Scrooge and the Single Girl

by Christine Rimmer

  And he was. He came back in the door a few minutes later. He had her boom box and her CDs and even her hat. “Your Cheez Doodles must have blown away.”

  It could have been worse. She thanked him again.

  He set her things on the kitchen table and then turned to find her starting to stand. “Stay there.”

  She made a face at him—but she did sit back down.

  He shrugged out of his jacket. “Just lie back and relax for a while.”

  “I told you, I feel—”

  “Jillian. Humor me.” He hung the jacket on its peg. “For an hour or so, just stay there on the couch where I can keep an eye on you.”

  She didn’t like the way he said that. As if she were some spoiled, undependable child who might get into all kinds of trouble if left to her own devices.

  Not that she could completely blame him for seeing her that way. After all, she had gotten herself into trouble and she was very lucky he’d been around to help out. She had no doubt she would have made it back inside on her own, but it would not have been fun crawling the rest of the way, and her boom box and CDs would still be out in the snow.

  So okay. She owed him. She’d do what he told her to do—for an hour. She glanced at her watch—8:05—and then slanted him a look from beneath the shadow of the ice pack. “I’ll lie here till five after nine, and that’s it.”

  He said nothing, just went back to his chair, picked up his book, sat down and started reading again.

  Jilly plumped up the two skimpy throw pillows and stretched out once more on the creaky old sofa bed. She readjusted the ice pack so it would stay in place by itself, which meant her right eye was covered. She folded her hands over her stomach and stared, one-eyed, at the ceiling.

  Like the walls, the ceiling was paneled in wood. What kind of wood, she had no idea. It had all been painted in high-gloss white enamel long, long ago. The enamel was yellowed now and cracked in places.

  For a while, as she studied the ceiling, she strained her ears to hear the radio. But he had it turned down so low, all she could make out were two voices speaking with English accents—maybe about world hunger, though there was no way she could be absolutely sure. What in the world, she wanted to ask him, is the point of listening to the radio if you have it down so low, you can’t hear what they’re saying?

  But she didn’t ask him. Who cared? She didn’t. Let him read his big, fat, pretentious book.

  He turned a page. The propane-burning wall heater not far from the kitchen door came on—a click, followed by a rushing sound as the gas was released and set alight by the pilot. Outside, the wind went on howling away.

  Jilly sighed. She glanced at her watch—8:17. At this rate, she’d be an old woman by the time the hour was up.

  Yes, she knew it. A total inability to lie still and do nothing unless she happened to be asleep was another of her faults. But she would do it. She would keep her agreement with him. Forty-eight more minutes of staring at the ceiling coming right up.

  Missy, who’d apparently taken it upon herself to wander into Will’s bedroom, came sliding through the split in the curtain—this one printed with palm trees—that served as his bedroom door. She strutted across the black-and-red spotted linoleum, tail held high.

  Jilly couldn’t resist. She lowered her left hand close to the floor and gestured to Missy to come over and see her.

  Will looked up. “Problem?”

  “No, not at all.” Jilly folded her hands on her stomach again and made herself stare ceiling-ward. But a minute later, she couldn’t resist a glance in Missy’s direction.

  The traitor. She’d found a seat near Will’s feet and was looking up at him as if she understood the true meaning of love at last.

  Jilly lifted the ice pack briefly in order to check out the bump on her head. It didn’t feel all that bad. And her headache really was better. There was no reason at all for her to lie here one minute longer.

  Except that she had said she would, and that she owed Will and this was what he wanted from her, so that if she went into convulsions or started imagining that she was Napoleon, he would be right there to…what?

  To nothing. As she’d kept trying to tell him, if brain damage was in the offing, there wasn’t a thing he’d be able to do.

  He must have felt her exasperated stare, because he looked up again. “What?”

  “Nothing.” She carefully set the ice pack back in place, stifled a sigh and took up staring at the ceiling once more.

  Decades later, it was 9:05. Jilly set the ice pack on the side table, and swung her feet to the floor.

  Will glanced up from his book. “How do you feel?”

  “Good. Fine. Incredible.”

  “Maybe you ought to—”

  She put up a hand. “Don’t. I did what you wanted. I’m feeling great. May I please be excused?”

  He grunted. “All right, Jillian. Go.”

  I am dismissed, she thought. At last.

  She stood. There was a slight throbbing in her temple, but nothing to worry about. Very manageable.

  She headed straight for her coat.

  She was just reaching to lift it from the peg when he demanded from behind her, “What in hell do you think you’re doing?”

  Lord, give me strength, she thought. Let me get through this night without murdering this man. She calmly took her coat off the peg.

  “Jillian. Are you completely insane? You almost got yourself killed once tonight. You’re not giving it another try.”

  The pure disgust in his voice really got to her. She had a powerful urge to start shouting rude things. But somehow, she managed to keep her cool as she faced him, holding out the coat. “See that? Bloodstains. Once they’re set, they’re almost impossible to get out. I’m taking this coat in the bathroom and I’m getting to work on these spots.”

  He blinked. “You’re not going outside.”

  “No. I’m not.”

  “You’re going to spot-clean your coat.”

  “That’s what I said.”

  “That is the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard.”

  There was something about the way he said ridiculous. She knew what he meant by it. Oh, yes. She did. He meant that she was ridiculous.

  “Will Bravo. You are pushing me. You are pushing me too far.”

  “Just put the damn coat back on the peg. Go upstairs and lie down.”

  “You are so hateful. So bitter. So mean.”

  “Jillian—”

  “It’s not my fault a tree branch fell on me. I’m very sorry you had to come out and rescue me.”

  “I didn’t say—”

  She waved a hand. “I don’t care what you said. I’m saying that I wish you’d just stayed in here by the fire with that damn book of yours. I would have made it in on my own.”

  “You were barely—”

  “I was getting there. All right, it wasn’t pretty, but I was managing.”

  He dared to open his mouth again.

  She didn’t even let him get a word out. “I want you to listen. I want you to hear me. I am sorry to be here, sorry to disturb you. I was tricked into being here. I swear if I’d had even a suspicion, even a scintilla of a notion that you might be here, I never, ever would have come within a hundred miles of this place.”

  “I don’t care what—”

  “I’m not finished. I’m not even close to finished.”

  He raked a hand back through his hair, and he glared at her good and hard.

  As if she cared how hard he glared. He had pushed her too far and he was going to get it.

  She hit him with the one thing she would have sworn, until that moment, that she would never, ever have revealed to him. “I heard what you said about me two weeks ago at that party at Jane’s.”

  He actually flinched. Good. He should flinch.

  “I was right around the corner in the front hall when your mother suggested you ought to go and say hi to that ‘sweet little Jillian.’ Tell me, Will. Do you
happen to remember what you said then?”

  “Jillian, I—”

  “Oh, no. Please. Wait. Don’t tell me. Let me tell you. You said that if you were looking for a woman—which you were not—the last woman in the world you’d go after would be me. Because you find me flighty. That’s right. Flighty. Flighty and…how did you put it? Ah. I remember. I’m ‘A silly woman with a silly job. A woman of absolutely no depth, a slave to fashion, the kind of woman who would jump over a dying man on the street in order to be at the head of the line when they unlock the doors for Nordstrom’s after-Christmas sale.”’

  Chapter Four

  Jilly noticed with a high degree of satisfaction that Will didn’t seem to have anything more to say. There was a long silence, one that crackled with mutual hostility.

  Finally, he muttered, “Are you through now?”

  “Oh, absolutely. I am done, concluded, finished in the truest sense of the word—and may I please go take care of my coat?”

  “Be my guest.”

  Her head high and her shoulders back, Jilly headed for the bathroom, shutting the door good and hard when she got in there, and then catching sight of her self in the cracked full-length mirror on the back of that door. What she saw was not encouraging. Her hair gave new meaning to the words matted and stringy. The knot on the right side of her forehead was turning a very unflattering shade of magenta.

  Jilly wished a lot of things right then, as she stared at her pitiful reflection in the mirror on the back of the bathroom door. She wished she’d just written the piece Frank had asked for in the first place. Certainly wandering the club scene, guzzling Cosmopolitans, listening to tired pick-up lines couldn’t be worse than this. She wished she’d never called Celia about finding a cabin, wished she’d taken a pass on the suggestion that she get a hold of Caitlin—and yes, she had been reluctant, after what she’d heard at Jane’s party. She wished she’d gone with that reluctance and never picked up the phone.

  As a matter of fact, she couldn’t wait to get home, to spend Christmas with her own family, after all. Next to what she’d been through up here at Mad Mavis’s ramshackle old house, she was actually looking forward to having her mother and her two very married sisters sending her the usual pitying looks, dropping subtle hints about how much happier she’d be if she found someone special, had a baby and did something worthwhile with her life for a change.

  But wait. What was this?

  Looked like a serious case of Poor Me, oh yes it did. And though Jillian Diamond had a number of faults, wallowing around in self-pity was not one of them.

  Jilly straightened her shoulders again and carefully smoothed a few straggling strands of hair away from her injury. Okay, it was ugly. But it could have been much worse. And her hair would look a hundred percent better once she’d taken a brush to it.

  Too bad her brush was upstairs….

  But later for that. First things first. Her coat required attention.

  The bathroom lacked the usual white porcelain sink. Instead, two deep concrete laundry sinks lined the outside wall, a long window above them. Jilly turned to the sinks and flipped on the cold water.

  As she moistened and blotted the soft suede of her stained coat, she decided that she didn’t feel so low, after all. There was something about telling a person the one thing you would have sworn you’d never confess to them that was very freeing. Somehow, it didn’t even matter that he hadn’t apologized. His response wasn’t important.

  Jilly bent over her coat, dabbing and blotting. To be fair, she would have to say that he had looked just a little bit embarrassed at what a complete jerk he’d been. She found that appropriate. He should be embarrassed.

  “There,” she said under her breath, holding up the coat and examining her handiwork. “Best I can do until I can get it to the cleaners.”

  She took the coat back out through the kitchen and hung it at the door, taking scrupulous care not to look in Will’s direction. Next, she padded over to the little table by the sofa bed and collected her empty water glass, the bloodstained cloth and the ice pack. She washed the glass, rinsed out the cloth and hung it over one of the bathroom sinks. She emptied the ice pack, leaving it, with the glass, in the dish drainer to dry.

  Oh, what she wouldn’t give for a long, hot soak in that clawfoot bathtub. But it was Will’s house—more or less. Somehow, she felt it would be nothing short of rude just to get out her bath salts and fill up the tub without asking him first. And since the last thing she wanted to do was speak to him again, the bath was out. She carried her boom box and CDs upstairs and came back down with her vanity kit. She cleaned her face, brushed her teeth and did what she could with her hideous hair.

  Finally, there was Missy to deal with. Jilly carried the litter box and water bowl upstairs. Then she went to get the cat.

  As Jilly had feared, Missy was reluctant to leave the newfound object of her inexplicable devotion, but Jilly tempted her with a few cat treats and that was the end of that. She closed the door to the kitchen before she carried the cat up the stairs.

  As soon as Jilly put her down, Missy took off. Jilly shrugged and got out her lovely soft micro-fleece pajamas with the blue and yellow stripes on the bottoms and cheerful daisies on the top. She was pulling them on when Missy started crying from the foot of the stairs.

  Too bad. She’d get over it.

  Jilly slid her Ray Charles Spirit of Christmas CD into the boom box, turned the volume low enough that it wouldn’t disturb the Grinch downstairs, and got out the three novels she’d brought.

  There were two juicy romances and a nail-biting thriller. She chose the thriller. She had no desire at all to read about men and women working out their problems, enjoying great sex and finding lasting love. Not tonight, anyway.

  Jilly got under the covers, plumped the pillows against her back and started reading. Eventually, Missy quit meowing pathetically at the stairway door. She appeared at the side of the bed, jumped up next to Jilly, curled in a ball and went to sleep. Outside, the wind wailed and the snow blew against the window, making a sound like someone tapping to get in.

  The CD ended. Jilly hardly noticed. The thriller certainly did deliver the goods. It was a tale of a serial killer who murdered young women in various gruesome ways. He broke in on them late at night—they all lived in isolated houses—and no one heard their terrified screams.

  The book was probably a bad choice, in hindsight. One of those books that shouldn’t be read at night, in the dim attic bedroom of a house rumored to be haunted, with the wind howling outside and a view of a dingy curtain with pineapples on it—pineapples that, somehow, had begun to resemble ghostly faces, grinning malevolently.

  “There is nothing to be afraid of,” Jilly whispered aloud as she marked her place in the book and set it aside for the night. She was safe in a warm bed. No deranged serial killer lurked outside—and if one did, he certainly should be frozen to death by now. The pineapples in the curtain were not evil faces. Mad Mavis was long gone. And Jilly did not believe in ghosts.

  But just to be on the safe side, she left the lamp on. She turned away from the light and snuggled down with Missy purring at her back.

  Her headache, she realized, was completely gone. She allowed herself a smug little smile. Take that, Will Bravo. No brain damage for this girl. She yawned.

  It wasn’t long at all before she drifted off to sleep.

  Jilly woke some time later. She was lying on her stomach with her face buried in the pillow.

  She lifted her head, blinked, and looked out the window above the bed.

  The clouds had cleared. The storm was over. A full moon shone in on her, casting a magical, silvery light through the narrow attic room.

  And wait a minute. The lamp was off. Odd. Hadn’t she left it on?

  Jilly pushed herself to her knees and brushed her sleep-tangled hair from her eyes. She picked up her watch from the nightstand and peered at it.

  Midnight, on the nose.

  Jil
ly set the watch down and turned over, dragging herself up to a sitting position. She saw Missy, then. The cat was sitting at the end of the bed, golden eyes gleaming eerily in the moonlight, watching her. Jilly stretched out a hand.

  And Missy vanished—or rather, she faded away, first becoming transparent and then, poof, gone. Just like that.

  Jilly pondered her cat’s Cheshire-like disappearance. All was not as it should be.

  And who was that skinny old woman standing at the foot of the bed, the one in the quilted blue bathrobe and the ruffled hairnet, the one with the face that vaguely resembled Caitlin Bravo’s? The one with Will’s blue, blue eyes?

  “Mavis?”

  The old woman nodded. Imagine that. First, her cat literally faded away. And now she was being treated to a visitation from Mad Mavis McCormack.

  “This is a dream, right?”

  Mad Mavis smiled. For such an old, wrinkled woman, she had surprisingly white, straight teeth. She stepped forward—right through the bed—and held out her hand.

  “Oh, I don’t think so,” Jilly said.

  But Mavis just went on standing there, her lower half disappearing into the bed, holding out that bony hand until Jilly looked down and discovered that she’d taken that hand, after all.

  The walls around them were melting, the bed disappearing. Jilly closed her eyes.

  When she opened them, she and Mavis still held hands, but now they stood side-by-side. There was another bed in front of them. A man lay sleeping on that bed, facing away from them. Jilly knew who the man was even before she noticed the curtain on the other side of the bed—the one that led to the living area and was printed with palm trees.

  “Mavis, I am begging you,” Jilly whispered. “Don’t do this to me. Okay, maybe for a minute or two, for a fraction of a nanosecond, I might have been attracted to him. But not anymore. It’s really over, you know? I mean, it never even got started. I don’t want anything to do with him. I just want to forget he even exists. And I most certainly don’t want him taking up space in my dreams.”

  Mavis began fading backward, her skinny old hand passing out of Jilly’s grip without either of then actually letting go. She floated toward the corner of the room, drifting past the ladder-back rocker under the window, insinuating herself between the far wall and an old dresser with a yellowed lace runner and a streaked mirror in a heavily carved frame.