Baby Christmas

by Pamela Browning

  Rachel’s head was spinning with all these revelations. “I’m not going to marry Joe. I won’t marry anyone who spends the night with another woman, especially on the very night that I’m considering his marriage proposal,” she said slowly.

  “Rachel, oh Rachel. I slept at his apartment, all right, but not with Joe. Last night I went over there to tell him about the baby and what I’d done, I had to get it off my chest, and I was helping him fix a faucet and the water spurted all over me, so I changed into some other clothes of his, and when I got around to telling him that Chrissy is my child, he got really upset and started yelling.

  “And I began to cry and he apologized for yelling, and I cried some more, and if I had gone home looking upset, Anna and Mitch would have demanded to know what was wrong. I know I’m going to have to tell them, but I couldn’t face them, not so soon after admitting everything to Joe. Joe was real nice. He let me sleep on the couch. He cooked breakfast for me, and I was getting ready to drive home when we both came out and saw you there. You took off before we could explain that it was perfectly innocent.”

  “Oh,” Rachel said. She hadn’t thought that it was possible for the scene at Joe’s to be anything but incriminating. But now, knowing what she knew, understanding Gina’s state of mind and Joe’s nurturing nature, everything began to make sense.

  Neither of them spoke for a long time. Gina sighed heavily. “Now you know what happened.”

  There were still loose ends, and Rachel’s mind struggled to tie them all together. “But the Santa…” Rachel said, her voice trailing away when she realized how silly it would be to say that she’d thought that the Santa whom she had first met on Christmas Eve when she was buying paper had put Chrissy in the manger.

  “The Santa?” Gina repeated, looking confused. “What did Santa have to do with it?”

  “I don’t know,” Rachel said truthfully. “I honestly have no idea.”

  “I mean, it was Christmas Eve and all. But I’m too old to believe in Santa Claus.”

  Rachel thought about the kindness of the Santa in the discount store and the way his eyes had seemed to pierce right through her soul to the pain that she’d thought would never go away. “I’m not sure I’m too old to believe, Gina,” she said, meaning it.

  Gina was twisting a sodden handkerchief in her hands. “The thing is, Rachel, I feel so awful. I failed to live up to the responsibility of having a baby.”

  Rachel moved to the couch and curved an arm around Gina’s shoulders. The girl felt so fragile, so tiny. “Yes, Gina, I suppose you did. The baby might not have been found until morning.”

  “I’m so ashamed of what I did that night! If anything had happened to my baby, I would have wanted to die. It’s just that…that I thought I didn’t have anywhere to turn,” Gina said, beginning to weep again.

  “I know why you felt that way. Believe me, I understand.”

  “How could you?” Gina wailed. “I bet you’ve never done anything so awful.”

  “Oh,” said Rachel, “but I have.”

  Gina dried her eyes and stared. “Not you, Rachel. You look so perfect, so pretty, so… so okay.”

  “Maybe,” Rachel acknowledged. “But I did something I’m not proud of.”

  “You, Rachel?” Gina looked unconvinced.

  Ever since Jœ had told her about his shame over his involvement in the robbery, Rachel had felt better about the way she had acted on the night of the fire. So now it seemed to her that the most helpful thing she could do for Gina was to hold Gina’s hand and tell her about Nick and Lolly and Melissa and Derek and the puppy and the fire that had claimed their lives, and how she almost couldn’t live with herself because if she hadn’t left the burning house, if she had made sure that everyone else got out when she had, they might have lived.

  In the end, after the telling of it, they both had tears in their eyes.

  “Rachel, I’m sorry. I didn’t know,” Gina said.

  “The best advice I can give you—or anyone else—is that bad things happen to people sometimes. The only thing we can do afterward is to move on. To get on with our lives.” This was what Joe had told her. It was what she now believed to be true.

  “But, Rachel, what makes that possible?” Gina asked tremulously.

  “Love,” Rachel said with sudden certainty. “In the end love is what we live for. It helps us move beyond the tragedies.”

  “There’s not going to be any love for me,” Gina said with dark certainty.

  Rachel couldn’t believe her ears. “Gina! That statement makes me want to shake you until you come to your senses! How can you say that, when all the Marzinskis care about you so very much and when you have two sisters who, from what I can tell, love you a lot?”

  “Oh,” Gina said, understanding dawning in her eyes. “I thought you meant love as in, well, romance.”

  “There are lots of different kinds of love, which is a lesson I’ve learned only recently. Look at Gladys and Ivan, at Ynez, at Chrissy and what a difference she made to all of them!”

  “And she made a difference to Joe and to you, Rachel. She brought you together. He really does love you, you know. You were all he could talk about last night after I told him about the baby. You and his hopes that you could all be together.”

  Something lightened in her heart then, and a great burden seemed to lift from her shoulders when she thought about Joe. She had resisted him long enough; now it was time to reach out and take the gift of love that he had offered her almost from the very beginning.

  “Joe has given me the strength to move on with my life. I guess I’d better tell him so, don’t you agree?” There was a lilt in her voice and gladness in her heart for the first time in many years.

  Gina smiled shakily and squeezed her hand. “You’re going to marry him?”

  “If he still wants me.”

  Gina perked up at this. “He does, Rachel. You’ll see. Oh, but he’s not at home. He had a call this morning. Something about an elevator at some condo down the beach.”

  Rachel went to phone Joe, her heart doing little joyful triphammer things as she dialed his pager number. In her mind she was already rehearsing the words she would say when she heard Joe’s voice, but to her surprise the person who answered the page wasn’t Joe.

  “This is Andy, Joe’s my boss. He can’t answer your page. There’s been an accident, and they’ve taken him to the hospital.” The words were terse, the information chilling.

  “What hospital?” Rachel felt as if a cold knife had been driven through her heart.

  “Holy Angels. But I’m not sure you can see him.”

  “Is he going to be okay? Is he—”

  “I don’t know. I haven’t heard. He looks as if he’s in pretty bad shape.”

  WHEN RACHEL AND GINA arrived at the hospital, other Marzinskis were gathered in the emergency room.

  Mary Marzinski gathered Rachel into an embrace, and even the prickly Mary Cecilia seemed glad to see her.

  “What happened?” Rachel asked, her heart in her mouth.

  “An elevator shaft accident. He’s unconscious,” Jim Marzinski told her. He looked worried and much older today. Maybe it was the harsh fluorescent lighting overhead, but Rachel didn’t think so.

  “Unconscious!”

  “They aren’t telling us much,” Mary Cecilia said.

  “Is anyone allowed to see him?”

  “Not yet.”

  Rachel turned to Jim, who seemed the calmest. “What went wrong?”

  “There was a problem with the elevator cable, and Joe leaned into the shaft to look. Somehow he lost his footing and fell. That’s all we know,” Jim said.

  “Andy said Joe seemed distracted this morning,” Grade said into the awful silence.

  Rachel exchanged an anguished look with Gina. What if Joe had been so upset by her actions that he’d become careless? And she was haunted by the last words she had ever said to him when he’d called and tried to explain. She would give anything to
take them back, she’d give anything to have never uttered them. She had told him to drop dead.

  “The accident couldn’t have been your fault,” Gina whispered when no one else was paying attention, but Rachel’s stomach had tied itself in knots and she didn’t know what to think. AU she knew was that Joe was hurt and that she felt responsible. It was like the fire all over again, only Joe was alive and there was still a chance that he would recover. She closed her eyes and willed him to be all right.

  After a time—Rachel had no idea how long—a nurse ushered them into a waiting room where Jackson handed Rachel a cup of coffee that she couldn’t drink. They all sat down and tried to look more cheerful than they felt. A loud TV on the wall provided dubious distraction.

  Some of them made attempts at desultory conversation.

  “I guess you’re looking forward to starting back to school in January,” Jenn said to Rachel.

  Rachel thought for a split second that Jenn had her confused with Gina, who would be returning to college soon. “Oh, I’m not—” she began, then realized that they all still thought she taught school. Now what?

  “What grade do you teach?” Reggie, Tonia’s husband, asked in an attempt to be polite.

  This was it She would have to tell them the truth about herself. And in that instant she realized that she could. She could talk about her past without feeling like a failure. No more was she the pathetic, bereft woman who had come to Coquina Beach to hide from life.

  She inhaled a shaky breath. “I…well, I’m not actually a teacher,” Rachel said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “I’ m not the schoolteacher Joe was going out with at Thanksgiving. That was a misunderstanding.”

  “Misunderstanding?” Mary, his mother, wrinkled her forehead.

  Rachel wasn’t sure how much to say, but she knew that she couldn’t let Joe’s family go on thinking that she was someone she wasn’t. If she were going to marry him, they would eventually need to know the truth.

  “On Christmas Day everyone assumed that I was this other woman he’d dated, and Joe didn’t correct anyone, but I’m just visiting Coquina Beach to house-sit my grandmother’s condo. I’ve never taught school, I run my own secretarial service. I found the baby on Christmas Eve, and Joe helped me. You see, I don’t have any family here, and that’s why he invited me to Christmas dinner.” She knew this sounded jumbled and confused, but at the moment she wasn’t capable of organizing words into neat little sentences. This was as logical as she could make it.

  “You have no family?” asked Tonia sharply. “None at all?” It was as if she couldn’t imagine anyone’s being so deprived.

  Rachel took a deep breath. “My grandmother’s in Asia doing some long-awaited traveling. After that there’s only my mother, but she’s in a nursing home in New Jersey. She doesn’t know who I am anymore. And I did have a family—a husband and children. Once.”

  “What happened to them?” Gracie, Joe’s quietest sister, asked.

  “They died at Christmas four years ago. In a house fire.”

  This statement produced a long silence.

  “How terrible for you,” murmured Mary at last

  “How awful.” Mary Cecilia reached over and touched

  Rachel’s hand.

  Rachel looked around at their concerned faces. “thought I would never be able to celebrate Christmas again. And then I met all of you. I felt so welcome in your home.” She tried to smile.

  Jim cleared his throat. “You are one of us,” he said comfortingly. “You’re family.”

  Rachel felt their love reaching out to include and embrace her. “I feel that I am. Thank you—all of you. And

  I hope you know that I love Joe very much.”

  “We’ve wanted to see Joey settled for a long time,” said Lois. This elicited a round of agreement.

  “Chrissy isn’t your baby, is she?”

  Rachel stared back at Mary Cecilia, who had zinged out of left field with that question and dropped it right in her lap. “No,” Rachel said quieüy. “She isn’t.”

  “Chrissy’s mine,” Gina said into the hollow silence.

  Rachel swiveled to look at Gina. She remained composed, her hands folded quietly in her lap, even as everyone’s jaw dropped.

  “And I hope that she will soon be Rachel and Joe’s,”

  Gina said.

  No one spoke for a long time as their minds grappled with this unexpected revelation. “I guess there’s more to this story,” said Mary gently. “More than you’ll want to tell us right now?”

  “Yes, and I want to share it with all of you soon,” Gina said, her head held high. “After I’ve talked to my sisters. I just hope that…that you won’t think less of me. I couldn’t bear that.” Her voice broke slightly, but she looked at Rachel and seemed to take heart.

  “Whatever you’ve done, we love you, Gina,” Mary said firmly.

  “You had the baby,” said Tonia. “You didn’t get rid of it”

  Gina’s eyes opened wide. “I would never—I mean, I couldn’t”

  Gracie went to Gina and slid an arm around her shoulders. “Tell us about it only when you’re ready, okay?”

  Gina, tears in her eyes, nodded.

  Lois glanced around at the group before she spoke. “Well, guys, we all wanted Joey to have his own family. Looks like Gina has given him a head start, if you ask me.

  A few tentative smiles, and then Mary got up from her chair, walked to Rachel and hugged her. Rachel was framing what she wanted to say to them, something about love and loyalty and how she admired those traits in them, but she didn’t have a chance to speak before a doctor arrived carrying a clipboard.

  Unaware of the mix of powerful emotions humming in the air, he greeted them quickly and began to brief them on Joe’s condition.

  “Joe’s got a few nasty bruises, and we’ve set his broken arm. We’re also monitoring him for internal injuries. There are no signs of any yet, which is encouraging. He has a concussion, but I’m happy to report that as of fifteen minutes ago, he has regained consciousness. The only thing is, he keeps asking for Rachel. I don’t recall a sister named Rachel.” He raised his eyebrows questioningly.

  “I’m Rachel.”

  “She’s his fiancée,” supplied Mary.

  The doctor grinned at her. “Ah, I see. In that case, Rachel, won’t you come with me? He won’t be pretty to look at, but I think it would be good medicine for Jœ to see you.”

  JOE OPENED HIS EYES. The pain had receded into a huge white void, and hovering above him was the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen. She was gazing at him with love and trust and a lot of other emotions that were too complicated to enumerate. Her hair was bunched around her face in a wondrous welter of curls, and she had a face like a Madonna, or was it an angel?

  “Joe?”

  Drifting in from wherever he’d been, he realized that this wasn’t a Madonna, nor was it an angel. It was Rachel. He hadn’t expected her. She was furious with him. At the moment he couldn’t recall why she was so angry, only that he’d been devastated. He roused himself, tried to concentrate, couldn’t. So was he alive, or had that accident with the elevator shaft sent him straight to heaven?

  She touched his hand. She bent close and kissed his lips. This wasn’t heaven. It was decidedly real. It hurt when he smiled at her, even though the balm of her tears I fell on his eyelids.

  “Oh, Joe, I’ve been so worried about you.” She wiped the tears from his face with gentle fingertips and laid her cheek against his. This he could feel. This he liked. Suddenly he remembered. Oh, God. Gina. This morning. Rachel hanging the phone up on him. What to say?

  “Well, I was so upset about what you thought that went out and threw myself down an elevator shaft,” he said.

  She straightened and frowned. “Don’t joke, Joe. I know nothing happened between you and Gina. She’s I told me everything.”

  Relief sent him spinning. He squeezed her hand, and I she squeezed back. His lips were p
ainfully dry. “I would I have come over to explain after you hung up the phone on me this morning, but I got the call about the Crowne Point’s elevators malfunctioning, and it was a safety issue, so I knew I had to go check things out myself. I didn’t trust anyone else to deal with the problem.” The long speech wore him out.

  “Joe, I shouldn’t have jumped to conclusions about you and Gina this morning. I should have known better.”

  “It looked bad,” Joe conceded. “From your point of view, I mean.”

  “Don’t talk, my love. Save your strength.”

  “For what? Looks like I’m going to be laid up here for a while.”

  “For wedding vows. Marry me, Joe.”

  “I second the emotion,” said someone behind her, and she turned to see Joe’s parents, all his sisters and Gina, who proceeded to crowd into the small hospital room.

  Joe’s lips curved into a wry and painful smile. “I guess it’s unanimous,” he said.

  “Well? I asked you something,” Rachel said, holding tightly to his hand.

  “I asked you first,” Joe reminded her.

  “The answer is yes,” Rachel said.

  “When? When?” All the Marzinskis circled the bed.

  “As soon as we can,” Rachel said firmly. “As soon as Mimi gets home. I want her to be my attendant. And I want Chrissy to come.”

  As everyone else began to chatter among themselves, Joe gazed up at Rachel. “I love you, Rachel. With all my heart.”

  “And I love you.”

  He felt better now. Fantastic, in fact. “We’ll make a wonderful life together, you’ll see.”

  She leaned over the rail at the side of the bed and kissed him on the forehead. At least it didn’t hurt. “One thing for sure, I’11 always have plenty of reasons to celebrate Christmas from now on,” she said.

  “For instance?” Joe murmured.

  “You and Chrissy and Gina, and your mom and dad and Mary Cecilia and Greg and Paul, Megan, Mary Grace, Todd, Amanda—”

  “I get the picture. The very big picture. And I hope that before long we’ll be adding some new names of our own to that list.”