With a toothpick dipped in white icing, Amy drew candles in all the gingerbread windows and used a tiny fleck of red to show they were all lit.
“You’re going to let your little sister show you up like that with her art skills?”
Randy’s annual contribution was always heckling the artists. Mom’s had been providing creative direction, each year giving us a theme to work from that she’d probably stolen from one of her cooking shows. This year, we decided to go the classic Christmas route— a wreath on the front door with a big red ribbon along with other traditional decorations. All the additional details would just be to make the house itself look more realistic.
I shrugged. “At some point, the student becomes more talented than the teacher. Amy, I think this is your year.”
She leaned back to admire her handiwork before crawling around the other side of the table to assess mine. It was sloppy in comparison.
“The details on the roof are nice,” she said, pointing to where I’d added hatch marks to show each and every tile, “but your heart isn’t in it.”
“And how, pray tell, do you think we remedy that?”
“We get the sugar cookies out of the oven, we let them cool, and then we slather them with the leftover icing.”
“And eat them instead of a proper dinner?” Randy chimed in.
“Sounds like what the doctor ordered,” I said. After my day at the restaurant, I felt accomplished, but not particularly eager to get behind another oven. “Amy, you get the cookies out and I’ll cut up some cheese and Hickory Farms sausage so I don’t feel quite as guilty about all the empty calories we’re consuming.”
“Deal,” she said, springing to her feet. She slid down the hardwood hallway from the living room to the kitchen in her socks, giggling along the way. I was relieved every time I heard her laugh over something youthful. It meant mom’s passing hadn’t stolen away all that was left of her childhood.
As soon as I knew she was in the kitchen, I slid out my cell phone and checked my messages.
“Still nothing from Jody?” Randy asked.
“Nothing. How did she seem in the truck on the way to the hospital?”
“Pissed at me, because I deserved it,” Randy answered, stopping to polish off the eggnog. “You know how much trouble I have turning off my charm.”
I snorted. “As pissed as you made me yesterday, I hardly doubt you could do any more damage than her ex driving hours over ice to win her back like some kind of valiant knight.”
“Kind of hard to compete with a guy in a coma,” Randy said, getting up to prod at the fire. “That said, I get the feeling you don’t have to.”
“Then why’s she with him instead of me tonight?”
“Because she probably thinks his being there is her fault, even if she didn’t ask for him to come here. He wouldn’t have gotten in the car and driven to the middle of nowhere if it weren’t for her.”
I’d thought about what she could be feeling— fear for him, doubt over me, worry about how to respond to him the moment his eyes snapped open after being shut for too long— but guilt wasn’t a thing that had been on my list.
“They were together for more than ten years. Since they were kids. I imagine a bond like that is pretty strong.”
“But if he’s an ex, don’t you think whatever he did must have been pretty bad to be powerful enough to break that bond?”
I nodded. “I know the bare bones of it. The two biggest issues were that he was cheating and he was possessive.”
“If possessiveness is a deal breaker for her, don’t get insecure while she’s suffering and fuck this up. Think you can manage that, bro?”
“I guess.”
“Then get out of your head and go make sure our sister doesn’t burn those damn cookies before I can eat one.”
It was the closest thing Randy had given me to anything resembling a pep talk since I’d gone to college and stolen his place as mom’s golden child. While his delivery could use some work, it wasn’t terrible advice.
24
The thing that I’ve never understood about hospitals is how people manage to recover from anything when the nurses and doctors won’t let you sleep. It seemed like every hour, there was someone coming to poke and prod at Andrew. They administered medicine intravenously, did tests to measure reflective eye movements, and fiddled with his breathing machine.
In between, I talked about anything and everything. When I ran out of topics, I played the soundtracks from his favorite video games, like The Legend of Zelda, and talked smack about how I’d found certain shortcuts or beat a particular level before he did. As competitive as Andrew was, something told me that reminding him of my victories would be the fastest way to get him sitting up and arguing with me. He always seemed to remember my wins differently than I did.
After a mostly sleepless night, I stirred to the sound of two muscular men moving Andrew from his bed onto a stretcher.
“We’re going to move him downstairs for some imaging tests. We’ll have him return to this room when he’s finished.”
“Thanks,” I said, giving Andrew’s shoulder a squeeze as they strapped him in. I leaned down and addressed him as though he could see me. “These two gentlemen are going to figure out what the heck is going on with that brain of yours. It’s about damn time someone finally figured that out.”
One of the men lingered for a moment after helping the other navigate the stretcher through the narrow door out into the hall. “The humor is good. Keep it up. You need it just as much as he does.”
I sank back in the recliner. I needed a warm meal, a toothbrush, and preferably a clean pair of clothes that weren’t deeply saturated with the smell of cooking meat, but I needed comfort more. I opened Facebook on my phone and pulled up mom’s profile.
The most recent picture was of her and my father, both posed and dressed as though they were at a prom for adults, Mom in a slinky red number and Dad in his best suit. If the look they were giving one another was any indication, they were ready to rip one another’s clothes off. The image was captioned luckiest lady at the Yule Ball.
The biggest gift they could have given me on Christmas Eve was reassurance that at the end of their trip, the two of them would be fine. The picture seemed like evidence enough. If it wasn’t a gift directly from my parents, it was certainly a gift from God in a moment when I was desperate for another sign.
I was flicking through their other pictures from a cruise excursion the day before when Andrew’s parents burst into the room. Mr. Faircloth had a five o’clock shadow and Andrew’s usually immaculate mother looked disheveled and unkempt. I couldn’t imagine the torture they’d felt the night before, no doubt tossing and turning when all they wanted was to be the ones watching over their son.
“Where is he?”
“You missed Andrew by about twenty minutes. They just took him downstairs for some tests.”
Mrs. Faircloth grabbed the pillow from Andrew’s bed and hugged it against her middle before collapsing in the chair behind me. I relayed every detail from the night before that I could remember, doing my best to recall the layman’s terms the nurses had used to explain each injection and vitals check they performed. “At the nurse’s station, they’d probably know a lot more.”
Mrs. Faircloth leaned her forehead against mine for a moment. “Yes, but you’re the one that knows my son.”
I didn’t tell them about his hand pressing against mine. It wouldn’t have been right to get them excited when I wasn’t totally sure it hadn’t been my imagination. Instead, I told them what I believed to be true. “I mean this in the absolute best way possible. I think your son is too stubborn not to be fine.”
Both of them had a delayed reaction. In the milliseconds after it came out of my mouth, I was sure they were offended by what I said and were horrified. It wasn’t until Mr. Faircloth roared out in tired laughter that I realized they weren’t angry— just slow to process because they’d driven for hours over ice wh
ile sleep deprived.
“I think you might be onto something with that.”
Before I knew what was happening, the two of them had enveloped me in a group hug, the three of us leaning into one another as though not one of us could stand on our own. It was the first time I’d hugged either of them in over a year. They’d seen me grow up alongside their son and had pulled me in for hundreds of bear hugs over the years, but never one like this. Raw and vulnerable. Haggard and desperate. I hugged them even harder when I realized that it may be the last time either of them would ever wrap me up again.
Unless he didn’t wake up.
But that wasn’t an option. It wasn’t an idea I was giving any credence to when it was so obvious that the Faircloths wouldn’t be able to bear the burden of outliving their only child. I battered back the negative voice in my head that worried about worst case scenarios and the danger of false hope.
When we let go of one another, Mrs. Faircloth gave me a peck on the forehead and turned away while she wiped the tears from her eyes. I wanted to comfort her, but I was in such a strange place I wasn’t sure how.
I wasn’t the girlfriend anymore. I was the ex. The reason Andrew had gotten in the car.
“Hon, why don’t you go to the nurse’s station and find out more? Jody, how ‘bout you let me take you wherever it is you need to go?”
My gaze flitted back and forth between the two of them, not sure how to respond.
“You said they just took him down, yeah? There’s going to be a while before we can see him. Dropping you off will at least let me feel like I’m doing something productive.”
“I—”
Mrs. Faircloth grabbed my hand. “You showed up for him when he needed you. You’ve done what I asked. We’re here now. We can’t hold you hostage in the hospital on a holiday.”
“You’ll let me know if there’s any news? And if there’s anything I can do?”
She nodded.
“Merry Christmas,” I said, giving her a final squeeze.
“Merry Christmas, sweet girl.”
Mr. Faircloth and I made our way out of the hospital, past all the rooms with whirring and beeping machines and families trying to bring Christmas cheer to sick loved ones. The air was full of clashing smells— antiseptics and holiday baked goods, hospital food and pine-scented air freshener. The second we were out the automatic doors to the exit, I felt like a weight had lifted. I just wished that Andrew was breaking out beside me, healthy and ready to go back home with his parents.
As soon as Andrew’s dad turned the car on, the seat warmers kicked on underneath the leather. I fidgeted with my GPS to enter in Jessup’s address.
“Where to, kid?”
“Interstate 85.”
He put the car into drive, navigating the way fathers always seemed to— with absolute confidence about their abilities to get those in their care to the desired destination without any trouble. I realized as I melted into the warmth of the seat just how much I’d relaxed as soon as I’d seen the Faircloths, despite how much my heart was breaking for them.
It was nice to have adults around that seemed more sure about how to handle crisis than I was. As soon as something truly overwhelming happened, I felt like a little girl that needed her parents instead of a fully capable grown woman.
The Faircloths were as familiar as my favorite worn t-shirt. They’d even bought it for me. Andrew’s father had spent countless hours tutoring me in math and helping me prep for basketball tryouts in high school, despite the fact I’d been hopeless with both. His mother and mine had become close friends and accompanied me on what felt like countless shopping trips for dresses for everything from middle school dances to homecoming and prom. We always assumed the three of us would eventually shop together for a wedding dress. We’d even talked about it.
In my parents’ absence, the Faircloths were the closest thing to family I was going to get. It seemed impossible— and wildly inappropriate— for me to address the elephant in the room. Jessup. The boy with the serious eyes and warm hands that wasn’t their son.
And now Mr. Faircloth was driving me to Jessup. It was unthinkable, but it was happening.
He cleared his throat. “I’d be lying if I told you I wasn’t holding onto hope that you and Andrew would find yourselves together again. That said, we know what Andrew did to break your trust and push you away.
“I don’t want to make excuses for my son, but part of me thinks the two of you met too young, that if you met after you’d both had a chance to stretch your wings and see the world, he wouldn’t have done what he did.”
I closed my eyes and pictured the lush greenery of New Zealand, the places I’d seen in the pictures from halfway around the world.
“I also understand that you have every right to forge a new path to happiness. I know my son doesn’t understand that he might not be a part of it. I know he’s trying to force his way into your good graces again. When he told us about his plan, we begged him not to do it.”
I nodded, wordless, my lips in a thin line.
“If what you want is to explore what a relationship might look like with someone else, he’ll come to respect that. He knows you deserve a good man. We want it to be him, but eventually, we all end up with who we’re meant to be with.”
Before I knew what was happening, I was sobbing into my sleeves. Mr. Faircloth reached across me at the first red light once we were off the highway and pulled a box of tissues from his glove compartment, handing them to me. I let the voice coming out of my phone from the GPS direct him the rest of the way to Jessup’s house.
I felt seen, relieved, and somehow absolved. I also felt incredibly sad.
“Thank you,” I whispered when we rolled into Jessup’s driveway. We reached across the console and hugged again. We stayed like that for several minutes, ignoring the awkward slice of his seatbelt between us.
When he finally pulled away, it was to point to Jessup standing in the door. “Someone’s waiting for you. I think you’d better go in.”
As soon the SUV door was shut behind me, the front door to the house opened.
I took Jessup’s hand and walked him up to his bedroom.
“I don’t want to talk about it right now. All I want is for you to hold me.”
He pulled the flannel sheet down near the foot of the bed so that I could crawl in. He followed, my back to his stomach, his arm tight around my middle.
It wasn’t sexy or steamy like I’d imagined it would be when I finally got him into bed. I had a day’s worth of film on my teeth, unwashed hair, and puffy eyes. We weren’t clawing at one another’s clothing or devouring one another in the dark.
It was better than that.
In the stillness of the bedroom, Jessup showed me that he would be there when the world stopped turning and the sky fell in. He proved that he could be strong when I needed to be soft, that he could listen when I didn’t want to speak, that he would let a girl that had already required endless patience of him take things at her own pace.
He knew that before he could take me as his own, he had to let me grieve.
25
Christmas Eve night, I slept on the couch instead of curling up beside Jessup again or taking to the She Shed for another sleepover with Amy. Jessup had seemed confused by my insistence, but he didn’t push me. Instead, he brought me his comforter and a good down pillow and tucked me in.
“I think I figured out why you’re camping out down here tonight,” he said.
“Oh?”
“Either you’re planning to pilfer the cookies and milk Amy left out for Santa, or you’re hoping to catch Saint Nick in the act.”
“Something like that,” I said, winking before I closed my eyes and pretended to drift off to sleep.
As soon as the lights were out throughout the house and I heard the rumblings of a snore coming from down the hall, I got up and started on my mission. Using the flashlight app on my phone, I lit the way to the kitchen. Once I was there, I started
going through the drawers and cabinets.
After locating every last ceramic pot and spatula and cooking contraption, I struck gold. Ms. Rice’s recipe box.
I took it to the couch and flipped through the index cards. The woman had a handwritten recipe for everything imaginable: chicken pastry, cheese straws, buttermilk biscuits, Southern praline dessert bars.
The one I was looking for was near the very back. Christmas breakfast casserole.
Earlier in the day, I’d borrowed Jessup’s car to go to the grocery store. I’d told the brothers I wanted to stock their fridge as a thank you for putting me up for an extended period of time. I hadn’t known everything I needed to make their mother’s recipe, but I remembered most of what Jessup had said in the She Shed: eggs, Italian sausage, jalapenos, and hot sauce. I’d guessed at the other things the best I could, grabbing sharp cheddar cheese and an assortment of other odds and ends. I also purchased a week’s worth of meal ingredients for other things so that my intentions wouldn’t be given away by the grocery haul.
Knowing the brothers generally woke up around six, I was up before the dawn to work my magic. I browned the sausage, broke the eggs, and folded them into a mixing bowl with everything else I needed. When the baking dish had been greased and filled and one last sprinkling of cheese had been added to the top for good measure, I slid it in the oven.
While I waited, I brewed a pot of specialty holiday coffee that promised undertones of cherry liqueur beneath notes of velvety chocolate. I also thought about what I wanted the year ahead to bring.
A clean bill of health for Andrew. Happiness for my parents. A smooth transition for Jessup. Safety for Randy as he served his time overseas. For me? Some of the things I wanted were still the same as they’d been before my world had changed: to get through another semester with decent grades, to prepare for my LSAT, to enjoy time with the Vixens.
Carolina Christmas Kiss: A Vixens In Love Novella Page 13
