Christmas on Mimosa Lane (A Seasons of the Heart Novel) Page 5

  It was as if even their picturesque world hurt too much for her to embrace for more than a few panic-riddled moments at a time.

  “It’ll be a pretty day.” Sam stood from where she’d been weeding the flower bed beside her mailbox. She pushed back her straw hat with a gloved hand, her arms too thin, the shadows beneath her hazel eyes too dark. She smiled, seemingly pleased to have Julia there but not answering her question about how she was feeling. Sam never did when someone asked. “Cade was asking if this afternoon’s practice could be on the outside courts again.”

  “He’s loving his basketball. Will you be there tonight?” Julia sipped the decaf two-Splenda latte that she’d poured into her travel mug. She smiled hopefully at one of the women she felt closest to in the world, even though they saw each other less frequently than Julia did the rest of her circle.

  To look at them even now, a stranger would have thought she and Sam barely knew each other—Sam seemed to already be inching closer to her house and away from Julia’s questions. In reality, over the years Sam had graced Julia and Emma Lombard with the most priceless of gifts—opening up to them about her deepest hurts and dreams and the fragile hope Sam clung to that she would one day resume the active, happy life she’d taken for granted when she’d lived and worked in New York City.

  Most everyone pitied this young mother, understanding enough about what had precipitated the Perrys’ move to Georgia eleven years ago to give both their past and Sam plenty of space. Julia, however, knew the depth of grit that lay beneath her friend’s tightly wound personality. Yes, there was pain, always simmering below the surface. But Sam had the spirit of a fighter. She was a woman refusing to give up on the world that had nearly destroyed her. And Julia was equally determined to fight alongside her friend, even if she sometimes had to play dirty.

  “Brian’s going to be there tonight,” Sam said, speaking of her husband and shaking her head at the thought of helping corral overactive boys into organized athletics. “I have dinner to put on the table as soon as everyone gets home.”

  “Maybe Brian could pick up takeout on the way back from practice? That would free up your afternoon. I know your boys would love to have you watching them. Their skills are getting so much stronger. Just last night Walter was talking about both Cade and Joshua’s progress.” Julia placed a hand on her friend’s shoulder and squeezed. “We’d all love it if you’d join us.”

  Brian Perry and Julia’s husband, Walter, coached the Rockets, the neighborhood rec basketball team. Walter and Julia’s boys were in high school now, but Walter hadn’t let go of working with the youngest of the community’s players. And Julia was one of the team moms every season, a customary job for the head coach’s wife. The welcomed responsibility kept her in touch with the families who flocked to Chandlerville for quality schools and a middle-class suburban lifestyle. But Sam, even though it was clear that she doted on her boys, never joined her family on practice nights at the YMCA gymnasium. Group gatherings were particularly difficult for her.

  She was missing out on so much.

  Time seemed to stop whenever Southern communities drew together to mix and mingle and share their lives. Individual identities expanded to include the realities of the people living around them—creating an extended family who cared for one another as fiercely and effortlessly as they did their own kin. It was the exact kind of connection that Julia was determined for Sam to embrace this holiday season. She’d watched her friend sink into debilitating depression for too many years now, from early fall through the colder winter months. This holiday, solitude and isolation simply wouldn’t do—for either Sam or Polly Lombard.

  “I really want to make more practices.” Sam began packing her trowel in the caddy she used for her gardening tools. Her movements were jerky and hurried, her hands trembling just enough to be noticeable.

  “Did you see little Polly at the bus stop this morning?” Julia asked, shifting tactics before she found herself standing alone at the curb. “I’m worried about her. She’s not getting any better.”

  The one neighborhood tradition Sam never missed was walking her boys to the school bus, then meeting them there again every afternoon. And each morning Julia watched Sam give Polly Lombard a little extra attention, even though the child never outwardly responded any more than she did to the other parents.

  Polly’s complete withdrawal from her neighbors was hardest on Julia and Sam. They’d been such close friends with Emma. But no matter who approached Polly now, the child simply clung tighter to her daddy and pretended no one was there. It seemed to distress Sam most of all that there was no comforting the little angel.

  “She must feel completely alone,” Sam said. The turbulent green of her eyes deepened to a stormy gray, her empathy for Polly sounding hauntingly personal. She set her bucket of gardening tools down on her still-green grass and clenched her hands together in front of her body. “I imagine it feels like no one in the world could possibly understand what she’s going through.”

  Julia knew for certain that Sam didn’t have to imagine how Polly felt as the child dealt with emotions that were too overwhelming to cope with. And that morning as Julia had watched her reclusive friend attempt once again to engage Emma’s daughter, she’d felt a plan begin to form. One to help both lost souls come out of their shells.

  “Polly has the world on her shoulders,” Julia agreed. “Even though I’m sure Pete and her teachers at school are doing their best to help her deal with losing her mother.”

  “Sometimes there’s nothing anyone can do.” Sam cast a long look at her garden, as if her own answers lay there rather than with the people who lived nearby. “Sometimes dealing with something that horrible simply isn’t possible.”

  “It’s like Polly’s decided that the way she’s feeling is the way she’s going to feel forever, and there’s nothing anyone can do about it. Not even Pete.”

  “Of course she feels hopeless.” Sam’s scowl suggested that Julia had shed fifty IQ points. “Do you blame her?”

  “I don’t think it’s healthy, the way she’s pulling away. Neither do you, or you wouldn’t keep trying to talk with her.”

  Julia cleared her throat around words that suddenly didn’t want to come out. She knew how much this conversation must have been hurting her friend.

  “I was thinking just this morning,” she said, rushing to make her point, “that you might be the right person to push a little harder and break the ice with Polly.”

  Walter had warned her to back off not just the Lombards’ problems but the Perrys’, too. But this was what Julia did, both at her job on the county school board and as head of the Mimosa Lane homeowners’ association. She helped people every chance she got. She connected lives. She strengthened the community bonds that made their world better for all of them. She didn’t know how to stop, and she didn’t want to try.

  She loved Sam and Polly so much, the same way she’d adored Emma. Two beautiful souls like Polly and Sam deserved better than living reclusive lives amid the vibrant chaos of everyone else’s reality.

  “I’m the last thing Polly needs.” Sam glared at Julia.

  “I think you could be a wonderful friend to her,” Julia pressed, “if we could somehow get the two of you to spend a little more time together.”

  “That child lost her mother while we all stood there watching it happen. Emma and I were the same age. We even looked a little alike. I imagine I’m a reminder to Polly of what she’s lost, no matter how much I’d like to help her. And no one needs to face horrible memories like that every day, especially not a little girl.”

  “Running away from what’s happened doesn’t seem to be helping either one of you,” Julia pointed out, knowing as she did that she was taking an enormous risk. Even a friendship as strong as hers and Sam’s had its limits. “Being alone with your memories isn’t protecting either of you.”

  A flash of heat, of hatred, lit up Sam’s mercurial eyes, reminding Julia that she was talking to a
woman who’d, amid the first large-scale terrorist strikes on American soil, watched her world literally explode around her. Then just as quickly, Sam’s expression cooled, and she was staring blankly at Julia as if she didn’t know her.

  “I need to take care of something inside.” Sam turned and walked through her garden, a broken survivor—a former elementary school teacher missing her students but no longer capable of functioning within a classroom.

  Julia watched her go, more determined than ever not to give up on her friend. She’d see Brian tonight at basketball practice. Maybe if she took a different tack she could get through to him.

  Each year someone on Mimosa Lane threw a Christmas party to ring in the holiday season. And the Perrys’ sprawling two-story Colonial would be the perfect location for this year’s celebration. People would arrive and leave whenever their schedules allowed. Some would linger and mingle. The bonds that communities like theirs had been designed to foster would deepen, and Sam would at least be able to enjoy her neighbors from a distance while she hid upstairs in her office the way she had the few other times the Perrys had hosted get-togethers.

  The world she no longer needed to fear would come to Sam this Christmas, refusing to let her hide away entirely. And maybe, just maybe, Sam with her own bouts of silence and debilitating attacks of shyness and fear, as well as her experience working with children, would find a way to do the same for Polly. If Julia could talk Pete into attending.

  She checked her watch and headed for her car, sipping the last of her first cup of coffee from the mug she’d refill on the way to the county courthouse and the office hours she kept three mornings a week.

  She loved her community and the life she and Walter had built in Chandlerville. She believed in the power of neighbors and friendships and the value of shared experiences—both joyous celebrations and heartbreaking losses. To her soul she’d already accepted that there was a reason the Lombard and the Perry families had found their separate paths to this place, and why her closest friends now needed so much of the same kind of healing.

  Mimosa Lane had some magic to make this Christmas season. All it needed, Julia thought as she backed out of her driveway and rolled down her window to enjoy the morning breeze, was for someone to help the situation along just a bit.

  She’d talk Brian into hosting the party. Then she’d wrangle a promise from Pete to attend for Polly’s sake. The man was almost as determined as his daughter to keep to himself. But Julia would get through to him.

  This Christmas, she’d get through to them all.

  “Flu?” Mallory said. “Already? Tell me you’re kidding. It hasn’t even dropped below freezing at night.”

  She hadn’t yet made it to her office in the clinic at William B. Chandler Elementary. And already it was proving to be a two-Tylenol morning—with a pot-of-coffee chaser thrown in to get her to lunch. When she’d taken the gig as a school nurse, she’d known finessing flu outbreaks would be part of her job. But she’d managed to dissociate herself from that reality so far, hoping she’d escape its clutches until after the holiday season.

  Mornings, particularly Monday mornings, were supposed to be Mallory’s downtime. The school would soon be teeming with eager voices and nonstop energy, but for a while longer no one would typically need her for much. Today, battling a tension headache after her late-night visitors and the dream about her first Christmas on the streets with her mother, she’d needed some time to shrug off her emotional hangover. She’d also wanted to review the school’s medical records for Polly Lombard and the latest recommendations from her pediatrician for managing the child’s diet and anxiety.

  “Fourteen parents e-mailed teachers over the weekend,” Kristen Hemmings said. “If it’s anything like last year, half our students could be out sick by the end of the week.”

  The assistant principal had caught up with Mallory on her way into school. They were due back outside for bus call. In less than ten minutes children would begin arriving in an endless swarm that wouldn’t quiet until the morning’s first bell rang for everyone to settle down in homeroom.

  Mallory hitched one shoulder to resettle the straps of her tote bag.

  She’d already seen enough her first few months on the job to have an idea of what was coming. Parents always wanted to believe that a harmless cough or a sniffle was nothing more than a cold. That was until their sick little darlings ended up in Mallory’s office running a fever, infectious to everyone they came into contact with.

  She’d spent the month of November sending out e-mails and class notes lobbying for flu shots and parental agreement to keep sick kids at home, particularly viral ones. She suspected her requests for preemptive action had fallen on mostly deaf ears. People with the means to take their children to family doctors anytime they wanted to were prone to creating an environment ideal for spreading illness. It was a blind kind of recklessness that Mallory couldn’t wrap her mind around.

  A flash of residual panic from her own childhood shouldered its way to the surface.

  When you spent your formative years on the streets with no way to get well once you were ill, you learned to pay attention to early warning signs. Living somewhere like Chandlerville, not only did families have insurance, they had the luxury of state-funded nurses like Mallory to alert them when there was a problem. And no matter how long a virus festered before action was taken, kids sick with something as seemingly insignificant as the flu would almost always get well again after resting in warm, clean homes and being cared for by doting parents.

  Not so much for people who circulated from one homeless shelter to another the way Mallory and her mother had. Or for the financially strapped families living in overcrowded public housing like many of the people she still helped on the weekends, volunteering in Atlanta’s assistance community. You didn’t let yourself get sick when you didn’t know where your next round of medical care was coming from or how you’d pay for it if it were available. Every adult worked just to stay afloat, sometimes shouldering two and three minimum-wage jobs. There was no one to stay home with you and push fluids and meds and food, or to deal with the secondary complications that could follow poor treatment—things like bronchitis, walking pneumonia, and even permanent lung damage.

  Those harsh realities were so far removed from what life was like in a middle-class suburb, it was ridiculously easy to rationalize sending your kids to school with flu-like symptoms that might or might not turn out to be anything to worry about. If you were wrong, there was a built-in support network to care for children until parents could take over. At Chandler Elementary, that network was Mallory’s job to manage.

  So much for her taking it easy until dealing with happy, shiny people didn’t make her feel like screaming.

  “There goes the rest of the day,” she said.

  “There goes the week.” Kristen flipped through the file she held, a compilation of the atom bomb last year’s flu blitz had set off amid her orderly bastion of learning. The woman had a file for everything. “We’ll be lucky if this doesn’t consume the better part of the calendar between now and Christmas break. Our disaster recovery plan includes placing calls out to the community asking for volunteers to help with the overflow if more kids than you can handle flood the clinic. Lots of moms and friends of the school can pitch in, taking temperatures and handling minor things while you oversee the worst of the cases until the parents can get here to pick children up. You’ll want to send a memo to the teachers about sterilizing as much of their common areas and materials as they can, as often as they can, until this runs its course.”

  Elementary-age kids crammed together into classrooms or playing like bands of roving puppies on playgrounds were a breeding ground for a tenacious virus. Even with tried-and-true containment protocol in place, the flu would spread unchecked. Some of the staff would likely fall prey, too. They were all required to get flu shots, but not every strain of the virus was covered by each immunization.

  Chandler Elementary
was in for a bumpy ride.

  “Ms. Mathers and Mrs. Arnold’s classes seem to be the epicenter,” Kristen said with harried professionalism, looking down from the six-foot-two height that must have served her well as a college basketball all-star. Younger than most of her teachers, Kristen ruled her domain with a gentle voice and a quiet gift for achieving the staff’s commitment to the highest of standards. “Come see me after the bell. I’ll have worked up a short list of volunteers the school administrative assistants will call as soon as you think you need them.”

  “Today,” Mallory said, mentally rallying. “My guess is I’ll need them before lunchtime today.”

  Good thing she’d donned her brightest, most obnoxious scrubs in the hope of jump-starting her attitude to something perkier than Don’t screw with me. It was harder to be cranky when you were covered top to bottom with Tweety Birds.

  With a distracted nod Kristen peeled off, ducking into the front office with the grace of an all-conference MVP sprinting down a basketball court for a layup. Mallory considered sprinting herself, but kept her pace calm and unhurried. She smiled at the teachers she passed on the way to the clinic. As unhinged as she felt, this was work. And she could always, always handle herself at work.

  Once inside the clinic, however, she longed for a dark, cool spot to hide until the ache behind her right temple eased. She bustled farther into her brightly lit domain and stared at the cot she kept freshly made in the corner. It was ridiculous, fantasizing about spending the morning there tunneled under the covers. By lunchtime she’d likely have to cart in spare sleeping mats to handle the anticipated flood of sick children.

  She fired up the coffeemaker that she’d inherited from the previous school nurse who’d left after having her first child. She rolled her shoulders and told herself she was used to not sleeping. She regularly found it difficult to ease into the relaxation and recharging that nighttime was supposed to nurture. But the exhaustion vibrating through her today was different. She felt hollowed out and echo-filled. More empty than she had in years.