Matt Sanders

Matt scanned the newspaper. And there it was, one more blow for Ace. His name was not among the three hundred names, listed alphabetically, that had received one of those coveted tickets for the rows and rows of uncomfortable chairs he had helped set up in the auditorium. He would not be part of the live audience that got to watch The Christmas Angel/

"Buy the newspaper right away, Daddy," Ace had told him when he had dropped her off at school. "The names are coming out today. I just know you're going to get one of the tickets, Daddy. I just know it."

It had meant a lot to her that he be there, at The Christmas Angel, in person. After her disappointment about not being chosen the angel, he had hoped to at least be able to give her his presence as she sang along with the rest of the angel choir. Especially since his little girl was being such a good sport. It hardly seemed like a glitch on her radar that she hadn't been chosen.

She had just switched optimism, now it was all focused on Matt getting one of those tickets.

What had it been about her certainty that had almost convinced him that he would get one of these tickets?

He was becoming a dreamer, that's what. Had he actually started to feel, like Ace, as if an angel was watching over them?

Matt, you've been my angel. Now I'll be yours.

It was so unrealistic. So fantasy based, instead of fact based. It could not be a good thing.

His phone rang. He hoped it was Aubree, even though he knew she was teaching school. He hoped it was her, even though he had not called her since the skating party. Holding back. Proving to himself that he did have control. That he wasn't helpless.

The caller was the set designer for The Christmas Angel production team. In a panic. Matt had noticed the people who flooded the town. The Christmas Angel production team, were always in a panic about one thing or another.

Today, it had been discovered one of the props wasn't working. A window on the cottage was supposed to slide open, and Mr. Wellhaven was to lean out that window to sing his first song. The window was stuck.

For a minute, the Matt who could already feel his daughter's disappointment that he had not received one of those tickets, wanted to tell the set designer to stuff it. To stuff the whole damn Christmas Angel. To stuff himself while he was at it.

But he didn't.

Instead he asked himself, Where is all this anger coming from?

Was it because he had bought that damned ring? Or was it because ever since that announcement at the skating party he could feel his hopes dissolving, disappointment circling him and Ace, waiting, like vultures, for the inevitable. As if their very optimism had set them up for the kill.

But he thought of Wesley singing that night at the frozen pond, and he thought of how that voice had eased something in him. Maybe it could do something for the rest of the world when they watched it live.

So, instead of telling the set designer to stuff it, Matt took a deep breath, looked at his watch, said he'd be there as soon as he could to have a look at the window.

He hung up the phone. "Matt saves Christmas," he told himself sarcastically, but even his customary sarcasm felt funny, like a jacket that no longer fit.

No one was on the set or in the auditorium when Matt got there. it was unusual. Usually the whole area bustled with electricians and light people and sound people. But now it was down to the finishing details. Most of the work was done, and Matt had a rare opportunity to stand back and look at what they had accomplished.

It was amazing. The humble school stage had been transformed. it looked like the set for a highly polished and professional production.

The illusion had been created with nothing short of magical. The cottage, dripping snow, looked amazingly realistic. Suspended snowflakes that actually moved and changed colors dangled from the ceiling. The tiers the grade-one choir would stand on looked like banks of snow.

And the huge Christmas tree, sent from Canada, a Frasier fir, was stage right. It was filling the whole auditorium with it's scent, and it was finally magnificently decorated.

Matt went to the cottage, and went behind it, tested the window. It was sticking. He pulled a screwdriver from his belt, did an adjustment, tried it again. It slid a little more easily, but he wanted it to glide.

The door to the backstage opened and shut but he paid no attention to the sound of footsteps.

A curtain moved and a shaft of light fell across him. Matt looked up from where he was crouched below the window, and frowned.

Ace?

What was she doing here all by herself? He almost called out a greeting, but some instinct stopped him.

Her intensity, her single-minded focus on something.

So instead of calling out a greeting, Matt pulled back into the shadows behind the cottage and stood frozen and silent, watching his daughter tiptoe across the stage.

She went behind the tree, and with the familiarity of someone who had done this a million times, she climbed the staircase, hidden from the audience, that allowed the angel to get to the top of the tree.

Once there, she stood for a moment, radiant. From her lofty height and advantage, she smiled out at the empty auditorium.

And then she began to sing.

It was an awful sound, reminiscent of alley cats meeting and greeting under a full moon. And yet, despite how awful it was, Matt was transfixed.

His daughter looked so beautiful on that perch above the tree, her eyes closed, her arms extended, singing with exuberance that was attractive, even if the tone was not. He recognized the song and realized Ace had been humming and singing the same tune around the house for days.

"Angel of Hope," the number Brenda Weston had been chosen to sing.

As Ace poured her heart into singing now, there was a look on her face that every parent lives to see on the face of their child.

As if she was sure of her place in the world, and was claiming it. And as if she was accepting the world embracing her back.

But for as ethereal as the moment was, Matt realized he could not be transfixed by this! He was her father. And he had to do the responsible thing, even if it hurt. And it was going to hurt, him more than her, not that she ever had to know.

He stepped out from the cottage, stood before the Christmas tree, gazing up at her, his armed folded over his chest.

It took Ace a minute to realized she had an audience. Her eyes opened, her voice faltered and then died. She looked down at him.

"Daddy?"

"Get down from there," he said.

She came down slowly, not demonstrating even half the confidence she had gone up the staircase with. Finally, she stood in front of him, not looking at him, scuffing her toes against the floor.

The backstage door opened again.

"Emmaleigh?"

The curtain parted again and Aubree stood there, but he held up a hand a focused on his daughter.

"What were you doing?" he asked Ace.

"Just practicing," Ace said in a small voice.

"Practicing what?"

She hesitated. She looked at Aubree for help. Good God, was Aubree in on this?

"Practicing for what?" he said again.

"To be the Christmas Angel," Ace muttered.

"What?"

"I'm going to be the Christmas Angel."

"No, you aren't."

"I am so! I'm going to be the Christmas Angel!" Ace shouted at him.

"Oh, Emmaleigh," Aubree said, and stepped forward, but he stopped her with a look. It seemed his daughter's ridiculous, impossible, unrealistic hopes only mirrored his own. It felt as if that ring was burning a hold through his shirt pocket.

He didn't need any of what Aubree was bringing to his daughter. Or to him. All that softness and light. And hope.

He'd even started to think, just like his daughter, that an angel was looking after them! It was enough.

False hopes had to be dealt with. And destroyed.

Before they destroyed the one who harbored them.

"You...are...not...going...to...be...the...Christmas...Angel." he enunciated every word carefully. He wanted his daughter to understand how dangerous his mood was.

"I am!" Ace shouted. "I am. My mommy told me I was."

He closed his eyes and asked for the strength to do what needed to be done. "Ace, your mother is dead. She's been dead a long time. She didn't tell you anything."

"She did so! In the dream. She told me! She was an angel."

"There are no angels," he said. He said it firmly, but he could feel something dip inside himself. Who was he to make a statement like that? Still, it felt as though to show his daughter one bit of doubt right now would be the wrong thing. The worst thing.

Tears were coming up in Ace's eyes, furious, hurt, and he knew he couldn't react to them. Or to that funny feeling that he had just said something really, really bad.

For her own good, these hopes had to be dashed.

"Dreams aren't real," he said. "You aren't going to be the Christmas Angel. Not ever. There's There's no use thinking it. Brenda Weston is the Christmas Angel."

His daughter looked at him mutinously, not backing down.

"You can't sing," he told her, feeling like Simon in American Idol. "You sound awful."

Ace's mouth moved, but for a moment, no sound came out. When it did it was a howl of pain so pure it reminded him of when he told her that Valery was dead.

He made himself go on. "Brenda looks like the Christmas Angel. She's the perfect Christmas Angel."

"I hate you," Ace screamed, and then ran past him into Aubree's arms. She buried her head against Aubree, who was looking at him as if he was the devil himself.

"How could you?" she asked quietly.

Yeah, that was the question he was asking himself. How could he have done this? Let hope creep in? Allowed himself and his daughter to believe impossible things? How could he had leg things to this far?

"It needed to be said." He could hear the grimness in his tone.

"Not like that, it didn't."

"Yeah. It did. Exactly like that."

"You're breaking her heart."

"No," he said quietly. "I'm not. Her heart has already been broken. Unlike you, I'm doing my best to make sure it doesn't happen again."

"Unlike me?" Aubree whispered.

"We don't need dreams, Miss Dawson. We don't need the kind of dreams you represent."

"You're right," she said, her eyes snapping with indignation and anger. "You don't need dreams. You need a miracle."

He could tell she was within an inch of stamping her foot and announcing she hated him, too.

"We don't believe in miracles, either," he said, his tone deliberately flat, even though he felt that same little dip in his chest as he said it.

Aubree didn't stamp her foot, or tell him she hated him. That almost would have been easier to deal with than her look of hurt disdain, of absolute betrayal. She gathered Ace in close to her, and they left the stage.

Only after the door was shut, did Matt allow himself to crumple. He sat on the edge of the stage, and buried his head in his hands.

"Okay," he said. "Okay, if there are angels, or miracles, I could sure use one now."

He felt instantly ridiculous.

And all he felt was that same yawning emptiness he had felt on those pitiful occasions he had gone to Valery's grave, hoping to feel something. Anything.

It felt as though the darkness was gathering around him, pitch-black, tarlike, so thick and so sticky that nothing, least of all light, would ever penetrate it again.