“Someone called for maintenance?”
I jumped at the sound of a voice right behind me and turned to find myself facing a guy in tan coveralls that had a Fenster’s logo on the shoulder.
“Uh, yes,” I said.
“The message I got was a little garbled,” said the maintenance man. “A bear fainted?”
“No, he short-circuited, and we’re concerned this whole karaoke apparatus may be dangerous.”
“Karaoke?” the guy said. “That is dangerous.”
“We don’t want anyone to get a nasty shock,” I said as Lopez joined us. “So you’ve got this under control now, right? We can leave immediately, right?”
“Uh, sure, yeah,” said the maintenance man.
I scooped up my coat from behind Karaoke Bear’s platform. “Let’s go,” I said, taking Lopez’s arm and pulling, eager to get him out of here before Max and Nelli appeared.
“Wait, Esther, I should make sure this guy—”
“This is his job, not yours,” I said, hauling Lopez away from the platform. “What do you know about electricity, after all?”
I turned my head to give him an impatient glance. Behind him, I saw Belsnickel and Vixen approaching us from the western entrance.
Lopez shrugged. “Well, all right. Since I’m still here, I guess I could go upstairs and help execute the search.”
“No!” I blurted, fearing that he might find Max’s ID up there.
“I won’t touch your stuff, I promise. Okay?” he said reassuringly. “Believe me, I’d rather not search the belongings of someone I—”
“No, I mean . . .” Max and Nelli were approaching this spot. Max’s gaze was roaming the area, but he hadn’t seen me yet. “I mean . . .”
Behind Lopez, Lucky stepped out from behind his tree and started making exuberant gestures to Max to go back—go back!
Max mistook this for a friendly wave and returned the salute.
Lopez prodded, “You mean . . . ?”
“I’m . . . I’m . . .”
Lucky pointed at Lopez, then repeated his gesture urging Max and Nelli to flee—flee!
“You’re . . . ?”
Max looked this way and saw me. He smiled and started to wave . . . then apparently recognized the back of Lopez’s head. They had met a number of times, he knew Lopez was here, and I guess he made the connection between my companion’s build and his shiny black hair, and Lucky’s frantic grimacing. Max’s eyes flew wide open and dismayed surprise swept across his features. He stood there, stock still, while my heart raced. Lopez might shift or turn around any moment, and both elves were within easy view now.
“I’m . . . hungry,” I blurted. “Want to get a bite? Let’s go. Come on.” I started tugging on his arm again.
Looking understandably surprised at my urgency, he said, “Um . . . sure. I am kind of hungry.” Letting me drag him along, he asked, “Where do you want to go?”
“Out!” I said. “Out of the store!”
“All right.” He shrugged. “It’s not like I have to help with the search. I’m off duty now.”
“You are?” I asked distractedly, shoving through the crowd of shoppers as I towed him by the hand.
“Yeah. I was supposed to have dinner with my parents. But . . .” He stopped in his tracks. “Hey, Esther, why don’t we go out that way? It’s closer. And then we wouldn’t have to fight our way through this—”
“No!” When he tried to turn around to head back to the western entrance, I tugged on his arm so hard he stumbled into me. “It’s . . . We should . . . The north entrance!”
“Huh?” He didn’t back away after bumping into me. Just stood very close, looking down into my face.
Gazing up into his eyes, fringed by thick black lashes, I immediately lost my train of thought—such as it was. My heart gave that unexpected, inconvenient little lurch! it sometimes did when I looked at him. Especially when he stood so close that I could feel his body heat. The wool of his coat brushed against my skin.
He smiled and murmured, “What about the north entrance?”
“It’s, um . . .” Much to my surprise, a coherent thought entered my head. “It’s closer to the park.”
“You want to walk in the park?” he asked in surprise. “Now?”
“No, but I really want to get some air, you know? And walking up to the park is nicer than . . . walking the other way.”
“Okay,” he said easily. “Sure. Let’s go.”
I turned and led the way. The herd of shoppers was by now so dense that I could easily crowd-surf my way to the north entrance, if they’d cooperate. So we just moved along with the throng, not saying much until we were outside on the sidewalk.
It wasn’t mind-numbingly cold outside tonight, but it was certainly brisk. I was still carrying my coat, so Lopez took it from my grasp and held it open for me as I slipped my arms into it. While I fastened it, he asked if I wanted to go anyplace in particular to eat.
“It’ll have to be someplace quick,” I said. “I only get a half hour for dinner.” I wasn’t supposed to go on my meal break without telling anyone, and I especially wasn’t supposed to leave the store for it—let alone go outside in my costume. But removing Lopez from the scene had been an emergency measure. Besides, it wasn’t as if I feared Miles would fire me for this; not with a skeleton staff and two days left in the season.
Lopez pulled on his gloves as he said, “Well, you said you wanted to get some air, and it’s not that cold tonight. Want to see if we can find someone selling chili dogs by the park?”
“All right.” I smiled and took the arm he offered me. “I gather you’ve got a weakness for those?”
“I’m in control,” he said as we turned and headed toward the park, which was so close to Fenster’s we could see it from here. “I can quit whenever I want.”
“Hah! I’ve said that about Ben and Jerry’s ice cream, but I spiral into a panic if there’s an emergency and I haven’t got that stuff handy to keep me calm.”
He grinned at that. “But as vices go, it seems like a harmless one.”
“Not if you have to parade around in an elf costume,” I said gloomily. “Every extra bite shows up in this outfit.”
“That thing is disturbingly sexy on you,” he said, which made my heart give a little skip. “Are Santa’s elves really supposed to have that effect? I think it might have rocked my world if I’d met Dreidel at a tender age.”
As we approached the light at West 58th Street, we came upon a Santa Claus who was ringing a bell and soliciting donations for charity.
I said, “Speaking of things that evidently rocked your world at a tender age . . .”
Lopez grimaced as he dropped a dollar into Santa’s bucket, and he said grumpily to me, “God, they’re everywhere at this time of year.”
15
As we crossed 58th Street, our arms still linked, I asked, “So what’s that all about, Lopez? Why are you phob . . . Why do you find Santa Claus so startling? Did you have a bad experience when you visited him as a child?”
“Well, yes, but I had a . . . a thing about Santa even before that.”
“Why?”
“Hey, look at that.” He pointed to an upscale store window on the corner. “Who pays fifteen hundred dollars for a purse?”
“People like the Fensters,” I said. “Don’t change the subject. When did your thing about Santa start? Do you remember?”
He sighed, realizing I wasn’t going to drop it. “Okay. As soon as I was old enough to understand the concept, I found it very suspicious. I don’t really remember this, but my parents say I was full of questions about why we were allowing a total stranger to roam our house at night while we slept.”
“That sounds exactly like you,” I said, laughing.
“And I was very disturbed about the notion of someone, um, breaking and entering via the chimney.”
“Wow, you haven’t changed a bit since you were a little boy, have you?”
“So I trie
d to booby-trap it.”
“Booby-trap the chimney? I’m impressed! How did you do it?”
“I made a big pile of sharp things in the fireplace. You can’t expect something elaborate,” he added defensively. “I was three years old.”
“Three years old and trying to do grievous bodily harm to Santa Claus. Does the NYPD know about this?”
“Oh, there’s plenty they don’t know about my youth,” he said with a gleam in his eyes.
He’s really not the altar boy he pretends to be, is he?
I heard her voice in my head again; the woman who had nearly killed him, because he had come to Harlem that hot, storm-tossed night looking for me, trying to save me from her. She’d been correct in her observation that Lopez wasn’t exactly what he seemed—in more ways than she realized, too. But I really wished I could banish her, once and for all. I felt cold all the way through for a moment.
“Are you okay?” He’d noticed that shiver and misunderstood its cause. “Do you want to go back? I guess it’s colder out here than I—”
“No, elves are made of tough stuff,” I said. “We live in the North Pole, along with You Know Who.”
“You’re sure?” he asked, rubbing my hand to keep it warm.
“So Santa survived your attempt to perforate him, and he left Christmas presents under the tree that year, I assume?”
“I think if I’d been an only child, my parents would have let me think I’d succeeded in keeping him out of the house. Apparently I was very . . . focused on this problem.”
“I can see this whole story so clearly,” I told him in amusement.
“But my brothers both wanted Santa Claus to visit, of course, so my parents kept trying to get me to come round.”
“And that always works so well on you.”
He smiled wryly. “So the next year, when I was four, my parents decided to bring us all into the city to visit Holidayland at Fenster’s, where I’d meet Santa in this fairytale setting and finally realize what a great guy he was.” Lopez paused before continuing, “You know how some kids have a bad reaction to clowns?”
“Clowns are scary,” I said with a nod.
“That was pretty much my reaction to Santa Claus. I thought his bright outfit was creepy and his jovial behavior was sinister. I thought the way he hid behind that obviously fake beard and wig was suspicious and menacing. I imagined an evil face lurking behind all that fake hair.”
The word evil reminded me. “Actually, since learning of your Santa, uh, startle reflex—”
“I just don’t like it when they creep up on me.”
“—I’ve developed a theory.”
“I don’t want to hear it,” he said as we began crossing 59th Street, with Central Park right in front of us now.
“I think you dislike Max because of his resemblance to Santa Claus.”
Lopez looked surprised for a moment, then amused. “Actually, I never noticed a resemblance. I still don’t. He seems too small for Santa. I always think of Max as looking like a mad professor, or maybe like the ancient wizard in an old fairytale. What’s wrong?”
He’d noticed my startled reaction to that. “Nothing,” I said.
“But Max as Santa?” Lopez shook his head. “I don’t see it.”
“Even so,” I persisted as we reached the curb, “I think your unconscious reaction to his round face, with his white beard and hair, is why you have such a negative attitude about him.”
“No, I have a negative attitude about him because I think he’s a whack job who encourages you to believe crazy things and, more to the point, to act on those things—and to get into a lot of trouble, as a result.”
Well, that was direct. And hardly a surprise. I decided to revert to his childhood.
“So what exactly happened when they put you on Santa’s lap in Holidayland?” I prodded. “Being one of Santa’s helpers, I ask this strictly out of professional interest, you understand.”
“Well, that’s where the story resembles a criminal investigation: Everyone remembers it differently.”
We were on the sidewalk at the edge of the park, which spread lush and romantically dark before us, its glowing lamps peeking through the bare branches. People passed us, entering the park, maybe going to Wollman Rink to watch the skaters or to take a spin on the ice. On the next block over, we could see a hot-food cart under the street lights, so we started walking that way, arm in arm.
He explained, “My mother remembers me hyperventilating and then passing out, I was so overcome with fear of the red-clad menace. My father is still guilt-ridden about the visit because he remembers me crying until he thought I might need to be tranquilized. And my brothers remember me throwing a screaming tantrum and deliberately ruining their visit to Holidayland.”
“What do you remember?” I asked curiously.
“I remember finding Santa Claus suspicious and threatening, and then asking to leave.”
“Yes, that does sound like the way you would remember it,” I said.
“What does that mean?”
“Oh, look, we’re in luck,” I said as we approached the food stand. “Chili dogs.”
“I am a very reasonable person,” Lopez insisted.
“But between this tight costume and the difficulty of getting away from Santa’s throne if nature calls, I’d better not risk it. So I’ll just have a hot dog . . . Oh, what the heck, with cheese, please.” I added to Lopez, “I thoughtfully left my purse in my locker, so your colleagues could paw through it at their convenience—”
“Esther, we don’t paw—”
“—so you’ll have to pay.”
“If you want me to buy your dinner, you should be a lot nicer to me.” He pulled out his wallet and told the vendor, who was ladling cheese over my frankfurter, that he’d have a chili dog. We also got bottled water, one order of fries, and some napkins, and then we found an empty bench—which wasn’t a challenge, despite how crowded the whole area was tonight, since it was too cold, really, for sitting outside. But in his company, I scarcely noticed.
“So was the visit to Holidayland the experience that cemented your Santa phobia?” I asked.
Lopez gave me a frosty look for using that word. “Christmastime at our house was a little tense that year. And the year after, my father found me asleep by the chimney on Christmas Eve with my brother’s Jedi lightsaber in my hands.”
“Of course,” I said before biting into my deliciously messy cheese dog.
“By the following year, when I was six, Michael was nine and Tim was eleven, and they didn’t believe in Santa Claus anymore. So my parents decided we could dispense with all the Christmas trauma now, and they told me the truth.”
“That doesn’t seem to have resolved your Santa issue,” I noted.
“No, I was furious. They had lied to me my whole life. They’d scared me into believing a suspicious, weirdly dressed perp was infiltrating our house annually. They had even forced me to meet someone who was impersonating that character! And now they were telling me they’d made it all up?”
“You know, I didn’t exactly hit it off with your parents tonight—”
“Oh, I’d say my dad thought you were okay.” He offered me this faint praise as if it were rubies beyond compare.
“—but as this story unfolds, I feel the most profound sympathy for them,” I said.
“Hmph. Anyhow, I realized I could never trust anyone in my family again, and I didn’t speak to them for . . . Well, the stories vary there, too. My brothers say this lasted about a day. My mother claims it was at least a week. My father just gets teary-eyed and can’t talk about it.”
“I’m starting to feel a little sorry for your brothers, too,” I said.
“Those bastards,” he grumbled.
“And ever since then . . . ?”
“I just find Santa . . . startling. It’s not a big deal. So can we drop it now?”
“Of course not,” I said. “You know, it’s unusual to carry this fear into ad
ulthood—though you’ve obviously changed so little since earliest childhood that I guess I’m not that surprised in your case. But Rick says quite a few kids have a negative reaction when they first visit Santa. And I certainly see it in the throne room every day.”
“Who’s Rick?” he asked.
“Super Santa. The psychology grad student.”
“Oh, right.” Lopez rolled his eyes. “The self-proclaimed good listener.”
“He was trying to be nice,” I chided.
“Aren’t you supposed to be a student of human nature?” he said critically. “That guy was not trying to be nice, Esther. Your friend Satsy was trying to be nice. Rick was trying to play on my insecurities.”
“No,” I protested. “I think you’ve got him all wrong.”
“He’s not a healer, he’s an opportunist.”
“What makes you say that?”
“I’ve spent plenty of time interrogating people like him. I’ve learned to spot them.”
“I think you just feel defensive because he zeroed in on your . . . thing.”
“He’s a psychology student?” Lopez asked, backtracking. “I thought all of the Solsticeland staffers were actors.”
“Mostly, but not all. I don’t know what Eggnog does, really, but if you’re in the same room with him for five minutes, you find out that he’s—”
“Got a master’s degree in literature from Princeton.” Lopez did a fair imitation of the way Eggnog said it, which made me laugh.
“And I think Twinkle studies computer science.”
“Well, that fits.” He added, “Is it just me, or does Twinkle seem like he’s still in the closet, despite wearing red leotards in public?”
“You think he’s gay?”
“Sure.” Lopez shrugged. “What straight guy would agree to being called Twinkle?”
“That’s what I said! But Rick thinks Twinkle’s being ironic with that name.”
“And Rick, being a grad student in psychology, must necessarily be right in all things.”
“No, I didn’t mean that, I meant . . . I think he seems insightful.”
“Hmm.” Lopez didn’t say anything else, just sat frowning absently at his half-eaten chili dog as if it might contain the secrets to the human heart. I was familiar with that expression and knew that it usually meant something had triggered a thought or connection in his mind, and now he was examining scattered pieces of information inside his head, trying to figure out how to fit them together into a coherent picture.
Polterheist: An Esther Diamond Novel Page 20
