Father Christmas

by Judith Arnold

  “I’ve got a different problem,” Rick spoke up. “We celebrate Chanukah. Rebecca wants to know why Santa won’t visit her. She thinks it isn’t fair, because she’s been a good girl all year.”

  “That’s a hard one,” Molly confirmed. “It’s difficult to see so many people celebrating Christmas when it isn’t your holiday. Do you give her presents for Chanukah?”

  “Yes, but she says it’s not the same. How can I get her to be proud of who she is, when it looks like everyone else is having more fun than she is?”

  “You could try coming up with some family traditions, too. Maybe you could donate some time at a homeless shelter or a nursing home on Christmas Day. Or take a drive in the country. If you do something special that none of Rebecca’s Christian friends are doing, she might feel like they’re the ones missing out on all the fun.”

  And so it went, the entire two hours of the class devoted to making the holidays meaningful and happy for all the children. The fathers traded information on which toys were hot and which were worthless. They discussed ways to involve their children in various holiday preparations. They talked about how to maintain discipline when visiting relatives doted on the children and spoiled them. They even swapped laundry tips: cranberry sauce stained pretty badly, but sweet potatoes washed out all right if you pre-treated the stain.

  John listened without contributing too much. Molly had no idea whether he cared about wash-day challenges, but she knew he had already done most of his gift shopping for Michael. She’d been there while he bought the blocks and the puzzle plane and all the rest.

  At exactly noon, she heard tiny feet stampeding down the stairs, accompanied by giggles and the babble of shrill voices. The children spilled into the Pre-K room, all of them chattering at once: “We went in the foam pit!” “Joey has a hole in his sock!” “I jumped way, way, way high! I jumped the highest!”

  That last boast came from Michael.

  The next few minutes were a jumble of children struggling into coats and boots, fathers searching for missing mittens and exchanging best wishes for the holidays. Molly noticed that Michael was seated in the midst of the chaos, patiently putting on one of his boots. He didn’t ask for help, didn’t whine, but just sat on the floor, wriggling his foot slowly into the stiff rubber boot.

  When he’d first come to the Children’s Garden, he would have quickly grown frustrated and demanded assistance. He had matured a great deal in the past few weeks. Molly was proud of him. And then she wondered whether she had the right to be proud—not simply as a professional early-childhood educator but as someone who cared personally about his tender emotions. He had endured so much in his short life, yet he’d somehow developed the ability to face a challenge and try his best.

  Her vision misted. She experienced more than a teacher’s satisfaction with a successful student. Her pride in Michael was maternal—and she had no right to feel maternal about him.

  Abruptly turning away, she spotted John reaching for the zipper of his jacket. Had he come here only for the class? Was he really going to leave without talking to her?

  She’d slept with him, damn it. She’d shared herself with him, body and soul—and he’d shared himself with her. Was he actually going to walk out without a word?

  If Michael could face a challenge so courageously, so could she, even if his challenge was boots and her challenge was John. Squaring her shoulders, she crossed the Pre-K room to him. Standing so close to him made her uncomfortably aware of his height, his size...his virility. When he was this near, her mind came alive with memories of every minute they’d spent together, every word spoken, every thought exchanged, every kiss, every touch.

  “We have to talk,” she said.

  “Okay.”

  She would have preferred for him to say, “Yes, you’re absolutely right, I have things to tell you.” And then, of course, she would have wanted him to tell her what she longed to hear: I love you, Molly. I needed a few days apart from you to make sure, but now I know. Now I can say it. As if he’d ever say so many words without prompting. As if he’d say those words.

  But at least he was willing to give her a hearing. Now she had to figure out what to say.

  She waited until all the other fathers and children departed, leaving Molly and John alone—except for Michael. Not wanting to impose on Shannon, who was still upstairs, probably straightening out after the foam-pit jamboree, Molly hunkered down next to Michael, who had gotten his second boot about three-quarters on. “Would you like to do a puzzle?” she asked. “I’ve got a great animal puzzle.”

  “A big puzzle?” He looked interested.

  “Yes. Would you like to do it?”

  “I like a big puzzle.” He yanked his boot fully on and pushed himself to his feet. “Where’s the big puzzle?”

  Molly led him into the Young Toddlers section and pulled a box down from a shelf. “Here it is,” she said, emptying the pieces onto one of the low tables and pulling out a chair for him. Within minutes, he was immersed in the task of fitting the pieces together.

  Satisfied that he wouldn’t interrupt her and John for a while, she walked out of the classroom to where John was waiting on the other side of the partition. They could watch Michael over the wall while they talked.

  John clearly wasn’t going to begin the conversation. She’d been the one to request it, so she was going to have to get it started. Ignoring the panic that gnawed at her, she took a deep breath and lifted her gaze to him. “My sister told me she had a word with you on Monday.” She wished her voice didn’t sound so thin, so anxious.

  John glanced at Michael, then turned back to her. He lifted his hand, no longer bandaged, and shoved back his hair. When he lowered his arm, she saw the red line of his slowly healing wound across his palm. His wariness fell away, leaving behind a pained expression. “Yeah,” he said. “We had words.” The way he said it implied that they’d fought.

  “And ever since then, you haven’t—” she swallowed the catch in her throat “—you just backed off from me, John. I don’t know...” Her eyes were beginning to burn and she blinked, desperate not to cry in front of him.

  He wrapped his arms around her and pulled her gently against him. She wanted to resist, but she needed the strength of his embrace right now. She needed his warmth. Her nerves were shivering.

  “I don’t know what she said to you, John, or why it was so meaningful to you that you could just—just run away from me—”

  “Your sister only pointed out the truth,” he murmured, drawing her close. “She wanted me to promise that I’d never hurt you. That’s a promise I can’t make. I will hurt you.”

  The soft wool of his sweater was damp, and she realized the dampness had been caused by her tears. She hated herself for weeping, but she couldn’t help it. Stupid though it was, she felt that falling apart was a safe thing to do as long as John’s arms were around her.

  “Why do you think you’d hurt me?” she demanded.

  “I hurt the last woman I loved,” he said.

  Her tears halted as she felt the impact of his words. Did he just admit he loved her? Wasn’t that implicit in what he’d said?

  Before she could fully grasp his statement, he continued. “I can’t make the kind of promises you deserve.”

  “What promises have I asked for?”

  He sighed. “My work makes me hard. It makes me cold. I carry a gun, Molly.”

  “I know you carry a gun,” she allowed. “And I’m not thrilled about it. But when you got hurt...” She swallowed again, and leaned back so she could see his face. “When that creep hurt you, all I could think of was that I wish you’d shot him. I know, that’s a terrible thing to say.” Her voice crumbled, and she felt her eyes grow wet again. It was scary to think how much she loved John—so much that she would wish a violent punishment on anyone who hurt him.

  He pulled her back against him. “That’s what I’m saying,” he explained. “If you get involved with a cop, it’s going to chan
ge the way you think. It’s going to suck the sweetness right out of you.”

  “Maybe it’s too late to be worrying what it’s going to do to me. I’m already involved with a cop.” Her voice gained strength. She’d said it, said everything she had to without using the word love. Her words rang with truth, and her convictions gave her strength. “You’re afraid you might hurt me. Well, that’s a chance I’m willing to take. Love doesn’t come with a guarantee, and that’s why you have to be brave to try it. I can be brave if I have to.” She angled her head to view him, and his dark eyes found hers, locked onto hers the way his mouth might lock onto hers in a kiss. “I’ve seen how brave you can be, too. So I know you can do it if you want.”

  His lips twitched into a hint of a smile. “You’re a lot braver than I am, Molly.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “And you’re stubborn and reckless—”

  “Stubborn, yes. Reckless, no.”

  His smile solidified, reaching his eyes, reaching her heart and warming it. He bowed and brushed her mouth with his. “I guess I could learn to be brave, if that’s what it takes to make this thing work.”

  “We’ll make it work,” she vowed, wondering whether that was a promise either of them could keep. Perhaps he’d been right in calling her reckless. He was careful and self-protective enough not to promise anything.

  But she would keep this promise. She would do whatever she could to keep it, because she loved him. And when he kissed her again, a long, leisurely kiss that held promises of its own, she knew that the love they had was worth any promise.

  “I finished the puzzle!” Michael hollered, startling them. They sprang apart and glanced over the wall, where Michael was beaming at them, the completed animal puzzle spread across the table next to him. “A very hard puzzle. I worked it out. Everything fits. All the pieces!”

  Yes, Molly thought, her love expanding to include him. All the pieces fit, and the puzzle was solved. Like Michael, she and John could work it out. If John wanted the pieces to fit as much as she did, they’d get it done.

  Chapter Fifteen

  “SHE’S BEAUTIFUL,” John whispered.

  “You’re telling me,” Jamie whispered back.

  Through the open door John could hear laughter, conversation and the occasional clink of glasses touching. But Jamie McCoy, the host of this Christmas Eve party, had insisted on marching him down the hall to the nursery so he could admire the baby whose life he’d saved—or so Jamie claimed—by first tracking down her AWOL mother and then helping Jamie gain full custody of the child.

  She wasn’t as small as she’d been when John had seen her last June. Then, she’d been barely a month old. Now she was a gorgeous little girl, clad in white pajamas with little pink kittens printed all over them, sleeping peacefully, her thumb in her mouth. Her hair was pale and downy, her eyelashes silver-white and her mouth pursed as she sucked on her finger.

  “You realize,” Jamie murmured, gently spreading her blanket over her compact body, “that I owe you big for this.”

  John didn’t believe the citizens of Arlington owed him anything more than the generous salary and benefits package he received for doing his job. He was glad when a case came out well, but it was his professional responsibility to make as many of them come out well as he could.

  If anything, he owed Jamie. It was thanks to him that John had gotten the name of Allison Winslow—Jamie’s Daddy-School teacher and now his fiancée—as a source for child-care information, and thanks to Allison that he’d gotten Molly’s name.

  “Allison’s going to adopt her,” Jamie told him, keeping his voice down so he wouldn’t disturb the child. She was so deeply asleep, John doubted she could be roused by a nuclear explosion, let alone a couple of hushed voices. “She wanted to begin the adoption process now, but Dennis said to wait until we’re married. It’ll be simpler if she’s my wife.”

  “Dennis?”

  “My lawyer, Dennis Murphy. You probably wouldn’t know him. He doesn’t handle criminal cases. I’m about as wicked as his clients get.”

  Discretion forbade John from reporting that Dennis Murphy actually did handle criminal cases—specifically, the criminal case of two seven-year-old imps who happened to be his next-of-kin. He recalled the well-dressed lawyer who had come to bail out his bank-scamming offspring, and who had later stopped by John’s desk to thank him for keeping his kids out of the juvenile justice system.

  Nobody ever said fatherhood was easy. John knew—and Jamie surely knew, as well—that raising children was a high-risk undertaking. Even if Jamie’s daughter and John’s son had never gotten conned into ripping off an ATM, neither Jamie nor John would know whether their fathering efforts had paid off until their kids were grown and gone.

  A swell of laughter from the living room reached down the hall and into the gloom of the nursery, which was lit only by the dim green glow of a frog-shaped night-light. John listened for Molly’s warm, rolling laughter in the sound. Wanting her so much still frightened him, but he was trying hard to be as brave as she thought he was.

  Molly made it hard to be a pessimist. She refused to let him carry the weight of their relationship on his shoulders. She had actually gotten him to accept that the collapse of his marriage hadn’t been all his fault. “It takes two to make a relationship succeed,” she argued. “And it takes two to make a relationship fail.”

  If this relationship with Molly failed—and against his better judgment, he believed it might not—at least the issue that broke them up wouldn’t be his job. Molly seemed to understand that police work wasn’t always a nine-to-five thing, that sometimes he worked late and sometimes he brought his work home, not in a briefcase but in his heart and his gut, where it would gnaw at him long into the night.

  Only five days had passed since she’d persuaded him to take a chance on loving her, and in those five days she hadn’t seen him at his worst. She hadn’t witnessed what he could be like after spending a day working through a murder-suicide, after spending a night trying to erase from his mind the vision of Mr. and Mrs. Balfour lying side by side in their marriage bed, holding hands, violently dead. Molly had no idea how bad it could be.

  But she was prepared to defy the odds, and so was he.

  “It was good you could come tonight,” Jamie remarked, leading him from the nursery. They paused to adjust to the bright light of the hall, then proceeded to the even brighter kitchen. “But I wasn’t exactly expecting you. You’ve screwed up my plans.”

  John didn’t know how to respond to that. Molly had assured him he would be welcome at the party; she’d asked Allison if she could bring him and, according to her, Allison had sworn that she’d be in big trouble if she didn’t bring him.

  He remained silent as Jamie dug into the refrigerator and pulled out two chilled bottles of beer, one of which he passed to John. “See, I had this idea of setting Molly up with a friend of mine,” he explained as he wrenched off the cap and took a swig from the bottle. “You want a glass?”

  John shook his head, both intrigued and appalled by the thought of Molly with another man.

  “Allison hates it when I drink from the bottle,” Jamie griped. “She’s trying to civilize me. She thinks she understands guys, but she doesn’t. You tell me, am I an expert on guys, or what?”

  John smiled. He read Jamie’s weekly newspaper column, Guy Stuff, and found most of his observations right on the money. When it came to guys, Jamie was an expert. “Tell her beer tastes better from the bottle,” he suggested. He himself couldn’t recall the last time he’d drunk beer from a glass.

  “That might work.” Jamie took another drink, then lowered his bottle and gave John a good-natured smile. “My buddy, Steve—you met him, didn’t you? He’s the guy moping in the corner by the tree. He’s in a funk because I’m getting married. He thinks my getting hitched is a betrayal of everything I stand for. I had this notion that if I introduced him to Molly, he’d feel the sting of ol’ Cupid’s arrow and mayb
e understand that falling for a woman isn’t such a terrible thing.”

  John had felt that particular arrow’s sting, and while he wouldn’t call it terrible, he wasn’t quite convinced that it was good. It was good for him, certainly, but was it good for Molly? Would it be good for her once she realized what cops were like on a bad day?

  He had to stop being so fatalistic. She loved him; maybe she’d be able to deal with the rest. “I’m sorry I ruined your plans,” he said.

  “Well, for Molly’s sake, I guess I’ll forgive you.” Jamie tapped his bottle against John’s. “Here’s to her. Make her happy. She and Allison are like sisters, you know. If Molly isn’t happy, Allison grieves.”

  John smiled impassively, his thoughts on Molly’s real sister and her angry honesty. If he’d listened to her and kept his distance, he would have done his part to guarantee Molly’s happiness. But he hadn’t kept his distance, and he could only hope this thing worked out the way Molly was certain it would.

  Sipping his beer, he followed Jamie back into the living room. In one corner stood a towering spruce, its boughs decked with tinsel and metallic silver and gold balls. A glum-looking fellow hunkered down on an ottoman next to the tree—Jamie’s disappointed pal, Steve. Molly stood amid a cluster of guests, relating preschool stories. “One of the kids told me she’d seen Santa Claus at the mall, but she knew he wasn’t the real Santa Claus. She insisted that the real Santa Claus was living in a condo in Tampa. She said he was spending Christmas Day at Walt Disney World, and she wished she was, too. I swear, I don’t know how kids come up with this stuff!”

  “It makes more sense than what we tell them,” one of the women near her observed. “If you were Santa, where would you rather live, the North Pole or Tampa?”