Chapter 1 #2
It was a better roar than the teenagers had gotten. It was the roar for a famous face. The chairman! It’s the chairman! Somebody started the chant, and the whole floor picked it up. “Kiss! Kiss! Kiss!”
On the mezzanine, Caroline stood very still on her red X.
It was fine. It was funny, actually. She would tell this story at dinner parties.
The year the spotlight caught Connor with his chief of staff.
He would give Brittany a peck on the cheek, like a grandfather, and he would look up at the mezzanine and make a face at his wife, and the whole atrium would laugh.
That was what would happen. She could see it. She was already smiling for it.
Down in the light, Connor laughed and shook his head. He lifted a hand, like a man saying no, no, not me. He glanced around, looking for a way out of the circle.
Brittany put her hand flat on the front of his coat.
She said something to him. Caroline could not hear it. His face changed while he listened. The laugh went out of it. Something else came in, something Caroline had not seen on her husband’s face in a long time. It took her a second to put a name to it.
It was how he used to look at her.
He bent his head and kissed Brittany Vail.
It was not a peck. It started out like one, quick and light.
Then it didn’t stop. Brittany rose onto her toes into it, and Connor’s hand came up and slid into her hair, into that sharp blonde line of it, and he held the back of her head and kissed her the way a man kisses someone he has already thought about kissing.
His other arm went around her waist. Her coat pressed flat against his.
Her hand closed on his lapel and pulled.
The spotlight held on them.
The chant broke up into cheering. The cheering turned into whistles. Somebody yelled, “Get a room!” and people laughed, and then the laughing thinned out, and the whistles died, and still the light did not move and neither did they.
Caroline counted. She didn’t mean to. The number just went on in her head, just as she counted every cue in every show she’d ever run. Four. Five. Six.
The noise in the atrium changed. It dropped from a roar to a rumble to a murmur. It was the sound of nine hundred people realizing, one by one, that they were not watching a joke. Phones went up all over the floor. On the second-floor balcony, three news cameras turned and held.
Eight. Nine.
Connor lifted his head.
He didn’t let go of Brittany right away. His hand was still in her hair. His face was still close to hers. Then something reached him, the silence maybe, or the phones, and he looked up.
He looked straight at the mezzanine.
He looked at the center of the rail, at the red X, at the exact place his wife had stood every year for eight years. He knew right where to look. He found her. His face went white under the light.
For one second, across the whole dark atrium, they looked at each other.
Then the organ came in.
The organist didn’t know what else to do.
He had a cue sheet, and the cue sheet said that when the kiss ended, he played.
So he played, loud and bright, the opening bars of “O Come, All Ye Faithful,” and the atrium lights came back up, and the spotlight went out, and everyone blinked at each other in the ordinary gold light of a department store.
Every face in the building turned toward the mezzanine.
Caroline had the microphone.
Her heart was going hard in her throat, so hard it was almost a sound. Her hands were shaking so badly the clipboard rattled against the brass rail, so she set it down on the floor, very carefully, and put her hands behind her back where nobody could see them.
Down on the floor, Connor let go of Brittany. He said something to her, short. Then he started pushing through the crowd toward the mezzanine stairs.
Caroline looked at the camera on the long arm. It had swung around to her. Its red light was on.
You have a show, she thought. Run your show.
She leaned into the microphone.
“That,” she said, “was the thirtieth lighting of the Hadley’s mistletoe.”
Her voice came out of the speakers clear and even and warm. It was her announcing voice. It sounded exactly as it had thirty seconds ago. It filled the dome, and she could not believe it was hers.
“Please welcome the Saint Anne’s Children’s Choir.”
The crowd clapped, a little late and a little too hard. The kids on the risers, who had no idea what had just happened and would not have cared, lifted their chins and sang.
Caroline keyed her radio. “Luz.”
“I’m here.” Luz’s voice was very quiet.
“The mezzanine stairs stay closed until the choir is finished.”
A pause.
“Nobody comes up,” Caroline said. “Nobody. Tell security.”
“Copy,” Luz said. “Nobody.”
Below, Connor reached the velvet rope at the foot of the stairs.
The guard stepped in front of him. Caroline watched her husband say something, sharp, and point up at the mezzanine.
The guard shook his head and kept his hands folded in front of him.
Connor stood there with his coat open and his hair out of place, and the people around him turned and stared, and some of them lifted their phones again.
Caroline looked away from him and did not look back.
She stood on her red X while forty-two children sang four carols.
She smiled at them. She clapped after every song.
When the littlest boy, the one who had lost his mitten, forgot his line in “Jingle Bells,” she caught his eye and mouthed it to him, and he shouted it, and the crowd laughed, and for three seconds the laugh was real.
She thanked the sponsors by name. She thanked the children’s hospital.
She thanked the fire marshal, who was standing by the candy counter looking at the balconies with his lips pressed together.
She thanked the choir and the organist and the staff of Hadley’s, every one of whom had worked a double shift today.
She said the last line she said every year, the one her father had said before her.
“From all of us at Hadley’s, Merry Christmas, Philadelphia. We’ll see you under the mistletoe.”
She heard how it sounded the second it left her mouth.
A few people in the crowd laughed, the ugly, surprised kind of laugh. Most of them didn’t. The organ came in loud over the top of it, playing people out, and the crowd broke up and moved toward the doors.
Caroline switched off her microphone. She turned around. She walked, not fast, to the staff door at the back of the mezzanine, and opened it, and went through, and shut it behind her.
Then she ran.
* * *
The stockroom behind the mezzanine was long and narrow and smelled of cardboard and pine. Boxes of ornaments were stacked to the ceiling on metal shelves. There was a broken reindeer by the door that had been waiting for a repair since October.
Caroline got as far as the reindeer and stopped, because her legs would not go any farther.
She put one hand on a shelf. She bent over. She waited to be sick, and she wasn’t, and somehow that was worse. She stood there bent in half in her good black dress with her red scarf hanging down, breathing like she’d run up all six floors of the building.
Nine seconds.