Tangled Lights and Silent Nights

by Kelly Stone Gamble

  “Hmmm… Maybe you’re right. Maybe you’ve been going about this all wrong.”

  “Hey!” His mouth dropped open. “You’re supposed to be helping me!”

  Silvia laughed. “I am helping you. But first, you need to stop selling yourself short. You may not appear to be her fantasy man on the surface, but I have a feeling you’d give that vampire a run for his money any day of the week. In fact…” She tapped her bottom lip with a fingernail, and her eyes sparkled with mischief. “I think it’s time we regrouped. We need to try again after Christmas. And I know just the thing.”

  “I’m almost afraid to ask.” Cooper let out a nervous laugh. “But at this point, I’ll do anything to get her to notice me.”

  “You leave everything to me. I have a feeling about you two, and trust me, my instincts are rarely wrong.”

  “I do trust you—maybe more than I’ve trusted anyone else in a long time.” Giddy anticipation swirled around his gut. “What’s the plan this time?”

  Silvia grinned from ear to ear. “If Katie James wants a dark, mysterious suitor, we’ll give her a dark, mysterious suitor. And honey…” Silvia eyed him top to bottom. “You’re gonna knock that girl’s socks off!”

  Books by Erica

  To Katie With Love

  For the Love of Katie

  Suddenly Sorceress

  Suddenly Spellbound

  Splintered Souls

  Scattered Souls

  Ashes of Life

  Craving Caine

  About Erica

  After walking away from her career as a business banker to pursue writing full-time, Erica moved from the hustle and bustle of the big city to a small tourist town in the North Georgia Mountains where she lives in a 90-year-old haunted farmhouse with her workaholic husband, her 180lb lap dog, and at least one ghost.

  When she’s not busy writing or tending to her collection of crazy chickens, diabolical ducks, and a quintet of piglets, hell bent on having her for dinner, she’s either reading bad fan fiction or singing karaoke in the local pub. Much like the characters in her books, Erica is a magnet for disaster, and has been known to trip on air while walking across flat surfaces.

  How she’s managed to survive this long is one of life’s great mysteries.

  Erica is represented by Kelly Peterson of Corvisiero Literary Agency in New York.

  Get in Touch

  https://ericaluckedean.com

  https://www.facebook.com/ericaluckedean

  https://www.twitter.com/ericaluckedean

  Convergence

  by Stacey Roberts

  I got my first Christmas miracle in 1978, when I was seven years old. I found out that the first day of Hanukkah fell on Christmas Eve. We Jews had prayed to our vengeful, desert-dwelling Old Testament God for this very thing.

  Convergence.

  For every glorious holiday non-Jews had, we had a less-thrilling, watered-down one. The drunken revelry of New Year’s matched up with our Rosh Hashanah, where we spent what felt like a year in temple. Christians gave up something for Lent and had their slates cleaned. We did guilt and shame on Yom Kippur, where we cast our sins upon the water and spent another long, boring day at prayer. Easter was a gluttonous riot of candy and ducks and bunnies that somehow celebrated resurrection.

  We had Passover in the spring, a feast of flat crackers, bitter herbs, and salt water that somehow celebrated our freedom from the lash of Egyptian slavery. Passover was my mother’s favorite holiday—no gifts to give, reminders that our chores paled in comparison to building pyramids in the sand for free, and her usual bad cooking was good by Biblical standards. Her favorite bitter herb was the red onion. It went in everything, overpowering salads, sandwiches, soups, and stews. Her Classic Crunchy Egg Salad was equal parts eggs, eggshells, and red onions.

  It tasted like the hollow misery you feel when you realize your servitude will never end.

  Easter would have been way more fun.

  It had come to pass. The first day of Hanukkah was December 24th. I wouldn’t have to play with new toys, wearing new sneakers, unnoticed until Boxing Day, when my friends came out to play with all their new stuff, and expected me to be delighted.

  “What do you think of my new bike?” my neighbor Jimmy the Fourth asked. “Christmas present.”

  “Nice,” I said, to be nice. “How do you like my new Erector set?”

  “Is that new? Seems like you’ve always had it.”

  I had gotten it the day after Thanksgiving. Which was better than what I had gotten the day before – overdone turkey legs, dry stuffing jammed full of red onions, and can-shaped cranberry jelly.

  It tasted like the first hard winter in a new land.

  I gave my mother a significant Hanukkah list that year. Everything would be on sale because Christmas was imminent. In prior years, when no sales were going on, the gifts were paltry. When Hanukkah fell on November 28th there was no race car set or Star Trek action figures. They were way too expensive. But when the Christmas sales hit, they were dirt cheap.

  “How about getting it for me now?” I asked two days before Christmas.

  “SSSSSSStace, it’s not Hanukkah anymore. Wait till next year. What is wrong with you?”

  What was wrong with me was that next year Hanukkah was probably going to be the day after Halloween, where the only thing on sale was candy. My mother would never buy candy, cheap or otherwise. Sugar, she said, was bad for our pancreases. Whatever those were.

  I held out hope for the race car set in 1978. I ran out and got the paper every morning to check the sales at Toys R Us. I wanted the Aurora AFX Championship Raceway Race Set: twenty-one foot track, two Magna Traction cars with Magnatronic sound, two radio car controllers, pit area, track supports, grandstand, and guardrails. I made daily arguments in favor of it that I was sure would bring my mother over to my side.

  “It’s perfectly safe, Ma. There are guardrails.”

  “SSSSSStace. What does it need guardrails for?”

  “To protect the fans in the stands.”

  “Do you have fans to put in the stands?”

  I flipped to page two of the Toys R Us Christmas circular. “If you got me the Star Trek and Planet of the Apes action figures I would. Just picture it, Ma. Dr. Cornelius and Mr. Spock, talking centrifugal force from behind the guardrails, safe from decapitation by flying automotive debris. It’s very responsible.”

  She had tuned me out by then, because my father called. They had divorced three years earlier. My mother never gave reasons for her decisions, or at least never the same ones twice. When I asked why my parents got divorced, sometimes it was because he wasn’t Jewish, or because he gambled, or because he never wore matching socks. Likewise, when I asked her why she gave me a girl’s name instead of a boy’s, it was because Stacey was the name of the nurse who took care of her during delivery, or because she named me for her favorite aunt, or because she thought I was going to die. Her only consistency was in handing out nicknames to people. Those never changed—she dispensed titles like a medieval potentate trying to shore up support for her regime, and once you got yours, you were stuck with it for life. My dad’s nickname was son of a bitch. I listened to my mother’s side of the conversation.

  “Fred. What do you want?”

  “Oh. Is that so? You can talk to the younger one if you want. He’s standing right here with the paper, tryin’ to get me to buy him a race car set for Hanukkah.”

  “I don’t know why he wants it. He’s preoccupied with guardrails.”

  “He definitely takes after you, Fred. No one on my side of the family is odd. I told you we should have him tested. You’re such a son of a bitch.”

  “It’s a race track. With cars. I don’t know. You ask him.”

  She shoved the phone at me. Before my dad could g
et a word in edgewise, I ran through the specifications and virtues of the Aurora AFX Championship Raceway Race Set, with fans in the grandstands from faraway planets.

  “That sounds real good, son.”

  “Tell that son of a bitch that if he paid the goddamned child support, I’d have more money to buy presents with!” my mother shouted.

  “Dad, Mom says that if you paid the goddamned child support—“

  “I heard her, son.”

  I was out of reasoned arguments by December 23rd. There was no way the woman couldn’t see the advantages of the Aurora AFX Championship Raceway Race Set. The cars had Magnatronic sound, for God’s sake. So I just made sure the toy sale section of the paper was face up when I brought it in from the curb.

  “You’re folding the paper wrong. I like to read the horoscopes first.”

  My mother was a firm believer in the zodiac signs.

  My father was a Sagittarius. “You know what’s wrong with your father, that son of a bitch?”

  “He doesn’t pay the goddamned child support?”

  “He’s a Sag (pronounced Saj). Always making promises, always letting you down. I should have married an Aries. Leos are very compatible with Aries.”

  My mother married an Aries in 1980 – Ted the Drug Dealer. He had many positive traits of an Aries – determined, confident, enthusiastic. He was sure that moving our whole family into a used Winnebago for five years while we traveled the country would be a great experience for us all. On the Ariean flip side, he was also impatient, moody, short-tempered, and impulsive, like the time he thought it would be a good idea to drive from Florida to Kentucky and harvest impounded marijuana from a field guarded by policemen and Dobermans.

  “Ma, as you may or may not know, the Aurora AFX Championship Raceway Race Set has an actual pit area. Very educational.”

  “You shouldn’t work on cars. Your grandfather was killed by a car.”

  Technically, he was killed by a tractor that flipped over on him. He was unable to jump off because of a gangrenous leg wound.

  “Wasn’t it gangrene that killed him?”

  “SSSStace. His chest was crushed by a tractor. He was dead right away. Gangrene takes forever to kill you.”

  “But I thought—“

  “Capricorns are really such know-it-alls.”

  I was a Capricorn. I left her to her horoscopes, and the irresistible press of astrological destiny.

  We lit the first candle of the Menorah. My brother—Layne the Favorite, two years older than me—did it. I could not be trusted with fire. My mother said it was because I lacked focus, but she was wildly off-base. I was staring at the pile of presents she had kept under the stairs with an unbreakable intensity. There were some wrapped packages that were the right size to be the Aurora AFX Championship Raceway Race Set. I remained hopeful—the holidays were supposed to be all about miracles.

  “Which one do we get first?” I asked. My mother handed us two boxes of equal size, only slightly bigger than our hands, wrapped in blue and silver paper with Jewish stars on it. Maybe they were Magna Cars, with Magnatronic sound, one for each of us so we could play together.

  I opened mine. Inside were two yellow mesh bags filled with what looked like gold coins. I groaned.

  “What?” my mother asked.

  They were chocolate coins, made in Israel. You had to peel the gold foil off to expose the dry, unsweet chocolate underneath.

  They tasted like having to conquer your new homeland a mile at a time.

  “I love these!” Layne the Favorite said.

  I handed mine to him and walked out the door.

  I sat on the outside steps, shivering. Our neighbor’s houses were all lit up—red, gold, and silver. I saw Christmas trees in the windows. Snow had been falling most of the day, and the world was insulated and silent. We still had seven days to go, because once upon a time, the menorah oil that was only supposed to last one night lasted eight. Hanukkah was about conservation. Christmas was about celebratory over-indulgence. I looked over at Jimmy the Fourth’s house, lit up like a Yuletide cruise ship, and wished for the optimism of a Scorpio. I had given my mother a list of things I wanted, just like the Goyisher kids annually sent to Santa Claus. The Christians had it made; their methods always worked, but my mother was no jolly order-taker.

  The silence was broken by the sound of a car coming up the driveway. I didn’t recognize it, but I knew it was my dad. He showed up every year sometime between Christmas Eve and Boxing Day, but we never knew when to expect him. If he had nothing to do around the holidays, it was Christmas Eve. If he was busy, Layne and I often spent Christmas Day waiting in our pajamas, our eyes swiveling between the nearly-muted TV to the front door. We were like kids waiting for Santa Claus. One year I even thought to bait him like my friends did, but instead of leaving out milk and cookies, I was going to put out the only things I ever saw my dad consume: coffee and cigarettes. My mother stopped me when I asked her for two packs of Marlboros and how to work the coffee maker.

  My father got out and opened the trunk. I recognized him by his prematurely silver hair and the bright button down shirts he liked. I ran over to him and grabbed him from behind in a deathgrip of a hug. He smelled like Old Spice and cigarette smoke.

  “Hey there, son,” he said. “I didn’t see you.” He turned around and knelt down in front of me.

  “Did your mother send you outside without a coat?”

  “I sent myself out,” I said.

  “Chocolate coins?” he asked. I nodded. He chuckled. “I never liked them either.”

  In that moment it occurred to me for the first time that I had more in common with the parent who didn’t live at home. This did not bode well.

  He lifted two big wrapped packages from the trunk.

  “Are those for US?”

  He grinned. “Yes. Five pounds of chocolate coins.”

  “That’s not even close to funny.”

  “Close the trunk for me. Watch your fingers.”

  I went in first and let him come through with the packages. My brother looked up, his face covered in Israeli chocolate.

  “Mother,” he said. “Dad’s here.”

  My mother looked him up and down. “You coulda cawled first.”

  “I did call first. You put me on the phone with Stacey.”

  “Son of a bitch. What do you want?”

  “I got Christmas presents for the boys.”

  My mother’s eyes widened. My dad always brought presents over for us at Christmas. My mother said that it was because he only cared about his holidays. I thought it was because he could never figure out what day Hanukkah was. No wonder our towns kept getting sacked by Cossacks. We really needed to get our act together as a people.

  Whenever he brought us Christmas gifts my mother would give him her haughtiest look, as if his horsemen had just burned our village to the ground and peed in our well.

  “It’s. Not. HANUKKAH,” she would hiss.

  He put the boxes down on the floor. I lurched toward one. He put a hand up without a word and I froze in place.

  “Fred,” my mother hissed. “It’s not Hanuk—“

  “Yes it IS!” I howled. “It IS Hanukkah! AND Christmas! Thank you, Jesus!”

  My mother glared at me as if I’d asked for a ham sandwich.

  “SSSSSStace!”

  “Can I open mine? Can I?”

  My mother flapped her hands. “Go ahead.”

  “Go ahead,” my dad said.

  “You’re a real son of bitch, Fred. You know that?”

  “Yes,” my dad said. “Yes I do.”

  “Sssso. I guess this means I’m not getting the goddamned child support.”

  That whole conversation took place over my head. I didn’t realize it then
, but my father had two voices—the deep, measured one he used when he talked to my mother, or his bookie. The other, lighter, singsong one he saved for when he spoke to me and my brother. It was his voice I grew into years later—I heard it on a videotape of me talking to one of my daughters, the same light singsong.

  But in 1978, the only sound I wanted to hear was the ripping of red and gold wrapping paper with reindeer on it. As I shredded it, I could see the words on the package:

  AURORA AFX CHAMPIONSHIP RACEWAY RACE SET

  I was silent. I had only ever seen it in black and white. This glossy box was covered in lurid reds and yellows. The track was a deep black with white lines, the cars gleamed blue and orange, and even the guardrails were a safe and comforting gray. Seeing this treasure in living color caused my senses to overload. But not for long.

  “You got it,” I said wonderingly. “Magnatronic sound and everything. Look, Ma! Guardrails!”

  Dad reached down and put his hand on my head. He smiled down at me.

  “So it’s the right one.”

  I nodded, clutching the box.

  “Should we go put it together?”

  I ran for the living room. He shrugged at my mother and followed me, hearing her whisper son of a bitch as he went. I finally understood her frustration years later, after my own divorce. She spent every day with us, making sure we brushed our teeth and did our homework and stayed clean despite our own best efforts. We resented her for it. Our father, who showed up at random, didn’t stay long, and never contributed to the household, was treated like a hero. I get it now.

  At seven years old, though, I was simply grateful that the miracle of convergence had finally come. It would be another twenty-seven years before Hanukkah and Christmas ended up on the same night, but I was content to let the future take care of itself.