Baby Christmas

by Pamela Browning

  “Rachel?”

  “Why am 1 here?” she said. It had not escaped her that this Santa had a crescent-shaped birthmark exactly like both the store Santa on Christmas Eve and the Santa who had called at Mimi’s apartment later.

  “To learn,” said Santa.

  This was ridiculous. She wanted to be back in bed in j Mimi’s apartment, but she didn’t know how to get there.

  “Learn what?”

  “To know.”

  Rachel hated riddles. She hated guessing games. “I’m leaving,” she said abruptly.

  “Not yet.”

  “I have some serious thinking to do,” she said, feeling slightly frantic.

  Santa laid a finger alongside his nose. “Ho-ho-ho,” he said. “As if you haven’t been thinking seriously already.”

  “How do you know?”

  Santa looked wise. “Your Christmas wish.”

  She had to think hard for a moment to remember what she’d wished. Oh, yes. “I wanted a reason to celebrate Christmas again,” she said.

  “I gave you one. You’re not going to throw it away, are you?”

  “Uh—”

  “Think carefully, Rachel. And do the right thing.”

  She was on the verge of asking him exactly what the right thing might be, but he spoke again.

  “A baby is a symbol of new beginnings,” he said, and suddenly she woke up with a jolt. She was lying in Mimi’s bed, and her shoulder hurt because she was sleeping on something hard and uncomfortable, and she’d been dreaming a stupid dream.

  The magnetic pad. She never should have slept on it Mimi was out of her mind if she thought it could help cure anything.

  But her headache had gone away. And outside, a fragile, pearlescent light was creeping up from the horizon. It was morning, and she had to talk to Joe.

  She got up, showered and dressed, caught an elevator and ran out the lobby door past two startled condo residents who had ventured out early to buy their daily newspapers.

  “Hello, Mrs. Cohen,” she said. “Hi, Mrs. Winstrom.”

  “Rachel, I just wanted to tell you how sorry I am about little Baby Christmas’s leaving,” said Mrs. Winstrom.

  “We’re going to get her back,” Rachel said, determination in every syllable.

  “But I thought—” Mrs. Cohen began, wrinkling her forehead.

  “Not to worry,” Rachel said cheerfully, leaving the two women staring after her with confused expressions on their faces.

  She jogged past the manger scene, sniffed the brine in the air appreciatively and unlocked her car. The sun was shining, the sky was a bright azure-blue unsullied by clouds, and today was going to be a wonderful day, perhaps the most important day in her life. She sang “Hark, the Herald Angels Sing” off-key as she zipped her car across the bridge to Joe’s apartment house, where she squealed to a stop at the curb and started to get out

  The song died on her lips as the front door of Joe’s apartment opened. Joe stood there in the doorway, smiling down engagingly at a woman whose face was screened by the fronds of a small palm tree. Rachel slid back into her car, her heart beating wildly. Who could be leaving Joe’s apartment at this hour in the morning?

  Not only that, but his visitor was wearing a Condo Crisis Control T-shirt and shorts exactly as Rachel had when she’d spent the night. The woman was also clutching a plastic bag, and, recalling that she’d carried her own dress in such a bag on the morning after spending the night with Joe, Rachel had a pretty good idea what was in it.

  Shock, disbelief and rage curdled her blood. Here she Ì| was, prepared to tell Joe that she would marry him, and he was bidding goodbye to a woman who had obviously spent the night with him in his apartment. A wave of nausea rose up from her throat and threatened to choke her.

  Trust, Rachel believed, was one of the most important aspects of a relationship. It was the cornerstone on which a marriage should be built. She, Rachel, was not stupid; enough to marry a guy she couldn’t trust, and she most definitely did not trust Joe Marzinski now.

  She couldn’t marry him. And she wouldn’t.

  Blindly she rammed the key into the ignition, and her car’s engine sprang to life. Joe looked up. He froze in I place, his face blanching visibly, and the woman with him turned around so that Rachel got a good look at her for the first time. The uniquely shaped eyes and the close cropped dark hair left no doubt about who the woman was.

  It was Gina.

  RACHEL, HIGH ON THE ADRENALINE of her anger, made two trips downstairs carrying clothes and file boxes before Sherman arrived on duty that morning.

  “Ms. Hirsch, what’s going on?” He blocked her way to the elevator.

  “I’m driving back to Lakemont, New Jersey. Today,” Rachel said curtly.

  “Oh. Guess that means there’s not going to be any wedding bells. So to speak.”

  “Guess so. I might need some help with my computer when I’ve got it packed up and ready to go.”

  “Sure. Just call me. Oh, and you might like to know that I’ve given away all the kittens. You know, the ones that were born in the washing machine.”

  “Good, Sherman.” Rachel started to brush past him, but he didn’t step aside.

  “And guess who took one of them? A little gray tabby, real cute?”

  “I can’t imagine.” She didn’t feel like having this conversation. She didn’t feel like having any conversation. All she wanted was to get out of there before a delegation of Marzinskis descended on her with the idea of changing her mind or before Mimi arrived home from wherever.

  “Ynez Garcia took the gray tabby. She said that having the baby around made her realize how important it was to enjoy life while we can. She said she’d missed her cat Rubio so much that she didn’t think she had anything to live for. A baby gives you hope for the future, you know? So she wanted a baby. A baby cat. Neat, huh?”

  Rachel blew out an impatient breath. “Right. I’m glad for her.”

  “Look,” said Sherman. He delved a hand into his uniform pocket and extracted a tiny, fuzzy, gray tabby kitten. “See? This is Tabitha.”

  The kitten was adorable, and normally Rachel was not immune to such enchantment. On any other day she would have exclaimed over the kitten and cuddled it, but today was different. “She’s lovely, Sherman. And I wish I had time to get to know her. But I’m eager to get on the road.”

  Sherman stroked the kitten’s gray-striped fur, and it opened its mouth and uttered the squeakiest mew she’d ever heard. “No problem. Mrs. Garcia will be down to get her in a few minutes. You let me know when you need help with the computer, ‘cause there’s no need for you to lug it down by yourself.”

  “Thank you, Sherman.”

  Rachel fidgeted all the way up to the eleventh floor. Now that she’d decided, now that she’d made up her mind, she never wanted to see Joe Marzinski again. She did want to see Chrissy, however. But that wasn’t possible. She’d never see Chrissy again or hold her or sit with her in the middle of the night soothing her colic. She’d never get to celebrate another Christmas with Chrissy or her first birthday. She felt inconsolably deprived.

  She blinked tears from her eyes as she emerged from the elevator into the hall, and she was so blinded by them that she almost bumped smack into Gladys and Ivan. Gladys was wearing a pink linen dress, a sharp departure from her usual tennis whites or sweats, and Ivan was nattily dressed in green golf pants and a matching striped shirt.

  Gladys pounced. “Rachel, dear, how good it is that we ran into you! I know you’re going to marry that nice Joe Marzinski. I mean, why wouldn’t you? But that’s not the reason I’m so happy. Ivan and I are getting married, too! Aren’t we, Ivan?”

  “We certainly are. As soon as we can buy the ring and find a preacher.” He rocked back on his heels, smiling a smug little smile.

  Rachel blinked. The two of them were holding hands.

  “Isn’t this a bit sudden?” she said.

  “When you’re our age, you don’t have a lot of ti
me to waste. We want to spend all our time together. For the rest of our lives. Right, Ivan?”

  “That’s right, my little Googie.” Ivan beamed at her.

  Googie? Gladys Rink was Googie? Rachel was speechless.

  “And you know, Rachel, it’s all because of Chrissy. We never would have spent quiet time together—”

  “—and we never would have gotten to know each other,” said Ivan.

  “If it hadn’t been for Chrissy. So maybe Ynez was right. The baby was a Christmas miracle,” added Gladys.

  It wasn’t lost on her that Gladys and Ivan were finishing each other’s sentences, but Rachel almost couldn’t swallow around the lump in her throat. “Yes,” she said wistfully. “Perhaps Chrissy was a Christmas miracle.”

  “We’re going out to choose a ring, and then I want to hear all about you and Joe,” Gladys said, patting Rachel’s hand.

  But Rachel didn’t think they would want to know that she had seen Gina leaving Joe’s apartment very early this morning. They wouldn’t want to know that she wouldn’t marry Joe now if he were the last man on earth. And she wasn’t going to tell them. She would be long gone from Coquina Beach before the Theatrical Threesome even knew she had left.

  The phone rang as she reached her office, and she’d already unplugged her answering machine. Against her better judgment, she answered it.

  “Rachel,” Joe said. His voice was gruff, the way it was when he was upset. She had grown to know that about him in the past several days—not that it was important

  “I don’t have anything to say to you.” The fist around her heart tightened, twisted. She closed her eyes, tried not to picture his face.

  “I can explain. I can explain everything.”

  Pain and disappointment spewed out of her unabated and unedited. “Maybe you want to tell me that Condo Crisis Control T-shirts are standard issue for every woman who spends the night at your apartment? Or that asking me to marry you was some kind of weird joke you perpetrated on your family to make them think that you were finally going to settle down?”

  “No, Rachel, I’m in love with you. I want to marry you.” The words pierced straight to her heart.

  “So last night, I suppose, was one last fling.” There was no point in keeping the bitterness out of her voice, and she didn’t even try.

  “It wasn’t anything like that,” Joe said on a note of desperation.

  “I only have two words for you, Joe Marzinski—drop dead.” She slammed the phone down and tried not to think about his silvery eyes gone cold, about his strong arms never again enclosing her, protecting her, holding her close as he made love to her.

  You could lose in life. You could lose the things you loved over and over again. But you could also survive those losses, and that was what she intended to do, mainly by putting a lot of distance between herself and the man who was the cause of her pain.

  But would distance ease this ache in her heart, the knife in her gut? She loved Joe Marzinski, she’d wanted a lifetime with him. She treasured the time they’d spent together and the way he’d made her feel worthwhile. The way he’d loved her and, yes, cherished her in spite of her faults.

  She’d foreseen a future with him, bright and new and untarnished by pain or guilt She’d reached for it—and it had been yanked away.

  Life was cruel, and you couldn’t count on anything, so she might as well get on with the life that was left to her now.

  Mimi’s apartment was in chaos. Rachel had haphazardly tossed clothes into her two suitcases, and they lay open on the floor. Papers in the office needed to be packaged and mailed to her New Jersey apartment, where she could sort them later. She needed to call Gilberto Perez and tell him she was leaving; she needed to clean the apartment so that Mimi wouldn’t have to do it when she came home.

  But first she would box up her computer and printer.

  Once that task was accomplished, she called Sherman to carry them down to her car, and he answered his phone right away. Rachel was in no mood to listen to any more protracted stories from him, no matter how interesting they might be.

  “Sherman? My computer is ready. Could you please load it into my car? Thanks.” He was still talking when she hung up, but she didn’t want to hear what he had to say; she didn’t need to. She’d be out of here in less than an hour with any luck.

  When the knock sounded on the door, she opened it right away. But it wasn’t Sherman who stood on the threshold. It was Gina, and she had been crying.

  “Rachel, please, you have to listen,” Gina began.

  “No, I don’t,” Rachel said firmly, and started to close the door.

  But Gina had slid her foot into the opening. “It wasn’t what you thought,” she said. “There’s nothing between Joe and me.”

  Gina spoke with such resolve and determination that it gave Rachel pause.

  “And there’s something else you need to know,” Gina went on. “Please let me in.”

  “I’m going back to New Jersey,” Rachel shot back. “I don’t have time to talk to you.”

  Gina’s eyes widened perceptibly. “Oh, gosh, then you have to listen. You have to. Because I don’t want what I did to break you and Joe up.”

  “What you did was spend the night with him. Right?”

  “Yes, but—”

  Bitterness rose like bile in her throat. “Go away, Gina. Leave me in peace.” To pick up the pieces, Rachel added to herself. But then you always want what you can’t have, and Joe was just one more thing that was lost to her. The thought of a lifetime of losses threatened to make her break down right here, but she would save that for later. She wouldn’t give Gina the satisfaction of letting her know that her heart was broken.

  “Not until you listen. I have something really important to tell you, Rachel. It’s…it’s about Chrissy.”

  “Chrissy!”

  As soon as Rachel said the baby’s name, Gina’s face crumpled and tears began to course down her cheeks.

  “Gina,” Rachel said reasoningly, not understanding what this was about.

  Gina began to sob quietly, not covering her face, not doing anything to hide her raw anguish. Rachel knew it would be only a matter of time before Ynez popped out of the door to her apartment on her way to pick up her new kitten and asked what was wrong. To forestall that development, Rachel reached out and pulled Gina inside.

  “You might as well sit down,” she said ungraciously. She brushed a pile of papers and books off the couch and indicated that Gina should sit there.

  Gina scrubbed at her eyes with a fist. “You weren’t supposed to find the baby in the manger,” she said.

  Gina’s tone gave Rachel pause. “I wasn’t?”

  “No, Joe was.”

  “What on earth are you talking about, Gina?” She stared at the girl, whose eyes were so puffy that Rachel knew she must have been crying for hours.

  “I didn’t know what else to do with her. Joe was always so kind to me, so levelheaded, that I thought he’d be good to a baby. I was going to leave Chrissy on the doorstep of his apartment that night, but I waited and waited for him to come home and he didn’t come back. Then I found out from Mrs. Marzinski that he was working a condo crisis here on the island, and I rode over here to see if I could talk to him. So—”

  Rachel sank down on a chair; her knees refused to hold her. “You mean Chrissy is your baby?”

  Gina, eyes downcast, nodded. “Yes,” she whispered.

  Rachel’s thoughts were scrambling as if through a minefield where sections of the landscape had been blown sky-high. In the meantime Gina went on talking.

  “So I was sitting in my car in the Elysian Towers parking lot and I was getting so tired. I’d lost a lot of blood, and I was very weak. I mean, I’d just given birth to a baby all by myself.”

  “You were all alone? Oh, Gina,” Rachel said, but Gina silenced her with a wave of her hand.

  “No sympathy, please. I don’t deserve it. Anyway, the baby was born three days before Chris
tmas at Anna’s house. I knew I couldn’t stay there in the parking lot on Christmas Eve. I wanted to be at Anna’s, safe in bed when she and Mitch came home from a three-day visit to his parents that night. Joe’s van was parked outside this building because he was inside working, but the van was locked, so I couldn’t leave the baby in it as I planned. I knew that Joe would have to walk right past the Nativity scene to get to his van when he left that night. I figured he’d find the baby if I left her in the manger.”

  “And that’s why you left Chrissy outside the building?” Rachel’s outrage was exceeded only by her incredulity.

  “Uh-huh. It seemed safe enough, behind the ixora hedge, under that little roof of the stable where Mary and Joseph were. I laid Chrissy in the manger, told her goodbye, and then I went away. And you found her.”

  “What if I hadn’t? What if something had happened to her?”

  “I wasn’t thinking rationally. I was so exhausted.”

  “Your sisters never knew you were pregnant?”

  Gina’s head drooped. “I never told them. I went away to college before I got really big. I wore lots of baggy clothes and didn’t tell a soul.”

  “The baby’s father?”

  “A college boy who was in Daytona Beach for spring break last year. The only one I ever—well, I know he’s the father. I never even knew his last name or where he went to school.”

  Rachel couldn’t help it; her heart went out to this naive young woman who hadn’t known how to deal with such a grave mistake. “You should have told someone you were going to have a baby. You should have had help.”

  Gina looked as if she were at the end of her rope. No wonder she looked exhausted, though—no woman should have to handle pregnancy and birth all alone. “I know that now,” Gina said, looking straight at Rachel for the first time since she’d embarked upon her tale of woe. “But I’ve been on my own for a long time, and I thought I could deal with this by myself.

  “I was in denial for months, but when I finally admitted to myself that I was pregnant, I was afraid I’d have to give up college—and it means so much to me, Rachel! Everyone who helped me get there is counting on me. I’m not nearly ready to be a mother. I can’t keep that baby. But you and Joe could. You could adopt her.” She leaned forward hopefully.