Hot Secrets

  She’d deliberately chosen The Gift of The Magi.

  An old-fashioned tale of old-fashioned feelings—love, tenderness, sacrifice.

  Feelings utterly foreign to the kids gathered in front of her. Their lives were dark and dangerous. Many of them had been betrayed by the very people who were supposed to protect them.

  At first, they’d squirmed as they started to understand that the story wouldn’t be slam-bang fast like video games and the few TV shows they watched on ancient donated sets in the shelters. There were words they clearly didn’t understand and which she carefully explained. Pier glass, fob, meretricious.

  She skirted around O. Henry’s meaning of “chorus girls,” painfully aware that several of the kids had moms who gave blow jobs in back seats for twenty five bucks apiece. The language was archaic and slow and foreign to them. The emotions, too.

  But they got there. Because, although the type of love that existed in the story wasn’t one they’d seen firsthand, it was something every human aspired to. Something everyone instinctively understood.

  They were baffled at first, looking around at each other, rolling their eyes as the story unfolded. But, as she suspected they would be, they were slowly drawn in, helplessly attracted by the kind of experiences they’d likely never encountered. Generosity and true love.

  Her husband, Jack, had grown up as they had.

  Worse, even. Some of these kids, like little Manuel sitting quietly at the outer edges of the group, had mothers who loved them. His stepfather was a drug addict who was so violent there was a restraining order against him. But Manuel’s mother cared for Manuel. Caroline sometimes did readings in his shelter and he always nestled at her side like a small brown bird. Clothes old but carefully mended and clean.

  Jack had never had a mother’s love. He had never known his mother. All he’d known was shelter after shelter in the grip of a violent drunk for a father.

  Utterly unlike her own early experience of life in the embrace of a solid, loving family. She’d lost her family to tragedy at twenty, but nothing could ever erase two decades of love.

  Jack had turned into the finest man she knew, thanks to his rock-solid character and a few lucky breaks. These kids, too—born and raised in degradation—could turn their lives around. All they needed was to know that it was possible.

  If you believed something was possible, you could make it come true. Caroline believed that from the bottom of her heart.

  At the end, there was utter silence in the room, so different from the squirming and punching and shouting at the beginning. It had started to snow and in the silence you could hear the odd needle of sleet embedded in the snow as it hit the windows. Though the kids suffered in the cold, with frayed clothes and inadequate shoes, the few heads that turned to the window smiled at the snow falling like clouds, making the lit store windows along State Street glow with an unearthly light.

  Caroline was glad that a sense of beauty hadn’t been beaten out of them yet.

  “So, kids.” She put the book away carefully and leaned forward, looking each child in the eye. Unconsciously they leaned forward, too, watching her. Realizing that she saw them. Was listening to them.

  I was invisible, her husband had said of his early life in shelters. Nobody saw me except you.

  “What happened? How did Jim show his love for his wife?”

  It had been a suggestion of her father, to volunteer at the shelter—she who had grown up with so much. Her eyes had been opened and she’d discovered an entire new layer of reality. Including befriending a tall, gangly boy who’d been hungrier for learning than he’d been for food. She’d brought him books he devoured until she realized he was also literally hungry, and started bringing sandwiches together with books.

  He’d disappeared one Christmas and she hadn’t seen him again until he showed up twelve years later—a man so completely changed she hadn’t recognized him.

  These kids felt as invisible as Jack had felt. There were more and more of them in this recession—women and children falling through the cracks. Unseen, unwanted, unloved.

  Small arms were waving, like branches in the wind in a tiny forest. “Me, me, me!” they cried.

  Caroline smiled. She was determined to let every kid speak, be heard. Then they would troop across the street to Sylvie’s tea shop, where hot chocolate and muffins and a gift book for every child awaited. The Hunger Games. Because Jim and Della were the ideal, but Katniss . . . Katniss showed that you could grow up in terrible circumstances and you could still fight back—and prevail.

  “Okay, Jamal.” She pointed to a kid in the front row, whose eyes had grown larger and larger as the story progressed. She knew each kid’s story—she’d insisted on it. She wanted to know who they were, what their lives were about. Jamal had no father and five half-siblings, all from different men. “How did Jim show his love for Della?”

  “He sold his watch so he could buy a comb for her.”

  Yes, indeed. She’d read The Gift of the Magi a million times but it still made her smile.

  “That’s right. And why did he have to sell the watch?”

  Silence. The reason was so very close to their lives. “Because he was poor,” one girl whispered finally. “They were both poor.” Shawna, who was twelve but so thin she looked eight.

  “He could have stolen the comb and kept his watch,” Caroline gently suggested. Twenty small heads nodded. Yes indeed, he could have. “Why didn’t he?”

  Silence once more. Why Jim hadn’t stolen the comb was not very clear to them. In their world, a lot of people stole. It was just a question of not getting caught.

  “Because . . .” a shy voice said, a slight lisp on the s. He couldn’t be seen because he was behind Mack, who was huge for his age, but Caroline knew who it was. Manuel. Manuel, whose mother had been put in the hospital five times in the past year by his stepfather and was in the hospital right now.

  “Because?” Caroline said.

  “Because it showed how much he loved her.”

  “That’s right, Manuel. Not stealing the comb—but rather, sacrificing something he cared about to buy something for her—showed how much he loved his wife. And she made a sacrifice too, didn’t she? Who can tell me what she sacrificed?” Another forest of small arms. “Lucy?”

  “Her hair. She sold her hair for him,” Lucy sighed. Her mother was an addict who sold herself to buy drugs. Lucy’d been a ward of the state several times while her mother went to rehab. True love wasn’t a big part of her world.

  “That’s right. So, kids, if you could buy anything at all for your mom or your dad or a sister or brother—what would it be?”

  “Anything at all?” Jamal asked, scrunching his face up in puzzlement.

  “Go wild,” Caroline smiled. “Anything at all.”

  “PlayStation 4, for my mom,” Jamal said decisively, and the room erupted in laughter.

  It was an interesting exercise. It was probably the first time they’d ever thought about being able to get anything themselves without stealing it. And, for many, the first time they’d thought of sharing. Their lives were impoverished in every way there was. The gift ideas were all over the place—a house, a job, a dad out of prison, a trip to Disneyland, a pair of red shoes, a new car. Everyone spoke but Manuel.

  Caroline watched him, sitting small and quiet. Trying very hard not to be noticed.

  Jack had told her about his early childhood, when he’d been small and weak. Perfecting the art of sliding by without attracting attention because attention was, more often than not, painful. Hiding in the shadows, never speaking, because anything could set his father off. And even when not speaking, his father could fill himself with rage all by himself.

  Then Jack had grown big and strong and no one bothered him after the age of fourteen.

  But before then, before filling out, he’d been prey. He’d taken care of that by joining the army and then the super elite soldiers, the Ra
ngers. Jack was definitely not prey any more. And Jack had made it his life’s work to teach the weak to defend themselves.

  He was a security consultant, a very successful one. If you were a bank or a corporation and you wanted his expert help, he was happy to give it, at a premium price. He also ran a dojo school and fitness center, and if you were a lawyer or an executive hoping to firm up your abs and glutes, why, Jack was your man—at two hundred dollars an hour, when you could get him.

  But if you were young and poor—and above all, if you were female—you got the best help in the world and the bill was torn up.

  While the kids proposed wild presents, she glanced out the window at the Cup of Tea. Across the street her friend Sylvie waved. A big table with a red tablecloth, plastic cups and a huge thermos, and festive red plates had been set out in the center of the tea shop. Along the counter were enough muffins to feed a brigade of soldiers—just waiting for the kids. Time to wrap this up.

  One more kid.

  “Manuel? What do you think your mom would like as a present?”

  He was silent a long moment, long enough for the chattering of the kids to die down. He swallowed, small Adam’s apple bobbing. “For my step-dad to die,” he whispered.

  Caroline actually felt her heart contract—with pity, with sorrow, with the heaviness of painful truth. Because it was true. Manuel’s life and his mother’s life would be infinitely better without that violent monster in it.

  It wasn’t until she’d worked in the shelter that she’d even known there was such a thing as bad fathers in the world. Her own father had been wonderful—loving and generous and fun. A larger-than-life figure whose love for his wife and children was manifested a thousand times a day.

  Caroline was pregnant. She’d taken the test first thing this morning in the bookshop. She knew how much Jack wanted a child, so she didn’t run the test at home. No sense disappointing him. Somehow, though, even before the strip had turned red, she knew.

  Just as she knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that Jack would be a marvelous father. He’d probably be wildly overprotective, as he was with her, but he’d be there for his children in every way there was. She also had no doubt that he’d give his life for her without question. As he would for any children they might have.

  Jack had come late to love, but he cherished it. Caroline hoped with all her heart that the young souls in front of her would one day experience the precious gift of love for themselves.

  She thought of all she had in her own life—a loving husband, the beautiful home she’d grown up in, the prospect of a child to love—with enormous gratitude, because between the death of her family when she was twenty and the sudden, mysterious reappearance of Jack in her life, there had been hard, barren years. Years in which she’d cared for a sick brother, had watched her friends disappear one by one as her life grew harder and money grew scarcer. Years of working hard and watching her brother die, inch by slow inch. Years in which she couldn’t allow herself to cry at night because Toby would have noticed her swollen eyes and blamed himself. Years of hardship and sorrow.

  She knew firsthand how hard it was to hope when all around you is bleakness and despair.

  But on this Christmas Eve, at least there’d be hot chocolate and muffins and a book for these children.

  She clapped her hands. “Kids! Let’s get ready! Put on your coats because we’re going across the street for a treat.”

  The artificial lull created by the storytelling was over. The noise level rose and the twenty kids seemed to become a hundred and fifty as they pulled on ragged coats and dirty scarves.

  The noise level was so loud she didn’t hear the bell over the shop door ring, and only understood that someone had entered because within a minute, all the kids fell silent.

  She looked behind her and froze.

  Oh shit, was her first thought. She was instantly ashamed of it. The man who entered looked like a thug, but she knew better than to judge solely on appearance. One of Jack’s best friends looked like an extra out of Resident Evil—rode a big black bike and spoke in a low growl—and was a sweetheart.

  This man had the Resident Evil vibe down pat, but he didn’t look like a sweetheart at all.

  While her head was running through all this, her body went right ahead into overdrive. Sweat broke out all over and her heart kicked into a thumping beat guaranteed to pulse blood to her extremities simply because her body recognized that she was going to need it.

  Nonetheless, ten thousand years of civilization and her mother’s strict upbringing had her asking in a perfectly normal tone, “May I help you?”

  The man had been scanning the room but at her voice he turned slowly toward her, and her involuntary danger signals started booming.

  He was truly huge—taller even than Jack, and seemingly twice as broad. But where Jack was all tight muscle, this man looked like vats of lard had been thrown onto his frame before he’d been shoehorned into clothes. Underneath the fat, though, there had once been muscle. He must have weighed three hundred pounds, every ounce mean and stinking.

  The stench reached across the room. Booze, unwashed clothes, unwashed man, and that awful something some humans emanated that was like a dog whistle to normal people. This man is crazy. She’d seldom come across it, but it was unmistakable.

  There was absolute silence. The kids all had an instinctive understanding that danger had just walked into the room. They’d lived shoulder to shoulder with danger. Several of the kids were hunched in on themselves as if to make themselves smaller. Some had hidden under her desk, in corners; some stood frozen, white-faced.

  The man was dressed in filthy leather pants and a leather vest with no shirt, as if impervious to the cold outside. He shook the snow off himself like a polar bear and took a step forward.

  God, he was big.

  Jack had taught Caroline a lot of martial arts moves but there was nothing she could do against someone this massive. She simply didn’t have the weight or muscle mass.

  And anyway, the guy was flying higher than a kite.

  Looking closer, it was clear. The pupils were dilated and his eyes were slightly unfocused. He swayed a little where he stood as if he were in a strong wind, though there was no wind in her bookstore. Just twenty little kids and a very frightened bookshop owner.

  “Can I help you?” she repeated, keeping her voice neutral and soft, exactly as if she were trying to calm a wild beast.

  “Help me?” he repeated. “Can you fucking help me? Yeah, lady. Yeah, you can help me.” His eyes narrowed. “Looking for my boy. Manuel.”

  Oh God, oh God. This man didn’t only look dangerous, he was dangerous. He’d nearly killed his wife. He was like a walking bomb in her bookshop—a bookshop filled with twenty young kids. Her breath clogged in her lungs. She didn’t dare look around, but from what she could see in her peripheral vision, Manuel had disappeared.

  “So.” The man swayed. For a second she hoped that he’d simply collapse to the ground, stoned, but he stayed on his feet. “Where the fuck’s my boy?”

  Caroline swallowed heavily. She heard Jack’s voice in her head. What do you do if you sense trouble, honey?

  They’d gone over it a million times, and each and every time they talked about it, he tried to convince her to carry a weapon. He’d lived in a dangerous world all his life and he was always armed in some way.

  Not to mention the fact that, to a certain extent, Jack’s entire body was a weapon.

  “Where is he?” the man bellowed, voice hoarse and cracking. “Where the fuck is my boy? Where’s that little shit?” Her heart nearly stopped when he reached behind him and a big black knife appeared in his hand.

  In that instant, Caroline regretted bitterly not taking Jack up on his constant offers to teach her how to shoot. Oh man, if she had a gun and knew how to use it, she’d drill him right between the eyes—without any compunction at all, because it was clear he was here to hurt.

/>   His black, piggy eyes scanned the room with a narrow focus and he moved toward the kids. One girl screamed, the sound abruptly cut off by her own hand. The kids were like small animals, hoping to avoid the gaze of the predator in their midst.

  The man growled at the girl, moving forward unsteadily.

  Caroline stepped in front of him. He swatted her away backhanded like a bothersome fly.

  His blow took her by surprise. She landed against the corner of the bookshelf, the breath knocked out of her, and nearly passed out from the pain. She hung onto consciousness ferociously, understanding that she was the only thing between those kids and tragedy.

  “Manuel!” the crazy guy screamed, the booming voice echoing in the room. He brandished the knife. “Come out, you little shithead! You’re a worm, just like your fucking mom! Don’t have the courage to come out, eh? Then I’m coming after you!”

  He lurched forward and Caroline watched, horrified, as he plowed into the kids. Those who weren’t quick enough to scramble out of the way were swatted away, as she had been.

  She’d nearly been knocked unconscious by those huge ham hands. He could do real damage to a thin eight-year-old.

  Though her head was still spinning, she rolled to her knees, waited for some strength in her limbs. The kids were crying, screaming, two lying in little heaps on the ground.

  Caroline gritted her teeth and rose unsteadily to her feet. As she rose, she glanced across the street and saw Sylvie staring, wide-eyed. The man’s back was to her so Caroline pantomimed a phone to her ear. Sylvia grabbed a cell from the counter and punched three numbers in.

  9-1-1. Good girl.

  Sylvie spoke into the phone, clearly reporting what was happening in First Page. A huge man armed with a knife, a roomful of kids, and a potential hostage situation. They’d want to know numbers and positions and Sylvie spoke for a full minute.

  Sylvie gave a thumbs up and Caroline motioned for her to get down, since she was highlighted in the huge picture window. Sylvie dropped from sight.

  “Come out, you little fucker!” the monster was screaming. Except for the two small heaps, all the kids had scrambled out of his way. He didn’t pay them any attention, focusing on his specific prey.