Finding Father Christmas (3 page)

He did not move. Neither did I.

The gap between us remained a flat distance of undisturbed, watery space.

My mother swam about freely, silently. I bobbed and blinked only when I had to. Then she motioned for me to follow as she
slipped out of the pool.

We trotted as quickly as we could back to our room.

With a finger to her lips, she said, “We must hurry before one of them follows us into our room. Dragons are drawn in by the
scent of chlorine.”

She silently slid the key into the door and jiggled it once, twice, three times.

“Hurry!” my tiny voice begged. The legs of my cotton pajamas clung to me as the dripping pool water puddled at our doorstep,
leaving more traceable chlorine with every drop.

“Open!” my mother commanded the doorknob. Suddenly the key worked. We pressed through together as I stifled my squeals.

My mother quickly shut the door, locked it, bolted it with the chain, and motioned for me to cautiously peek out the front
window behind the closed curtain. I squinted at the submerged yellow eye that hadn’t moved from the pool’s deep end. We stood
together, barely breathing in the darkness, reeking of chlorine. My heart raced deliciously.

A few days later I was in our motel room alone, waiting for Carlita to arrive. I had planted myself in a chair beside the
window and was watching a girl in a flowered bathing suit as she squealed and splashed in the pool.

I wasn’t on a vacation like she was. I lived there at the Swan Motel, and I knew all about the yellow-eyed dragon that came
out on sweltering nights and breathed his fiery breath across the pool water. I wondered if I should tell her.

The blithe girl scrambled up on her father’s shoulders, plugged her nose, and did a clumsy free-fall dive into the deep end.
She did it again. And again. She had no fear.

I wanted to do that. I wanted to gallop down to the pool and join them. I wanted to be the next one to dive off the shoulders
of the laughing girl’s strong father into the pool. I wanted what she had.

Hurrying to put on my bathing suit, I returned to the chair by the window. As soon as Carlita arrived, I would convince her
to take me down to the pool. I would finagle my way into the father-daughter diving contest somehow. Once I did, I would be
the best diver of all. The girl’s father would cheer the loudest for me.

Then something inside me said no. That would never be so.

The man in the pool was her father. He was not my father. He would always cheer the loudest for her. No father would ever
cheer the loudest for me.

That was the first time I realized what a gift a father was. And I hadn’t been given such a gift.

Carlita came puffing up the motel steps and bustled into the room, wheezing with apologies for her delay.

“I want a father,” I said.

Carlita chuckled. “Most girls your age want a pony.”

“Well, I don’t want a pony. I want a father.” I stood up and put my hands on my hips, imitating my mother’s extended chin
gesture just so Carlita would know I wasn’t making a childish request.

“You have a father.” She set down her small bag of groceries.

“I do not.”

“Yes, you do. Everyone has a father. Every person who has ever been born has a father. A father and a mother. It takes the
two for you to be born.”

I scowled at her. Carlita had no magic in her words the way my mother did.

In a more instructive tone she said, “This does not mean that every child gets to live with both her father and her mother.
But you do have both. Everyone has both. You have a father, Miranda.”

“Then where is he?” My voice was still defiant but diminished.

“Your father is somewhere. I don’t know. Maybe he is dead. It does not matter. You have a mother who loves you and cares enough
for you. You should be grateful. Now sit down. I have brought you some cookies.”

That night, when my mother slid into bed next to me, I pretended to be asleep. When she was making the soft, sighing sounds
of sleep, I rolled over and whispered to her, “Do I have a father?”

“Hmmm?”

I had often heard her carry on conversations in her sleep. Sometimes the half sentences were lines from one of her performances.
Other times she twisted her neck and yelled at people with a muffled fierceness I never heard in her waking hours. My plan
was to make her respond to me while those mesmerizing eyes of hers were shut.

I wanted to know the truth, so I tried to sound like an adult. “Eve Carson, the actress, does your daughter, Miranda, have
a father?”

What proceeded to roll off my mother’s naked lips was
the familiar litany of the moonlight and the moss and me, the watermelon that popped out.

Her answer was acceptable to me. Under careful examination she hadn’t changed her story. Clearly, I didn’t have a father.
Car-lita was wrong. She didn’t know everything the way my mother did, and I would tell Carlita that the next time she came.

But Carlita didn’t come the next time.

Instead, her teenage daughter, Angela, came. When Angela arrived, I had discovered a splinter in the palm of my hand, but
all the pinching and biting I tried did nothing to bring it to the surface. Angela made me go look for a sewing kit so she
could use the needle to remove the splinter.

“Your mother must have a little sewing kit somewhere,” she prodded. “Every mother does. Look in all the drawers.”

I dutifully scoured our sparse belongings and made a discovery. The bottom lining of my mother’s green Samsonite suitcase
was loose. It could be removed. Under the flat panel I saw for the first time the blue velvet purse with the golden tassels.

“Is that a sewing kit?” Angela asked.

“I don’t know.”

“Well, open it!”

I lifted the top flap of the purse. The smooth fabric was folded over like an envelope. I carefully shook the contents onto
the bed. The inventory included a folded-up playbill of a production of Shakespeare’s
The Tempest
with my mother’s name next to the character “Miranda.” Also inside was a certificate with a raised emblem in the corner and
a wallet-sized photograph of a wailing young boy in an awful green sweater sitting on the lap of a bemused, wizard-looking
Santa Claus.

Without a blink, Angela picked up the paper with the raised emblem. She took one look at it and repeated the same truth her
mother had told me. The truth that my own mother had successfully kept hidden from me.

I did indeed have a father.

I had a birth certificate that came from a hospital, and even I knew that papers with raised seals on them had to tell the
truth. The paper had a name written in on the line above the word “Father.” The name was Jay Ames. He was real, my father.
And my mother had kept him from me.

That day I vowed I would never go to another play. It was the only way I could think of to get back at Eve Carson, the actress,
for all her lies, all her grand performances, all her many worlds of make-believe.

I denounced fables and fairy tales. Every mythical creature she had ever introduced me to ceased to exist. The tooth fairy,
the Easter bunny, and especially Santa Claus.

The only fable I still believed in was the yellow-eyed dragon that drank from our motel pool on scorching nights. I had
seen
him.

In place of my imaginary friends, I secretly began to believe in my father. I believed he must be somewhere on this earth,
lying in wait, with one eye open, wondering about me the way I wondered about him.

M
ore tea?”

The question from Katharine reached into the depths where I had gone in my memories and carried me back up to the present
and to England and to this place of comfort and serenity.

“I’ve brought some hot water.” Katharine placed a white ceramic teapot on the table. “I can bring fresh tea, if you like.
If you wish only to warm up the pot you have, you can add the hot water. The tea leaves might have made the tea too strong
by now.”

“Okay. Thank you.”

She didn’t step away.

“The scones are very good, by the way.”

“Would you like another?”

“No. I will take the bill, though. How much do I owe you?”

“Nothing.” She waved her hand. “Let this be my small Christmas gift to you.”

“No, really, I would like to pay.” I reached for my wallet.

“Not this time,” she said with a calm firmness. “This time I would like to give to you. Next time you can give to me.”

It seemed strange that her hospitality-clad services alluded
to a “next time.” I thought I had made it clear that I was passing through and had no plans to stay or to return.

“Have you decided then about the performance this evening?”

I paused. All my self-preservation instincts told me to be on my way. Ignore the possibility that someone else in town might
be able to identify the man and the boy in the photograph. I didn’t need to know. The mystery of my father’s identity could
die with me the way it had died with my mother eighteen years ago. If my mother were here today, she would be thrilled to
go to the performance. I was not.

“Would your mother like to come, then?” Katharine asked.

I looked at her hard. Had I said something aloud about my mother? I thought my reminiscences had been only in my mind.

Several friends and roommates had told me over the years that I talked in my sleep as well as in my waking. They told me when
I was deep in thought I would carry out the process half in silence and half in mutterings. I must have mentioned my mother,
thus prompting Katharine’s question about her.

“My mother passed away quite some time ago.”

Surprisingly, I felt secure enough to add my simple, well-rehearsed paragraph. It was a disclosure that evoked sympathy while
at the same time closing the door on the topic.

“She fell from a scaffold at an outdoor theater in Salinas when I was eleven. It was a dress rehearsal for
The Merchant of Venice.
She died from internal injuries two days later. However, the show did go on.”

I realized that what I had just revealed to Katharine sufficiently explained why I wasn’t on speaking terms with the theater.
Even without my boycott of all things make-believe,
this information was enough. Katharine certainly would withdraw her invitation to the Dickens performance.

She seemed unruffled, though. “I’m quite sad for your loss.”

I nodded my appreciation for the care in her voice. Now that we had that piece out of the way, as often happened in my relationships,
I felt we could go on to the business at hand. My business, as I saw it, was to be on my way to the train station.

Katharine’s business seemed to be waiting for an answer about the play.

“I need to go back to London.” I pushed the chair away from the table and slung my big purse over my shoulder. “Thank you
again for the tea and the scones. They were delicious.” I paused at the front door. “Are you sure I can’t pay you, though?”

“Next time,” she said with a smile. A silver earring peeking out from under her dark hair caught the light of the candle on
the table and gave me a silvery goodbye twinkle.

I stepped out into the cold with much less gusto than the kilt-clad “Christmas Present” had earlier. Immediately, the chill
went through me, and I wished for a longer coat.

“That’s what I’ll give myself for Christmas,” I said as I headed downhill on Bexley Lane.

This time I knew I was expressing my thoughts aloud. It didn’t matter. No one was around to hear me. I decided I would spend
tomorrow, Christmas Day, in my London hotel room. Understandably, I felt most nostalgically at home whenever I was in a hotel
room.

Then the day after Christmas I would go out shopping for a new coat. Surely London had after-Christmas sales that rivaled
the ones in San Francisco.

That way, when I returned to the office next week, I would have something to show for my on-a-whim spree to London.

My legs stretched to their full length as I picked up my pace and retraced the path to the train station. Windows on either
side of the lane were lined with festive decorations that jived in the gale that accompanied me, whistling down the lane.
One of the two-story brick buildings was adorned with a single lit candle on each windowsill of the four symmetrical windows.
Another place of residence had a large pot by the front door in which a four-feet-tall evergreen was strung with twinkling
white lights and red bows tied to the ends of the branches.

I turned the corner toward the train station and pulled the collar of my peacoat closer to my ears. The charm of the Tea Cosy
pervaded the village of Carlton Heath. If I ever decided to believe in fairy tales again, this would be the setting in my
mind’s eye.

Long, slender branches on the tall trees spread their protective embrace over glowing streetlights and stone cottages. The
trees didn’t seem to notice that they had lost all their foliage. Their role hadn’t changed with the fierceness of the seasons,-they
still sheltered the people and the dwelling places on Bex-ley Lane.

I kept walking. Down the hill, around the corner, and past the ivy-covered chapel. I paused only a moment to have a look at
the softly lit church with the arched entryway. It seemed to me as if the church were wearing her rambling cemetery like an
appliquéd blanket. The blanket tumbled from the foot of the rose bed and fell haphazardly over a hundred sleeping kernels
of life, lives that had built the chapel, paved the roads, and taken tea beside many a soot-covered hearth.

Now they were all silent.

One life. That’s all we get. When will mine be silenced? Or should I be asking when will it truly begin?

I crossed the street and tried not to think of anything but my numb feet all the way to the train station. The station had
a covered platform and a little station house. A single bench rested against the waiting area’s back wall. A newspaper kiosk
was positioned in one corner, and the ticket booth filled the opposite corner next to the blinking cash machine.