Unfortunately, I understood exactly what he meant. I was only ten-years-old, but my dad had been in and out of jail most of my life. And my mother’s cancer diagnosis had aged me a lot in the last six months. I had cultivated a polite and much more mature version of my kid voice to do things like talk ConEd out of turning off the electricity in our fourth-floor walk-up, explaining to my fifth-grade teacher why I hadn’t been at school in weeks, and to get additional pain medication for my mother to make her more comfortable.
The halfway house guy probably thought I was a girlfriend or someone my dad owed money. If he’d known I was Joe’s ten-year-old daughter, he never would’ve told me all that. I hoped. Even before I became an elf, I tended to see the best in others.
“Did you get him on the phone?” My mother asked when I came back in from the fire escape, which was the only place in our studio apartment where you could get decent reception. She was lying in the bed we used to share before her coughing got so bad, she made me move to the couch.
She’d complained that the little rail bed was too small when we first moved into the apartment after my father caught his second jail sentence less than a year after finishing out the first. But now, my mother was so frail and thin, she made the twin bed look like it was queen-sized.
I swallowed down the lump in my throat. “Yes, he’ll be here in about an hour.”
Before I became an elf, I could still lie. But not very well, apparently.
My mother looked at me for a short suspicious moment, one eye squinting. Then she said, “You lyin’. He ain’t coming to get you. He already done moved on from that halfway house. Probably got another woman by now.”
I looked away because no, he wasn’t coming to get me. And I didn’t have the heart to tell her what had really happened. The truth was even worse than what she was thinking.
“You can’t blame him,” my mother continued off my silence. “He’s a man. Men can’t wait. They just don’t know how to keep on loving when the going gets tough. The truth is I should never have fallen in love with him. Should’ve kept you and kept on walking. My good sense knew how he was from the start, but my heart wouldn’t listen...”
She grew silent for a long time after that, and I thought she was done. But then she said, “I’m going to give you one last piece of advice. Don’t trust men. They act like they love you, maybe even say the words. But when things get hard, they disappear. Remember that.”
She grabbed my hand with surprising strength. “Promise me you’ll remember that. Promise me you’ll never give your heart to some man and let him run off with it.”
Luckily, I was saved from having to answer when she started coughing again.
The coughing fits weren’t as bad as they used to be. However, they were even worse to watch. Maybe the cough wanted to come out big. But my mother was so weak now. It barely made a sound by the time it managed to hack up from her chest. And it looked like it hurt her.
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry, baby,” she said after she was done.
Mom apologized to me a lot during that last month of her life. For coughing. For keeping me out of school. For getting sick in the first place with a kind of cancer so aggressive and advanced it couldn’t be cured even with the best insurance—which, mind you, we didn’t have anyway.
I would wish I had given her a better answer to all those apologies in the years after her death. I wish I had told her the truth. That she had nothing to apologize for. That it wasn’t her fault. That I knew she loved me, and if she could’ve stayed, she would have.
But that night before her last Christmas, I just answered the same way I always did. “It’s okay, mama. It’s okay.”
She peered at me in that all-knowing way of hers, her eyes still sharp despite all her pain.
“Maybe it’s for the best he ain’t coming for you. Maybe the Lord will bless you with something even better.”
For the next two decades, I’d turn those words over and over in my mind. What had they been exactly? A wish? A blessing? A prophecy from someone on her last breaths? Had she somehow known that losing a parent on Christmas was the only way for an orphan to become an elf?
I could never be quite sure. But she held on. For almost two and a half more hours, she held on until 12:01 AM when she took her last breath.
And that’s how Santa found me. Crying over her lifeless body.
“Would you look at that! She just barely made it to Christmas. I was rooting for her. But I wasn’t sure she’d be able to do it. Strong lady, your mother.”
A new voice had invaded the room, older and jolly. I abruptly stopped crying and turned around to find a man standing in front of the apartment’s fireplace. He was dressed in a red suit and had a big stomach and a huge, curly white beard. So I knew exactly who he was even though I hadn’t believed in him since second grade when Natalie Rinaldi told me he wasn’t real.
He looked a lot less surprised to see me than I was to see him.
And his voice boomed as he declared, “I don’t know if I’m one lucky Santa or if you’re one lucky elf.”
“What is wrong, daughter?”
I blink. Jae-Hyun’s question pulls me from the memory of the last Christmas Eve I spent in this realm.
A bittersweet song is playing on the record player. “Turn! Turn! Turn!” by The Byrds. As the singer lets me know that there’s a time in every season for everything that humans do, I look down to find the sketchbook page I was supposed to be drawing on empty.
“Something weighs heavy on your mind,” Jae-Hyun says. He’s sitting across from me, working on the next issue of Nobles and Samurais. “Tell me what it is.”
I wish I could say it was nothing. But elves can’t lie. So, I try to throw him off the scent with a few excuses for my strange mood from earlier in the day.
“I’m just bummed about how badly the 10 LARPers Leaping panoply presentation went today. All they wanted to do was go on a quest and smoke some pot after they finished leaping. But then I…um…had to give three of them some bad news that totally bummed them out. It’s like I told Krista. I’m a terrible replacement for a matchmaker.”
Jae-Hyun makes a sympathetic noise. “It sounds like you have had a hard day taking over for your matchmaking friend at the panoply, daughter.”
I let out an inward sigh of relief. Good, he fell for my misdirection. We can talk about my truly terrible day instead of—
“Perhaps we can discuss those worries after you have told me what is truly bothering you.”
Elves don’t curse out loud. It’s really not our thing. But I’m sorely tempted to right now. I guess he’s not going to accept the runaround. And the way he’s looking at me, I can tell there’s no way out of answering his original question.
This time I sigh out loud with no relief whatsoever. “So…there’s something I haven’t told you about me. I’m like Krista. Kind of. I also have a special gift. But mine is for drawing people who are soon-to-be-departed. It’s hard to explain, but I just sort of know when someone you love is about to die.”
I cringe and wait for Jae-Hyun to ask me all the questions.
But he just nods and says, “I see. Go on.”