Christmas Day
“Kate! Kate!”
To her profound disappointment, Kate Bucker did not sleep until January second as she’d been hoping. Groaning from her place under the blankets, she reached a single hand out and shooed whoever thought it smart to intrude this morning. No doubt word of her story and failure with Clark made its way around town by now—Miss Carolyn was many things, but discreet could not be counted among them—and she did not want to spend her new least favorite day of the year listening to her friends try to comfort and console her. For the first time in her life, Christmas Day would be hers to do with exactly as she liked. With no festival to plan and run, she could stay in bed until well past noon and listen to heavy metal or whatever it was anti-Christmas people listened to on December 25.
“Go away.”
The security in her apartment didn’t exactly rival Fort Knox. On most nights, since she didn’t have a working lock on her front door, she usually kept a can with a bunch of coins in it directly in front of the door as a kind of makeshift alarm system. Apparently, she’d forgotten to put the can out.
Some mumbling voices, dampened by the comforter pulled over her head, didn’t make enough sense for her to understand their words, but she did recognize the voices. Emily and Michael. Those two. The best friends a girl could have…except for when she didn’t want any friendship. Petty though she knew it was, she wanted to wallow in her own self-pity, not accept it from anyone else. She’d always been the reliably cheerful, good ship lollipop kind of gal, but for once she had a real reason to disappear into her mattress. The mumbling stopped, only to be followed by the clicking of heels against hardwood and the sound of a closing door.
Wish granted. She was alone once more. Moments passed with no noise.
“Emily?” she called. No response. “Michael?” Again, no response.
The covers flew away from her body as she sat up and faced the day, but when Kate opened her eyes, something strange happened. Her little apartment didn’t look as she’d left it. Decorations that had been shoved into the bowels of her trashcan—now crumpled—were placed back on her walls. Light shone through her windows though she could have sworn she closed the curtains before she fell asleep. Everything was almost exactly as it was when she woke up on Christmas Eve.
Why was her apartment back to normal? She shot up to sit in bed, giving herself a head rush. Spots appeared in her vision. She never slept well, so the sensation could almost certainly be caused by oversleep. The clock on the wall read 9:30. When had she ever slept that late?
It was then, as she checked the clock, that Kate noticed that something was out of place. There, on the windowsill, sat a book with a sticky note upon it. Sunbeams played on gold lettering.
“READ ME,” it said.
A stubborn denial locked Kate’s limbs. She recognized that book. Of all the books in all the world, it was the one she’d recognize anywhere. And she wasn’t interested in reading it ever again. With a single bound, she was on her feet, ready to throw the book back into the garbage where it belonged—her best guess was that Emily or someone heard about her night and snuck in to make her feel better, a losing proposition—but then something hanging over her front door halted her stomping.
Her heart clenched. She gasped.
The Belle dress. The one she’d never gotten to wear after staying with Michael after he’d broken his leg, with its green velvet and perfect bustle, hung from a satin hanger over the lip of her door, complete with a corset, stockings and those shoes she’d always wanted to steal. Makeup and a curling iron, along with a plastic box of bobby pins and hair ties sat on her kitchen counter. Tacked to the dress waited another note, this time reading, “WEAR ME.”
She had to be dreaming. She had to be.
Her fingers reached out to brush the lush material of the gown. It ran like water beneath her skin. Quickly, as if afraid someone would come in and take it from her, she held it up to her body and rushed to examine herself in the bathroom mirror. Yep. Definitely a dream. The Belle dress for the festival stopped fitting after her growth spurt in junior year of high school.
No. It wasn’t a dream. If it was, she would have woken up by now. She didn’t know who had gifted her this dress, but if the festival was closing and all its assets sold, she was going to get one good Christmas Day use out of this gown. Even if she hated the book from which it came—which she did—it was too beautiful to pass up. Her practiced hands flew through the motions of dressing and preparing herself. Years and years of helping Belles fit themselves in the fabric guided her until she looked the part. Victorian curls framed her face, crowned by a halo of holly, a customary feature of Belle’s costume. Bright red lipstick brought some color to her otherwise pale skin. A red and gold brooch glowed at the base of her throat, pinned to the lace collar of her gown.
Oh, the gown. It fit as if it had been made for her. She spun, letting the skirts swirl up and reveal the petticoats and shoes hidden beneath. Even if everything was falling apart, even if her heart still felt half-stitched together, even if she didn’t want to believe in Christmas anymore, her girlhood dreams were coming true.
She looked better than beautiful. And she felt it.
“Extra! Extra! Read all about it!”
Her vain inspection smashed to a halt with the intrusion of a squawking voice; it filtered through her thin window panes, a little, booming cry from the streets down below. Doing her best not to trip over her own feet—she couldn’t remember the last time she’d worn heels that weren’t her sturdy work boots—she scrambled for the window, stopping only for the briefest of moments to grab the READ ME copy of A Christmas Carol waiting on the sill. Costume firmly in place and book tucked under her arm, Kate opened the panes and looked down below, searching for the source of the newsboy cries.
Only, she didn’t see the source. Not at first. Instead, an uncontrollable, unstoppable gasp flew from the depths of her chest as she stared out at the town square. It was there. Everything was there. As if Clark Woodward never demanded they take down the sets and facades and decorations, the square looked picture-perfect and ready for Christmas. As she leaned out of her window, she realized she was leaning into Dickensian England, with all of its beauty and wonder.
They’d put it back. They’d put it all back. She just didn’t understand why. But there, on the corner between the facade of Marley and Scrooge’s office and the butcher’s shop, Kate spotted Susan Cho, a nine-year-old who played one of the Cratchit daughters in last year’s festival. Dressed in one of the countless street urchin outfits Kate put together over the years, she held a newspaper high over her head. From this angle, Kate couldn’t make out the headline or even if it came from Dallas or their stock of Dickens-specific recreations of London newspapers.
“Merry Christmas, London! Extra! Extra!”
“Susan! Come over here!”
As if she’d been walked through this a dozen times, Susan hustled down the block to stand beneath Kate’s window, tucking the newsprint under her arm. If this were the festival come back to life, Kate would have scolded her for getting newsprint on the costume, but her confusion and awe at the entire situation overtook any practical thought. It didn’t matter if the costumes got dirty or the fake newsprint smudged, not when there was so much outside at which she could marvel.
“Morning, miss!” Susan lisped through her two missing front teeth and tipped her newsboy cap. “What can I do for you?”
“What in the world is going on here?”
“Sorry, Miss Kate. Can’t talk now. I have to stay in character,” she stage-whispered before returning to her strolling and hawking. “Extra! Extra!”
For her part, Kate remained rooted to the spot.
“But if I was able to talk to you, I’d say you should come downstairs.”
“What?” Kate whispered back, starting a complete conversation in hushed tones.
“You’re supposed to follow me.”
“Oh.” Whatever was happening here, whatever character Susan was meant to keep and whatever was happening to this town, it was clear there was a plan and an order in place. Kate just didn’t know them. But if she knew anything from a lifetime of working with and around children, it was to play along with their games. “Okay. I’ll be right down.”
She gathered up her skirts and did as she was told, skidding down her steps towards the town square. Once out on the street, following close behind the little girl as she hawked her papers, Kate couldn’t contain her curiosity.
“Hey, Susan?”
“Yes, ma’am?”
The little girl must have felt Kate’s distress radiating off of her because she dropped her character in order to answer. God bless children and their inability to pay attention to anything for more than ten minutes.
“Is this a dream? Am I dreaming?”
She didn’t exactly believe she was dreaming, but it seemed as likely as Clark suddenly having a change of heart and giving her the festival back.
“Hmmm.” The little girl tugged on her cap, considering the question. “I don’t think so. If you were I hope I’d be wearing something much cuter.”
Unconvincing as the argument should have been, it swayed Kate. After the events of last night, would this bizarre journey through Miller’s Point be something she would dream about? Unlikely.
By Sherlock Holmes logic, it meant she was definitely, for real, walking through the festival facsimile of A Christmas Carol in a sweeping ball gown on Christmas morning.
Susan led her around the empty square, all while Kate puzzled out what little she understood about her surroundings. Dickens. Susan. None of it made sense, but she decided she saw no harm in playing along. Her heart broke yesterday. It couldn’t re-break. Besides, the pieces were too small to be crushed into anything else. What did she have to lose?
When they reached the corner beneath Scrooge’s house, Kate turned to Susan for instructions. Susan, for her part, tapped her toe on the sidewalk and stared up at the closed windows.
“What are we waiting for?” Kate asked.
“I’m really not supposed to break character, but—”
“You there, boy!”
System overload. Kate’s processing power extinguished itself within one second of hearing that familiar, booming voice fill the square. Like staring at a box of puzzle pieces, she understood the picture in front of her in fragmented snippets. She knew that line. It was Dickens. No one knew A Christmas Carol better than she; it only took three words for her to identify his speech. And when Kate followed the conversation up and up and up the wall of the building she stood in front of, she was greeted by the unfathomable puzzle piece.
Clark Woodward. Leaning out of Scrooge’s window. Wearing the Ebenezer Scrooge costume. Screaming Scrooge’s Christmas morning lines.
Rats. Somehow the cut of the Victorian era costumes made him even more attractive. Great. Just great.
“What’s the day today?”
Nope. Susan couldn’t be right. This had to be a dream. Nothing else could explain it. Screw Sherlock Holmes logic. Not only was Clark wearing the Scrooge costume, but he somehow got at least one person in town to trust him enough to play along with…whatever this charade was?
No. Wrong again. If this was her dream, Clark would get the lines absolutely right instead of paraphrasing them. This was definitely happening, but why?
“Uh… Christmas Day, sir? What’re you, crazy?”
Ah, Susan caught the paraphrasing bug, too. As the Assistant of Operations, Kate always stayed on book and gave the performers line notes at the end of each night, ensuring vigilance and protection for the Dickens text. This morning, protecting a long-dead author seemed everyone’s last priority.
Kate knew everything there was to know about this scene. Pick any random scene in A Christmas Carol, she could have recited the dialogue, at least, entirely by heart while visualizing its exact place in their version of Victorian London. Here, after waking up very much alive, Scrooge renews his lease on life and decides to live every day as if it’s Christmas, beginning by employing an errand boy to fetch him the biggest turkey in London.
What a crock.
Caught between her desire to continually roll her eyes every time they spoke and her rapture at watching the most wooden, stoic man in the world wildly shout about turkeys with a face-splitting grin on his face, Kate leaned against the nearest lamp post for support.
His smile, rare and pure, weakened her knees. Her last thoughts before falling asleep last night were, I’m so glad I got Clark Woodward out of my system, but the longer he smiled and the longer she stared at it like a snake charmer’s victim, the more untrue that statement became. He hurt her. He hated her. But he was not out of her system.
Dickens’s dialogue—or this interpretation of it—flew past her like a familiar song, allowing her to just drink him in. A dangerous prospect. If this was a dream, she’d dream something stupid like falling into his arms, and if this was real, she’d endanger her heart. And then probably stupidly fall into his arms.
Unable to speak during the performance, a hurricane swirled inside her. Remnants of her feelings for him yesterday swirled with her anger at not being able to fight them off well enough.
At the end of their scene, Susan took the oversized bag of gold coins and rushed off, leaving Scrooge and Belle—Clark, who had somehow made his way down to street level, and Kate—very much alone, but that didn’t break his concentration.
“I must go see the charitable gentleman. And Fred and his wife. Oh, thank you, Spirits!”
Apparently, these were cues of their own as out of nowhere, Doctor Joe Bennett appeared, dressed as the charitable gentleman Scrooge denies a donation earlier in the book. In real life, Joe played this role every year as a bit of a charitable scheme in and of itself. As the Chief Physician of the county’s charity hospital, the festival always donated a little something to the cause. But when Clark approached him and shook his hand, he did not pull out one of the phony-baloney bank notes used during the regular festival. Clark instead handed the man a very real-looking check, and the man’s shock wasn’t the well-rehearsed expression he used every year during this big moment in the narrative.
“Hey, man…”
The line was most definitely, Lord bless me! Yet another clue the check in Clark’s hand was real.
“And not a penny less. I owe you many, many back-payments, and this is just the beginning.”
Doctor Bennett rooted himself to the spot, jaw nearly scraping the floor, while Clark-as-Scrooge hummed to himself and scooped up several brightly wrapped presents on his way down the slowly filling street towards Fred’s house. Familiar faces of the town started to mill about in their costumes, just as they would any other Christmas morning. As if this all were very normal indeed. Without the slightest clue what else to do (she thought she might need to stay and give the doctor a dose of oxygen to combat the symptoms of his shock, or at least stick around long enough to see if the check really was real and how much it was made out for, but ultimately decided against it because she didn’t want to get stuck taking care of a fussy doctor type), Kate followed them.
The scene in Fred’s house always pleased crowds, and this morning was no exception. Kate giggled as Fred’s wife fainted at the sight of Scrooge and Scrooge scrambled to help her—a comedic diversion not written into the original text, but added at a much later date by Miss Carolyn in order to beef up the character when Kate played it at sixteen—and followed along as Scrooge proceeded to collect people, imploring them to bring along foodstuffs and presents, treating them all with the charm and guile of a newly risen king. Such generosity, such goodness was an unnatural fit for Clark, but perhaps that was why the cautious parts of her hated how much she wanted to believe it.
In spite of her newfound hatred for this bogus holiday, the naive glass shards of her heart longed for him to be the real-life Ebenezer Scrooge. She wanted his smiles and his warmth to be real.
But it wasn’t. And when she examined things more closely as Clark picked up small children and spun them around or joined in carols, Kate realized she didn’t care for this at all. The spectacle was just that: a spectacle. Fake. Phony.
He had an angle. All of this was part of some plot. To humiliate her or to make fun of her or to stomp on her one more time… She didn’t know. But he was working a fix and she wouldn’t fall into its trap. With that, she folded her arms across her chest and resolved to give off the most unsympathetic, hateful, grumpy vibes she could manage.
Basically, she channeled him from one day ago.
“Can you show me the way to Bob Cratchit’s house?”
All at once, he was there, directly in front of her, asking for directions to Bob Cratchit’s house. Oh, yes. He was real. And so, so unfairly handsome. She’d never seen his eyes catch the light like this or his smile relax into an effortless assurance of his goodwill.
Kate urged herself not to give in. And she didn’t. Something was going on here, and she could indulge it for the sake of her festival family, but she didn’t have to invest herself in it. Blindly, Kate nodded and took the arm he offered her. Soon, she found herself leading a parade of Victorian-dressed characters carrying presents and goose, pies and wreaths like some kind of out-of-place drum major. Behind her, they sang in unison, a feature of their penultimate scene. They did it every year. This was the ending of A Christmas Carol. Clark, somehow and for reasons passing understanding, brought the end of the festival into his home and let it take life there.
The doors to the Cratchit House stood closed, and, against her will, a familiar rush of joy fluttered in Kate’s stomach. Whether or not Clark knew it, this was her favorite part of the entire story. The beauty of the tale and the reversal of fortunes for the Cratchits made the entire journey worth it. In the novella, the confrontation between Bob and Scrooge happened at the office, but for the sake of bringing Tiny Tim back for one final “God Bless Us, Every One,” they transposed the encounter to Bob Cratchit’s house instead.
As Scrooge always did—Kate would know, she’d trained six different Scrooges—he waved away the crowd, they feigned hiding, and he settled an angry scowl upon his brow before knocking upon Cratchit’s door. Boom! Boom! Boom! Goosebumps raised the hairs on her arms.
She just hoped she wouldn’t break and cry. She always cried at this scene.
The Cratchit family generally consisted of a real-life husband and wife and whatever children could sit still the longest and memorize the most dialogue, but when the Cratchits appeared today, Mr. and Mrs. Isaacs were not standing there in their costumes, ready for their close-up. Kate’s breath hitched.
There, framed by the holly-lined doorway, stood Michael and Emily, dressed up in the poor clothes of the clerk and his wife, while the usual suspects of children cowered behind them at the mean ol’ Uncle Scrooge. The last time Emily got in front of a crowd, she picked up the lid of a piano and vomited into it, so her appearance here caught Kate off guard.
If she had a heart any longer, it would have warmed and stretched with love for her friend’s courageous appearance, made all the more amazing by her genuine acting chops.
“Bob Cratchit!” Clark-as-Scrooge boomed. “You did not come in to work today.”
Michael cowered, his knees shaking in a mockery of knocking together.
“But it’s Christmas.”
“I never gave you the day off.”
“You did, sir.” To his credit, Michael appropriately stammered and stuttered over the words forcing them out between his teeth with all the joy of poisoning himself. He even wrung his hands. Kate couldn’t have directed this scene any better. The children in the back did their part, too, huddling together as their mother grew in anger. “You just said to be in earlier tomorrow.”
“Oh, I’m going to throw the book at you, you lazy layabout!” Scrooge shouted, shaking his walking stick for emphasis. Kate would have directed against that particular choice, but hamming it up seemed to be Clark’s style of the day, a noted change from the man who wouldn’t even smile at a little boy yesterday after he begged him to do so.
“Lazy layabout!” Emily charged forward, her thick curls shaking under her bonnet. She shoved up her sleeves as if to instigate a fight. Kate almost laughed. Almost. “I’ll have you know—”
“I’m going to give you everything I’ve got!”
“Please don’t! I’ll come in now! I can—”
Scrooge cut him off.
“I’m going to raise your salary.”
“Pardon?” Emily and Michael said at once, a unified explosion of shock.
“I’m going to raise your salary and take care of you and your family for the rest of my days. And,” Clark waved his hands, calling the crowd from the shadows, filling the room with rich aromas and colors the likes of which contrasted deeply with the Cratchits’ costume design, as was Kate’s plan when she helped pick those outfits. The sight of the swarm of well-wishers sent Kate’s temperature skyrocketing. Her stomach turned. “We will discuss the entire thing over the most beautiful Christmas dinner ever brought forth in the whole of Christendom!”
A cheer. Little Tiny Tim leapt into Scrooge’s arms and he lifted him high upon his shoulders.
“Mr. Scrooge!”
The room filled, leaving Kate distinctly apart. A viewer of this spectacle. The object of their collective stare as much as they were an object of hers.
She wanted to vomit.
What on earth could have possessed them to all come here and be a part of this? Maybe it was Miss Carolyn. Surely Clark didn’t do this all by himself. Miss Carolyn must have threatened to throat punch him if he didn’t comply. They were trying to fix her Christmas cheer, surely. Or bring her back into the fold after a tough night of disillusionment and Clark was a part of that. They all bought into the dream, a dream she no longer knew how to be an active participant in.
Next in the story came the “Scrooge was better than his word” speech. Another surefire “Kate always cries at this part so make sure someone has Kleenex handy” moment.
It felt like Christmas. It looked like Christmas.
And she couldn’t stomach it. She didn’t know what Clark was doing in the middle of all of this. She didn’t know what his game was. She didn’t know what he wanted from her or why he seemed intent on hurting her through the one thing she used to love most in this world.
All Kate knew was that she needed to get out.