by Tonya Hurley
Petula melted.
“Oh, my Santa Baby!”
Scarlet stuck her finger down her throat, trying her best to vomit, and snuck away.
“Just keep it between us, though?” Damen asked, pulling Petula in close to him once again. “I told The Wendys you wouldn’t find out.”
“Pinky promise.”
Scarlet and Petula entered the Kensington kitchen almost simultaneously.
“You seem pretty relaxed,” Scarlet observed, referencing Petula’s traditional Christmas Eve freak-out. “Did you manage to pry the details out of Damen?”
“Which details?”
“Your gift? You know? The one you practically threatened his life over?”
Scarlet didn’t let on that she already knew from eavesdropping, and Petula downplayed it, not wanting to share the info she’d garnered with Scarlet. Info Scarlet had already pieced together. It was a passive-aggressive cat-and-mouse game they frequently played with each other.
“Oh, that. Not exactly. It’s a big secret, apparently,” Petula said, lying through her fake white teeth. She was preoccupied, barely giving her answers a moment’s thought, double-checking a list so long it scrolled at the bottom.
“You know, one day he is going to figure out he doesn’t need to take that crap from you and leave you for another girl,” Scarlet teased.
“Like who?” Petula said, not even bothering to look up. “You?”
Petula belted out a shrill, witchy laugh as humiliating as any Scarlet had ever heard and returned to her list.
Scarlet gleefully prepared for Petula to go nuclear as she loudly snapped the arms and legs off the gingerbread man Petula had just finished baking. She loved pressing her buttons. Didn’t matter if it was Christmas or her birthday. Scarlet and her sister shared the same genetic mean streak; it just came out in different ways.
“Brains!” Scarlet said, eating the gingerbread man’s head. “Gingerdead man!”
“Can you keep it down over there?” Petula agreed, barely acknowledging Scarlet’s zombie-like behavior.
“Have you taken a sedative or gotten a lobotomy or something?”
“Huh?”
“What are you doing?”
“Oh, I’m going over my Christmas list to Santa.”
“You mean Mom,” Scarlet corrected.
“Party penalty!” Petula shouted. “Don’t ruin it for me.”
“Ruin it? If you get even one tenth of the stuff on that list, you could start your own online store.”
“Not a bad idea,” Petula said, returning her attention to the scroll. “I’ll have to put The Wendys on that, if they survive.”
“Survive?” Scarlet asked coyly.
“Don’t tell anyone, but Damen said they are going to be buried alive at midnight to raise money for my present. It might be dangerous. I’m going to surprise them and show my support by turning up.”
“To help?” Scarlet asked, touched that a morsel of humanity seemed to have survived drowning in her sister’s blackened soul.
“No, to give interviews,” Petula said. “It’s being filmed. Not to mention, cameras will be everywhere if there is an unfortunate accident. And hot cops and firemen.”
“That’s the Christmas spirit for you,” Scarlet said, chomping down on a few more cookie arms and legs.
“Hey! Christmas cannibal,” said Petula, finally noticing Scarlet’s cookie abuse. “You’re hurting him!”
She had more sympathy for a cookie, Scarlet noted, than for her closest friends.
“I just can’t believe they’d do anything remotely dangerous for you—or anyone.”
“I know,” Petula said, gathering a few of the gingerbread crumbs on her fingertips and bringing them to her mouth.
“Gotta run,” Scarlet said. “Don’t eat too many of those. You might get fat.”
“Scarlet!”
“I’m sorry, I meant stay fat.”
Petula promptly spit the gingerbread goo out of her mouth and into a napkin. Her famous holiday chew-and-spit diet. She could taste anything she wanted without the calories.
“By the way, what did you ask for for Christmas?” Petula probed.
“What’s the difference? I never get what I want anyway.”
“Better not pout,” Petula replied. “You can have all the stuff I don’t want.”
“Just like every year,” Scarlet mumbled. “I’m the only sister I know that gets hand-me-downs with the tags still on them.”
10
Last Christmas
Present Tense
Holiday shopping is a race to decide which will give out first: your wallet or your feet. From the post-season closeouts to the pre-Christmas blowouts that begin earlier and earlier each season, the strain on your bank account, your patience, and your body is tested nearly all year round. The key to success and sanity is pacing. Choosing to run it as a marathon or sprint is ultimately up to you.
Prue returned to the compound looking exhausted and grim-faced. Dejected.
“Anything?” Pam asked, her voice bolstered by a faint flutelike sound.
“No,” Prue said. “It’s bad.”
“It’s bad here, too,” Pam advised, pointing off in the distance to the Dead Ed kids, once joyfully preparing for the holidays but now scattered around, looking useless, like wrapping paper the day after Christmas.
“I tried everything—guilting her, haunting her, threatening to kill her. She’s not interested in coming back. She won’t listen.”
“She’ll listen to me,” Pam said, mustering her last bit of strength.
“I don’t know, Pam. This is way beyond the bonds of friendship or sisterhood or . . . anything,” Prue moaned. “She’s forgotten us.”
“What other choice do we have?”
“You’re too weak to go back there,” Prue said. “You have more of a chance of staying behind, getting sucked in, than she does of coming back.”
“I have to try,” Pam said.
“You’re so vulnerable right now,” Prue said. “It would take a miracle.”
Violet only nodded, reverting to the silence from which she had reprieved for so long. Rita kept trying to catch creatures crawling out of her eye sockets, hook them, and hang them onto the tree branches in a vain effort at decorating, but even the bugs were too fast and heavy for her. Tears began to fall from Virginia’s eyes.
Pam lifted her head and spied the crepuscular scene, Christmas lights growing fainter, decorations losing their luster, the angel voices from on high harder and harder to hear. The strength and the hope were being sapped from them at an accelerated speed now.
“Well, this is the season for miracles,” Pam nearly sang, momentarily energized and then totally stunned. She grasped for her neck, hyperventilating out a staccato tune.
“Did I just hear a whistling sound in your throat?” Kim yelped, like she’d just received the tastiest morsel of gossip to spread.
“Piccolo Pam is back!” Simon and Simone announced together, marshaling the attention of the gloomy group like a double-sided loudspeaker at a football game as only twisted twins would do.
“Don’t get used to it,” Pam said as she left, determined to retrieve her friend and her future.
“It was so cool to hear Pam’s piccolo,” Gary said. “It was gone before I ever got here.”
“You say that like it’s a good thing,” Prue offered somberly.
The night before Christmas had come. Or in this case, the nightmare.
It was growing colder. The temperature and the sun dropping together like school friends playing Ring Around the Rosie in the yellowed grass. Charlotte looked skyward into the twinkling twilight above.
Still no sign of him, she thought.
Charlotte buttoned her coat to the neck, stepped out her front door, and took a deep breath. She held it in as long as she could, feeling the chill circulate within her lungs, and then exhaled, watching her icy breath dissipate into fog and then to nothing. Her ghost, she thought, reveali
ng itself, departing from her. A last gasp of her former self. It relaxed her in the way a warm bath after a hard day might comfort someone else. She was letting go. It had taken her so long to let go of her life, but now it was her death she was bidding farewell to.
“Well, it won’t be my first Christmas on my own,” she murmured.
Charlotte walked across the street, passed the Dumpsters, and through the putrid alleyway behind the strip mall pawnshop. You would hardly know it was Christmas, judging from the mostly empty parking lot. The Christmas tree vendors that lined the sidewalks in the center of town were nowhere to be found, nor were any Salvation Army Santas ringing up donations. Very few had either the will or the wherewithal to give or to shop. Even the bells from the churches preparing for their early Christmas Eve services were harder to hear on her side of the tracks. The whole holiday, everything, just seemed to echo in the distance.
She hadn’t remembered things being so glum in Christmases past but then she had a tendency to romanticize everything, like that little ghost said. Sometimes to a fault. No matter what it had been like before, though, the wonderful thing about Christmas was that it offered hope that things could yet be different. And if anyone possessed that knowledge firsthand, she did. Charlotte shrugged off the brewing metaphysical dilemma and returned to the issue at hand.
“When the going gets tough,” she said, and goosed herself, “the tough go shopping!”
Ignoring her surroundings, Charlotte practically skipped into the pawnshop. She didn’t have any money to spend, but she had plenty of time to browse, and she was going to make the most of it. The first thing that struck her was the smell. It was stale, like the inside of Gladys’s closet, with stained carpet and faint traces of mildew growing through cracks in the plaster walls.
She looked around at the glass counters filled with oddities and mementos of all kinds—from family heirlooms to fossils, some human. Estate jewelry and musical instruments shared shelf space easily with antique pocketknives and cheesy collectibles. Taxidermy birds from every species seemed to swoop from the ceiling, frozen in midflight just above eye level, Christmas ornaments hanging randomly from their clawed feet. Items both precious and ridiculous were strewn about everywhere, vying for buyers’ attention. Items that had once been loved, needed, coveted were now orphaned, traded in and up. A cornucopia of all things unwanted, like infants left on a church doorstep. Charlotte felt surprisingly comfortable.
She stopped at the first case, pored over it, and started to panic, almost overwhelmed by the quantity of merchandise and her total cluelessness about what she was actually shopping for, when what to her wondering eyes did appear? A familiar figure, clothed in crimson crushed velvet and black leather, standing across the shop, studying the displays as intensely as she was. One in particular.
“Scarlet,” Charlotte said with a smile.
Charlotte wanted to just run right up and throw her arms around the girl, but this girl wasn’t her Scarlet. At least not yet. She needed to work her way back into this Scarlet’s consciousness, her heart, her soul. And what better way than with a gift.
“Um, hi?” Charlotte said cautiously.
Scarlet turned to face her.
“Oh, hi,” Scarlet said, surprised to see anyone she knew, even remotely, at the shop.
That wasn’t a bad start, Charlotte thought.
“What are you doing here?” Charlotte asked bluntly, cringing before the last of the words left her lips.
“What does it look like? I’m shopping.”
Despite Scarlet’s dismissive tone, Charlotte felt validated. True, she was there mostly because she didn’t have much money, but whatever the reason, she and Scarlet were shopping in the same place.
“For Petula?” Charlotte said excitedly, her idol-worship poking through.
“No,” Scarlet said, mocking Charlotte’s enthusiasm. “For myself.”
“Cool,” Charlotte said awkwardly, remembering whom she was dealing with. “What looks good?”
“Not much. Just this one thing. I come here every once in a while to look at it. I guess it’s window-shopping, really.”
Scarlet directed Charlotte’s attention to a black cat doll—not new, but well cared for. Charlotte recognized it but couldn’t let on how she knew.
“Just to look? Why don’t you save up and buy it or something?”
“It’s not the price,” Scarlet replied. “It’s special. It should be a gift from someone special.”
“Right,” Charlotte said. “I remember him saying that.”
“What?”
“Nothing.”
Charlotte knew the history of Scarlet and the cat because of Virginia. This was exactly what she needed. She looked upward in a vain effort to thank Virginia for the insight, if for nothing else.
“You’re special,” Charlotte blurted.
Scarlet looked at her as she might a lab experiment, trying to make sense of the strange creature in front of her.
“What I mean is maybe Santa will bring it one of these years,” Charlotte said.
“You never know,” Scarlet agreed. “But I won’t hold my breath.”
“I’m sure your mom would—”
“I never get what I want,” Scarlet informed her abruptly.
“Why?”
“First, because my mom doesn’t like to encourage my paranormal hobbies, which makes no sense since Christmas is probably the most paranormal event in history if you think about it,” Scarlet explained dramatically. “Second, because my name isn’t Petula.”
“I’m sure your mom loves you both the same,” Charlotte said.
“Yeah, but Petula just sucks all the generosity out of the room, and out of Mom’s wallet. Know what I mean?”
Scarlet cracked a sly smile, and Charlotte stifled a little giggle with her hand.
“I guess.”
“What are you doing here, anyway?” Scarlet inquired casually as she returned her eyes to the glass case.
“I’m shopping too.”
“Anyone special?”
Girl talk. They were sharing. Charlotte had to fight back the urge to reach out and hug her, squeeze her, tell her how much she missed her.
“Yep,” Charlotte said sweetly.
“That’s really thoughtful,” Scarlet observed.
“Thanks,” Charlotte said. “It would be better if I had some money to spend, but I will soon.”
“Really? Where are you going to dig up some last-minute dough on Christmas Eve?”
Scarlet was steering the conversation now.
“The Wendys. I mean, Wendy Thomas and Wendy Anderson. You know them?”
“Yeah, I know them.” Scarlet’s lips curled like she’d just tasted a mouthful of expired milk.
“Oh, of course you do,” Charlotte said, feeling awkward again.
“Why?” Scarlet asked but wasn’t sure she wanted to hear the details.
“They are letting me in on this thing they are doing later to earn some extra cash.”
“Yeah, I heard from my sister.”
“Really?” Charlotte was wowed. Scarlet and Petula were talking about her.
“Listen, I was actually hoping I’d run into you.”
Charlotte was getting overwhelmed.
Scarlet’s mood, however, suddenly turned much darker. This was her chance to spare Charlotte some humiliation and ladle some on The Wendys.
“You know The Wendys aren’t your friends, right?”
“Not yet!” Charlotte spouted, almost in full regression now.
“I don’t get it,” Scarlet shouted. “What is it with the obsession with these people? The Wendys. Petula. Even Damen.”
“They’ve got it all,” Charlotte said, summing it up.
“Got what?” Scarlet pushed back. “Looks? Style? Attitude? Okay, not my taste level, but beauty is in the eye of the beholder, I guess. But you know what they don’t have?”
“What?” Charlotte asked sincerely.
“Souls.”
<
br /> Charlotte knew a little something about souls.
“I don’t know. Damen and Petula seem to have a good—”
“You have no idea how she treats him behind closed doors,” Scarlet interrupted. “He’s not a boyfriend; he’s a friggin’ detainee.”
“Well, if he ever sees the light, I’m available!”
Scarlet just ignored Charlotte’s comment and continued to rant.
“It’s a shame, really, because he’s a good guy deep down. A little thick, but good.”
“Maybe he’d be better off with someone else. Someone like . . . you.”
“That’s killer!” Scarlet laughed.
Charlotte just smiled.
Scarlet looked at her standing there so innocently.
“Look, we don’t know each other at all, really, but I feel like I need to say this. Be careful. Those girls are poison. They will use anyone to get what they want.”
Charlotte blushed with embarrassment.
“I’m not stupid, you know,” Charlotte said quietly.
“I wasn’t saying that,” Scarlet said, tamping down her harsh tone a little. “I was just trying to help.”
“Thanks for looking out for me,” Charlotte said.
Charlotte looked up at Scarlet and their eyes met. They connected.
“Well, I’ve gotta go. Merry whatever,” Scarlet said, breaking up the shared moment.
“Merry whatever to you, too,” Charlotte replied cheerfully.
“Oh, and just because I was nice to you today, don’t expect me to be nice the next time I see you. If you tell anyone, I’ll deny it.”
“But you might be nice to me,” Charlotte said hopefully.
“’Tis the season of miracles.”
Scarlet split, and Charlotte returned to the case and stared at the cat Scarlet had been eyeing.
“What time do you close tonight?” Charlotte asked the pawnbroker.
11
Up on the Grave-Top
Lay Away
Christmas is a day for getting. It is also a time for not getting. We drop hints, make lists, send letters to Santa, all with the expectations our wishes will be granted, our order filled. As we eye our gifts beneath the tree with anticipation and open them with bated breath, we have every expectation our desires will be realized, only to sometimes suffer the shattering disappointment of finding that dreams are out of stock.
