Return to Christmas

by Anne Stuart

  It took six average-size steps, but there was nothing pulling at her, no sudden barrier blocking her way. The door was wide, to accommodate hordes of shoppers, but she let her body brush against his anyway, her own quiet act of goodbye.

  And she stepped out of Macy’s Department Store, the massive building that had been her refuge and her prison, into the cold night air.

  Part II

  MOLLIE

  MOLLIE

  Chapter 15

  The blast of cold wind hit her with the force of a hurricane, and she froze, her eyes closed as she desperately tried to hang onto her equilibrium. Her stomach roiled, ice was all around her, and her knees felt weak. She was going to fall, onto the hard, hard cement, and that would be her conduit back, the path she needed to find as she swirled in this tempest of no man’s land, tossed in the wind, lost, yearning...

  A hand caught her elbow, and she was brought back to earth with a rushing, shocking force. “It’s colder than I thought,” came Johnny’s deep, laconic voice. “You should have worn the fur Irene left you.”

  Slowly, she opened her eyes. He was standing right in front of her, tall and impossibly gorgeous in his formal clothes, the city lights illuminating his face. The wind had stopped, the roaring in her ears had disappeared, and for a moment, there was just her and Johnny, cocooned in the busy, noisy, nighttime city.

  “Cat got your tongue?” Johnny said, but there was an unexpected note of gentleness in his usually caustic voice. “I’ll get us a taxi. You’ll be warm in a moment. Stay here.”

  She couldn’t have moved if she’d wanted to. She stood very still on the sidewalk as Johnny moved to the street, his arm up in the age-old sign for hailing a taxi.

  She slowly looked around her. New York City was dressed for Christmas in 1947, as it was every year. Red and green lights mixed with the orange glow of the city neon, and the street was filled with cars and taxis, all of them huge; yellow ones with orange and green panels, and green checkered ones from another time... Elvis may have left the building, but he hadn’t left the past.

  Johnny was back in a moment, ushering her into the huge backseat of a green and yellow taxi, and the feel of his hands was the only thing that grounded her. Sliding in beside her, he gave the driver an address on the upper east side and then sat back, looking at her.

  “Is it that bad?” There was an unexpected note of kindness in his voice, and she wanted to cry. She wanted to turn to him and bury her face against his chest and weep, feeling his arms around her, comforting her. She tried to say something, but it caught in her throat, and she cleared it, then tried again.

  “I’ll be fine,” she said in a raw whisper.

  “Yeah, you will,” Johnny said, back to his usual self, and Mollie recognized the relief that flooded her. Kindness from the irascible Johnny was too hard to take.

  He leaned back, looking out into the city as it moved by, at a slower pace than the taxis and Ubers Mollie was used to. “I have a friend down near the Bowery,” he said, voicing a seemingly random thought. “He had a hard time of it. His platoon was the first to go into the death camps, and he saw things that were burned into his brain.”

  She said nothing, not wanting to distract him. He never willingly talked about the war, and she waited, ignoring the cigarette smoke that was billowing from the driver into the back of the cab.

  “He barely made it home,” Johnny continued, staring out into the night, his voice deceptively casual. “He wouldn’t go back to South Dakota and see his family. Instead, he found a dive with cheap booze and a room overhead in exchange for to sweeping the floors and cleaning up the puke, which was nothing after what Jacob had seen in Austria. And he didn’t leave the building for a year and a half.”

  Johnny sighed, and Mollie held herself very still. “Every time he tried to leave, he panicked. Things got real bad when the store next door caught on fire and they were trying to evacuate. Jacob would have burned to death rather than leave.” His voice trailed off as the taxi made the turn up Park Avenue.

  “When did he finally leave?” she asked after a long moment.

  “He didn’t. He died of alcohol poisoning. That’s where I was this week—down with his friends.”

  Mollie made a soft sound of distress, unsure of what to say. Johnny thought she had agoraphobia, brought on by some sort of trauma, and she felt like a fraud. “I’m so sorry,” she finally whispered. “But you’ve got it wrong. I’ve wanted to go outside. I just couldn’t.”

  “That’s what Jacob said.” He reached down and caught her hand with his, warm and strong and capable. A craftsman’s hands. “I can’t leave you in there to wither away.”

  She should have laughed. Should have said something about her stubbornly strong constitution, turned it into a joke. He had it all wrong, and yet he didn’t. Something had trapped her inside that massive building with him, and her entire previous life felt like the fantasy.

  She curled her fingers around his, knowing her heart was beating too fast, and said nothing as they rode the rest of the way up the stately avenue.

  Hermione Davis didn’t own a massive apartment, she owned a building—a huge stone edifice with a curving drive just off the busy avenue—and Mollie looked up at it in wonder as Johnny gave the taxi driver a generous thirty-five cents. There were no Christmas lights, just a large, tasteful wreath on the broad front door, where an honest-to-God butler and maid stood, welcoming guests. They looked straight out of central casting, and Mollie had one of those bizarre, disconnected moments where everything felt like realistic cosplay. And then the altered universe righted itself, and she climbed the expansive stone steps with Johnny’s reassuring hand at her back.

  She had no idea why she was frightened. This was just part of fate’s cosmic joke, and she’d already learned the best way to survive was not to take anything seriously. It didn’t matter what she told herself. Maybe it was simply an emotional reaction to finally breaking free of the building, maybe it was shock that she was still stuck in the last century, but whatever it was, she felt unsettled, nervous, edgy.

  It hit her with the force of a blow. She wanted to be back in the building. She wanted to be curled up on the couch with Johnny, she wanted to shut all this unfamiliar New York away. The only thing that was keeping her tethered was Johnny’s almost constant, reassuring touch, never controlling, never restrictive, just letting her know he was with her.

  Jesus Christ, she must be agoraphobic after all, and she’d just been fooling herself. Maybe those doors had always been unlocked, and she’d refused to see it.

  But that didn’t explain what she was doing here in the first place, and if she’d learned one thing in this crazy, mixed-up world, it was to stop trying to make sense of it.

  The vestibule was crowded with glittering socialites in vintage...high-fashion clothing, and the candlelight spread a soft glow over the multitude as Johnny gently led her through the guests and up the broad staircase.

  She realized belatedly that she knew this house, or at least had a fuzzy memory of where it had been. Her box-like high rise apartment building was only twenty blocks south, and this grand old house had been torn down when she’d gone up the avenue, lost to luxury condominiums.

  The place had an honest-to-God ballroom on the second floor. A small orchestra played in one corner, there were linen-covered tables and silver, and diamonds gleaming off the raddled necks of elderly women in unsuitably frilly gowns. Everyone seemed to look like Margaret Dumont in the old Marx Brothers movies that she loved, but Groucho was nowhere to be seen. She halted at the entrance to the room, taking it all in.

  “May I take your wrap, miss?” One of the perfectly uniformed maids stood at her side, and without thinking she dropped the cashmere wrap that had been covering her. She realized with regret that the scarf she’d used to bind her breasts had slid off her at some point after they’d left the building that was their de facto home, but she mentally shrugged. Rosa was right—the line of the dress fit better wi
thout it. It was probably puddled on the floor of that smoke-riddled taxi.

  As she handed the wrap to the maid she heard a groan, and she glanced up at Johnny with sudden concern. “Are you all right?”`

  His blue eyes were very dark as he looked at her, and his gaze felt like a physical caress down the length of her body. “Why, Lord, why?” he muttered, but before she could call him on it, he’d taken her arm again and steered her into the melee.

  “Johnny!” Irene Davis’s arched tones reached her ears, and she jerked, then wanted to smack herself. The day she let someone like Irene Davis intimidate her was the certainly not this day, and she turned with Johnny to greet the daughter of their hostess.

  At first, Irene had eyes for no one but Johnny, and Mollie couldn’t blame her. By any standards, by any century, Johnny was gorgeous, and Irene was determined to get him.

  “Merry Christmas, Irene,” he said, and Mollie’s annoyance cut back on some of her edginess. He’d always called her Miss Davis in the store—maybe he’d been spending some of that missing time with her and not his agoraphobic, alcoholic friend.

  She wanted to smack herself for her uncharitable thought. “Happy Holidays, Miss Davis,” she said in a dulcet tone, and Irene left off preening for a moment to turn her icy, disbelieving gaze on Mollie.

  Pure rage flared in her slightly protruding eyes. “How...nice you look, Miss Madison. I believe that’s last year’s Balmain you have on. Where on earth did you find such a treasure, hmm?” There was a dangerous malice in her words, and Mollie quickly scrambled to protect Rosa and Nancy.

  “Oh, someone found the key to the castoff room, and this was there. It only needed a little mending to make it wearable.” She did a slow, deliberate turn, knowing the deceptively simple dress fitted her perfectly, and she heard another muffled curse from her date.

  Irene’s smile was icy. “How fortunate for you. Most department store clerks don’t have the chance to wear designer clothes.”

  “She’s not a clerk, Irene,” Johnny said, surprising Mollie.

  It would take more than a veiled reprimand, even from Johnny, to get to Irene, and the malice turned harder in her eyes as she looked at her. “No, she isn’t.”

  “She’s right here,” Mollie said, letting her annoyance break through.

  “So you are,” Irene cooed. “Such a self-possessed young woman—I’m quite impressed. And I know you won’t mind if I carry Johnny off for a bit—there are some important people I want him to meet.”

  Johnny, to his credit, kept his hand on her back, and began to demur. “I don’t think...”

  Mollie had already caused him enough problems—she slid away from him, and the loss of his touch was almost painful. “No, you go on,” she said with the best smile she could manage, willing it to reach her eyes. “I’ll be fine.”

  “Of course, you will,” Irene said. “I’ll send someone by with a cocktail.”

  Full of arsenic, Mollie thought, but nodded pleasantly, as Irene dragged Johnny away with her. At least he glanced back at her, and she could see the veiled concern in his eyes, but then they were swallowed up by the chattering crowds, and she was alone.

  She looked around her, and for a moment it seemed as if everyone was watching her—the group of men over by the lavish bar, the women who were huddled together on several loveseats, the couples who left their mutual involvement to survey her. She felt naked, as if all those assessing eyes had stripped her bare.

  She was being ridiculous, and she knew it. There was some vague phrase she remembered about the last century—the four hundred of New York, the upper classes, so tightly defined and exclusive. She must simply be a stranger, an interloper into their hallowed ranks.

  It didn’t help. It didn’t help that almost everyone in the room was smoking, filling the vast room with a blue haze that made her want to choke. She’d never been that sensitive to the occasional smoker she’d been around, but this much was making her want to gag.

  Time to disappear, she thought, sliding into the crowd, weaving her way among the guests so that no one had time to focus on her. She passed another perfectly-uniformed maid, grabbed a sherbet cup full of champagne, and slipped out the door into the cold New York night.

  The terrace ran along the width of the building, overlooking the city, and it was almost deserted. Moving to the railing, she looked out, into the stars, into the city lights, and she wanted to cry, she wanted to scream, she wanted to weep. What was happening to her? Why hadn’t she returned to her own life once she’d left the store? Was there some lesson she was supposed to learn?

  She tried to bring up the memory of her box-like condo, of her work-driven life, but it remained stubbornly elusive, like that was the dream, not this. She set the untouched champagne down on the wide stone parapet and looked out over the chilly view. Maybe if she closed her eyes and prayed.

  But she didn’t think the protestant God of her Vermont youth had anything to do with this cosmic joke. Kokopelli or Loki or some other kind of mythic trickster was messing with her, for God knew what reason, and free will had left her stranded.

  Stop it! Her hands clutched the hard stone in front of her, the iciness flowing up her arms and through her already chilled body. Trying to understand what was happening to her only made things worse. She’d already figured out that the best way to get through this was one day at a time, and that had worked fairly well.

  She felt rather than heard someone come up behind her, and relief began to fill her as she turned around to face him.

  It wasn’t Johnny. To her absolute shock, she recognized the cruel, blunt features of Benny Morelli, and there was no question that he had come out to find her.

  She could bluff with the best of them. He was a little shorter than she was, but that didn’t fool her into thinking he wasn’t very dangerous. He was thick with muscle, and the darkness in his eyes made her catch her breath.

  She was no coward. She gave him a dazzling smile. “Oh, hello. I thought you were someone else.” She started to turn back to the skyline with the unlikely hope that he’d go away, but he grabbed her arm painfully and hauled her back around.

  “He’s not coming to rescue you,” he said. “Miss Davis is keeping him busy while I take care of you.”

  She was past feeling any fear, and she dropped the thought of bluffing. “And how are you going to do that? Toss me over the parapet?”

  “It’d work. Rumor has it you’re crazy. You’re some rich, homeless dame who’s latched onto Larsen. You’ve been trespassing, stealing, and he keeps protecting you. But Larsen’s not around right now, and by the time he gets free, you’ll be long gone.”

  Oddly enough, it wasn’t fear that was knotting her insides. Maybe he was going to kill her. Maybe that was the only way she’d get back to her own time. “Would you like me to climb up on the ledge?” she offered calmly.

  If Benny had looked dangerous before, his current expression was terrifying. “You think you can make fun of me, you cunt?”

  The use of the term would have surprised her in 2020—seventy-some years earlier, it was a greater shock.

  “I wouldn’t think of it,” she said politely. “If you’ll tell me what you have in mind, I’d be happy to cooperate.” She was going home, she thought. Through violence, maybe, but she was going home.

  “I’m gonna fix it so you never see Johnny Larsen again.”

  Her momentary surge of giddiness vanished, like a balloon popping. She wanted to leave, she was desperate to leave. But she had to say goodbye.

  She swallowed, trying to look unfazed. “Won’t it spoil the Christmas party if one of the guests takes a dive onto the pavement? Seems rather messy.”

  “You think I’m stupid, don’t you? You ain’t got any idea what I got in mind.”

  “Not much, I imagine,” she said, then could have kicked herself.

  Benny stared at her, vibrating with hatred. “You got no idea of the trouble you’re in, lady.”

  “Lady’s be
tter than cunt.”

  Her own use of the shocking word was almost magical. Benny had been crowding her back against the wall, but in his unexpected shock he fell back, giving her a brief window of escape.

  She took it.

  The dress was tight and slinky, but it fit her like a glove, and it took her a nanosecond to hike up the silk, lift her silver-sandaled foot and nail him in the soft area between his legs. The feel through the open shoes made her shudder, but she was gone before he hit the ground, his high-pitched scream sounding like a siren as it wailed through the night.

  She ran. Slamming the terrace door behind her, she pushed through the now-oblivious crowds, ignoring the muttered protests as she collided with idiots who wouldn’t fucking move! She’d never kicked a man in the balls before, so she had no idea how long he’d be out of commission, but she couldn’t afford to waste time. The broad marble steps down to the foyer stretched out in front of her, filled with newly-arriving guests, and visions of Cinderella filled her head, warring with a picture of her lying dead at the bottom, her neck broken from the fall.

  If she hesitated, she’d be dead anyway, and while she’d considered that option abstractly when Benny threatened her, she’d changed her mind. She’d rather live, thankyouverymuch. She took off down the stairs.

  A few moments later she was out on Park Avenue, cold wind blasting around her. Glancing up at the house, at the wide terrace on the second floor, she couldn’t see any sign of Benny, but that told her exactly nothing. She’d left her wrap up there—it didn’t matter. Freezing to death was better than murder, and besides, this cold blast was child’s play compared to her childhood in Vermont where the temperatures routinely dipped to twenty below zero every winter.

  She had no idea where she was going—she only knew she was going there fast. Wrapping her arms around her bare shoulders, she moved, fast and determined, her mind a blank, down the wide, almost empty sidewalks.