Isley A Christmas Caroline

A Second Chance, Amnesia Romantic Comedy
1. Auflage 2021
ISBN: 978-88-87269-60-4
Verlag: Pink Bloom Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection

E-Book, Englisch, Band 2, 230 Seiten

Reihe: Christmas Romantic Comedy

Caroline is a cynic career woman living the high life in Manhattan where love and relationships are but a distant memory of the past.

But after a freak accident on Christmas Eve, Caroline receives a visit from a cheeky spirit of Christmas Past, Present, Yet to Come, and-most importantly-Christmas That Could Have Been.

When she wakes up on Christmas Day suddenly married with three kids and living two doors down from her parents in New Jersey, Caroline has a chance to experience the life she would've had if she'd made a different choice.

Will small-town life as a mother and a wife make her rediscover what's really important in life?

A modern-day retelling of A Christmas Carol...

Autoren/Hrsg.

Isley, Camilla

Leseproben

Two

Leaks and Slips

“Would you like me to wait for you, Miss Wilkins?” my driver asks.

I meet his eyes in the rearview mirror.

“You’d rather go home, I expect?”

Nelson’s gaze lowers with guilt. “If it isn’t too inconvenient; it is Christmas Eve.”

“It’s not convenient for sure, but I suppose you must have the night like everybody else. Leave me the keys and call a cab. You can expense it.”

“Thank you, Miss, but it’s no matter. I’ll walk a few blocks to the station and take the train back. In this weather, it’ll be faster.”

Nelson exits the car to open my door and once I’m out, he hands me the keys. One last goodbye nod, and he gets on his way to the station.

All too soon, I’m alone walking up my sister’s driveway and slipping on the ice despite the pointy spikes of my leather stiletto heels—these should work as crampons.

I stop at the front door, allowing myself one last quiet minute. A Christmas tune is busting from inside the house, pouring out at every chink and keyhole, scraping against my skin. An ominous prelude to the chaos awaiting me within these walls.

I raise my hand to ring the bell, but before I can push the button my eyes fall on my sister’s door knocker, which isn’t at all particular, except for its largeness. Except now, I stare aghast as the tarnished brass surface transforms into Sam’s face.

I haven’t spared my ex-boyfriend of seven years a thought until Annabelle mentioned him earlier this afternoon. Was that enough to make me hallucinate him?

I try to blink the image away, but when I reopen my eyes his features, pale and wistful, are still there, aglow in a dismal light. Sam’s expression isn’t angry, but his gaze on me is the same as the day we broke up: disappointed, hurt, sad. His hair is curiously stirred, as if by a breath of hot air, and, although his eyes are wide open, they’re perfectly motionless—fixed on me in that accusatory, regretful frown.

As my heart throbs under the relentless scowl, Sam’s face disappears and the metal molds into a knocker again.

Startled, I squeeze my eyes shut and open them again to make sure he’s really gone.

Yep. It must’ve been a trick of the light or something. I blame the hallucination on the lack of caffeine—I skipped my regular four o’clock double espresso today—and push my sister’s doorbell.

Harper, Fan’s oldest kid at age eight, comes to open the door, yelling, “Auntie Caroline.” She tackles me into an embrace and drags me into the house.

An explosion of warmth and colors along with the smell of my mother’s cooking replace the dingy fog and frost of the front porch.

“Mom,” Harper shouts. “Auntie Caroline has arrived, I told you she’d be on time.”

Ah, so the will-Caroline-deign-us-with-her-presence merry-go-round has taken place also this year.

I don’t hear what Fan says in response if she replies; immediately after Harper’s announcement, Fan’s middle kids, Nora, five, and Benjamin, three, burst out of the living room and wrap themselves around my legs too.

They “help” me get rid of my coat, scarf, and gloves like little trained elves.

Nora also steals my bag and saunters back into the living room with the Prada tote slung over her shoulder and reaching to her calves.

The noise in this room with the tall ceilings and crooked wood floors is perfectly tumultuous. Instead of four kids, there might be forty for the uproar they’re making. No one seems to mind. On the contrary, Mom and Fan are by the fireplace, laughing heartily, enjoying the raucous.

When Thomas, Fan’s youngest at eight months, crawls to the couch and successfully steals Benjamin’s toy car, his older brother manhandles—or should I say kidhandles—him, prompting Fan to break them apart. On all fours, she gets in between her youngest to separate them and, at once, becomes the new attack focus. All the kids gang up on her. Benjamin pulls at her braid, tearing it half undone. Nora jumps on her back and tries to ride her like a horse, while little Tommy is quietly working behind the scenes to pluck off one of her shoes.

The scene is pure chaos, everything I don’t want in my life and that makes me cringe watching. And yet… my sister looks so happy. A string I haven’t stroked in years pulls in my heart, and I can’t help but wonder if that could’ve been me if I’d stayed with Sam and we’d had kids. Another thought strikes me, who would our kids have taken after? Me? Him? Would they have laughed like Sam? His whole-heartedly laugh was one of the things I loved most about him.

But then I take another look at Fan’s living room, at the mounds of discarded sticky toys and crayon stains adorning most surfaces, and at the stash of diapers she probably hasn’t had time to put away, and I retract. No, thank you.

Harper comes standing next to me, arms crossed over her chest. “They’re so juvenile sometimes, Auntie Caroline,” she says, observing her brothers and sister with contempt. “Can I offer you anything to drink?”

“Thank you, Harper, I’m good for now.”

My niece grabs a tray from a nearby coffee table. “A cookie then?”

I try not to wince at the tinge of artificial dyes on the sugar cookies. Gross. “No, thanks, I wouldn’t want to spoil my appetite before dinner.”

The festive atmosphere is already churning my stomach enough. Gag.

I’m scoping out where a safe place to sit would be when someone knocks on the door. In a rush, Fan shakes off Nora, scoops up Tommy, and, with her hair flying in all directions and minus a shoe, she rushes to the entrance.

“Hey, Caroline.” My sister stops briefly by my side to greet me. “Sit down, get comfortable.”

Then she carries on, followed by all her kids, to embrace her husband. Elijah comes stumbling into the house laden with Christmas presents.

At once my defenseless brother-in-law becomes the next victim of the shouting and struggling in an onslaught of miniature bodies.

Benjamin scales him, using a stool for a ladder. Nora picks his pockets. And even Harper, while not trying to get ahold of the presents, jumps on him from behind and, arms around his neck, rides him into the living room.

Elijah scrolls off his kids as a dog would with water, provoking even more shouts of wonder and delight. All the pillaged presents are recollected and placed in their rightful spot under the giant tree in the corner to be opened after dinner. At last, with all the adults finally present, we sit at the table.

The meal isn’t any less anarchic than my welcoming into the house. Fan insists on maintaining “baby-led” weaning for all her kids. This means the children don’t eat dinner before the adults or at a different table, but sit with us and have license to feed themselves however they see fit. In a nutshell, I can’t protest when Tommy puts his dirty, chubby fingers on my plate to steal a bite of turkey or to squish my mashed potatoes and lick the puree off his knuckles. I don’t know what sadistic instinct inspired my sister to place me next to the baby.

After a couple of hours around her kids, my temples are throbbing into a splitting headache. So much so that when the time comes to open the presents, I’m as eager as my nieces and nephews. Once this final consumerist ritual—great for book sales, I’m not complaining—will be completed, I’ll be free to go. I brush off a stray smudge of gravy from my hand, a leftover from the baby slamming their fists down into their plate, and give the little monsters my presents to speed up the process. Annabelle always marks the packages with remarkable stickers so I know what I supposedly bought for each.

The unwrapping proceeds smoothly, the only bit of drama occurring when Tommy steals a doll’s frying pan from Nora’s new toy kitchen set, and the baby becomes more than suspected to have swallowed a plastic turkey glued on a wooden plate. And with all his imparted lessons on self-weaning, how to blame him?

My sister breaks into hysterics, expecting Tommy to go blue and suffocate any minute. And when the turkey reappears at the bottom of Benjamin’s slipper, she’s ecstatic with relief.

Once the drama is over, the kids become gradually more subdued. Instead of running around screaming and playing with their new toys, they lie on the couch or in someone’s arms, rubbing sleep from their eyes. One by one, they’re brought upstairs and put to bed. Fan and Elijah work together as a well-oiled team. Benjamin goes first, then Nora. The youngest, Tommy, will go last as he still takes many naps during the day and is not yet time for his final feeding. When the time comes to put Harper to bed, Fan drops the baby in my lap in another shrewd maneuver.

The move surprises me so much, I don’t have the promptness to complain. I remain stranded on the couch, with this miniature person in my arms.

We study each other.

Tommy looks up at me with big blue baby eyes and flashes me a one-toothed smile, followed by a happy gurgle. Kind of cute.

The baby reaches up for my hand and grabs one of my fingers with his tiny ones. A strange wave of heat flushes my cheeks and empties my stomach. A powerful emotion I can’t describe, but that makes me deeply uncomfortable.

“Mom,” I say when she reappears after tidying the kitchen for Fan. “You want to take little Tommy?”

“Caroline, he’s just a baby.” She sits on one of the twin armchairs by the fireplace next to my dad, who’s reading the paper. “Holding him ten minutes won’t kill you.”

“I know, Mom, but I...