A Valentine’s Day Miracle Read online

  A Valentine’s Day Miracle

  Tammy Falkner

  Night Shift Publishing

  Contents

  1. Miracle

  2. Paul

  3. Friday

  4. Matt

  5. Sky

  6. Lady Humbug

  7. Emily

  8. Logan

  9. Miracle

  10. Sam

  11. Pete

  12. Lady Humbug

  Also by Tammy Falkner

  Miracle

  My grandmother sits regally in a highback chair like she’s the queen of the castle. The only thing is…she’s far from being a queen. Yet there she sits, with hordes of children swarming around her feet, waiting to hear the same story they hear every year. It’s the story of how Sandra Baumgartner came to be a grandmother, and a good person, all in the span of one silly week.

  “It all started with a wish,” she says, her voice clear and crisp, with only a hint of the warble that worsens each year.

  Then she begins to tell the story she has perfected over the years.

  “One day, a man walked down the street with his little girl. His name was Paul Reed and he had a little girl, Hayley, with eyes as blue as the sky and hair the color of cornsilk. The city was suffering under the heaviest snowfall it had seen in thirty years. The city was cold, but the hearts of those Reed boys were warm enough to thaw even the coldest night.”

  She lays a hand on her chest and feigns surprise. “How do I know, you might ask?” She stops talking and blinks her eyes, which are suddenly shimmery and wet. “I know those boys have the warmest hearts because they used them to thaw mine that year.” She waggles her finger in the air. “That’s how I know. Because my heart thawed that very winter.”

  “Your heart was fwozen?” a little boy asks from where he sits next to her right foot.

  She pats her hand against her chest. “Frozen solid. Until I met them. And her. I found her.”

  She looks at me and winks, and tears fill my eyes. I blink them back and smile a watery smile at her. I can still remember that day. Vividly. It was the first day I ever saw the Reeds. It was the day they saved me. And her.

  Paul

  My daughter, Hayley, looks up at me and says, “I wish I could help that little girl.” Her words are nearly swept away by the wind, and I can barely catch them. It’s almost as though I have to scoop them into my cupped hands and bring them to my ear, the wind blows that strong.

  “What little girl?” I ask. I tug my coat tighter around my body. It’s cold outside, and it has been cold for weeks. Snow in February in New York City is not unheard of. What isn’t normal is how long it has been falling. The snow is so deep that roads are covered and impassable, the buses no longer run, and schools are now closed. I jostle Hayley’s hand, which is clutched tightly in mine. “What little girl?” I ask again.

  “The one who lives in the stairwell,” Hayley says. She nods her head back in the direction from which we’d just trudged through calf-deep snow.

  “What stairwell?” I have no idea what she’s talking about.

  “Dad,” she whines. “The stairwell over there. There’s a little girl who lives there.”

  Of course there isn’t a little girl who lives in the stairwell. It’s way too cold. No one could survive there.

  “Show me,” I say, because now I’m curious.

  Hayley rolls her eyes and turns around. She braces herself against the wind, spreading her feet a little farther apart. She raises one mitten-covered hand to point. “That stairwell. Over there.”

  I walk a little closer and look down. The stairwell ends one floor down and there’s a closed door at the bottom. I don’t see anything. Or anyone. “There’s no one here, Hayley,” I say, slightly exasperated that she’d made me stop for nothing. I’m freezing my balls off and we still have to pick up a few things from the store for Friday, my wife.

  Hayley points. “Right there, Dad,” she says.

  What I had assumed was a bag of trash at the foot of the stairs moves. It skitters across the ground, one big lump moving from one side to another. “What the…?” I start down the stairwell.

  Suddenly, the lump lifts its head, and I can see big brown eyes staring up at me. Frost has gathered on long lashes as she blinks. She’s not a little girl, but she’s not adult, either. I’d guess she’s a teenager.

  “Hey,” I call out.

  The girl reaches for the doorknob and opens the door, dashes through it, and then she’s gone. The grip I’d felt around my heart eases a little when I see she does have a place to go.

  “She must live here, Hayley,” I say.

  “She lives in the stairwell, Dad. I see her every day.”

  “Well, she went inside, so she must be okay.”

  Hayley slips her hand into mine. “She’s not okay, Dad,” she says. The cold wind blows harder and her teeth begin to chatter.

  “Come on,” I say, biting my teeth together.

  We finish our shopping and then go back to our apartment building. It’s the same apartment building I’ve always lived in, but now it seemed a little nicer than it had back then. My brothers and I purchased it, and we all live here with our families. I help Hayley out of her coat and take off my own, and then walk into the kitchen, not at all surprised to find my two youngest brothers in my kitchen with Friday.

  “Get your ass off the counter,” I grouse. I swat Sam, one of the twins, on the leg. He yelps and slips off the countertop, landing on his socked feet.

  “Who pissed in your corn flakes?” Pete, the other twin, asks.

  Friday tips her face up to mine and I lean down to kiss her. “Where’s PJ?” I ask, ignoring Pete, which wasn’t easy to do because he’s…well, he’s Pete.

  “Playing in his room with Kennedy and Tuesday.”

  Friday helps pull Hayley out of her winter gear and Hayley turns to run to her room, but at the last minute she turns back to face me. “Daddy?”

  I nab a chicken strip from a plate Friday was putting together and pop it into my mouth. “What?” I ask around my mouthful.

  “Do you think that if I do a good deed and win a wish, then wish really hard, I could find a home for that little girl?”

  “What little girl?” Friday asks as she carries the chicken to the table.

  “She already has a home, Hayley,” I say. “You saw her go inside.”

  “No one can live in a basement, Dad.” Hayley huffs out a breath.

  “Hay-le-e-ey…”

  “Da-a-ad…” She mocks me. Hayley has a way of exposing my bones with nothing more than her voice.

  “I’ll go and check on her tomorrow, okay?” I’d seen her go inside. I feel certain she was okay.

  “Do you promise?”

  She can always get me by asking for a promise and she knows it. I lay a hand over my heart. “I swear it.”

  “Okay, Dad,” she says. Then she scurries into the other room.

  “What’s she talking about?” Friday asks.

  “She thinks there’s a homeless girl who lives in the stairwell on Fifth Street.”

  “She’s right,” Sam says. He sits down at the table and helps himself to some of everything on the table. I slap his hand when he reaches for more chicken.

  “Don’t you have your own home to go to?” I complain. But secretly I love having my brothers around. I raised them. I need them the same way I need air. Do they get on my nerves sometimes? Yes. They do. But the rest of the time, I like having them around. They’re good men, and I had a little something to do with making them into who they are, so I like to see where they ended up.

  Pete speaks around a mouthful of food. “She’s right,” he says, sounding just like Sam had a moment ag
o.”

  “Right about what?” I ask.

  “The little girl,” Sam says. “She lives there. She has for months.”

  “What?”

  “She lived there with her mother for several months. Then a few weeks ago, her mother disappeared. Child services keeps going and getting her and putting her in group homes, and then she runs away. She always goes back to the same place.”

  “How do you know this?”

  “I’ve met her a few times. She’s a sweet girl, but slippery.”

  “Slippery,” I say.

  “Meaning no one can catch her. Not for long.”

  “I saw her go inside,” I protest.

  “There’s a basement where she gets out of the weather.”

  “You’re shitting me,” I say.

  “Would I do that?” Sam grins.

  He would, but not about this.

  “So what are you going to do?” Friday asks, her gaze intent upon me.

  “About what?” I ask.

  Her eyebrows scrunch together. “About the little girl. You can’t just…” Her hands start to fly around her face. “…leave her there in the cold.”

  “It’s probably not even cold where she is. She went inside, Friday.”

  “Paul,” she prompts. I have heard her say my name in many, many ways, and this is one that always gets me in trouble.

  “Friday,” I reply.

  “Paul,” she says again, glaring at me as she raises her fists to rest on her hips.

  “Seriously?” I mutter to no one.

  The twins grin at me. Assholes.

  “Which one of you is going with me?” I ask with a sigh as I push back from the table.

  “Not me,” they both say at once.

  “It’s cold outside,” Sam protests when Friday glares at him too.

  “Fine,” she bites out. “I’ll go myself.” She goes to get her boots. “I have to go see Lady Humbug anyway.”

  “Why do you have to go see her?” I ask as I start to put my own winter gear back on.

  “She filed an injunction with the city to stop the Valentine’s Day festivities.”

  Anger stills my movements. “She did what?”

  “I told you she wasn’t going to make it easy. That woman is allergic to happiness.” Friday is finally dressed, and she wraps a warm scarf around her neck. “We’ll check on the girl in the stairwell on the way.”

  “Does this girl have a name?” I ask Pete and Sam.

  “Miracle,” Pete says around a mouthful of chicken. “Really,” Pete says after he swallows. “Her name is Miracle.”

  I grab the chicken strip from his hand and shove it into my mouth, and then I follow Friday to the door.

  “You’re in charge of the kids,” I call as we step out.

  “Yeah, yeah,” they call back, already digging into the plate of chicken again. “We’ll keep them alive.”

  Friday

  For Valentine’s Day this year, the Reed family decided to sponsor the huge heart in the center of town. It has more than ten thousand lights adorning it, or at least it will as soon as all the wishes have been fulfilled.

  The Reed brothers have become famous in the neighborhood for their good deeds. This year, they turned the lighting of a Valentine heart into something special. They made it so that people who live in the city can earn a light on the heart to call their very own by asking their significant others to give a gift to someone who needs it, rather than to them. For example, if a husband was going to take his wife to dinner, he could instead donate the money he would have spent to the local food bank and help feed the homeless.

  But the project doesn’t stop there. Logan and Emily set up a website where people could list their needs and other people could fulfill them. The only rule was that no one could ask for an extravagant wish that’s based on money. No vacations, cars, or luxury items. Instead, people could ask for a ride to the bus station, or for someone to sit with their aging aunt so they could rest for a little while.

  By combining monetary donations and good deeds, people with money to spend could make their donations go far, and people who didn’t have a lot of money to spend could still give of their time and their kindness.

  Mrs. Connelly, a woman who lives in our building, saw that someone wished for a head of hair for Valentine’s Day. I thought that one was a joke, but she knitted the person a hat and delivered it herself. It turned out that the person who made the wish was going through cancer treatment, and she needed something to keep her head warm. The hat worked nicely. Once that wish was marked as fulfilled, Mrs. Connelly had earned herself the right to claim a light on the heart, as well as a wish when the lights are lit.

  Another person on the list asked for a fairy to come and clean her home, and someone volunteered to help her out. It turned out that the person was just lonely and tired and wanted someone to talk to. But the person who fulfilled the wish now has a new friend, and neither of them will be lonely this Valentine’s Day.

  For Lady Humbug to even attempt to stop the lighting of the heart in the square would devastate the community, and we cannot let that happen, not with all the good deeds that have already been done.

  “I hope you’re ready to sweet talk the pants right off the woman,” I say to Paul, my voice almost being stolen by the wind.

  He grimaces. “I’d rather not.” Then he grabs my ass. “Your pants are the only ones I want to talk off.” He grins at me.

  I roll my eyes. “Does Lady Humbug have a real name?” I ask.

  “I have no idea,” Paul says, hunching his back against the weather, drawing into himself. “She’s been called Lady Humbug for as long as I can remember. She used to drive my mother nuts with the way she complained about the food bank giving out free food and the clothing drive we had at the elementary school each year. She tried to have the coat drive cancelled, saying that people would get lice from the hats and coats, that the sharing of clothes was not sanitary.”

  “Did she win?”

  Paul snorts. “Against my mother? Never. Mom got a laundromat to donate the use of their washers and dryers so she could personally wash every used coat that was donated. Lady Humbug didn’t stand a chance against her.”

  Paul doesn’t speak of his mother often. None of the boys do. I think it’s painful for them to remember her, particularly at this time of the year since the anniversary of her death is approaching, so his sharing is nice. “Your mother was fierce, huh?” I ask.

  “Fierce and soft in the best of ways,” he replies. He lifts a finger and points. “Look over there,” he says. “See the corner of that building?”

  I nod and look toward the cinderblock wall of the vacant building.

  “If you look closely, really closely, you’ll see it.” He steps up behind me and I lean against him, his feet bracing the outsides of mine.

  I stare at the blank wall, but all I can see is years of exhaust stains and age.

  “Do you see it?” Paul asks.

  He takes my shoulders in his hands and turns me ever so slightly, and suddenly I can see it. Five profiles of boys have been painted on the wall. They are so faded that you can barely see them, but I see a young Paul, Matt, Logan, Sam, and Pete. Their features are nearly indistinguishable, but their blue eyes are still clear and their outlines are strong.

  “Who painted that?” I ask. It’s like an old-fashioned mural, but it’s so good that I can almost feel the love in the brush strokes.

  “My mother,” he says with a fond smile. “She used to sneak out late at night, back before every street corner had a surveillance camera, and she would paint little things on the walls of buildings. Sometimes it was just words like “be kind” and other times it was full murals.” He shrugs. “This is one of the only ones that hasn’t been covered up.”

  “I can’t believe I never noticed it.”

  “You can barely see it now.” He snorts. “Lady Humbug had a fit over the murals. She compared them to graffiti.”

  I poin
t toward the wall. “That is not graffiti. It’s art.” I turn to face him. “Is that where Logan got his talent for drawing? From your mother?”

  He shakes his head. “Logan was born being able to draw. I don’t remember him with an empty hand from the moment that he learned to hold a pencil. He was always doodling something.”

  We arrive at Lady Humbug’s building and stop to stomp the snow from our boots. The doorman helps us get cleaned up and Paul asks for the penthouse apartment.

  “Is Ms. Baumgartner expecting you?” the doorman asks.

  Paul’s eyebrows lift toward his hairline. “Baumgartner?” he repeats.

  “You did say the penthouse, correct?”

  Paul glances toward me. “I think so.” He waits for me to confirm.

  I tap the edge of the doorman’s desk. “We’re here to see Lady Humbug. We don’t know her real name, and she’s not expecting us. So could you do us a solid and call up there to her palace in the sky and see if she’s willing to slum it with us for a few minutes?”

  Paul bites back a grin, his cheeks turning a little pink as he fights back a laugh.

  “Lady Humbug is not home right now,” the man says, his own mouth lifting ever so slightly at the corner with a grin. “She’s out decapitating small children so she can turn them into stew.”

  “To feed the homeless?” Paul says with a mock look of horror.

  “To her, the homeless do not exist,” the man says, his voice not even breaking with a laugh.

  “Does she at least feed the bones to the stray dogs?” Paul asks.

  “’Fraid not,” the man says. “She calls and has them picked up, instead.”

  “The bones?” Paul asks, suddenly looking confused.

  “The dogs,” the man says drolly. “To the pound they go.”

  I can’t take any more of this conversation. “What’s the best way to get an audience with her ladyship?” I ask.