Authors: Fern Michaels,Elizabeth Bass,Rosalind Noonan,Nan Rossiter

Tags: #Fiction, #General, #Anthologies (Multiple Authors)

Making Spirits Bright (13 page)

BOOK: Making Spirits Bright

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He laughed. “Huge. Five brothers and sisters, uncles and aunts and nephews all over the place. We’re the kind of family that has to set up card tables in two rooms to squeeze everybody in at holiday meals. And I can’t even remember the number of Lego sets I wrapped up for Christmas presents for my nephews in the past week.”

A stupid grin seemed to have frozen itself in place on her face. A real family. One that actually liked you. What would that be like?

“And so your mom’s it?” he asked.

“Well ...” She cleared her throat, mentally fishing for some angle that would make her life seem less isolated and desperate. “I’ve got a couple of ex-stepdads, and some ex-stepfamily in Texas. That’s where the café’s name comes from. Sweetgum, Texas.”

He nodded.

“Sometimes I dream of having more family—
real
family—but I’m not sure I would know what to do with them. Maybe I should kidnap a few kids, give it a trial run.” She felt her face go scarlet. “That is, I wouldn’t
really
kidnap anybody.”

Those eyes skewered her. “Like you wouldn’t actually yank an old lady off her stoop?”

“Oh God.”

He laughed and put his hand on her shoulder. The touch startled her. She hadn’t realized how close he was. His eyes, which had laughter in them at first, darkened. His entire expression changed, and a charge snapped in the apartment’s frigid air. She pulled her gaze away from his eyes, but it landed on his lips. She’d never noticed how full they were.

Marcello growled.

“It’s late,” Patrick said, standing abruptly. “I should get going.”

She followed him to the door, the comforter requiring a geishalike mince. She still felt dazed from being so close to him, from sensing they were a moment away from ... from what? What would have happened if Marcello hadn’t intervened?

“Good night, Heidi,” Patrick said at the door, putting his hat back on. “I’ll see you tomorrow at the coffee shop.”

“Actually, you’ll see me today at the coffee shop.”

“Right.” He grinned. “Love the Snoopy jammies, by the way.”

She closed the door and sagged against it. Her fleeting romantic notions faded as she looked around her—the crappy apartment, her bizarre outfit, the watery hot chocolate with cocoa film floating at the top. If Dinah’s first theory had been correct, and Patrick wasn’t just a nuisance bear, this visit had probably cured him. No wonder he’d fled.

What an evening.

She deposited the mugs in the sink and stumbled back to the futon. Marcello hopped up ahead of her, settling into the center against the backrest. She lay down, attempting to perch on the edge and not squish the dog. As she closed her eyes, a curious question popped into her head.

How had he known when he’d heard the EMS report that it was her apartment building?

How did he know where she lived at all?

Interesting.

Yawning, she flipped over and was immediately hurtled back to the edge by a series of rapid-fire snarls.

Chapter 5

She awoke to someone pounding against her skull with a mallet.

Except, when she listened more closely, she realized the mallet was Marcello. Marcello barking. And that pounding? Someone was at her front door.

Heidi lumbered off the futon and stumbled toward the door, tripping on the comforter she still hugged around her for warmth. God, it was cold. Was miserly Mrs. DiBenedetto controlling the thermostat from her hospital bed with thought rays?

“Marcello, shut up.”

He didn’t like that. The dog turned his frantic attention from the door to Heidi, as if
she
were the intruder.

“Shush!”

When she swung the door open, letting in a blast of wet freezing air, he was still barking ... and Martine was standing in front of her, still weeping. It might have been two in the morning all over again. Except Heidi felt more tired now, even after sleeping. What time was it?

“Will you take him?” Martine asked.

“Who?”

“Wilson. I must go.”

Heidi gave herself a mental slap in an attempt to wake up. Something told her she needed to have her brain firing on all cylinders.
Take Wilson?
She hadn’t babysat anything since she was a teenager. And that had just been one time, for a desperate neighbor, and it had not resulted in success. Due to a Jiffy Pop disaster, she’d ended up with fire trucks surrounding the house.

Sometimes it amazed her that she’d made it to adulthood. So-called. The jury was still out on whether she would actually make it
through
adulthood.

Still, Martine looked frantic. She couldn’t not help.

“Of course I’ll take him. Let me wake up a little ...”

“I must go. Now.”

“Now?” Heidi tried to kick-start her head. “Okay—I guess I can take him to the café with me. He doesn’t move around much, does he?”

The French girl’s brows beetled. “What?”

“The kid. He mostly just sits there, right?” Heidi had really only seen him in his stroller, with Martine pushing him.

“He’s a toddler.”

“Oh.” Toddling. She supposed she could handle that. The incipient cry coming out of Martine’s throat made up her mind for her. “No problem,” she assured the au pair. “Bring him down.”

The girl was gone in a flash. Heidi turned back to the apartment and tried to pull herself together. Marcello’s vocal output shifted from annoying barks to a constant whining hum. Heidi hurried to the kitchen and got out some cereal bowls, filling one with water and putting it on the ground. The dog trotted over and started slurping it up.

Maybe she should have put a bowl out for him last night. She opened his bag of food, shook some kibble into the other cereal bowl, and placed it on the floor next to the water. Marcello switched to it immediately, inhaling the dog food in such a frenzy that he seemed to be choking and swallowing at the same time.

Before Heidi had finished dressing, another sharp knock sounded at the door. Martine was back, this time lugging a lot of stuff with her, not the least of which was Wilson, who she pushed inside the apartment in his stroller. The little boy looked a lot bigger than he’d seemed the last time Heidi had seen him. Like a little human, really. He was half covered in a puffy snowsuit, although she could see he was dressed in jeans and a green corduroy jacket and matching hat underneath. Martine dropped a duffel bag on the ground and tossed a manila envelope and some keys on the kitchen counter. “It should be okay.”

Heidi frowned at the keys. “Are those to Janice’s place?”

“Of course. But please don’t mess anything. The maid has come yesterday.”

“Yeah, but ...” How long did Martine intend to be gone? Heidi assumed she was going to the hairdresser’s or something. Or to a Christmas brunch with some fellow au pairs. But the duffel indicated something longer than a morning.

“Thank you so much, Heidi. I know we have never became good friends ...”

“Wait a sec,” Heidi interrupted the farewell message with a frown. “Where exactly are you going, Martine?”

The girl blinked. “Lyon.”

“Lyon?” Heidi repeated. “In
France
?”

“Yes, of course. My home. I told you.”

Crap. “But—” What about Janice? What about Wilson? Heidi eyed the kid again. With each passing second, he looked bigger, more labor-intensive.

Her small hesitation was all it took to set Martine off again. She not only started crying, she was quivering. “I
must
go home! My father, he is dying, do you understand? Doesn’t anyone understand what it means to be so far from him now?”

Heidi remembered hearing about the death of her own father, long divorced from her mom and living on the other side of the country. She had seen him a few months earlier, but she never had a chance to say good-bye. “Yes, I understand. Really, I do. But Janice—”

“Janice is coming back.”

“When?”

“For Christmas.”

Christmas was tomorrow.

“But I have to leave, now, because of the ice,” Martine explained.

“Ice?”

Martine nodded. “Otherwise I will never get home until it will be too late.” She pushed the envelope toward Heidi again. “It’s all there. All instructions. It will all be okay.”

“But won’t Janice be pissed?”

Tossing the fringed end of her scarf over her shoulder, Martine said, “I don’t care. I will be in France.” She was already heading for the door. “Thank you for doing this thing for me, Heidi. I never believed Mrs. DiBenedetto when she called you
une criminelle.
”

Lovely.

Heidi was still trying to make sense of what Martine had said before—about the ice. “What did you mean about ice?”

“There is a storm on the way,” Martine said, opening the door. Her suitcase was waiting outside. She wasn’t wasting any time, evidently. When she took hold of the handle, Heidi began to panic.

“Wait—what should I do with Wilson? I mean, what does he eat ... and
do
all day?”

“It’s all in the envelope,” Martine said, flipping up her coat collar. “You can take him with you everywhere. He likes people.”

Without further adieu—literally—Martine headed up the walkway and turned onto the street. In a flash, something red streaked out the door past Heidi’s knees.

Wilson!

She reached out in time to catch him by the hoodie. When he realized he wasn’t moving anymore, and that his nanny was disappearing down the street through the snow at a quick trudge, the kid started screaming his lungs out. Martine whirled, yelled something that was lost in the wind and the distance, and blew a kiss at him. Wilson shrieked her name as she turned away and grew smaller. “Tiiiiiiiiiinne!”

It was like the end of the Western,
Shane
—the scene when Shane rides away, leaving the boy, stuck on his parents’ bedraggled ranch, yelling after him. Heidi felt she was playing the part of the bedraggled ranch.

When she couldn’t take any more of the drama or the cold, she pulled a shrieking Wilson back indoors and flipped the lock.

She had to think. But the dog was barking again—at Wilson now—which in turn made Wilson scream louder. Or maybe he was crying because it had sunk in that Martine had left him stuck in Heidi’s incompetent hands. Come to think of it, she felt like crying herself.

The kid stood in the foyer, frozen, except for his mouth in full cry. Then he began to stomp-hop across the living room, weeping and raving. “Pee pee pee pee pee!”

Those syllables set alarm bells clanging inside Heidi’s skull. Especially once she caught the first strong whiff of urine.

“You need to pee?” she asked in a voice that sounded unnaturally loud and upbeat. Then her slippers skidded beneath her and she noticed glistening little boot tracks all across her polyurethane plank floors.

She swept Wilson off the ground, holding him at arm’s length, and skidded toward the bathroom. He was wailing and she was letting out a keening sound, and Marcello was right at her heels, yapping. She deposited the kid in the bathroom and had started peeling the snowsuit off of him when it occurred to her that his clothes were dry. And that even if the kid had peed in his pants, he was probably wearing some kind of diaper. Which meant the offender had to be ...

She glared at Marcello, who sensed immediately that the worm had turned. He yelped and fled to the living room, scooting under the futon.

Maybe that was the real reason he’d been whining this morning, she realized. She had a lot to learn—about dogs and kids.

Unfortunately, dogs were probably easier. At least she knew what to feed them. A quick look in the bag told her that Martine hadn’t left her a bag of toddler kibble. There was a sippy cup in there, however. She put a kettle of water on for hot cocoa for the kid and set about mopping up the floor damage. Then, once the water was tepid, she mixed in the cocoa in the sippy cup, sloshed in some milk, and put the kid on the futon with it.

While he was slurping, she frantically went through the information Martine had left. Amazing—Janice was into helicopter parenting even from a continent away. She’d written up rules about how much television Wilson could watch (none), what music Martine could listen to in the child’s presence (no rap, hip-hop, or anything with foul language or dissonant chords), and what foods he could eat. Nothing but organic produce was supposed to pass baby’s lips. Best not to think of the five inches of unpronounceable chemicals on the ingredients list on the cocoa box. Already she was failing.

But Martine had sworn Janice was coming back for Christmas. That had to mean today or tomorrow. How much damage could she do in a day?

She hoped it would be no more than a day. Heidi scanned the complicated contact sheet Martine had left. Although she doubted Darfur was on her calling plan, she picked up her phone and dialed a number in Africa.

Thirty minutes later, it was clear that tracking down someone in Darfur was no easy matter. She had finally reached a woman speaking on a satellite phone in a village, who had informed her that Janice had left there over a week before.

So where was she? On her way home, Heidi hoped.

Please let her be on her way home.

What Martine had meant about the ice storm became clear as soon as Heidi left the apartment. Earlier, when she’d hurriedly walked Marcello up and down the street, the sky was partly cloudy. Yet by the time she’d rebundled Wilson, packed a backpack full of emergency supplies—extra clothes and Pull-ups—and wrestled him into the stroller to head out for the café, sleet was coming down steadily. A film of ice covered the snow, making walking an extra challenge. With every step, her boot would crunch through the ice and she would have to pick her foot out of the snowy trench.

Sal, Clay, and Dinah were hunched on the café’s stoop when she walked up. Seeing the stroller, Dinah’s eyes widened. She shouted something through her muffler, but Heidi shook her head in incomprehension as she dug for her keys and opened up the café. Talking in the open air required effort, and she was already exhausted from picking her way across five blocks of the slippery ice bog to get here.

Once they were inside, everyone began to unpeel their outer layers and gathered around the stroller. “What is that?” Dinah asked, dropping the suitcase she’d brought with her on the floor.

Clay laughed. “I’m guessing it’s a boy.”

“But where did he come from?”

The kid gaped at them all shyly. He’d kept up a constant semi-intelligible babble all the way from the apartment, but now he didn’t appear willing to give these people any information, even under torture. Which, judging from his wary expression, he expected at any moment.

“He’s a neighbor’s kid,” Heidi explained. “His name’s Wilson.”

She was going to make introductions, but Wilson wasn’t paying attention to them at all now. He gazed at all the stuff on the walls—Christmas decorations, mementos from Texas, pictures of Sweetgum, and the television mounted on the wall near the counter. And, of course, the Christmas tree. The moment she unbuckled him, he hopped out of the stroller and took off running to inspect the tree, falling halfway there.

Heidi braced herself for a piercing cry that didn’t happen. Sal cut it off at the pass.

“Watch out, Wilson!” He picked the kid up and swung him to his shoulders. “Wanna see the angel on top?”

“Wilson reminds me of that Tom Hanks movie,” Dinah said. “You don’t think the kid’s parents named him after a volleyball, do you?”

Heidi shrugged. “It might be a family name. Who knows?”

“I was assuming
you
would,” Dinah said. “Since you volunteered to take him.”

BOOK: Making Spirits Bright

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