Christmas on Mimosa Lane (A Seasons of the Heart Novel) Read online

  Shadows from her dream were still clinging, settling in with a slimy, sickening after burn, owning pieces of her that didn’t fit in with the cheery sunlight streaming through the clinic windows or the gaggle of community volunteers that was about to descend.

  She’d trained to be a social worker after years of volunteering in homeless shelters and assisted-living centers, telling herself since she was a teenager that those places were where she still felt most at home. She’d wanted to make a difference where she could do the most good for people in the most need. In the end spending all her time with lives still trapped in the world she’d escaped had made it impossible for her to either do that job well or move on with her own life. That’s when she’d set her sights on making a home somewhere else.

  She’d started over in Chandlerville. She was done looking back, no matter how hard letting go was turning out to be. She was strong enough to do this, just like her grams had said…

  Mallory secured her tote and lunch bag in her bottom drawer, sat in her desk chair, and dropped her head into her hands. The intercom chimed all over the school, giving a two-minute warning to bus call. Behind her closed eyes flashed a picture of her mama’s dirt-smudged, emotionless visage, then of Polly Lombard’s pale, beautiful features. Guilt bubbled through Mallory from each image.

  You can’t fix everyone, her supervisor had said at her last appointment as a social worker. And if you don’t stop overidentifying with your cases, you’re going to eventually wreck more than your career.

  Mallory pushed out of her chair and, on her way to intercept the buses, stopped at the mirror beside the clinic door. The face that smiled back at her was as much a stranger as always. Where was the competent, successful woman who’d moved on from every mis-start and mistake and mess and arrived safely on the other side, ready to settle down? The past, not her future, filled her eyes, tainted as always with a predatory hunger for peace.

  She could handle a run of the flu. She could handle the Lombards. If she had to, she could handle this Christmas feeling just as forced and empty as all the rest, no matter how much she craved a taste of holiday magic all her own. She could handle anything. But she was tired of it—the constant, careful dance of pushing away who she’d been, so she could navigate the world she lived in now.

  Polly Lombard didn’t have a patent on avoiding painful holiday memories. Mallory had lived that same choice most of her life—never celebrating Christmas all out, no matter how much she’d longed to as a child.

  She’d triumphed, according to her childhood therapist, her grams, and her own once-upon-a-time social worker. She’d escaped the world her bipolar, alcoholic mother had dragged her into. She was free, they’d insisted. Free to be happy and make everything she wanted a reality. This first Christmas of her fresh start she’d planned to put their assurances to the ultimate test.

  She’d intended to revel in the holiday season, not merely survive it. Nothing in Chandlerville was supposed to remind her of her childhood. Hadn’t that been the point of moving somewhere so different?

  Except despite her cushy job and pretty house and the twenty hours of volunteer work she still donated in Atlanta each weekend to keep her hand in paying back all that had once been done for her, an unrelenting part of her was still walking down that freezing-cold, dead-end road with her mother.

  It doesn’t hurt that bad…

  The intercom chimed again. She walked slowly out the door when she normally would have hurried along with her coworkers, through hallways that smelled of crayons and books and glue and happy childhoods.

  Each day that went by, she counted it a blessing to have found her way to this nurturing world. A world where good people like Pete and Polly could have their lives ripped apart, but know that their community would rally around them until they fought their way back from the shock and pain. Chandlerville was a hopeful, healthy place, and Mallory had made herself a part of it.

  Yet she knew her colleagues at work only as much as she needed to do her job. And she couldn’t string two sentences together with her neighbors—except for the grieving ones. There were no presents under her fake tree and no holiday cards on her blue refrigerator. And a silly flu outbreak was threatening to torpedo even more her chances of manufacturing the jolly Christmas she craved.

  As she walked toward the buses she could feel the bite of a long-ago winter pushing at her back, whispering to her of another, darker reality she understood so much better.

  It doesn’t hurt that bad, Mal, she heard her mama saying. One day, this will all be over…

  Polly had never been more excited to ride the morning bus to school. All school year long she’d sat alone in her seat at the front, trying not to cry or scream or want to disappear. The other kids looked at her like everyone else did, expecting her to be something she couldn’t—to be better or happier or more like she used to be. And she hated it. She hated being with almost anyone now, going anywhere where she had to fake being okay, where people talked and acted like they understood, only they didn’t. But this morning was different. The bus was noisy like always, with kids talking and playing and screaming like she used to. And it still smelled like the driver’s, Mrs. Appletree’s, medicine that she put on her hand and arm sometimes when they were waiting for a stoplight to change. And the kids who used to be her friends had still stared at her when she got on, then when she didn’t say anything to anyone they’d ignored her. But today she didn’t mind feeling lonely while Mrs. Appletree drove them through Chandlerville.

  This morning she couldn’t think of anything but her plan—the one she’d been thinking about for days now. She finally knew how to save Christmas and get her daddy back, the way he’d been a real daddy before Mommy left them.

  Every day it was like more and more of him was gone—more of the daddy who’d used to hug her and Mommy like it was the best part of his day, and kiss them and join in the fun games Mommy always made sure they played whenever he wasn’t working. He never played now, and they never went anywhere anymore because he was so worried about Polly and how she’d act.

  Not that Polly wanted to be someplace, anyplace, but at home. Not that she really wanted to be home, either, when all her daddy talked about there was eating and sleeping and school and Polly feeling better. He’d used to want to go do fun things almost all the time. Now he didn’t want to do anything. Not with Polly—not when she was so upset she made herself and Daddy and everyone else act so weird everywhere she went.

  She made her daddy sad now, and she’d give anything to stop. She’d give anything to go back to being normal so he could go back to loving her the way he used to before.

  He never talked to her anymore. Not about important things. He was too worried. She wasn’t a good girl anymore when other people tried to talk to her about how she felt. Every time she’d cry and tell them to go away even though it made Daddy get even more quiet around her—and he was the only person she really wanted to talk to at all now, even when she couldn’t.

  It made him mad, too, the way everyone treated them. Polly could tell he wanted people to go away and leave them alone, too.

  “I don’t need anyone’s damn help,” she’d heard him say to Ms. Phillips last night and under his breath one morning at the bus stop just last week when everyone had been asking all over again how it was going and what they could do to make things better.

  It wouldn’t be good for Polly, he’d said when the next day she hadn’t wanted to wait for the bus anymore with everyone else. She and Daddy needed to stick to a normal routine, her doctor said. So they had to try harder to be with people on Mimosa Lane and at school—when Polly kept wishing Daddy would just try harder to be with her even though she was upset like all the time now.

  She’d messed up Thanksgiving at her grandparents’. She’d really messed it up. Daddy hadn’t wanted to be there, either, and he hadn’t wanted to think or talk about Mommy the way Mommy’s parents always did. But he’d said they had to go, they had to try. And
then Polly had freaked because it had felt like her mommy should have been everywhere she looked at her grandparents’ house, only Mommy wasn’t going to be there for another Thanksgiving ever again.

  Everyone kept acting like everything was okay and they were all just as happy as ever and it didn’t matter that Mommy was everywhere, only she wasn’t there at all. And Polly couldn’t do it. She just couldn’t. She’d run away in the middle of dinner—right out the front door and down her grandparents’ brick steps. When Daddy caught her in the front yard and tried to get her to stop crying for Mommy, he’d right away said they could go home, almost like it was what he’d wanted, too.

  That was when she’d begged him not to have Christmas at all. Not if it was going to be like Thanksgiving and every other day since Mommy died—Polly not being able to forget or sleep or eat or be with people the way she was supposed to, because she couldn’t stop remembering the way everyone else could. He’d agreed, even though he’d sounded even sadder and had acted even more worried and gotten even quieter ever since.

  She’d hurt his feelings, and she’d sorta lied. She really did want Christmas, more than anything in the world. A real Christmas, not a scared one the way Thanksgiving had felt.

  Mommy had always made the holidays so fun and full of music and decorations and cookie baking and present wrapping. Polly wanted all of that back. The daddy she remembered, too, as much as he wanted the Polly she’d used to be. He’d always watch them being silly, then he’d laugh that way he did that made her feel all shimmery and perfect inside, and suddenly he’d be dancing with them and doing silly things, too, like hanging too many ornaments on the tree or too many lights outside on the front porch, or trying to figure out what was inside the presents Mommy had wrapped and put under the tree.

  She wanted all of that back.

  It was all she thought about anymore, especially when she stared out her bedroom window at night at her neighbor’s shiny tree. How did she make herself feel better in time? How did she stop being so sad, so Daddy could stop feeling bad, too? How did she act normal again so he’d start treating her like a real daddy did, and so everybody else would leave them alone and stop doing and saying the things that hurt so much?

  She hugged her lunch box to her chest and watched the streets pass by outside her window. She tried not to, but all she could think about was before and how her mommy used to drive her to school down the same road. She tried not to think about how Mommy had always been so happy to see Polly leave for school and come home again, or how Daddy treated the bus stop like homework now—it was something Polly had to do, so he could check it off his list of things that were going to make her better. She tried not to think about how Mommy used to always be talking with the neighbors in the mornings and afternoons when the bus came, being friendly to everybody even though she drove Polly back and forth to school. Now all the neighbors talked about was Mommy and how Polly and her daddy were doing without her.

  “How are you feeling?” they always asked, expecting Polly to say she was better, and she wasn’t, so she didn’t say anything at all. And then Daddy didn’t say anything, either, not to any of their friends the way he used to talk to all of them.

  She had to fix this. She had to stop her head and her chest and her tummy from hurting, especially the way they had at Thanksgiving. She had to stop thinking about the way things were before. She just had to.

  Before was ruining everything.

  She thought of Ms. Phillips and her silly new tree and her fun kitchen and pretty pink cereal. Daddy had said he and Polly could go back to Ms. Phillips’s house. Ms. Phillips had said she wanted to help make Christmas better for them. And Ms. Phillips never felt like pretending and faking or needing to run away. Would it be the same way with Polly’s plan? Would Ms. Phillips help with that, too?

  The driver pulled up to the curb outside the school. Polly was in the first front seat since she was the youngest kid on the bus. She sat the tallest she could now, scanning the school staff who waited at the curb to make sure kids got to class okay without wasting time before going inside. Ms. Phillips was right where she always was, wearing her Tweety Bird uniform today and looking just like she always did, like no matter what a kid did or said it would be okay with her.

  Before she changed her mind, Polly reached into her Cinderella lunch box and grabbed what she’d brought from home. The bus door swung open. She slid off the seat, her fist clenched around her treasure, her other arm squeezing her lunch box to her tingly chest. Her backpack felt like a million pounds weighing her down as she stepped onto the curb and hurried over to the school nurse. Ms. Phillips smiled down at her. One of the other kids knocked into Polly’s backpack and pushed her closer.

  Ms. Phillips had asked her what she wanted over and over again, instead of telling her what to feel and do to get better. Polly shoved what she’d hidden away for so long into her neighbor’s hand, desperate not to be afraid anymore the way she bet Ms. Phillips was never afraid of anything.

  “I want to forget my mommy,” she said, “so I can stop making everyone so sad. Will you help me save Christmas this year for me and Daddy?”

  Then before Ms. Phillips could answer, before Polly could explain what she’d given to her and why and how they couldn’t tell Daddy until Polly had forgotten everything she needed to, she chickened out and raced inside the school that she hated, too, because all she could remember whenever she was there was how her mommy had volunteered almost every day, helping with absolutely everything.

  Polly had run from what she’d really wanted to say, just like at Thanksgiving. She hadn’t told Ms. Phillips all she’d planned to or asked her to keep her secret until Polly was better. What if Ms. Phillips called Daddy because she didn’t understand? He’d be even sadder. He’d feel even worse. And maybe he’d be mad at Ms. Phillips the way he’d sounded like he was for a while last night.

  What if instead of making things better, Polly had just ruined this year’s Christmas for good?

  Chapter Five

  To comprehend a nectar

  Requires sorest need…

  Today of all days wasn’t the time to have Polly camped out in the clinic.

  But Mallory didn’t have the heart to shoo the little girl away. At least her records indicated Polly’s pediatrician had administered a flu shot a few weeks ago. The kid hadn’t made it through her first lesson that morning before showing up with a note from Ms. Caldwell that her stomach was upset—amid Mallory’s triage of what seemed like the entire third grade’s descent into the creeping crud.

  None of the ten kids curled up on mats in her office knew Polly, so no worries that any of them might make fun of her for sitting in the corner alone, looking pale and lost, with the biggest, saddest eyes Mallory had ever seen. Not that any of her coughing, sneezing patients were curious about anyone else in the room.

  By mere proximity Polly and her weakened immune system were running the risk of catching the virus, despite her immunization. Still, after last night’s visit and the bizarre moment they’d shared that morning, how could Mallory send the child back to class until she knew what was wrong?

  “Pete Lombard, please,” she said into the phone once the call connected at Pete’s station house. “He’s an EMT with your company.”

  Parent and community volunteers had been trickling in since nine thirty to help care for the growing number of plague victims waiting for parents to pick them up, freeing Mallory to document and triage each new student. Only her current priority was getting Polly out of there, while she longed to make an excuse to flee herself.

  She stared at the mint-green walls of the clinic, at the cartoon posters of boys and girls happily eating veggies and brushing their teeth and getting shots from equally beaming doctors and nurses, and felt herself losing even more ground. No matter how competently and in control she was functioning, each happy volunteer’s smile and offer to do whatever she needed whispered that she had to get away, that any minute they’d all see tha
t she didn’t belong there any more than Polly did.

  “Pete’s out on call,” said the masculine voice on the other end of the line. “Is this an emergency?”

  Mallory wasn’t sure she’d call it an emergency, but something important had most definitely changed for Polly.

  How many times had Mallory made this call, saying she would keep the little girl in the clinic until Pete could come by the school? What must her constant interruptions be costing him at his job? But her little friend was finally opening up. Though Mallory didn’t fully understand what had happened, Polly looked on the verge of a breakdown. Today of all days she needed her daddy there as quickly as possible.

  “Please have him call the clinic at school. It’s important.” She hung up before the man could say anything more.

  “Poor little thing,” one of the community volunteers said, a Mimosa Lane neighbor Mallory had spoken to once or twice in passing as they’d plucked their mail from their boxes. Each time, Mallory had of course been wearing the same raggedy shorts and tie-dyed T-shirt.

  Forty-something Julia Davis sat on the county board of ed and had been the PTA president when her kids attended Chandler. When Kristen Hemmings’s plea had gone out asking for extra hands, Julia had been the first volunteer on the scene. Within minutes of arriving at the clinic she’d literally rolled up the sleeves of her conservative navy business suit and blended into Mallory’s process as if she’d always been there—reassuring and cheerful and boundlessly confident in that way all successful working mothers seemed to master.

  The woman had whispered her Poor little thing just now, presumably because she didn’t want to disturb their dozing patients. The problem was she wasn’t talking softly enough to prevent her observation from being overheard by either Polly or the parents milling about the clinic and the hallway beyond.