The Ghost of Christmas Past

Midnight woke him up like a clarion going off right over his head. Steve's eyes shot open and his breath caught in his chest, and he felt like he might as well have not slept at all.

The room was dark save for the vaporous glow of moonshine reflected off the snow outside and suffusing through his window. Not enough to make shadows and not enough to actually see by, it was more the idea of light than light itself. Steve sat up and rubbed his face, breathing in the stench off his hands that no amount of soap could ever eradicate completely. It was the stink of failure, the terrible residue of guilt, and although that smell had been with him for most of his life its pungency surprised him every time.

He knew the hour without having to look at a clock. Resigned to all that would follow, he swung his legs out over the side of the bed and placed his naked feet on the cold floor. His leg muscles cramped instantly. At least he felt something. He pulled on his robe and got up, stumbled into his slippers, and walked blind to the bedroom door.

She waited for him in the next room.

"Thought maybe I was gonna catch a break this year," he said, his voice still gravelly from sleep and too many years of pouring cheap booze down his throat.

She smiled. "Nice to see, you, too," she said.

Julie was dressed the same as always, in a smart blue business suit. Her red hair was piled up atop her head with just a few single strands floating loose beside her beautiful, youthful face. She hadn't changed. She never would. He had himself to thank for that.

"Drink?" he offered her as he shuffled to his small kitchen.

"I wish I could," she said, and sighed nostalgically. "There's a lot of things I wish I could enjoy again."

He poured himself a drink, an amber liquid inferno in a hazy glass. He downed it and winced as fire burned down his gullet. He poured a second and carried this to the room where Julie sat on the couch waiting for him, looking every bit the queen perched on her throne.

He plopped himself down in a shabby recliner. The fabric at key points had long since worn out and tufts of soiled stuffing puffed out like dirty clouds curious about the goings on in room but not enough to actually venture completely into it.

"Wasn't all my fault, you know," he said.

Julie laughed. "Of course, it was!"

She was right. It was all his fault. "Mea maxima culpa," he mumbled, then sighed and drank half the glass. "So, what's it gonna be this year?" he asked.

The room was lit as if from some central fire. Shadows flickered against the four walls as if born of a thousand lit candles. But there were no candles, there was no fire. The light came from another source altogether.

"The same," she said, sounding surprised. "You expected something new?" Her eyes scanned the room. "Nice tree," she added, indicating the foot-high plastic replica on top of the TV.

Steve shrugged. "Tradition, you know?"

Julie smiled and wagged a delicate finger in his direction. "I always had you pegged as a sentimentalist," she said sarcastically.

He coughed. "Can we just get this over with?" he asked.

"In a hurry?" she asked him. "Expecting company?"

He snorted. "Only you," he said. "Always, only you. Can we just do it?"

Julie sat forward from her perch in the middle of his couch. "You know," she said slowly, "you've grown exponentially more impatient every year lately. I'd have thought by now you'd come to look forward to these visits."

Steve laughed and finished his drink, and wished he'd brought the bottle in with him. "Like I look forward to more heart surgery," he said.

She sat back again. "That was your fault, too," she said.

He threw his glass across the room. It shattered into a million pieces and rained down like snow on the bare wood floor.

"Everything's my fault, okay?" he bellowed. "Every goddamned thing in the world is my fault, and you won't let me go a year without reminding me, so let's just get this done with, okay? Then you can go back to whatever it is you do when you're not torturing me and I can go back to what's left of my life."

She studied him for a while. "You can fix it, you know," she told him.

He didn't have to be reminded.

"Just do it," he said. "Aren't you supposed to show some mercy at Christmas?"

Julie laughed a little. "It says "Peace on earth to men of good will", not to everyone."

He sighed again. "Just get on with it," he told her.

She sat forward, contemplated something for a minute, and then stood up. "You know," she said as she crossed the room to him, "we never spend any quality time together anymore."

If he hadn't felt like retching he might have laughed. Julie stood before him and held out her hand.

"You know the routine," she said.

He had no choice. She wouldn't leave until he did it. He burped and lifted a hand to hers. Their flesh touched.

In a flash he was young again, like her, and they were happy and together and it was Christmas twenty years before. They'd been at a party at her sister's house and now it was time to leave and go home and cuddle up together in bed and maybe make love and celebrate their year-old marriage and the coming of their first child in another few months.

Steve had been drinking a little too much and everybody knew it. Her family and friends gathered to watch from the big bay window beside the gaily decorated tree, satisfied when they saw him toss Julie the car keys and wave at them. They all waved back and then returned to their festivities.

"I'll drive," he told her, holding out his hand to take the keys back.

"I don't think so," she said, laughing, unlocking the driver's door.

He was beside her and he grabbed the keys out of her hand. "I said, I'll drive!" He shoved her aside and slipped into the driver's seat.

Thank God he didn't drink that often. She didn't like him when he drank. Knowing she'd win no battles, she glanced once more at the house and the empty windows and went around the car and got in the passenger side.

He revved the engine and slipped the little sedan into gear, and pulled out into the quiet suburban street. It was just coming up to midnight on Christmas Eve. Every house sat in stillness, waiting patiently for morning. Nobody noticed the car speeding down the street, screeching as he took the corner a bit too fast.

"Steve, please, honey, let me drive," she said.

"Bullshit," he said. "I'm all right, dammit. You worry too goddamned much."

She cursed herself for having given in. She should have marched back into the house and asked for help, even if only to beg a ride home so she wouldn't have to be with him in that condition. Pride had stopped her. Her sister and two brothers all had postcard marriages. She refused to be the only one with problems. Besides, there was very little traffic, and they only had a few miles to go to get home. Maybe he was right. Maybe she worried too much.

Steve took another turn too fast and the back end of the sedan fishtailed. He recovered quickly enough, but she didn't know why he took that turn anyway. Home was the other way.

"Highway," he said as if reading her mind. "S'faster."

"You're going fast enough," she said. "Slow down, please?"

He pushed the gas peddle a little harder. Lesson learned. She shut up.

A green and white sign overhead announced the highway interchange. They passed the entrance ramp, and then he made his turn, sending them up the exit ramp past the garish "Do Not Enter" signs.

"Steve!"

He gunned the engine. The car flew up the ramp.

"Steve! For God's sake, stop!"

He went even faster. The motor screamed as they flew up onto the highway.

Into the oncoming headlights.

The sound of the crash was like a cannon shot ripping a hole in the night. Metal screamed and glass shattered as the two vehicles met head-on, lifted up off the ground, spun in place, and fell back with the resonation of a thunderclap.

Chunks of both cars scattered in every direction. Oil, gas, and blood seeped out onto the cold midnight pavement.

Steve was still aware and awake. He had no idea what exactly had happened but he knew it was something bad. Something life-alteringly bad.

His wife sat strapped in beside him. He was no expert but just by looking at her he knew that she was dead. In the wreckage welded to his own car in front of him he saw at least two other people in much the same shape. An elderly couple who would get no older.

Steve unsnapped his seat belt, and waited for the pain. It would come soon enough. The cold and the terror had burned off the alcohol. He was on pure adrenalin then. He had just enough time to make a few changes.

He unbuckled Julie's corpse and pulled her across the divide into what was left of the driver's seat with him. His window was gone and he climbed out into the still and abandoned highway and then reached in and pulled her fully behind the wheel. He secured the seatbelt around her waist, and then walked around the remains of his car and climbed in the passenger window and sat in her place.

The agony began to grow as he put her seatbelt around his own middle. He thought he heard sirens in the distance as the night settled in and swallowed him up.

He woke the next day, Christmas Day, in the hospital. He had a few cracked ribs and was bruised from head to toe, but he'd live.

He was the only one of them that did.

Over the next few days he apologized to the family of the couple killed in the other car, saying he had no idea how his wife had managed to make that mistake. He admitted he'd been drinking, that was why she was driving. The people at the party all said they saw Julie take his keys and they believed she had driven. They had no reason to think otherwise. And she was always such a meticulous driver. She had a perfectly clean record. Until this.

Everyone was very sympathetic to him. He'd lost his family so horribly, and on Christmas, too. They understood when he climbed into a bottle to hide -- who wouldn't? -- but as the years went on they all abandoned him, unable to watch him self-destruct.

His health suffered in unimaginable ways for a man his age. Heart disease at thirty. Liver and renal breakdown at forty. He lost the house they'd bought, moving into a small apartment. He lost job after job. He lost every friend he'd ever had.

But he didn't lose Julie.

He was back in his apartment, in his recliner. The clock on the VCR beside the TV said it was just midnight again. Steve breathed like a struggling locomotive. Julie stood before him, her hand just having left his.

"Merry Christmas," she said to him. Decades of sadness hung off her voice.

"Yeah," he said.

She backed away into the shadows. The flickering light dimmed.

"See you next year," she said, fading, fading away. "Unless..."

Steve snorted again. "Yeah," he said. "Unless."

But he knew he didn't have the guts to make it right.

"See you next year," he said.

And she was gone.

On his way back to bed he grabbed the bottle from the kitchen and emptied it down his throat before lying down. Julie's last "Merry Christmas" echoed inside his head as he sunk into the mattress and felt yet another drunken stupor wash over him like a tide of sewage.

"Merry Christmas," he said, the last sound lingering on his lips like steam escaping from a cracked pipe.

In the night he thought he felt a hand delicately soothe his brow. When he woke alone and sick he cursed Death for not having had the decency to take him while he'd slept. Now he'd be subjected to yet another day of living inside his own head.

He got up, ate some aspirin to calm the throbbing in his brain, and in the kitchen found another bottle of cheap bourbon. He opened it and didn't bother with a glass. After saluting the old photo he had of her, he drank it all down and collapsed into his recliner, staring at the miserable little plastic Christmas tree.

Outside, it started snowing.

Merry Christmas, indeed.