Nebula Awards Showcase 2014

by Kij Johnson

  I’m June Christmas. My husband Julius and I own the Christmas Inn, an old hotel out in the country that we keep modernizing as we get the money. That Christmas, it didn’t look like we were going to get any, just deeper in debt. I kept telling myself it was good, because of breakfast.

  Felix is our cook and he handles lunch and dinner, usually without any help from me. But I do breakfast. When we have twenty or more guests, that’s a buffet, with lots of scrambled eggs, bacon, and sausage. Milk and coffee, and hot water for tea. Cold cereal. Bread and bagels for toast. You know.

  Before she was married, our daughter Mary would help. Then after the divorce, she helped again; but Mary had been taken from us a year ago. She was dead and gone, Julius said. Sometimes our son helped, mostly at the waffle iron. It’s hard to get him to do much.

  That Christmas, before the five of them came (the five who looked to all of us so much like four), it seemed the only breakfasts would be for Julius, Wyatt, and me.

  Hi. My name’s Wyatt Christmas. Go ahead and laugh. People call me Whitey, mostly. Mom calls me Darlin’, like she can’t think of my name. Dad calls me The Snide Brat. Or Pimples. I get that sometimes, too. You can call me anythin’. Don’t matter to me.

  It started a couple days before Christmas. We were snowed in, and I mean snowed in good. There wasn’t one guest in the whole fuckin’ place. I liked it ’cause there wasn’t as much for me to do, only Dad kept pissin’ and moanin’ about no money comin’ in.

  As if much ever did.

  He told me to get out there and shovel the drive, and he didn’t give a damn whether it was snowin’ or not, by God get out there and shovel. He’s got a big, loud voice for such a little guy. So I got my coat and boots and the shovel, and out I went. With Dad yellin’ at me, it took about fifteen minutes.

  Was it snowin’? Jack, you never seen so much fuckin’ snow in your life. It was snowin’ so hard I was down off the porch and about to turn around and shovel the steps before it got through to me that there was a place in the drive that looked darker than it should have. Naturally, any dark was darker than it should’ve been. Everythin’ else was blind white. So I went to see, wadin’ through three feet of snow. That was my first big mistake.

  It was a big SUV, just sittin’ there. I’ve been tryin’ to remember if there were tire tracks behind it. I don’t think so, so either it had been there a while or somethin’ else. I know what else, only I’m not goin’ to say. You want to guess? Give it a shot.

  I went up to the driver’s side window and rapped it with the handle of my shovel, and said very polite, “Can I help you folks?” when he rolled it down. I’m the politest bastard you ever saw as long as there’s a chance of a tip.

  The big, square-faced guy behind the wheels said, “We are looking for Christmas.”

  “You’re here,” I told him. “Clean rooms and good food. Hikin’, cross-country skiin’, and huntin’ and fishin’ in season.”

  There was a dark lady in back that looked like she had a fever. She leaned up and touched my arm and said, “Have we come to the place? For Christmas?”

  If I’d known what was comin’, I’d have hit her with the shovel. But I said, “You bet. This’s the Christmas Inn. We’ve got Christmas decorations and all sorts of stuff you can send for presents. We’ll have carol singin’ and games, and the biggest tree in the county.” Dad couldn’t have done it better.

  “Dendrolatry?” That was the other woman, the big blonde.

  I thought it sounded good, so I said, “Sure.” Then I said, “If you folks’ll just pull up another hundred feet, I can help you up the steps—they’ll be slippery—and bring in your bags.”

  Even a big SUV ought to have trouble in three feet of snow, but that one didn’t. It rolled right up to the front door, practically floatin’ on the snow. I never did hear the engine start.

  J. R. Christmas heard voices and the stamping of feet, and got behind the long desk between the fireplace and the grandfather clock as the doors opened.

  Andril and Dondel came in shoulder to shoulder; Andril was tall and stooped, with burning eyes. Dondel was tall, too, but wide. Red-faced in the cold, a big man who looked as if he might have played football in college.

  Erennide followed them, brushing snow from her green parka with rose-red gloves. (All four wore green parkas.) Erennide’s face seemed all big blue eyes and plump pink cheeks. Golden hair strayed from under her knit cap.

  After her, Nranda—smaller than Erennide, darker than Andril, and ready to solo on her first broom.

  The child came last. No one paid much attention to the child.

  Julius R. Christmas is my name. June and I own this place. We’ve owned and run it for eight years, and have felt, both of us, that it would eventually be a highly profitable operation, one that would make us rich. I don’t for one moment doubt we’re right, but we’re right only if we can keep it. There’s a mortgage, a big one. People say (correctly, I believe) that banks never foreclose at Christmas, biding their time until January. I don’t know that I’ve ever dreaded anything quite as much as I dreaded January that day.

  We’re out-of-the-way, you see. To reach us, you exit the Interstate and drive a bit over three miles along back roads. Snow had made those roads almost impassible.

  Let me be frank. There are a lot of lonely men and women at Christmas. Good people, many of them. They have no families, or their families are far away. Some are alienated by long-standing quarrels. I could give details; some confide in me, but it’s better not to repeat those confidences. What are they to do for Christmas? Where can they go? Should they sit alone in some apartment, cut off from humanity, drinking and watching television? It’s a recipe for suicide.

  Our place offers a solution. They come by dozens, each alone in his or her car. They sit around the fires (we’ve seven fireplaces), drink hot buttered rum, and talk like old friends.

  Which they soon are. Don’t get me wrong. They’re good people for the most part. Lonely women who never found a man, and lonely men who never found the right woman. In a day or two they’re very good friends indeed. Let me put it like this. For eleven months of the year, we just get by. It’s at Christmas each year that we start making real money.

  That was how it’d been for the first seven. Not this one. The cancellations came in waves; when a wave slacked and I’d begun to think it was over, a new one began. It was the snowiest winter in the history of the state, the weathermen bleated, and more snow on the way.

  I’d been counting on Christmas to bail us out, to let us make up all the past-due payments. Christmas had come, and there was nobody. We’ve forty-two rooms; not a one was reserved. Not even one.

  So when Andril and Dondel came to the desk, I thought, “Thank God! This is two rooms anyway.” I supposed they were married couples, you see.

  Andril asked how much. He didn’t have a good voice; it was thin and hard, an accountant’s voice. I smiled and told him, “Only fifty dollars per night, sir, and that includes a good big breakfast.”

  Dondel produced his wallet and got out a fifty. “This is fifty dollars?”

  “Certainly, sir, and it will cover your room for the first night.” I reached for it.

  He took it back, returned it to his wallet and counted five one-hundred dollar bills onto the desk. “This is ten times as much?” As soon as I’d heard him, I’d decided he was in sales. He had the big, hearty voice that tells the client, lunch is on me.

  I said, “Yes, sir. It’ll take care of your room for ten nights.”

  “We shall remain,” he said, “until the morning after Christmas.”

  “In that case,” I told him, “I’ll owe you money when you leave, even if you and your wife eat all your meals with us and charge them.”

  The thin, dark one butted in. “For the room? How much?”

  “Fifty dollars a night,” I told him again, “but you needn’t pay cash. We take credit cards.”

  Dondel pointed to the five bills on our registr
ation desk. “Two rooms,” he asked, “to the day after Christmas?”

  I said yes, it would more than cover them both.

  Dondel got out his wallet again and laid another five hundred on the desk. “Four rooms?”

  That was when I realized that they were four singles carpooling, not two couples. I said, yes, of course, and got out four keys.

  Dondel pulled five fifties from his wallet; he laid those on the desk, too. “Five rooms,” he told me. I had no idea why four guests would need five rooms, but it was over twelve hundred dollars and we needed it badly. I took it, put it in the register under the tray, and gave him five keys.

  When they had checked in, Wyatt offered to move their vehicle into the parking lot. Dondel said he would take care of it and went into the bar. He gave four keys to Nranda first, and asked her to see that Wyatt distributed the luggage correctly.

  I was vacuuming the hall when they came, and I stopped to look. My first impression was that they were ghosts, which was what Julius said at the seance. You’ll laugh, but was how I felt, just the same. He says I’m irrational. He laughs about it and is nice, but he believes I’m wrong. I feel I’m right. What we feel is what makes us do things, not what we think. It’s what we feel that’s true.

  I see it again and again. Mary’s with me often—her spirit, I mean. Dead and gone? I know that though Mary’s dead, she’s not gone. Julius thinks, so he thought we’d lost her. I feel and knew she was with us still.

  Where was I?

  I felt they were all spirits, then I saw the child. If they were spirits, what was the child? (I can’t say he or she because I don’t know. It was like seeing an old, cracked photo of a child, taken when all small children wore dresses. You don’t know, unless you read the name.) I wondered whether Mary could see it, whether she knew.

  When they’d gone, Julius said they’d want dinner. He wanted me in the kitchen, getting ready. I felt I could not cook well when I knew all the snow they’d tracked in—Wyatt, too—was melting into the carpet in the lobby. I swept out as much as I could while Julius built a fire in the bar.

  I’m tellin’ you, Jack, their luggage was everyplace in that SUV. In front, in back, behind the back seat, and tied to the roof. There were no names on the bags, and no initials. No company name on the SUV, either.

  I carried everything upstairs and knocked on a door lookin’ for help. It was the dark one. She pointed to a big hard-sided bag and said, “That is mine. Carry it into the room.”

  So I did, and she said, “You must open this for me.”

  “Guests usually do that for themselves,” I told her. “I got to see about the rest.”

  “Open it!”

  It wasn’t locked, and her underwear was right on top. So I figured I could put an end to this quick. I picked up a lacy number and said she must look good in it.

  “You wish to see?”

  She was startin’ to undress, and that’s when I sat on the bed. I’m not goin’ to tell everythin’ we did—it was a lot—or everythin’ we said. But when I couldn’t anymore and she shoved me out, with me carryin’ half my clothes and my hair a mess, I felt like shit. Those dumb fuckers at school say there’s good sex and bad sex but even bad sex is pretty good. That wasn’t how I felt. They never did it with Nranda.

  Probably not with anybody.

  * * *

  Dondel, Andril, Nranda, and Erennide sat in the big dining room at a table for four, served by Wyatt, who answered their questions in a monotone and would meet no one’s eyes. Dondel had roast beef, Andril chicken potpie, Nranda a vegetarian plate, and Erennide lasagna, at Dondel’s suggestion. She and Dondel ate dessert—plum pudding and strawberry shortcake.

  Dondel signed for all four; when Wyatt muttered that he could add a tip to the bill if he chose, he said, “Yes, I had forgotten. And carrying our sacks?” The tip was a hundred dollars.

  I fixed all the food. We’d told Felix not come in (the same with both maids), because of the snow and the cancellations. I know all the cooking sounds hard, but it wasn’t. Everything was frozen except for salads and desserts. I just put it in the microwave and unwrapped it afterward for Wyatt.

  He was depressed. I don’t like that, but I see a lot of it and I thought Julius had tied into him for something. I asked him to help with dishes afterward, so I could talk to him; but he just cleared and stacked for me. He didn’t even scrape them like you have to for the dishwasher. He looked so blue I didn’t have the heart to say anything.

  Mary had won Julius from the beginning. Me, too. She was the daughter everybody wants, so clean and pretty and kind and even tempered. And smart! When she married that teacher, I knew she was making a mistake. I should’ve said so. It was the first big mistake she’d ever made, and she didn’t know how to handle them. She divorced him, but . . .

  Oh, I don’t want to talk about it!

  The child came in and asked for something, mostly by signs. I peeked out into the dining room, and there they were at a table for four. They didn’t even have a place for the child.

  I said, “Do you speak English?” The child shrugged and didn’t want to look at me, just like Wyatt.

  So I tried a cookie and glass of milk, then a bowl of strawberries, with milk and little sugar on them. “How old are you?” That got seven fingers held up, but when I said, “You don’t look that old,” the child only shrugged.

  “Are you a boy or a girl?”

  “Soon I must choose.”

  It was the most I had heard the child say, so I felt encouraged. I was a friend, and it saw I was. That was how I felt. Pretty soon it would be my friend, too. I said, “I’m June. What’s your name?”

  “Soon I must choose one.”

  “You get to choose?”

  A tiny nod.

  “What’s your mommy’s name?”

  The child shrugged, and as soon as the strawberries were finished there was no child. I looked all around to see if it was hiding, but I couldn’t find it.

  We ate as a family when they’d gone. It means a lot to me, but Julius and Wyatt don’t care.

  Wyatt wanted his hundred dollars immediately, but his father refused to give it to him until Dondel had settled. “All right,” Wyatt said. “I got somethin’ real important, and I’m not goin’ to tell you.”

  Almost nothing was said after that, until the desk phone rang.

  When Julius was in the next room, June said, “What’s your important news, Darling?”

  “If I tell you, you’ll tell him.”

  “I won’t. That’s a promise.” June crossed her heart.

  “No matter what it is?”

  She nodded. “No matter what it is.”

  “Well, I wanted to take their SUV and park it. The big guy said he would, only he didn’t. Only it’s gone. It’s not out front, and it’s not in the lot.”

  “He parked it somewhere else,” June said. “You can find it tomorrow, if you want to.”

  It was the big blonde. I was looking in the book—we’re old-fashioned here—for her name while I was talking to her. I found her writing pretty easily, a big florid hand for a woman, and green ink. Big curves and curlicues I could no more read than Chinese. Her name’s Erennide. I got it a lot later. Which was not until I had my coveralls and had found my tools. My coveralls are pretty warm. I ought to say that. So I took off my tie and the dress shirt I had been wearing, and my wool slacks.

  I don’t know what another woman would have called that lacy thing, but it looked like she’d been sewed into it. I said, “Have you gotten it to flush?”

  She just smiled and shook her head. She’d the best smile I ever saw. I’ve never seen another like it. It made me feel we were kids, a boy and a girl, and we were into mischief. It was good mischief, and we’d never be caught.

  I went into her bathroom and there was nothing in the toilet. I said, “You flushed it with water from the tap, I guess. I understand, believe me, and I wouldn’t want to embarrass you.”

  That got the s
mile again. “Nor would I wish to embarrass you, my Jule. I have locked the door.”

  From here, I don’t know what to say or what not to say. It was wrong and I knew it.

  But every time I looked at her it seemed her breasts got bigger. I knew it couldn’t be true, but that was how it seemed. Bigger breasts and a warmer smile. Every time I touched her, a little more of the lacy thing fell off.

  Afterward, when we lay in bed panting and sweating, me on my back feeling wonderful and she on her side facing me, I could see each breast was bigger than her head. You’d think a woman with breasts like that and hips like hers would be thick at the waist.

  That night when things had quieted down, I got a flashlight and went out lookin’ for the SUV, mushin’ through the snow like a fuckin’ sled dog. There wasn’t any. Not anyplace. When I got back inside and got my coat and sweater off, I went down to the kitchen, made coffee, and thought about it.

  There was only one way it could’ve happened. There’d been somebody else in there with them. Somebody I’d never seen. When they got out and I got all the bags out, he’d driven it away. That was how it had to be.

  Only how could there have been? I’d been all over it grabbin’ their luggage. If there’d been somebody else in it, I’d have seen him for sure.

  That reminded me of what my mom had said at dinner, about a little kid with them. I’d never seen any kid and neither had Dad, but he’d said they took five rooms. He thought they were expectin’ somebody else.

  So I went to the front desk and got the room numbers. Nranda was in two-twenty, at the top of the stairs. I knew because I’d been in there and I’d never forget it as long as I lived. There were names for the next three, and what looked like grown-up writin’. Two-twenty-four had a little wavy line where the name should’ve been.