The Winter Games

by Sharp, Dr. Rebecca

  “Dad!” I exclaimed, punctuating it with a groan. “We should get back. Mom said you are grilling.”

  My father grinned conspiratorially at me and threw his arm around Nick’s wide shoulders. “I guess we’ll continue our little chat later, son.”

  I huffed and shook my head. I knew this was going to happen.

  How did I explain to my parents that Nick was only a friend with benefits? That for reasons—on both sides—becoming more than that was as unlikely as the sun rising in the West.

  “Alright. I’ll meet you kids back there. I rode the raptor out here.” He gave us a small wave and continued to head for the four-wheeler.

  “Sorry about that,” I murmured as I led us over to the fence to mount back up and begin the ride back to the house.

  “Priss.” Nick sent me a sideways grin that warmed me down to my toes. “I showed up to your parents’ house with my daughter. You better believe that I was expecting to have to answer that question at least one time this weekend.”

  “And what answer did you come up with?” The question was out before I could stop it, my heart beating like a drumroll waiting for the answer. “What am I?”

  My whole body took a snapshot of that moment—the warmth of the red setting sun, the cool fresh breeze, the complete silence of the plains.

  “You are my moon. You aren’t blinding or burning like the sun, instead you rise quietly and calmly, bathing everything around you in your beautifully soft glimmer; you are the bright, pure luminescence in the darkness of life. No matter what the day brings, at the end of it you are always there, always rising.”

  My heart was choking on its own beats. His words were so beautifully sad as we rode away from the sunset, the very moon he was talking about just beginning to show in the dusk.

  “You were going to tell my dad that I’m the moon?” I squeaked out a little breathless and a lot starry-eyed.

  His sad smile tugged on every string attached to my heart. “I was going to tell him that you are the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen and the only thing I’ll never be able to keep.”

  There were no words. No response. I was stuck in that moment. The vastness of the fields around us, the way the mountains framed the horizon, the setting sun bathing the scene in burnt orange, and Nick, riding beside me, making my heart beat more fully with every word that he spoke.

  “No matter how high I jump, no matter how hard I try, I’ll never be able to reach you all the way up there. And even if I could, what kind of man would I be if I tried to pull you down to my world?”

  “It is not time or opportunity that is to determine intimacy; it is disposition alone. Seven years would be insufficient to make some people acquainted with each other, and seven days are more than enough for others.”

  —Jane Austen, Sense & Sensibility

  MY STOMACH HURT FROM LAUGHING so much during dinner. I’d never seen Lila warm up so thoroughly or so quickly as she had to my siblings. And my dad had been right, the first thing she’d said when we’d arrived back to the house in heavy silence was that she wanted a pony of her own for Christmas. Even the mention of her very own fish tank and Dory couldn’t sway her from her newfound wish.

  Truthfully, I didn’t get to talk to Nick much after the moon conversation—private space tends to go out the window in a house of eight kids, nine including Lila. He stood out with my dad and James by the grill while my dad cooked up some cowboy steaks. I had a sneaking suspicion that they were talking about football—at least, I hoped they were. Easton and Mitchell went out there too, but they were in deep discussion about the faux-rodeo contests that were going to be held for Mitchell’s party tomorrow.

  Meanwhile, Lila and Trevor ran around outside pretending to be cowboys and the rest of us girls stayed in the kitchen, ready to help my mom with whatever she needed. I finally had the chance to catch up with my sisters—Lizzy was at the local community college studying to apply to veterinary school in Ft. Collins. I was glad she finally was taking a step toward making her own life; she’d always loved helping the animals on the farm. Kat was too busy complaining about the boys at school to think about college plans at the moment and Jenny, who was in her second year of middle school, got too bored by our conversation and ended up outside joining the rest of the ‘cowboys.’

  Dinner was a mix of the latest and greatest ranch stories. Periwinkle, the devious little pony, breaking through the fence and grazing in the cow’s pasture. Then, there were the henhouse stories which led to Trevor promising Lila he would let her hold a chicken tomorrow. There was the time that Mitchell and Kat thought it would be funny to dye Charger, Easton’s horse, bright pink so that he was stuck riding around on a pink ‘unicorn’ for several weeks; Easton grumbled that there was still some dye in his mane that wouldn’t come out.

  And of course, there was the bickering because everyone had his or her own version of who did what and what animal belonged to whom, which resulted in my mom mislabeling each of her children before just generally scolding all of them.

  I hadn’t laughed so hard in a long time. And what made it sweeter was that it looked like Nick hadn’t either.

  Just like he wanted to give those kids their own birthday party, I wanted to give him this: a loving family, happiness, laughter—he’d been deprived of it all for too long.

  After too much food was topped with a trek out to the fire pit to roast marshmallows, Lila collapsed against my side barely able to keep her eyes open.

  “Alright, kids, time for bed. Someone has a big day tomorrow,” my mom announced, giving all my younger siblings, aside from Lizzy and James, an eye that said it was time to head inside.

  “Nick, you and Lila will be in my old room. I’m going to stay in Lizzy’s room,” I said softly as he walked over to us, the firelight flickering off every etched plane of his body. I didn’t want to sleep separate from him, but I wasn’t going to do that in my parents’ house; I knew what was bound to happen. Plus, Lila was here.

  “Lila,” I whispered softly, kissing her hair. “Time for bed.”

  “Can I please get a pony, Mammy?” she mumbled against my shoulder.

  “You’ll have to ask your dad.” I sent him an apologetic look like he had a better (although not by much) chance of resisting her.

  With one last small burst of energy, her eyes opened, and she slid down from the bench. Waving her hand, Nick bent down to her level. The poor thing was so tired, my hands were ready to shoot out and catch her.

  “What’s up, Princess?” he whispered, gently reaching for her chin.

  She tipped forward and my heart stopped—not because she went to fall, but because she leaned forward to wrap her arms around his neck and hug him tightly to her. I was sure his surprise was a mirror of my own. She’d never hugged him before—not like this. His shoulders shuddered underneath her tiny arms and I covered my mouth but was unable to stop the small sob that escaped.

  And then I heard it. Her soft little murmur telling him, “I don’t want a pony, Daddy.”

  “No, Princess? What do you want?” he asked thickly, his arms clutching her to him as tight as he dared. “You want your own Dory?”

  “No,” she replied. “I want Mammy to stay with us. Please…”

  My eyes caught and locked with his. This little soul not only saw with her heart but spoke it. For her, even after what she’d been through, she’d distilled everything between him and me into one wish.

  But like most wishes, it was unlikely to come true.

  “I… should go help my mom,” I murmured tightly. There was a vise around my chest. It was one that I had willingly put there and strapped myself into—tightening it with each moment in this man’s presence.

  My hand wiped my cheeks as I choked on my tears. I stood quickly and walked inside knowing that putting Lila to bed would keep us apart until the morning.

  And as if one emotional event wasn’t enough, I took a deep breath as I walked into the kitchen, prepared to face my mother and the c
onversation that she’d been waiting for.

  “Tammy,” she sighed and came right up to me, putting her hand on the side of my face. “What’s wrong, baby? What’s going on?”

  “Oh, Mom,” I whispered just before I crumbled.

  Collapsing into her embrace, I cried for everything that I would never have. Children. Lila. Nick.

  Love.

  “I have cancer,” I whispered into her ear. And then with words that struggled to stay afloat, I quietly told her how my endometriosis had gotten worse, how I’d been tested and tested… and tested, to finally find that it was ovarian cancer. I told her that I’d been on chemo the past three weeks and that my surgery was scheduled in two weeks, at which point it was most likely that I was going to lose all of my reproductive organs.

  “Oh, baby.” She squeezed me, and I felt her shoulders shaking, too.

  It wasn’t my fault, but I still felt like a failure. How is it you can try to do all the right things in life, try to follow all the rules, make all the thoughtful and safe choices, and yet somehow you still end up here—losing part of your body to an unrelenting disease?

  And how was it that being with Nick, who was all the rules of wrong, felt so right?

  I’d already cried over this for so long now, and as the tears streamed down my face and onto the soft, wool-lined jacket my mom had on, I realized they weren’t coming because of the cancer anymore. I cried because all I still saw was the look on Nick’s face when Lila hugged him. And then the look that replaced it when she asked if I could stay.

  It was like me asking the doctors to keep one of my ovaries. Sometimes, the darkness is in too deep. Sometimes, you don’t get to keep what you want.

  I cried because in that moment, I would have willingly traded even those healthy parts of me if it meant that I could stay with Nick and Lila—and that was a greater shock to me than hearing that I had cancer: realizing that the one thing I’d put such importance on for my entire life, no longer compared to how much the two of them meant to me.

  They’d both stolen my heart and now, instead of just losing the ability to have children, when what we had ended, I knew I was going to lose my ability to love, too.

  “Oh Tammy.” She pulled back, wiping my face with her hands. “Why didn’t you tell me? All this time… have you been dealing with this alone?”

  I shook my head. “No,” I stammered. “I had Jessa and Ally, but I didn’t want to tell you until I knew for sure… and when I did know for sure, then I didn’t know how to, but I knew I had to do it in person.”

  She led me over to the small table that sat in the corner of the kitchen by the windows; there was nothing to see out of them now since the sun had set and it was pitch-black outside.

  “Oh, baby,” she sighed as we sat on the small bench by the table, her arm coming around my shoulders. “What can I do? Do you want me to come back with you? When is the surgery? I’m coming down for that no matter what you say.”

  My head fell to her shoulder and I took a deep breath in the fire smoke-stained scent of her sweater. “Love you, Mom.”

  “Oh, I love you, too baby girl.” Her hand rubbed up and down my arm.

  “I’m sorry, Mom,” I whispered, hearing the back door open and close one more time; I knew it was my dad coming inside after having cleaned up from the fire and making sure that all the animals were in the barn for the night.

  “What are you sorry for?” she asked. “For not telling me? I understand, honey, don’t apologize.”

  “No…” I shook my head. “I’m sorry that I won’t be able to have children.”

  She pulled back from me so fast I thought she must have seen a coyote through the window or something.

  “Tamsin Lucas,” she gasped in shock. “Are you really apologizing for having cancer right now?”

  My brain was as cloudy as my eyes. “No, but…”

  “No buts. Do you know me? Do you know your own family?” she demanded firmly. “I don’t think I need to remind you that more than half of your siblings are adopted. Do you think that makes them less in my eyes? Do you think that I don’t love them like I love you?”

  “No!” I exclaimed. “That’s not what I meant. I just… I don’t know, Mom. I just feel like I’ve failed at something.”

  “Tammy.” She clasped my face, wiping more tears that had fallen unnoticed. “I may not remember all of your names correctly all of the time but I know my children. And I know that you were born to be a mother. Some days, I believe that you are more responsible for how sane your siblings turned out than I am.” We both let out a watery chuckle. “Being a mother means unconditional love. Do you hear me? No conditions. Including the one that says that the child had to be pushed from your body for him or her to be yours.”

  Every word she spoke seeped into the cracks that the cancer and my perceived failure had caused in my heart. I knew what she said was true—and not just because she was my mother.

  “A person does not have to come from you to be a part of you. DNA is just letters hung up on a string. And just like it takes knowledge to turn a jumble of letters into a word, it takes love and caring and devotion to turn those letters into a family,” she finished softly.

  I knew because I felt it. I felt it for Lila. And I’d felt it for a long time now. Somewhere along the way, being with her—and Nick—had turned our chaos into something that overflowed with love and devotion. It wasn’t perfect, it didn’t follow all of the rules, and that’s why I’d thought I could ignore it for so long and pretend like being a part of their lives didn’t mean as much to me as it did.

  And that is what made it worse—that I could love them so much that I’d let them right into the part of my heart that had been reserved for ‘perfect’ and replaced it with ‘family.’

  “Does he know?”

  Again, I shook my head, pulling my sweater tighter around me like I was trying to protect myself from what I knew she was going to say.

  “You have to tell him, Tam.”

  I drew a wavering breath. “It’s not going to matter. I know I brought him here, but he’s not… we’re not…” I didn’t even know what we were or what we were doing. It was wrong and right. Dark and light. Healing and destruction. It was what I needed—that was all I knew.

  “Honey, I’ve watched that boy look at you all night. And yeah, part of that look was uncomfortably similar to the one that we see when the animals are in heat, but the other part of that look I see every day—every morning when your father wakes up and looks at me. He loves you, honey.”

  I tried to hear anything else in the house or outside—anything besides those words because I wanted them to be true.

  “And if you brought him here, that means you love him, too.”

  There was no point in arguing; moms were always right and this was no exception. My family was loving, welcoming, kind, caring—but they were my rock. And I could never bring myself to introduce them to anyone who wasn’t going to last; Ally and Jessa hadn’t even met them, although I talked about them enough that I’m sure my mom knew them just about as well as I did.

  I’d never wanted to bring someone here until I knew they were the perfect fit—until they checked off each and every box that I had on my forever-man requirement list. And then, in a moment where my heart finally climbed over the walls my brain had built around it, I’d told Nick to come with me because it felt right; it felt like the only right thing.

  “There’s… a lot more going on,” I admitted cautiously. “Not just with me, but with him. I just don’t know that it’s all going to work out.”

  “Oh, Tam. I know you, honey. I know that if things don’t go exactly by the book, you think that constitutes failure. Love isn’t by the book, baby; love doesn’t follow the rules or do what you think it should do. If it did, it wouldn’t be love.”

  “Thanks, Mom,” I murmured quietly. There was nothing else that I could say. I wanted to fight for him and this crazy little family that we’d become, but I couldn
’t be the only one.

  “Alright, baby, let’s go to bed. That’s enough for one night. We’ve got a rodeo to run tomorrow. We’ll figure out the details later.”

  It was a whole different world here—one I honestly wouldn’t mind living in. Open space for as far as the eye could see, broken up only by the barn, pastures, and simple ranch house. That’s what this place was: love, simplified. Family, simplified. Less than twenty-four hours here was more than sufficient to see exactly why Priss was the way that she was. This morning, she’d quickly asserted her calm confidence in instructing her siblings around to set up for the various little games for Mitchell’s party. Then she jumped right into the kitchen with her mom to help prep all the BBQ food and cake. She blossomed around those who loved her and whatever had been weighing on her for weeks—whatever it was that had driven her to me—seemed less after last night.

  And Lila… I almost didn’t recognize my child. Even at the daycare, from the reports that Sophia gave, she was friendly with the other kids but not overly social. Here though, any onlooker would have thought that Tammy’s siblings were her own the way she followed them around, playing with them, chasing chickens, petting the ponies. She was happy here and so was I; and Tammy had given that to both of us.

  I was standing with James and some of his friends who’d come over. We’d all just loaded up our plates with ribs, mac and cheese, corn on the cob, and fried chicken—all of which there would be leftovers of for a week. I only half listened to their conversation about some lasso-club at school while my eyes followed my daughter who was running around like a chicken without a head trying to follow Kat and Jenny. Every few seconds, my gaze drifted to Tammy, standing with her mom and Lizzy, carefully watching over everyone and everything.

  Never in my life had I regretted my past choices more than I did in this moment because all I fucking wanted—more than revenge on Stone, more than revenge on Eliza, more than anything—was to promise Tammy my forever if she would only give me hers.

  Then again, if I hadn’t become this, she might have never come to me; she might have never felt comfortable enough to show me her beautifully broken pieces.