White Rabbit Chapter 41

41.

            Delores got word from her mother that she would not be going home to Maine for summer until early August. Her parents were jetting to Denmark to decide if they wanted to move—if her father wanted to take the job. “You can’t!” Delores panicked. But every time she protested her mother would say it wasn’t a decision that was hers to make, so it wasn’t worth her time. “Denmark?” Such a bizarre place to move. People move to Ohio, or Colorado, but Denmark? Really? Finally, though not giving in, she told her mother that she would return to the United States promptly when she was eighteen to go to college. The plane ticket may as well be a birthday present reserved as soon as she struck the magic age of eighteen.

            “Of course,” her mother said. “We’ve arranged for you to stay on with Agnes until we return. Or would you like to go with Whitney? Her father called and invited you to Martha’s Vineyard with them. Seems like such a nice man.”

            “I’d rather stay here,” she said bleakly.

            Delores talked to Lady Goodyear telling her that she’d rather not tell Whitney that she was staying on through the summer so not to hurt Whitney’s feelings. Lady Goodyear said it was understood and so Delores told Whitney that she was going to Denmark with her parents. When she saw Whitney again in August, she would say it was cancelled and she spent the summer catching up on reading here in Boston. That is, if she saw Whitney in August. It is nearly impossible at fifteen to imagine doors closing and endings so soon in life when everything else seems to be just beginning. “I hope you don’t move, Delores.”

            “I will refuse,” Delores replied flatly. “Somehow.”

July 25^th…

Delores was scheduled to turn sixteen in two short weeks. It had been two months since she heard from Alex De Wolfe. She was starting to think that he had a family in Toledo, or Muncie. Kids in braces, toddlers, babies, a wife, a minivan, a dog, a two story blue house with a tree house in back and white picket fence, the works. Sure, why not? People are duped every day. People are duplicitous every day. Her stomach ached when she thought of it. Her lack of faith in Alex was tearing her apart. Boston is so goddamn hot in the summer. Smoldering…and it stinks. Today was better than yesterday though. There was one of those breezes that seemed to sneak in out of sympathy for people. If ever there was proof there is a God it is in a cool breeze. She walked into Dunkin’ Donuts. The air conditioning relieved her sweat-dampened skin. Her clothes suddenly unstuck. She still drank coffee because she didn’t care for the frozen drinks and she needed the caffeine. She was an addict. She didn’t take Adderall anymore. She was weaned off it by her mother at her father’s request. Her father didn’t like the state of modern medicine, the good or the bad. He believed everything could be resolved by a better diet.

She sat at her usual table. Actually, it was a booth by a large window on which there were still traces of spray-on snow from Christmas in the corners. A Boston Globe sat uncomfortably under a silver napkin holder. Someone left it there like a chain letter. Read me, it screamed. Black words on gray sky newsprint. The smell of newspapers, she loved. If ever there was cologne. She looked out the window like she usually does. Observation, key to life. There were no agents following her anymore, no black Lincoln driven by glib bricks scowling at her with Blackberries, Ray Bans. She took that as a bad sign. If Alex didn’t have a family in Toledo or Muncie, they probably had him. He was probably in detention again. She wouldn’t write any letters this time with her red Pelikano fountain pen on fancy Strathmore parchment paper. She was in love with him and knew she would always love him but it seemed that there was nothing that would keep them together in this life. She reserved her place in the broken hearts club, figured she’d try alcohol sooner than later, more pills. She was reading Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar. It didn’t help. It lied on the table by her cup waiting for her inevitable disappointment in the Globe. Her love wasn’t capricious teen love like Whitney and Bruce. Not something to carve on a tree or tattoo on an arm. It wasn’t Romeo and Juliet or anyone she has ever read of or known. It was something permanent that would always be with her, like a scar. No, a scar isn’t good. Like, like…no, like a scar. A meaningful and permanent scar from something very good like saving a baby from a railcar, or from a dog bite. A dog that could have taken off her face. She survived it. That is what matters. She survived. Or maybe it was like a birthmark. Love didn’t seem to be a strong enough word. It seemed corny and used. Like God. But she would always belong to him and he would always belong to her and maybe someday, in another life, or later in this one, they could meet. They would have a life uninterrupted by insanity, by prison, government agents, reason and logic…

As she sat there in a meditative trance she barely noticed Santa Claus coming straight for her. It wasn’t just any Santa Claus it was the Santa Claus. The Santa Claus that Alex spoke to the night they met here, the preface to their first night together. Her bottom lip tingled. Her body shot with electric. He was very tall and portly, polite as Santa Claus is expected to be. Delores couldn’t help herself. “Don’t you know its July?” It sounded more acrimonious than she meant it to sound.

“Oh, yes!” he sat across from her squeezing in between the back of the booth bench and the table. “Christmas in July,” he replied jovially. “Today is the 25^th mind you. Half way past Christmas, halfway to.” His beard was real, a swirling wispy cloud, and his eyebrows were like strewn cotton or ghostly caterpillars. He was pale and his face was red, his nose as well which made Delores think of an old Uncle she had that she didn’t know if she had anymore who was a jovial alcoholic, roughly the same age and build. No beard, though, no white eyebrows. Santa sat there and as though he forgot his entire purpose for coming over said, “Ohh!” loudly then reached into a large front pocket and pulled out a wrapped box sliding it across the table between the Globe and The Bell Jar.

“What is this for?”

“Christmas.”

“Christmas?”

“Yes, actual Christmas, last year, sorry it is late.”

She opened the gift. It was a silver braided chain with a beautiful silver Eiffel tower pendant. It was etched so delicately that you could see the beams and perhaps, if you looked close enough, a lady jumping. Delores smiled wildly. “I cannot accept this!” she cried. “I love it! But I certainly cannot accept it. I mean why?”

“Why can’t you accept it?” asked Santa.

“Because I don’t believe in you.”

                 Santa laughed. “Oh…”

           “I’m sorry,” she apologized.

“You don’t have to believe in me. It isn’t from me.”

“Well, who is it from?”

“We have a mutual friend.”

“We do?” Delores asked. She was lost. The pendant distracted her. She held the chain with one hand and cupped the pendant in the other.  

            “We do,” he affirmed. He never stopped smiling. The tip of his nose was a cherry tomato.

Then she remembered again that he was the Santa Claus from that night as though she sometime between the time he sat down and now forgot entirely and she nearly fainted. “It comes with a message. I wrote it down,” he reached a white gloved hand into his red coat and pulled out a pair of reading glasses. Cars honked in the busy street outside muted by the window. Passersby outside said random things to Santa and looked in oddly through the glass. Young teen boys acted goofy and little children’s faces were lit up with excitement. “How long until Christmas,” they’d inevitably ask their parents. Santa unrolled a scroll.

“Delores, as you may have guessed I’ve been arrested, again. I haven’t been able to have any contact with anyone and there has been no opportunity yet for me to escape. They know I am invisible so I have been kept in a special security area which will make it very difficult for me to leave. A guard kindly allowed me to use his cell phone to make this call. Bronson is here but he has no memory of me and will likely be released soon. Somehow they are erasing memories of those incidentally involved. There is a chance I will not be able to see you again in this life, but I will have faith that this will end soon and we will all be freed.” Delores was wearing the pendant and began to cry. Even more bizarre looks in through the glass. Santa continued, “Please forgive me for leaving but I had to return. I will find you, someday. All of my love to you, Alex.”

Delores dropped her head on the table. The pendant lay flat. Her hair sprawled out wildly. Santa rubbed her head with a white-gloved hand. “Rather than calling a lawyer, or whoever, he called me. Told me the gift he wanted to get you and left that message on my answering machine. I wasn’t home when he called. I had no idea how to find you but he said to try here. Sure enough, I walk past and here you are.”

“When did he leave you the message?”

“Two weeks ago.”

“Is there anything we can do to get him released? We have to do something.”

“Be careful, Delores. They can make you vanish. And you wouldn’t be likely to return.”

“I don’t care to return. I’ve read of the CIA kidnapping people and erasing their minds. I thought it was all science fiction.”

“I’ve read of worse.”

“Who would believe that any of this could happen in our country?”

“Anyone who has been around long enough. McCarthyism ruined the lives of countless people all based upon the accusation that they were communists. Being a communist and being American, they charged, are not synonymous.”

Delores drank her coffee. The caffeine made her mind do a torrent of backflips. She talked to Santa for a little while longer about Alex and then took a cab to meet Philippe at Fenway for a ballgame. They stood for the National Anthem and Delores looked around and wondered how many of them knew what exactly they were singing. Soldiers were honored on field from a Massachusetts reserve unit that had recently returned from Iraq and they were in their fatigues on field along with a small band of men dressed as Revolutionary War soldiers who stood alongside like cheerleaders. Please rise and remove your caps. During the procession pn the scoreboard it read, “Freedom isn’t free.”

Delores sneered.