That was how Christmas Eve began at Starlight Roller Palace in Mansfield, Ohio, in the winter of 1985: two strangers and a small orange comet, a glossy wooden oval, tinsel hung in tired silver ropes from the railing, colored bulbs blinking along a mural of a painted night sky that had been peeling since Carter left office, and a town gone quiet under snow outside the glass doors.
Elena Vargas was twenty-three and had not meant to be here. She had meant to be on a Greyhound toward Cleveland, where her aunt kept a spare bed and a pot of pozole that could forgive any amount of pride. The bus had been cancelled for weather. The diner where she waitressed on Fourth Street had closed early, the manager muttering about ice and liability while wiping the same clean counter twice. Her roommate had gone home to Dayton with a suitcase that rattled like it contained unfinished arguments. The apartment above the coin laundry smelled like detergent and loneliness, and the radio kept playing carols that made the silence louder, as if joy were something you could overhear through a wall but not quite touch.
So she had put on the red velvet mini dress she usually reserved for New Year's, tugged the cropped white faux-fur jacket over it because the night was cruel, clipped her big chestnut curls to one side with the gold clip her mother had mailed from Texas in a padded envelope that still smelled faintly of her perfume, laced the white skates with the red wheels, and walked through the snow to the only place in Mansfield that still sounded like joy.
If Christmas Eve insisted on being empty, she would meet it looking like a holiday postcard that refused to apologize. The arched brows were deliberate. The winged black liner made her eyes look like they were mid-dare. The rosy blush sat high from cold and from something more stubborn than cold. The glossy deep-pink lips were a decision. She checked herself once in the glass of the rink doors before she went in and thought, fine, then, if the night wants a show, I will give it one.
Jake Brennan was twenty-eight and had not meant to be charming. He had meant to be useful. His sister, Claire, worked the night shift at Mansfield General, and her husband, Phil, was stuck on a delayed flight out of Chicago that kept getting later in the way flights do when the Midwest decides to invent new kinds of clouds. That left Mikey, eight years old and built like a determined marshmallow in a puffy orange jacket, in Jake's care until morning. Jake's apartment above the shuttered barbershop on Bowman Street was a shrine to half-finished projects, a stereo that still believed in vinyl, and a Charlie Brown Christmas tree with exactly seven ornaments that Mikey had counted twice for accuracy. The rink was open until midnight as a Christmas Eve tradition: cheap skate rental, free cocoa that tasted like warm brown water with ambition, a DJ who thought "Last Christmas" counted as both irony and sincerity.
Jake had laced his black skates, shrugged into the midnight-blue satin jacket that had survived every bad decision of his twenties, and told Mikey that if he stayed where Jake could see him, he could have two cups of cocoa and one candy cane the size of a small weapon.
Jake skated backward because that was the only direction that still felt like flying.
He had not always been this way. At nineteen he had been Starlight's golden fool, skating forward into every song, every girl, every dare, the kind of local legend that existed mostly in the mouths of people who needed the town to feel larger than it was. Then a wet patch near the snack bar on a Thursday that should have been ordinary, a bad fall, a fractured ankle that sounded, he still swore, like a pencil snapping inside his body, three surgeries, and a winter of crutches that smelled like hospital soap and the particular boredom of daytime television. When he came back to the wood, forward skating made his body brace for the fall before it happened. His muscles remembered the wet patch more faithfully than his mind remembered the song that had been playing. Backward skating did not trigger the same alarm. Backward was a trick he had learned in recovery, circling the empty rink in the early afternoons when Dot let him in before opening, a sideways kind of courage. Over time the trick became a habit, and the habit became part of the story people told about him: Satin Jake, the guy who could do more going the wrong way than most people could going the right one.