After such an anticlimax, everyone left. Joe did, too, saying that if Rachel needed time to think things over, he’d understand. Rachel took to her bed, downed by a nasty headache that no doubt owed its origins to the distressing and unsettling events of the afternoon. She had no intention of going to sleep, but she must have dozed for a while because suddenly she was dreaming that the phone was ringing. And then she realized that it wasn’t a dream—the phone really was ringing. “Hello?” she said fuzzily into the receiver.
“Rachel?”
She swung her feet over the side of the bed. “Mimi! Oh, Mimi, I’m so glad it’s you. You wouldn’t believe what’s been going on.”
“If it has something to do with that guy who showed up fixing things on Christmas Eve, I might. What’s happening, dear?”
“Where are you?”
“In India. Today I rode an elephant.”
“Well, something almost as exciting happened to me. Jœ Marzinski asked me to marry him.”
Her grandmother indulged in a stunned silence for al· most thirty seconds at expensive international telephone rates. “What did you tell him?” she asked cautiously.
“I said I’d have to think about it.”
“Rachel, I don’t know how to give grandmotherly advice when I haven’t even met the man, but I have one question to ask you. Do you love him?”
‘I’ve only known him for a few days.”
“I didn’t ask how long you’ve known him. I know how long you’ve known him. What I asked is if you love him.”
“I think so. I’m pretty sure. He’s a good man, Mimi, and he’s crazy about me.”
“Oh. Well, it sounds like something hormonal. I’d better call Gladys or Ynez and get the real scoop.”
Rachel jumped up and began to pace the floor. “Don’t you dare call them! They like him. And guess what—Gladys and Ivan are falling in love.”
Her grandmother gasped. “Rachel, that is simply not possible. Not Gladys and Ivan. They were always nattering at each other. She’s always called him a pompous old fool, and he thinks she’s an obnoxious busybody.”
“They might both be right, but listen, Mimi. Gladys wears perfume now. Ivan gets this ridiculous idiotic expression on his face whenever he looks at her, which is all the time.”
“I’d better cancel the rest of this trip and come home. It sounds as if you’ve all lost your alleged minds. Tell me, is Ynez part of this madness?”
Rachel thought for a second. “She’s unwound her hair from those pink foam rubber curlers and looks better than she’s ever looked. She seems to have taken more of an interest in life in general.”
“That’s a good thing. Ynez folded up and gave in when her cat died, and it was like she simply didn’t choose to participate in life anymore. Why, she even quit the community theater. But back to this marriage proposal from this Joe Syzinski. Wasn’t it a bit sudden?”
“Marzinski. Joe Marzinski.”
“Sorry, dear. But answer my question. Hasn’t this all happened much too fast?” Rachel thought back over all that had happened during the past days. “Sort of. But there was a natural progression. And, oh, Mimi, the HSS came and took the baby. We all love her, and we didn’t want to see her go. And I’m a foster parent but couldn’t keep the baby because the state requires two parents in a foster home, and Joe asked me to marry him. If we were married, we could make a home for the baby. Don’t you see, it’s the perfect solution.”
“Rachel, I’ll be home as soon as I can get a flight. I can’t believe this—I leave town for a month and everyone goes bonkers.”
“I have to call Joe in the morning. I have to tell him what I want to do. And I have a terrible headache, I can’t even think.”
“Lie down on my magnetic pad. The one on my bed. I know you never believed in it, but it will cure your headache and help you dream good dreams. But don’t—and I repeat don’t—do anything.”
“Mimi—” She was going to tell her grandmother that she didn’t believe in the magnetic pad’s ability to cure anything, but Mimi wouldn’t listen.
“I’m hanging up right now. I can’t believe this. I’ll see you soon, Rachel.”
“Mimi!”
But her grandmother had already hung up.
FOR THE FIRST TIME IN HIS LIFE, Joe Marzinski had asked a woman to marry him. And with most of his family watching and listening and waiting to hear her answer.
And what had she said? “I’ll think about it.”
She’d think about it! Sheesh. He thought he’d done his part by accepting the challenge of converting her from one of the walking wounded into a woman who was ready to move forward with her life. All she had to do was say the word, and a whole new vista would open up for both of them.
It was all right with him if Rachel needed time and space to think things over, as long as she came to the right conclusion in the end. To maximize her chances of doing that, Joe had ushered everyone out of apartment 11E, kissed Rachel goodbye and driven Gina back to her sister’s house. Then he’d gone straight home.
Now he was doing some much-needed repairs around his own apartment. What was that they always said about the shoemaker’s children never having any shoes? It was like that with him and his apartment. He might always be fixing someone’s drain or dealing with air conditioner problems in the condominiums he serviced, but he needed screens replaced in his own apartment, and so that was what he’d decided to do tonight.
He had a roll of screening stretched over the door and was tugging it into place, trying to get it to fit inside the grooves of the aluminum frame. If only dealing with Rachel could be this easy! He pushed and pulled at the screen, making it fit, using the tool that would fasten it tightly. He was sliding the refurbished screen experimentally along its track when the doorbell rang.
He almost didn’t answer it. It was late for unannounced visitors, ten o’clock at night, and he had work to do. But perhaps it was Rachel. In case it was, he left his task and went to the door. A look through the peephole revealed Gina standing there.
He was worried about her, fainting like that today, and now here she was at his place. He opened the door, and Gina gave him a tentative smile. She was all dolled up, and she looked as if she might have been out on a date. He hoped so. A boyfriend might be exactly what she needed to get her mind off more serious matters.
“Well, come on in,” he said heartily, glad to see her. He hadn’t expected her to be out tonight, and he certainly would have advised her to stay home if she’d mentioned going anywhere, but now that she was here, maybe they could have that heart-to-heart that he’d been planning.
“You’re not busy, are you?” Gina seemed nervous and uncomfortable.
“I’m doing some work around the house. I find that it helps to keep busy when I’m concerned about something.” He ushered her into the kitchen. “Want a snack or something? I’ve got tortilla chips and maybe some salsa in the refrigerator.”
“I’m not hungry.”
“Where have you been? You look nice.” She was wearing a navy blue dress, high heels and gold earrings. He realized that she had grown into a beautiful woman in the past year or so.
“Anna and Mitch took me out to dinner. They asked me to go to a club with them, but I thought they might like privacy and, anyway, I didn’t want to overdo.”
“How’d you get here?”
“Drove Anna’s car.”
“Come on out on the patio while I put the screens back on the track. Then you can keep me company while I install a new faucet on the kitchen sink.”
Gina followed him outside and perched on one of the patio chairs while he finished with the screens.
“Have you heard from Rachel? About whether she wants to get married?”
He glanced over at her. “Nope. My offer is still on the table.”
“Aren’t you worried, Joe? I mean, what if she says no?”
Joe tossed a screwdriver back in his tool kit. “I hope she’ll say yes. I haven’t allowed myself to think that she might not.”
“I hope you and Rachel get married. I hope you live happily ever after.”
Gina’s impassioned words made him look at her closely. It seemed to him that her emotions were teetering on a fine edge. Maybe she just needed to talk. Maybe he could find out what had been bugging her lately by encouraging her to open up to him. He’d always been her first choice for confidences and advice. In the early days after she’d moved in with his parents, Joe had been the only one she trusted. He didn’t know why there had always been a special bond between them, but that’s the way it was.
“Let’s work on that faucet,” he said easily. They went into the kitchen, where he showed her the new faucet and explained how he was going to install it, and she seemed interested in the way it worked.
“Maybe you don’t want to get an MBA in marketing after all,” he teased, hoping to make her smile. “Maybe you’d rather learn condo crisis control.” This, he thought, was the perfect opening for her to talk about her change in courses, which was what he thought had been worrying her ever since she’d been on break, but she didn’t pick up on it. Instead she moved closer and watched as he removed the old faucet.
He completed the attachment of the new one quickly, perhaps too quickly. Something went wrong—perhaps he hadn’t tightened it enough—and when he turned on the water again, water sprayed all over the place, inundating him and the kitchen and Gina, as well.
It was only a few moments before he had matters completely under control, but by that time he was soaked. So was Gina.
He ruefully wiped the water from his face and handed Gina a clean towel so she could do the same. “I’m sorry,” he said, but Gina didn’t seem unduly upset.
“It’s an old dress,” she told him. “It’s completely washable. Being wet doesn’t feel so great, though.” She picked wryly at the wet fabric.
“I’ll change clothes and find you something else to wear,” he said.
Gina had already taken her shoes off and was padding around barefoot by the time he came out of the bedroom with one of his Condo Crisis Control T-shirts and a pair of shorts for her to wear. This reminded him of how he’d found Rachel something else to put on when she’d spent the night, and the memory tugged at him. He wanted to call her. But it was eleven o’clock. He thought she might be asleep.
Gina changed clothes in the bedroom and hung her dress to dry on a hanger on the patio while Joe sliced each of them a piece of the chocolate cake that his mother had sent home with him as a reward for fixing her stopped-up drain.
“This reminds me of old times,” Gina said as she sat down across from him at the breakfast bar in the kitchen. “Remember how you used to come to see me when I lived at your parents’ house? And we used to raid the pantry?”
“Mom always has something good to eat around,” he said.
“Yeah, like fresh-baked bread. And she always made extra fried chicken because she knew I liked to nibble on cold drumsticks.”
Joe exchanged a smile with Gina across the table.
“You were lucky, Joe. To grow up in a home with parents like you had, I mean.”
“I know.”
There was a silence, and Joe dug into the cake. It was good, his favorite. He wondered if Rachel knew how to make chocolate cake. He wondered if it mattered.
“Joe,” Gina said suddenly. “I need to tell you something.”
Here it is, Joe thought. This is what Gina’s been worried about. He thought he was prepared for whatever she might have to say. But he still didn’t believe his ears when she spoke.
Gina shifted uncomfortably in her chair and looked as if she’d rather be anywhere else. “Joe, I’ve done something awful. Chrissy—well, Chrissy is my baby.”
AGAINST HER OWN better judgment, Rachel slept on the side of the bed with Mimi’s magnetic pad. It took her a while to get comfortable on it, but she eventually fell into a deep sleep. The sleep was accompanied by vivid dreams, one after another, and she knew she was dreaming but was powerless to stop it. Then the dreams slowed, and she fell into a deeper sleep. It was then that she had the strangest dream of all.
She was floating through the Marzinskis’ living room, and all the children were watching. She was looking for
Joe and couldn’t find him. She felt scared and lonely, or as lonely as anyone could feel when in the company of all those kids. And she thought she might never find Joe again. There was also someone else she couldn’t find, someone who might be waiting for her in another room of the house.
But she couldn’t move very fast. It was as if she were swimming through the air, similar to when she and Joe had swum in the ocean. She rounded a corner and saw the entrance to the sunporch. On the doors was the mural of the Santa scene, complete with elves. She vaguely recalled that one of the children had painted it on the door, and although she hadn’t paid a whole lot of attention to the mural on Christmas Day, when she’d been there for dinner, now she was aware of every detail.
What surprised her was that she walked up to it and then took one more step, only to find that she was actually inside the picture. And Santa, who was standing at a table helping an elf cobble together a toy house, glanced up and smiled at her.
“Come in, Rachel,” he said. “I’ve been expecting you.”
Rachel looked wildly around. She saw the glass door through which she had gained access to the picture, and on the other side were all of Joe’s nieces and nephews, their faces pressed to the glass and listening to every word.
“Rachel?”
“Why am 1 here?” she said. It had not escaped her that this Santa had a crescent-shaped birthmark exactly like both the store Santa on Christmas Eve and the Santa who had called at Mimi’s apartment later.
“To learn,” said Santa.
This was ridiculous. She wanted to be back in bed in j Mimi’s apartment, but she didn’t know how to get there.
“Learn what?”
“To know.”
Rachel hated riddles. She hated guessing games. “I’m leaving,” she said abruptly.
“Not yet.”
“I have some serious thinking to do,” she said, feeling slightly frantic.
Santa laid a finger alongside his nose. “Ho-ho-ho,” he said. “As if you haven’t been thinking seriously already.”
“How do you know?”
Santa looked wise. “Your Christmas wish.”
She had to think hard for a moment to remember what she’d wished. Oh, yes. “I wanted a reason to celebrate Christmas again,” she said.
“I gave you one. You’re not going to throw it away, are you?”
“Uh—”
“Think carefully, Rachel. And do the right thing.”
She was on the verge of asking him exactly what the right thing might be, but he spoke again.
“A baby is a symbol of new beginnings,” he said, and suddenly she woke up with a jolt. She was lying in Mimi’s bed, and her shoulder hurt because she was sleeping on something hard and uncomfortable, and she’d been dreaming a stupid dream.
The magnetic pad. She never should have slept on it Mimi was out of her mind if she thought it could help cure anything.
But her headache had gone away. And outside, a fragile, pearlescent light was creeping up from the horizon. It was morning, and she had to talk to Joe.
She got up, showered and dressed, caught an elevator and ran out the lobby door past two startled condo residents who had ventured out early to buy their daily newspapers.
“Hello, Mrs. Cohen,” she said. “Hi, Mrs. Winstrom.”
“Rachel, I just wanted to tell you how sorry I am about little Baby Christmas’s leaving,” said Mrs. Winstrom.
“We’re going to get her back,” Rachel said, determination in every syllable.
“But I thought—” Mrs. Cohen began, wrinkling her forehead.
“Not to worry,” Rachel said cheerfully, leaving the two women staring after her with confused expressions on their faces.
She jogged past the manger scene, sniffed the brine in the air appreciatively and unlocked her car. The sun was shining, the sky was a bright azure-blue unsullied by clouds, and today was going to be a wonderful day, perhaps the most important day in her life. She sang “Hark, the Herald Angels Sing” off-key as she zipped her car across the bridge to Joe’s apartment house, where she squealed to a stop at the curb and started to get out
The song died on her lips as the front door of Joe’s apartment opened. Joe stood there in the doorway, smiling down engagingly at a woman whose face was screened by the fronds of a small palm tree. Rachel slid back into her car, her heart beating wildly. Who could be leaving Joe’s apartment at this hour in the morning?
Not only that, but his visitor was wearing a Condo Crisis Control T-shirt and shorts exactly as Rachel had when she’d spent the night. The woman was also clutching a plastic bag, and, recalling that she’d carried her own dress in such a bag on the morning after spending the night with Joe, Rachel had a pretty good idea what was in it.
Shock, disbelief and rage curdled her blood. Here she Ì| was, prepared to tell Joe that she would marry him, and he was bidding goodbye to a woman who had obviously spent the night with him in his apartment. A wave of nausea rose up from her throat and threatened to choke her.
Trust, Rachel believed, was one of the most important aspects of a relationship. It was the cornerstone on which a marriage should be built. She, Rachel, was not stupid; enough to marry a guy she couldn’t trust, and she most definitely did not trust Joe Marzinski now.
She couldn’t marry him. And she wouldn’t.
Blindly she rammed the key into the ignition, and her car’s engine sprang to life. Joe looked up. He froze in I place, his face blanching visibly, and the woman with him turned around so that Rachel got a good look at her for the first time. The uniquely shaped eyes and the close cropped dark hair left no doubt about who the woman was.
It was Gina.
RACHEL, HIGH ON THE ADRENALINE of her anger, made two trips downstairs carrying clothes and file boxes before Sherman arrived on duty that morning.
“Ms. Hirsch, what’s going on?” He blocked her way to the elevator.
“I’m driving back to Lakemont, New Jersey. Today,” Rachel said curtly.
“Oh. Guess that means there’s not going to be any wedding bells. So to speak.”
“Guess so. I might need some help with my computer when I’ve got it packed up and ready to go.”
“Sure. Just call me. Oh, and you might like to know that I’ve given away all the kittens. You know, the ones that were born in the washing machine.”
“Good, Sherman.” Rachel started to brush past him, but he didn’t step aside.
“And guess who took one of them? A little gray tabby, real cute?”
“I can’t imagine.” She didn’t feel like having this conversation. She didn’t feel like having any conversation. All she wanted was to get out of there before a delegation of Marzinskis descended on her with the idea of changing her mind or before Mimi arrived home from wherever.
“Ynez Garcia took the gray tabby. She said that having the baby around made her realize how important it was to enjoy life while we can. She said she’d missed her cat Rubio so much that she didn’t think she had anything to live for. A baby gives you hope for the future, you know? So she wanted a baby. A baby cat. Neat, huh?”
Rachel blew out an impatient breath. “Right. I’m glad for her.”
“Look,” said Sherman. He delved a hand into his uniform pocket and extracted a tiny, fuzzy, gray tabby kitten. “See? This is Tabitha.”
The kitten was adorable, and normally Rachel was not immune to such enchantment. On any other day she would have exclaimed over the kitten and cuddled it, but today was different. “She’s lovely, Sherman. And I wish I had time to get to know her. But I’m eager to get on the road.”
Sherman stroked the kitten’s gray-striped fur, and it opened its mouth and uttered the squeakiest mew she’d ever heard. “No problem. Mrs. Garcia will be down to get her in a few minutes. You let me know when you need help with the computer, ‘cause there’s no need for you to lug it down by yourself.”
“Thank you, Sherman.”
Rachel fidgeted all the way up to the eleventh floor. Now that she’d decided, now that she’d made up her mind, she never wanted to see Joe Marzinski again. She did want to see Chrissy, however. But that wasn’t possible. She’d never see Chrissy again or hold her or sit with her in the middle of the night soothing her colic. She’d never get to celebrate another Christmas with Chrissy or her first birthday. She felt inconsolably deprived.
She blinked tears from her eyes as she emerged from the elevator into the hall, and she was so blinded by them that she almost bumped smack into Gladys and Ivan. Gladys was wearing a pink linen dress, a sharp departure from her usual tennis whites or sweats, and Ivan was nattily dressed in green golf pants and a matching striped shirt.
Gladys pounced. “Rachel, dear, how good it is that we ran into you! I know you’re going to marry that nice Joe Marzinski. I mean, why wouldn’t you? But that’s not the reason I’m so happy. Ivan and I are getting married, too! Aren’t we, Ivan?”
“We certainly are. As soon as we can buy the ring and find a preacher.” He rocked back on his heels, smiling a smug little smile.
Rachel blinked. The two of them were holding hands.
“Isn’t this a bit sudden?” she said.
“When you’re our age, you don’t have a lot of time to waste. We want to spend all our time together. For the rest of our lives. Right, Ivan?”
“That’s right, my little Googie.” Ivan beamed at her.
Googie? Gladys Rink was Googie? Rachel was speechless.
“And you know, Rachel, it’s all because of Chrissy. We never would have spent quiet time together—”
“—and we never would have gotten to know each other,” said Ivan.
“If it hadn’t been for Chrissy. So maybe Ynez was right. The baby was a Christmas miracle,” added Gladys.
It wasn’t lost on her that Gladys and Ivan were finishing each other’s sentences, but Rachel almost couldn’t swallow around the lump in her throat. “Yes,” she said wistfully. “Perhaps Chrissy was a Christmas miracle.”
“We’re going out to choose a ring, and then I want to hear all about you and Joe,” Gladys said, patting Rachel’s hand.
But Rachel didn’t think they would want to know that she had seen Gina leaving Joe’s apartment very early this morning. They wouldn’t want to know that she wouldn’t marry Joe now if he were the last man on earth. And she wasn’t going to tell them. She would be long gone from Coquina Beach before the Theatrical Threesome even knew she had left.
The phone rang as she reached her office, and she’d already unplugged her answering machine. Against her better judgment, she answered it.
“Rachel,” Joe said. His voice was gruff, the way it was when he was upset. She had grown to know that about him in the past several days—not that it was important
“I don’t have anything to say to you.” The fist around her heart tightened, twisted. She closed her eyes, tried not to picture his face.
“I can explain. I can explain everything.”
Pain and disappointment spewed out of her unabated and unedited. “Maybe you want to tell me that Condo Crisis Control T-shirts are standard issue for every woman who spends the night at your apartment? Or that asking me to marry you was some kind of weird joke you perpetrated on your family to make them think that you were finally going to settle down?”
“No, Rachel, I’m in love with you. I want to marry you.” The words pierced straight to her heart.
“So last night, I suppose, was one last fling.” There was no point in keeping the bitterness out of her voice, and she didn’t even try.
“It wasn’t anything like that,” Joe said on a note of desperation.
“I only have two words for you, Joe Marzinski—drop dead.” She slammed the phone down and tried not to think about his silvery eyes gone cold, about his strong arms never again enclosing her, protecting her, holding her close as he made love to her.
You could lose in life. You could lose the things you loved over and over again. But you could also survive those losses, and that was what she intended to do, mainly by putting a lot of distance between herself and the man who was the cause of her pain.
But would distance ease this ache in her heart, the knife in her gut? She loved Joe Marzinski, she’d wanted a lifetime with him. She treasured the time they’d spent together and the way he’d made her feel worthwhile. The way he’d loved her and, yes, cherished her in spite of her faults.
She’d foreseen a future with him, bright and new and untarnished by pain or guilt She’d reached for it—and it had been yanked away.
Life was cruel, and you couldn’t count on anything, so she might as well get on with the life that was left to her now.
Mimi’s apartment was in chaos. Rachel had haphazardly tossed clothes into her two suitcases, and they lay open on the floor. Papers in the office needed to be packaged and mailed to her New Jersey apartment, where she could sort them later. She needed to call Gilberto Perez and tell him she was leaving; she needed to clean the apartment so that Mimi wouldn’t have to do it when she came home.
But first she would box up her computer and printer.
Once that task was accomplished, she called Sherman to carry them down to her car, and he answered his phone right away. Rachel was in no mood to listen to any more protracted stories from him, no matter how interesting they might be.
“Sherman? My computer is ready. Could you please load it into my car? Thanks.” He was still talking when she hung up, but she didn’t want to hear what he had to say; she didn’t need to. She’d be out of here in less than an hour with any luck.
When the knock sounded on the door, she opened it right away. But it wasn’t Sherman who stood on the threshold. It was Gina, and she had been crying.
“Rachel, please, you have to listen,” Gina began.
“No, I don’t,” Rachel said firmly, and started to close the door.
But Gina had slid her foot into the opening. “It wasn’t what you thought,” she said. “There’s nothing between Joe and me.”
Gina spoke with such resolve and determination that it gave Rachel pause.
“And there’s something else you need to know,” Gina went on. “Please let me in.”
“I’m going back to New Jersey,” Rachel shot back. “I don’t have time to talk to you.”
Gina’s eyes widened perceptibly. “Oh, gosh, then you have to listen. You have to. Because I don’t want what I did to break you and Joe up.”
“What you did was spend the night with him. Right?”
“Yes, but—”
Bitterness rose like bile in her throat. “Go away, Gina. Leave me in peace.” To pick up the pieces, Rachel added to herself. But then you always want what you can’t have, and Joe was just one more thing that was lost to her. The thought of a lifetime of losses threatened to make her break down right here, but she would save that for later. She wouldn’t give Gina the satisfaction of letting her know that her heart was broken.
“Not until you listen. I have something really important to tell you, Rachel. It’s…it’s about Chrissy.”
“Chrissy!”
As soon as Rachel said the baby’s name, Gina’s face crumpled and tears began to course down her cheeks.
“Gina,” Rachel said reasoningly, not understanding what this was about.
Gina began to sob quietly, not covering her face, not doing anything to hide her raw anguish. Rachel knew it would be only a matter of time before Ynez popped out of the door to her apartment on her way to pick up her new kitten and asked what was wrong. To forestall that development, Rachel reached out and pulled Gina inside.
“You might as well sit down,” she said ungraciously. She brushed a pile of papers and books off the couch and indicated that Gina should sit there.
Gina scrubbed at her eyes with a fist. “You weren’t supposed to find the baby in the manger,” she said.
Gina’s tone gave Rachel pause. “I wasn’t?”
“No, Joe was.”
“What on earth are you talking about, Gina?” She stared at the girl, whose eyes were so puffy that Rachel knew she must have been crying for hours.
“I didn’t know what else to do with her. Joe was always so kind to me, so levelheaded, that I thought he’d be good to a baby. I was going to leave Chrissy on the doorstep of his apartment that night, but I waited and waited for him to come home and he didn’t come back. Then I found out from Mrs. Marzinski that he was working a condo crisis here on the island, and I rode over here to see if I could talk to him. So—”
Rachel sank down on a chair; her knees refused to hold her. “You mean Chrissy is your baby?”
Gina, eyes downcast, nodded. “Yes,” she whispered.
Rachel’s thoughts were scrambling as if through a minefield where sections of the landscape had been blown sky-high. In the meantime Gina went on talking.
“So I was sitting in my car in the Elysian Towers parking lot and I was getting so tired. I’d lost a lot of blood, and I was very weak. I mean, I’d just given birth to a baby all by myself.”
“You were all alone? Oh, Gina,” Rachel said, but Gina silenced her with a wave of her hand.
“No sympathy, please. I don’t deserve it. Anyway, the baby was born three days before Christmas at Anna’s house. I knew I couldn’t stay there in the parking lot on Christmas Eve. I wanted to be at Anna’s, safe in bed when she and Mitch came home from a three-day visit to his parents that night. Joe’s van was parked outside this building because he was inside working, but the van was locked, so I couldn’t leave the baby in it as I planned. I knew that Joe would have to walk right past the Nativity scene to get to his van when he left that night. I figured he’d find the baby if I left her in the manger.”
“And that’s why you left Chrissy outside the building?” Rachel’s outrage was exceeded only by her incredulity.
“Uh-huh. It seemed safe enough, behind the ixora hedge, under that little roof of the stable where Mary and Joseph were. I laid Chrissy in the manger, told her goodbye, and then I went away. And you found her.”
“What if I hadn’t? What if something had happened to her?”
“I wasn’t thinking rationally. I was so exhausted.”
“Your sisters never knew you were pregnant?”
Gina’s head drooped. “I never told them. I went away to college before I got really big. I wore lots of baggy clothes and didn’t tell a soul.”
“The baby’s father?”
“A college boy who was in Daytona Beach for spring break last year. The only one I ever—well, I know he’s the father. I never even knew his last name or where he went to school.”
Rachel couldn’t help it; her heart went out to this naive young woman who hadn’t known how to deal with such a grave mistake. “You should have told someone you were going to have a baby. You should have had help.”
Gina looked as if she were at the end of her rope. No wonder she looked exhausted, though—no woman should have to handle pregnancy and birth all alone. “I know that now,” Gina said, looking straight at Rachel for the first time since she’d embarked upon her tale of woe. “But I’ve been on my own for a long time, and I thought I could deal with this by myself.
“I was in denial for months, but when I finally admitted to myself that I was pregnant, I was afraid I’d have to give up college—and it means so much to me, Rachel! Everyone who helped me get there is counting on me. I’m not nearly ready to be a mother. I can’t keep that baby. But you and Joe could. You could adopt her.” She leaned forward hopefully.
Rachel’s head was spinning with all these revelations. “I’m not going to marry Joe. I won’t marry anyone who spends the night with another woman, especially on the very night that I’m considering his marriage proposal,” she said slowly.
“Rachel, oh Rachel. I slept at his apartment, all right, but not with Joe. Last night I went over there to tell him about the baby and what I’d done, I had to get it off my chest, and I was helping him fix a faucet and the water spurted all over me, so I changed into some other clothes of his, and when I got around to telling him that Chrissy is my child, he got really upset and started yelling.
“And I began to cry and he apologized for yelling, and I cried some more, and if I had gone home looking upset, Anna and Mitch would have demanded to know what was wrong. I know I’m going to have to tell them, but I couldn’t face them, not so soon after admitting everything to Joe. Joe was real nice. He let me sleep on the couch. He cooked breakfast for me, and I was getting ready to drive home when we both came out and saw you there. You took off before we could explain that it was perfectly innocent.”
“Oh,” Rachel said. She hadn’t thought that it was possible for the scene at Joe’s to be anything but incriminating. But now, knowing what she knew, understanding Gina’s state of mind and Joe’s nurturing nature, everything began to make sense.
Neither of them spoke for a long time. Gina sighed heavily. “Now you know what happened.”
There were still loose ends, and Rachel’s mind struggled to tie them all together. “But the Santa…” Rachel said, her voice trailing away when she realized how silly it would be to say that she’d thought that the Santa whom she had first met on Christmas Eve when she was buying paper had put Chrissy in the manger.
“The Santa?” Gina repeated, looking confused. “What did Santa have to do with it?”
“I don’t know,” Rachel said truthfully. “I honestly have no idea.”
“I mean, it was Christmas Eve and all. But I’m too old to believe in Santa Claus.”
Rachel thought about the kindness of the Santa in the discount store and the way his eyes had seemed to pierce right through her soul to the pain that she’d thought would never go away. “I’m not sure I’m too old to believe, Gina,” she said, meaning it.
Gina was twisting a sodden handkerchief in her hands. “The thing is, Rachel, I feel so awful. I failed to live up to the responsibility of having a baby.”
Rachel moved to the couch and curved an arm around Gina’s shoulders. The girl felt so fragile, so tiny. “Yes, Gina, I suppose you did. The baby might not have been found until morning.”
“I’m so ashamed of what I did that night! If anything had happened to my baby, I would have wanted to die. It’s just that…that I thought I didn’t have anywhere to turn,” Gina said, beginning to weep again.
“I know why you felt that way. Believe me, I understand.”
“How could you?” Gina wailed. “I bet you’ve never done anything so awful.”
“Oh,” said Rachel, “but I have.”
Gina dried her eyes and stared. “Not you, Rachel. You look so perfect, so pretty, so… so okay.”
“Maybe,” Rachel acknowledged. “But I did something I’m not proud of.”
“You, Rachel?” Gina looked unconvinced.
Ever since Jœ had told her about his shame over his involvement in the robbery, Rachel had felt better about the way she had acted on the night of the fire. So now it seemed to her that the most helpful thing she could do for Gina was to hold Gina’s hand and tell her about Nick and Lolly and Melissa and Derek and the puppy and the fire that had claimed their lives, and how she almost couldn’t live with herself because if she hadn’t left the burning house, if she had made sure that everyone else got out when she had, they might have lived.
In the end, after the telling of it, they both had tears in their eyes.
“Rachel, I’m sorry. I didn’t know,” Gina said.
“The best advice I can give you—or anyone else—is that bad things happen to people sometimes. The only thing we can do afterward is to move on. To get on with our lives.” This was what Joe had told her. It was what she now believed to be true.
“But, Rachel, what makes that possible?” Gina asked tremulously.
“Love,” Rachel said with sudden certainty. “In the end love is what we live for. It helps us move beyond the tragedies.”
“There’s not going to be any love for me,” Gina said with dark certainty.
Rachel couldn’t believe her ears. “Gina! That statement makes me want to shake you until you come to your senses! How can you say that, when all the Marzinskis care about you so very much and when you have two sisters who, from what I can tell, love you a lot?”
“Oh,” Gina said, understanding dawning in her eyes. “I thought you meant love as in, well, romance.”
“There are lots of different kinds of love, which is a lesson I’ve learned only recently. Look at Gladys and Ivan, at Ynez, at Chrissy and what a difference she made to all of them!”
“And she made a difference to Joe and to you, Rachel. She brought you together. He really does love you, you know. You were all he could talk about last night after I told him about the baby. You and his hopes that you could all be together.”
Something lightened in her heart then, and a great burden seemed to lift from her shoulders when she thought about Joe. She had resisted him long enough; now it was time to reach out and take the gift of love that he had offered her almost from the very beginning.
“Joe has given me the strength to move on with my life. I guess I’d better tell him so, don’t you agree?” There was a lilt in her voice and gladness in her heart for the first time in many years.
Gina smiled shakily and squeezed her hand. “You’re going to marry him?”
“If he still wants me.”
Gina perked up at this. “He does, Rachel. You’ll see. Oh, but he’s not at home. He had a call this morning. Something about an elevator at some condo down the beach.”
Rachel went to phone Joe, her heart doing little joyful triphammer things as she dialed his pager number. In her mind she was already rehearsing the words she would say when she heard Joe’s voice, but to her surprise the person who answered the page wasn’t Joe.
“This is Andy, Joe’s my boss. He can’t answer your page. There’s been an accident, and they’ve taken him to the hospital.” The words were terse, the information chilling.
“What hospital?” Rachel felt as if a cold knife had been driven through her heart.
“Holy Angels. But I’m not sure you can see him.”
“Is he going to be okay? Is he—”
“I don’t know. I haven’t heard. He looks as if he’s in pretty bad shape.”
WHEN RACHEL AND GINA arrived at the hospital, other Marzinskis were gathered in the emergency room.
Mary Marzinski gathered Rachel into an embrace, and even the prickly Mary Cecilia seemed glad to see her.
“What happened?” Rachel asked, her heart in her mouth.
“An elevator shaft accident. He’s unconscious,” Jim Marzinski told her. He looked worried and much older today. Maybe it was the harsh fluorescent lighting overhead, but Rachel didn’t think so.
“Unconscious!”
“They aren’t telling us much,” Mary Cecilia said.
“Is anyone allowed to see him?”
“Not yet.”
Rachel turned to Jim, who seemed the calmest. “What went wrong?”
“There was a problem with the elevator cable, and Joe leaned into the shaft to look. Somehow he lost his footing and fell. That’s all we know,” Jim said.
“Andy said Joe seemed distracted this morning,” Grade said into the awful silence.
Rachel exchanged an anguished look with Gina. What if Joe had been so upset by her actions that he’d become careless? And she was haunted by the last words she had ever said to him when he’d called and tried to explain. She would give anything to take them back, she’d give anything to have never uttered them. She had told him to drop dead.
“The accident couldn’t have been your fault,” Gina whispered when no one else was paying attention, but Rachel’s stomach had tied itself in knots and she didn’t know what to think. AU she knew was that Joe was hurt and that she felt responsible. It was like the fire all over again, only Joe was alive and there was still a chance that he would recover. She closed her eyes and willed him to be all right.
After a time—Rachel had no idea how long—a nurse ushered them into a waiting room where Jackson handed Rachel a cup of coffee that she couldn’t drink. They all sat down and tried to look more cheerful than they felt. A loud TV on the wall provided dubious distraction.
Some of them made attempts at desultory conversation.
“I guess you’re looking forward to starting back to school in January,” Jenn said to Rachel.
Rachel thought for a split second that Jenn had her confused with Gina, who would be returning to college soon. “Oh, I’m not—” she began, then realized that they all still thought she taught school. Now what?
“What grade do you teach?” Reggie, Tonia’s husband, asked in an attempt to be polite.
This was it She would have to tell them the truth about herself. And in that instant she realized that she could. She could talk about her past without feeling like a failure. No more was she the pathetic, bereft woman who had come to Coquina Beach to hide from life.
She inhaled a shaky breath. “I…well, I’m not actually a teacher,” Rachel said.
“Excuse me?”
“I’ m not the schoolteacher Joe was going out with at Thanksgiving. That was a misunderstanding.”
“Misunderstanding?” Mary, his mother, wrinkled her forehead.
Rachel wasn’t sure how much to say, but she knew that she couldn’t let Joe’s family go on thinking that she was someone she wasn’t. If she were going to marry him, they would eventually need to know the truth.
“On Christmas Day everyone assumed that I was this other woman he’d dated, and Joe didn’t correct anyone, but I’m just visiting Coquina Beach to house-sit my grandmother’s condo. I’ve never taught school, I run my own secretarial service. I found the baby on Christmas Eve, and Joe helped me. You see, I don’t have any family here, and that’s why he invited me to Christmas dinner.” She knew this sounded jumbled and confused, but at the moment she wasn’t capable of organizing words into neat little sentences. This was as logical as she could make it.
“You have no family?” asked Tonia sharply. “None at all?” It was as if she couldn’t imagine anyone’s being so deprived.
Rachel took a deep breath. “My grandmother’s in Asia doing some long-awaited traveling. After that there’s only my mother, but she’s in a nursing home in New Jersey. She doesn’t know who I am anymore. And I did have a family—a husband and children. Once.”
“What happened to them?” Gracie, Joe’s quietest sister, asked.
“They died at Christmas four years ago. In a house fire.”
This statement produced a long silence.
“How terrible for you,” murmured Mary at last
“How awful.” Mary Cecilia reached over and touched
Rachel’s hand.
Rachel looked around at their concerned faces. “thought I would never be able to celebrate Christmas again. And then I met all of you. I felt so welcome in your home.” She tried to smile.
Jim cleared his throat. “You are one of us,” he said comfortingly. “You’re family.”
Rachel felt their love reaching out to include and embrace her. “I feel that I am. Thank you—all of you. And
I hope you know that I love Joe very much.”
“We’ve wanted to see Joey settled for a long time,” said Lois. This elicited a round of agreement.
“Chrissy isn’t your baby, is she?”
Rachel stared back at Mary Cecilia, who had zinged out of left field with that question and dropped it right in her lap. “No,” Rachel said quieüy. “She isn’t.”
“Chrissy’s mine,” Gina said into the hollow silence.
Rachel swiveled to look at Gina. She remained composed, her hands folded quietly in her lap, even as everyone’s jaw dropped.
“And I hope that she will soon be Rachel and Joe’s,”
Gina said.
No one spoke for a long time as their minds grappled with this unexpected revelation. “I guess there’s more to this story,” said Mary gently. “More than you’ll want to tell us right now?”
“Yes, and I want to share it with all of you soon,” Gina said, her head held high. “After I’ve talked to my sisters. I just hope that…that you won’t think less of me. I couldn’t bear that.” Her voice broke slightly, but she looked at Rachel and seemed to take heart.
“Whatever you’ve done, we love you, Gina,” Mary said firmly.
“You had the baby,” said Tonia. “You didn’t get rid of it”
Gina’s eyes opened wide. “I would never—I mean, I couldn’t”
Gracie went to Gina and slid an arm around her shoulders. “Tell us about it only when you’re ready, okay?”
Gina, tears in her eyes, nodded.
Lois glanced around at the group before she spoke. “Well, guys, we all wanted Joey to have his own family. Looks like Gina has given him a head start, if you ask me.
A few tentative smiles, and then Mary got up from her chair, walked to Rachel and hugged her. Rachel was framing what she wanted to say to them, something about love and loyalty and how she admired those traits in them, but she didn’t have a chance to speak before a doctor arrived carrying a clipboard.
Unaware of the mix of powerful emotions humming in the air, he greeted them quickly and began to brief them on Joe’s condition.
“Joe’s got a few nasty bruises, and we’ve set his broken arm. We’re also monitoring him for internal injuries. There are no signs of any yet, which is encouraging. He has a concussion, but I’m happy to report that as of fifteen minutes ago, he has regained consciousness. The only thing is, he keeps asking for Rachel. I don’t recall a sister named Rachel.” He raised his eyebrows questioningly.
“I’m Rachel.”
“She’s his fiancée,” supplied Mary.
The doctor grinned at her. “Ah, I see. In that case, Rachel, won’t you come with me? He won’t be pretty to look at, but I think it would be good medicine for Jœ to see you.”
JOE OPENED HIS EYES. The pain had receded into a huge white void, and hovering above him was the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen. She was gazing at him with love and trust and a lot of other emotions that were too complicated to enumerate. Her hair was bunched around her face in a wondrous welter of curls, and she had a face like a Madonna, or was it an angel?
“Joe?”
Drifting in from wherever he’d been, he realized that this wasn’t a Madonna, nor was it an angel. It was Rachel. He hadn’t expected her. She was furious with him. At the moment he couldn’t recall why she was so angry, only that he’d been devastated. He roused himself, tried to concentrate, couldn’t. So was he alive, or had that accident with the elevator shaft sent him straight to heaven?
She touched his hand. She bent close and kissed his lips. This wasn’t heaven. It was decidedly real. It hurt when he smiled at her, even though the balm of her tears I fell on his eyelids.
“Oh, Joe, I’ve been so worried about you.” She wiped the tears from his face with gentle fingertips and laid her cheek against his. This he could feel. This he liked. Suddenly he remembered. Oh, God. Gina. This morning. Rachel hanging the phone up on him. What to say?
“Well, I was so upset about what you thought that went out and threw myself down an elevator shaft,” he said.
She straightened and frowned. “Don’t joke, Joe. I know nothing happened between you and Gina. She’s I told me everything.”
Relief sent him spinning. He squeezed her hand, and I she squeezed back. His lips were painfully dry. “I would I have come over to explain after you hung up the phone on me this morning, but I got the call about the Crowne Point’s elevators malfunctioning, and it was a safety issue, so I knew I had to go check things out myself. I didn’t trust anyone else to deal with the problem.” The long speech wore him out.
“Joe, I shouldn’t have jumped to conclusions about you and Gina this morning. I should have known better.”
“It looked bad,” Joe conceded. “From your point of view, I mean.”
“Don’t talk, my love. Save your strength.”
“For what? Looks like I’m going to be laid up here for a while.”
“For wedding vows. Marry me, Joe.”
“I second the emotion,” said someone behind her, and she turned to see Joe’s parents, all his sisters and Gina, who proceeded to crowd into the small hospital room.
Joe’s lips curved into a wry and painful smile. “I guess it’s unanimous,” he said.
“Well? I asked you something,” Rachel said, holding tightly to his hand.
“I asked you first,” Joe reminded her.
“The answer is yes,” Rachel said.
“When? When?” All the Marzinskis circled the bed.
“As soon as we can,” Rachel said firmly. “As soon as Mimi gets home. I want her to be my attendant. And I want Chrissy to come.”
As everyone else began to chatter among themselves, Joe gazed up at Rachel. “I love you, Rachel. With all my heart.”
“And I love you.”
He felt better now. Fantastic, in fact. “We’ll make a wonderful life together, you’ll see.”
She leaned over the rail at the side of the bed and kissed him on the forehead. At least it didn’t hurt. “One thing for sure, I’11 always have plenty of reasons to celebrate Christmas from now on,” she said.
“For instance?” Joe murmured.
“You and Chrissy and Gina, and your mom and dad and Mary Cecilia and Greg and Paul, Megan, Mary Grace, Todd, Amanda—”
“I get the picture. The very big picture. And I hope that before long we’ll be adding some new names of our own to that list.”
“We will, my love.”
Oblivious to the other people in the room, Joe reached out and gripped Rachel’s shoulder, because for this he had amazing strength. And he kissed her properly, with everyone watching.
“Oh, Joe, don’t you think there’s something to this Christmas miracle business?” Rachel said unsteadily, her lips close to his.
“Maybe so, my dearest. Maybe so.” And with that, Joe kissed her again.