Susan Wiggs - Lakeshore Christmas

Tonight, the road was bare and dry. The iconic church was the picture of placid serenity, its windows aglow in the twilight, the landscape stark but beautiful, waiting for the snow. This, Eddie figured, was the sort of setting people imagined for weddings and holiday worship, community events—and of course, AA meetings.

He pulled into the church parking lot. “I’m officially broke now. Thanks a lot.”

“I heard you used to be a movie star,” Randy, the older brother, pointed out. “Everybody knows movie stars are rich.”

“Yeah, that’s me,” Eddie said. “Rich.”

“Betcha you’re rich from that movie,” the middle brother, Moby, pointed out. “I saw it on TV just the other night. ‘There’s magic in Christmas, if only you believe,’” he quoted. It was a famous line in The Christmas Caper, uttered by a wide-eyed and irresistible little Eddie. The damn thing aired endlessly like a digital virus every holiday season.

“Now you’re officially on my nerves,” said Eddie. “And FYI, I’m not rich from the movie. Not even close.”

“Huh,” Moby said with a snort of disbelief. Moby was his nickname, based not on his size, but on the fact that his given name was Richard. “Your movie’s huge. It’s on TV every Christmas.”

“Maybe so, but that doesn’t do me a bit of good.”

“You don’t, like, get a cut or anything?”

“Geez, don’t look at me like that. I was a kid, okay? And my parents didn’t do so hot, being in charge of finances.” The Havens had been incredibly naive, in fact. Against all odds and conventional wisdom, they’d managed to fail to make money off one of the most successful films of the year.

Maybe that was why he avoided his folks like poison ivy around the holidays. Oh, please let it not be so, Eddie thought. He didn’t want to be so shallow. But neither did he want to try figuring out the real reason he steered clear of family matters at Christmas.

“Did they, like, take your money and spend it on cars and stuff?” Randy asked. “Or make stupid investments?”

“It’s complicated,” Eddie said. “To make a long story short, they signed some contracts without quite knowing what they were agreeing to, and none of us saw any earnings. It was a long time ago,” he added. “Water under the bridge.”

“Didn’t you, like, grow up in some kind of compound?” Moby asked. “That’s what I heard, anyway.”

Eddie laughed. “Commune, not compound. There’s a difference.” His parents had caught the tail end of the radical sixties, and for a time, they’d dropped out of society. They’d spent the seventies on a commune in a remote, rural area of the Catskills, convinced that simple living and self-sufficiency would lead the way to Nirvana. Eddie had been born in a hand-built cabin without electricity or running water, his mother attended by a midwife and surrounded by chanting doulas. He wondered what the Veltry brothers would say if they knew the actual name on his birth certificate. It was a far cry from Eddie. “A commune is based on the idea that the community raises the kids, not just the parents,” he explained to them. “I was homeschooled, too. The group kind of fell apart after a while, but by then, my folks had created a traveling show. We were on the road a lot.”

“Musta sucked for you,” Randy said.

Eddie had thought so, but working with kids like the Veltrys had shown him everything was relative. Compared to the three brothers, Eddie’s problems had been nothing. At least both of his parents had been present. According to Eddie’s friend Ray Tolley, who was with the local PD, the Veltry boys were in foster care more than they were out. Eddie didn’t know the precise reason and he didn’t want to bug them by asking. They’d never known their father, and they had a mother who couldn’t manage to stay out of jail.

When Eddie was their age, his biggest worry had been how to survive his parents and the legacy of the Haven family. He came from a long line of entertainers dating back generations, to Edvard Haszczak, a circus acrobat who stowed away on a freighter from the Baltic Sea. Upon arrival in America, Edvard had changed his unspellable last name and founded a family of performers. Eddie’s great-grandparents had been vaudeville singers; his grandparents were borscht-belt crooners and Eddie’s parents were a semifamous couple who had starred in a cheesy variety show in the 1960s called Meet the Havens when they were just teenagers themselves.

During their counterculture years, they’d dropped out of everything, but trying to bring up a child woke them up to the reality that they couldn’t always depend on the commune for everything. They couldn’t raise money for doctor visits and clothes for a growing child in the communal garden. So at a young age, too young to be consulted about it, the youngest Haven carried on the family tradition of show business. After appearing in a couple of commercials, including one featuring him as a bare-bottomed baby, he scored a box office hit which had become the Christmas movie that would not die. His delivery of an unforgettable line, and his performance of an iconic song—“The Runaway Reindeer”—ensured his fame for decades to follow.

Although he landed a couple more movie roles—a horror flick, a stupid musical, voicing a cartoon—Eddie never cared that much for acting and the projects flopped or never made it to release. Yet no matter how many hats he subsequently tried on—serious music student, edgy grunge rocker, soulful singer/songwriter—the child-star persona stuck to him like melted candy. He grew up in the shadow of a little kid who had no idea what he was saying when he mouthed the lines that defined him for a generation of viewers.

His parents continued to perform, featuring Eddie in an act designed to cash in on his popularity. “Meet the Havens,” as the trio became known, spent every Christmas season on the road. This left Eddie with little more than a blur of unpleasant memories of the holiday season. His parents insisted Christmas was the ideal time of year for a traveling ensemble. People tended to get nostalgic, and in the grip of the holiday spirit, they opened their pockets. From the time he was very small, he’d been obliged to head out with his parents the day after Thanksgiving, playing a different small venue every night, right up to New Year’s Day. They stayed in nondescript motels and ate their meals on the fly, often skipping dinner because it was too close to showtime.

Eddie had hated it, yet every single night when he stepped out in front of an audience, he did so with a smile on his face and a song on his lips. But it left a bad taste in his mouth about Christmas.

He didn’t let on to the three Veltry boys, though. He honestly wanted them to regard Christmas with the benign good spirits that seemed to emanate from those who, this evening, had left their warm homes to help build the church’s nativity scene—an elaborate, detailed and life-size frieze that attracted fans from all over the upper part of the state. This was one of the most popular sights in Avalon this time of year, and the church, in cooperation with the Chamber of Commerce, went all out.

A number of volunteers were there already, organizing the components of the display—structures and figures, heavy-duty cables and lights, lumber and power tools. The boys approached their task with a cocky swagger that was lost on the church people. What was not lost was the boys’ sagging jeans and oversize hoodies with tribal-looking symbols.

Ray Tolley came over to greet them. “Not your usual suspects,” he murmured to Eddie. Ray was one of Eddie’s closest friends, though they couldn’t be more different. Ray came from a solid, stable background. He’d been born and raised right here in Avalon. He was a good keyboard player, mediocre at pool and big on practical jokes.