A Lot Like Christmas

by Connie Willis

  “No,” he said. “Aunt Lulla wasn’t really an actress?”

  “No.” She took a bowl out of the cupboard. “Do you have a ladle?”

  “No.”

  She got a dipper out of the silverware drawer. “Lulla was never in a single play,” she said, ladling the gravy into a bowl and handing it to Luke, “where she hadn’t gotten the part by sleeping with somebody. Lionel Barrymore, Ralph Richardson, Kenneth Branagh…” She opened the oven to look at the goose. “…and that’s not even counting Alfred.”

  “Alfred Lunt?” Luke asked.

  “Hitchcock. I think this is just about done.”

  “But I thought you said she was the shy one.”

  “She was. That’s why she went out for drama in high school, to overcome her shyness. Do you have a platter?”

  At 6:35 P.M., a member of the Breckenridge ski patrol, out looking for four missing cross-country skiers, spotted a taillight (the only part of Kent and Bodine’s Honda not covered by snow). He had a collapsible shovel with him, and a GPS, a satellite phone, a walkie-talkie, Mylar blankets, insta-heat packs, energy bars, a thermos of hot cocoa, and a stern lecture on winter safety, which he delivered after he had dug Kent and Bodine out and which they really resented. “Who did that fascist geek think he was, shaking his finger at us like that?” Bodine asked Kent after several tequila slammers at the Laughing Moose.

  “Yeah,” Kent said eloquently, and they settled down to the serious business of how to take advantage of the fresh powder that had fallen while they were in their car.

  “You know what’d be totally extreme?” Bodine said. “Snowboarding at night!”

  Shara was quite a girl. Warren didn’t have a chance to call Marjean again until after seven. When Shara went in the bathroom, he took the opportunity to dial home. “Where are you?” Marjean said, practically crying. “I’ve been worried sick! Are you all right?”

  “I’m still in Cincinnati at the airport,” he said, “and it looks like I’ll be here all night. They just closed the airport.”

  “Closed the airport…” she echoed.

  “I know,” he said, his voice full of regret. “I’d really counted on being home with you for Christmas Eve, but what can you do? It’s snowing like crazy here. No flights out till tomorrow afternoon at the earliest. I’m in line at the airline counter right now, rebooking, and then I’m going to try to find a place to stay, but I don’t know if I’ll have much luck.” He paused to give her a chance to commiserate. “They’re supposed to put us up for the night, but I wouldn’t be surprised if I end up sleeping on the floor.”

  “At the airport,” she said, “in Cincinnati.”

  “Yeah.” He laughed. “Great place to spend Christmas Eve, huh?” He paused to give her a chance to commiserate, but all she said was, “You didn’t make it home last year, either.”

  “Honey, you know I’d get there if I could,” he said. “I tried to rent a car and drive home, but the snow’s so bad they’re not even sure they can get a shuttle out here to take us to a hotel. I don’t know how much snow they’ve had here—”

  “Forty-six inches,” she said.

  Good, he thought. From her voice he’d been worried it might not be snowing in Cincinnati after all. “And it’s still coming down hard. Oh, they just called my name. I’d better go.”

  “You do that,” she said.

  “All right. I love you, honey,” he said, “I’ll be home as soon as I can,” and hung up the phone.

  “You’re married,” Shara said, standing in the door of the bathroom. “You sonuvabitch.”

  Paula didn’t say yes to Jim’s proposal after all. She’d intended to, but before she could, the viola player had cut in. “Hey, wait a minute!” he’d said. “I saw her first!”

  “You did not,” Jim said.

  “Well, no, not technically,” he admitted, “but when I did see her, I had the good sense to flirt with her, not get engaged to Vampira like you did.”

  “It wasn’t Jim’s fault,” Paula said. “Stacey always gets what she wants.”

  “Not this time,” he said. “And not me.”

  “Only because she doesn’t want you,” Paula said. “If she did—”

  “Wanna bet? You underestimate us musicians. And yourself. At least give me a chance to make my pitch before you commit to this guy. You can’t get married tonight anyway.”

  “Why not?” Jim asked.

  “Because you need two witnesses, and I have no intention of helping you,” he pointed at Jim, “get the woman I want. I doubt if Stacey’s in the mood to be a witness, either,” he said as Stacey stormed back in the sanctuary, with the minister in pursuit. Stacey had on her wedding dress, a parka, and boots.

  “You can’t go out in this,” the minister was saying. “It’s too dangerous!”

  “I have no intention of staying here with him,” Stacey said, shooting Jim a venomous glance. “I want to go home now.” She flung the door open on the thickly falling snow. “And I want it to stop snowing!”

  At that exact moment, a snowplow’s flashing yellow lights appeared through the snow, and Stacey ran out. Paula and Jim went over to the door and watched Stacey wave it down and get in. The plow continued on its way.

  “Oh, good, now we’ll be able to get out,” the minister said, and went to get her car keys.

  “You didn’t answer my question, Paula,” Jim said, standing very close.

  The plow turned and came back. As it passed, it plowed a huge mass of snow across the end of the driveway.

  “I mean it,” Jim murmured. “How about it?”

  “Look what I found,” the viola player said, appearing at Paula’s elbow. He handed her a piece of wedding cake.

  “You can’t eat that. It’s—” Jim said.

  “—not bad,” the viola player said. “I prefer chocolate, though. What kind of cake shall we have at our wedding, Paula?”

  “Oh, look,” the minister said, coming back in with her car keys and looking out the window. “It’s stopped snowing.”

  “It’s stopped snowing,” Chin said.

  “It has?” Nathan looked up from his keyboard. “Here?”

  “No. In Oceanside, Oregon. And in Springfield, Illinois.”

  Nathan found them on the map. Two thousand miles apart. He checked their barometer readings, temperatures, snowfall amounts. No similarity. Springfield had thirty-two inches, Oceanside an inch and a half. And in every single town around them, it was still snowing hard. In Tillamook, six miles away, it was coming down at the rate of five inches an hour.

  But ten minutes later, Chin reported the snow stopping in Gillette, Wyoming; Roulette, Massachusetts; and Saginaw, Michigan, and within half an hour the number of stations reporting in was over thirty, though they seemed just as randomly scattered all over the map as the storm’s beginning had been.

  “Maybe it has to do with their names,” Chin said.

  “Their names?” Nathan said.

  “Yeah. Look at this. It’s stopped in Joker, West Virginia; Bluff, Utah; and Blackjack, Georgia.”

  At 7:22 P.M., the snow began to taper off in Wendover, Utah. Neither the Lucky Lady Casino nor the Big Nugget had any windows, so the event went unnoticed until Barbara Gomez, playing the quarter slots, ran out of money at 9:05 P.M. and had to go out to her car to get the emergency twenty she kept taped under the dashboard. By this time, the snow had nearly stopped. Barbara told the change girl, who said, “Oh, good. I was worried about driving to Battle Mountain tomorrow. Were the plows out?”

  Barbara said she didn’t know and asked for four rolls of nickels, which she promptly lost playing video poker.

  By 7:30 P.M. CNBC had replaced its logo with Digging Out, and ABC had retreated to Bing and White Christmas, though CNN still had side-by-side experts discussing the possibility of a new ice age, and on Fox News, Geraldo Rivera was intoning, “In his classic poem ‘Fire and Ice,’ Robert Frost speculated that the world might end in ice. Today we are seeing the coming
true of that dire prediction—”

  The rest had obviously gotten the word, though, and CBS and the WB had both gone back to their regular programming. The movie White Christmas was on AMC.

  “Whatever this was, it’s stopping,” Nathan said, watching “I-80 now open from Lincoln to Ogalallah,” scroll across the bottom of NBC’s screen.

  “Well, whatever you do, don’t tell those corporate guys,” Chin said, and, as if on cue, one of the businessmen Nathan had met with that morning called.

  “I just wanted you to know we’ve voted to approve your grant,” he said.

  “Really? Thank you,” Nathan said, trying to ignore Chin, who was mouthing, “Are they giving us the money?”

  “Yes,” he mouthed back.

  Chin scribbled down something and shoved it in front of Nathan. “Get it in writing,” it said.

  “We all agreed this discontinuity thing is worth studying,” the businessman said, then, shakily, “They’ve been talking on TV about the end of the world. You don’t think this discontinuity thing is that bad, do you?”

  “No,” Nathan said, “in fact—”

  “Ix-nay, ix-nay,” Chin mouthed, wildly crossing his arms.

  Nathan glared at him. “—we’re not even sure yet if it is a discontinuity. It doesn’t—”

  “Well, we’re not taking any chances,” the businessman said. “What’s your fax number? I want to send you that confirmation before the power goes out over here. We want you to get started working on this thing as soon as you can.”

  Nathan gave him the number. “There’s really no need—” he said.

  Chin jabbed his finger violently at the logo False Alarm on the screen of Adler’s TV.

  “Consider it a Christmas present,” the businessman said, and the fax machine began to whir. “There is going to be a Christmas, isn’t there?”

  Chin yanked the fax out of the machine with a whoop.

  “Definitely,” Nathan said. “Merry Christmas,” but the businessman had already hung up.

  Chin was still looking at the fax.

  “How much did you ask them for?”

  “Fifty thousand,” Nathan said.

  Chin slapped the grant approval down in front of him. “And a merry Christmas to you, too,” he said.

  At 7:40 P.M., after watching infomercials for NordicTrack, a combination egg poacher and waffle iron, and the revolutionary new DuckBed, Bev put on her thin coat and her still-damp gloves and went downstairs. There had to be a restaurant open somewhere in Santa Fe. She would find one and have a margarita and a beef chimichanga, sitting in a room decorated with sombreros or piñatas, with striped curtains pulled across the windows to shut the snow out.

  And if they were all closed, she would come back and order from room service. Or starve. But she was not going to ask at the desk and have them phone ahead and tell her El Charito had closed early because of the weather; she was not going to let them cut off all avenues of escape, like Carmelita. She walked determinedly past the registration desk toward the double doors.

  “Mrs. Carey!” the clerk called to her, and when she kept walking, he hurried around the desk and across the lobby to her. “I have a message for you from Carmelita. She wanted me to tell you midnight mass at the cathedral has been canceled,” he said. “The bishop was worried about people driving home on the icy roads. But Carmelita said to tell you they’re having mass at eight o’clock, if you’d like to come to that. The cathedral’s right up the street at the end of the Plaza. If you go out the north door,” he pointed, “it’s only two blocks. It’s a very pretty service, with the luminarias and all.”

  And it’s somewhere to go, Bev thought, letting him lead her to the north door. It’s something to do. “Tell Carmelita thank you for me,” she said at the door. “And Feliz Navidad.”

  “Merry Christmas.” He opened the door. “You go down this street, turn left, and it’s right there,” he said, and ducked back inside, out of the snow.

  It was inches deep on the sidewalk, and snowing hard as she hurried along the narrow street, head down. By morning it would look just like back home. It’s not fair, she thought. She turned the corner and looked up at the sound of an organ.

  The cathedral stood at the head of the Plaza, its windows glowing like flames, and she had been wrong about the luminarias being ruined—they stood in rows leading up the walk, up the steps to the wide doors, lining the adobe walls and the roofs and the towers, burning steadily in the descending snow.

  It fell silently, in great, spangled flakes, glittering in the light of the streetlamps, covering the wooden-posted porches, the pots of cactus, the pink adobe buildings. The sky above the cathedral was pink, too, and the whole scene had an unreal quality, like a movie set.

  “Oh, Howard,” Bev said, as if she had just opened a present, and then flinched away from the thought of him, waiting for the thrust of the knife, but it didn’t come. She felt only regret that he couldn’t be here to see this, and amusement that the sequined snowflakes sifting down on her hair, on her coat sleeve, looked just like the fake snow at the end of White Christmas. And, arching over it all, like the pink sky, she felt affection—for the snow, for the moment, for Howard.

  “You did this,” she said, and started to cry.

  The tears didn’t trickle down her cheeks, they poured out, drenching her face, her coat, melting the snowflakes instantly where they fell. Healing tears, she thought, and realized suddenly that when she had asked Howard how the movie ended, he hadn’t said, “They lived happily ever after.” He had said, “They got a white Christmas.”

  “Oh, Howard.”

  The bells for the service began to ring. I need to stop crying and go in, she thought, fumbling for a tissue, but she couldn’t. The tears kept coming, as if someone had opened a spigot.

  A black-shawled woman carrying a prayer book put her hand on Bev’s shoulder and said, “Are you all right, señora?”

  “Yes,” Bev said, “I’ll be fine,” and something in her voice must have reassured the woman because she patted Bev’s arm and went on into the cathedral.

  The bells stopped ringing and the organ began again, but Bev continued to stand there until long after the mass had started, looking up at the falling snow.

  “I don’t know how you did this, Howard,” she said, “but I know you’re responsible.”

  At 8 P.M., after anxiously checking the news to make sure the roads were still closed, Pilar put Miguel to bed. “Now go to sleep,” she said, kissing him good night. “Santa’s coming soon.”

  “Hunh-unh,” he said, looking like he was going to cry. “It’s snowing too hard.”

  He’s worried about the roads being closed, she thought. “Santa doesn’t need roads,” she said. “Remember, he has a magic sleigh that flies through the air even if it’s snowing.”

  “Hunh-unh,” he said, getting out of bed to get his Rudolph book. He showed her the illustration of the whirling blizzard and Santa shaking his head, and then stood up on his bed, pulled back the curtain, and pointed through the window. She had to admit it did look just like the picture.

  “But he had Rudolph to show the way,” she said. “See?” and turned the page, but he continued to look skeptical until she had read the book all the way through twice.

  At 10:15 P.M. Warren Nesvick went down to the hotel’s bar. He had tried to explain to Shara that Marjean was his five-year-old niece, but she had gotten completely unreasonable. “So I’m a canceled flight out of Cincinnati, am I?” she’d shouted. “Well, I’m canceling you, you bastard!” and slammed out, leaving him high and dry. On Christmas Eve, for Christ’s sake.

  He’d spent the next hour and a half on the phone. He’d called some women he knew from previous trips, but none of them had answered. He’d then tried to call Marjean to tell her the snow was letting up and United thought they could get him on standby early tomorrow morning and to try to patch things up—she’d seemed kind of upset—but she hadn’t answered, either. She’d probably
gone to bed.

  He’d hung up and gone down to the bar. There wasn’t a soul in the place except the bartender. “How come the place is so dead?” Warren asked him.

  “Where the hell have you been?” the bartender said, and turned on the TV above the bar.

  “…most widespread snowstorm in recorded history,” Dan Abrams was saying. “Although there are signs of the snow beginning to let up here in Baltimore, in other parts of the country they weren’t so lucky. We take you now to Cincinnati, where emergency crews are still digging victims out of the rubble.”

  It cut to a reporter standing in front of a sign that read “Cincinnati International Airport.” “A record forty-six inches of snow caused the roof of the main terminal to collapse this afternoon. Over two hundred passengers were injured, and forty are still missing.”

  The goose was a huge hit, crispy and tender and done to a turn, and everyone raved about the gravy. “Luke made it,” Aunt Lulla said, but Madge and his mom were talking about people not knowing how to drive in snow and didn’t hear her.

  It stopped snowing midway through dessert, and Luke began to worry about the snowman but didn’t have a chance to duck out and check on it till nearly eleven, when everyone was putting on their coats.

  It had melted (sort of), leaving a round greasy smear in the snow. “Getting rid of the evidence?” Aunt Lulla asked, coming up behind him in her old-lady coat, scarf, gloves, and plastic boots. She poked at the smear with the toe of her boot. “I hope it doesn’t kill the grass.”

  “I hope it doesn’t affect the environment,” Luke said.

  Luke’s mother appeared in the back door. “What are you two doing out there in the dark?” she called to them. “Come in. We’re trying to decide who’s going to have the dinner next Christmas. Madge and Shorty think it’s Uncle Don’s turn, but—”

  “I’ll have it,” Luke said, and winked at Lulla.

  “Oh,” his mother said, surprised, and went back inside to tell Madge and Shorty and the others.