The Mistletoe Promise

  However even that had now changed. I had wearied of Dan’s constant complaints about the cost of Hannah’s day care, so a week earlier I had found another place at nearly half the price. Since it was on my way to work, now I would have to leave even earlier to drop her off. I didn’t like the place as much as the day care where we’d been taking her, but since Dan’s commissions were always down during the summer, I decided it was at least worth giving it a try. I wasn’t used to the new routine, and one day I’d forgotten to drop her off and had had to turn around just a block from my work and take her to the new place.

  On this morning, Hannah was unusually quiet as I got her out of bed. “Are you tired, sweetie?” I asked.

  “Yes, Mama,” she replied.

  “I’m sorry you had to get up so early. I made you Mickey Mouse pancakes.”

  She smiled. I fed both of us at the same time. Dan stumbled out of bed as I was finishing up.

  “Pancakes,” he said dully. Dan was taciturn by nature, at least with me, and before nine o’clock getting more from him than a string of three words was rare.

  “What’s wrong with pancakes?” I asked.

  “Had them yesterday.”

  “No. I made crepes yesterday because you said you wanted them.”

  “Same diff,” he said, sitting down at the table.

  I shook my head as I carried our plates over to the sink. I filled the sink with soapy water, then looked down at my watch. “I’m going to be late. I need to grab Hannah’s bag, will you please put her in her car seat?”

  “Can’t you? I’m eating.”

  “Come on,” I said.

  “Whatever,” he said, standing.

  I quickly brushed my teeth, grabbed Hannah’s bag, and ran out to the car. “See you,” I said to Dan.

  “Bye,” he said, waving behind his back.

  I threw Hannah’s bag into the backseat of my Toyota. I looked back. She was asleep. “Sorry, sweetie,” I said softly.

  I had just pulled out of our subdivision when my cell phone rang. I checked the number. It was work.

  “Hello.”

  “Elise, it’s Shirlee,” my boss said. “We’ve got a problem.”

  “With who?”

  “The Tremonton group. Did you book the Smithsonian for today?”

  “No, they’re tomorrow.”

  “No, we changed it, remember?”

  I groaned. “That’s right.”

  “They’re standing outside the Smithsonian. They’re telling them that our vouchers aren’t good.”

  “Just call the office of direct sales. Natalie will let them in.”

  “Where’s the number?”

  “It’s in my Rolodex on my desk. Look under Smithsonian.”

  “Just a minute.” There was a long pause. “You don’t have Smithsonian here.”

  “Of course I do.”

  “I looked through all the S’s, Elise. It’s not here.”

  I was puzzled. “I don’t know where it would be. It’s got to be there.”

  “Do you have it in your phone?”

  “No.”

  Shirlee groaned. “There’s the driver on the other line. He’s got to go. He’s got another pickup.”

  “Just tell him to wait a second, I’ll be right there.”

  I sped into the office. I pulled into a parking place and ran inside. I had accidentally filed the Smithsonian card under N for Natalie. But that’s not the only mistake I made. I left my three-year-old Hannah in the car on the hottest day of the year.

  I’ve heard it said that there’s no greater pain than losing a child. But there is. It’s being responsible for your child’s death. The day it happened to me is indelibly etched into my mind. People have questioned the existence of hell, but I can tell you it’s real. I’ve been there. Seeing my beautiful little girl’s lifeless body in the backseat of my car was hell.

  I don’t know how long it took for the switch to connect, but after work when I got to my car I just looked at her, the sight incomprehensible. Why was Hannah in the car? Why wasn’t she moving? Then reality poured in like a river of fire. I pulled her out, screaming at the top of my lungs. A crowd gathered around me. I tried CPR, I tried mouth-to-mouth, I prayed with everything I had for a miracle, for a heartbeat, for a single breath, but she had been gone for hours. The world swirled around me like a tide pool, spinning me out of control. The paramedics arrived. The police arrived. There was talk of heatstroke and core temperatures and hyperthermia. I fell to the ground unable to walk, unable to do anything but scream and babble, to plead for my baby’s life.

  A police officer tried to get information from me, but it was like I wasn’t there. My little girl’s body was taken. I screamed as they took her away even though she was already gone. My Hannah. My reason for living, was gone.

  A woman came and put her arm around me. I don’t know who she was. I never saw her again. I wouldn’t recognize her if I did. She said little, but she was there. Like an angel. Somehow I could talk to her. “I want to die,” I said.

  “I know, honey,” she said. “I’m so sorry.”

  Then she was gone. Had I imagined her?

  The press arrived with cameras and video cameras. Dan arrived after them. “What have you done?” he shouted at me. “What have you done?” I couldn’t answer. I couldn’t even speak. I was catatonic.

  There were discussions on whether I should be tried for murder or manslaughter. There would be an investigation. It had already begun. People were talking to Dan. To Shirlee. To my co-workers. To people who didn’t know me well enough to speak about me. What kind of person was I? What kind of mother was I? No one asked me. I could have answered the latter. I was the worst kind. The kind who killed her own child.

  They put me in a police car and drove me downtown to the station. I waited alone in a room for more than an hour. It seemed like no one knew what to do with me. A few police officers came in and asked me questions. Inane questions. Did I know she was in the car? Had I left her in the car on purpose? When did I realize she was in the car? “Probably when I started screaming hysterically and collapsed,” I wanted to say.

  Then a man about my age came and talked to me. He wasn’t with the police. He wore a suit. His voice was calm. Sympathetic. He asked me questions, and I mostly just blinked at him. He told me that he was from the prosecutor’s office or someplace official. He finished with his questions and spoke with the police. There was a discussion on whether or not I should be arrested and fingerprinted, but the man intervened. The talk of court and jail scared me, but nothing they could do could match the pain I already felt. Someone asked if I wanted a sedative. I turned it down. I deserved to feel the pain. I deserved to feel every barb, every hurt, then, God willing, to die.

  And the barbs came. My Hannah’s death set off a firestorm of media. The television covered it, reducing my tragedy to four minutes of entertainment followed by a commercial for tires. Both newspapers, the Deseret News and The Salt Lake Tribune, weighed in. There were columns of letters to the editor about me. Some said I deserved life in prison for what I’d done. Some said I should be locked in a car with the windows rolled up. I agreed with the latter. The cruelest thing said was that I had killed my Hannah on purpose.

  Most confusing to me was how deeply people I didn’t know hated me. The attacks lasted for months. I don’t know why strangers went so far out of their way to hate me. Maybe it made them feel like better people. Or better parents. Maybe it convinced them that they would never do such a thing. Maybe it masked their fears that they were flawed like me.

  I noticed stories like mine everywhere. One British lawyer called it forgotten baby syndrome. It’s not a syndrome, I thought. It’s an accident. A horrible, exquisite accident. A failure of humanity.

  Once a psychiatrist on TV spoke out for me. He said, “Our conscious mind pri
oritizes things by importance, but our memory does not. If you’ve ever left your cell phone in your car, you are capable of forgetting your child.” He pointed out that this was an epidemic and there were scores of stories like mine. In one state three children died in one day. He said that this was a new phenomenon, that ten years ago it rarely happened because parents kept their babies near them in the front seat. Then airbags came, and our babies were put out of the way, where we couldn’t see them.

  He explained that there were two main reasons that people left babies in cars: change of routine and distraction. I’d had both. He said, rightly, that no punishment society could give could match what I was already feeling. I don’t know how he knew. I guess it’s his job to know.

  Through it all, Dan’s moods were as volatile as the Utah weather. He was supportive and sympathetic, then, sometimes in the same hour, angry and brooding. He was always moody. He was gone a lot. I didn’t know where he went. I didn’t really care. It was easier being alone. I was fired from my job, not that I could have worked. I stayed in bed most of the time, hiding from the world, wishing that I could hide from myself.

  Then, one night, I got sick with appendicitis. If I had known that my appendix had already burst, I might not have gone to the hospital. If I had stayed home for just another hour or two, I could have ended it all. I had been given a way out. I don’t know why I didn’t take it. Perhaps, in spite of my self-loathing and pain, some part of me still longed to live.

  As I lay in bed wracked with fever, I thought about my life. It was then that I had an epiphany. It came to me that one day I might see my sweet little girl again. What if she asked me what I had done with my life? I was not honoring her by retreating from the world—from life. At that moment I resolved that things might be different. That I might be different. That I might be better.

  Then my husband divorced me.

  CHAPTER

  Twelve

  Even in the darkest of days there are oases of joy. And there’s usually pie.

  Elise Dutton’s Diary

  As a rare gesture of magnanimity, Mark closed the office two hours early on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving. On the way home from work I stopped at the grocery store for pie ingredients. It had been years since I’d made pies. I unearthed the old cookbook my mother had written her pie secrets in; that cookbook was one of the few possessions I got after my mother’s death.

  Before settling in to bake I put the Mitch Miller Holiday Sing Along CD on my stereo to set the mood. The truth was, I was already in a good mood. It seemed that I always was when I was about to see Nicholas.

  Nicholas arrived at my apartment a little before six. I had finished making all the crusts, and the cherry and apple pies were in the oven, along with a baking sheet spread with pecan halves.

  “I got here as soon as I could,” he said apologetically. He carried a paper coffee cup in each hand, and a large white plastic bag hung from the crux of his arm. He breathed in. “It smells heavenly.” He handed me a cup. “I got you a salted caramel mocha.”

  “How do you always know what I want?”

  “It’s easy. I find the sweetest thing on the menu and order it.”

  “You’ve pretty much got me figured out,” I said.

  “It’s probably sacrilege, but I brought us Chinese for dinner. I got wonton soup, sweet and sour pork, walnut shrimp, and pot stickers.”

  “Which will all go nicely with pumpkin pie,” I said. We walked into the kitchen. Nicholas set the bag of Chinese down on the table.

  “So, I’m making apple, cherry, pumpkin, and pecan,” I said. “The apple and cherry are already in the oven. They’re just about done.”

  Nicholas examined the latticework on my apple and cherry pies through the oven window. “Those are works of art,” he said. “Where did you learn to make pies?”

  “My mother. She was famous for her pies. Well, about as famous as you can get in Montezuma Creek. She won a blue ribbon for her cherry pie at the San Juan County fair. It was the only prize she ever won. She hung it in the living room next to my father’s bowling trophies.” I opened the oven and took out the pies, setting them on the counter to cool. “I don’t have a lot of happy memories from my childhood, but when she made pie, life was good. Everyone was happy. Even my father.”

  “My mother always made pies at special times,” Nicholas said, “like the holidays or special family get-togethers. But my favorite part of pie making was after she was done and she would take the leftover dough, sprinkle it with cinnamon and sugar, then bake it.”

  “I know, right!” I said, clapping my hands. “Piecrust cookies. They’re the best. Which is why I made extra dough.”

  “You’re going to make some tonight?” Nicholas asked.

  “Absolutely,” I said. “When the pies are done.”

  “So, what fat do you use for your crust? Butter, shortening, or lard?”

  “My mother was old school. She said that lard made the flakiest piecrust. She thought butter was lazy and shortening was a sin. She was religious about it.”

  “People get a little fanatic about pies,” Nicholas said.

  “I’m just getting ready to mix the pecan pie filling. Would you mind getting the pecans out of the oven? The mitts are right there.”

  “On it,” he said.

  While he brought the baking sheet out of the oven, I mixed the other ingredients.

  “Where do you want the pecans?” he asked.

  “Go ahead and pour them in here,” I said.

  “The pecans rise to the top?”

  “Like magic.”

  In the end I made four regular-size pies for Thanksgiving as well as two tart-size pies—one pecan, one pumpkin—for us to eat with our dinner.

  After the last of the pies were in the oven, we sat on the floor in the living room and ate our Chinese food with chopsticks. This was followed by the small pies for dessert and piecrust cookies as a post dessert with decaf coffee.

  As I finished my coffee I lay back on the carpet. “I’m too full for Thanksgiving dinner.”

  “No, we’re just stretching out our stomachs to get ready for Thanksgiving dinner,” Nicholas said.

  “That’s a brilliant excuse for gluttony,” I said.

  “My father used to say that,” he said. “He used to make a big breakfast Thanksgiving morning.”

  “I bet your mother loved that.”

  “Oh yeah, a dirty kitchen to start with.”

  “Thanks for bringing us dinner,” I said. “What was the name of that restaurant?”

  “Asian Star,” he said. “And it was nothing. If I’d known you were such a good cook, I would have added a clause in the contract requiring you to cook for me.”

  “You didn’t have to,” I said. “I’m happy to cook for you whenever you want.”

  “There’s an open-ended commitment,” he said. “Speaking of commitments, how is the contract going?”

  “Our contract?”

  “The Mistletoe Promise,” he said.

  I wondered why he was asking. “I think it’s going very well.”

  “So you’re glad you signed?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good,” he said.

  We decided to watch television as we waited for the last of the pies to bake. I turned the lights out, and we sat next to each other on the couch. I handed Nicholas the remote, and he channel-surfed for a few minutes until we came to It’s a Wonderful Life on PBS.

  “Let’s watch this,” I said. “I love Jimmy Stewart.”

  “And that Donna Reed,” Nicholas said. “That is one low-maintenance woman.”

  “Like me,” I said.

  He smiled. “Just like you.”

  I must have been exhausted, because I don’t remember falling asleep next to him. Actually, on him. I woke with my head on his shoulder. I jumped up
.

  “You’re okay,” he said.

  “The pies?” I said. “I didn’t hear the buzzer.”

  “I got them out. They look perfect. Marie Callender herself would be proud.”

  He turned off the television, then walked me to my bedroom. I sat down on the edge of the bed, rubbing my forehead and yawning. “Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome. I’ll see you tomorrow. I’ll just let myself out.”

  “Nicholas,” I said.

  “Yes?”

  “Are you glad you signed the contract?”

  He smiled, then came up next to me and kissed me on the forehead. “I’d do it again.”

  CHAPTER

  Thirteen

  It seems a long time since I remembered all I have to be grateful for. Perhaps that’s why it’s been such a long time since I’ve been really happy.

  Elise Dutton’s Diary

  Thanksgiving arrived with a heavy snowfall, and I woke to the sound of plows scraping the road. Around nine the snow stopped, and the roads were clear by the time Nicholas arrived at two. Traversing a slippery sidewalk, we carried the pies out to his car, laid them on lipped cookie sheets on his backseat, and drove off to Thanksgiving dinner.

  “Tell me about the Hitesmans,” I said as we drove.

  “You’ll like them. Good people. Scott is one of those small-town boys who made good.” He turned to me. “He grew up in Burley, Idaho, working the potato fields. Went to Yale for law. The firm picked him up out of college.”

  “What’s his wife’s name?”

  “Sharon. You’ll love her. She’s one of those people who’s always baking bread for the neighbors or visiting people in the hospital.”