The Christmas Hope(42)

“What’s this?” I asked.

“Somebody started a collection for Mia. We thought maybe you’d know what to do with it. You can use it however she needs it most.” I felt like a little girl again watching Pastor Burke hand my mother an envelope at Christmas.

“This is so kind of everyone,” I said, wishing I were better with words. “I can’t believe they did this.” He smiled and I knew that Mia wasn’t the first child Dr. Andrews and the staff had rallied around at Christmas.

“Are you ready for Christmas?” he asked Emily. She shrugged but kind of grinned.

“Are you?” I asked.

“Oh, yes. My dad and his wife and my grandmother are coming to visit us this year because my wife is so pregnant that everyone’s afraid she won’t be able to make the trip to see them. They say they’re coming to see us but I know they’re hoping she has the baby early.”

“When is she due?” I asked.

“The first of January.”

“How long have you been married?”

“Three years tonight!”

We got out a round of congratulations before Dr. Andrews was paged to another room.

“If I don’t see you again today, Emily,” he said, kneeling in front of her, “I hope you enjoy this Christmas and every one after it.”

She put her arms around his neck and hugged him. When everyone left, Emily pulled the gift she had chosen at the department store out of the bag. Mark and I had followed her earlier as she went from one floor to the next looking for the perfect present. It was sitting alone on a shelf that had long been picked over and emptied. She fluffed the angel’s dress and set it on the windowsill by Mia’s bed and then leaned in and whispered something to her. I kissed my finger and put in on Mia’s head and then Emily did the same.

“I suppose you’re not going to tell me what you said to Mia this time either,” I said.

“I told her that her angel would stay with her until we got back. She can’t see her angel. That’s why I wanted to get her one, so she’d know what angels looked like.”





Nathan Andrews walked past the nurses’ station on the way to his office. “Are there any messages for me?”

A nurse looked at the message caddy next to her phone and shook her head. He walked toward his office, disappointed that he hadn’t heard from Rory yet.

“Oh, wait, Dr. Andrews, you do have a message.”

He turned around.

“Sorry. It was sitting on the desk instead of in the message carrousel.” She picked it up and held it in front of her. It says, ‘Found the needle.’ That’s all.”

Nathan smiled. He went to his office and picked up the phone.

“Sorry, Dr. Lee had to go off site,” someone said. “Some sort of explosion. He’s already been gone close to an hour.”

“Do you know if he left any sort of message to give to Nathan Andrews?”

The woman shuffled through paperwork and grunted. “No, nothing here,” she said. “I expect them to roll back in here any minute.”

Nathan asked her to remind Dr. Lee to call him but he wasn’t hopeful. Nathan jotted a name down on a notepad on his desk: “Mark.” He underlined it. Then he wrote “Mark and Patricia Addison.” He tried to put a face to the mother he had spoken to four years earlier but there was no use; he couldn’t. It was part of his job that he didn’t like; how names and faces could blur. For all he knew he was confusing everything in his mind: the young man, the mother, the gift, the social worker he’d met who had a deceased son. Coincidence? he thought. What were the odds? Slim, he thought, pushing away from the desk. In five hours he’d be eating dinner with his family. If Rory didn’t call before then he’d forget about it till after Christmas.





After we returned home from the hospital Mark and Emily made a fire. When it crackled and popped and a steady flame wrapped around a log we sat together at the kitchen table and ate lunch. It was the first time Mark and I had sat at that table with someone else in four years. After lunch Mark sat on the sofa to read through the instructions for Candy Land. It had been so many years that neither one of us could remember how to play. He threw his legs up on the ottoman and Emily sat down next to him. Within minutes of Mark reading the instructions out loud she was asleep, falling over onto his shoulder. He tried to reach the blanket on the back of the sofa and I grabbed it, pulling it over her. “You may be there for a while,” I said, whispering.

“I hope so,” he said, wrapping his arm around Emily’s shoulder and resting his hand on her arm. In a few short days Emily had managed to wrap Mark around her little finger. I guess she’d done that to both of us. It was going to be hard to place her in a foster home. I put the thought out of my mind. I didn’t want to think about that right now. I’d deal with it after Christmas; then maybe it wouldn’t be so hard. I looked at Mark. His head was resting on the back of the sofa and his eyes were closed. For so many years he hadn’t been able to sit and relax. He had kept himself busy; we both had. I never took the time to rest because that paved the way for thinking and remembering, and those were painful options, especially if I wasn’t ready for some of the memories. Emily repositioned herself and snuggled closer to Mark’s side. He was relaxed now and the look on his face told me he was at peace. I didn’t know if placing Emily was going to be harder on him or me.