Yuletide

by Joana Starnes

  “What?” Georgiana looked at him for a moment and then shook her head. “You wish what would happen for you?”

  “I don’t know. Remember, I didn’t write this. So how do I know what it means?”

  She ignored him. “Only you would make such a non-specific wish. You wish what would happen? Didn’t you just say you thought everything was great?”

  “I didn’t write this,” he reminded her firmly.

  “But the monogram is—”

  “Somehow Richard is behind this,” he told her. “He’s probably been on pins and needles for days waiting for this to come to fruition. You know how he is.”

  “Oh.” She had a crestfallen look. “I’m sure you’re right.”

  “I’m sure I’m right too,” he said. He leaned over, kissing her head. “You need to get some sleep.”

  Ten minutes later, he was back in his study queuing up a movie while he tapped out a message on his phone.

  FD: Nice with the ornament. Had us going for a bit, I’ll admit it.

  His movie had just come on when Richard replied.

  RF: IDK what you mean

  FD: the wishing thing

  RF: ???

  FD: the ornament you had engraved with my initials

  RF: Right. To match the hankies I’m embroidering for you. WTF?

  Darcy paused a moment. Was Richard being serious? Normally, once one of his jokes was brought to light, he’d call his victims chortling with glee and amusement. This time he seemed genuinely baffled.

  FD: It really wasn’t you?

  RF: Nope. Sounds like it got you good though. Wish I thought of it whatever it was

  Another pause, and then Richard texted again.

  RF: Gotta bolt. Lissette is here. TTYL

  FD: later

  Setting his phone on the table, Darcy sank a bit into the couch cushions, feeling exasperated and uneasy. He could already tell it would be a long night. He was exhausted but not sleepy, a combination he detested but which was becoming all too familiar.

  He had no idea what was causing his frequent insomnia lately, but night after night saw him sitting on this very same couch watching pointless movies and wishing the nights weren’t quite so long. He had developed quite a sympathy for older people like his aunt Catherine, who sounded almost boastful when she whinged about her inability to have a full night’s rest. She scoffed at the notion of eight hours sleep but, in a way, he could understand it now. It seemed the ultimate divine irony that when a person arrived at the stage of their life in which they had ample time to sleep, their brain chemistry or whatever would prohibit it.

  The worst was that during the night his other feelings, his restless sort of ennui, came at him in full force. He really had no idea what was even wrong; he just had a constant sense of waiting. For what, he had no idea, but he felt like his real life was out there, waiting to be lived, and he was only marking time until he caught up with it.

  In that sense, he understood completely the meaning behind the words on the little paper. “I wish it would happen for me.” Maybe it was something to do with being almost thirty, but he was exhausted with the uncertainty of his life. He had too many questions and not enough answers. Would he ever fall in love? Would he always be alone? Would he marry someone awful who would take his money and drag him through a bitter divorce? Would he ever have children? Would he have children that turned into drug addicts and screamed “I hate you” at him? What if he finally found a wife he adored and then she died?

  Too many questions. No wonder he couldn’t sleep. It seemed so easy for other people: meet, date, fall in love, marry…give birth to adorable cherubs who played soccer and drew pictures of dinosaurs with thick rectangles for legs…who refused to eat vegetables and went trick or treating and learned to ride bikes and roller skate…who took tests and went to proms and made varsity teams and graduated and went to college and soon had babies of their own. Normal life.

  He had picked up his laptop as he mused, absently flicking through web sites: ESPN, CNN…and Facebook.

  He never looked at Facebook, having been coerced to join it by Bingley at the beginning of the year. Bingley had been enthusiastic about it, going full bore into liking and following and updating his profile picture and his status with an almost manic glee. Darcy had, on several occasions, debated unfriending him—if he saw one more picture of Bingley’s hand holding a cup of coffee and musing about the wonder of Starbucks in the morning, he couldn’t say what he’d do to him. But unfriending him seemed too hostile, so he simply stopped looking.

  Tonight though, he was bored and lonely and it seemed worth a look so he started scrolling. Moments later, he nearly dropped his laptop, sitting up and exclaiming aloud, “Who did that?”

  His own profile shot had been changed to a picture of a baby. A baby dressed as a snowman, dark curls pressed into a top hat (which it was reaching up to try to remove) with an orange nose painted onto its little face and greasepaint “buttons” on its bare belly. A jaunty red scarf completed the effect.

  “Richard,” Darcy muttered, wondering how long it had been like this and how many people had seen it. A quick glance at his feed showed that the photo had received seventy-three likes … Did he even have seventy-three people who could see his stuff?

  There were comments too. Jane Bingley (Who?) said “Totally stealing this idea!” and TomFanny Bennet (Who?) said “When are you coming to see us?” Georgiana Darcy said “I have the sweetest nephew ever!” —What?

  Why would Georgiana say this kid was her nephew? What was going on here?

  His heart began to pound even as his head insisted that this was all some ridiculous sort of joke. He began to move through the pictures, seeking clues for what in the world was happening.

  The next picture showed two kids, the baby and another little guy—a toddler—hovering over the newborn with a clear sense of disdain. “He looks like me,” Darcy mused aloud. “Sort of.” Actually there was no “sort of” about it. The kid was a dead-ringer for him as a child.

  He continued scrolling, moving back in time on his Facebook page. The baby was replaced by a woman, standing sideways with a massively swollen belly jutting out in front of her. Lots of likes on that one, along with Bingley’s comment: “Stop taking pictures and get her to the hospital!”

  Then the toddler kissing her belly…and a picture of Darcy himself, taken from what must have been the woman’s vantage, looking down at him. He was grinning like a completely besotted goofball, his lips puckered toward the belly.

  “I’ve never grinned like that in my life,” he told the screen.

  Finally there was a full-on shot of the woman, much less pregnant this time, although still with a little bump. She was cute, he supposed, although not really his type. Too short, and that wild, curly sort of bohemian hair wasn’t really his thing. Although…it was pretty. It looked soft, albeit frizzy. She was holding his hand and the toddler was in his other arm. They made a nice-looking family. Whoever did this was pretty good with photoshop.

  He kept scrolling, still working backwards. The belly disappeared altogether and the toddler reverted to babyhood. He liked trains apparently; his room was decorated in Thomas the Train. And there was a picture of Darcy sitting hunched over a train table, playing with him. Christmas again? Looks like it.

  Who is this kid? Where did these pictures come from?

  I’ve been hacked. He heard about these Facebook hacks all the time, and obviously that was what happened here.

  “Change my password,” he muttered going to his security settings and clicking around before realizing he had no idea what his current password was and therefore attempting to change it would only get him locked out.

  And he didn’t want to get locked out. He wanted to keep looking. He knew he should be completely weirded out but he was intrigued. Intrigued…and also a bit jealous. He liked this life he was looking at. He wished it was real. He’d play trains with this kid, gladly.

  For a brief mome
nt, he wondered where his old trains were. He’d been quite a collector when he was young and had saved it all thinking that one day his son would—Stop it! He scolded himself. Not real. You don’t have a son and no one wants to play trains with you!

  One of the comments suggested to him that the boy was named Jaz. Seriously? Who named this kid Jaz? Unless…well, his grandfather’s name had been Jasper, and it had been his father’s middle name. Was this kid named Jasper for his own grandfather?

  Time kept rolling backward. He saw more pictures of himself along with the woman and Jaz…they took some sort of vacation, him in the sand with both of them… Okay, when she isn’t pregnant, this woman has one seriously hot body. “And this is after she already had Jaz,” he said aloud, then wondered if he was crazy for talking about these people like he knew them.

  It was the next picture that truly arrested him though. It was just him and the woman. He didn’t know who had taken it. They were sitting at a table, very close together. She was smiling at the camera but he was smiling at her, his arm around her. It didn’t take too much to see that he was completely in love with her, and he could see why.

  Her hair was beautiful, cascading down over her shoulders and his arm, but her eyes…her eyes were the most gorgeous he had ever seen. Rich and dark and large and lined with thick lashes. His heart beat fast just looking at them.

  What really made them extraordinary though was the expression. Was it always so easy to know a person just from their eyes? This woman’s eyes told everything about her. That she was warm and loving and kind. That she had a great sense of humor and didn’t play games with people. For her eyes alone, he desperately wanted this woman, whoever she was. He felt a rush of yearning, of desire for this unknown woman.

  He suddenly realized he could find out exactly who she was. He moved his cursor around, looking for the tag. Finding it, a name came up: Elizabeth Darcy.

  “Elizabeth Darcy?” He half-scoffed. He clicked her name, hoping to find her page and shed some light on this whole puzzling absurd…thing.

  Error. The page you are looking for cannot be found.

  He frowned, went back to the link, and tried again. Same result. Couple more clicks yielded exactly the same thing.

  He opened another tab and googled Elizabeth Darcy. There were several, it seemed, but none that made any sense to his current dilemma. There was a Beth Darcy on Facebook, but she looked about twelve and didn’t resemble his Elizabeth in any way.

  He decided to keep looking at the pictures.

  Some family gathering was the next picture, but who were all these people? Richard with Lissette…was she pregnant too? Bingley with a good-looking blonde on his arm, a definitely pregnant blonde. Georgiana was there, sitting next to some trampy-looking girl about her age. Lots of young women; they filled the room. Lots of smiles all around, though, including on Georgiana’s face. Too bad it wasn’t real; Georgiana had always wanted to go to some big family holiday get together as opposed to just the two of them sitting in some five-star restaurant.

  The next picture seemed to be the same gathering. An attractive woman who looked around fifty and wearing an extremely low-cut sweater was holding Jaz, who had red lipstick marks on his head. A man sat beside them, sort of scholarly-looking older man, smiling down at Jaz. Grandparents?

  He kept going, watching as Jaz got smaller, took his first steps, and celebrated a birthday with Elizabeth laughing beside him. Wow…it was a moment frozen in time and yet he could almost hear it, the silver bell of her laughter. He wanted to laugh too, just looking at her joyous face.

  In the next shot, he saw why she was laughing like that. Jaz had eschewed the typical first-birthday tradition of wiping cake all over his own face, choosing instead to smear it on Darcy. In another shot, the boy appeared to be licking Darcy’s cheek. Evidently he’d realized that frosting was good stuff. Darcy chuckled looking at him, almost feeling Jaz’s small baby hands holding his head still while he attacked his dad’s face.

  In subsequent shots, Jaz got his first tooth and sat up for the first time. Then Elizabeth was pregnant again, wearing leggings and Darcy’s Cambridge sweatshirt for what looked like a room-painting project. A grainy picture before that, black with some fuzzy ghost-like images and a caption: “IT’S a BOY!!!” Darcy felt weirdly choked up to see that.

  Then came the pictures of just him and Elizabeth. Picnics in the park, hiking among autumn leaves, some river in England…evidently she was a nature girl. They had honeymooned somewhere with a big coral reef, evidently done a good bit of snorkeling.

  He had never really thought about it before, but it would be nice to have a wife who enjoyed doing fun things like he and Elizabeth appeared to do on Facebook. “They’re friends, too,” he told the screen. “Best friends from the look of it.”

  Wedding day. Some weird impulse made him skip over those pictures. “Can’t see the bride before the wedding,” he murmured. “I wouldn’t want to know what her gown looks like.”

  A picture of Elizabeth’s hand, his mother’s ring proudly displayed with: “SHE SAID YES!” That got one hundred and twelve likes along with a few comments like “Man down!” from Richard and “I’m so happy, I’m crying!” from Jane Bingley. Jane Bingley always commented on their stuff, so she and Elizabeth must be good friends, he thought.

  He couldn’t take his eyes off that hand wearing his mother’s ring. He found himself reaching out and laying his fingertips on the screen.

  Of course the ring was in his safe, and he had no doubt that it was still there… This is just a dream…right? Obviously he had fallen asleep on the couch and was dreaming all of this.

  He then remembered something Bingley once told him. Everything a person did on Facebook was recorded—the time, the date…

  He debated a second before quickly clicking on his account summary and activity log.

  A quick glance showed him, yep, Fitzwilliam Darcy joined Facebook on January 4, 2014. He skipped over the stuff in between to see that his last activity had been at 8:49 p.m. on December 12, 2018, when he had changed his profile picture.

  He inhaled sharply.

  What sort of…this was weird! It had gotten too weird and he needed to just forget about it all. It was a dream. Nothing but a crazy, sharply detailed dream.

  Temptation attacked him… He wanted to find out more about the woman who would become Elizabeth Darcy. Had he met her before and just didn’t remember her? Or maybe he’d meet her… Where would he meet her? When would they go out? What about Jaz?

  A strange, painful pang hit him: Jaz didn’t really exist. Snowman Baby didn’t exist either. Jane Bingley, the happy family stuff—none of it was real. He swallowed against the pain of loss that thought produced. What if Elizabeth didn’t exist, either?

  Not real. He woke the next morning on the couch in his study. His laptop was on the floor, having apparently slid from his lap at some point. Didn’t seem to have any harm done to it; it woke from sleep mode much more easily than Darcy himself did.

  The temptation to log onto Facebook immediately was overwhelming, but he resisted for a good hour or so, reminding himself every other minute that he had dreamt the entire thing. A weird dream brought on by some sort of holiday melancholy and the peppermint rum he’d put in his cocoa.

  As he sat down to lunch, however, he couldn’t help himself. The intention to check email somehow became a log on to Facebook. The page loaded slowly while his heart pounded in his chest.

  His corporate mugshot stared grimly back at him. Total number of friends was seven, total pictures posted was one, the mugshot. No status updates.

  His disappointment lasted for most of the day until it occurred to him that night, in the midst of another bout of insomnia, that she might be out there. Every day that passed would bring him closer to the reality of knowing her.

  He began to imagine scenarios for meeting her. While Christmas shopping somewhere in the city, he scanned the crowds hopefully, once following a curly haired woman
twelve blocks before she glanced over her shoulder and he realized she was a teenager. Feeling like a creep, he turned on his heel and walked away fast. He ducked into busy coffee shops, scanned the theatre diligently when he and Georgiana saw the Nutcracker and studied the ice skaters at Rockefeller Center more than he ever had in his life. He watched the Today show religiously, looking at the people in the background while Al Roker did his schtick.

  He even went so far as going to Times Square for New Year’s Eve. It was horrid, with drunken people everywhere, pressed up against him as he moved through the crowd with Bingley. Bingley loved it, of course, commented several times on the “energy” of it all, but he had a purpose.

  Alas, it was a purpose that went ungratified.

  By Valentine’s Day, he had essentially given up. Bingley had ended his holiday fling, so he was despondent too. They ordered in some Thai food and drank too much while toasting the single life and watching action movies on TV.

  March 2015, Orlando

  Bingley waited until they were deplaning to hit him with the news.

  Darcy shot him down immediately. “You want to buy a place here? Bingley, that’s a terrible idea.”

  “The market is oversaturated,” Bingley said, rolling his luggage past a stand of coconut candies, stuffed alligators and oranges. “Great properties are a dime a dozen, and I thought it would be fun to—”

  “You can’t look at it like that.” Darcy groaned. “Yes, they have a surplus, but you would have to see a ten percent growth over the next five years to recapture…”

  Darcy continued on, delivering a veritable dissertation to Bingley on how and why investment property in Florida was a bad, bad idea for him. Bingley blithely whistled as they walked along, ignoring Darcy completely.

  “I want a place where my friends and I can go, do some fishing, and have a good time,” Bingley explained when Darcy had said his piece. “You can’t do that with bonds and securities.”