SYLER MCKNIGHT: A Holiday Tale

by Brent, Cora

  “Gem?” I prodded, getting worried now because she’d been silent for too long.

  “Shmushel leaf flea,” she said.

  “Huh?”

  “Sorry.” She cleared her throat. “Apparently I can’t talk and blow my nose at the same time.”

  “Oh. What were you trying to say?”

  “Russell left me.”

  “No.”

  “Yes. He did.”

  “No.”

  “Why do you keep saying that?”

  Because it was impossible. Because hearing that Russell had left Gemma was like hearing a basset hound recite the Pledge of Allegiance. These were not things that occurred in any rational realm I knew of.

  “He’s been having an affair with Ophelia Benoit,” Gemma explained. “They’re moving to Syracuse together. He left this morning.”

  “Ophelia Benoit!” My outrage blasted into the stratosphere.

  “Yes. Ophelia Benoit.”

  “Isn’t she still a guidance counselor? That’s disgusting. And illegal.”

  I had enough common sense to understand that there was nothing lawless about Russell sticking his dick into the consenting adult of his choice. However, my emotions wanted both him and his lover to be hauled away in handcuffs and shoved into lightless solitary cells.

  Gemma snorted. “It’s not illegal in any way, Katrina. We’ve been out of high school for quite some time. By the way she’s the principal now.”

  “That bastard,” I swore and threw a couch pillow for emphasis. “I swear I could murder him.”

  Last week I’d shepherded a frightened mouse out of harm’s way on 42nd Street so the chances that I’d inflict harm on any person were nonexistent. Yet for a second I indulged in a satisfying fantasy of feeding Russell Reese to the imaginary zombie-esque flesh eaters that inhabited Pretend Apocalypse Land.

  Then the violent impulse passed and my eyes filled with tears. “Oh Gems. I don’t know what to say. This is horrible. I’m so sorry.”

  She exhaled and the shuddering sound made it clear she was struggling not to cry. “I think part of me is still in shock. I have to tell the kids when they get home from school. How could he have done this to them right before Christmas?”

  For once in my life I was at a genuine loss for words. Gemma was the most amazing person in the world. Any man in his right mind would fall to his knees in daily gratitude if she belonged to him.

  And the kids!

  All four of them so wonderful and precious and loving. To think of them hurting was almost too much to bear.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I really don’t know how he could do this to you and the children.”

  A fat tear of grief rolled down my cheek for my beloved friend. Silently I cursed the prick who couldn’t keep his zipper closed and his wedding ring on.

  Gemma’s husband and I weren’t great buddies but we’d managed to exist on polite terms for years. I’d had opinions about Russell Reese long before he convinced Gemma that she ought to marry him and remain in Maple Springs for eternity. In high school he was top of the food chain; tall, good looking, athletic. But thanks to his chronic slacker tendencies he flunked out of the University of Connecticut and lost his football scholarship, slinking back home to work in his dad’s tire store. Gemma was on college summer break and in town to visit her grandparents when she and Russell rekindled a high school romance that ended with a fairy tale wedding. My doubts about him were put on mute because while Russell wasn’t perfect, Gemma seemed happy with him and with her life and that was all that mattered.

  Now that Russell had gone and broken Gemma’s heart he was public enemy number one as far as I was concerned.

  As for that plastic, pretentious Benoit twit, she’d earned a spot on my crappy people list eons ago.

  Gemma was still rather shell shocked and details were fuzzy. They didn’t matter anyway. All that mattered was her marriage of ten years was over, her soon-to-be-ex-husband was a perverted douchebag and news would travel fast in a place like Maple Springs.

  Sure, Gemma had plenty of friends in our hometown but I’d bet my entire shoe collection that they weren’t ride or die types. They wouldn’t step into traffic for her. They weren’t me.

  Gemma needed allies at her side. Maple Springs had too many busy bodies and some of them would be mean. The thought of Gemma courageously holding her head high and fighting back tears as she ducked comments from ignorant garbage people was enough to make me spit nails.

  “I don’t think I can deal with the rest of my family just yet,” she sighed. “I’ll give it a few days before I try to reach them. I’ve only told Syler.”

  Despite the gravity of today’s events I felt my mouth pulling into an immature ‘Ewww’ grimace over the mention of her brother.

  My best friend had two brothers.

  One of them was a serious science genius with the body of a Roman statue who’d always been adorably clueless about his astonishing impact on the opposite sex.

  And the other one was Syler.

  One of them had been the object of a passionately unrequited schoolgirl crush back when my romantic options were limited to the male population of a small town in upstate New York.

  And the other one had been encouraged to study my body with his tongue on a night that shamed me to this day.

  I cleared my throat, revolted by the rush of heat that surged low in my belly thanks to thoughts of Syler McKnight. There were far more important matters at stake than ancient sex blunders.

  “I was thinking,” I said. “I should really get out of town for at least a few days to let this whole social media storm run its course. I’m hoping Maple Springs doesn’t have a huge pool of Bath Bombers who’d like to spit on me.”

  “People are spitting on you?”

  “Just a few of them,” I assured her. “It’s no big deal. Anyway, I know you’ve got your hands full but I promise to earn my keep if I can come stay with you. Who knows, maybe I could even be of some help.”

  If I made it sound like I was going to Maple Springs just to come to Gemma’s aid she would have been embarrassed and insisted that she had everything covered. Gemma couldn’t stand the thought of inconveniencing anyone.

  “Katrina, you know you’ve always got a room here and I would love to see you but are you sure you can get away?”

  “From what? My job? Yeah, might not have one of those right now. Or a relationship. Or friends who don’t record my most idiotic blunders and broadcast them to the world.”

  “What about Annika? Didn’t she get upset last time when you came to town and didn’t stay at her house?”

  “Not really. My mother and I have an understanding. And anyway from what I hear she’s got a new toy now, an emotional support artist who was kicked out of the commune outside town for refusing to wear clothes when he paints.”

  That earned a small laugh. “Brilliant. When are you coming?”

  I glanced around at my cookie batter, my sloppy apartment and remembered I was still wearing my nightgown.

  “I’ll be on the train in an hour.”

  3

  Land Of Gingerbread and Supermodels

  Katrina

  Thirty minutes after ending the call with Gemma I was tugging my largest Louis Vuitton spinner through the lobby of my building. Sylvester was on the job and I could swear he muttered an obscenity beneath his walrus mustache but ultimately he swept the door open.

  “Thank you, Sylvester,” I said, all sweetness and dimpled charm.

  “Hmph,” Sylvester replied and disappeared back into the building.

  Out on the city sidewalk a blast of frigid winter air penetrated my leather jacket and made me wish for something more bulky, less fashionable. I paused to wrestle on a pair of gloves and arrange my wool scarf. Then I pushed a red felt cloche hat over my rowdy black curls and shoved on a pair of sunglasses, fully aware that I was imitating my mother’s look when she ventured out to the Saratoga Shopping Mall or any public location where pe
ople might scream, “FUCK ME, IT’S ANNIKA!” and vault over the frozen yogurt kiosk in pursuit of her autograph.

  Not that I was worried about anyone getting star struck over running into the reporter from Sports Talk. I was just tired of being snarled at, spit on, and screeched at by Bath Bombers. For a moment I suspected the Yellow Cab driver who marshaled me to Penn Station was regarding me with disapproval in the rearview mirror. My paranoia might be winning out because he said nothing and unloaded my suitcase beside the curb before departing.

  On the drive I’d made the mistake of looking out the window and spotted a gigantic billboard featuring Pas, my younger brother, the one who’d pleaded for a sibling annulment mere hours after the Bath thing hit TMZ. His gigantic, enviably cheekboned, pouty face rebuked me from above.

  The city I’d always adored had become a chilly place in a way that had nothing to do with the temperature or the promised snow forecast. All of a sudden I couldn’t wait to get out of here. I had every intention of giving Gemma all the support she needed but now I realized that a trip to Maple Springs also happed to be exactly what I needed. In high school the McKnight house had been a place of refuge, a retreat from the side effects of being the child of famous (or infamous, depending on who you asked) parents. Gemma had inherited her grandmother’s home when she died a few months after Gemma’s wedding. The rambling century old Victorian was where I spent many of my happiest teenage moments. It was where I giggled with my best friend and learned how to bake snickerdoodles. It was where I mooned over Gemma’s dreamy older brother and avoided Gemma’s infuriating younger brother. That house was where I felt normal, like I was part of a family.

  After struggling through the smells and humanity of the commuter hordes, I boarded my train with plenty of time to spare. Maple Springs wasn’t large enough for a station. I could only go as far as Albany and then I’d have to take a car for the final forty mile leg to town.

  A glance at my watch made me wince as I realized Gemma’s kids would be finishing their school day in a couple of hours. I wanted to gather up the lot of them in my arms and squeeze all the bad news away. The least I could do was try to help Gemma salvage the Christmas spirit and swat aside any jerks who dared to mess with her.

  “I have a question,” said a voice. Female but deep, raspy with smoker’s damage.

  The train had not begun moving yet. I’d been hunched over my phone, admiring elaborately frosted plates of cookies on Pinterest and wondering what those little decorative little silver balls were made of. My hat and glasses disguise were still intact but the woman hovering beside me with a giant crochet tote bag must have seen through it. Her dry lips puckered into a frown and her eyes narrowed in the wilds of her craggy face.

  “Look,” I said, pulling my glasses off and removing my hat. “I’ve apologized until my lips were numb and I will be forever sorry that I said Chris Bath kisses like he’s half asleep and reptilian. I was wrong. Chris is terrific. Lucky is the girl who gets to pay for all of his street snacks. I’m sorry.”

  The woman blinked. A ball of red yarn rolled out of her crochet bag. “I have no idea who Chris is, sweetie. I just wanted to know if this seat was taken.”

  “Oh.” A hot blush seared my cheeks. “My mistake. I thought you were someone else. Please, take a seat.”

  I bent down to retrieve the errant yarn ball, handed it over, and then scooted as close to the window as I could without melting into the glass.

  The woman hoisted her pink crochet bag up and then wedged her slight body on the vinyl seat. She was small, with a coarsely wizened appearance that made it tough to guess her age. She could have been a well preserved age eighty or a sunbaked fifty. She wore one of those knee length mega coats that resembled a puffy down comforter with sleeves and pinned to the chest was a long strip of jingling bells.

  After shrugging out of her coat blanket, she retrieved a small silver object from her bag. She immediately began looping yarn and adding to the work in progress that seemed destined to become an itchy scarf.

  “Do you crochet?” she asked, evidently sensing my stare and choosing to forgive my odd outburst.

  I shook my head. “Afraid not. Years ago I tried to learn how to knit by watching YouTube videos. My first project was a pair of fingerless gloves.”

  “How nice.”

  “Not really. I finished half of one glove before it was unraveled by my mother’s pet goat. Then I sort of forgot about it until now.”

  Her fingers moved with hypnotic speed, magically producing another row of red stitches. “You could always try again. That’s the thing about life. It’s full of second chances.”

  I was pretty sure life could happily go on without my erstwhile crafting efforts but I appreciated the sentiment. “I’d like to think so. I could use a second chance or two.”

  “Does your mother still have a pet goat?”

  “She has a menagerie.”

  Yarn Lady looked up but her crochet speed didn’t suffer as she examined me with warm brown eyes. “Is it your mother you’re going to visit in Albany?”

  “Oh, I won’t be staying in Albany. It’s just the quickest way to get to my hometown. Maple Springs.”

  Plus, I wasn’t really going there for the purpose of visiting my mother. However, saying so out loud would make me sound kind of like a creep. Naturally I’d be letting Annika know that I was in town. Maybe not today, but at some point. My relationship with my mother wasn’t exactly terrible. The word ‘mystifying’ came to mind. We were like two interplanetary species who’d just made contact for the first time. Except we’d been that way for twenty-nine years.

  Annika Jean Sorenson achieved worldwide recognition in the supermodel prime years of the 1980s and became simply ‘Annika’. Sometimes all the letters were capitalized and sometimes they were not. She had three hostile ex husbands and two distant children and resided year round in a meticulously renovated yet rather drafty stone building that had once been a Quaker meetinghouse.

  “Maple Springs,” beamed Yarn Lady, flashing a set of even white dentures that were slightly too large for her mouth. “Great apple picking in those parts. And for years my husband and I would drive out for the home tour. All those lovely old homes laid out like a perfect gingerbread village.”

  I felt my lips stretching into a smile over her description. “My best friend’s house is showcased on that tour. The gabled green Victorian on Center Street.”

  She was impressed. The silver hook even paused. “I remember that one. Looked just like a postcard. Living there must be lovely.”

  It was. Even for me the house was the centerpiece of a thousand great memories. I understood why Gemma had chosen to keep the place largely unchanged as a happy tribute to her grandparents.

  Yarn Lady remembered something about Maple Springs that didn’t have anything to do with gingerbread houses. “Aren’t there some celebrities who live in Maple Springs?”

  Crap.

  She answered her own question. “Like that model. You’re probably too young to remember her but she used to be on all the magazine covers. Anna.”

  “Annika,” I corrected automatically.

  “Right.” She was getting excited now. “Annika. She was stunning back then.”

  “She still is.”

  Her eyes widened. “You know her? You know Annika?”

  “Not well,” I replied because it was easier than the truth and because it closed the door to further inquiry. Usually when people heard I was the child of Annika, (a.k.a. ANNIKA) they were confused. I wasn’t tall. There was nothing sun-kissed about my appearance. My dark hair frizzed in the damp and my complexion objected to the cold by breaking out in patchy red blotches.

  I knew I wasn’t unsightly. No one would have turned a camera on me if I were. I was just…cute. In a short, benign, peasant-bosomed kind of way. I’d never be picked out of a crowd as the child of Annika. I’d been asked if I was adopted more times than I could count. It seemed in the battle of the gene pool, my
father’s side had won out. In an old photo album I used to page through as a child there was a woman with my face. Her hair had been tightened into a severe bun, she posed beside a high top table with a stiffness that suggested her corset was slowly strangling her, and her hundred year old gaze stared out wistfully, perhaps reminiscing about her childhood home in Russia.

  If that hopeful young woman could have peered through the generations to come she might have been troubled to discover a great great (or was it great great great?) granddaughter who was single, childless, potentially unemployed and the inspiration for the latest social media cancellation hash tag.

  Or she might have just been glad to see that no one outside of fetish dungeons wore corsets anymore.

  Who knows.

  Not me. And not Yarn Lady, who had evidently grown tired of trying to prod normal conversation out of me and pushed a large pair of headphones over her ears so she could hum along to Grandma Got Run Over By a Reindeer while finishing her scarf.

  I was about to text Gemma to give her an ETA and then hesitated. She’d be busy figuring out how to comfort her children while trying not to call their father a pea-brained, degenerate fuckface. But no, Gemma wouldn’t ever use language like that. And while I was in her house I’d have to remember not to use language like that. I was determined to be a breath of cookie-baking, Christmas caroling fresh air. Perhaps I’d even dress up as Santa Claus if the opportunity arose.

  My thumb hovered over my mother’s contact information and then slid away. I’d wait until tomorrow to call her and let her know I was in town. She’d be surprised, but ultimately pleased to see me. In her ditzy, ambiguous kind of way. I could meet her naked painter boyfriend. I could nod with sympathy over her chicken troubles. Tomorrow. Today I was all about Gemma. I just wanted to hug my broken hearted best friend and let her cry on my shoulder all night if she felt like it.