Jingle All the Way

by Fern Michaels

  I try to rearrange my scarf babushkalike to better cover my nose, ears, and head, but then my neck is exposed, and it instantly hurts from the biting wind.

  At last, a van stops in front of the building. It has the words “For the Children” emblazoned on the side. It hadn’t occurred to me that For the Children would have lent out a van. A man rolls down the passenger side window.

  “Are you Aimee?” he asks.

  “Yep.”

  “Hey. I’m Gerry. I’ll open the door. Hang on.”

  He gets out of the van and shakes my hand. He’s wearing baggy green velour pants, pointy elf shoes, and a white T-shirt. He’s got crewcut blond hair, rough skin, and pale blue eyes.

  “Hi. It’s nice to meet you. I’m Aimee.”

  When he opens the van door, I realize there’s something weird about this van, and I’m struck by the sudden knowledge that I’m getting into a vehicle of total strangers. Maybe they painted “For the Children” on it as part of an elaborate ruse. These three guys could be serial murderers who have outfitted their van so they can trap me inside it and then gut and flay me in a particularly brutish manner. Then I see that the only real thing that’s different about this truck is that it’s got a fold-out ramp, and that’s when I realize this van hasn’t been designed to kidnap random women; it’s a van for somebody who uses a wheelchair.

  I get in, and there is a very attractive man sitting in the backseat. Before I tell you what happens next, I have to give you some more background on me. You need to know that I’m not normally a woman who gets crazed with lust over a good-looking guy. I’ve never been out just for fun, meaningless sex. It’s important to me to care for somebody and for that somebody to care for me before I get physical with a guy. I tend to be practical with my choice of boyfriends. I’m not looking to reform a bad boy who treats me like crap. Give me a sweet guy with a good job who treats me well over a jerky pretty boy any day. Because I care a lot less about dating a hunk than choosing a sweet guy, I usually go through this whole evaluation of a guy that’s not based so much on initial attraction but on things like whether he’s smart and has a good career and so on. Having said all that, you’ll understand how surprised I am when, with one look at this guy, my body is rocked by this intense carnal craving. In just moments, the wave of desire eases, and I decide to pass off the powerful surge of emotion to the fact I haven’t had sex in several months.

  Then I see the wheelchair folded up against the wall beside him, and that jars me even more.

  “Hi, I’m Aimee,” I finally manage.

  “I’m Ryan.”

  I wave up front at what must be Vince. “Hi. Thanks for picking me up.”

  “No problem. Sorry we’re late.”

  Gerry closes the door and gets in the front seat, and Vince takes off. I smile shyly at Ryan, feeling a little awkward.

  I’d put all three guys to be about my age. Vince is Hispanic and very good-looking, with dark hair, dark eyes, and a nice smile framed by two small dimples. Vince is also wearing green pants, and I think it’s an interesting choice to have the guy in the wheelchair play Santa while the rest of us are the elves. I wonder how the kids will react.

  Ryan has curly brown hair and friendly brown eyes. He looks like he was once a jock. He has large, muscular arms and a powerful chest. He’s not wearing a winter coat, just his red Santa pants and a white T-shirt. He doesn’t need a jacket because the heat is cranked up to levels you’d expect to find in the center of the sun. Within a minute or two, I’m all warmed up, and a couple minutes after that I start to sweat, so I peel my jacket, scarf, and gloves off. I catch a glimpse of myself in the rearview mirror and discover that my hairstyle can best be described by the word “disastrous.” I have curly hair just like my mother and sister, but unlike the two of them who always blow-dry and straighten their hair into sleek, orderly styles, I’m far too lazy to bother with much in the way of primping, and today I regret it. The scarf has completely flattened the curls on the left side of my head while causing the curls on the right side to spring all over the place in lunatic coils. Lovely.

  “So, Aimee,” Vince says, “how’d you get roped into doing this? Did your office make you so it looks like your company is full of charitable, well-meaning employees?”

  “No, no. I volunteered by choice. I get a little delusional every now and then and think I want to be a better human being, and then I remember being a good human being takes a lot of energy, and I’m not really up for it. But here I am. How about you guys?”

  “We’ve been doing this every year for three years,” Vince says. “It’s actually really fun. Well, Gerry and I have done it for three years, and Ryan has done it for two.”

  “I was recovering in the hospital three years ago, so that wasn’t my fault,” Ryan says with a smile.

  Again, I feel uncomfortable, and I absolutely hate myself for feeling this way. So he’s in a wheelchair, get over it!

  “How do you guys know each other?” I ask.

  “High school. We went to high school together,” Vince says. “We were all on the football team together. You like football?”

  “I don’t much like watching any sports,” I say. “I like playing them. Volleyball, skiing, swimming, tennis, really just about anything. I was a jock in high school and college, but football has never been one of my favorites.”

  We talk some more, and I learn that Vince owns his own motorcycle repair shop and Gerry is in the air force. Ryan once worked as an organizational management consultant in the medical industry, but since he got out of rehab from his accident, he’s been reexamining his life and trying to figure out if he wants to go back to doing that or take his career in a new direction.

  The traffic is absolutely unbearable, which I don’t understand. People should have taken the day off to fly home to be with their families. They should not be in our way, anyway. I feel strongly about this.

  “Is there an accident? Why aren’t we moving?” Ryan asks.

  “I don’t know. I don’t see anything,” Vince says.

  When we finally get off the highway, we’re able to go a little more quickly, but we still seem to drive and drive and drive for an eternity. I don’t understand how it can take so long to get to a suburb.

  “Where is this place? I feel like we could have driven to the Himalayas in the same amount of time,” I say.

  “Welcome to urban sprawl, Aimee,” Vince says.

  To kill time, Vince and Gerry tell very explicit off-color jokes. I can tell a racy joke every now and then, and I don’t usually get offended easily (although if something strikes me as sexist, I can go from calm to outraged in seconds flat), but because these guys are strangers, it makes me a little uncomfortable.

  At long, long last, we get to the hospital, and Vince hands me a plastic bag. “You can change inside.”

  Oh, goody.

  Inside the women’s washroom, I change into the green velour top and pants that could comfortably clothe a rhinoceros. I tuck my hair back beneath the green felt cap and add a ton of red lipstick and pink blush to affect looking merry.

  I join the guys in this waiting room area just outside the children’s ward. They are completely dressed in their Santa and elf attire. They are the youngest, buffest, hottest Santa and his helpers I’ve ever seen in my life.

  “Okay, so what is it I’m supposed to do?” I ask.

  “Well, here’s the scoop,” Vince says. “The gifts are color coded. Red is for girls and green is for boys. On the bottom of the gifts, it says what the gift is and what age group it’s appropriate for.”

  He flips over a red box, and written faintly in pencil it says, “Age 3. Doll.”

  “We can’t guarantee that every kid will get what he or she wants, but Santa will ask, and we’ll do our best to accommodate. I was thinking we should have one elf sort of entertaining the troops while they wait and the other two elves picking out the gifts for Santa to give out. Aimee, how about you do the girls’ gifts, I’ll do th
e boys’ gifts, and Gerry, you can maintain order while the kids wait their turn.”

  “Sounds good,” I say. Gerry nods his agreement as well.

  With our plan in place, a nurse ushers us into a large room where the kids are waiting for us, and the stressed-out, bummed-out feeling I’ve been battling all day lurches toward a full-on depression because these kids look very, very ill. Several are bald, a couple are bedridden and hooked up to machines, and all of them seem pale and weak. It is heart-wrenching and soul-diminishing at the same time.

  The walls are painted in relentlessly cheerful primary colors. Kids’ artwork—crayon drawings and watercolors that range from discernable images to abstract, Rorschachian shapes—is taped to nearly every available inch of wall space. There is a Christmas tree with ornaments that were obviously crafted by the kids, and the handmade decorations, with their perfect imperfections, put a smile back on my face.

  It turns out my worries about how the kids would react to a Santa in a wheelchair were unfounded. They seem thrilled by him. Some of the kids don’t mention the chair at all. Others ask how he got hurt or why he needs the chair. Each time he tells a new made-up story that makes the kids laugh, and then he turns the attention to them, asking what it is they want for Christmas. A boy who is also in a wheelchair seems especially excited to meet this particular Santa.

  “Do you really need a wheelchair?” the boy asks.

  “I really do,” Ryan says.

  “What happened?”

  “It was when I was going down a chimney. I came down the wrong way and blammo! Wheelchair City.”

  The boy giggles.

  “But it’s not too bad being in a wheelchair,” Ryan says.

  “Yeah it is; you can’t skateboard or anything.”

  “But just think. Your feet never get tired when you’re going through museums or the zoo. You get special seating at the movies, and you always get a parking space.”

  “Parking space?”

  “You’ll care about it when you’re older, trust me. Now, what is it you want for Christmas?”

  “An X-box.”

  I watch Vince do some frantic searching through his bag of gifts, and then he leans in to whisper something to Ryan. Ryan nods, and Vince hands him the gift.

  “Now, since you don’t have your own TV to use while you’re hanging out in the hospital, why don’t you check this out?”

  The boy unwraps the package, which turns out to be a Gameboy, a handheld computer game player.

  “All right!” the boy says. “Cool. Thanks.”

  “No sweat. You have a Merry Christmas, okay?”

  The boy hugs Ryan, and my heart melts. It’s easy to see Ryan as a former football-playing hunk, but it takes a little suspension of disbelief to get my mind around the idea that this cute, brawny, young guy could bond so well with little kids. It’s the stuff of made-for-TV movies, cotton candy, and greeting card sentiments—sickeningly sweet, but also irresistible.

  The next kid in line is an adorable blond girl with slightly chubby cheeks and ringlets of curls springing out from her head. She looks like she’s around five or six years old.

  “What’s your name?” Ryan asks.

  “Madelyn.”

  “So, Madelyn, what is it you want for Christmas?”

  “See her?” Madelyn says in a whisper. She points to one of the little girls who is asleep in a bed and attached to various scary, futuristic-looking machines. “Her name is Sarah. Can you bring her a new heart? She’s been waiting a real long time. She’s real sick.”

  A stricken look crosses Ryan’s face, and for a moment, he’s rendered speechless.

  “I’ll see what I can do, okay? But what about you, what would you like for Christmas?”

  She shrugs. “Just the heart for Sarah’s all I want.”

  I lean in and whisper into Ryan’s ear, “Give her two stuffed animals. One for her and one for Sarah.”

  “Good thought,” he says.

  I hand him two boxes marked “Age: 4–8. Battery operated stuffed animal (cat).”

  “Why don’t you take this one for Sarah and this one for yourself so you can play together?”

  Madelyn smiles. “Yeah. ’Kay. Thanks, Santa.”

  I’m impressed with how comfortable Gerry, Vince, and Ryan—three tough-guy-looking types—are with the little kids. As I watch the guys with the kids, my dark mood softens, because there is no possible way anyone can feel grumpy when little kids are scampering around, squealing and laughing with delight.

  I’m not sure how long we’ve been at the hospital when the nurse tells the kids that Santa has to go home because it’s getting close to their bedtime. I can’t believe how quickly the night has gone. There are many protests—plaintive choruses of “Nooooo!” fill the room—and I understand a little of what it’s like to be a beloved celebrity.

  We leave the hospital still dressed in our outfits, and that’s when I feel the fatigue of the long day—the long month—hitting me. As Vince pulls out of the parking lot, I say, “Weren’t the kids adorable?”

  “That girl with the red hair is going to be a babe when she grows up,” Vince says. “She is going to be one juicy morsel.”

  I know technically that kids grow up and become adults with sexual feelings, but I don’t want to talk or think about it, and I really don’t want a man I barely know to talk or think about it.

  “She reminds me of that girl that was after me the other night at the bar,” Gerry says.

  “She wasn’t after you. She couldn’t have been less interested in you if she tried.”

  Vince and Gerry start arguing loudly about whether this girl they met at a bar the other night was flirting with Vince or Gerry. They are each quite convinced that he is the one she had her sights on. They go on and on about what great tits she has and how great her ass is. As they go into greater and greater detail about how they’d like to sexually service her and be serviced by her, I get more and more uncomfortable. I realize that Gerry and Vince may be the kind of guys who volunteer their time to bring cheer into children’s lives, but they are also sexist bastards.

  From the purgatory of the backseat, Ryan and I exchange looks and half smiles, trying to pretend we can’t hear the gutter talk going on in the front of the van.

  “That was fun tonight, wasn’t it?” I say.

  “Yeah. The kids are really great.”

  “I was really touched by that little girl who didn’t ask for anything for herself but for a new heart for a friend.”

  “I read this article about this charity—shoot, I can’t remember what it’s called. It might be the Make a Wish Foundation or another one like that. Anyway, the charity takes poor kids out shopping for Christmas, and the director of the project said the hardest thing about it was trying to get the kids to buy things for themselves. The kids always want to buy things for their family instead.”

  “That is so sweet.”

  Our conversation is cut off when we hear Gerry say, “Where the hell are we?”

  I look out the window. We’re in a subdivision, with cookie-cutter houses as far as the eye can see.

  “What are we doing in a subdivision?” I ask.

  “Shit. I’m not really sure. Mapquest told me to turn on Ida, which I did,” Vince says, “but I’m not sure where I went wrong. What does Mapquest say?”

  “Well, where are we now?” Gerry asks.

  “We’re on . . .” Vince slows the van down and squints at the street sign. “Man, could they make these signs any smaller? Streetlights, anyone? It looks like Grape Circle. Wait, how’d we get on Grape? I thought we were on Ida.”

  We drive around in circles for fifteen minutes, which may not sound like that long of a length of time, but in the context it’s an eternity—after all, we’re in a major suburb, not the Australian outback. How hard could it be to find civilization?

  “We have to get back to Tower Road,” Gerry says.

  “Thank you, genius, I hadn’t thought of that.”
Vince slows the van down to inspect the street sign. “Grape Drive. What’s that street?” We slow down again a little ways ahead. “Grape Circle! We’re back to Grape Circle!” At the next block, we slow down again. “Grape Road. Aah! We need to get to Ida to get back to Tower. Where’d Ida go? We’re in an endless maze of Grapes.”

  “We’ve done a good deed tonight,” I say, “and how are we rewarded? By being banished to the farthest hinterlands of subdivisioned suburbia! We’ll be lost here forever! Why do they name every single street Ida and Grape? Why?”

  “Because they are out to get us, obviously,” Ryan says dryly, and I can’t help but snicker.

  “That way!” Gerry yells. “That street is Tower Road! That’s the road we came in on!”

  “Where?” Vince asks.

  “Back there. You passed it.”

  Vince does an abrupt and extremely illegal U-turn and goes careening into the curb, which makes a horrible noise and gives us all a very hard jolt.

  We get onto the road Gerry thought was Tower Road, only it turns out to be Smoky Mountain Road.

  “Shit. I’ve never heard of Smoky Mountain. Is it on the map?” Vince asks.

  “I’m looking,” Gerry says.

  “Where are we?” Ryan asks. The subdivision we were driving in is behind us, but ahead of us it looks like farm country, just endless empty fields that will no doubt one day become more subdivisions, but right now just seem like an endless expanse of wastelands.

  I can’t believe we were lost for fifteen minutes only to be spit out onto some unknown street in the middle of nowhere.

  “I feel like we’re in rural Nebraska or Kansas or something,” Ryan says.

  Just then the van makes a horrible sputtering noise, and Vince starts swearing up a storm. The van dies just as Vince pulls over to the side of the road.

  Vince, Gerry, and I go outside to see what’s going on, leaving the van door open so we can easily talk with Ryan.

  “You must have knocked something off the van when you hit the curb,” Gerry says.

  Vince lays in the rocky, snowy terrain on the shoulder of the road so he can inspect under the wheel of the passenger side where he rammed into the curb.