“Yes,” Chabo said, bewildered by my excitement. “What of it?”
“Santa pulled a new bag from his bag!” I spoke slowly, as if explaining a difficult concept to children. “When Santa Claus reaches into his magic bag, out comes exactly the right gift.”
“But I wasn't trying to bring out a gift,” Santa insisted.
“Weren't you? You said you wished you could set things right, and out came a new bag. With a fresh supply of Christmas magic. It's a second chance, Santa! You can take back your throne from Hemmit!”
“Oh, no.” Santa folded the new bag over his arm, instinctively stroking it smooth. “The time has passed—”
I stuck my forefingers in my ears to block out his denial and chanted, “I believe, I believe, I believe.”
After a few seconds Chabo followed suit and we chanted in unison. Then Jericho woke up and chimed in declaring, “Yip yipyip, yip yipyip.”
The elves were assembled in the gym, curious to learn why they'd been called away from their work during the busiest season. A ladder stood in the middle of the ring, with the new Christmas bag suspended from the ceiling above it.
As Santa took center stage, a legal document in one hand and a microphone in the other, the room fell silent. Santa gazed out over the crowd, spotted Hemmit in the audience, and grinned at him.
“Hemmit Elf!” he screamed into the mike. “You got a big mouth! You been talking trash‘bout me, saying you can take my place. Well, I'm givin’ you a chance to prove just how wrong you are!”
Hemmit and his gang snickered nervously.
“You think you can run the Pole? Huh?”
From the audience Hemmit answered with his usual arrogance. “Anything you can do, I can do better and twice as fast.”
Santa feigned admiration. “Ooooh. A brave elf! Well, a talented upstart like yourself, you wouldn't be afraid to put that claim in writing. I've got a contract right here.” Santa shook the paper at Hemmit. “You want a chance at the Pole? All you gotta do is sign this contract. Just agree to fight me in a ladder match. Whoever gets the bag”— Santa looked up at the prize— “gets the job. And the loser leaves the Pole forever.”
“That's ridiculous,” Hemmit muttered.
“Maybe,” Santa allowed. “But it's the only way you'll get rid of me.” Again he held up the contract, showed a mouthful of teeth to his nemesis, and hissed, “To be the Claus, you gotta beat the clause!”
I watched with satisfaction as Hemmit's face changed colors—red, magenta, purple. Santa had called him out, and if he didn't accept the challenge he'd show himself to be a cowardly blowhard. Quaking in his pointy shoes, Hemmit shuffled toward the ring.
Whatever the outcome, this would be a different sort of Christmas, the tone of which would be determined by the nature of the ruling Claus. There was no guarantee The Boss would be able to retain his title against a wily elf like Hemmit, of course. I was nervous, yes, but my optimism swelled as Hemmit climbed the steps to the ring.
I believe what happened next was an omen. Charged with excitement, Jericho dashed forward to meet Hemmit, who foolishly halted his ascent just long enough for the Christmas pup to prop a hind leg on the traitorous elf and …
Midnight Clear
Jane Haddam
JANE HADDAM is the author of sixteen Gregor Demarkian mysteries. (The most recent installment is Skeleton Key.) Married for thirteen years to three-time Edgar Award winner, the late William L. DeAndrea, she lives with her two sons in Litchfield County, Connecticut.
Once, when she was very young, Carolanne Tierney had believed that she was changed. That was her First Holy Communion, at Sacred Heart Church, on East Main Street. In those days, East Main was a major thoroughfare, a street full of clothing shops and bakeries, and the side streets that surrounded it were where good people lived. Carolanne remembered the Murphys and the Kellys and the Bohrs.
In those years before the subdivisions were built in Bunker Hill and Robin's Wood, everybody lived in threedecker houses with stacked porches and renters on the top floor—except, of course, that Carolanne and her mother were renters. That was because Carolanne's father had disappeared, nobody knew where. Carolanne's mother said he was dead and went every week to light a candle for the repose of his soul. At school, the nuns taught Carolanne to say the rosary and make First Friday devotions in honor of the Sacred Heart.
Even then, Carolanne knew that there was something wrong in the way they lived. Nobody else's mother locked herself in the hall closet for hours at a time, crying and praying at once. Nobody else's dinner came down to nothing but bread and margarine at least two days a week. There was more wrong there than that, but Carolanne had a hard time explaining it in words, even to herself.
There was something wrong with the way she was. Somehow, she never seemed to understand what people were talking about or when they were making jokes. Somehow, she could never be like the girls who walked down the steep hill to school with her. Years later, when all those people had moved away and there was nobody left on the street for her to talk to, Carolanne would be able to close her eyes and see just how very awful she had been. Fat. Slow. Stupid. Shabby. Maybe her soul had been transfigured, that First Holy Communion day. Her body had not been. In the elementary school pictures she still kept tucked into the top drawer of her bedroom dresser, she was the square, dark, ugly one, shoved into the back row with the boys. In the First Holy Communion picture she kept in a frame on top of her television set, she was barely visible at all.
It was visibility Carolanne was thinking of, that third day of December, when she saw Lucy Blackthorne for the first time in thirty years. Actually, she didn't see Lucy Blackthorne at all, not at the beginning. It was cold for that time of year in Waterbury, hard cold, as if the air itself had frozen into glass. Across the street, in the green and white house where the Kellys had once lived, the second floor tenants had put tinsel garlands all around their front porch. Downstairs, in Carol-anne's own house, somebody was playing “Nasty As They Want to Be.” One of the boys down there had a new tattoo and other boys from the street had come in to admire it. Every once in a while, there was the sound of breaking glass. Every once in a while—more rarely still—there was the sound of a toilet flushing. They took dope down there, and sold it, too, when anybody in the neighborhood had the money to buy it. Carolanne sometimes bought marijuana from them when she was feeling very bad.
That morning, she was thinking about Christmas decorations and what it would mean if she put some up. She had bought a silver tinsel garland and a string of red and blue lights. She wanted to wind them around the pillars on her porch and hang a tinsel flower at the center, to show people that she was one of the few people who still believed in God, who still went to church. The problem was that she was the only white woman left on the street. They talked about her already: about the way her coats always looked worn at the elbows and not the right size, about the way she went to work every day even though the job she had paid less than welfare, about the fact that she had nowhere to go for Christmas but the party that the parish gave. One or two of the older women had tried to befriend her. They'd come to her front door with casseroles in covered dishes and big loaves of bread. All Carolanne had been able to do was sit at her kitchen table with her hands folded, mute. It was the same kitchen table where she had eaten her breakfast on the day of her First Holy Communion. Nothing had changed, except that the kitchen now needed paint.
“You keep this up, you're going to end in the nuthouse,” Mrs. Jackson had said, putting a tuna, noodle, and cream of mushroom soup dish in Carolanne's refrigerator. “A person needs someone to talk to. A person needs someone to love.”
“I'm all right,” Carolanne had told her.
“The people at that church of yours don't know how to behave,” Mrs. Jackson had said. “The people of my church would never leave a body alone like this. They'd never let you live without even a telephone.”
Downstairs, “Nasty As You Want to Be” changed
to something else, to rap, a driving beat with no words behind it that Carolanne could make out. It was too hard to lift her arms when she was wearing her coat. She took her coat off and laid it down on the floor of the porch. There used to be a wicker chair out here, but it had disintegrated into twigs. She picked up the silver garland and went to the porch balustrade to begin to wind it around the column. Visibility, that was the problem here. How visible did she want to be?
She was putting Scotch tape on the end of the garland when she looked over the wall at the street and saw the dog, the most amazing dog in the universe, pure white and enormous. She stopped what she was doing and looked up and down the sidewalk. The dog was on a leash. No dogs in this neighborhood were ever on leashes. No dogs were ever pure white. If they started out that way, they got dirty, and nobody would clean them.
Carolanne looked at the other end of the leash. The woman holding on to it was tall and thin and dressed in a good camel's hair coat, the kind of coat women wore on the covers of fancy magazines like Vogue and Town and Country. Her hands kept going up to her face and rubbing it against the side. It was a gesture Carolanne had seen a thousand times, that meant that this woman was out of cocaine and needed not to be. If she keeps it up, she'll smear her makeup, Carolanne thought.
Then the woman turned her head and shook out her hair, and swivelled around on the backs of her stackheeled boots. The sun came out from behind a curtain of clouds. The woman's large square-cut diamond and flat gold wedding rings gleamed in the light. Carolanne put her tinsel garland down and leaned over the porch balustrade to get a better look.
That was Lucy Blackthorne down there, who had the best veil in Carolanne's First Holy Communion class. That was Lucy Blackthorne down there, who had been the first to move away to a subdivision and the first to buy her clothes at Lord & Taylor and the first to announce that she was going away to college somewhere real, at Smith, which was too expensive a place for most of the people in Waterbury to go.
Carolanne picked up the garland again and threaded it through her hands. Any moment now, one of the boys on the street would notice this woman. He would see her rubbing the side of her face and know what she was looking for. Then Lucy would have her cocaine and she would take away her dog, and that would be the last Carolanne ever saw of either one of them.
The dog was leaping and prancing in the light, running in circles, barking happily. Every time it barked, Lucy Blackthorne seemed to wince.
It was one of the boys from the ground floor who came out to give Lucy Blackthorne what she wanted to buy. He was more cautious about it than she wanted to be, and drew her up on the ground floor porch in order to make the deal. Carolanne came out the front door to find them standing together, huddled, while Lucy counted out money. The dog was sitting still at Lucy's side, but looking as if it wanted to run. When the door opened, the two of them jumped. Then Miguel saw that it was only her and went back to what he was doing.
Lucy brushed hair off her face and blinked. “I know you,” she said. “Don't I know you? It's Carol Something.”
“Carolanne Tierney,” Carolanne said. Her voice came out in a high squeak, she didn't know why. She leaned over and stroked the dog on its head. He seemed to like it.
Lucy took the clear plastic bag Miguel was holding out to her and stuffed it into her big leather shoulder bag. Carolanne knew what they called those shoulder bags, because they sold them in the mall and she had gone to look at them: Coach. Lucy had a pair of gloves that were made of leather, too, stuffed into the pockets of her coat. Carolanne stroked the dog again.
“You can come upstairs if you want,” she said finally. “To lay out some lines, I mean. If you need to.”
“Upstairs?”
“My apartment is upstairs. You've been there. When we were children.”
Lucy swivelled around on the heels of her boots again. She took in the broken boards on the porch and the peeling paint on the porch ceiling and the people in the street. The men wore clothes that looked as if they had been dirty for years. The women wore bright colored Spandex everything, tight stretchy things in lemon yellow and lime green. Lucy rubbed the side of her face again and then started to bite her nails, viciously, as if she didn't care if she made herself bleed.
“You'd feel better if you did a few lines,” Carolanne said. “It's just up the stairs. You could bring the dog.”
“I don't understand how you can live like this,” Lucy said. “White people aren't supposed to live like this.”
Carolanne wanted to say that she knew a lot of white people who lived like this, but instead she stood back, and held open the door, and watched the dog. It was glad to be moving again, even if it was moving into a dark and claustrophobic house. Carolanne wondered why she had never noticed before how narrow the stairways were.
“Christ,” Lucy said. “Were these houses this cramped when we were all growing up?”
The dog found a place on the couch as soon as they got into Carolanne's apartment. Lucy tried to make him get off and sit on the floor, but Carolanne stopped her. She liked the look of the dog where it was, comfortable and happy, in a way she couldn't remember anyone ever being comfortable and happy inside the walls of this apartment. She sat Lucy down at the table and got her best hand mirror out from the high shelf in the bathroom. She offered coffee or tea or Coca-Cola and was refused.
She doesn't want to drink out of any of my glasses, Carolanne thought, and then she sat down on the couch next to the dog to see what it would do. It pressed its nose into the palm of her hand and whimpered. It was even more beautiful close-up than it had been far away from her on the street. When she stroked it, it moved under her hand. When she put her face close to it, it felt as warm as the wall near the radiator when the heat was on.
Lucy had laid out her lines on the mirror. Her hands were shaking. Her whole body was tense. She looked through her big bag for a straw and came up with the stub of one. It was a good thing, because for cocaine you needed those thin cocktail straws, and Carolanne didn't have any.
“I can't believe I get like this,” Lucy said. “It's all Dan's fault. Dan and his vacations. If there's someplace to score a little coke on Aruba, I didn't find it.”
There was probably someplace to score a little coke on Aruba. Carolanne thought there was probably someplace to score a little coke in a convent, if you really wanted it badly enough. She wondered if Lucy's husband had been watching her, if everybody Lucy lived with knew she was like this. There was something about the idea that was very satisfying.
Lucy stuck the straw up her nose and inhaled. Then she stuck the straw up her other nostril and inhaled again. Almost instantly, she was both calmer and more hyper at the same time.
“Oh, thank God,” she said. “I couldn't think straight. I've been going nuts all morning.”
“I think you're supposed to watch it when it starts to make you nuts.”
“Probably.” Lucy had laid out one more line. She sucked half of it into each nostril and stood up. She now seemed not only alert but formidable, as if all her systems had suddenly switched on, as if she were a super robot in a late night science-fiction movie.
“Jesus,” she said, walking around the kitchen.
Carolanne rubbed her hand into the dog's fur. It turned and shimmied at her touch.
“Is it a girl dog or a boy dog?” she asked Lucy.
“It's a boy dog. It's a Samoyed. We call him Sammy.”
“Is Samoyed a breed?”
“Of course it's a breed.”
“I didn't know,” Carolanne said. “I don't know anything about dogs. I don't even know anybody who has a dog.”
“It's a pain in the ass,” Lucy said. “It's got to be brushed every day. And washed once a week. And it sheds everywhere. You have no idea.”
“It's beautiful.”
“It's useless as a guard dog. That's what I wanted him for. Today. Coming here. But they don't guard. They like people too much. Even bad people.”
�
��Right,” Carolanne said.
Lucy went back to the table and began to put away her cocaine things. She wet her finger and ran it over the surface of Carolanne's mirror, making sure to get the powder up. She checked twice that the clear plastic bag was securely closed, and then put it in her makeup bag just in case.
“I have to get out of here,” she said. “Thank you for letting me use your kitchen. It really helped.”
“You can use it any time. When you come back. You can bring the dog.”
“I won't be back,” Lucy said.
She heaved the big bag up on her shoulder and called to the dog. The dog leaped off the couch and ran to her, wagging its tail furiously, letting out little barks. Sammy, Carolanne thought, and then wondered why Lucy didn't seem to like him much. To Carolanne, he was a kind of miracle. She'd had no idea that animals like this existed in the real world.
Lucy went out into Carolanne's living room and to the front door. She went out the front door and into the hall. The hall was cramped and dark and smelled funny. The walls always seemed to be coated with some kind of grease.
“I wish I could buy enough to last me a year,” Lucy said, “but you can't do that anymore. You can't have a ton of it. If you get caught they think you're trying to sell.”
“Right,” Carolanne said.
Lucy made her way down the stairs, very carefully, holding onto the walls. When they got to the first floor foyer she looked around again, at the rickety table where the junk mail was, at the strips torn out of the wallpaper over the mailboxes, at the narrow stained glass windows on either side of the front door. The door to the first floor apartment opened and Miguel came out. Lucy didn't look at him. She went out into the cold and down the front porch steps.
“Thanks again,” she said, not quite over her shoulder, not quite looking back. She was headed down the hill toward East Main Street with the dog at her side, moving so fast she might have been running, except for the heels.
“I'd like to get that one at night,” Miguel said. “What do you think?”
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