her toe at the page in front of her. “I drew this one,” she said.

  “You know what?” Molly asked.

  “What?” Bailey asked, squirming in her lap so that she could look up into Molly’s eyes.

  “I think you already are an artist,” Molly said.

  Bailey regarded her seriously for a moment, as if to make sure this wasn’t a joke. Then a shy smile began to steal over her face. Before it could overtake her completely, she squirmed back around into a position where she could see the manuscript Molly was holding again.

  “Read it!” she crowed.

  As Molly read the first few pages, a familiar story emerged. A dad and his young daughters, both dressed in princess gowns in the most vibrant possible shades of turquoise and magenta that Molly’s pencil box would allow, were caught by surprise in the midst of a terrible snowstorm.

  But just as a large and quite convincing abominable snowman was opening his jaws to swallow their little red car, a snow witch appeared and chased it off.

  When Molly got her first look at the drawing of the snow witch, she got a sensation the girls themselves must have felt when they first saw the drawings in her manuscript the night before, pictures that were obviously inspired by them. It was both thrilling and a little vertigo-inducing to see herself being drawn as a character, even in a book that had actually been written by children, because it offered such a clear mirror of what they thought of her, juxtaposed against what she hoped others might see when they looked at her.

  But from the very first page where the snow witch appeared, the girls’ vision of her was full of wonder. She was almost twice the size of their car, with bright red lips and long, flowing hair, all accented by a sky-blue-and-silver dress. Somehow, the two girls had drawn Molly as both more powerful and more beautiful than she would ever have drawn herself.

  When the snow witch first joined the story, though, the little family wasn’t sure if she was going to swallow them, just the way the abominable snowman had threatened to. As the snow witch waved her wand at them, the girls in the story had a nervous conversation about whether she was going to turn them into pillars of ice, or maybe tiny winter birds.

  But when the snow witch waved her wand, she transported them to her magic castle, which was warm and cozy, and full of tables piled high with delicious food: stacks of buttery pancakes, gooey grilled cheese, and laundry-sized baskets of brownies.

  She introduced them to her magical companions, who bore a suspiciously striking resemblance to a number of the characters from Molly’s own books. And finally, with their dad’s smiling permission, she taught both of the girls to be snow witches themselves, and they all flew off together in search of other lost travelers to rescue from the winter roads and take back to their vast but cozy castle.

  At the end of the story, Molly had a feeling that she rarely had with books anymore, since writing and reading them had become her profession. Just as she’d often felt when she was around Addison’s and Bailey’s ages, she didn’t want the story to end.

  “Should we read it again?” she said, looking from girl to girl.

  Bailey, thinking that Molly was making a joke, teasing her for always demanding to hear any story once more, burst into laughter.

  So Molly just shuffled the papers together, lining them up with each other so that none of the pages would be out of order or have their corners bent.

  She looked down again at the “cover” drawing of the inn, which she now knew was just the top bit of the good witch’s castle, peeking up above the mountain it was hidden in, and where she could now see the face of the snow witch smiling from the corner of one of the windows.

  “This is such a beautiful present,” Molly said. “Thank you, girls.”

  But as she said this, she realized something: she didn’t have a present for them.

  Neither girl seemed to mind this, at least not yet. Both of them were still looking at her happily, gleeful with the pleasure of giving. And there was no reason to believe that either of them would expect a present from her. After all, when would she have had the chance to get them one, since they’d all been trapped together at the inn since the day they met?

  Still, something in Molly yearned to give them something in return for this story they’d worked so hard on. Almost selfishly, she wanted to have the pleasure of watching their faces light up the same way they had moved her heart this morning.

  Gently, she lifted Bailey from her lap and pushed the covers back, as Bailey began to protest. “Hey, no!”

  “Where are you going?” Addison called, as Molly went over to the table by the door, where the manuscript she’d written yesterday was sitting.

  When she picked it up, she held it for a minute in her hand. She’d already taken photos of each page, backed them up, and emailed them to herself. She wasn’t about to take a chance on losing a draft once it was finished.

  But she’d always kept her first drafts, her very first drafts, before. In fact, she had a whole section of a shelf of them at home: her own private library of books that only she would ever see. The idea of not taking this one home to sit among its brothers and sisters gave her a moment of pause.

  “Molly?” Bailey asked, in the same tone of disappointment she might use to inquire if a beloved game was finally over.

  The sound of Bailey’s voice drove away the last of Molly’s hesitation. She turned around, slipping the manuscript behind her as she did.

  “I’m not going anywhere,” she said. “I just had to get the present I have to gi
ve you girls.”

  “A present?” Addison said, calculating quickly. “Where did you get us a present?”

  Her voice got wobbly by the end from the sonic interference of her sister, doing her best to bounce on her heels while standing up on Molly’s bed.

  Half worried that Bailey would bounce herself right onto the floor before she got there, Molly almost dove for the bed, scooping Bailey up as she sat down and the girls crowded around, both craning their necks to get a look at whatever she was holding in her hands.

  When Molly removed the manuscript from the folds of her gown, Addison piped up with consternation.

  “That’s your book,” she said, as if it should be obvious to everyone that Molly couldn’t give them her book as a present.

  “That’s right,” Molly said. “And I want you to have it.”

  Bailey, for her part, didn’t have any hesitation. She seized the pages and clutched them to her chest.

  “Your book!” she said.

  “Be careful!” Addison said, retrieving the pages from her as if Molly’s hand-drawn sketches were actually the Mona Lisa. “This is the only one!”

  “The only one?” Bailey said, looking up at Molly. “And you’re giving it to us?”

  Molly nodded. “Well, it won’t be the only one forever,” she said. “Eventually, I hope there will be quite a lot of copies. But no one will have this one. It’s the first one, and there won’t ever be anything else in the world quite like it. And that’s just right, because there’s nobody else in the world quite like you two.”

  At this, Bailey buried her head against Molly’s chest. “Our own book,” she said in rapture.

  As she sighed, a knock came on the door.

  “Daddy!” both girls chorused, piling off the bed as Molly grabbed for her robe.

  But when the door opened, it wasn’t Marcus, but Santa Claus, and not a Santa Claus with quite the same tall, fit build as Marcus, but one who looked quite a bit more like one of their refugee travelers, Frank.

  “Ho, ho, ho!” he boomed. “I don’t usually have to wake little girls up on Christmas morning, but I thought this time I’d make an exception. I’m so close to the North Pole up here in Vermont that sometimes I like to stick around to see children open their presents. And let me tell you, there are some very nice presents waiting downstairs for you to open.”