A Lot Like Christmas

by Connie Willis

  She went back to dissecting sonnets: “Roses have thorns, and silver fountains mud.” “My grief lies onward, and my joy behind.”

  She gave up and sat there waiting for Norwall to override. “I checked with lawyer.com,” he said when he came on, “and it’s perfectly legal. Thank God she didn’t pick a theme. There isn’t a thing Dr. Darbingdon or Galatek will be able to do about it.”

  “About what?” Linny asked.

  “About the elegant revenge you’re going to work on them.”

  “Revenge?”

  “Yes,” he said eagerly. “You get to pick the theme. All right. You pick Death and Destruction or Nightmares or Strip Mining. You do the installation—when is it, by the way?”

  “A week from now. The twenty-third. But—”

  “You decorate her house totally as per the contract, only with Disgusting Things in Caves or Revenge Is Sweet, and when she sees it, you’ve not only ruined her Christmas, but she knows she can’t go around stealing people’s concepts. And you have your revenge.”

  “What does that have to do with Christmas?” Linny murmured.

  “What?” Norwall said.

  “Nothing. Isn’t it enough to tell them we know what they’re up to and refuse to do the installation?”

  “She’ll just get Galatek’s designers to do it. This way, she’s publicly humiliated. She’s having a dinner party for Galatek’s board of directors the night of the day you’re scheduled to do the installation.”

  She wasn’t lying about that, either, Linny thought.

  “I think Hell Hath No Fury would be perfect,” Norwall said.

  “But it’s Christmas. It’s not supposed to be a time for revenge. It’s supposed to be the season of forgiveness and good will.”

  “After what they’ve done to you? All right, no revenge themes. But you have to do something, unless you just want to hand your clients over to them.”

  “I’ll go talk to them,” she said, but her heart quailed at the thought.

  “Have it your way, no revenge,” Norwall said, throwing up his hands. “But let me handle it. I don’t trust you to be tough enough. Let me be the one to confront them.”

  “All right,” Linny said gratefully.

  “Good,” Norwall said. “Don’t worry, I’ll take care of everything.”

  But she did worry. She tried to take her mind off it by focusing on the sonnet problem, but it wasn’t much help.

  “Poems, you mean?” Pandora said vaguely when Linny called her with her proposal. “Oh, I don’t want poems. They’re so—don’t you have any other ideas?”

  “Stock car racing?” Linny said at random. “Herbs and spices? Duck decoys? Media bias?”

  “It has to have the bust in it.”

  Pikes Peak or Bust? she thought wildly. Or Great Busts of History, with Madonna and Diana Dors and the Great Crash of 2006. “How about Famous Dramatists?”

  “Mitzi Poulakakos did that five years ago.”

  I wonder if I could talk her into “Fire” as a theme, Linny wondered. That way I could just burn down her house. “Or Christmas at the Globe Theater?”

  “I don’t know…maybe…why don’t you work up a proposal?”

  Linny did, and installed the Goldfarbs’ Christmas and the Marcianos’ Hanukkah, trying to reach Norwall at intervals and finally succeeding around noon on the twenty-third.

  “All taken care of,” he said. “You don’t have to worry about anything.”

  “You talked to them?”

  “I did, and told her in no uncertain terms to leave you alone or you’d sue.”

  “What did she say?” she said, wanting to ask if Brian had been there.

  “They…oh, my God, the Pyramids just fell down,” he said. “Don’t give it another thought. All taken care of. If you get any messages from them, delete them.”

  Linny did, putting them on “automatic delete” so she didn’t even have to hear Brian’s voice, and moving on to messages about the Carmodys’ flamingos, a delivery of wrapping paper that had butterflies instead of caterpillars on it, and the ever-present problem of Pandora, who had decided Christmas at the Globe was too confusing.

  “People might be expecting to see an actual globe,” she said, and Linny thought, Why did I get angry when I found out Brian and Dr. Darbingdon were trying to steal my business? Why didn’t I jump at the chance?

  “How about Christmas in Westminster Abbey?” she suggested. “Candles, a holo of the nave, busts of Byron and Shakespeare and Keats. All the famous poets are buried there.”

  Shakespeare wasn’t, but Pandora and her friends wouldn’t know that. “I can see it all now—Poet’s Corner, Queen Elizabeth’s tomb, the Crown Jewels—”

  “The Crown Jewels,” Pandora said, pleased. “I don’t suppose you could work King Harry’s coronation in somehow?”

  “Why not?” Linny said. I have nothing else to do between now and the twenty-fifth. She uplinked to Fergie’s Fripperies and reserved an ermine cape and then called Rock and a Hard Place and asked what they had left in literary busts.

  “Not a thing. I’ve got some statues—rappers, mostly, and a Sammy Sosa. I don’t have a Judas, either.”

  A Judas?

  “The closest thing I’ve got is an Adonis,” he went on. “You could maybe put a tunic on him and thirty pieces of silver in his hand. Do you want me to send it over?”

  “Send it over where?” Linny asked with a sinking feeling.

  “Mrs. Shields, 3404 Aspen Lane,” he said. “Do you want the Adonis or not?”

  “Not,” Linny said, hit “end,” and called a taxi.

  She worried the whole way out on the maglev and in the taxi from the station about what she might find, but when it pulled up in front of the house she saw a row of life-size tin soldiers standing stiffly in red and blue uniforms.

  “Oh, good, Norwall thought better of getting revenge,” she murmured, sliding her card through the taxi’s reader. He’d decided to fulfill their contract with a standard treatment instead, and one Galatek couldn’t learn anything from. Babes in Toyland was one of the most common Christmas themes.

  She hurried across the street and up the path to the door, and then stopped short. The soldiers had their toy rifles raised and pointed at a life-size doll in a pink dress and a blindfold. “Oh, no,” Linny murmured, and hurried inside.

  The tree in the hall was swathed in crime scene tape and flashing red-white-and-blue police lights, and there was a painting of Benedict Arnold on the wall behind it.

  She went into the living room, where a holo of Julius Caesar being stabbed was playing on a continuous loop. She walked through Brutus and into the dining room.

  The walls and table were draped in black and in the center of the table was a horse’s head with a sign pinned to the mane. “This is what happens to people who try to steal our design concepts,” it read. “Merry Christmas from deck.halls.”

  Linny pulled the sign off, wadded it up, and walked warily into the study. Statues filled the room, cups of wassail in their hands as if this was a Christmas party. Nero, and Hitler, who was Sieg Heiling with his other hand, and Simon Legree, and someone who was probably supposed to be Iago from the handkerchief in his hand.

  Oh, no. I can’t let Mrs. Shields see this, Linny thought, and then remembered she wasn’t Mrs. Shields.

  I still can’t let her see it, she thought, sick at the thought of what Brian would say when he saw this, of what he’d think if he believed she’d done this. Even though he’d—

  “Revenge doesn’t have anything to do with Christmas,” she said firmly, and began pulling down the black garlands looped all around the room.

  There was a tree here, too, hidden behind Billy the Kid. It was lying under a guillotine, its tip, with the star still on it, chopped off, and ornaments in the shape of instruments of torture. Linny finished pulling down the garlands, stuffed them into a trash bag, and began unhooking the ornaments.

  There was a sound. Oh, God, what if it’s B
rian? she thought, leaping for the door, but it was only a workman, wearing the red-white-blue-and-brown coveralls of FedXUPS and carrying a toga’d and gold-laurel-wreathed mannequin.

  “What’s this?” she asked.

  The workman righted the mannequin and set it down. “Nero,” he said, though she had already figured that out from the plaster violin under the statue’s chin. “Where do you want it?”

  “Back where you got it,” she said. “Put it back in the truck.”

  “I’ve got a delivery order for this address,” he said, pulling out his handheld.

  “I’m rescinding the order.” She reached for the handheld and clicked “cancel.” “I want all of these returned,” she said, indicating Hitler et al.

  “Those aren’t ours,” he said. “We don’t do statues. Or fictionals. The fictionals are from Eveningprimrose. The only ones that are ours are the toy soldiers and the doll.” He checked his manifest. “And the Pontius Pilate in the bathroom.”

  Oh, Norwall. “Well, take it back, too.”

  “I’ll have to charge you extra for an unscheduled pickup.”

  “Fine,” Linny said, and then, as he picked up Nero, “What would you charge to take the rest of these back to—” she tipped Stalin forward to take a look at the bottom of his foot, “Rock and a Hard Place and Eveningprimrose?”

  “Two days before Christmas? Are you kidding?” He picked up Nero and started out. “You’re lucky I’ve got room on the truck for the toy soldiers. Otherwise, you’d have had to wait till January. There’s no way you’re going to get anybody to do unscheduled pickups this close to Christmas.”

  He was right, but she tried anyway, calling Rock and a Hard Place and Eveningprimrose, and then Nowheretoturn Trucking, which had helped her one time on the twenty-fourth with an emergency delivery to Pandora’s, but she got voice mail on all three, and her overrides didn’t work. She would have to talk the FedXUPS guy into taking at least some of the statues, but he and his truck were already gone.

  At least he took the firing squad, she thought, looking at the trampled snow, and went back inside. She would have to do it herself. Dr. Darbingdon couldn’t walk in here and see the house like this. She went out to the dining room and scooped up the tablecloth by the corners, the centerpiece and dishes and all, into a clanking bundle, tied the ends, and carried it out back to the trash recycle, and then went back into the study and began wrestling Nixon through the dining room toward the back door.

  She made it as far as the door to the kitchen, which apparently wasn’t as wide as the study’s, because his arms, raised in his trademark V’s for victory, got wedged in the door and wouldn’t budge. She tried to turn him sideways, but his arms were jammed tight.

  They’ll have to come off, she thought, and began unbuttoning his jacket so she could unscrew the arms. The front door opened. Oh, good, she thought, he came back for the Pilate in the bathroom. “Can you give me a hand? I’m in the dining room,” she called, struggling with the sleeve.

  “What the hell’s the idea?” Brian said.

  She looked up. He was standing in the door to the living room, his fists full of police car lights and crime scene tape. The lights were still flashing blindingly.

  “You found out,” he said.

  “I found out,” she said.

  “And you did this,” he said, looking at Brutus.

  “No, though it would have been an appropriate reaction. What did you expect me to do, be overjoyed?”

  “No,” he said. “I thought maybe…no, I suppose not.”

  It wasn’t at all the reaction she’d expected. She’d expected slick explanations, but he just stood there, his hands full of flashing red and blue, staring at the holo and looking like he’d been kicked in the stomach. After a long minute, he said bitterly, “I suppose you ran a background check and found out who she really was.”

  Linny nodded. “They’re routine for all new clients, even with a little-nobody Christmas company like deck.halls.”

  “I told her you were bound to find out,” he said. “I told her lying to you was terminally stupid, that we should just tell you—”

  “And that would somehow make it more acceptable to me?”

  He waited a minute before answering. “I thought it might be a possibility.”

  A possibility. The arrogance of the man. “Well, it’s not,” she snapped.

  “Apparently not,” he said, looking at John Wilkes Booth pouring himself a cup of wassail. “And so you—”

  “I told you, I didn’t do this. In fact, I was trying to get it taken down before anybody saw it. I don’t believe in an eye for an eye, especially at Christmas.” She reached forward and took the lights and tape from him and stuffed them in a garbage bag. “Dr. Darbingdon’s going to be here in a few minutes,” she said, “and some of this is too heavy for me to move, so if you don’t want her to see this, you’re going to have to help me. And, no, you don’t have to remind me that I’m under contract. I am painfully aware of that.”

  “I definitely don’t want her to see this,” he said, and seemed to come to himself. He hoisted Nixon up. “Where do you want me to put this?”

  “Out back behind the spruces for now,” she said, and went ahead into the kitchen to open the back door for him. A grim-looking automated store mannequin in a navy dress stood at the stove, stirring a pot.

  “Who’s that supposed to be?” Brian asked, grunting as he maneuvered Nixon through the door. “Lucrezia Borgia?”

  “Linda Tripp,” she said, and as soon as Brian and Nixon went out, switched it off, unplugged the control box, and began winding up the cord. “I can get this one,” she said when he came back in. “You get the ones in the study.”

  She dismantled Linda and then the guillotine in the living room and put them out back while he carried out Haldeman and Ehrlichman, and then linked to hollyandivy.com to order a Number One. It wasn’t much, but there wasn’t time for anything but standard decorations, if that.

  Hollyandivy was sold out. She linked to Everything Christmas. “Site closed,” it said. She punched in their emergency number. “We’ve been completely cleaned out since the nineteenth,” Nadia told her. “Did you try Holiday Heaven?”

  She tried Holiday Heaven, and Christmas“R”Us and Partyplus. “Everyone’s completely sold out,” she told Brian when he reappeared with O. J. Simpson. “The only supplier who has anything in stock is thegooseisgettingfat.com, and all they’ve got is a Mayan snake god and two dozen yellow polka-dot bikinis, no candles, no lights. Dr. Darbingdon wouldn’t have her old decorations in the basement, would she?”

  He shook his head. “She gave them all to charity after she started having Galatek do her Christmases. Nobody’s got anything?”

  “No,” she said, scrolling through a list of electronics suppliers. Maybe one of them would have some colored LEDs that could pass for Christmas tree lights—

  Her screen buzzed. “The Westminster Abbey theme won’t work,” Pandora Freeh said.

  “Who is it?” Brian said.

  “I just found out Sashine Nackerty’s new live-in’s old live-in’s theme last year was A Double-Decker Tour of London—the Tower, Madame Tussauds, mad cow disease, Big Ben—”

  “Who is it?”

  “I can’t talk right now,” Linny said desperately. “I’ve got an emergency.”

  “An emergency!” Pandora said, waving it aside. “The Abbey’s in London! If Jane sees it, she’ll think I’m trying to remind him of his old live-in, and—”

  “Who is it?” Brian said. “Is it my aunt?”

  “No,” Linny hissed, and hit “speaker” so he could hear for himself.

  “Besides which, Westminster Abbey’s only one tiny stop on this elaborate tour!” Pandora said. “The theme just won’t work. You’ll have to come up with something else.”

  “Westminster Abbey?” Brian whispered. “What happened to Twelfth Night?”

  “Too intellectual,” she whispered back. “And she insisted it ha
d to be something that involved Shakespeare’s bust. Poet’s Corner was the only thing I could think of.”

  “—and it needs to be done by tomorrow because that’s when Griselda and Carlos are coming. I invited them to lunch, having no idea—”

  “Shakespeare wasn’t buried in Westminster Abbey,” Brian whispered.

  “I am aware of that, but I had to come up with something, and since when are you such a stickler for the truth?”

  “Touché,” he said.

  “I sympathize with your situation,” Linny said into the phone, “but I have a client arriving any minute to no Christmas at all, so if I could call you back—”

  “What happened?” Pandora said, instantly interested. “Didn’t FedXUPS arrive? That happened to me one time before I hired you—it was why I hired you, as a matter of fact. The truck was one of those unmanned robot things, which they assured me was perfectly reliable—”

  “No, it wasn’t the truck. It—” Linny glanced at Brian. “It’s too complicated to explain right now. I have to try and find some Christmas decorations—”

  “What do you need?” Pandora said. “Maybe I can help.”

  “No, you don’t understand, none of the suppliers—”

  “Have you got decorations?” Brian cut in.

  “Yes, a whole attic full. Grisham says I never throw anything away, but I always say, you never know when things might come in handy. They’re the ones I used before I started hiring it done. It’s mostly nonthemed stuff. Santas and snowmen and jingle bells.”

  “I’ll be right over,” Brian said, grabbing his coat.

  “Oh, and I’ve got several antelope from this darling Home on the Range Christmas I did. If you have some antlers, they’d look just like reindeer.”

  “You’re a godsend,” Brian said, starting for the door.

  “Well, after all, that’s what Christmas is all about, isn’t it, helping each other? Oh, dear, I just thought of something. I don’t have a tree. I do have a crane, from Christmas on a Construction Site. You could—”

  “We’re set for trees. Brian will be right over,” Linny said, and hung up. “Don’t let her give you a crane,” she called after Brian, “or a bulldozer. And no roaming buffaloes.”