Christmas Angels Read online

  Kate looked over at Chad. “I did and then I didn’t,” she said, before looking at the tree and down at her pin. “But what’s left if we don’t? Shouldn’t we believe in things we can’t see or understand? Shouldn’t we view the holidays and life with hope, no matter how much the world beats us up?”

  She stopped and again stared at the Christmas tree. “And, yes, I still believe in angels,” she said. “Somehow we all have to learn to see the possible in the impossible. Somehow we all have to learn to fly again, don’t we?”

  Kate heard her words echo in her head, and it was then she realized: This was the advice her mother had been trying to impart.

  I’ve just been too stuck and depressed to hear it until now, she finally understood.

  “Daaaaaddd!”

  Just then Coop came running into the room and jumped onto his dad’s lap. “We had a blast at the zoo,” he said. “Everyone there loved my stocking cap, too, since it was a monkey!”

  “I’m glad,” Chad said. “You remember Miss Roseberry, don’t you?”

  “The Christmas Angel!” Coop yelled. “Yeah! Oh, hold on! I’ve got something to show you!”

  He leapt off his dad’s lap and took off running, his footsteps thumping up the stairs. A moment later he was back, out of breath, and hiding something behind his back.

  Kate lifted her hands and looked at Chad with a “What’s going on?” expression. Chad shrugged his shoulders.

  “I—well, we—made a present for you,” Coop said breathlessly, using his free hand to pull off his Sock Monkey stocking cap and throw it aside, the static electricity causing his hair to stand on end as if mimicking his excitement.

  “What is it?”

  “Ta da! It’s a tree topper!”

  From behind his back, Coop pulled an angel made from white construction paper, its base a circle that had been folded to resemble a flowing gown, its wings gold and featuring intricate cutouts like a snowflake. Coop had colored the angel’s face with Crayons and decorated the front with little hearts. Over its head, the angel wore a halo made from a silver tinsel pipe cleaner.

  “It’s beautiful,” Kate said, standing and taking the angel from Coop’s hand.

  “Thank you,” Coop said. “Remember how sad you were when you couldn’t find one for the top of the tree?”

  Kate nodded.

  “I wanted to make one for you and for us,” he said. “And see what it says on back? Ella. My mom’s name.”

  Kate smiled, and overcome by Coop’s love for his mom, her eyes filled with tears. “She would be so proud of you,” Kate said.

  “My dad helped me make it, but I did most of the hard work,” Coop said proudly. “But he’s the one who thought you should be here to help us put it on the tree.”

  “Oh, really?” Kate asked, looking at Chad and remembering he’d said it was his son who wanted her to see it.

  Chad shrugged innocently before standing. “Ready?” he asked.

  The three gathered around the tree, and Chad pulled an ottoman over and stood on it. Coop gave him the angel, which he began to place on top of the tree. He stopped mid-motion.

  “This seems more like your thing,” he said, stepping off the ottoman and handing Kate the angel.

  How does he know that? Kate thought.

  “I can’t,” she protested. “This is your family tree.”

  “Yes, you can,” Chad said, helping her onto the ottoman. “A new tradition to honor an old one.”

  Kate smiled and placed the homemade angel on top of the tree, adjusting it until it was perfectly straight. When she stepped off the ottoman, Kate felt like hugging Chad.

  Kate, she thought, shaking her head. You only just met him.

  “Perfect,” Chad said. “Hey, how about a cookie, Coop? Miss Roseberry brought some iced sugar cookies in all your favorite shapes. There are even some angels!”

  “Cookies!” Coop yelled, taking off toward the kitchen.

  Kate laughed.

  “Hey, I was just wondering,” Chad started in a quiet voice, “if you might be free to help me decorate for New Year’s. Or, even, maybe just stop by for a glass of champagne.”

  Kate blushed. “I would love to, but that’s a big night for me,” she said. “You know, everyone and their New Year’s parties.”

  “And resolutions,” Chad added. “I know Coop would love for you to see the tree one more time. And maybe watch Elf with him.”

  “He would?” Kate asked.

  “I would, too,” Chad said softly.

  “That would be nice,” Kate said, her face flushing. “I’ll see if my assistant can cover for me, and I’ll try and sneak away.” Kate pictured Claire’s reaction, and she stifled a smile. “I haven’t really taken a break all year, and I’ll be by myself over the holidays, so a glass of champagne and Elf would be nice. I just don’t want to intrude.”

  “You’re not,” Chad said quietly with a shy smile.

  There was a moment of silence, save for the crackling of the fire.

  “Beautiful tree,” Chad said, stepping back to admire it. “Didn’t think I’d have one this year.”

  He stopped and looked at the tree topper. “Didn’t think I’d have a guardian angel, either.”

  Kate smiled at Chad.

  Me, either, she thought.

  Suddenly, Coop came running into the room, two iced cookies dangling from his hand.

  “I brought you a cookie, too,” Coop said. “It’s an angel!”

  Kate took the cookie and studied it. Its body was painted in white icing and its wings studded with gold nonpareils. Kate had drawn two eyes on the angel, closed as if in heavenly prayer, its mouth open, as if in the midst of singing a joyous hymn.

  “Thank you, Coop,” Kate said.

  For a moment, the trio stared at the tree in silence, before Coop scanned the room and began pointing.

  “Angels on the tree, angels in the snow, angels on the cookies, angels on Miss Roseberry,” he said. Coop looked at his father and then at Kate, a serious look on his face. “And mom is now an angel.”

  Chad nodded, and Kate could feel her heart rise in her throat.

  “We’re surrounded by angels!” Coop said definitely. “Merry Christmas!”

  “Merry Christmas,” Chad and Kate said together.

  Then they looked at one another and nodded.

  Yes, Kate thought, continuing to look at Chad, who seemed to be reading her mind, his eyes conveying the exact same message. We are surrounded by angels.

  Read on for a preview of

  The Hope Chest

  Available March 2017

  May 2016—

  “I think that’s about the last box, sweetheart. Do you need a few minutes alone to say goodbye?”

  Mattie Tice scanned the room and then looked at her husband, Don, before nodding yes.

  How can I properly say goodbye to the home I love when I can barely even talk anymore? Mattie thought.

  After nearly fifty years together, Don could read his wife’s thoughts by instinct. He walked over to Mattie, knelt in front of her wheelchair, and leaned in close, until her white-blond hair tickled his tanned face.

  “It will always be our lake home,” he whispered, his breath smelling sweet like the toffee lattes he loved to drink, especially when he was tired. “Our home is wherever we are.”

  Mattie knew his words were meant to comfort her, but she was too upset for them to help. She opened her mouth to talk, but even if she screamed, no one could hear her.

  My voice is getting weaker, Mattie thought.

  “Say it again, sweetie. For me,” Don said softly, lifting the tiny mic that dangled in front of his wife’s face to amplify her voice.

  “That’s … B … S,” Mattie said slowly. “Just … like … A … L … S.”

  Don laughed at her pluck and kissed her cheek.

  “I know,” he said. “I’m sorry. I know how much you hate platitudes.”

  “You know what they say about death and movin
g,” Mattie said, one garbled word at a time. “Very stressful.”

  The word “death” hung in the silence of the now empty cottage and rattled around in Don’s mind.

  He smiled and bit the inside of his cheek—it was the only way he could keep himself from crying in times like this.

  Don put his hands on his wife’s shoulders and massaged them.

  “Right up there with taxes,” Don said. “I know how hard this is, my love.”

  Mattie leaned her head to the right until it was pressed against her husband’s hand. He is a warm man, she thought, inside and out.

  “Don’t beat yourself up,” she said to her husband, knowing his every emotion. “I’m a big girl.”

  Mattie Tice was the strongest person Don had ever known and that strength had willed her through five years of living with ALS.

  But now their beloved lake house was simply too much for her to navigate.

  It’s too big, and I’m too small, Mattie thought, looking around the cottage she’d been coming to since she was ten years old.

  Two movers suddenly came barreling down the narrow staircase carrying a box. Mabel, the Tice’s beloved, mutt, barked her disappeared.

  “I thought that was everything?” Mattie asked before they could exit the front door. “What’s in there?”

  The two young men—broad shouldered, barrel-chested—stopped, unable to understand what she was saying.

  “She’s wondering what’s in there,” Don restated for them.

  “OF COURSE, MA’AM!” one of the movers, who was maybe twenty, yelled. He walked over, gesturing for his friend to follow, and stopped in front of Mattie. “WOULD YOU LIKE TO SEE?”

  He put the box on the floor with great animation and opened it, as if he were pantomiming a children’s story to a group of kindergarteners.

  Don tried hard not to roll his eyes.

  People always talked to his wife as if she were a baby, or deaf. They shouted, they cooed, they were nervous, they even invented their own language.

  Why are people always so uncomfortable around someone with a disability? Don wondered, his mind screaming: She has ALS! Her brain, ironically, is as strong as her body is weak.

  Instead, Don smiled politely and remained quiet. His wife hated scenes.

  The box was filled with big, old scrapbooks, and the mover pulled one out and placed it on Mattie’s lap. Don walked over quickly to open the ancient, hardbound album for her.

  “My flowers,” she said. “Oh!”

  Over the years, Mattie had created these albums, documenting every start of every flower that every person had ever given her: Latin and common names of the plants and flowers, their colors, and years they were gifted and planted.

  Alongside, Mattie had made a watercolor of each plant. Years later, when the plant was mature, Mattie would paint another watercolor of it in full bloom.

  These books had also served as Mattie’s professional signature: She gave elaborate drawings of her garden designs to her landscape clients, returning years later—often unannounced—to paint the now-fully-grown gardens she had envisioned. Mattie’s clients had included CEOs, politicians, famous actors, and musicians.

  The earth centers us all, Mattie thought.

  Mattie ran a trembling finger over a watercolor of a white peony with a pink center, one of her favorite flowers. It transported her back in time. She could feel her hands in the earth. She could feel a connection to the world.

  I could feel, Mattie thought.

  “Thank you,” Mattie said suddenly, and Don instantly closed the book. “Alone … now … please.”

  “Of course,” Don said. “Let us know when you’re ready.”

  Mattie could still hear her husband’s Ozarks accent living deep within his well-polished city-speak. It unknowingly reared its head when he was stressed. He’d try to hide it, but the give away, “ready” always came out in three syllables: “re uh-dee.”

  “Go,” she said, forcing a smile.

  Don was often the only one now who could easily understand his wife without intense concentration. He knew by heart her vocal cadences and rhythms, her every grunt, grumble, cough, choke, inflection. He could nearly read her mind by staring into her hazel eyes, those verdant flecks reminding him of the sea grass waving in the distance on the sandy dunes leading to Lake Michigan.

  Don kissed the top of his wife’s head, stopping for a second to inhale her scent.

  She always smells like sunshine, Don thought.

  Mattie smiled, lifted her head a few inches off the headrest of the wheelchair, and nodded, before reclining it slightly to watch her husband—still so young, so strong, so vibrant—as he walked out the front door. A spring wreath hanging on the door looked like a happy halo over his head as he passed by.

  She heard the birds sing before the door closed, their song like a summer chorus. Don always told Mattie that her voice, even now, sounded like a bird’s song.

  Still beautiful, he told her every day.

  Mattie pressed her right index finger on the wheelchair’s control and slowly rotated in a circle around her living room before toggling the joystick forward and stopping the wheelchair in front of the large picture window overlooking the lake.

  The window was open just a touch—“to air out the home as well as its ghosts,” Mattie had joked earlier. She closed her eyes, listening to the whistle of the breeze as it transitioned from water to dune to land. Mattie opened her eyes again and rolled her head to the left, watching the breeze ripple the dune grass before causing the peonies, fox glove, delphinium, and arctic orange poppy blossoms to dance. When the wind finally reached her, the dainty collar of her white shirt rippled and her matching hair took flight.

  She rolled her head right and watched Don load hundreds of little pots into the back of their “handi-capable” van.

  Mattie’s heart broke.

  Pots! Now all I will have are pots? she thought. Potted plants. Just like me.

  When Mattie was diagnosed with ALS, her life in her beloved garden—and career as a landscape architect—quickly disappeared.

  For decades, she had worked alone, in her garden, in other people’s gardens, and in the attic office she could no longer reach. Those were her private places.

  Now, she was never alone: Everyone hovered around like ghosts, worried about every cough, breath, sip of water.

  Nothing to take root ever again, to grow, to bloom. Forever trapped in this chair, Mattie thought, slamming her fists down on her wheelchair.

  Mattie negotiated her wheelchair from the living room into the dining room, Mabel following closely behind. She stopped in the middle, where the grand table had long anchored the room. She could hear the voices of her family and past celebrations—anniversaries, birthdays, Thanksgivings, Fourth of Julys—ring in her head.

  She moved into the kitchen, and thought of all the dinners she had prepared, the cookies she had baked, the picnic baskets she had packed. Vintage lake blue tiles she’d bought from Pewabic Pottery—Michigan’s historic ceramics studio—reflected the sunlight and filled the room with a warm glow.

  Mattie moved her chair into the family room overlooking the lake, and the smell of smoke from the floor-to-ceiling fireplace engulfed her. She smiled at the beautiful, polished Michigan stones—gathered by her father and husband from the lakeshore—that comprised the fireplace.

  Mattie remembered the first night in this house—a bone-chilling June night—when her father had just purchased the cottage.

  He had lit a fire with birch limbs he had picked up in the woods—and nearly lit himself and the house on fire as well—not yet realizing that some woods were made for burning and some were not.

  Mattie smiled and looked at the faded square over the mantel. She had framed a picture for her father decades ago of “The Firewood Poem,” and she could recite it line by line even though it was no longer in its sacred place.

  … Birch and fir logs burn too fast

  Blaze up bright and
do not last …

  But ash green or ash brown

  Is fit for a queen with golden crown

  Poplar gives a bitter smoke

  Fills your eyes and makes you choke

  Apple wood will scent your room

  Pear wood smells like flowers in bloom

  Oaken logs, if dry and old

  Keep away the winter’s cold

  But ash wet or ash dry

  A king shall warm his slippers by

  Mattie turned her chair toward the screened porch that overlooked her massive backyard gardens, patio, and pool.

  Her giant ferns were unfurling everywhere—like sleepy dancers stretching after a long winter’s hibernation. She stared out at the lake, the entire sandy coast of Michigan in the distance, the water’s horizon draped in clouds, almost like a mirage.

  So Wuthering Heights, Mattie thought. I will miss you.

  Mattie watched the wind sway through the branches and tender leaves of the sugar maples. Suddenly, a gust off the lake swept up and over the bluff, and a smell overwhelmed her. She shut her eyes and inhaled.

  The scent of cedar.

  Without warning, Mattie’s heart began to pound. She stared at the reddish-brown trunk of the ancient tree that sat at the edge of her garden.

  How long ago was it? she thought, trying to remember how old she was when she took a sapling from her parents’ home in St. Louis and planted it here with her father.

  The cedar’s arms reached toward the heavens. It was old, some of its lower branches sparse, and it stood in contrast to the willowy white birch she had also planted long ago. But the ancient, aging cedar had an unmistakable grace.

  Just like me. Mattie laughed.

  Mattie lifted her nose and sniffed again, Mabel doing the same. Mattie unconsciously moving her wheelchair until she was up against the screen.

  The scent triggered something in Mattie, something powerful, ancient, unforgettable.

  Mattie’s mind whirled, and she could suddenly hear the voice of her father.

  “How big do you think this will get, Dad?” she remembered asking him when they planted it.

  “How big are your hopes and dreams?” he asked, shovel in hand.