and hidden doors to get to the prize inside?”
Dan nodded, wondering for a moment what country they came from and if that was another of Tracy’s dream destinations. “You have to know the secret to get to the center.”
“Right. Well, after the divorce was at last final, that’s where I put my feelings about it. Locked and hidden away behind a dozen secret doors.”
With a password that she would never share with him, he realized in dismay.
For some reason, he remembered again her trembling hand on Harry’s college comforter. Their son had already been making jokes with his roommate, helping set up the other boy’s computer as his mother blurred around the edges in front of their eyes.
Had that been Dan’s mistake too? Had he been laughing, joking, hooking up computer wires when the connection he should have been making at that moment was with his wife?
In 1955, a newspaper misprint directed children who wanted to call Santa Claus to the Continental Air Defense Command instead. Realizing the error, the Director of Operations had his staff check the radar data in order to provide children with updates on Santa’s position in the skies throughout Christmas Eve.
Chapter 12
Propped against the headboard, Trin lay on Bailey’s bed, studying Kurt Cobain’s face on the poster pinned to the opposite wall. “I think Finn used to wear black eyeliner like our grunge-band buddy here. I remember his eyes always seemed to smolder.”
Still smoldered, Bailey thought, as she rummaged through her closet for something to wear on their date. “It’s the thick eyelashes,” she said, glancing over at the other woman. “It’s unfair that I got puny blond ones and his are so dark.”
Trin crossed her ankles. “So what’s the occasion of this dinner of yours?”
“Heck if I know.” Was it only to ensure they could have a private chat without interruption? She wasn’t certain. In his grandmother’s kitchen, Finn had set the night, she’d agreed, and then been ecstatically happy that he’d left it at that and let her leave the house without fulfilling the other part of their bargain: that she’d tell him why she’d run ten years ago.
And that embarrassing, sloppily emotional interlude in the Jacobson kitchen was something she’d been trying to distance herself from too. It had started with watching Finn fall on the dark street. Then only gotten worse at the sight of his torn skin. He’d assured her it was nothing, but it was enough to give her perfect recall of the infamous assassination attempt video. Though his face was never shown, and his name kept secret by the government agency that employed him, now she knew it was he who had taken the second bullet. She knew it was his shattered sunglasses, his puddle of blood.
Finn who could have died.
Once again, the thought gave her that weird, weightless feeling in her stomach and she pressed against it hard.
She knew that for a fact, because that day and the day before he’d shown up at The Perfect Christmas as promised. With little direction on her part, he’d reorganized the back room, replenished stock, donned the Santa suit at the appropriate hour. With the additional, very capable help, she’d been able to relax a little.
A surprised Byron had caught her humming to the store’s background music. And, funny, she’d been recalling old memories of The Perfect Christmas when he’d pointed it out. Not the chaos of the post-Christmas sale or the endless summer shifts she’d spent at the cash register as a restless teen. These memories were of quiet afternoons when she’d stood on a stepladder to help her grandmother rearrange the Christmas villages on the shelves. Of poring over product catalogs with her grandfather, Bailey on his lap, the warmth of his chest at her back. He’d had a special fountain pen that he’d let her use to circle pretty things that caught her eye.
Then her parents had divorced and everything changed, including her feelings toward The Perfect Christmas.
Refocusing on the issue at hand, Bailey slid some hangers along the closet pole. A dress for a dinner date. A dinner date during which it was unlikely she’d be able to duck the question of why she’d run away a decade ago.
Not that she couldn’t answer. It wasn’t such a big deal, was it? But still it felt as if looking back with Finn would let him see other things she didn’t want him to know.
Like how strong she was pulled toward the man he had become.
Like how much she had once loved the young man he had been.
Like how hard it had been to turn her back on him then.
“We were just kids, right?” she said aloud. “Nobody expects those kinds of feelings to last forever.”
“Hmm.” Trin palmed the head of her sleeping son, who was sprawled over his mother’s body in toddler abandon. “Are you trying to convince me or yourself?”
Flushing at what she’d revealed, Bailey shoved a blouse farther down the pole. “Did I invite you over here?” she muttered. “Because I forget.”
“You walked away from me too, Bay,” Trin said, her voice quiet. “All those years growing up, you were the yin to my yang.”
Bailey swallowed a sudden lump in her throat. “Wouldn’t that be the trang to your trin?”
“See, that cleverness is just one of the many reasons why we got along so well together. You were my best friend since preschool. There have been times over the years I’ve needed you. Times I could have helped you too.”
Bailey’s hand, lingering on a blue sleeve, moved to a black one, her mood sliding toward funereal. After she’d left early for college that summer, she’d never spent another night in her childhood home until now. “I had to make a clean break,” she tried to explain. “As clean as I could, anyway.”
She heard Trin sigh, then listened to the other woman roll off the bed to stand behind her. “Not that dress. You look lousy in black.”
Bailey turned to face her friend. Baby Adam’s head rested on Trin’s shoulder, his body limp. She reached out to stroke the little boy’s back, surprised by its sweet warmth. In breaking from her past, she’d lost out on reunions, weddings, births, all the many ceremonies that connected someone to her community.
In L.A. she had acquaintances, colleagues, fellow condo dwellers. But no one who knew where she used to hide her love letters, how she could sneak out of her house with the help of an open window and a trash bin, why she hated the smell of Chanel No. 5.
At eighteen, she’d been so afraid that one part of her life would blow up in her face, that she’d walked away from the rest of it…and lost so much.
“I’m sorry, Trin.” Tears pricked the corners of Bailey’s eyes and she stroked Adam again. “I’ve missed you.”
Trin sniffed. “Stop it. We both look ugly in tears.”
Bailey smiled at that. “Remember when we hoped we were one of those girls who look pretty when they cry?”
“Yeah. And so we rented the old
“Your nose turns an icky red,” Bailey said.
“You get splotchy. From your forehead to your neck.”
