Put It Out There

by D. R. Graham

  “Except my pride.”

  “Any boy who doesn’t realize how special you are doesn’t deserve you.”

  That wasn’t the problem with Trevor. He had always treated me like I was special. There was some other reason why he didn’t want to date me. Probably a perfectly valid reason like the fact he was planning to go to university in the fall. Or, the fact he knew neither one of us would likely be living in Britannia Beach for much longer. Or, the fact he didn’t feel the same way back. It was probably better for my mental health to go back to having no hope.

  My mom ended my defeatist internal monologue when she launched into a lecture about safe sex, the preferred choice of abstinence, and gynecological health. It was absolutely torturous, so I cut the skating short to end the misery.

  We went out for lunch at a nice restaurant before doing a little Christmas shopping. She was right about my mood improving by getting out of the house, and since she had stopped with the heart-to-heart attempts, we were actually having a pretty good time. I bought an Austin Sullivan poster for Kailyn and hiking socks for her dad. My mom bought me a long red cashmere sweater to wear at dinner. It was too expensive, but she insisted. I already had my mom’s and granddad’s gifts wrapped back at the apartment. The only other thing I had to buy was an ornament to hang on the tree in memory of my dad. I purposely picked a sparkly one to match her design theme. It was a three-dimensional snowflake that I imagined had floated down from heaven. I cried as I paid for it. The sales clerk seemed equally concerned and uncomfortable.

  “Sorry,’ I mumbled and walked away to find my mom.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  I slept in on Christmas morning because we always waited to open our gifts until just before dinner. I called Sophie and Steve to wish them a merry Christmas. Sophie was struggling because it was her first Christmas since her parents had separated. We talked until my mom called me for brunch. After we ate, we watched National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation on TV. Then I helped her get everything ready for our big turkey dinner.

  I had left the scissors on the island, where I’d been wrapping gifts, so I reached over to grab them. When I handed them to her, she seemed perplexed.

  “What?” I asked. “You need the scissors, don’t you?”

  She nodded but still seemed confused. “Yeah. To cut the packaging on the cheese log, which is still in the fridge. How did you —”

  I glanced at the counter, where I had seen the cheese log only a few seconds earlier. It wasn’t there. Great. The line between my intuition and reality had blurred. If I couldn’t tell the difference between a vision and real life, the descent into insanity would be slick and quick.

  Her eyebrows rose. “Oh. Wow. You can still do that? I thought you grew out of your little mind-reading ability.”

  “I can’t read minds. I anticipated that you might need scissors. Anyone with basic situational awareness can do that,” I said, trying to downplay it.

  She studied my expression, contemplating whether to press the subject or let it drop. She was smart enough to know I had used more than just keen observation skills, but to my relief, she turned and opened the fridge to get the cheese log.

  When I was ten years old, she tried to convince my dad to have my brain studied at the university, which I assumed would land me in a psychiatric hospital. Fortunately, my dad didn’t think it was a good idea to make a big deal about what he considered to be nothing more than sharp instincts. I purposely hid all my intuitions from my mom after that, including the fact that I had seen my dad’s accident before it happened. There was no reason for both of us to be haunted by the exact heart-wrenching details of the last moments of his life. Plus, I already blamed myself enough. I couldn’t handle how she would look at me if she knew.

  “Cut those in all the same size chunks,” she said, referring to the carrots I had started to chop.

  Frustrated by everything needing to be precisely her way, I said, “They’ll still taste the same no matter what size they are.”

  “Actually, they cook differently if they aren’t uniform. The little ones will get dried and burned.”

  Irritated that she was right, I shook my head and started cutting them all exactly the same size, like a psycho cutting off someone’s fingers.

  “So, Grandpa still has the Inn on the market.”

  Really? Was she trying to provoke me while I had a knife in my hand? I moved to the stove and mashed the yams with unnecessary force before I answered. “Yeah.”

  “Well, when it sells, you can obviously come live with me and finish school down here.”

  “Sure,” I said, because if I debated with her, it was a conversation that would land me right back in my funk and ruin the progress we had made. “Can we talk about something else, please?”

  She sighed at how difficult I was to connect with and sprinkled brown sugar on the pulverized yams. “It’s too bad Trevor has to work tonight.”

  “Yeah.” I tried to sound nonchalant, even though her attempt to steer the conversation to safer territory had inadvertently hit another land mine. “He’s had Christmas dinner with us for the past eleven years. Maybe we need to have it in Britannia again next year.”

  “Oh, I don’t think where we host it matters. He’s getting older. He has his own life. Even if I came up on the train, he probably wouldn’t want to have dinner with us anymore. It was bound to happen eventually.”

  An actual gasp escaped from my throat. I covered it up by pretending to cough. It hadn’t occurred to me that we’d had our last Christmas with Trevor ever. I had to flatten my palms on the granite countertops to brace myself. It felt like my mom had literally jammed her carving knife into my back. “Excuse me,” I sputtered and ducked out to hide in my bedroom.

  I sat in the dark on the edge of my bed for a long time, trying to catch my breath. She was right. Especially if Trevor got a serious girlfriend, who wasn’t me. We were bound to drift apart for family holidays. Accepting that probably wouldn’t have been hard if I hadn’t stupidly gone and developed real feelings for him. But I had, and I didn’t know how to turn them off.

  Eventually, I mustered enough energy to change into black leggings and my new cashmere sweater. I strung my dad’s wedding ring from my necklace and clasped it around my neck. After I brushed my hair and applied some make-up, I stood by my window and stared at the snow falling heavily—too heavily. I rushed back into the kitchen.

  “Mom, did you see how hard it’s snowing? They’re not going to be able to drive back up to Britannia if the highway gets closed.

  She put down the tray of dinner buns she had just removed from the oven and walked over to the floor-to-ceiling windows in the living room. The city streets were already coated with thick snow. Big, fluffy flakes still rapidly fell. If it kept snowing that hard through dinner, they would have to stay overnight.

  “Well, it makes for a nice cozy Christmas. Kailyn can stay with you, Dad can stay in the guest room, and Jim can stay on the pull-out couch in the den. Do you mind getting the bed linens and towels ready for everyone while I finish with dinner?”

  “Sure.”

  I made up the guest bed and pull-out couch, then stripped the sheets off my bed and put fresh ones on. The doorbell rang as I was getting an extra pillow for Kailyn out of the closet. My mom sang, “Merry Christmas”, and familiar voices filled the apartment. I held my breath, closed my eyes, and strained to hear Trevor’s voice. I hoped that by some miracle he had gotten off work early and come down with them. I didn’t hear him.

  My granddad’s giggly laugh and Kailyn’s singing of Frosty the Snowman made me feel Christmassy inside, and I suddenly couldn’t wait to join them. I rushed into the living room and gave them big hugs. My granddad had on brown trousers, a tan cable-knit cardigan over a white dress shirt, and his pointy green-and-red-striped elf cap with big fabric ears. Jim looked handsome in a red V-neck sweater and dark-grey trousers. He always acted a little uncomfortable in dressy clothes, as if he were being restricted
by the fabric or something. Kailyn spun around to show off her dark-burgundy dress with a black satin sash around the waist. “I love your dress, Kiki. You look beautiful.”

  Without acknowledging the compliment, she asked, “Can we open gifts now?”

  I laughed, reminded of why I loved celebrating Christmas with them. “Ask your dad.”

  “Daddy! Can we open gifts now?”

  “Sure,” Jim said before he popped a cheese-and-mushroom appetizer into his mouth. He picked up his wine glass off the counter and walked over to the tree to join Kailyn and me.

  “Wait for me,” my mom hollered from the kitchen, as she stirred the gravy on the stovetop and turned the dial to adjust the temperature. She rubbed her hands on her apron, then skipped into the living room and sat on the arm of the chair that my granddad had settled into.

  Kailyn bent over to find a gift with her name on it and sat on the couch to open the wrapping. It was a gold charm bracelet from my mom. The kind you could add charms to. My mom started her off with a heart, a K, and a Hello Kitty face. I helped her put it on and then she walked across the room to give my mom a hug. “Now, open my gift for you, Colleen,” Kailyn said. She grabbed a gift bag with Santa’s face on it from under the tree and handed it over. My mom dug through the piles of tissue paper and pulled out a pillar candle with a glass base. “It smells like you,” Kailyn declared proudly.

  My mom pressed her nose to the candle and smiled. “You’re right. I have a lavender-scented moisturizer that smells just like this. Thank you. It’s almost too pretty to light it.”

  Kailyn handed each of us presents one at a time until there were only three left. One was the one from Trevor to me. I decided to wait until I saw him again to open it, so I told Kailyn to leave it under the tree. Kailyn flipped the tag on one of the last two presents and read, “To Derian from Steve.”

  “Oh. Did you bring this down with you?” I asked my granddad.

  He nodded and seemed intrigued to know what it was. “He came by the Inn yesterday.”

  I unwrapped the ribbon and carefully opened the paper. It was a leather journal. “Wow. It’s so nice,” I said under my breath.

  “This one is for you too,” Kailyn shouted. “It’s from Santa!”

  Kailyn handed me a flat, professionally wrapped, square. The handwriting on the tag was neat. I didn’t recognize it. My granddad grinned.

  “I take it you brought this one down too,” I said.

  “Yes.”

  “Who’s it from?”

  “Santa.”

  “I see that. Who dropped it off at the Inn?”

  He shrugged as if he’d been sworn to secrecy. “It just mysteriously appeared on the front desk this morning.”

  Curious, I opened it slowly. It was a vintage vinyl Ramones record.

  “What is it?” my mom asked excitedly.

  “A record.”

  “A record?” She exchanged a look with my granddad and laughed. “I didn’t think kids these days knew what a record was. You don’t even have a turntable.”

  “It’s not really for playing. It’s more of a collectable,” I mumbled as I racked my brain trying to figure out who it could have been from. Pretty much everyone in Squamish had seen me do the Dirty Deri dance. I hoped it wasn’t from a psycho stalker or something.

  “Looks like you have a secret admirer,” my mom said and winked. She got up and headed back into the kitchen.

  Jim had an amused expression on his face. I couldn’t tell if he was stoked because he liked his gifts, or because dinner was almost served, or because I got a provocative present from a secret stalker. I set the record back under the tree and went to help my mom transfer everything over to the table.

  Even though we weren’t at the Inn, my mom’s Christmas dinner was delicious, as always. I ate way too much but still stuffed a piece of pumpkin pie down. My mom and Jim were pounding back the wine pretty good since he didn’t have to drive home. At the rate the snow had piled up on the patio, I figured he might not even be able to drive home the next morning.

  My granddad wrapped the leftover food to stack it in the fridge. I was washing the dishes when there was a knock at the door. My heart stretched out into twelve different directions and snapped back into place. I couldn’t help hoping it was Trevor. I knew the weather was too bad to make it down on the highway, and it was only seven-thirty, so he wasn’t even off work yet, but I held my breath and made a wish. My mom walked to the foyer. She peeked through the peephole and stepped back to swing the door open. “Merry Christmas,” she sang. “Come in, come in.”

  A crushing pressure hit my chest when an unfamiliar, short, thin man held up a bottle of wine and a cellophane-covered gift basket. He kissed my mom on both cheeks and greeted all of us, “Merry Christmas.”

  “Everyone, this is my new neighbour, Philip. Where’s Simon?” She poked her head down the hall.

  “Oh, he’s feeling a little under the weather. He wants to rest so he’ll be raring to go for our New Year’s soiree, which, by the way, you are absolutely attending.”

  “My daughter is staying with me, so we might just have a quiet New Year’s Eve at home.”

  “Ludicrous. You’re both coming to our place. Don’t even try to get out of it.” He placed the gift basket on the console table in the hall and handed my mom the bottle of wine. “I don’t want to interrupt your family time. And I should be getting back to Simon. He’s such a baby when he’s sick.”

  “Wait, wait. I have something for you guys.” She rushed past me and opened the fridge door. She grabbed one of the tins of white-chocolate, almond, cranberry bark I had helped her make.

  “Colleen, you shouldn’t have, but I’m glad you did,” he said when she handed him the tin. “Enjoy the rest of your evening, everyone.” He waved over his shoulder as he disappeared back into the hall.

  After my granddad and I finished up in the kitchen, he joined my mom and Jim in the living room. They opened another bottle of wine, laughing loudly about some old memories from Britannia that I didn’t think were quite as funny as they did. At least she was less uptight when she was tipsy.

  Kailyn dumped out the puzzle my granddad gave her and sat at the dining room table to sort the edge pieces. I sat down across from her and grouped similar colours together. It was a thousand pieces of chestnut-coloured horses running through a grassy meadow with trees in the background. Every piece was either green or brown—it was a good thing Kailyn was a whiz at puzzles because I already wanted to give up.

  “I bought my mom a present,” Kailyn whispered across the table.

  “Really? What did you buy?”

  “A red lipstick. I think she likes red lipstick.”

  “I’m sure she does.” I glanced over at Jim. He was engrossed in a story my mom was telling.

  Kailyn also glanced at her dad cautiously and lowered her voice. “Will you ask my brother for her phone number? He won’t give it to me, but I know he’ll give it to you.”

  “I don’t think he’ll give it to me either. He doesn’t want any of us to talk to her.”

  “He’s not the boss of us. I want to give her the lipstick.”

  Her expression was heart-breaking. And, although I was pretty sure it wasn’t going to happen, I felt obligated to say something that would make her feel better. “I’ll see what I can do. I’m not promising, though. Don’t get your hopes up.”

  She nodded and grinned optimistically before she focused back on her puzzle. About twenty minutes later, there was another knock at the door. I didn’t bother to react, because even if Trevor had gotten off work early, there was too much snow for the highway to still be open. My mom had lots of friends in the building and we’d made enough chocolate bark to fill five tins, so she was obviously expecting more drop-ins.

  “Merry Christmas,” she sang. “Come in, come in.”

  “Merry Christmas.”

  I recognized the voice and the puzzle piece dropped out of my hand onto the table.

&n
bsp; CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Trevor stood at the door and smiled in his sexy, confident trademark way. Literally every cell in my body felt electrified by the sight of him. It was an amazing rush. If I had known falling for him was going to feel so exhilarating, I would have done it a long time ago.

  My mom gave him a hug. “I’m so glad you made it. It didn’t feel quite the same without you.”

  Kailyn bounded across the room and wrapped her arms around his waist. He kissed the top of her head, then looked at me again.

  “Hey, kid. How bad was the highway?” his dad asked.

  “It’s closed, but Riaz was the cop turning people around, so he let me go through. I had to use chains,” he answered, without looking away from me. Then he gave me a look that made me want to run across the room and jump into his arms.

  Instead, I stood up and froze like an awkward dork as he took off his boots. My mom hung his coat in the closet. He had on dark jeans and a silver-grey sweater that matched his eyes. The cold weather had made his face flushed.

  After mustering the nerve, I took a deep breath and rushed over to him. I threw my arms around his neck and hugged him tightly. He loosened his embrace after what was the appropriate duration for friends. I didn’t let go. When he realized I wasn’t done, he squeezed me one more time and whispered, “Merry Christmas.”

  I tilted my head back, looked directly into his eyes, and whispered, “It is now.”

  Kailyn and my granddad got tired first and went to bed around midnight. My mom and Jim said good night closer to one o’clock. It had never occurred to me before, but as I watched them laugh and stumble down the hall together, I wondered if they had ever considered getting together after my dad died—not that I wanted them to. I didn’t want my mom to be with anyone other than my dad, and it was hard enough to convince Trevor to not treat me like his sister. It would be impossible if I actually was his sister. “Do you think they would ever date each other?” I asked.