She grew silent for a long time after that, and I thought she was done. But then she said, “I’m going to give you one last piece of advice. Don’t trust men. They act like they love you, maybe even say the words. But when things get hard, they disappear. Remember that.”
She grabbed my hand with surprising strength. “Promise me you’ll remember that. Promise me you’ll never give your heart to some man and let him run off with it.”
Luckily, I was saved from having to answer when she started coughing again.
The coughing fits weren’t as bad as they used to be. However, they were even worse to watch. Maybe the cough wanted to come out big. But my mother was so weak now. It barely made a sound by the time it managed to hack up from her chest. And it looked like it hurt her.
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry, baby,” she said after she was done.
Mom apologized to me a lot during that last month of her life. For coughing. For keeping me out of school. For getting sick in the first place with a kind of cancer so aggressive and advanced it couldn’t be cured even with the best insurance—which, mind you, we didn’t have anyway.
I would wish I had given her a better answer to all those apologies in the years after her death. I wish I had told her the truth. That she had nothing to apologize for. That it wasn’t her fault. That I knew she loved me, and if she could’ve stayed, she would have.
But that night before her last Christmas, I just answered the same way I always did. “It’s okay, mama. It’s okay.”
She peered at me in that all-knowing way of hers, her eyes still sharp despite all her pain.
“Maybe it’s for the best he ain’t coming for you. Maybe the Lord will bless you with something even better.”
For the next two decades, I’d turn those words over and over in my mind. What had they been exactly? A wish? A blessing? A prophecy from someone on her last breaths? Had she somehow known that losing a parent on Christmas was the only way for an orphan to become an elf?
I could never be quite sure. But she held on. For almost two and a half more hours, she held on until 12:01 AM when she took her last breath.
And that’s how Santa found me. Crying over her lifeless body.
“Would you look at that! She just barely made it to Christmas. I was rooting for her. But I wasn’t sure she’d be able to do it. Strong lady, your mother.”
A new voice had invaded the room, older and jolly. I abruptly stopped crying and turned around to find a man standing in front of the apartment’s fireplace. He was dressed in a red suit and had a big stomach and a huge, curly white beard. So I knew exactly who he was even though I hadn’t believed in him since second grade when Natalie Rinaldi told me he wasn’t real.
He looked a lot less surprised to see me than I was to see him.
And his voice boomed as he declared, “I don’t know if I’m one lucky Santa or if you’re one lucky elf.”
“What is wrong, daughter?”
I blink. Jae-Hyun’s question pulls me from the memory of the last Christmas Eve I spent in this realm.
A bittersweet song is playing on the record player. “Turn! Turn! Turn!” by The Byrds. As the singer lets me know that there’s a time in every season for everything that humans do, I look down to find the sketchbook page I was supposed to be drawing on empty.
“Something weighs heavy on your mind,” Jae-Hyun says. He’s sitting across from me, working on the next issue of Nobles and Samurais. “Tell me what it is.”
I wish I could say it was nothing. But elves can’t lie. So, I try to throw him off the scent with a few excuses for my strange mood from earlier in the day.
“I’m just bummed about how badly the 10 LARPers Leaping panoply presentation went today. All they wanted to do was go on a quest and smoke some pot after they finished leaping. But then I…um…had to give three of them some bad news that totally bummed them out. It’s like I told Krista. I’m a terrible replacement for a matchmaker.”
Jae-Hyun makes a sympathetic noise. “It sounds like you have had a hard day taking over for your matchmaking friend at the panoply, daughter.”
I let out an inward sigh of relief. Good, he fell for my misdirection. We can talk about my truly terrible day instead of—
“Perhaps we can discuss those worries after you have told me what is truly bothering you.”
Elves don’t curse out loud. It’s really not our thing. But I’m sorely tempted to right now. I guess he’s not going to accept the runaround. And the way he’s looking at me, I can tell there’s no way out of answering his original question.