This Christmas (25 page)

“It’s for me.”

“For you and Mr. Perfect,” he said.

What did he think? “You have a problem with that?”

He didn’t answer right away. “How are things in the animal kingdom?”

“Frigid. I’m here with Maddie and Jason.”

“What about Vlad?”

“He’s at home.” I did another quarter turn away from Jason and Maddie, who didn’t seem to be paying any attention to me anyway. “Guess what?” I hissed into the phone. “She just picked him up.”

“I thought he was from her hospital.”

“He was a head-wound case. Jason probably thinks I’m nuts. I promised him Norman Rockwell, and instead he’s getting drunks, quarrelsome parents, and crazy Russian dudes.”

“So how are Jason and Maddie getting along?” Isaac asked.

“Why?”

“No reason. I was just looking at them together this morning. Jason looks like something she would have had made to order.”

What was he trying to do, make me jealous? I felt a snit coming on, but instinctively my eyes strayed over to Maddie and Jason. They were in profile, pointing at some exotic variety of goat, laughing. They did look Dentyne-ad wholesome together.

And what about Jason’s little Vlad the Inhaler joke? I had never heard him crack wise like that before. It was as if he’d been showing off a little for her.

I shut my mind to this line of thinking. Isaac was just trying to stir something up. Although why he was being such a fiend, I couldn’t say. “I gotta go,” I told him.

“Okay. I’ve just lost feeling in my right big toe.”

“Are you still coming for dinner? Assuming Vlad or my brother doesn’t burn the house down between now and seven o’clock?”

“In that case, I heard about a great Italian place we can go to,” Isaac said helpfully.

“Comedian.”

Jason, Maddie, and I tromped through a little more of the zoo, enjoying the relative warmth of the snake house before going to stare at the empty panda enclosure for a few moments. In all my years of living near DC, the most I’d ever seen of the pandas was the occasional glimpse of dirty white fur visible behind a log. Today we didn’t even get that.

“We should take a picture in front of the giraffes,” I suggested. For one thing, the giraffes were inside a heated building right now.

“Oh, did you bring your camera?” Maddie asked.

“No—didn’t you?”

“I left all my camera equipment in Boston this year,” she said. “I had to travel light.”

How could she have left her camera? She was the family’s unofficial photographer. “You always take pictures.”

“Sorry—not this year.”

My $200 haircut. The matching sweaters. My camera-ready boyfriend.
No photos?
It was heartbreaking.

Was no one going to cooperate with my one and only perfect Christmas?

I confess I was still in a stew when we got back to the car.

“I guess we could stop by a drugstore and get one of those disposable kind, if you really want pictures,” Maddie said from the backseat.

It didn’t help my mood any that I was so obviously transparent. I swung around. “I can’t believe it, Mad.”

“Can’t believe what?”

“You!” I said. “Ever since you were old enough to talk you’ve been the Christmas drill sergeant. Now you’ve completely flaked out.”

“Just because I didn’t bring my camera?”

“That—and also Vlad. Stopping at boarded-up houses doesn’t make you suspicious?”

“I can’t believe
you’re
being so judgmental!” Maddie crossed her arms over her chest, which was rising and falling in angry little heaves. “I thought I could count on you of all people to understand.”

“Understand what? That you’ve decided to stage a powderpuff reenactment of
Easy Rider?
”

Maddie’s thin shoulders started convulsing, and she dashed several tears off her face. “No. That I’m trying to change.”

“You’re changing, all right.” Changing into a nitwit.

“I’m just trying to be more like you!” she howled, reaching for a Kleenex. She of course had a neat little packet of them in her jacket pocket.

I gawped at her in disbelief as she honked into a tissue. Had I heard her correctly? Had she said
like me?

“Don’t you think I know what you think of me?” she howled. “That I’m too enthusiastic, too perky, too perfect?”

My mouth opened and closed several times.

“Well, of course you think that,” she said, waving away my mute protest. “It’s the
truth
. I am too perfect. Even my therapist thinks so.”

“Your therapist?” This was the first I’d ever heard of her seeking professional help.

“Dr. Howell said I need to learn to be more spontaneous—or to just
be
.”

I frowned. “Who is this doctor? Some sixties throwback?”

“He’s a
very competent
therapist,” she said, still sniffling. “I did months of exhaustive research on psychologists and psychology before I called him.”

Of course.

She looked up as if she’d just been caught in a trap. “Oh, God! That sounded terrible, didn’t it?”

I rolled my eyes. “Maddie, for God’s sake. You can’t go nuts with this. Researching a doctor for months is a lot more understandable than spending that much time researching the best way to make oatmeal.” Which, honest to God, she had actually done once.

She slumped, and looking at her, I felt terrible. What had happened to bring on this crisis? “Look, I hope nothing I said—”

“No—of course not,” she answered, cutting me off. “It’s all me. I had realized for some time that I just had an unsustainable desire for perfection. I mean, look at you! Your life is so…”
Half-assed
, I believe was the word on the tip of her tongue that she was too polite to voice. “…and you’ve always been much happier than me.”

Where did she get
that
crazy idea?

I glanced anxiously over at Jason, who was staring grimly ahead at the road. Poor man. He must think the entire Ellis family was composed of nothing but flakes. At some point I would have to reiterate that we were actually very normal.

“You were
so smart
not to position yourself as some insanely brilliant overachiever,” Maddie went on. “I mean, Mom and Dad just don’t have the same expectations for you. You don’t have to feel this
pressure
all the time!”

“Well, uh…”

“Oh, sure, they rib you about going to graduate school,” she said, sort of clucking dismissively. “I mean, that’s sort of a joke.”

I was feeling emotionally whiplashed as we pulled into the driveway. I wanted to reach out to Maddie, but I was beginning to suspect she thought I lacked expertise to get anywhere close to feeling her pain. And what was this BS about my not feeling pressure? Had she ever had to endure Dad telling her that it was never too late to become what she might have been?

Jason left the Saab idling in the drive for a few moments—I thought to give us the opportunity to wind down or for Maddie to fix her makeup. His jaw was still set in that anxious way I’d noticed before. After a few moments, he turned in his seat to face Maddie. “You can never be too perfect,” he said gently, putting his hand on her corduroy-covered knee.

Maddie’s eyes widened. Mine, too, probably. I kept staring at his hand, as if I could will it away from her leg.

I couldn’t.

“If that’s who you are, so be it,” he said. “Some people probably tie themselves in knots trying to become more like
you
.”

There was a silence, during which I could feel my face turning red. Was it just Isaac’s phone call making me zany when it came to Jason and Maddie, or was this really weird?

Jason gave her a squeeze. “Don’t see perfection as a curse; count it as a blessing. Embrace that trait as part of who you are, and then try to work with it.”

Wow. I’d never heard him come out with any pop psychobabble like that before. It was as if the man of my dreams was suddenly morphing into Dr. Phil. “Sometimes even the best therapist can say something that sends you down a mental rabbit hole,” Jason said. “Believe me, I know.”

Jason had been to a therapist?
That was the first time he had mentioned it. But, of course, now that I thought about it, it seemed likely that he would have. He probably had a lot of issues from his weird childhood.

When Jason finally switched off the engine, Maddie got out of the car quickly. I wondered if she felt awkward after having spilled her guts. And then having a near stranger spouting Oprahisms at her.

Still, I was grateful to Jason, despite his emphasis of the touchy in his sudden touchy-feeliness. “Thanks for jumping in. I was having a hard time thinking of anything to say.”

“No problem. I’ve done stuff like that a lot, actually.”

I narrowed my eyes at him. “You’re a bond trader and part-time psychologist?”

He chuckled. “No, actually, I’ve been involved in Big Brothers for a long time now. I’m sort of used to hashing out family problems with people.”

“You never told me about that.”

He raised his brows. “Well—it never came up. I always feel uncomfortable about talking about volunteer work. It would sound too much like tooting my own horn.”

“I was hoping we would be able to have a moment tonight to exchange gifts,” I said, meaning a moment not in a car. “Christmas morning is sort of nuts, and public…”

He flashed me a high-wattage smile. “Sounds like you’re hoping for
a lot
of gratitude for your gift.”

Heat crept into my cheeks, but I couldn’t help tossing off saucily, “I might.”

He leaned over and gave me a peck on the nose, and then a slightly longer kiss on the mouth.
This is more like it
, I thought, my enthusiasm for this trip returning.

When we pried ourselves out of the car, the first flakes of snow were falling out of the sky.

“Looks like we’ll have a white Christmas!” Jason proclaimed.

In the house, everything was disturbingly the same. There was no “Nutcracker” music booming through the house, and no tantalizing smell of dinner getting started that would presage a holiday feast.

Ted and Vlad were on the living room couch watching ESPN through heavy-lidded eyes, and Mom was sitting in the recliner chair, listening to her book on headphones. Jason said he had something he needed to do quickly, and he disappeared upstairs. I stayed down with the others.

I waved at Mom and she slipped the headphones off.

“When’s dinner?” I asked. I didn’t want to be pushy, but…

“Don’t worry about it,” Mom said. “It’s all taken care of.”

My head was practically swiveling. “How can that be? Everything’s just the same as it was before we went to the zoo.”

“Then you didn’t notice the piano.”

I pivoted toward the old Steinway, which
was
decorated. I had to admit that. But where were the sledding monks? In their place, there was a Christmas village (the misplacement of it offended my newfound reverence for tradition), but it was sort of an abomination of a village. Scrooge and Marley’s Counting House was right smack in the middle of the little Alpine buildings. And Fezziwigg’s Delivery Wagon was parked on the fake pond. Not
next
to it, mind you. Right on top of it. I glared at the display for a full minute, my indignation gaining steam, before I was finally able to pronounce this conglomeration simply not acceptable.

Mom laughed. “Just move the wagon off the pond, for heaven’s sake.”

“But there’s hardly any room—”

“Well, don’t blame me. Vlad did it.”

“Vlad?”
I twisted toward the couch. His eyes slowly dragged themselves away from the football game on television to glare at me.
You gotta problem with my snow village?
those eyes asked.

I wondered briefly whether he was packing heat in his backpack. I smiled. “Looks nice!”

He nodded cautiously, then turned back to the TV.

“Since when do you outsource the decorating?” I asked Mom. “And where are all the walnut people? And why is the attic so neat?”

Mom kicked the footrest of her chair abruptly, bringing herself upright. “If you don’t mind, Holly, I’m getting sick and tired of your nit-picking. Just because this is the one year you decided to participate—”

“I’ve always participated,” I argued. “I’m here every Christmas.”

“Yes, to snigger at everything.”

“I never—”

“You
always
laughed at my walnut people,” she said. “But now when you want to impress your boyfriend, you act as though you can’t get enough of them. Well, news flash! We’re not all here to perform on cue for you.”

She jammed on her headphones, grabbed her huge box of tapes by its handle, and flounced out of the room. She looked like someone running away from home.

I stood in the middle of the room, my ears stinging. I was steamed—but it was a chastened kind of steamed. Maybe she was right. Partially. I
had
always taken all the labors everyone went through for granted.

“Nice going,” Ted grunted at me.

I turned to the piano. Maybe it was the house, or being around my family, but for the first time since I was thirteen I had the urge to dig my hands in my pockets and whine that
they just didn’t understand me
. But I was an adult now—nominally—and I tried to channel my frustrations to productive ends. I moved Fezziwigg’s Delivery Wagon off the skating pond. But then I discovered why it had been put there in the first place. There wasn’t enough cotton fluff to hold all the buildings and the wagon. So it either had to go on the pond or be stuck off by itself next to the metronome. Defeated, I rolled it back down on the pond.

I managed to laugh at myself as I made my way to my bedroom. Obviously I needed to chill out. It was natural that I was tied in knots, actually—I wasn’t used to feeling responsible for someone else’s Christmas vacation. I had dragged Jason down here, and so far things weren’t quite what I had expected. Minimal Christmas cheer, minimal romance.
But so what?
Next year—when hopefully everyone would be acting saner and all the crystal angels and inflatable polar bears would be in place again—Jason and I would probably be laughing about all this.

I flopped back on my bed and clasped my hands together on my stomach.
God I hope Isaac found that mistletoe
. Right now it felt like my only hope.

A light tapping at my door made me sit up suddenly. Jason was standing in my doorway, looking around the room with a half smile. It was an odd mix of the old me—my student desk with a pink Princess phone on it, my
Last of the Mohicans
poster, a corkboard full of pictures and mementos—and my parents’ attempt to assert their dominion over my room. Mom had put a Laura Ashley–esque coverlet on the bed, and Dad’s HealthRider exercise bike stood in front of my dresser.

“Come in,” I said.

He had something hidden behind his back and I felt a little surge of curiosity. He sank down on the bed next to me, pushing Mr. Fabulous away with an uncomfortable nudge of his elbow. “You said you wanted to exchange gifts in private.”

Actually, I had envisioned us getting together after everyone else had gone to bed—a stroke-of-midnight moment, maybe, in front of the odorless tree.

But apparently Jason hadn’t planned the present swap for optimum romance potential. He brought out his gift and handed it to me. “Well, so…here.”

It was too large for a jewelry box. From the looks of it, I expected a small clothing item maybe. Very small and featherlight…lingerie, perhaps? (Just what I needed.)
What the hell was it?
I wondered, suddenly overcome with curiosity. I reached around to my bag and got out his present from me.

We sat side by side and unwrapped. Jason was faster than me. When he lifted the lid of the box he drew in a sharp breath. “Wow!” he exclaimed. “This is sooooo great!”

He jumped up and wound the huge muffler around his neck. It
did
look great, but he was sort of overreacting—like a floozy in an old movie with a new fur coat. “Where did you
find
this?”

“We saw it together,” I reminded him.

“Did we?” He frowned, obviously having forgotten.

But how could he have forgotten? How? He was an elephant. He even remembered the name of Isaac’s ex-girlfriend, a person I hadn’t mentioned more than once, I’m sure.

He grinned as he fingered the soft wool. “That makes it even better. More personal.”

I should have gotten him a watch, I thought, kicking myself.

I took the lid off the small white box in front me and found a wall of tissue paper. When I peeled away that layer, I realized he had fooled me completely. There was no slip of silk—just an envelope. My heart thumped—
some kind of love note, maybe?
Or one of those hand-printed cards that promised,
“This card good for one romantic winter getaway.”
I had a friend whose boyfriend had done that for her birthday once.

I ripped open the envelope and a Barnes & Noble gift card fell out onto the carpet.

“Oh!” I bent down to retrieve the card, then bashed my head against my desk when I lifted my head. The Princess phone let out an incidental jangle as my head crunched. I winced. “Oh!”

Jason reached over. “Are you all right?” he asked, his face twisted in sympathetic pain.

I nodded mutely, waving my gift card at him. “Thank you so much.”

“I knew you liked books,” he said.

“Yes, I do,” I assured him. “Love ’em.”

I gave bookstore cards as gifts all the time. To coworkers.

He frowned as he peered at my scalp. “Did you break skin?”

I shook my head.
A gift card was a practical gift. Flexible. It shows that he really wants me to have what I want
.

It also meant that he didn’t even bother to guess what I’d want. This from a man I’d watched spend an entire day racing around Macy’s trying to find just the right thing for his office’s mailroom clerk. Was this his way of sending me some kind of signal?

Had he simply been dating me for a month so he wouldn’t be alone on Christmas?

He stood up. “Have you seen Maddie?”

“Not since we got back.” Something in his tone…my stomach clinched. Isaac’s last phone call came back to me. I glanced up at him almost hesitantly, afraid of what I would see. That distracted gleam in the eye I had witnessed so often in men who wanted to talk to me about Maddie. “Why?”

He wore a concerned frown. “I’m a little worried about her.”

Don’t act jealous.
“Her room is the next one down the hall, after the bathroom.”

He tilted his head. “You think she’d resent it if went to talk to her? I mean…I think I could help her.”

I held my hand to the throbbing little knot on my head and nodded. “Sure, go talk to her,” I said, dismissing him with a fatalistic wave. I had discovered years ago that keeping men away from Maddie was like trying to keep lions away from wildebeests.

He turned to go, then stopped at the door. “You might want to talk to Maddie yourself,” he said, “and tell her about that cut. I bet she’s a fantastic doctor.”

I gulped. “Yup. She’s fantastic at everything.”

Thank God I hadn’t gotten him a watch.

When I heard his footsteps retreat down the hall, I reached over and closed my door, then leaned back on the bed with a long, teenagerly sigh. This was so mixed up. I stared at my Daniel Day-Lewis poster and suddenly remembered again why I had fallen in love with him in that movie, as he crashed through the woods in his buckskins to find his lady love. When I was fifteen, the possibility that anyone would ever love me enough to endure knife fights and dives through waterfalls and five-minute montages of running through the forest seemed like a faraway dream.

Now, thirteen years later, the dream was still just an ever-dwindling speck on the horizon.

I must have fallen asleep, because the next thing I knew there was a hand on my shoulder shaking me. “Hey! Wake up. It’s dinnertime!” My eyes popped open to see Isaac looming over me. “How long have you been asleep?”

I jolted up to sitting, feigning alertness as best as I could. “I was just resting my eyes.”

“Really? You were snoring
really loudly
.”

“Where is everybody?” I asked, slipping on my shoes.

Isaac sat down and dandled Mr. Fabulous on his knee. “Down in the dining room. We’ve been waiting on you.”

“Oh—wait.” Damn! It was Christmas Eve. Picture time. Except, of course, that Maddie had forgotten her camera. But someone in the family had to have a camera. “I need to put on makeup.”

I frantically ran a brush through my hair and hid behind my closet door so that I could put on my special sweater that matched Jason’s, which we had agreed to wear on Christmas Eve.

“How long have you been here?” I asked.

“’Bout an hour.”

I nearly shrieked. “And you didn’t come get me?”

“Jason said you looked like you needed a rest. Besides, we were all watching a movie.”

“What movie?”

“Holiday Inn.”

“I love that movie.”

“It adds a whole new dimension to it to watch it with Ted. He wept.”

“Well, it is awfully sentimental at the end….”

“He was crying through the tap dances,” Isaac said.

Poor Ted. He was even more of a mess than I was. I slapped on some lipstick and stepped out from behind the door, modeling my sweater. It was green cotton with a big Santa head on it, with googly eyes and a fluffy beard. When I stepped back into his sight line, Isaac’s face fell and he actually recoiled a few inches.

“Oh, no!” he breathed.

“It matches Jason’s. We’re wearing them together. As a joke.”

“You are?”

I nodded. “We planned it.”

Isaac looked doubtful. “Holly, can I just say one thing?”

I blinked at him. “Did you ever find mistletoe?”

He rolled his eyes. “No.”

I shook my head. “It probably doesn’t matter.” I was so confused about Jason. I didn’t know what to do, honestly. I couldn’t tell anymore if he was a perfect gent or a perv with a Christmas fetish.

“We should go,” I said. “Mom is probably upset that I’ve been slacking off all afternoon.” And after she gave me a tongue-lashing for being a nonparticipator, too. I looked at my face in the mirror. It still lacked something to be desired, but there was no time now.

I raced ahead of Isaac and was halfway down the stairs before I realized that something really seemed off. When I swung into the dining room, everyone looked up from various poses of reaching out for slices of pizza from the boxes that were strewn across the dining room table.

I froze.
Pizza?

The others seemed frozen, too. They were staring at my chest.

“What’s going on?” I asked.

“I decided we should go more casual this year,” Mom said, in almost a singsong. “Come have a slice.”

I was still having a hard time taking it all in. I don’t think I had ever seen my parents order pizza. Ever. But there they all were, my assorted loved ones, balancing giant wedges in their hands, looking ridiculously pleased with themselves. Jason had a pepperoni slice that was about to spill a waterfall of cheese onto the tablecloth. Ted was leaning back glassy-eyed, chewing a crust. Vlad had a pile, one of each kind, on his plate. It was hard to tell if he intended to eat them one by one or cut into the pile as if it were a triangular layer cake.

Jason laughed. “Oh—I forgot about the sweaters!”

No kidding. He was wearing a plain navy blue sweater—no googly-eyed Santa in sight—over a red plaid shirt.

Isaac, behind me, put his hand on my elbow and steered me to a chair. I have to say, I needed the help. I felt like an idiot.

The dining room was set up buffet style, and Mom passed us plates. At least we were using the gold-rimmed Havilland china we always brought out for nice holiday meals. I flopped a piece of pepperoni on it and bit back a sigh. “Pizza on Havilland. I guess I should be glad tradition hasn’t been completely thrown out the window in this family.”