Christmas in Bethel

Prologue

PROLOGUE

Please don’t judge me too harshly. The jury in my own head is merciless enough and rarely adjourns.

Beth Stilton’s Diary

Despite the title of this book, my story is more of a love story than a Christmas story. I hope that’s okay with you. Especially since most Christmas stories are love stories. I don’t think that’s a coincidence. Christmas, if done right, is love. And love, like Christmas, should be infused with magic.

I’ve been accused of oversharing, but I think it’s the things we don’t share that people really want to hear. And if I can’t be honest, I might as well write fantasy, which, I admit, my story still feels like. Things like this don’t happen to ordinary people. Especially me. Up until that Christmas, my life was a dumpster fire, but without the warmth or illumination.

I’ll warn you in advance that I’ll be sharing a few difficult parts from my past. I have to. If I left the hard parts out, there would be no story. And you wouldn’t believe it anyway. Only lives on social media don’t have problems.

Most of the time I feel like I live in a different world than the rest of humanity—like I march to the beat of a different cellist. I don’t participate in popular culture, I don’t have a subscription to any streaming services, I don’t recognize the faces on magazine covers, and the only music I listen to was composed before our century or was meant to be played on vinyl records.

The one exception to my cultural detachment is books. There are authors who somehow speak my world’s dialect. Or at least my heart’s. So, I suppose it’s not entirely surprising that what happened to me that Christmas unveiled more like a novel than real life, and involved an author. Most of all I wonder why he chose me.

My name is Leigh, though I go by my middle name, Beth. There are two reasons for that. First, as Leigh people assume I’m a man, which sometimes has its advantages, but usually just makes me feel masculine. Second, because Lee was my biological father’s name, whom I don’t want anything to do with. I think my mother named me Leigh hoping that my father would feel some attachment and stick around. It worked for only a little while.

My last name is Stilton, like the cheese. Enough said.

That was a lot just to tell you my name. I’m thirty-nine, though I look closer to thirty, I have dark brown eyes and middle-of-the-back-length, cappuccino-colored hair, and I’m five foot six. Men tell me that I’m pretty, but since that’s all they seem to care about, I stopped seeing that as a positive. These days I don’t do much to be pretty. I’d as soon wear a ball cap than do something to my hair. And since I mostly work at home, shaving my legs requires a command performance.

I’m single, by choice, because I have poor judgment in men. I’m apparently attracted to narcissistic abusers. The thing about narcissists is that they’re charming on the outside, but once the veneer has worn off, there’s nothing but anger. I’ve never known a narcissist who wasn’t rageful at his core.

The thing about narcissists is that you’re either a supporting actor in their play or a prop. And if a prop isn’t where they want it, they’ll just kick it out of the way. That’s all I’ve been in my life—a prop in others’ dramas. I’ve wondered if I subconsciously sought out these men because that’s all I thought I deserved. Up until that Christmas season, it was all I’d known.

I suppose that I was groomed for failure. My father left us when I was two. When I was nine, my mother, who was a mean-spirited alcoholic, married a man who abused me until I was fourteen. When I was eleven, I told my mother what he was doing to me and she slapped me and called me a liar, so I kept to myself and silently endured the nightmare. I had an older brother, but he was smart—he’d left as soon as he could.

My only escape at that time was books. I read voraciously. I read everything they had for young adults, which, back then, was two shelves in the public library. Then I read them again. By the time I was ten I had read Gone with the Wind twice.

When I was in the eighth grade, Mrs. Johnson, my middle school gym teacher, saw me in the shower, and I was called in to the school office. I had no idea what I’d done, but I was left with a school counselor who interrogated me until I confessed to what was happening at home. I was terrified. I thought I was in trouble—like, go-to-jail trouble. I wasn’t, at least not from the authorities, but my stepfather was. He was arrested. My mother never forgave me for that. I suppose I never forgave her either. I don’t know who I hated more, my stepfather for what he did to me or my mother for letting him do it.

Unwanted, I left home at sixteen. I got a job with a wilderness rescue team. I found three bodies that year, all of them suicides. It was the beginning of a new kind of trauma in my life, one that never left. A year later, I became the youngest EMT in Pennsylvania. That’s also where I met my first boyfriend, Lance. Handsome, cocky Lance. He was my boss; a twenty-six-year-old thrill junkie, and I was his underaged thrill. The day I turned eighteen he took me out to celebrate my birthday, though he was really just celebrating himself. He took what he wanted. It took only three months for him to move on.

I had some dark experiences as an EMT, even more than I’d had on the rescue team. Car and motorcycle crashes, burn victims, murders and suicides, things most people see only on TV. It’s different when it’s real. They collected in my head like a shelf of bad movies, sneaking out of my subconscious in the form of night terrors. By the time I was eighteen, I had seen more horror than most people will witness in their entire lives. The things I saw still haunt me. I sometimes wake at night screaming.

After Lance, I moved on the only way I could think of and joined the military. That’s where I met my husband, Dan. He was large and muscular, and I guess that’s what attracted me to him. I assumed he could protect me. Unfortunately, there was no one to protect me from him. Once he started beating me, there was little I could do.

I got pregnant seven months after our marriage. One night, angry that I was pregnant (as if he hadn’t anything to do with that) and too sick to cook his dinner, he threw me down the stairs. I lost the baby I was carrying. I was still in the hospital when I filed for divorce. By the age of twenty-two I was divorced, had lost a baby, and was alone with a mind filled with more horror than a Stephen King movie marathon. Like I said, dumpster fire.

That’s when I got the idea to find my birth father. I don’t know what I was looking for; probably some misguided hope for connection or salvation. Or maybe something more basic, like validation for my existence. One of the books I read when I was younger was about a young woman hunting down her birth father and their happy, somewhat comical reunion. I think I bought into the fantasy. Unfortunately, the book version was different than my reality.

Ronald Jeffrey Lee (I know, it sounds like a serial killer’s name) wasn’t happy to see me. That’s putting it mildly. He started with denial, basically telling me that I didn’t exist and asked to see my birth certificate, which I don’t happen to carry around with me. I think my body is proof enough that I was born. Then, when he saw that I wasn’t backing down, he said, “What do you want? I don’t have any money.”

That was obvious. He dressed like he didn’t have a mirror either. His socks didn’t match, he wore a wife-beater T-shirt, and his hair—what was left of it—looked like it hadn’t been washed or combed since George Bush was president (either Bush). I found him at home in a low-income housing unit in the middle of the day with a beer in his hand. The man was a living stereotype.

He proceeded to tell me that I was a mistake and that he wished I had never been born. I told him that at least we agreed on one thing.

I meant that. I really did wish I had never been born. Alone, broken, and unwanted, I had nothing left to live for. That’s when I decided to end my pathetic little life. I knew that no one would miss me. Outside of my brother, whom I never saw, I couldn’t think of even one person who would care. I set a date for December 25. It would be a Christmas present to myself. In a deeply macabre state of mind, I even bought one of those cardboard Advent calendars, the kind that have a chocolate behind each day’s door, and began counting down the days to my departure.

During those “coda” days I found myself wandering a lot, both mentally and literally, mixing with the bustle of holiday crowds. I was in a bookstore looking for something to distract myself when I came across a book titled Bethel by an author I’d heard of but never read: J. D. Harper. I don’t know why, amid all those book-laden shelves, this book called out to me. Maybe it was some spiritual force that guided me to this book, or maybe it was just the echo of my name in the title. Whatever the reason, I bought the book and took it home to start reading.

I didn’t sleep that night. The book felt as if it had been written just for me. The way the author wrote, it was like he knew me, like he knew my pain and walked with me. This was someone who understood loss and brokenness. This was someone I could trust.

I sniffled through the last half of the book, and cried when I closed it. Something in me had changed. I felt purged and new, like not only had I found someone who cared for me but, for the first time in my life, I was worthy of being cared for. I wanted to be loved the way this author wrote about love.

I knew he was a big-time author. I’m sure millions of people felt the same way about him as I did, but I put that out of my mind. He was mine. Just mine. He wrote just for me.

I threw away the Advent calendar. (After taking out all the chocolates, of course). And then I went back and found everything Mr. Harper had written. At the time there were seven books in all, each as powerful as the first. I read and reread them until their pages were worn.

Life went on. Significantly, my life went on. I no longer thought about ending it. The days crawled, but the years flew. I changed apartments; I changed careers.

Then, more than a decade after I found that first book, I read in the paper that J. D. Harper was coming to my town for a book signing. I had to meet him. I wanted to look into the eyes of the man who could conceive such things. I had to know if he was real.

I planned for more than three weeks for that day. I bought a new outfit. Two of them. Truthfully, I was as terrified as I was excited. What if he wasn’t anything like his books? How could a man that successful not be affected by fame and fortune?

But my greatest fear was personal. What if meeting my author was as disappointing as meeting my father had been? Then I’d no longer even have the comfort of his words. I almost didn’t go. But in the end, my curiosity was stronger than my fear. It was time to meet my author.