One Great Christmas Love Story

by Kaylee Baldwin

  “Wait, Holly!”

  Jack followed behind her, but Holly increased her pace, knowing the futility of it, the childishness of it, even as everything in her screamed to get away from here, from this moment, to pretend that nothing had ever happened and that it was still possible for things to go back to normal.

  She stopped at the ballroom door, realizing that Jack had stopped following her when he reached the tree line. He stood with his arms folded, his face a brick wall of unreadable expression.

  “So this is it.” The way he said it made it sound so final.

  “I’ve had my great love, Jack.” She turned toward him, the distance seemingly unsurmountable. “I’m sorry,” she said, so quietly she wasn’t sure he heard her. She wasn’t even quite sure what she was sorry for, except maybe every single thing that led them to this moment.

  But Jack replied stonily, “Don’t be. I knew.”

  And with that, he turned on his heel and walked in the opposite direction.

  Chapter 26

  Jack couldn’t go home that night, not to where it was too quiet and he would be alone in his thoughts. Instead, he went to the hospital. In moments, he’d removed his tuxedo and changed into a pair of blue hospital-issue scrubs.

  He threw himself into work for hours, reading images, consulting with specialists, discovering tumors and broken bones and pneumonia. It seemed as if everyone was out past dark in the cold, putting up Christmas lights, sledding with friends, or nursing pains they’d ignored for too long, but a family member in town wouldn’t let them ignore anymore.

  After he barked at a nurse for giving input on one of the scans, he’d overheard her whispering, “Dr. Shay is in rare form tonight. Even for him. Steer clear.”

  Finally, at four in the morning, there was a lull in the after-midnight ER rush, and Jack collapsed into his seat at his desk. The thought of every day of being in this hospital stretched ahead of him, of maybe running into Holly in the halls. Of going to text her out of habit and then remembering that she wanted nothing to do with him.

  He’d let Megan get in his head with all her texts tonight, encouraging him to fess up to Holly about how he’d felt. But the real fault lay with him. He’d let himself hope.

  He tipped his head back with a long sigh. Had he expected anything different? What was love anyway, if not a knife to your chest? He was done with that forever.

  The glow of his laptop in the dim room invited him to his computer. He opened his email, and to the distant, manic sound of “Carol of the Bells” playing at the nurse’s station, he composed an email first to Danforth and then to Denver Central Medical Center, accepting the position as their new chief of radiology.

  Chapter 27

  Holly woke up the day after the Christmas party, and for one moment, she forgot everything that had happened the night before. But then, with a stabbing in her head from crying most of the night and an angry twist of her stomach, it all rushed back to her.

  Which was harder to remember? Jack’s confession? Or the look on his face as he walked away?

  She buried her face in her pillow with a groan. Why had he gone and messed everything up? She couldn’t imagine living her life without Jack in it, but how would they go back to the way things had been after what he’d said? It couldn’t be unsaid. It couldn’t be forgotten.

  Staying in bed was only making her feel worse. She got out, and her feet touched the cold hardwood floor, sending a chill through her. First a fire, then breakfast, and then—

  She paused when she caught sight of herself in the mirror. Red, puffy eyes from crying, circled with the makeup she’d been too exhausted to clean off last night. Fire, breakfast, and then a shower.

  The fire went up quickly, and immediately her town house started to fill with warmth. She put a pot on the stove for tea and popped a couple of pieces of bread into the toaster. It was her morning ritual, yet it felt different this morning. Like her house was bigger and lonelier, which was ridiculous, because it was always only her.

  Her phone beeped from where she had it plugged into the charger on the kitchen counter. She lunged across to grab it, hoping it was Jack, wondering how she’d reply if it was.

  Interview Francis at 10.

  She frowned at the calendar notification. There was no way she would be in any condition to be at the hospital in an hour.

  She sent Francis a quick text: Need to reschedule.

  She ate her breakfast and drank her tea, all the while steeling herself to figuring out her next MyHeartChannel episode. For the first time in two years, she contemplated skipping a release day.

  She pulled up her show and picked one of her favorite videos from the archives to watch. The couple had met on an airplane back in the nineties. They’d sat beside one another and started to chat. From there, they’d exchanged information, and it turned out they only lived thirty minutes from each other.

  Could something like that happen nowadays? On her last plane trip, everyone had been buried in their devices, headphones and glowing screens acting as a very effecting barrier between them and the world.

  Them and their potential great love story.

  “Maybe it couldn’t happen like this in today’s day and age,” Rafael, the man she’d interviewed, said from the video. “But people have always had barriers of one kind of another that keep them from connecting with others.”

  Holly paused on that frame, watched as Rafael and Stephanie looked at each other with love so obvious in their gazes. And for the first time since starting this podcast, she didn’t feel warm and fuzzy at the sight of their palpable love. Rather, it hurt in a way she couldn’t pin down exactly, but she felt no desire to continue subjecting herself to.

  She turned the video off, unable to watch it any longer.

  After her shower, she saw the blinking light on her phone indicating a new message.

  Jack! She thought again.

  But also once again, it wasn’t him.

  She clicked her phone on and saw the text was from Francis’s wife: At our age, rescheduling is a little bit like Russian roulette.

  Holly let out a short laugh, imagining the mirth on Pauline’s face as she typed those words.

  Holly: Give me another hour and we can do it then.

  Sitting around the house wasn’t doing her any good. And maybe there was a chance she could run into Jack. She’d taken the day off, knowing how tired she’d be, but he hadn’t, needing all the time he could get in the days before and after Christmas.

  She placed a cold cloth over her eyes to lessen the swelling from crying, and then did a light application of makeup when she was done. Her viewers had definitely not seen her so minimal, but maybe it wouldn’t be so bad for them to do so.

  Life was hard. It threw you curveballs, and for so many years, she’d thought having love—or at least a strong memory of it—made everything better. But was it helping her now?

  Francis was reading a book when she walked into his hospital room. He’d been moved out of the ICU and wasn’t under constant supervision, but he still didn’t appear to be ready to go home. Two heart surgeries in less than a month was a lot to recover from.

  “Hello,” she said quietly, and Francis and Pauline looked up to see her in the doorway.

  “Well, hello,” Francis said. His eyes narrowed as he took her in. “Everything okay?”

  She tilted her head side to side. “Not really.”

  “Anything we can do to help?” Pauline asked.

  “I wish, but no, thank you.” Holly didn’t even know what she could do to help things, except hope that with the passage of time, all of this would fade away. She took a deep breath. It was time to focus on Francis and Pauline and set aside her own woes for a little while. “Are you sure you’re up for this?” Holly asked Francis. “There’s no reason we can’t wait until you get home and get some energy back again.”

  “Two heart attacks is reason enough,” Francis said. His body wracked with a deep, phlegmy cough she didn’t li
ke the sound of at all.

  “Has respiratory therapy been coming in at all?”

  “Once,” Pauline said. “The nurses say they’re understaffed for the holidays, but they’re working on it.”

  Holly frowned. “I’ll take care of it.” She went to the computer in the corner of the room, entered in her password, and looked up his information. His temperature was elevated today, not quite enough to cause alarm, but even so … “I think I’m going to order a few labs today. And maybe get a chest X-ray, depending on the results.”

  Pauline frowned. “That doesn’t sound good.”

  “It may be nothing. But people who are sitting in bed for too long are especially susceptible to pneumonia.”

  Francis coughed again, cementing Holly’s worry. “Let’s do this first,” he said, his voice raspy. “Please.”

  He motioned toward a chair beside his bed, and Holly sat, despite everything in her wanting to treat him rather than take the time to listen to his story.

  He started. “First, my feature on you is going to be printed Christmas Day.”

  “And on the Internet,” Pauline cut in. “Gone are the days when everything was done on paper.”

  “That’s true.” Francis paused for another cough, and Holly handed him a cup of water. “It used to bother me, not having something tangible in my hands to hold, one of my stories in black ink on white paper. But I guess we get more visibility and reads this way.”

  “Sometimes things go viral, usually the thing you don’t expect,” Pauline said. “Which often means more money.”

  “And who can say no to that, especially on the principle of tangibility?”

  Holly smiled. Coming here today had definitely been the right thing. Francis had a way of making a person feel comfortable immediately. It probably had to do with years of interviewing people. “Okay, if you’re sure you’re up for it …” She paused and waited for Francis and Pauline to nod. “Then I’ll explain a little bit about how we’re going to do this, and we’ll get started.”

  The hospital tray table came in handy as she set up her smaller tripod on it, making sure to get all three of them in the frame. This was definitely going to be more unique than any of her other interviews, but lately her show had embraced the unique, and viewers seemed to be enthusiastically along for the ride.

  “I’m going to start by asking you guys a few questions, and then I’ll let you tell your story. When we’re done, I’ll take it home and edit it.” She glanced down at her watch. She’d originally planned to have another Christmas matchmaking episode for Christmas Day, but there was no way that was going to happen. This might make a good fill-in. “I’ll send you a link after I post it Christmas Day, and in the show notes, I’ll include a link to your website. I will not talk about any of your medical history, or even allude to the fact that I’m your doctor, okay?”

  “Can I mention it?” Francis asked.

  “You can talk about anything you want,” she replied with a smile. “Make sense?” Francis and Pauline both nodded, so she pressed “record” on her phone and then sat in the seat to the left of Francis, while Pauline sat to the right.

  “Hello, everyone. Welcome to One Great Love Story.” She smiled at her camera. “As you can see, we are in a bit of an unusual environment for today’s interview.”

  “It’s fitting, since we met in such an unusual way,” Francis interjected. Holly could immediately see that he was completely comfortable behind the camera. Some of her subjects would look furtively at the camera or they’d shift uncomfortably, like they didn’t know what to do with themselves when it was time for them to speak. Francis looked at it like an old friend he was catching up with.

  “Would you like to share more about that?” she asked.

  “Sure. My wife and I were here at the hospital visiting a friend a few weeks ago. We decided to grab a bite to eat in the cafeteria while she got some testing done for something or other. I’d been feeling a little under the weather all morning—you know, tired, achy, feeling like all my limbs weighed more than they usually did.”

  Holly nodded to show that she was still listening. She’d heard all of this before when she was getting his health history after his first surgery.

  “But during lunch, it started to get worse.”

  “He couldn’t eat anything,” Pauline cut in, “which is very unlike him.”

  “I do like to eat,” he said, patting his stomach over the hospital blanket, which had shrunk quite a bit over the last few weeks. “I was telling Pauline that I needed to go home and lie down, and that’s when the pain started. Right here—” He gently indicated his heart. “—and all down my arm. Everything was mostly a blur after that, except for Dr. Whitacre kneeling down beside me, telling me everything would be okay.”

  “But I noticed you even before that,” Pauline told Holly.

  “You had?”

  “Yes. You were sitting with a handsome young gentleman, who I now know from watching your show was Jack Shay. You two seemed so young and full of life that it reminded me of myself at that age. It seemed like you were in your own little world, so I was surprised to see you walking toward our table.”

  Holly had to blink back tears at the thought of her and Jack together. No, she told herself. You will not cry. You will not go back into that place you were in last night. Things are not all lost with Jack. You will be friends again. Any other option was completely untenable.

  “I’d noticed you two as well,” she said. “I was on break, eating lunch with Dr. Shay, and he finally told me to go talk to you two. I could tell you had an amazing love story. But when I got closer, I could see that Francis didn’t look good.”

  “So then you saved my life. You and Dr. Shay,” he said. “Or so I’m told. I don’t remember much after seeing your face for the first time, and then again after surgery.”

  Holly turned to the camera. “So for a month, I’ve been in suspense about their love story. It feels like everything has conspired against us talking, doesn’t it?”

  “It does,” Francis said. “Which is why I didn’t want to wait another moment, and I’m doing this despite my doctor’s wishes that we wait until I’m feeling better.” He gave her a pointed look. “I know all too well that sometimes things don’t get better, and we have to live in the moment instead of waiting for the perfect time to do something.”

  “So here we are,” Holly said, holding out a hand like a model to show off the hospital room.

  “Here we are,” Francis said. “This is real life. And this is real love.” He held his hand out to Pauline, and she took it firmly in hers. Holly’s frozen heart melted a little bit. Okay, maybe she still believed in love; she and the idea of love were just at odds with one another right now.

  “When I spoke with you earlier, it sounded like there are two different versions to this love story,” Holly said. “I’d love to hear both of them.” She turned toward Pauline first, because she knew that Pauline was going to keep it short and to the point. “Pauline, tell me about the first moment you met Francis.”

  “We met when he called me up for an interview. He was doing a story about the war and wanted to talk to someone who had lost a loved one. We met at a diner. I’d never believed in love at first sight, but that day, I was almost struck down by how handsome he was.”

  Francis smiled ruefully at this. “Nice try, Pauline.”

  “What?” she said, a little too innocently. “That’s how I remember our first meeting.”

  He shook his head. “Holly, let me tell you the real story.”

  Pauline groaned. “You’ve always got to tell the other story. My story is perfect for her MyHeartChannel show. Yours is going to get us kicked off of it.”

  Holly smiled in anticipation. These two didn’t even need her to prod them about their stories. She could tell this was not the first time they’d had this conversation with someone, as it had the feel of a well-choreographed dance.

  Francis jumped in. “Pauline’s aunt
was having her hundredth birthday party, and I was sent to cover it for the lifestyles beat. They’d just sent me home from Afghanistan with some shrapnel injuries I’d received while covering a story over there.”

  “Wait.” Holly held up a hand. “Afghanistan? I thought it was Vietnam.”

  Francis shook his head, his eyebrows furrowed in confusion. “I did go to ’Nam, drafted right before my first baby was born, but that’s not how I met Pauline.”

  Holly blinked. “I’m having a hard time placing myself in this story.”

  Francis and Pauline shared a confused look. “Should I start at the very beginning?” Francis asked.

  “You’d better,” Pauline advised.

  Francis coughed, and Holly wondered if it was a good idea to start at the very beginning, but he was already talking, and her curiosity was fully piqued.

  “I married my high school sweetheart, Jessa, in 1964, straight out of high school. We grew up next door to each other and had been in love for as long as I could remember. We knew about the Vietnam War, and I figured I’d be going over there, so we might as well get married as quickly as possible.” He smiled softly then. “We were married almost twenty years when she got cancer, and before I could even process it all, I was a single father with three kids, covering the safe beats at work.

  “Once the kids were in college, I went back to reporting more dangerous stories.” He got a faraway look on his face, as if remembering good times. “In 2004, I was sent to Afghanistan and got on the wrong end of a roadside bomb.”

  Holly took in a quick breath. She knew how dangerous and destructive those could be.

  Francis shook his head. “Nearly took my arm off, but they were able to save it. I got sent back to the states, and once I was back to work, they assigned me to the lifestyles section of the paper. Thus, the assignment to go to Pauline’s aunt’s hundredth birthday party.”