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“Where’s the Christmas decorations?”
At the unexpected voice behind her, Sophie jumped and spilled her cup of coffee across the breakfast table.
“I beg your pardon?” she managed, turning in her seat. Parker, their newest teenage foster daughter, was scowling down from her position between the kitchen cabinets and the ceiling.
Sophie hadn’t realized anything bigger than dust bunnies could even fit in that gap.
Parker’s thin brows drew even more fiercely together, and she jabbed a finger towards the calendar hanging on the fridge. “It’s December first,” she said. “Time for Christmas. Where’s the decorations?”
“Oh.” Sophie mopped at the spill with a handy dish towel. “Nate and I don’t do much for Christmas. We’ve got a box of decorations somewhere in the basement, I think. Maybe you and I can hunt it down next week?”
Parker blinked at her. “But it’s Christmas,” she repeated, as if that explained everything.
Sophie sighed and patted the chair next to her. “Come on down and I’ll get you some cereal,” she said, and stood. Parker’s scowl deepened, but when Sophie turned back from the fridge, jug of milk in hand, she found the teenager crouched on the designated chair.
“Christmas is a hard time of year for Nate,” Sophie explained, setting the milk on the table and opening the cupboard to get down an assortment of cereal boxes. “You knew he was married before?”
Parker shook her head, blonde ponytail flapping, and snatched the most sugary of the cereal boxes offered her.
“Well, he was.” Sophie got out a bowl and spoon, setting them in front of Parker. “They had a son, but he passed away. Ever since, Christmas has been rough for Nate.”
Parker didn’t react, busily filling her bowl. It occurred to Sophie that among the tragedies in the life of a foster child, this was probably par for the course.
“We’ll have a Christmas, of course,” Sophie assured her anyway, turning to put her empty cup in the sink. “It just won’t be terribly over the top. And we’ll find that box of ornaments, okay?”
There was no answer. And when Sophie turned back to the table, she wasn’t surprised to find that Parker, her bowl, and the entire box of cereal had vanished without a trace.
The boys woke up an hour later. Sophie could tell, because even from the kitchen she could hear Eliot yelling at Hardison for waking him up with some prank or other—and then, twenty minutes later, Hardison yelling at Eliot to “quit fussing with your hair and get out of the bathroom already or we’ll be late to school.”
They came down the stairs together, each grousing and griping at the other. Although they were both in high school, the two were polar opposites in every other way—Hardison was tall and gangly, outgrowing all his clothes faster than they could be replaced. Eliot, on the other hand, had already finished his growth spurt and was rapidly packing on muscle. There were tiny braids and beads in his hair today, and the bruise on his face he’d come home with yesterday had darkened to a dull purple.
Sophie frowned again at the sight of that bruise. She’d suspected for a while that Eliot had fallen in with bad friends. In the short time since he’d come to be with them, he’d been staying out later and later, and the other night he and Nate had gotten into a yelling match when he’d come home at three in the morning smelling like liquor with split knuckles and blood—or was it lipstick?—smeared on his collar.
“Dinner is at five,” she reminded them as they inhaled their cereal. “Please be home in time.”
“Yuh-huh,” Hardison promised. Of the three teens they were fostering, Sophie worried about him the least. His previous foster home had been solid, and her biggest concern about him was the amount of screen time he seemed to require to exist.
“Got a date,” Eliot growled, grabbing his lunch bag off the counter and jamming it into his backpack.
“Then be home by curfew,” Sophie started to call after him, but the slam of the front door cut her off short. She turned back to Hardison. “You’re going to miss the bus. Where’s Parker?”
Parker materialized at the door, wearing—was that a pair of reindeer antlers? “I don’t want to go to school.”
“Two more weeks, and you’ll have Christmas break.” Sophie promised, handing out lunch bags and herding them both out the door. “Good luck at school today!”
She shut the door behind them with a long sigh of relief. Now to get some aspirin for Nate and the hangover he was certain to be nursing.
December was always a hard month for him.
Eliot catfooted his way up the stairs in the dark, dodging creaks with the ease of long practice. It was long, long after curfew—again—and he’d rather avoid another confrontation with Nate if possible.
Sophie had been waiting up for him in the front room. Had she known it, her mute look of reproach did more than Nate’s shouting ever did.
He let out a quiet breath of relief once he was safely inside his room. It turned into a hiss as he gently prodded the ribs on his left side. Not broken, he thought, but definitely bruised badly…
“Oh good, you’re back. We need to talk.”
Eliot jumped, did not squeak in surprise, and swore instead. “What…?”
A flashlight clicked on, illuminating Parker’s face from below, giving her a particularly witchy appearance. She grinned and jumped off his bed where she’d apparently been waiting for him. “Hang on, I’m getting Hardison.”
“You—you’re not supp—get out of my room,” he growled as she clicked off the flashlight and flitted past him, a ghost in the dark.
Sheesh, the nerve of that girl.
He shut and locked the door firmly behind her, and then began to painfully peel off first his jacket, and then the hoodie beneath it. He was just beginning to pull off the t-shirt when his door swung open again and Parker tumbled in, yanking a bewildered, half-asleep Hardison behind her.
“Parker!” he yelped, yanking the hem of his shirt back down. “I locked that!”
“Shhh,” Parker shushed him, and let go of the stumbling Hardison, who promptly tripped over Eliot’s sweatshirt and landed on the floor with a muffled squawk. She shut the door and put her back against it before clicking the flashlight on again. “This is important.” She lowered her voice, and an impish grin spread across her thin face. “We need to save Christmas.”
Eliot was not impressed, even after he heard what Parker had to say.
“I been at a lot of houses over Christmas,” he said. “Most the time it’s just another day. Why should this be any different?”
Parker looked at him as though he’d kicked a puppy. “Because it’s Christmas,” she repeated. “And Nate and Sophie are sad, and that’s just wrong.”
Eliot shrugged, and ignored the pain in his shoulder. “Not like we can fix that. And I ain’t rich enough to play Santa Claus.”
Hardison yawned until his jaw popped audibly.
“We used to do this thing for Hanukkah when I was at Nana’s,” he offered. “There was too many of us to get presents for everybody, but we could draw names and get something for whoever we draw.”
Parker’s eyes brightened. “Yeah, let’s do that!”
“But what about Nate and Sophie?” Eliot sat on the edge of his bed with a suppressed groan, getting interested despite himself. “I don’t think any of us would know what to get them if we drew their name.”
“We’ll draw each other’s names, and then all pitch in on Nate and Sophie together,” Hardison offered. “It doesn’t have to be expensive.”
Paper tore, and Eliot looked up to find Parker ripping an army recruitment flyer into pieces. “Parker,” he growled, but then gave up. It was just a piece of junk mail, after all, and he’d probably get plenty more during the next year or so before he’d be eligible to enlist.
“Here,” she said, holding out a fist with the ends of three papers poking out. “Draw.”
“Uh-uh.” Hardison wrestled the papers out of her hand. “Too easy to cheat that way. Somebody find a hat or something.”
A used cereal bowl was under the bed. Eliot shook out the last few dried Cheerios still clinging to the sides, and Hardison dumped the little scraps of paper in. “Okay,” he said, holding the bowl over his head. “Who’s first?”
They ended up having to draw several times, since first Eliot and then Hardison drew their own name, but at last the three looked at each other, papers in hand.
“I don’t got my own name,” Hardison said. “You?”
“Me neither,” Parker grinned.
“Great.” Eliot shoved his slip into his pocket. “Neither do I. Now get outta here so I can get some shuteye. And Parker, don’t you dare pick my lock again. I mean it.”
She giggled and then vanished into the hall, silent as a shadow, followed by Hardison, who managed to step on every creaky board between Eliot’s room and his own.
Over the next few weeks, Sophie noticed decorations appearing around the house. When she asked Parker, the girl just grinned and ducked away. Apparently she had somehow wiggled into the tiniest corners of the attic and managed to discover boxes of decorations that even Sophie had forgotten about.
Others in the house noticed too. Eliot growled half-heartedly when he nearly got strangled by an incautiously hung strand of tinsel, but he was there to catch Parker when she tumbled off a ladder trying to hang lights.
“Whatcha tryin to do, kill yourself?” he demanded, setting her on her feet and scowling.
Parker looked up at him and flashed one of her quick, lightning-quick grins. “No. I knew you’d catch me.”
His scowl deepened; he looked confused at her trust, Sophie thought. But the next day he actually came home right after school and spent the evening helping Parker put up the lights on the outside of the house.
“If it seems too complicated, make it easy on yourself. Just send money. How about tens and twenties?”
“See, she makes sense,” Parker said sagely, nodding at the screen, where a cartoon Sally Brown was dictating a letter to Santa Claus. “Money. Best gift ever.”
Eliot eyed her warily. “There’s something wrong with you,” he grumbled.
It was a weekend, and for once they were all home. Fueled by copious amounts of orange soda pop, Hardison had pulled the TV apart and put it back together and managed to tune in to a channel showing Christmas shows. Now the three teens were watching A Charlie Brown Christmas and whisper-arguing about what to get Sophie and Nate.
“A bottle of nail polish?” Hardison suggested. “Tickets to go see Ninja Zombie Massacre #3? Hey, hey, hey—a coupon for a carwash!”
“Ninja—what? No, just—no,” Eliot growled. “Shut up, Hardison. I got a better idea. There’s a reception at the art museum downtown next month. Fancy dress, a lecture, I don’t know what all. We get Nate and Sophie an invitation to that.”
Parker grinned. “I like it,” she said. “Where do we get an invitation?”
Eliot fumbled in his jacket pocket and pulled out an envelope, slightly dented. It was addressed to a Mr. and Mrs. Arbuckle. “I dated the museum intern. Hardison, think you can make up something to match with Nate and Sophie’s names on it?”
Hardison nodded, already turning the invitation over in his hands. “Yeah, sure, easy-peasey. But there’s a space on here where the museum director guy is gonna sign it personally. How will we get our invitation signed and mailed out with the rest?”
Eliot grimaced slightly. “I was hoping you guys could figure that part out. The intern and I aren’t really on speaking terms right now.”
“Ohhh, she dumped you?” Hardison taunted in a sing-song voice.
“I said shut up,” Eliot growled. “Parker, you’re good at picking locks. Think you can sneak this invitation and our bogus one back into the museum office before they sign and mail out the lot on Monday?”
Parker blinked and shrugged. “Sure,” she said. “But I still think they’d like money better.”
“You would,” Hardison grumbled. For Hanukkah that week he’d taught the other two how to play dreidel, and Parker had shamelessly either won or stolen almost every one of the chocolate coins they had played for.
Eliot shook his head. “Something wrong with you,” he muttered again, but he didn’t flinch when Parker aggressively snuggled up between him and Hardison to watch the rest of the show.
“What’s up with the kids?” Nate surprised Sophie by asking abruptly. It was late, and the two of them were sitting in the front room enjoying an evening drink before bed.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Sophie answered smoothly. She curled her feet up beneath her on the couch, and sipped her drink, eyeing Nate over the rim of her glass.
“Parker’s acting like the cat who ate the canary,” Nate said. “Hardison’s actually spending time in other parts of the house besides the computer room, and Eliot hasn’t stayed out late with those thug friends of his all week. It’s weird.”
Sophie hid her smile with the ease of long practice and pretended to study the Christmas tree that Parker had bullied Eliot and Hardison into setting up. “Maybe it’s because it’s Christmas,” she said instead.
“Humbug,” Nate retorted.
“Oh, now careful.” Sophie nudged him teasingly. “You sound like Scrooge, and we all know how he ended up.” Beloved by everyone, she thought—but did not say.
Nate simply snorted, and finished off his glass without comment.
The day before Christmas, Eliot surprised them all.
“No, man, I can’t make it today either,” Sophie overheard him say over the phone when one of his questionable buddies called him up. “I gotta help my kid sister with something.” Then, swathed in an oversized hoodie and one of Sophie’s aprons, his hair tied back with a bandanna, he proceeded to take over the kitchen and bake a massive amount of Christmas cookies.
“I didn’t know you could bake,” Sophie said in surprise, leaning against the door frame and looking rather dazedly at the rows and rows of cookies laid out on the counter. She herself had never been much of a one for cooking.
Eliot just shrugged. Without looking up from the cookie he was icing, he twirled a spoon around the fingers of his free hand and smacked Hardison’s knuckles with it as he tried to sneak a gingerbread man off the cooling rack.
“Yowch!” Hardison yelped, jumping back and sucking his knuckles. “Dude, not cool. Hey, what happens if you put orange soda in the frosting?”
“Get out,” Eliot snarled, but for once the snarl had no bite to it.
“Yay! We can leave cookies out for Santa!” Parker squealed happily, hopping up onto the counter and knocking a cup of powdered sugar all over Hardison’s jeans. She was wearing a pair of truly extravagant reindeer antlers with red ribbons.
“Watch it,” Hardison swatted hopelessly at his pants, only smearing the powdered mess further. “Which ones you think Nate’ll like best?”
Parker scowled. The jingle bells on the reindeer antlers jingled almost threateningly. “I said Santa, not Nate.”
“Wha—you… wait.” Eliot shot a surprised look at her. “You still believe in…”
“You think Santa’s real?” Hardison spoke overtop him, powdered sugar forgotten in his surprise.
“Of course he’s real, silly.” Parker wagged her reindeer antlers at them both in a very supercilious manner. “Just because he sometimes loses track of foster kids doesn’t mean he’s not real. It just means—maybe he can’t find them in their new house.”
She looked a little sad at the thought. Eliot and Hardison exchanged meaningful glances.
“That’s definitely it,” Hardison spoke up abruptly. “Y’all know how mixed-up the system can get, and the data plan probably ain’t great all the way up at the North Pole. His database just needs an upgrade to keep track of where we all get moved around to.”
Parker’s lips tightened as she considered the thought, and she nodded vigorously, jingling her bells. “You should work for Santa, Hardison,” she said seriously. “You’re good at computers.”
Eliot didn’t say anything then, because the oven timer went off again, but when Parker stole two Santa’s thumbprint cookies and gave one to Hardison a few minutes later, he pretended not to notice.
And only Sophie saw Nate standing through the kitchen door, listening.
On Christmas morning Parker woke everybody up by ringing a cowbell up and down the hall and squealing at the top of her lungs. “Wake up, everybody! It’s Christmas, Christmas, Christmas!!!”
Nate swore and put his head under his pillow. Sophie groaned, staggering to the door of their room and pushing up her sleep mask to squint groggily at her foster daughter. “Parker, what on earth?”
“It’s Christmas!” Parker cheered, hopping up and down in her candy cane pajamas like the elf she was. “Let’s go see if Santa came!”
Santa had come. Or, at least, there were gifts under the tree, and the plate of cookies Parker had so hopefully left out was empty. The glass of milk was empty too, but Hardison guessed it had been poured back into the jug. After all, as he murmured in an aside to Eliot, he suspected this Santa preferred whisky.
Parker was in her element. As the only one with any kind of energy at that hour of the morning, she busily handed out gifts, distributing the packages under the tree to their respective owners. The gifts from Sophie and Nate were opened quickly, and without any particular surprise—they were mostly socks, clothes, new backpacks or school supplies.
“What’s this?” Sophie asked with genuine surprise, lifting the envelope with “Nate and Sophie” scrawled across it. Inside was the letter from the museum, signed and postmarked and looking every bit as official as any other invitation issued for the event. “Where on earth…?” Her look of pleased astonishment made even Eliot grin.
Hardison shrugged. “We got some connections,” he said casually. “Thought the two of you would like some getaway time.” He didn’t add that the three of them had been watching the mailbox like hawks for days, waiting to intercept the invitation and hide it away before Sophie collected the mail.
Sophie beamed. Even Nate looked interested despite himself, though that might have been because the event had an open bar.
Then it was time for the three to open their gifts for each other. Hardison pulled out a flat gift, wrapped in brightly-colored paper and shoved it across to Parker. “You go first.”
Parker, who was fairly vibrating in her skin with impatience, didn’t need to be told twice. Snatching the package, she ripped open the paper with such abandon that Nate caught the ribbon right in the face.
“It’s a quarter collecting kit,” Hardison explained, as Parker unfolded the cardboard portfolio with rows of empty circles inside. “You like money so much, I thought you might have fun collecting ‘em. And here,” he rolled a jar across the floor to where Parker sat. “It’s some quarters for you to start with. I dunno what’s in there—I been gathering change for weeks.”
“Money!” Parker squealed, snatching up the jar. Her face stretched into a smile of absolute bliss as she shook it next to her ear. Unscrewing the lid, she took a long, deep sniff and closed her eyes in rapture.
“Best gift ever!” she announced with supreme satisfaction. “Who’s next?”
Eliot dropped a rectangular package unceremoniously in Hardison’s lap. “Your turn,” he growled.
Hardison wasted no time. “No way, man!” he exclaimed delightedly, tearing the paper away to reveal a set of DVDs. “Where did you find these?”
Eliot simply shrugged. He didn’t mention that he’d been stopping off at a secondhand store after school for the last few weeks, scouring the place top to bottom for something the computer geek might like.
“I thought we already had the original Star Wars trilogy,” Sophie murmured, craning her head to look.
“Yeah, no. You guys got the remastered ones with all the computer effects added in. This is the genuine, original, Han-shot-first goodness without any of that CGI crap,” Hardison explained delightedly, turning the disks over.
“Who shot first?” Eliot asked, confused.
“Han Solo,” Hardison clarified, looking up. “No—wait, wait, wait, don’t tell me you’ve never seen Star Wars before!”
Eliot shrugged. “Okay, I won’t. Isn’t that the one with stick-ons or something?”
Hardison did a double-take as he stacked the DVDs next to his new socks. “You mean Klingons, and no, that’s Star Trek. Ohhh, man, this calls for a movie night!”
“Open mine, open mine!” Parker interrupted, pushing a wrapped box studded with at least six bows into Eliot’s surprised hands. “Merry Christmas!”
It took a while—Parker had evidently used up an entire roll of tape wrapping this present—but eventually Eliot managed to rip open the paper and cautiously cracked the top open. He paused, and then got a very peculiar look on his face.
“Open it, open it!” Parker cried again in excitement, and then when Eliot didn’t move, she grabbed the box from him and dumped its contents into his lap.
Hardison snorted with laughter. Sophie hid a smile behind her hand. Eliot stared down at his gift, absolutely baffled.
“Do you like it?” Parker demanded eagerly.
It was a large plushy stuffed horse. Eliot blinked wordlessly.
“I know you like horses, but horses are scary so I got you this one because you get hurt a lot and this kind of horse is safer,” Parker babbled on. “It can be friends with Bunny. We can snuggle them while we watch scary movies.”
Eliot seemed to finally realize that his mouth was hanging open, because he shut it with a click. Then he looked up at Parker with startlingly vulnerable eyes. Sophie, watching, realized that this was probably the first time in a very long time that somebody had expressed the desire to comfort him.
“Thanks, Parker,” he said after a minute, and smacked Hardison, who was still laughing. “I like it a lot.”
And even though he set the floppy stuffed horse aside, Sophie noticed that his hand stayed buried in the soft plush, patting it absently.
“Looks like you forgot something,” said Nate.
Everyone looked up in surprise. The torn wrapping paper was being cleared away, and Sophie was starting to think about what they would do for breakfast.
“What did we forget?” Parker demanded eagerly. “More presents?”
Nate shrugged. “Well, I think there’s something at the very back of the tree. Guess you guys will have to take a look and see.”
Parker had already knocked her chair over in her headlong lunge for the tree, and the rest of the family heard her cry of glee as she emerged from beneath the prickly branches.
“Santa found us!” she announced, lifting three packages from their hiding place. Each one bore a large label inscribed ‘From Santa’ in red marker. “He found us!”
Eliot grinned widely as he opened the envelope containing football tickets, and Hardison exclaimed with delight over the GPS device in his package.
“What’s a climbing wall?” Parker demanded, frowning at the piece of paper in her hand.
“It’s a really high wall with fake rocks sticking out of it that you can climb,” Nate explained. “Looks like you’ve got a season pass.”
Parker’s eyes lit up. “I can climb all I want?”
“You can climb all you want,” Nate assured her, and was startled when the impish grin she shot him made something in his tired old heart warm.
Nate jerked awake with a groan. Apparently he’d dozed off for a minute or two after the others had headed to the kitchen to make breakfast. The smell of bacon and pancakes must have woken him up.
Then he opened his eyes the rest of the way and jolted in surprise. Parker was perched on the arm of his chair, her face hovering about six inches from his, watching him very intently.
“Parker,” he gasped, jerking back. “Don’t do that. You just took ten years off my life.”
She didn’t smile, just surveyed him for a long moment, her head cocked to one side. The jingle bell on the end of the elf cap she wore reflected the lights of the Christmas tree back at him.
Then, with a rare, surprisingly sweet smile, she slipped off the arm of his chair. “Merry Christmas,” she whispered, and was gone, between one breath and the next.
It was only when something rustled that Nate realized she had somehow managed to slide something into the pocket of his bathrobe. It was a piece of paper, he discovered. Unfolding it, he discovered a surprisingly good drawing of all three of their foster children, arm in arm—and at the bottom…
Nate’s breath caught. He blinked hard and dragged the cuff of his bathrobe across his eyes.
“Merry Christmas, Dad. From your kids.” Sophie read the words at the bottom of the page aloud, her voice a trifle husky. He hadn’t even heard her come in behind him. She sank into a crouch beside his chair, her arm around his shoulders. “Oh, Nate.”
He tipped his head against hers and closed his eyes and for a long time neither one said anything. They didn’t have to. Sophie knew how he felt about the loss of his son—and she could guess how it felt to hold the beloved title of “Dad” again.
It wasn’t the same as before. But this was good too, in an altogether different way that made his heart soften.
At last, he cleared his throat, and stirred, folding the paper back up with careful hands and storing it safely in the breast pocket of his pajamas. “Eliot kick you out of the kitchen?” he asked, attempting to sound casual.
Sophie leaned back on her heels, but kept her fingers drifting gently on his arm. “He did, as a matter of fact.” She looked up at him, and then smiled, reaching up to brush cookie crumbs off of his collar. “I think you made their day today, especially Parker. Thank you, Santa.”
”Yes, she’ll like that climbing wall,” said Nate thoughtfully. “But I think,” he added more slowly, as he looked around at Sophie’s smile and the decorations and heard the contented chatter of his kids echoing in from the kitchen, “that the real Santa this year was Parker herself.”
“I’m gonna say Operation: Save Christmas was a win,” Hardison announced to the other two in the kitchen. “Look at this! Presents, decorations, cookies! I think we even cheered up Nate and Sophie.”
“Grub’s done,” Eliot said, flipping the last piece of bacon with a flourish and completely ignoring everything Hardison had just said. “Somebody go get Sophie and Nate before everything gets cold.”
“Ehhh, better give them a minute,” Hardison said, after a quick glance into the front room. “They’re—kinda busy at the moment. Parker, were you the one who hung that mistletoe in there?”
Parker, gleefully pouring syrup on the heaping pile of pancakes on her plate, simply jingled the bell on her hat and grinned.