The Christmas Gifts: The Unexpected Gift

[christmasmacabre]

The Unwanted Gift

JONAH SAT AT the bar, unwinding a strand of tinsel the bartender had tied round the neck of the bottle.
It might have seemed a bitter thing to do, to someone looking in from the outside—someone who knew his past, maybe—but he didn’t actually mind the little bit of merriment. The tinsel just interfered with his drinking the beer comfortably. Being bitter about anything was beyond Jonah Hope these days.
There were festive carols playing on the jukebox, but the TV drowned them out. There were still three days to go until the holidays and a place like this didn’t let the hype get out of hand. There were cranberries mixed in with the peanuts on the bar, but nobody was eating them. Jonah drew on the bottle and twisted the knotted and discarded tinsel around his ring finger. It glittered there, and in his memory.
Something shining on his finger. Knots twisted in his grip.
“Can I sit here?”
A woman stood beside him, pulling a heavy overcoat from her shoulders while handling an oversized gift box.
“Do you mind?” she went on.
Maybe it was surprise at being spoken to by a woman after all these years, maybe it was his age and the times he’d grown up in, but Jonah immediately assumed that she was referring to her coat and he automatically stood to help her off with it. She thanked him and let him help her, but it was only then that he realised she’d still been talking about the empty seat beside him. So, mortified, he pulled the stool back for her as well and sat back down only after she had. He smiled at her and she returned it. She was well into her forties, he reckoned, though still ten years his junior for that, but her dark hair lacked a single grey that he could see. Of course, no woman had grey hair nowadays, no matter what their age. They went blonde until they finally went white, when age was finally beyond caring about. White as snow. As bone. They never went grey, though. That or they never got old.
A shadow came over his thoughts and, though he hadn’t the strength to be bitter, the plain weariness of it was enough to tell him it was time to go home. He pushed the bottle away and made to stand.
“Mr. Hope,” said the woman, “won’t you sit a little longer? I’d like to speak to you.”
Jonah eyed her in silence before searching the floor beside her stool for the briefcase or the over-bulging purse.
“Are you a reporter?”
“No. My name is Carol Linwood, Mr. Hope.” She extended a hand.
“You some kinda Christian?”
“Not especially.”
“Just a concerned citizen, then? Community minded and all that.”
“No, sir. I think I know what you’re getting at, but I’m not here to talk about punishing anyone, okay? Least of all you, Mr. Hope. I’d like to see you get a little something back of what you lost, actually.”
He didn’t sit, but pulled the stool back from between them.
“Are you hitting on me? Is that it? You one of these women gets romantic notions about convicted murderers? Imagining yourself being strangled in the bedroom, maybe, and telling me how you’re a dirty girl and how you really deserve it while it’s going on? That doing it for you?”
“No.”
She spoke flatly and she fixed him in the eye. He returned her stare for a moment but he’d felt instantly humiliated in adopting his threatening stance. He resented it, too: the wasted heat of anger would have been better held onto, not least for the energy to get out of bed the following morning. He broke the standoff and leaned gingerly against the bar.
“I’m sorry, miss. I get a lot of twisted attention.”
“It’s fine.” She gestured to the vacated stool. “Won’t you sit again? Let me buy you a drink?”
“No, thank you. I’m sorry, you may be very well meaning, but I’m tired and I need to get home. Goodnight. Happy Holidays, miss.”
“I just want to return something. Of your wife’s.”
Jonah looked at the box she’d left on the bar in front of her and back to the woman. Dark green paper was done up in red and gold printed ribbon, but paper and ribbon alike seemed faded and dull, like she’d been holding onto the gift for years. She was crazy after all, then, no matter how composed she appeared. He lifted away from the bar and walked towards the door.
The scent hit him almost immediately. He turned to see her sitting with her back to him, the lid of the box raised in her hand.
The smell of Daisy’s perfume seemed to fill the whole room, but more than that: the perfume of her skin, the smell of coffee on her breath, a dozen different scents of the late Daisy Hope were pouring from this box and drowning him in waves. He made his way back to the bar, swimming through sweet airs with his heart pounding, his nerves alive as they hadn’t been in over two decades. He took the cardboard edge in his hand and tipped the box half upright. The contents were wrapped in pink tissue paper.
“Let me,” said Carol, reaching past him to fold back the protective paper. Underneath was a doll.
“This would have been my daughter’s doll,” Carol told him, turning the box round so he could see the toy clearly. “She’d have been twenty-five this September past, if she’d lived. But the doll was your wife’s, originally. I’ve waited a long time to be able to return it.”
“I don’t understand. This was Daisy’s?”
He lifted the little figure out of the box. Its white porcelain face was rudimentarily painted, with two black strokes for eyes and a rosebud of red for lips. The hair was white blonde, and it felt real and dry and old. Her dress was baby blue, with nets and frills, and her clay feet were cold and bare. He didn’t recognise her.
“This is from—what—when she was a child?” he asked this woman, Carol, who was closing the empty shoebox. “Did you know Daisy when she was little?”
“I never met your wife, Mr. Hope. I got the doll from a third party who had taken it from amongst her things, after she died.”
Jonah felt fresh suspicion flaring. His home had been thoroughly searched after the murders, despite the open and shut nature of the case. Despite them occurring many miles away. He had called the police himself that night, had sat in a chair and waited with the motel room door open until they arrived and immediately admitted to what he had done, and why he had done it. Still, after they had taken Daisy and her lover’s bodies from the scene and put him in the back of the police car, they had asked him for his house keys and told him they would be searching the house. They never said for what. He took it for procedure. And he didn’t care. What had he to hide? Still, could it be this woman or some accomplice had been part of that search and thought they had found something then that they could hold over him now? Some new layer to the scandal, some fresh humiliation? He set the doll down on the bar.
“The police never mentioned the search of my home at the trial. Nothing was presented as having been taken into evidence. If someone took this from my house, then it’s stolen and I’d have no problem in reporting it. Whatever you hope to bleed from me with this thing, I have nothing left to protect and nothing to offer you even if I did. I’m old and broken and flat broke, lady. You can take your blackmail elsewhere.”
“Mr. Hope, I fully understand your suspicion. I do. I know I’m not making myself properly clear and I know you don’t get treated very well by everyone you meet, so...” Carol lifted the doll from the bar and smoothed her hair as she stumbled on. “Um…look. What I have to say isn’t easy to explain, you just have to suspend your disbelief for a few minutes and…”
Jonah watched her chewing up her words and comforting the doll like a child, and his stomach began to twist. He pulled his stool back to steady himself and sat back down.
“May I?”
He lifted the doll from her hand and ran his own fingers over the hair as she had been doing. He’d been all the while wondering how the smell of his wife could have lasted so long and so strongly on the toy; there was nothing of her in the house anymore. The smell had unsettled his stomach. He wondered more, sitting now, how he could even recognise these scents so unmistakably. He’d never noticed them at all when she was alive.
“Go on,” he said.
“I got her from Father Christmas. Christmas Eve, 1984. The night that, well, that…”
Jonah continued to examine the doll.
“So who was the guy playing Santa?” he asked when the pause didn’t seem to want to end.
Carol placed her hand on his and he lifted his eyes to meet her gaze.
“No, Mr. Hope. This wasn’t a guy in a suit. He was the real Father Christmas. Saint Nicholas himself. Except he wasn’t any kind of saint.”

christmasmacabre.com

[christmasmacabre]

“I don’t—”
“Oh, I know. I would have laughed in his face when he started into his story, if what he was talking about wasn’t so...personal. And painful. Finally, he left me in no doubt.”
Carol released Jonah’s hand and she called for the bartender. He brought her a white wine, Jonah a fresh beer and set out another plate of nuts. While he was pouring the wine she’d taken the doll back from Jonah a final time and placed her back in her box with her protective paper folded neatly over her again. Carol sipped the wine and started her story again.
“I was in a place like this, and I was drunk. I’d told my husband I was doing last minute holiday shopping. I didn’t know how I was going to explain things to him when I got home. And then this man came and sat beside me and he put that box in front of me and said it was my Christmas present.”
“Father Christmas?”
“Yes.”
Jonah paused and considered. “How did he convince you he was the real deal?”
“Oh, he wasn’t in a costume or anything. He was old, though, all hair and it was white and he did have this real nice, grandfatherly smile. But he never even tried to talk me into believing anything about him. It was when I touched the doll. I knew what he was saying was true. I…I didn’t exactly see things in my head, pictures or anything, but I just knew the things he was saying were true.”
“That’s crazy.”
“Yeah. Yeah, it is.” Carol ran her index finger through the plate of nuts. “But it is what it is.”
“And he told you he took the doll from Daisy?”
“Not directly. He never mentioned her name but, like I said, I just somehow knew all the details once he’d given me the doll.”
She fell silent and sipped at her wine again as the bartender came to wipe around them. Jonah saw her teeth clenching inside her cheek as she tried to look nonchalant, waiting for him to step out of earshot again.
“He’s probably heard crazier, in his line of business,” Jonah remarked. He wasn’t sure how much he should be encouraging her, though.
“Maybe. I hope not.”
“Look, I’m not sure we should—”
“Please, Mr. Hope. Jonah. Indulge me for a few more minutes.”
He sighed and for want of anything to say, put his mouth to better use drinking.
“Father Christmas gave me your wife’s doll to balance— his words— a deal she’d not been able to profit from. She’d...”
“She’d what?”
“She’d made a deal for a child. To get a child. And this doll was, like, a down payment. Or a contract, I’m not sure.”
“Alright, stop.” Jonah pushed his half-empty bottle to the inside of the bar and placed his two hands down flat, not turning to face his female companion. He discovered he’d been gripping the piece of tinsel all the while.
“My wife sure as hell broke vows, but she didn’t break laws. Desperate as she was for a baby, she wouldn’t take somebody else’s. I don’t for one minute believe she made any such deal.”
“She made a deal to have her own child.”
Jonah barked a laugh at her, too loud. He went on in a husky whisper.
“We couldn’t. Neither of us, we were both—”
“She made a deal with someone who could get round nature.”
“What? I don’t—”
“The devil, Mr. Hope.” She seemed almost shocked to be saying it. “She made a deal with the devil.”
She clearly expected Jonah to protest again immediately, but he wasn’t giving her any reaction.
“He promised her a baby and then he gave her that doll, for a token of that promise.”
Jonah had actually filled his lungs with ready protest and ridicule but his energies, as they usually did, had failed him. Eventually, he just let a long, thin hiss of air escape him and he dropped his head to his hands, still flat on the wood in front of him.
“When a woman wants a baby and she can’t have one, Mr. Hope,” Carol went on, “it’s not just sadness, it’s not some insane greed. It’s a hole. Doesn’t matter how tough she is, how much she loves a man, how much she is loved herself. It makes this hole in her that washes with blood and agony every month and still stays empty. And your wife wasn’t tough, Mr. Hope. She was soft and she couldn’t take that kind of hurt. So she took what she felt was the only option left to her.”
Jonah couldn’t raise his head.
“Why are you doing this?” he asked her
“Father Christmas told me that when your wife made this deal, Heaven stopped watching her. That’s how it works, he told me. She fell off the Almighty’s radar and what the devil did after that didn’t have any witnesses. So, he told your wife that she wasn’t going to be getting some kind of miracle out of this deal; that she would need to do her part in keeping their arrangement secret. She had to find a man to be the father, to go some way to explaining how she’d suddenly been able to conceive after all that failure. It took her weeks to overcome her disgust and find a ready dupe at a bar. Didn’t matter if he could really perform, he just needed to be there, to make the story work.”
No.
Jonah’s breath caught. Something had moved in his head as she spoke. Something in his head was shouting: It’s true. Daisy’d been acting oddly for weeks; she’d been nervous and crying, but different from the usual depression. She went out a lot. That’s what had aroused his suspicion in the first place. That’s why he’d followed her that night. Jonah turned his face to one side, away from Carol and stared into his memory, coming like a train from a tunnel.*
No—
“The man she chose was drunk, really drunk, but sleepy drunk, not violent.”
No. No.
“She got him to the motel, Father Christmas told me, kept him drinking until he—”
“Stop.” Jonah lifted his head from his hands, his voice flat and quiet. “I don’t – I don’t believe you.”
“I’m sorry.” Carol lifted her wine and sipped some more. She rolled the bulb of the glass between her fingers, as Jonah continued to stare ahead of him. At length it was she who broke the silence.
“Look, um, whatever you may think, the point is that your wife never got to have her, but there was a child nonetheless. A baby girl. Which is where Father Christmas came in. Seems these deals are rarely made good on, not when Heaven stops looking out for you. Still, anything the devil is selling needs to be accounted for. So Father Christmas, he takes them and sees that they go to someone more deserving. That’s what he told me. That’s what he exists for. Just came up to me in a bar with the child I couldn’t have and told me it was mine. Free and gratis, no deal or cost to me. And then he just left.”
She drained her glass and sat with him in silence.
“A little girl?”
“A little girl.”
“What did you call her?”
“Emma. She’d be twenty five now, if she’d lived.”
“How did she die?”
“She didn’t.”
He turned to look at her, the water hitting her lip as she spoke.
“She never lived. I didn’t accept.”
She stood and lifted her coat from beneath her.
“I don’t understand. Why?”
“Heaven has never taken its eye off of me, Mr. Hope,” she answered. “And some day it’s going to notice that a child is still unaccounted for.” With her coat around her shoulders she stroked the lid of the shoebox. “The most...desperately wanted child, left unwanted.”*
She dried her eyes roughly, almost violently, near bruising them.
“And when they come looking for that doll,” she continued, “you, or someone you trust — someone will have this story to tell. I don’t know if it’ll matter that the deal was never made good on, but it might. It should. Or else Heaven isn’t the place I think it is. She could be forgiven, your Daisy. Get out of whatever awful place she ended up. Either way, it’s still yours now. Happy Christmas, Mr. Hope.”
Jonah pulled the box towards him and opened it again. The little doll seemed to stare up past him, her flat eyes fixed upon Heaven in blank accusation. By the time he looked back, Carol had reached the door. She opened it and was almost through when she looked back.
“You know, Mr. Hope, cheating on my husband was the first thing I tried. But not her. You could forgive her too.”
He didn’t know how to answer that. But then she was gone.
“Happy Christmas,” he mumbled.

ON THE SIDEWALK, Carol pulled her dark red overcoat tighter round her shoulders and started down the street to where she’d parked. The stores she passed didn’t much go in for Christmas displays, certainly not ones that wasted power running lights through the night. The city saw fit to string the rooftops with lights, however, so the outside was bright if the insides were not. As she walked, Carol caught sight of a reflection in one such darkened store window: a young blonde woman in a ripped blouse. Carol gave her only the merest of glances before walking on.
“What you want is in the bar. With him,” she said as she walked. “You’re off my list, little girl.”
And her heels clicked as she stepped on all the faster, ringing on the sidewalk like bells.

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[Spooky Spencer]

Um, I guess Hope springs eternal, especially at Christmastime?

[christmasmacabre]

Originally Posted by Spooky Spencer

Um, I guess Hope springs eternal, especially at Christmastime?

It does indeed, Spencer. It does indeed. Like a neck wound.