If Only in My Dreams

  “Sounds great,” Clara says sincerely, leaning her head back against the pillow in sheer relief.

  Dr. Bronstein makes more notes. “Dr. Hunter will meet with you later to discuss his recommendations for further treatment, and I’ll check in on you again in the morning.”

  “Thank you,” Clara murmurs, tilting her face toward the window beside the bed.

  Outside, above the gray skyline, she can see a slice of clear blue December sky.

  You’ll come back here to stay, as soon as you’re finished with your treatment.

  She shakes her head, pushing Jed’s words away.

  Even if she did find her way back to him, he wouldn’t be there for long.

  “All right, then, Clara, I’m going to leave you now. Congratulations.”

  She turns back toward Dr. Bronstein and manages to smile. “I don’t know how to thank you.”

  “You don’t have to. Those happy tears in your eyes speak volumes.”

  She doesn’t have the heart to tell him that they aren’t happy tears at all.

  Clara winces as she lifts her arm to pull the black velvet dress over her head.

  It’s been a week now, but the site of her lumpectomy is still sore, and it’s likely to be for quite some time.

  Every day, though, she feels a little less discomfort… and a little more optimism. All right—infinitely more optimism.

  In part because Dr. Hunter, the oncologist, decided chemotherapy will be unnecessary. After a round of radiation treatments, mostly as a safeguard, Clara should be able to put this whole experience behind her.…

  Or so the medical team claims.

  She can’t imagine ever feeling entirely safe in her own skin again, and she’ll be ultra-vigilant… as will her doctors.

  But she isn’t going to die young of breast cancer, as her grandmother did. She’s going to have a life.

  And for tonight—and tomorrow, especially—she’s going to forget about everything in it that’s the least bit disturbing—Jed Landry included.

  If that’s even possible. Jed has been on her mind every moment of every day, haunting her dreams whenever she’s asleep.

  But those are just dreams.

  So very different from her actual time with Jed…

  And that, she remains certain, wasn’t a dream.

  She still hasn’t come any closer to understanding why it all happened. In fact, the more time that passes, the more perplexed she feels.

  But you’re going to put that aside for now.

  This is Christmas Eve, and somebody is meeting her at The Nutcracker ballet.

  Her heart races every time she wonders who it might be.

  It isn’t going to be Jed, she reminds herself sternly. You do know that… don’t you?

  Of course she does. She just needs a reality check every so often, that’s all.

  She leans toward the mirror above her dresser, carefully clipping dangling diamond drops to her earlobes.

  The earrings belonged to her grandmother Irene—a wedding day gift from her loving husband. Grandpa gave them to Clara one Christmas long ago.

  You look so much like her, Clara-belle, she hears him saying as she inspects her reflection.

  Something flutters in the corner of her eye, and she turns her head quickly to catch it… but the spot is empty.

  “Grandpa… is that you?” she asks, standing absolutely still, listening… for his voice?

  All she can hear is a steady drip from the bathroom sink, and, beyond the window, traffic on the avenue, and a car alarm howling in the distance.

  Her grandfather isn’t here. If he were, he’d let her know somehow.

  No, but he and her grandmother might be out there somewhere, like she told Jason that time.

  Maybe they were both reborn as babies right now, and they’re going to grow up and find each other and fall in love all over again.

  Comforted by the thought, Clara smiles. Of course, if they have found their way back to earth, Grandpa and Grandma would have no memory of their identities in their past lives.

  The books she read made it pretty clear that without professional hypnotic past-life regression, most people have no idea that they are, indeed, reincarnated souls. But once in a while, a person can have a flash of inexplicable memory that might really be a glimpse into his or her own past… as somebody else. And some souls are irrevocably linked through the ages, destined to be reborn and find each other over and over again.…

  Maybe Clara’s grandparents are like that. Maybe that romance, nipped so cruelly in the bud by untimely death, will have a chance to play itself out someday.

  Yes, and maybe Jed—

  The buzz of the bell downstairs shatters the hush as well as the beginnings of that unbidden thought.

  Clara hurries to the security panel by the door, unnerved. She thought she was meeting her secret Santa at the ballet, but maybe he’s picking her up here.

  She presses the intercom button.

  “Who is it?” she asks, and braces herself for the reply.

  “It’s me,” a familiar voice answers. “Can I come up?”

  She closes her eyes briefly, and releases the lock on the door.

  Come on, Clara. You knew it wasn’t going to turn out to be Jed.

  Still…

  Jason?

  Yes, Jason.

  Maybe she should have expected this. After all, he’s called a few times this month, most recently leaving one message on her voice mail while she was hospitalized and another here with her mother afterward.

  Plus, he would have been able to access the building using his key.…

  Then again, the whole secret Santa thing seems too… whimsical… for Jason’s romantic style. Doesn’t it?

  Yes, definitely.

  Well, maybe he’s trying to show me that he’s changed, she tells herself.

  And if he has…

  Do I want to give him another chance?

  Honestly, now that she’s about to come face-to-face with her ex-fiancé, she has no idea how she feels. Everything is happening so quickly.…

  Too quickly…

  And it’s not what I expected… or wanted.

  Jittery, she opens the door and waits, listening to his footsteps coming up the stairs.

  Maybe things will be different this time around, she tells herself halfheartedly.

  Maybe we’re meant to be together.…

  Still, what about Jed?

  The stubborn thought comes out of nowhere.

  What about Jed? Jed died. He isn’t coming back.…

  No matter what he promised.

  Unless…

  Well, what if she mistook Jed’s voice just now for Jason’s?

  What if he somehow—

  Then Jason comes into view, looking exactly the same as he always did: clean-cut, freshly shaven, wearing a suit and dark wool overcoat and shiny black shoes.

  And Clara instinctively reacts with the same sense of affection—but not attraction—as she always did.

  “Hi.” Jason looks uncharacteristically nervous.

  “Hi,” she responds quietly, trying to quell the crushing wave of disappointment.

  She almost let herself believe…

  But that was ludicrous.

  Of course it wasn’t going to be Jed.

  Jed died. He isn’t coming back to you, no matter what he promised.

  When will you believe that?

  Maybe never, she tells herself desolately.

  “These are for you.” Jason hands her a vase containing a big bouquet of red roses and Christmas greens.

  “Thank you—they’re beautiful.” She sets the vase on the table beside the door.

  “How are you feeling? Your mother answered when I called the other day and said you were sleeping and you’d just had surgery…? She didn’t want to give me the details. Said you’d have to tell me yourself. What’s that all about?”

  “I’ll explain everything on the way. Just let me get my coat.”
>
  “Coat? Where are you going?”

  “To the ballet… with you.…” She frowns, watching his expression. “Aren’t I?”

  “The ballet?”

  “The Nutcracker,” she clarifies, wondering if maybe he didn’t realize it was a ballet when he bought the tickets.

  “The Nutcracker… with me?” he asks cluelessly, and all at once, she realizes…

  He doesn’t know what I’m talking about!

  “I’m sorry, I got confused for a minute,” she tells Jason, giddily relieved that he isn’t her secret Santa after all. Not that she believes for one second that it still might be Jed, but…

  Well, maybe just for one second.

  “What are you talking about, Clara?”

  “I’m the one who’s going to The Nutcracker, and you’re here because…”

  “I want to talk to you about something, and I thought you needed to hear it in person.”

  “On Christmas Eve?” Dear God, is he going to propose again?

  “It’s the only time I could squeeze it in.… The market’s going crazy, and I’ve been working like a dog all week.”

  She nods knowingly. So what else is new?

  “You, uh, might want to sit down for this, Clara.”

  “I can’t sit down.…” She checks her watch. “I’ve got to get uptown. What is it?”

  “It’s… Clara, I’m getting married.”

  Her jaw drops.

  “Her name is Anne,” he rushes on nervously, “and she’s a terrific girl. She’s an investment banker, and she lives on the Upper East Side, and… you’d like her, and I told her she’d like you, too. She knows all about you, about us. She’s the one who showed me that article about you in Entertainment Weekly, even.… She saw it at the gym.…”

  Of course. Clara just knew Jason wouldn’t have picked up that magazine on his own.

  “Hey… I’m really happy for you.” She wraps him in a heartfelt hug.

  “You are?”

  “Why wouldn’t I be? You deserve to be happy, and she sounds right for you.” An investment banker from the Upper East Side. Yes, perfect.

  “I was afraid you’d be upset.” Jason seems almost disappointed that she isn’t. “You know… it’s so soon after we broke up and everything. But when I met Anne, it was… well, I guess I fell in love at first sight, as they say. Who knew that was possible?”

  I did.

  Aloud she says, “That’s great. And I wish you the best, Jason. Really.”

  “Well, what about you? Are you seeing someone, too? Is that who you’re rushing off to go to the ballet with?”

  Maybe.

  Stop that! Of course not.

  You’re going to the ballet with… with…

  Santa.

  Right. Whomever that is.

  “Clara?” Jason prods, and she merely shrugs.

  “You don’t want to tell me about him, huh? Fair enough. Oh, here’s the key to the apartment, by the way.… I never did return it.” Jason removes it from his pocket and hands it to her.

  “And you didn’t…”

  “What?”

  “You haven’t used it lately… have you?” she asks, just to rule out the remote possibility that he might be her secret Santa after all, even if he’s in love with another woman.

  “Used it for what?”

  “Never mind.”

  Secret Santa really isn’t his style. So… whose style is it?

  “Come on, Jason, you can walk me to a cab.” She pushes her feet into black velvet pumps and slips into her dress coat.

  For a moment, she toys with the black leather gloves she finds in the pockets.

  Then she tosses them aside and pulls on her red mittens instead, slipping her Nutcracker ticket into one of them.

  “All set,” she tells Jason, her heart fluttering in anticipation of whomever she might find waiting for her at the ballet.

  “Are you alone, ma’am?” a uniformed usher asks, as Clara stands at the top of the aisle above her section, holding her ticket and scanning the rows below.

  “No… I mean, I don’t think so, but… I’m, uh, meeting someone here.”

  And I have no idea who it is, or whether he’s already here, or even whether he really is a he.

  For all she knows, it might be her mother.

  No, she was in Florida when the gifts arrived.

  Well, her father, then. Or one of her cousins, or a friend, or Mr. Kobayashi, even…

  But not Jed.

  It can’t be Jed.

  “May I show you to your seat? The ballet is about to start.”

  Yes, it is, because she spent the last half hour milling around in the crowded lobby, searching for a familiar face. She just didn’t know whose.

  The usher leads the way down front, then hands her a program and gestures at two empty seats in the center of the row.

  Clara thanks him and makes her way across several pairs of knees, feeling conspicuous to be here alone. She’s grateful when the lights dim just as she slips into one of the empty seats; the buzzing audience promptly falls silent in rapt anticipation.

  As the orchestra’s opening notes fill the great hall, a melancholy feeling settles over Clara. She isn’t just thinking of her grandfather, who sat beside her here for so many years.…

  No, she’s mainly thinking of Jed.

  Look for me, Clara… because I’m going to find you. I promise.

  Those were his last words to her.…

  Right, so somehow, you expected to walk into the concert hall tonight and see him standing there, waiting for you?

  Yes, maybe she did.

  Maybe, she thought, he had found some way to slip forward through time the way she slipped back.…

  But that isn’t going to happen.

  It can’t happen, because Jed died.

  Nothing can change that now.

  He died, and you have to move on.…

  “Excuse me,” a voice whispers above her in the dark.

  Clara looks up, startled, to see a crouched male form trying to sneak past her knees.

  She twists in her seat to let him past… even as she realizes there’s only one empty seat in the row… and it’s the one beside hers.

  Sure enough, he settles into it.

  “Hey, Merry Christmas,” he whispers, grinning at her in the dim glow of bluish light from the stage.

  Shocked, she finds herself face-to-face with her neighbor, Drew Becker.

  “There’s one thing I still don’t get,” Clara says, as they stroll along their own quiet block munching Ray’s Pizza slices in the glow of streetlights and colored Christmas lights and blue Hanukkah lights.

  “What’s that?” Drew asks, hot cheese stringing from his mouth to his hand.

  “Why you did it.”

  “I told you… you said that you were spending Christmas alone, just like me… and I could tell you weren’t any happier about it than I was. Plus, you looked like you needed some serious cheering up.”

  “I did.” But of course she isn’t going to tell him exactly why.

  Not yet, anyway.

  Maybe not ever.

  After all, it’s not as though they’re going to be seeing each other again… as anything other than neighbors. He did a nice, platonic thing for her, to be… platonically neighborly. Right.

  “Plus,” he says, casting a sidelong glance at her, “I wanted to ask you out… but something tells me that if I had, you would have said no.”

  “Probably.” She laughs, even as something unexpectedly stirs inside her.

  “Probably?”

  “Okay, I definitely would have said no.”

  “Why?”

  “A lot of reasons.”

  “But you’re out with me now… and it isn’t so bad, is it?”

  “No,” she agrees with a smile, “it isn’t. Except… what about your girlfriend?”

  “My what?”

  “Betty,” she reminds him.

  He just looks at her.
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  He’s wondering how I know. He probably thinks I’ve been spying on him.

  Embarrassed, she admits, “I heard you talking to her one night from the hallway.”

  “I don’t think so. I don’t have a girlfriend named Betty.”

  “What’s her name, then? Maybe it just sounded like Betty. Is it Betsy, maybe, or… Hettie?”

  “Hettie?” he echoes. “Wasn’t she the heroine of The Scarlet Letter?”

  “That was Hester.” Clara declines to tell him she once played the role in a short-lived off-Broadway version of the story. He hasn’t asked her about her work, and she isn’t about to get into that.

  Especially now that she’s officially unemployed.

  And really, what business is it of his, as a platonic neighbor?

  “So I take it your girlfriend isn’t Hettie? What, then… Letty?” At his dubious look, she laughs and says, “Come on… it was hard to hear, exactly, with the music playing.”

  “What music?”

  “Perry Como,” she recalls with humiliating ease.

  Finishing his pizza, Drew wipes his hands with a napkin and stashes it in his pocket. “When did you say this was?”

  She didn’t. She frowns, wishing he would just tell her what his girlfriend’s name is and stop making her feel so foolish.

  “It was a Saturday night,” she reluctantly tells him, realizing he’s not going to move on until she gives up more details. Which, of course, she recalls. “It was a few weeks ago. At the beginning of December.”

  He’s nodding. “That’s what I thought. I stayed home that night. Alone.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Positive. I haven’t had a date since I moved here, until tonight.”

  A date? He thinks this is a date?

  But…

  Well…

  Is it?

  And how does Clara feel if it is?

  Not bad.

  Maybe even… pretty good.

  “I remember that night,” Drew tells her. “I was watching an old movie on TV and burning a CD to send out with my Christmas cards.”

  At her surprised look, he explains, “I’m a multitasker, and I’d seen that movie a zillion times—so I didn’t have to pay close attention.”

  “No, I’m just surprised.… You send Christmas cards? With homemade CDs in them?”

  “It’s kind of a tradition… I do it every year. Cheesy, I know.”

  Not cheesy at all, she thinks, struck by the notion of a single guy going to all that trouble.