SYLER MCKNIGHT: A Holiday Tale

by Brent, Cora

  She clucked her tongue. “Syler, how is it you have your face perpetually stuck in a computer screen and yet you know nothing about what’s going on in the world?”

  “The world has little interest in what’s going on with me so I’m happy to return the favor.”

  “Well, I don’t know the whole story but there’s this video circulating of Katrina saying some unflattering things about that football guy who’s in all the phone commercials. She didn’t know she was being recorded and she’s taking a lot of backlash. Her network has even suspended her.”

  I didn’t know which football/phone celebrity Gemma was talking about. But I wasn’t surprised to hear Katrina had wound up in hot water for shooting her mouth off. Katrina’s mouth happened to have a lot of talents. Some of which weren’t a good idea to think about right now. This wasn’t an ideal time to get hard.

  I shoved aside all thoughts of Katrina. And her mouth. And her other assets.

  “Please call me later if you want to talk,” I said to Gemma. “Tell the kids they can always call me too. I don’t care what time it is.”

  There was now a smile in her voice. “You’ve always been there for me.”

  I was bad at almost everything I touched in life. My relationship with my sister was the one thing I’d managed to keep intact. “I always will be.”

  “Sy, I know I’ve told you this before but I never had any doubts about you. I know that all those rotten stories aren’t true.”

  “Everyone else thinks they are. And it’s okay. I kind of enjoy the myth.”

  “Love you, little brother.”

  “Love you too, Gem.”

  A hollow feeling enveloped me the instant the connection was broken. I thought of Gemma hundreds of miles away, bravely swiping the tears out of her eyes and then sitting down her four children to tell them their father had left without even a courtesy goodbye. Christmas was in just eight days. The tree was probably already up and decorated with the eclectic blend of vintage ornaments that had been inherited from our grandparents. The family stockings would all be hanging from the stone fireplace and Florence, the surly, three-legged, one-eyed cat that had been rescued from the roadside fifteen years ago would be wheezing just this side of extinction beside the crackling fire.

  Then I thought about my sister picking her words carefully and hugging her children close as her heart tried not to break in half. They would be devastated. Even Drew, who was on the precipice of truculent teenage-hood would no doubt have a tough time grappling with this news.

  The timing made the situation even worse. The holiday season in Maple Springs was a cornucopia of Normal Rockwell-level events that would make a very public and very messy scandal tougher for Gemma to bear. How could she be expected to hold her head up and withstand the cruel whispers while managing the annual cookie exchange, supervising the Christmas carol spectacular and running her jam business? That was too much to ask of anyone.

  The way I saw it, I had a few choices.

  I could return to my meaningless lines of code, tune out the world and offer a few useless support calls.

  I could haul Russell Reese out of his Syracuse love cave, tie his thumbs together and promise to scoop out his liver if he didn’t return to his responsibilities.

  Or, I could abandon this brooding imitation of life I had going on here in my low rent colorless computer cell and drive home to Maple Springs to help my sister weather this storm.

  There was no choice at all.

  I spent the afternoon hurrying through the rest of my current project and dashed off a message to ask a few favors from a friendly fellow freelance programmer.

  By late evening I was on the road in my not-so-trusty crap mobile and inching through traffic on the way to the winter wilds of upstate New York. The snow that had started out as a few charming flakes had become a perilous mess. It was expected to accumulate at least knee deep where I was going and travel had slowed to a chilly crawl. Once I was just north of the New York City metro area, driving was all but impossible. I decided to stop at a Holiday Inn and sit it out for a few hours.

  Maple Springs would still be there in the morning.

  2

  Bath Bombs Away

  Katrina

  It was a Pretend Apocalypse kind of a day.

  There was a possibility I was the only who celebrated these.

  A day when the world outside the confines of my cozy apartment felt like a very unfriendly place. And so I imagined a reality where I had no choice but to stay put or else be confronted with twitching crowds of mutated flesh eating zombies.

  Luckily such days didn’t come around very often.

  Only in the aftermath of having sex with someone I shouldn’t have had sex with.

  Or when I carry out an NBA locker room interview with a sizeable smear of melted chocolate over my left nipple, vaulting to instant stardom in Internet meme world.

  And days like today.

  Today I had discovered that Pretend Apocalypse was also a good coping tool should I happen to drunkenly defame a national treasure with four Super Bowl rings and a terrifying army of fan girls who call themselves Bath Bombers.

  In my defense, I had no idea my words were being recorded. Following a Monday night football segment at the studio I was feeling adventurous and not even slightly tired. So when Drea Dougray invited me to come out for drinks I saw no reason to refuse even though we’d been on professional rival status ever since we started at the network the same week.

  She was a piece of work, one of those people who smilingly offered compliments like, “What a cute dress, Katrina. Did you get it on clearance?” Or, “Damn, I wish I had your confidence but if I eat twelve cookies in a row there’s no way I’ll fit into my size negative 2 dress for the network holiday party.”

  We’d been on especially chilly terms ever since the announcement was made that I’d been chosen to go to the Super Bowl to conduct live post game interviews while she’d be stuck here doing the studio pre game show. If the decision had gone the other way I wouldn’t have been angry. They were both great assignments. But for the last week Drea had been glowering at me and complaining.

  Still, the drink suggestion appeared to be a peace offering. Maybe Drea had finally realized what I’d known all along. There was room for more than one woman in the sports broadcasting world.

  Drea already had a place in mind, this new downtown sushi bar. She neglected to mention that we’d be meeting a quartet of her college sorority sisters but I didn’t mind. The more the merrier was my attitude when it came to a night on the town and they seemed to be a friendly pack. However, I did inwardly groan when Drea decided to mention my family pedigree. The other girls oohed and ahhed all over the place.

  “OHMYGOD your mom is so unbelievably gorgeous. You don’t look like her at all.”

  “OHMYGOD your brother is so ridiculously hot. I could cougar all over that.”

  “OHMYGOD my parents watch your dad’s show all the time. Why is he always yelling?”

  That was par for the course when your mother was a legendary supermodel, your brother was plastered on billboards across the city wearing overpriced underwear, and your father hosted a highly rated cable news show where he screamed about politics five evenings a week. I was used to the comments and questions so I could handle the situation just fine, but a few doses of sake made the outlook more pleasant. I signaled to the waitress to keep the bottles coming.

  I have never been the sort who could gracefully hold her alcohol. And I’d failed to eat dinner before overdoing it on the sake. After stumbling back to the table following a dizzying visit to the ladies’ room I started thinking it was just about time to call it a night.

  But Drea poured me another glass and prodded me to talk about an insignificant year old fling with the golden god of football.

  Chris Bath was more than a quarterback with a lot of championship hardware. He was a billionaire brand with a clothing line, a record contract and more social media foll
owers than the population of China.

  Or something like that.

  Let’s just say he was popular.

  Every time he Instagrammed a close up of his sculpted jaw with a semi-permanent swath of sandy hair flopping into his grey eyes the world gasped. Bells tolled. Angels sighed. Panties disintegrated.

  We dated last year.

  On exactly five occasions stretched out over two weeks.

  Regrettably, when he wasn’t being aggressively curated by his team of handlers, Chris Bath was about as interesting as a deflated sock puppet. And oddly enough, he didn’t like to pay for anything. Not even a street vendor hot dog. He would just saunter off with his mouth full, leaving me behind to deal with the baffled cart operator. Perhaps that was how billionaires remained billionaires. By having someone else pay for all of their hot dogs.

  He did take pictures of his food (that I had purchased). Then he took pictures of himself with his food. And then suggested that I should take pictures of him with his food. Whenever I spoke for longer than two sentences he would yawn and allow his gaze to wander. Plus, despite his jaw dropping looks, the physical chemistry between us was nonexistent. Kissing him was like kissing a very attractive semi-conscious fish.

  None of these lackluster details about Chris Bath should ever have been shared with Drea and friends but Alcohol + Empty Stomach = Stupid Katrina. Soon after sharing my short and rather comedic history with Chris Bath I left the sushi bar, never guessing as I cheerfully gnawed on a giant pretzel in the crowded subway that the wheels of destruction had already been set in motion. Drea had recorded every Bath-bashing second of my monologue and even though every word was completely true and somewhat hilarious, it didn’t matter. By the time I climbed out of my vague hangover early the next morning the video had already traveled far and wide.

  The fallout was instant and severe.

  No amount of public groveling on my part made a dent in the damage. I apologized to Chris Bath on every social media platform. I offered to make a sizeable donation to the charity of his choice as penance. To his credit, he didn’t do much to fuel the flames. Other than a cryptic, heavily misspelled tweet he said nothing about the matter and refused to comment in interviews.

  His fandom was another story. I had insulted their idol. I must be punished without mercy. People shouted at me on the street. A pair of determined middle aged women wearing purple glitter Bath’s Bombers windbreakers chased me through Midtown until I lost in them in the stacks of the New York Public Library.

  And then yesterday my boss summoned me to his office to break some news. Not only had I lost the Super Bowl assignment but I was being formally suspended by the network for having violated an obscure ethics clause in my contract.

  I could understand where they were coming from. The network overlords were eager to satisfy the demands of the bloodthirsty Bath Bombers and cut me loose. It seemed that in addition to threatening phone calls and endless #KancelKatrina hash tags, the mail room had been swamped with deliveries of fragrant bath bombs, which wound up being a bigger hassle than one might guess.

  My boss, a former major league pitcher who’d shifted into broadcasting years ago after an untimely injury, was somewhat sympathetic as he passed a tissue box across his desk. He told me the big bosses would surely reconsider after the holidays when the furor died down. At least I hadn’t been outright fired.

  “One more thing,” he added, looking uneasy as I wiped the snot off my face. “Can you please ask your father to stop threatening to have his viewers boycott the network?”

  There was really little hope of putting a lid on Levi Feldman’s outrage once he found something to get excited about, but I gathered my dignity and my tissues and promised to ask my father to cease the boycott and lawsuit threats.

  My plan was to slink out of the building without being seen but Drea Dougray had anticipated my back door exit. She was leaning against the wall beside the stairwell, her spidery legs crossed at the ankle as she faked scrolling through her phone while on a coffee break.

  She hailed me with a wave of her festive red cup. “Katrina. Oh god, I feel so awful for you. I kept meaning to call. I don’t know which of the girls recorded that video the other night but somehow I feel responsible.”

  My jaw clenched. Words became difficult to shape. “’S all right. My fault.”

  She smiled and flipped her shiny red hair over one shoulder. I had a powerful urge to shove that coffee cup up her left nostril. Then I reasoned that assaulting a colleague would not add much shine to my very tarnished image.

  “You’re a big person for being accountable for your actions,” Drea gushed. “Most people wouldn’t be.”

  Most people indeed. And I didn’t miss the way she stressed the big syllable.

  “No kidding,” I said.

  Drea had the nerve to wish me a lovely holiday, as if I were leaving on a river cruise instead of creeping away from work in suspended disgrace. I thought about giving her the middle finger. But I didn’t need that to go viral as well so I chose to leave the building rather than make Drea eat her coffee cup.

  That was yesterday.

  Today I was mixing endless batches of snickerdoodles, playing Pretend Apocalypse and avoiding human contact even though I owed a few people callbacks. My father’s voicemail demanded to know who he should address his legal team’s new batch of cease and desist letters to on my behalf. My brother’s message implored me to claim that we’d been estranged for years, in case anyone asked. And my lovely mother, obliviously ensconced in her northern small town hamlet, wanted to let me know that she was worried about how all this stress was impacting her favorite chicken.

  But then Gemma called.

  Gemma was my rock, my best friend on earth since age thirteen when I was kicked out of another Ivy League pipeline boarding school and deposited in the upstate New York town where my former supermodel mother had been evading the spotlight for years. Gemma suffered from her own version of dysfunctional parents and, like me, she’d been dumped in Maple Springs to attend high school. Gemma was funny and smart and beautiful and instinctively kind. To know her was to adore her. Looking back, I could say with confidence that Gemma McKnight was the only miracle of my very confusing adolescence.

  So despite the fact that I was shunning all human contact on this day of Pretend Apocalypse, the sound of her ring tone sent me diving for the phone after plucking a cinnamon and sugar-covered spoon out of my mouth. I loved Gemma more than I loved snickerdoodles and that was really saying something.

  “Hello, my person,” I greeted her. “You should know that yours is the one and only voice I care to hear right now on this forsaken earth.”

  She laughed. Or was that a sob?

  “Oh Katrina, are you doing the end of the world thing again?”

  “See, that’s why you’re my best friend. Because you sense when I have retreated to my dystopian crutch.”

  I stretched across the white quartz breakfast bar to reach the knob on the vintage stereo and turn the music down. In my Pretend Apocalypse world the soundtrack invariably consisted of hair band ballads of the late eighties. My mother’s tastes hadn’t rubbed off on me in many areas but she’d shaped my taste in music. In her glitzy pre-Katrina life she starred in a number of music videos with her blonde hair teased skyward as she strutted in tight leather. I loved those videos. And I loved that music. There was something both campy and therapeutic about howling out the lyrics to Here I Go Again while gyrating around my apartment in a pink satin nightgown, swinging my hair and sampling raw cookie dough between verses.

  At least I had a decent voice to back up all of that attitude. Well, I assumed I did. Since life, sadly, did not resemble a Broadway musical, I didn’t have many reasons to break into song in the presence of other people.

  “How are you holding up?” my best friend asked and another strangely muffled sound carried across the miles. “Things must be bad if you were blasting Bon Jovi.”

  “Not Bon Jovi. Whit
esnake. Let’s see, the network suspended me. Wait, I texted you about that yesterday. By the way I’m pretty sure my doorman Sylvester is a Bath Bomber. Up until last week he greeted me with a pleasant smile and referred to me as Princess Katrina. Now every time I enter the lobby I’m skewered by his weirdly purple eyes and he doesn’t say a word. God, I am so damn glad you called. I needed to escape the apocalypse before things got really weird. How are my babies?”

  I’d earned the coveted title of favorite aunt to Gemma’s four kids. There wasn’t much competition since her husband was an only child and neither of her brothers were married, but I’d earned it just the same. I always remembered their birthdays and treasured the little scraps of artwork that had come my way over the years, the very first of which was an orange elephant that had been proudly drawn for me by Drew, the oldest, adopted into the family when he was four. I kept it framed on my dresser and took a look at it whenever I needed to smile.

  Gemma could talk about her kids for hours and I could happily listen for hours so I took a seat on my customized rose colored velvet sofa and got comfortable.

  But apparently Gemma was not in a chatty mood today.

  “They kids are just fine I guess,” she said, sounding hollow and faint.

  I frowned with concern. “You sound stuffed up. Are you sick? You always overdo it at the holidays. Tell the Maple Springs social committee to find another Cookie Caper organizer. You need to take better care of yourself.”

  That was true. In addition to the hectic everyday care of a busy family, Gemma was in charge of nearly every seasonal activity in town while also running her jam business. If Christmas Queen of Maple Springs were a title then Gemma would win handily. A large portion of the local economy depended on its sweet small town appeal to passing tourists and prime visiting months were September through New Year’s. People were charmed by the aging Victorian homes that had been built as summer getaways for Manhattan’s moneyed elite many decades ago. They imagined that life inside the enchanted boundaries of the picturesque small town was like a Currier and Ives print. This was the Maple Springs high season of endless Christmas carol parties and town square candlelight processions and Gemma was responsible for making most of them happen.