Christmas in Cactus Flats and Other Holiday Romances

by Laura Briggs

  Christmas in Cactus Flats and Other Holiday Romances

  By Laura Briggs

  Smashwords Edition

  Copyright 2015 Laura Briggs

  Cover image: “Western Christmas.” Original art, “Vintage Christmas green card” by Geraktv. Used with permission. http://www.dreamstime.com/

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. It may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com to purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  Table of Contents

  Christmas in Cactus Flats

  Parade Banter

  Secret Santa

  I Know What You Did Last Christmas

  Life at the North Pole

  Chapter One

  A train rumbled past Drew Lorman's window every night at nine-fifteen. Well, not really — the train was six blocks away — but that was how it sounded in the silence of her neighborhood, knowing the city was vibrant, alive, and beckoning in the distance.

  She would lay awake, curly strawberry hair spreading across her pillow, and imagine what people were doing in the world beyond the four walls of her darkened childhood room. The people at parties in lighted apartments, the lonely people in sad, dark rooms, the people walking dogs or running late at night in the park a mile away from her rose-printed paper and Care Bear collection piled on the window seat. Sometimes, she imagined her other life, the one she could have had if her moment of birth hadn't been the last she shared with her birth mother. Another apartment, a house sided in yellow with a postage stamp lawn covered in plastic toys — these were tangible possibilities which seemed as real in the darkness as the brick exterior of her Boston home.

  On her dresser, a lantern nightlight cast shadows of running horses on the wallpaper, turning slowly around the lighted bulb within. Drew's sleepy gaze would watch it when these thoughts finally ceased to crowd her mind. Their lighted figures would race across the walls for hours, until her mother's hand flicked the switch before she, too, went to bed. Sometimes late, past midnight if she had been on call as the emergency doctor at the pediatric hospital.

  "Night, night," she said, pulling the door closed gently behind her. Her voice a soft sing-song tone, the final sound Drew heard before falling asleep.

  Drew had known the truth about her birth since she was five. Her parents had read aloud storybooks like "Being Adopted is Special", its child psychology-approval stamp alongside copies of Peter Rabbit and Dr. Seuss. In a way, Drew felt she would have known anyway. Her mother Priscilla's hair naturally the shade of brunette, no traces of freckles, a sturdy figure in comparison to Drew's wiry form. Her father Willis, who died when she was twelve, dark hair and the muscles of a football player beneath the surgical scrubs and white coat in the photograph framed in his old study.

  Drew would play at his desk sometimes, pretending he might still come in and catch her, pretending to be annoyed as he chased her out, the way he had years before. It was her way of resisting the emptiness of knowing the room was untouched since the previous occasions she performed this act; Priscilla couldn't bring herself to enter.

  "Oh, someday I'll clean it out," she would say casually whenever friends asked about it. "I'll put the things away that Drew should have eventually. I suppose I'll call an office supply place about the furniture. Make the room over into a guest bedroom or something." After one of these conversations, Drew couldn't help but notice the door left ajar; sometimes she would catch her mother standing in the open doorway, staring inside. Later on, Priscilla carefully locked it and kept the key in an Oriental bowl on her own desk. If she knew Drew sometimes borrowed the key, she never said anything.

  A funny way to deal with grief, as Drew slowly realized over time. But that was just how they were, she decided. Like Priscilla, she molded her life in the fashion of a stoic, stiff-upper-lip persona — although Drew would confess to cramming the emotional turmoil of being a teenager into the closet more than once to live up to the model.

  But the tragedies of childhood are usually small for an attractive, semi-popular, easygoing girl whose life was sheltered against too many hardships. Like most other seventeen year-old girls in her Boston community, Drew jostled her way down the halls of a crowded public school and applied to an excellent college. She applied for a medical scholarship; then for one in design after her initial rejection. She filled out the entrance forms for a college in Virginia, filed letters of recommendation from her high school teachers in art design and fabric arts, and looked through brochures on student loans.

  "This place will be too empty when you're gone," Priscilla said. She was watching Drew from her seat in one of the den's armchairs, a magazine open on her lap.

  "Not at Christmas," said Drew. "Or spring break." She grimaced. "I won't have the money for the beach unless I get a part-time job freshman year." She pictured herself folding and re-folding t-shirts in retail bins, adjusting strappy dresses on sale racks.

  Her mother was silent for a moment. "Maybe I should think about a smaller place," she said. "Since it's just you and me, anyway ... I could get something closer to the hospital. Then I'll spend less time in transit and more time home or working." Priscilla's knees were plagued with arthritis from years of climbing stairs in the train tunnels, from cramped positions in the backseat in city cabs as she toted her presentation materials for medical lectures. Her personal physician had advised her to spend less time teaching and more time resting — giving a little thought to her family's history of hereditary heart disease, something Drew would never worry about.

  "Give up the house?" Drew's brow furrowed. In the past, she had imagined life in a place that wasn't a brick townhouse in a residential row, but that was a childhood fantasy akin to walking on the moon or moving to France.

  "Cheaper rent would mean more money," said her mother, waggling her eyebrows. "Maybe you could go to the beach after all." With that, she took a sip from the glass on the table beside her.

  "I was just kidding," said Drew, with a shrug. "I thought maybe I'd spend the first few here. You and me, maybe going to Gran and Gramp's old cabin for a week or so. Or we'll hang out here and go to a movie or something."

  Drew sneaked a glance at Priscilla, half-conscious of a desire to see how this idea registered. Her mother was gazing at the magazine's pages as if she hadn't heard; but the movement of her hand, flicking the ice cubes in the glass, was a familiar "tell" that her mind was focused on another subject.

  A few times in the past, Priscilla's preoccupation had turned out to be a sign of something significant. The dreadful two minutes of silence before she told Drew about Willis's sudden, fatal aneurism, a moment which was preserved as an eternity in Drew's memory. The vacant stares and nonreplies which preceded her ruling in favor of Drew's longed-for double piercings for her sixteenth birthday.

  This subject fell somewhere in between. Priscilla didn't bring it up until a week before Drew's freshman orientation. Drew was packing, sorting her possessions into piles for taking and leaving, having a difficult time with the two. The dark blue sweater — it was good for outdoor studying on the lawn, but also nice for lounging around at home on a Saturday evening. Piles of Madeleine L’Engle paperbacks and battered high school classics, the teddy bear in a t-shirt her father brought her from a St. Jude's conference, destined to be piled on her window seat after a last-minute elimination.

  Priscilla watched
from the doorway, a glass of herbal tea for arthritis cradled in her fingers. "Do you," she began, "ever think about your birth family?" Her voice was casual, her brow quirked upwards in feigned nonchalance.

  Drew paused in the act of stuffing two more throw pillows into a box of bedding. "What do you mean?"

  This conversation seemed awkward in comparison to pierced ears — Drew felt an uncomfortable flush creep steadily upwards from her neck to her face, a feeling she experienced whenever she was part of a discussion she didn't want to have.

  "I mean, do you want to know more about them?" Priscilla asked. "Before you answer, I want you to know that it wouldn't hurt me. I've been prepared for this moment for a long time. Actually, I've thought it was a good idea, to give you both worlds at once."

  Drew wet her lips as she debated the answer. "No," she said, after a moment. "That is, I thought about them before, but I guess I've never really wanted to know."

  "I was thinking," her mother continued, "that now might be a good time to get to know them. Even if it's just a little bit. A name, an address, maybe a couple of photos..."

  "But what's the point?" Drew shrugged.

  "To know where you come from," her mother said. "To know your medical history, the place you were born —"

  "I'm from Boston," said Drew, with a pert grin. "So no matter where my birth mom is from, it won't matter. And with a doctor in the family, I don't have to worry about missing any symptoms for any diseases I might have." This was her way of switching topics, of making a serious subject flippant.

  "You know it wouldn't change anything for me," said Priscilla, gently. "Between us. I just want you to know that if it's important to you, it's all right. You don't have to wonder, that's all." She took a sip from her glass, then smiled at Drew.

  Drew knew it was the truth; after eighteen years, she could always detect when Priscilla was lying, the faint uptick of her mouth's corners, the uncertain gaze cast up and away from her daughter's eyes. Even so, she didn't want to talk about it. It didn't bother her — the truth — but it didn't exactly make her happy, either. In all these years, anything more than a mention of her past was accompanied by a small feeling deep within her chest at the thought of really, truly belonging somewhere else. Like her fantasies in the dark — they were all right as imagination, but any possibility of truth almost hurt.

  *****

  It was because of that, she said no. The subject didn't come up again that week, nor the weeks afterward when Drew phoned home from her dorm room or the hall as she walked between classes. For spring break and Thanksgiving, she bounced between sleeping in at home and traversing a five-state circuit of friend's homes and traditions. Her Christmas vacations of freshman, sophomore, and junior year, she helped her mother drag the boxes of ornaments down from the topmost shelf of their storage closet.

  "These get heavier every year," her mother groaned. "I think next time, I'll have Lloyd Randall's son bring them up for me. He's a strapping lad of about fifteen. For twenty bucks, he'd be happy to do it." With a wink at Drew over the box's dusty top as she rubbed her shoulder. The stiffness in Priscilla's knees was now accompanied by a shoulder twinge — something she warned her daughter fiercely not to laugh at.

  "You wouldn't dare," said Drew. "I thought that's the whole reason you had me come home every year. To help lift all the heavy things around here." This statement was followed by a fake grunt as she shoved aside the armchair in the den, making room for the tree in the corner by the window.

  Every year, they picked out a Douglas fir on the tree lot, the same one where Drew once piggybacked Willis's shoulders when the two of them performed this ritual. It was the day they enjoyed the customary cup of cocoa from the city park's vendor, admiring the snowy trees, if any, which replaced the fall colors of New England.

  Junior year was their last year for the cocoa and cardboard boxes of faded ornaments. Late November of her senior year, when the phone rang at five a.m., Drew felt the cold premonition of one who knows that the hour and the call are signs of something terrible. An inexplicable, growing dread as she answered it and learned that Priscilla had collapsed in the apartment.

  A sudden, massive heart attack. An attempt to phone 9-1-1, a brief sign of response when the E.M.T.s rushed her to the ambulance with the usual reassuring phrases and urgent attitudes. An attempt at resuscitation when her heart flatlined en route to the hospital.

  All these explanations Drew heard but did not comprehend, crumpled a few hours later in the hospital waiting room like a piece of paper. Compressed small by a pain which no one else shared, except a handful of her mother's colleagues, a few polite students who brought plants and kind words to Doctor Lorman's office over the next few days.

  She left the hospital an hour afterwards, driving automatically to her house. Her numb fingers clutched the steering wheel, her mind blank as if operated by an autopilot program. Thinking about what happened after she arrived — that was impossible. The list of cold tasks were a steady tickertape in the very back of her mind: arranging the funeral, phoning her mom's attorney, contacting the bank and the financial planner, the credit card company and their landlord...

  It seemed surreal, that she was now responsible for any part of her mother's present life; for something more grown up than her own student loans.

  She parked behind her mother's car on their street; she strode towards the walkway, noticing the tracks of the ambulance in the slush. When she touched the knob of the street door which led to their apartment, the reality of this moment was as keen as the biting cold around her. Her first time to enter her apartment without her mother being on the other side of the door — first time ever, she believed, since she couldn't recall a childhood occasion of coming home to an empty house before. Always, in some sense, Priscilla was there. Puttering around the kitchen with a recipe clipped from a magazine, hunched over her office desk as she worked on a paper for a medical journal. As if her presence somehow doubled itself, filling the hole left behind when Willis's place fell silent.

  For a moment, Drew hesitated; then pushed it open to release a wave of cold air from inside. Their house was always cold at night, Priscilla keeping the heat low in favor of economical blankets. There was a damp, stale smell, a sign that the leak upstairs was creeping through the ceiling tiles again. A smell at once familiar and alien; as if a sign that the presence of life had vanished from the house. With a sense of pain sinking deeper within, Drew crossed the threshold.

  On the table in the entryway lay a pile of open Christmas cards mixed in with unopened financial statements. Priscilla's keys lay beside them. A pair of shoes with sensible heels before the cold radiator. Drew stepped over them as she crossed towards the open den.

  In the floor sat a pile of dusty boxes from the store room. Familiar even before Drew lifted the flap to reveal a glimpse of mercury glass and fraying tinsel. Her vision blurred beneath a layer of tears as she sank down on the armchair.

  Apparently, Priscilla had hired the Randall boy after all.

  Chapter Two

  One Year Later

  "Yeah, I'm still looking," Drew said, shifting the phone from one shoulder to the other as she sorted the contents of a file cabinet into two piles. "I know, Candace. Clock's ticking before all the good apartments are rented. I'm looking through ads even as we speak."

  "Of course, I'm looking for something in the art district ... I haven't forgotten Professor Hill's recommendation."

  She paused momentarily, looking at a sheet of paper in her hand. Not a real estate listing for Boston's cheaper apartments, but an old kindergarten report card from her past. Keep? Dispose of? These were the kinds of things she wasn’t certain about yet.

  "Sure, call me if you see something tempting on the market. Talk to you later." She hung up and tossed her cell phone onto the sofa, then shoved a mass of strawberry curls out of her face.

  A lot had changed in Drew's life since the morning she walked into her mother's empty apartment. She had walked
across a graduation ceremony platform, for instance. She had taken care of what was left of her mother's estate — paying off bills, closing the bank account, and listening to her mother's financial planner make the decisions about how her small inheritance should be invested. After graduation, Drew had informed Mr. Randall the landlord that she wouldn't be renewing the apartment's lease. It was time to move on with her life and find a place for herself.

  "It'll only be a few months," she told her roommate Claire in the week before graduation. "Some of Mom's affairs are still unsettled. I need to tie up my loose ends and then ... a future of interior designers and drawing boards, flipping burgers — whatever. Whatever I want to try. The blue skies of opportunity, as they say." For some reason, the picture in her mind at this moment was not ethereal clouds, but the nightlight horses racing across her childhood walls.

  "You could get stuck doing that kind of stuff," said Claire. "Can't your mom's lawyer hire somebody? Didn't you have, like, an aunt or someone who could finish it for you?" She gave Drew a knowing look. "How do you expect to go home like that and then find a place in some other city? All the good stuff will be gone."

  "I'll just have to take that chance," answered Drew, sticking out her tongue in mock offense, her fingers peeling a vintage band poster from her wall and rolling it into a tube. "This is all part of being grown-up. As my mother would remind me if she was still here." As she slipped the rubber band over it, she pictured herself driving away from her mother's apartment for the last time. She swallowed hard, dispelling the lump which threatened to form even in a vision which included a sunny afternoon and her dreams of an independent future on the horizon.