Colors of Christmas Read online

  “Only a mile or so away,” Sam said. “Carly, what about you? Do you have to come far?”

  “About seven miles,” Carly said. “It’s not too bad.”

  Carly looked at Sam as she spoke. Astrid’s smile tugged that corner of her lips again. Even an old lady could see the spark Sam’s attention stirred in Carly.

  “The fire looks cozy,” Sam said. “Penny’s trees are spectacular.”

  Astrid and Carly nodded.

  “You should see the photos Astrid has,” Carly said. “Her father trimmed a beautiful tree.”

  “Oh?” Sam moved his glance to Astrid.

  “He did indeed,” Astrid said. “The photos are only black-and-white, but it takes little imagination to add color.”

  “I’d love to see the photos sometime,” Sam said. “How many trees did Penny do?”

  Astrid ticked off her fingers. “Lobby. Parlor. Library. Community room. Landing. Dining room.”

  “Six trees!” Carly said. “I really should make a point to go around and look at them.”

  “I was just about to say that,” Sam said. “Maybe when I’m finished in the kitchen, I can come find you to see the trees together.”

  Carly blushed. “Maybe if I’m not too engrossed in my documentation.”

  “It won’t take long,” Sam said.

  The corner of Astrid’s mouth twitched. She must not let on that she noticed the two of them dancing around the edges of flirtation.

  Carly tilted her head back to take in the height of the lobby tree. “I haven’t seen them all, but it’s hard to imagine another one could be as striking as this one done in gold.”

  “My father did one in gold one year,” Astrid said. “Somewhere I still have some of his gold ornaments. They came from his mother, actually. They were quite old even when I was a girl. I loved them best of all.”

  “I’d like to see them,” Carly said.

  “Don’t leave me out,” Sam said.

  Astrid gave into the full smile. “As soon as they turn up, I will let you both know.”

  Surely Alex wouldn’t have sifted them out. Astrid had specifically asked for them, and he knew they held great sentiment. Yet she had opened the last box yesterday, and it held only more towels than she was likely to need. If he called, she would ask him about the ornaments, but she might have to wait until he returned from France.

  “I’d better get to my work,” Carly said. “I promised my son we’d play in the snow today.”

  “You have a son?” Sam said.

  Carly nodded. “He’s four.”

  Astrid’s eyes went to Carly’s left hand. No wedding band. Had Sam also noticed?

  “If I don’t get to the kitchen,” Sam said, “there might be no lunch.”

  The pair disappeared into the hall behind Carly, walking in the same direction. Astrid would like to have heard their conversation. Instead, she stared into the gold tree on the other side of the fireplace. So much gold made for a stunning entrance.

  The memory of her father’s trees shifted to the three days she had spent with him in the rubble. It had taken her three days of persistent nagging to convince her father to take her with him. He had wanted to take Harald, but her mother had argued that Harald could ill afford to put his employment at risk with an extended absence. Then Papa said he would go alone, but Astrid had kept her foot propped in the opening of her father’s intention. He had meant to take someone. Why not her? She was old enough.

  Papa’s acquiescence gave way to a steady stream of caution. “Be careful what you touch.” “Stay where I can see you.” “Don’t put your weight down on anything you’re not certain of.” “Don’t slam the shovel.”

  The stench assaulted her nostrils as soon as they rode into Würzburg, and her heart clenched. The devastation of the bombs left little untouched in the city that dated back a thousand years. Here and there were pockets of people hoping to rebuild, but Astrid’s twelve-year-old mind couldn’t conceive that this place might once again be a thriving home to thousands of people. Unbridled grief made her tremble.

  “You asked to come,” Papa said softly. “You must be strong enough to be helpful.”

  She wiped the back of one hand across her face. “I am strong, Papa.”

  Astrid couldn’t even determine where the Apotheke had once been, with its impeccable shop windows at street level and stories of doctors’ offices above. But somehow Papa knew.

  Jagged edges of glass, chunks of brick, random remains—a table leg, the back of a chair, a headless doll, rags that had once been clothing, powders that could have been anything, shards of wood, crumbled and unrecognizable gray bits everywhere. Rodents scurried through the rubble. Astrid’s chest had burned, both with the dust that rose from the rubble and the disappointment that this was what their previous life had been reduced to.

  “We are looking for the safe,” Papa reminded her, handing her a shovel. “That is all that matters.”

  “The ornaments,” Astrid said. “Can’t we look for the ornaments?”

  Papa shrugged. “Don’t get your heart set on that. We must accept they are gone.”

  Astrid didn’t argue. But as she methodically helped her father shovel through the detritus of their city, her eyes searched not only for the black of her father’s safe but also the brown of the wooden box that had sat in his office. It was a strong box. Papa had always said so. It was possible it had survived both the blasts and the burning.

  Anything was possible. If she couldn’t believe that, what good was it to believe anything? “With God all things are possible.” Wasn’t that what the priest in the village always said to people grasping for hope in the time since the war ended? Astrid wasn’t simply grasping for hope, she was digging for it with a strong shovel.

  For three days they dug. Others dug up and down the block, and Papa seemed to recognize some of them. Wheelbarrows carried away load after load of jumbled, worthless debris, and Astrid wanted to cry out to be allowed to look in the passing loads for her wooden box. Even if all she found was a shining bit of gold glass, she would at least know what happened to the ornaments. When her eyes drifted, though, Papa spoke her name and she returned to the spot he had identified.

  Three days.

  At night they huddled in an old bomb shelter. The door had been blasted off, and Astrid’s mind filled with every instance of seeking refuge from the bombs. She slept little, waiting for daybreak.

  Two nights and three days.

  On the third afternoon, they uncovered debris they recognized from the Apotheke. The bent metal frame of a display case. The wooden slab that had been Papa’s desk. A black metal handle from the filing cabinet. Shreds of the packets he used for dispensing medicine. And then the tilted plane of black. Papa’s efforts intensified, digging and tossing aside anything in his way. Astrid cringed. He might toss away the ornaments.

  The safe was sound, still closed tightly. Papa turned the combination lock and tugged at the door. It swung free. His concern wasn’t for the safe but for the papers it held. Relief colored his face, and in that moment Astrid saw hope. Papa took all the documents the safe had held and jammed them into his coat.

  “If we go now”—Papa said, beginning to climb back off the debris toward the street—“we can be back to your mother before dark.”

  “But the box,” Astrid said.

  “We will not find the box,” Papa said. “How would a small wooden box of glass ornaments survive what we have been digging through?”

  “Please, Papa. Just a little while longer?”

  Papa blew out his breath, but he picked up his shovel once again.

  Papa wouldn’t pray, but Astrid did. For the ornaments. For more time to search. That she wouldn’t put her shovel down in the wrong place and destroy precisely what she was hoping to save.

  “Papa!” Astrid went to her knees and began moving rubble by hand. “I see it.”

  He knelt beside her, and she pointed.

  “That’s the corner,”
Astrid said. “With the brass hinge.”

  He nodded, and with a huff, he moved the largest piece of jagged concrete that remained in the way.

  Trembling and grateful to find the box whole though covered in soot, she opened it. Most of the ornaments had shattered, but three survived whole.

  “Thank you, Papa.” Astrid threw her arms around her father’s neck. “Thank you. I promise I will never lose these again.”

  Everything about her young life was broken—and probably always had been because of Hitler’s rise to power in the years of her childhood. But with three ornaments cradled in her grimy hands, she believed with her whole heart that not everything must break.

  Astrid now pushed herself out of the chair and onto her scooter. She had kept the ornaments safe for sixty-eight years.

  And now they were lost again in the debris of her move.

  CHAPTER 14

  There was no point in answering her cell phone. Didn’t Truman ever sleep? Or maybe he’d figured out a way to schedule a call to go through while he was in dreamland and Carly lay in her bed resisting sleep because she knew it would be interrupted.

  Tonight was different. He’d called four times already, and it was only three in the morning. After the third call, Carly put the phone on vibrate, but she was so accustomed to interrupted sleep that even the slight buzz her phone made on the nightstand jolted her. Now, after the fourth call, she turned it off completely, crossed the room, and stuffed the phone between the cushions of a chair. It couldn’t ring now, and in the morning she would take a screenshot of the list of missed calls to send to the police as evidence that Truman was still harassing her. The only reason she ever answered was that one of the officers had suggested that if she didn’t answer the call and hear his voice, she couldn’t testify credibly that it was him.

  Carly was sure. Blocking the number was pointless. He just got another number, probably prepaid phones that he could change as often as he wanted to. Carly even changed her own number twice and was very careful whom she gave the numbers to—her mother, Tyler’s school, the supervisor at whatever job she had at the time—and somehow he found the new numbers. That was the creepiest part of the whole travail.

  She was entitled to sleep with her phone on if she wanted to. Anyone should be free to make that choice. The level at which Truman violated her space intensified, aggravating her chronic agitation. No one, not even her mother, knew how hard Carly worked simply to appear calm, or that if she could save enough money—which seemed unlikely with the way car repairs and day care ate up her paychecks—she contemplated moving halfway across the country. But that might make her mother vulnerable, and Carly couldn’t abide that thought. She would just have to turn the phone off and shove it out of earshot.

  Back in bed, all she’d accomplished was not hearing the phone. Falling asleep—deeply enough to feel restored—remained out of reach, and she entertained the thought that she might as well get up and do something productive.

  The house phone interrupted this consideration. It rang three times and stopped. Almost immediately it rang again. And stopped. The third time it began to ring, Carly threw back the quilts and went out into the hall. She had no extension in her room, but her mother did.

  Carly knocked on her mother’s door. “Mom?”

  “Come in.”

  Carly opened the door, to find her mother sitting on the side of the bed, lamp on and the cordless phone in her hand.

  “I’m sorry, Mom.” If Carly lived somewhere else, even in an overpriced apartment the size of a shoe box, this wouldn’t involve her mother.

  “No one was on the line,” her mother said.

  “There never is.” Carly took the phone from her mother’s hand and set it back in the cradle. She could complain again to the police about the nocturnal calls, but if Truman never spoke and used prepaid phones, what could they do? Track down his new address or his place of employment to make accusations they couldn’t substantiate?

  “So you think it was him,” her mother said.

  Carly nodded. “Who else? I had four calls on my cell, and now this. It’s no coincidence.”

  “This is getting out of hand. It’s always been out of hand, actually.”

  “We could turn off the ringer on the phone in here.”

  “Suppose someone really needed to reach me?”

  Her mother’s best friend had a husband ailing with advanced Parkinson’s. Carly’s grandmother was in a nursing home, and this was the number they would call if something happened. Her uncle was fighting cancer, and his wife sometimes called at odd hours. All of them would call the house line out of habit if they needed her mother.

  “You could ask everyone to call your cell number if they need you at night,” Carly said.

  “I shouldn’t have to. He’s the one who should be stopped. If I have to give my cell number to half the world, they’ll want an explanation I don’t wish to make.”

  Her mother was right, of course.

  “I’m sorry, Mom.” The response was feeble and repetitive, but Carly could think of nothing else to say.

  The thump against the door made them both jump.

  Tyler, rubbing his eyes and walking unsteadily, entered the room. “I had a noisy dream. Make the telephone stop.”

  Carly exchanged glances with her mother before picking up the phone and sliding the ringer button to the off position. Tyler burrowed into her hip, and she picked him up.

  “There,” she said, “I turned off Nana’s phone.”

  He wrapped his legs around her waist, almost too big for her to keep lifting him to carry.

  “Will you sleep with me?” he said, his chin propped on her shoulder.

  “Sure, baby,” Carly said. “Let’s go lie in your bed so Nana can go back to sleep.”

  Tyler might be the only one to return to slumber that night, but Carly hoped her mother would at least try. She crossed the hall to the small room with a twin bed, an upright dresser, and shelving that held the toys and treasures of a little boy. He was reluctant to let go of her neck when she bent over the bed.

  “It’s all right, Tyler,” Carly said. “I’ll stay with you until you fall asleep.

  She lay beside him in the narrow bed and pulled the sailboat-printed quilt over the two of them. How much had he heard? Could he have heard her cell phone or only the landline? With his head against her shoulder, Tyler’s breathing soon was deep and even. Carly’s mind raced. The landline account was in her mother’s name, and Carly wasn’t authorized to request changes. But she would urge her mother to ask the phone company to block the particular number these calls were coming from now. Suggesting that they get a new number and keep it unlisted would meet resistance, and Carly wouldn’t blame her mother. If television shows were to be believed, he never stayed on the line long enough to be traced, but the police might be able to search a proprietary database and find out where his new apartment was.

  The day Truman had shown up at her new job and casually handed her an envelope, it was all she could do not to tear it in half in front of him.

  “I came across this and thought you’d like to have it,” he’d said.

  “Thank you,” she’d managed to say, refusing to make a scene in front of the receptionist.

  Once he’d left the building, she almost dropped the sealed envelope in the nearest trash can, but she could just see the police officer who helped her from time to time shaking his finger at her at the inadvisability of that choice. Instead she slit the envelope open and peered at its contents.

  The photo of her and Truman on the night of the movie.

  Only this version had Tyler’s face in it, like a cozy little family.

  It was after four when Carly returned to her own room. Rather than crawl into bed—pointless, because she wouldn’t sleep—she instead closed the door behind her, flipped on the overhead light, and slid the closet door open. The items she sought were crammed in the back on the floor. She hadn’t thought about her high school so
ftball team for years, but in this moment the purpose of that effort proved fruitful. The duffel had long been unused, but now she pulled it out, put it on the bed, opened the zipper, and turned back to the closet. It was time to take matters into her own hands and make sure Truman left her—and Tyler and her mother—alone. Fear would not be a new normal Carly would accept any longer.

  Astrid’s daily activities were caught between the independence she had taken for granted before her fall and thoughts that began, Once I am mobile again … On Sunday morning, reconciling that neither of those conditions were true at the moment, she decided to give the chaplain’s Sunday morning service a try. Billed as nondenominational, the service struck her as a generic Protestant offering without the passing of the offering plate. The order of service printed on the handout was simple: a couple of hymns sung to the accompaniment of a spinet piano in the community room, a brief sermon, a time of prayer, and a closing hymn. The front of the room had been rearranged and draped with cloths the color of blue that more progressive churches had begun using for Advent, the weeks before Christmas, and Astrid appreciated that someone—she supposed Russell—had given thought to how to make this multipurpose space appropriate for a worship gathering.

  The crowd wasn’t large. Others still drove cars or could take the buses Sycamore Hills provided for transportation to several larger churches in the area. Then there were those who would rather do without a service if they couldn’t attend their own churches. And of course, not everyone was inclined to go to church at all. But nothing about the service made her feel that Russell took any shortcuts simply because the group was small and the service generic. Heartfelt was the word she would use to describe it.

  Russell’s sermon was on one of the familiar Advent texts that Astrid would have expected to hear in a church service. This passage was a glorious text and one of her favorites:

  “Comfort, comfort my people, says your God. Speak tenderly to Jerusalem, and proclaim to her that her hard service has been completed, that her sin has been paid for, that she has received from the LORD’S hand double for all her sins. A voice of one calling: ‘In the wilderness prepare the way for the LORD; make straight in the desert a highway for our God. Every valley shall be raised up, every mountain and hill made low; the rough ground shall become level, the rugged places a plain. And the glory of the LORD will be revealed, and all people will see it together. For the mouth of the LORD has spoken’” (Isaiah 40:1–5).