The Angel Tree

Vodka. Check.

Sleeping pills. Check.

Funeral instructions. Check.

Will. Check.

House cleaned. Check.

Front door unlocked, so her body could be found without damaging the cabin door. Check.

Christie went on down the list, checking off everything she had been able to think of that needed to be taken care of. She depended on her lists. Her friends said she had become a little OCD, but she needed something ordered and logical in the howling chaos that had filled her life in the last year.

Her eyes moved over the cabin her family had always used for their Christmas vacations. It was a big log cabin, with three bedrooms and two bathrooms, and a big kitchen. The living room was L-shaped, and had an enormous fireplace against the end wall. The front porch opened to the short leg of the L, which helped keep cold winds from blasting through the door and filling the room. Her husband had built the cabin to her specifications, and had become the family’s favorite vacation spot.

This was the first year the cabin had no decorations, no cinnamon and spices filling the air, no tree surrounded by a huge pile of brightly wrapped gifts. Last year it had been a wonderland filled with love and laughter and joy. Then her husband had taken the children down the mountain to see the lights in the town below on Christmas Eve while she wrapped all the gifts she and her husband had previously delivered and hidden in the cabin.

They never came back. The officers came instead; telling her there was nothing anyone could do, except to identify the bodies. That had been her Christmas present; a trip to the morgue, to verify what everybody already knew. Her New Year’s Day was spent burying her reasons for living.

She had gone to grief therapy. She had received counseling. But she had nothing left, no reason to live. She had sold their home, had sold all the furniture, and given away the clothes she had once so carefully chosen for the people she loved. There was nothing left in the world for her, and she was ready to leave it.

The church her family had been members of believed that suicide was a sin, and that those who committed it went to hell. Christie didn’t care. She only wanted relief from the screaming in her head, and an escape from the well meaning platitudes of friends who thought words could ease her pain.

Now it was Christmas Eve again, and her plans were set, her lists checked off, and she was ready to turn off the lights and fall into the darkness in her soul. Moving to the entryway of the cabin she glanced through the window blinds by the front door, absently noting the wind was howling and the snow blowing so that nothing outside could be seen. It was a good night to die.

She jerked back as she reached for the light switch next to the door. The pounding on the door sounded again over the howling wind. “Open the door, for the love of God! My children are freezing to death! Please, please, let us in! Oh, God, help us!”

Christie gasped and yanked the door open. A man staggered in, holding a small child, followed by two other children and a woman. She urged them toward the living room. Just as she was about to slam the door shut on the snow blowing in after them, a horn sounded. She shielded her eyes against the snow and wind and saw headlights pulling up to her porch next to the car already there. And then another pair of lights!

Glancing over her shoulder, she saw the family who had come in getting out of their coats, the woman frantically checking the children’s faces and hands, brushing snow off their hair. Christie held the door almost closed as she looked back out to see an elderly lady making her way carefully up the porch steps, fighting the wind. As she almost fell through the door, Christie caught her and pulled her in, depositing her in a chair beside the door.

“The thermostat is on the wall there!” she told the man leaning against the wall. “Turn it up, and you can turn the fireplace on as well. It’s gas, with a pilot light. Just turn the ignition switch on the mantel. That should warm it up in here faster.”

A young couple staggered in as Christie held the door. “Oh, thank you, thank you, thank you!” The woman sobbed as the man with her helped Christie slam the door shut. “I was so sure we were going to wind up freezing to death before we found shelter! There was no way we could stay warm in that car!”

The young man nodded. “We had the heater up as high as it would go, but we were still freezing. If we hadn’t seen your lights and been able to make it up the road, we would have met Jesus for Christmas.”

The elderly woman laughed. “I was following the tail lights in front of me. That’s all I could see through that snow. Thank God you were here. I couldn’t go another foot, I think.”

The man with the children came over and shook Christie’s hand. “Have to second that. Mack Williams, ma’am. These are my wife Annabelle and my kids, Jody, Ricky, and Susanne. Thank God your light made it through that blizzard.”

Christie looked around at them shrugging off their coats. Her forehead wrinkled in confusion. “How could you see any lights? My porch light is off, and the blinds are over the windows. And this cabin can’t be seen from the road. We designed it that way.”

They all stared at her. “Then maybe it’s just a Christmas miracle!” the elderly lady finally said with a laugh. “My name is Edith Morton, my dear. And a very merry Christmas to you.”

Christie sucked her breath in, but before she could say the angry words trembling on her lips, the little girl Susanne announced in a loud voice as only a four year old could, “I gotta go potty!”

Her mother looked alarmed. “Oh dear, all the children need to go. Please, where’s your bathroom?”

Distracted by mundane problems, Christie pointed to the doorway. “Down the hall, past the kitchen door.”

The children rushed to the door, the young girl bellowing, “Me first! Me first!”

Their mother hurried after them, “Boys, wait till I finish with her. You know she doesn’t have as much control as you do!”

Their father chuckled as he hung up his family’s coats on her coat tree by the door. “We’ve been in the car for a while. We should have stopped in that little town at the bottom of the mountain, but we wanted to make it on over to our destination. Had no idea that blizzard would whip up and make the pass impossible to get through.”

The young couple agreed, and offered their hands to Christie. “Tim Sutherland, ma’am, and my fiancée Beth Cummins. We were headed to our wedding in Las Vegas, but I don’t know if we’ll get there in time.”

Edith looked toward the doorway. “Oh dear, I hope they don’t take too long. I’ve been in the car too long as well.”

“There’s another bathroom in the master bedroom at the end of the hall,” Christie said automatically. Her mind whirled as she was forced to deal with the invasion when she had been set on dying alone in peace.

The little girl came out of the bathroom with her mother as Edith passed. As her brothers shoved past them, elbowing each other and slamming the door, little Susanne pulled at her mother’s hand as she peered into the dark kitchen. “I’m thirsty!” she cried. “I want some hot chocolate! And cookies!”

Her mother hushed her and looked up at Christie, an apologetic smile on her face. “That’s what we always have on Christmas Eve,” she explained. “Susanne, honey, we’re not at home. We’re at…” She looked up, realizing she didn’t know her hostess’ name.

“Oh, uh, I’m Christie, Christie Wright. And I can make some hot chocolate, but I don’t have any cookies made. But I do have some canned food that we can probably make into a meal.” She went into hostess mode automatically, locking onto something she could deal with. She went into the kitchen and turned the light on. The little girl followed her in and began exploring the cabinets she could reach, ignoring her mother’s reprimands.

“It’s okay, those are childproofed. My youngest son is the same-aahh!” Her voice stopped with a gasp. When Annabelle looked at her, frowning, she shook her head frantically and fumbled with the pan she was putting on the stove. The little girl wandered out the door and her mother chased after her. Christie fought for calm as she measured the ingredients with shaking hands.

She nearly dropped everything as an arm wrapped around her waist and squeezed lightly. “I put away the vodka and pills,” Edith whispered in her ear. “Wouldn’t want the children to come upon them. I put them in the closet up on the highest shelf. That little girl looks like she might go through all your drawers if she gets away from her mama. You don’t have a gun around anywhere, do you?”

Christie shook her head numbly. She had disposed of her husband Rick’s guns as well. She didn’t need them.

“That’s good. Do you need any help here, dear?” Edith then said in a normal voice. “Why don’t we fix something to eat? I’m sure everybody is hungry.” She began opening cabinet doors until she found the pantry and began pulling out cans and jars. She looked in the refrigerator and freezer, but they were empty. Christie had no need of fresh or frozen food before she left this world.

Edith didn’t seem bothered. She asked Christie to introduce herself again, since she had missed it on the way to the bathroom. When Beth came in asking if she could help, Edith put her to work opening various containers, explaining as she went what needed to be done.

“You got no tree!” young Ricky exclaimed in the living room, outrage in his voice. “How can you have Christmas without a tree? You got no decorations at all! Don’t you believe in Christmas?”

“Does that mean Santa isn’t going to stop here?” His little sister cried over his parents’ frantic shushing noises. “How are we going to get presents if he doesn’t stop here?”

“Children, children, he’ll leave the presents at our house, like he does every year! We just have to wait until the storm is over, and we’ll be able to get home and get your presents.”

“But the lady here won’t get any presents!” their oldest boy Jody complained. “Why didn’t she get ready for Santa?”

Christie came out of the kitchen to meet the children’s accusing faces. She fumbled for an explanation. “I, uh, I just got here. I didn’t have time to put anything up.”

Tim peered out the window around the blinds. “I’d volunteer to go get a tree, but not in that storm!”

Mack looked out the other window. “Yep,” he agreed with a nod. “Just going to have to make do this year kids, till we can get home. If we did have a tree we could make popcorn strings and our own decorations, but looks like that’s a bust.”

Beth came out of the kitchen, holding a tray of cups. “I remember sharing my first apartment with four other girls. There was no room for even a tiny tree, and we wound up hanging a paper tree on the wall, and stringing yarn to hang paper ornaments. It wasn’t half bad.” She offered everyone a cup of hot chocolate before returning the tray to the kitchen. She and Edith came out holding their own cups and finding seats on the big roomy couches and chairs in the living room.

“The food should be ready in a few minutes,” Edith told them, and sighed with satisfaction as she sipped her cocoa. “Hot cocoa and a fireplace and a comfortable seat. Just what we need on a night like this.”

The children weren’t satisfied. “We need to make a paper tree,” Jody decided. “That wall there doesn’t have anything on it. We can hang a big one there. You got any paper, lady?”

Christie almost told them there was no way they were going to mess up her good wall with tape and tacks, until she realized how stupid it was to care about her wall when she was planning to kill herself. “Why don’t you just draw a tree on the wall? That way we can save the paper I’ve got for ornaments.” The adults protested, but Christie waved her hand dismissively. “Let me find the kids’ – I mean, some pencils and coloring pens or something.”

She ignored the looks the adults gave each other as she hurried to her children’s bedrooms. She had to stop inside the boys’ door to pull herself together. She had not been able to come in here since that night a year ago, and everything was unbearably familiar. Hurrying to the desk against the wall, she grabbed the trashcan and put all the drawing and coloring utensils she could see into it. She found some paper and tacks and tape and put those in as well. Her little girl’s room had glue and glitter and all sorts of stickers. She found yarn and beads and other craft materials and threw them in.

Taking the can back to the living room, she handed it to the children. “See what you can do with this. Don’t worry about making a mess, it will clean up. Excuse me; I have to check on the food.” She headed for the kitchen. The sight of the children digging through the materials just like her children always had tore at her heart.

Edith followed her into the kitchen and silently helped her set down plates and pull the food from the stove. She gave Christie a wordless hug before she called everyone to eat. The other adults politely ignored Christie’s silence and covered it with casual conversation while filling plates for the children and getting them back into the living room.

When Christie thought she finally had enough self control to go back to the living room, she found Beth outlining a fir tree freehand on the wall. “I’m a graphic artist,” she explained over her shoulder with a smile. “Piece of cake for me.”

Susanne’s head popped up from the ornament she was drawing. “Cake? Who’s got cake?” She looked bewildered at the laughter that drew. After her mother gently explained it was just a joke, she shook her head and went back to her artwork. The adults choked back more laughs when she nodded vigorously at her brother’s muttered, “Grownups are weird.”

Beth did a remarkable job bringing the tree to colorful life on the wall. The children drew their versions of ornaments and cut them out with the child sized scissors Christie had provided. Susanne used glitter and glue with a generous hand and ignored her mother’s attempts to rein her in.

Jody got bored with the art first and put his materials down. He looked around the room. “Where’s the barn and the baby Jesus?” he demanded. His brother and sister looked around too. “You got to have one for Christmas. It’s not Christmas if you don’t!”

Christie didn’t know what to say. All the Christmas paraphernalia, including the Nativity set, had been thrown in the trash the year before. While she fumbled for words, everyone suddenly heard Annabelle’s exasperated, “Susanne! That is not your room! Get back to the living room!”

The child scampered back to the group. “Look!” she crowed. “Toys!” She clutched a Barbie doll, a GI Joe, and a farm animal set to her chest. She ignored her mother’s scolding and handed the toys to her eager brothers. “There’s more in there, too!” The boys dashed past their parents before they could grab them and ran for the bedrooms.

Christie sighed. “Just let them go. They might as well get some use out of them. I forgot they were there.” She waved away the embarrassed apologies. “Don’t worry about it. Nobody else is going to play with them. I forgot to give them to charity after – after…” she stammered to a halt. “I’m sorry. I have to go to the bathroom.” She ran out of the room.

In the hall bathroom, she turned on the water to drown out the sound of her sobs. Through the door, she heard the children returning down the hall. “Look at all this!” Ricky exclaimed. “There’s a barn and everything we need. We can fix it up just like it’s supposed to be!”

Christie took several deep breaths and pulled herself together. Stepping out of the bathroom, she headed for the bedrooms to turn out the lights. As she looked toward the master bedroom, she remembered her guests would need to sleep that night. Glad for anything to keep her away from them, she headed to the storage closet where they kept extra supplies. She pulled out the spare blankets and pillows they had kept for rare guests in the past and piled them on the bed. When Edith slipped into the room, Christie looked swiftly at her and away again.

“It occurred to me we would need bedding. The kids can sleep in the children’s beds, but the adults will have to bed down in the living room. I think we have an air mattress in here somewhere.”

Edith picked up some of the blankets. “A good idea. The children will probably wind down soon. They’ve done a wonderful job on making a Nativity set. They’re very creative. So is that young Beth. The tree looks wonderful. Mack told me if the weather would just calm a bit he could get the little ones’ gifts out of the car trunk, but it’s still too bad to go out.”

Just as she turned to the door, Christie let out a soft, broken whimper. Edith turned back around as Christie slowly reached in the closet and pulled out a wrapped gift. “We never put these out last year. I was waiting for my husband Jack to get back with our children. We always waited for them to go to sleep on Christmas Eve before putting out the gifts. We kept them hidden in here. I forgot to clear them out, just like the toys.”

Edith set the blankets back down and took the gift from her shaking hands. “Shall we put these out for the children or back in the closet? Do you remember what they were?” Her voice was soft and calm, the matter of fact tone helping Christie find her self control again.

“Yes. Yes. The tags that say Juliet – my daughter – she was five. The gifts should be fine for Susanne. My sons Donnie and Ronnie – they were nine year old twins, but those gifts should work for Ricky and Jody both. None of them are very age specific.” She turned back to the closet. “Just change the names on the tags. I can’t – I can’t do it. I can’t.” Blindly she handed out package after package.

Edith spread a blanket to place them into, and tied up the corners to create a bag. “We’ll just keep them in here until the children fall asleep then.” She looked over her shoulder at her hostess. “I take that’s where the vodka and sleeping pills come in?”

Christie nodded, gazing blankly into space. “It’s been a year. I can’t handle it anymore. The therapists, the counseling, nothing has helped. I can’t go on. I just can’t. Do you understand that? I can’t.”

Edith urged her to sit on the bed. “I understand, my dear, but not tonight, alright? Not tonight.” She put her arms around Christie and rocked her gently. “Let me tell you something, my dear. I’ve outlived three husbands and two sons and a daughter. I’ve often thought I couldn’t go on, but here I still am.”

Christie stared at her, blinking back tears. “What? But – but how can you stand it? How can you lose everybody and keep going? How can you possibly do that?”

Edith squeezed the younger woman’s shoulders. “One day at a time, my dear. Just holding on, one day at a time. I had to find a reason to hold on, and it was always somebody who needed me. When my first husband was killed in a job accident, my small children needed me. When I lost my oldest boy to war, I had to hold on to comfort his widow.”

She sighed. “The Lord was good to me, and sent another good man to marry, but I lost him to cancer. I found myself working with his fellow cancer patients and their families, so I was able to keep going. Then my younger son was killed by a drunk driver, and my daughter died in childbirth, and once again, I had to hold on to help others.”

“Sometimes it seemed like we were a crowd of broken strangers, all holding on to each other, holding each other up, but we kept each other moving. I think as long as I wasn’t alone, I could keep myself distracted. I could hope that the darkness and the weight of all that grief would finally rise off my shoulders for just a little while. And you know, it did. It’s never completely gone, but I can deal with it. When it gets bad, I go find somebody who needs me, and I make through another night.” She patted Christie’s back and kissed her cheek. “Just hold on another night. Hold on tight to your hope for just one night at a time. You’ll find a reason to keep going, I’m sure of it.”

Christie held on to Edith’s arms and found more peace than she had known before. It helped enough to finally allow her to pick up the bedding and carry it out to the living room. She looked around at the transformation. The tree on the wall was colorful, with bows made of yarn tacked here and there. The ornaments the children had made hung there as well, with glitter glued erratically on them.

An unusual Nativity scene stood on the previously bare mantel. The barn from the farm set stood in the middle. Around it were placed various farm animals. A miniature trough held a small baby doll wrapped in a facial tissue. Barbie and GI Joe were posed around it, dressed in paper towels tied on with yarn. Her sons’ plastic green soldiers surrounded it all, also wrapped in paper towels. From the look of them, she thought they were supposed to be shepherds. Three of them had glitter and colored markers decorating their paper towels, so she assumed they were the Magi.

The children were peering over Beth’s shoulders as she worked on something on the coffee table before the couch. Jody looked up as Christie edged closer. “She’s doing pictures of all of us for special ornaments! See, we made big fancy paper frames and she’s drawing our pictures in them! We’re all going to have one! Isn’t this great?” He picked up a finished one and handed it to Christie. “See? It looks just like me!”

It really did. Beth was a very talented artist. It was a pencil sketch, but it was very good. Ornaments with sketches of the other two children were waiting and Beth was swiftly drawing their mother on a fourth. Christie helped the children decide where to hang their pictures on the tree. By the time they were done, all three children were yawning.

Christie looked over at the parents. “The children can sleep in the, um, the bedrooms past the kitchen and bathroom. The beds in there are too small for adults, but I have extra blankets and pillows and an air mattress. I think these three are ready to dream of some sugarplums, don’t you?” Mack and his wife thanked her profusely and herded their children into bed.

When they came back, Beth had finished the adults’ sketches and tacked the ornaments onto the tree. Edith handed around refills of hot chocolate and the group settled into the couch and chairs near the fireplace. Christie took the gifts from the blanket and arranged them on the floor at the base of the tree on the wall. After consulting everyone, Tim turned off the lights. The firelight twinkled off the glitter on the ornaments and in the dim light, turned the children’s handicraft into magical art.

Christie sat in her favorite rocker and slowly moved back and forth, staring at the display. “My children loved to do this sort of thing. All three were always making things, drawing pictures, and every Christmas they would make an ornament for the tree. They were so creative, so - so lively, so…” she stopped and began sobbing. “They were so alive, and they’re not anymore. Ronnie, Donnie, Juliet, my babies, they’re gone. James, my husband, they’re all gone. I’m all alone, and I can’t bear it anymore. I can’t stay here anymore, I have nothing left! I want to die! Please, just let me die!” Her throat closed up until the last was a whispered scream.

Sliding out of the rocker, she knelt on the rug and folded over, wrapped her arms around her head and keened her grief into her knees. Her uninvited guests knelt beside her and stroked her back silently until her sobbing trailed off into exhausted gasps.

Mack and Tim helped her rise and stagger over to the couch where she collapsed. She buried her face in the paper towels Annabelle pushed into her hands and let Edith gently mop her face. She blew her nose obediently when she was ordered to and submitted to the mothering she was given. Tim arranged a shawl around her shoulders and Beth tucked a throw across her lap.

Edith looked around at the others. “We interrupted her tonight. She had vodka and pills in her bedroom. This is the anniversary of her family’s deaths.” Christie heard no criticism in the murmurs that followed. They sounded understanding and sympathetic.

Beth laid a hand on Christie’s knee. “Hey, I nearly committed suicide once.”

Christie stared down at her. “Why? Did someone you loved die?”

Beth sighed. “It might have been easier. I was a teenager, right in the middle of that stage where my hormones were driving me nuts. My boyfriend dumped me for my best friend, and when I got home to cry on my parents’ shoulders, they announced they were getting divorced because they both had someone else they wanted. It was like the foundation of my life just collapsed.”

“Everything I’d ever believed, like my parents loving each other and my boyfriend being true to me, it was all a lie. And it turned into a really nasty divorce, and during one of their arguments I found out neither of them wanted me around as a reminder of a marriage they both regretted. My best friend and ex-boyfriend wouldn’t talk to me anymore and my other friends didn’t know which side to pick. So I decided to give everybody a break and remove myself from the picture.”

“What happened?” Annabelle asked softly.

“I was going to jump off a local bridge. It was pretty high over a big river. I figured it would work pretty well. If the fall didn’t kill me, the river could drown me, or I’d freeze to death.” She looked up with a wry smile. “It was at Christmas, too. That had made the situation even worse. All that seasonal good cheer, and all the happy songs and TV shows. I wanted to throw a brick at the TV whenever one came on.”

“Did you change your mind?” Mack asked.

“No. A cop grabbed me just as I was going over the side. I almost pulled him over, I was fighting so hard. He finally got me up and cuffed me and hauled me off to a head shrinker.”

“And he got you straightened out?” Edith assumed.

“No, he just made me mad. What did an old guy know about my problems? No, I wound up in a group with other girls who had been through stuff a lot worse than me. Nobody said that except me. They told me that anything that made me want to kill myself was as serious as their problems. But I felt pretty stupid for not being able to deal with my life when I heard the horrors that some of them went through.”

“So you changed your mind?” Christie asked. She supposed losing your family to divorce was bad, but still, it wasn’t death…

Beth shook her head. “Nope. I still didn’t want to deal with my parents or my ex, so I started spending all my time at the teen crisis center in town. I just wanted to be distracted, you know? One day, this girl was sitting in there, and she had that look, know what I mean? I recognized it. I saw it in the mirror the day I went to the bridge.”

“I sat with her and tried to talk to her, but she wasn’t very responsive. She tried to get up after a while, and something just told me to keep her there. I put my arms around her and held on. She struggled for a while, before she started crying. I didn’t know what to do except hold on tight. I must have held on to her for two hours. Nobody disturbed us. It was like we had a bubble around us. She finally finished crying and dozed off on my shoulder. One of the counselors showed up then and took over.”

“I didn’t know her name, or what had happened to her, or what happened after, except they told me she recovered from her depression and made it back to a normal life. Then she found me several years later and thanked me for helping her when she needed it most. I was so relieved to know she was okay.”

Her fiancée leaned over and kissed the top of her head. Tim grinned wryly at the others. “That’s how we met. That girl, Angie? She was my sister. We had no idea she was having a problem with her medication for a physical problem she had. The doctors changed her medication, and after that she was fine. But she never showed any signs of depression, and if Beth hadn’t held onto her that night, there’s no telling what she might have done. The crisis center director told us when they contacted us that night that several teens had been in and all the counselors were busy. Beth was the answer to a prayer we didn’t even know we needed to make.”

Beth shook her head. “All I did was hold her. It was all I could think to do. Just hold on tight. I guess that’s why God didn’t let me kill myself. I needed to be there to stop her.”

Mack and Annabelle both laughed softly as they looked at each other. “Sounds like what we did, doesn’t it?” Annabelle said, chuckling. “We held on tight.”

Mack shook his head. “I think you did more holding on to me than I did to you, darling, but you were surely the answer to my prayer. Even if I was too angry with God to do any praying except to die.”

He looked up at the others. “I was a Marine in the middle East. I was the only survivor out of my squad, and I didn’t want to be. I had survivor’s guilt in a major way. I had injuries that left me in rehab, and I didn’t want to do any kind of physical therapy that would help me live.”

Annabelle shook her head and kissed him on the cheek. “He was awful. We were used to angry survivors at the rehab center I worked at, but he was a real handful. I was assigned as his physical therapist, and it only took a week for me to ask to be reassigned. But my boss knew how competitive I was, and asked me if I really wanted to let him win a battle of wills. I just couldn’t. I almost beat him over the head occasionally, but I wouldn’t give up.”

Mack laughed heartily. “She was tougher than my drill instructor in boot camp, just as determined to make me do what I didn’t want to. I think her threats were more imaginative, though.” He squeezed his wife’s shoulders. “One day I got so frustrated with her I told her I ought to marry her just to teach her a lesson. When she told me she would only marry a man who could stand beside her at the wedding, suddenly it just made me determined to do it. I still have bad moments, but I just reach for her and hold on tight. And here we are, three kids later!”

“They definitely taught me a lesson!” Annabelle laughed. “I thought I knew about kids!” She grinned at Christie. “What’s the most embarrassing moment your children put you through?”

At first Christie felt a clenching in her stomach, but then remembered a moment that still made her blush. Before she thought, she recounted it and was amazed to hear herself laughing with the others. Suddenly it was easy to talk about her children and husband and the wonderful, funny, exasperating, awful moments of their life together, and finally the painful, agonizing end.

She wept again, but it was not so painful or long this time. It felt more like a lancing of a boil, and she felt cleansed and peaceful afterward. She yawned, and blinked. “Thank you so much for listening to me. I really feel better, but I’m so,” she yawned again. “I’m tired. I think I’d better go to bed. Just make yourself comfortable, okay?”

They all nodded and said their goodnights. As she made her way to her bedroom, she found gratitude in her heart that they had helped her go through the painful memories and helped her remember the good times. It had been much better group therapy than she had found in the actual sessions she had tried.

For the first time in a year, Christie woke up feeling almost normal. The crushing weight was incredibly lighter. She was able to sit up and breathe without choking on tears. She wanted to get out of bed instead of curling up in a ball and hiding in the darkness. She felt alive again, with the darkness pushed back behind a cautious hope that she could go on without her family after all, for at least one more day.

The first thing she noticed was the silence. The wind had died. Sunlight glowed through the blinds. She listened carefully but heard nothing from her guests. Amazing, she thought, I could never get my own children to stay this quiet on Christmas morning. Surely they can’t still be asleep. Well, maybe, since they had a late night. She enjoyed the warm feeling the memory of her children brought instead of the crushing pain she usually felt.

She jumped out of bed and hurried to dress, wanting to see their faces as they woke and discovered the gifts under the tree on the wall. She smiled as she quickly threw on some pants and a sweater, remembering the work of art Beth had made. She was going to leave the tree, to remember her guests and how they had kept her from making what she was beginning to feel was a bad mistake.

She slipped out of her bedroom as quietly as possible, not wanting to wake the children if they still slept. She knew from experience it was better to get the adults awake and dressed, preferably with a cup of coffee already in them, before the children woke and began creating the chaos of Christmas morning. They especially needed to get up and away from the gifts next to the wall. That little four year old looked like she would not notice any adult she trampled on her way to Christmas presents.

She noticed the kitchen wall clock said it was 10:00 AM. Those kids were really sleeping in. As she neared the front door, she realized the guests’ coats were no longer on the coat tree. Mouth hanging open, she turned back to the children’s bedrooms and looked in quietly. Had they left already? Those rooms were empty, too. The beds were made, the rooms looking the same as they had the night before when she had entered for the first time in a year.

After checking the second bedroom, she dashed to the front door and threw it open. The driveway was empty. The snow was untouched, piled as high as the mounds around the porch. There was no sign any cars had ever been there. Christie ran her hands over her hair. But they had been there! She had spent hours with the people in those cars, had hugged and been hugged by them. She had eaten with them!

Remembering, she dashed to the kitchen, looking for the used food packages in the trash can, but they were not there. Throwing open the pantry, she found them all still there. Spinning around, she stared with blind eyes at the clean, neat room she had left the night before, before the cabin was invaded by her missing guests. They had invaded her miserable little world, used her bathrooms…

Christie stilled, remembering that Edith had put away her vodka and sleeping pills when she had used the master bathroom. She didn’t remember seeing them when she woke that morning. Muttering under her breath, “I’m not crazy, I’m not crazy!” she ran back to her bedroom and threw open her closet door. There, on the top shelf, behind a folded sweater, there were the vodka and pills, just like they had been left by Edith the night before!

She looked down, and grew very still as she saw the gifts she had taken out the night before. The bedding was folded and on the shelves with the deflated air mattress, just as it had been. Staggering backward, she sat down hard on the bed, her hands over her mouth. Had she dreamed it all? Had she dreamed so vividly that she put away the vodka and pills herself, walking in her sleep after changing her mind about suicide?

Before she could wonder about her sanity further, she heard the familiar noise of a snowmobile pull up out front and a masculine voice call out. “Hey, Mrs. Wright! Are you up? Did you come up this year? Hello?” The engine cut off and a knock came on the door shortly after.

Christie leapt to her feet and hurried to the front door. “Hello! Yes, I came to the cabin. How are you, Sergeant Mason?” Her visitor was a policeman from the town at the foot of the mountain, one of the pair who had the unhappy duty of breaking the bad news to her the year before. Christie blinked and swallowed as she suddenly realized that fact did not stab her heart as it always had before when she thought of him. He had been very kind to her through the ordeal, helping her deal with the details of death.

She smiled at him now, and he returned it, his rugged features glowing red from the cold. “Come in, come in! Were you checking all the cabins again?” She waved him in and shut the door behind him. Every year he showed up on Christmas Day. The first year he had arrived, he explained that he was checking all the cabins in the mountains around the town, making sure all the inhabitants were okay.

“Sure was. You were the last on my route. You doing okay? I wasn’t sure if you’d, well, after last year…” he trailed off awkwardly. His face flushed with embarrassment and he stared at the floor.

Christie felt her heart squeeze at his obvious misery, and impulsively she threw her arms around his tall figure and gave him a quick hug. “It’s been a bad year,” she admitted after she let go. “But I think I’m getting better, at least a little.”

He took her hands and looked her in the eyes intently, as if checking the truth of her words. “I’m glad. I’m really glad. I worried about you.” He glanced around the little entry way. “What were you planning to do with your day? Were you just going to stay here?” His voice was tentative as he peeked at her out of the corner of his eyes.

Christie blinked thoughtfully. She remembered how shy he was, and remembered he had mentioned once that he had never married and had no family, so he spent his holidays helping others. That hurt her now. Even though she had lost her family, she had years of happy memories, and photographs and home movies. It just wasn’t right to be alone on this day of all days.

“I hadn’t really thought about it,” she told him. “Do you have plans?”

His face brightened. “Uh, well, I always go help out at the homeless shelter and soup kitchen my church sponsors after I check all the cabins. The church folk give out gifts that we’ve collected through the year and make sure everybody has a hot meal and some food to take with them. We sing and the pastor does a service for them. Would, um, would you…like to join us?”

She smiled slowly, remembering her dream about her visitors and how they had made her feel better. Maybe that was what she needed, instead of isolating herself, to mix with those who had so much less than her. “I think I’d like that. How about you wait in the living room while I get something warmer on?” She thought of the gifts in the closet. “Sergeant Mason, I still have the, um, the gifts the children never got last year. Do you think they could use them at the shelter?”

“Sure!” he exclaimed. “But hey, call me Frank, will you? I’m not on duty, so it sounds kind of wrong.”

She laughed. “Fine, if you call me Christie. Calling me Mrs. Wright makes me think of my late mother in law.” She waved him toward the living room. “The light switch is next to the doorway. I’ll be back in just a minute.”

Hurrying to the bedroom, she threw on some thermals and a ski suit. She managed to get the gifts in a couple of pillow cases. Luckily none of them were very large. She paused and stared at the shelf in the closet as she retrieved the last gift. Impulsively, she grabbed the pills and vodka and dashed to the bathroom before she could change her mind and dumped both into the toilet and flushed. Dropping the bottle in the trash, she washed her hands and dried them with a feeling of finality. It was time to live again. She might have bad days again, but it was a beginning.

She headed for the living room with her bags of gifts in hand and her wallet zipped into her pocket with a small comb. She snatched the key to the front door off its hook and went to peek around the corner of the living room. Her eyebrows rose when she saw Frank standing near the wall staring at it.

“Ready to go?” she prompted.

He looked around and smiled. “Sure. I was just admiring your Christmas tree, here, and these terrific ornaments. Where did you get them? Was it a project for your grief therapy class?”

Christie’s mouth dropped open. “Christmas tree?” she whispered and stepped around the corner to see what he was examining. She swallowed hard as she stared at the beautiful Christmas tree painted on the wall, instead of the mere outline Beth had drawn. There were glittering gold and silver icicles painted in metallic enamels, with beautiful ornaments spread among them. An incredibly detailed angel spread her arms and wings at the top, smiling out at them.

She stepped closer and took a deep breath as she looked at the portraits of each of her guests from the night encased in lovely antique frames hanging on the wall. Her eyes filled as she spotted her children and husband among them.

Frank touched them almost reverently. “Where did you get the pictures?” He didn’t wait for her answer. “These are great. It’s nice to see them looking so good after having to work their accident scenes.”

Christie’s attention jerked to him. “You worked their accident scenes?” Cold sweat began to trickle down her back.

Frank didn’t seem to notice her tone. He nodded and touched the pictures one by one as he named them. “Some you don’t forget. These were especially bad for me because they all died at Christmas, same place as your family. Three years ago, the Williams and their kids. Mack, Annabelle, Jody, Ricky, Susanne. God help me, handling those kids hurt me and the others at the scene.”

“Two years ago, Tim Sutherland and his fiancée, Beth Cummins, on their way to get married in Vegas on Christmas Day. She had her wedding dress in the trunk. The rest of the car was demolished, but the luggage in the trunk wasn’t damaged at all. Her family had her buried in her dress next to her fiancé in his tuxedo.”

“Then last year, your family. You know, I don’t drink, but a bunch of us went out and got drunk after that one. We all had to go to a lot of counseling, but it didn’t help much. It’s just not right, happening like that at Christmas.”

Christie felt waves of heat and chills wash back and forth over her. “What…what about Edith Morton?” she finally managed to ask.

Grief and deep affection showed in his face and his voice as he touched her picture. “Miss Edith. She’s the reason I patrol all the cabins every Christmas. She outlived three husbands and her kids. We all wanted her to move down into town, since she was always there most of the time anyway, doing church work and helping out in the shelter and doing whatever she could to make folks’ lives a little better. Everybody in town adored her. We all worried about something happening to her, and it did.” He sighed brokenly. “It did.”

There were tears in his eyes as he looked over his shoulder at Christie. “Four years ago, she didn’t arrive for the church service on Christmas Day. She didn’t come to the homeless shelter. Nobody saw her. We should have checked on her. I should have checked on her. But everybody was busy with family and holiday stuff, and nobody did. When she didn’t come for the New Year’s Eve service it suddenly occurred to everybody that something might be wrong.”

He rubbed his eyes and sniffed. “I came up on my snowmobile. She was lying on the floor, her arm stretched out toward the phone. She used an old wood stove for heating, and the fire had gone out the first night. It was a deep freeze in her little cabin. They told us later she apparently had a fall in the kitchen and broke her hip, then tried to crawl to the phone in the living room.” His breath hitched. “She was making cookies for the shelter. The propane stove’s oven was still on, all the gas burned up. The medical examiner said she’d probably lain there for several days before she couldn’t hold on any more. If one of us had just cared enough to go check on her, instead of thinking our little problems were more important…”

Christie couldn’t help but put her arms around him as he shuddered, her mind going back to Edith’s warm comforting hug. “She was a lovely lady,” she told him softly. “And she’d probably be scolding you for feeling guilty about not finding her in time.”

Frank sniffed again and managed to laugh. “You know, she would. Did you get to meet her? I thought she died before you built the cabin here.”

Christie shook her head, not wanting to tell him the truth – at least not yet. “I heard a lot about her,” she told him, thinking that he had told her quite a bit. It wasn’t quite a lie.

His shoulders heaved with a deep sigh as she stepped back from him. “Anyway, that’s why I check all the cabins every Christmas now. I don’t ever want to find someone else that could have been saved if I just had cared enough to check. Sometimes after bad storms when I’m off duty I’ll come around just in case. Just in case,” he repeated softly with a hint of remaining regret. He didn’t see Christie swallow hard.

He turned his back on the tree with a determined smile and reached for the pillow cases. “These are the gifts? This will be great at the shelter. There always seems to be more folks than gifts, no matter how many we prepare. I’ll put them in my rack bag on the snowmobile. I’ve got a spare helmet for you.”

She followed him out, locking the door behind them. As he put away the gifts and handed her a helmet, he looked around them at the glittering snow and bright blue sky. “I’m glad the good Lord saw fit to give me my Christmas wish this year,” he said with a smile.

Christie raised her eyebrows and paused before putting the helmet on. “What wish was that?”

He looked suddenly embarrassed. “It just got to be too much, you know? Every Christmas, somebody dying. I’ve been seeing a counselor all year, but it wasn’t helping. I finally decided if I had to deal with one more death at Christmas, especially somebody I knew, I was just going to go home and put my pistol to my head. But I guess God heard me cry out.”

He fastened his helmet and swung his leg over the snowmobile’s saddle. “Hop on, and hold on tight!” he yelled as he started the engine. “Wouldn’t want to lose you!”

Stunned at how another tragedy had been narrowly averted, Christie almost staggered as she got on behind him, and wrapped her arms around him. “Hold on tight, yes. Oh, God, I promise I’m going to hold on tight from now on.”