'Tis The Season: Under the Christmas TreeMidnight ConfessionsBackward Glance

by Robyn Carr

  When Sunny was focusing the camera, she didn’t miss much. Maybe she should have been looking at Glen through the lens because clearly she missed a lot about him. Or had she just ignored it all?

  She wondered if this was all about it being New Year’s Eve, being among friends and the promise of a brand-new start, a first day of a new year. That’s what she’d had in mind for her wedding—a new beginning.

  Then she spotted Drew, apart from the crowd, leaning against the wall beside the hearth, watching her with a lazy smile on his lips. He had one leg crossed over the other, one hand was in his front jeans pocket and he lifted his bottle of Mich, which had to be warm by now since he’d been nursing it for so long. She snapped, flashed the camera, making him laugh. He posed for her, pulling that hand out of his pocket and flexing his muscles. Of course it was impossible to see his real physique given the roomy plaid flannel shirt. He put his leg up on the seat of a nearby chair, gave her a profile and lifted the beer bottle—she liked it. He grinned, scowled, stuck his tongue out, blew raspberries at the camera—she snapped and laughed. Then he crooked his finger at her for her to come closer and she took pictures as she went. When she got real close he pulled the camera away.

  “Let’s get out of here,” he whispered. “Somewhere we can talk.”

  “Can’t we talk here?” she asked.

  He shook his head. “Listen,” he said.

  She listened—the jukebox. Only the jukebox. He turned her around. Every single eye was on them. Watching. Waiting. She turned back to Drew. “Everyone knows,” she said. “We are the only single people, we’re both single and miserable—”

  “Single,” he said. “I’m not miserable and I know you intended to be miserable, but that’s not really working out for you. So?” he asked with a shrug. “Wanna just throw caution to the wind and see if you can enjoy the rest of the evening?”

  “I can’t enjoy it here?”

  “With all of them watching you? Listening?” he asked with a lift of the chin to indicate the bar at large.

  When she turned around to look, she caught everyone quickly averting their eyes and it made her laugh. She laughed harder, putting her hand over her mouth.

  “Don’t do that,” he said, pulling her hand away. “You have an amazing smile and I love listening to you laugh.”

  “Where would we go?”

  “Well, it’s only ten. I could take you to Eureka or Fortuna—there’s bound to be stuff going on, but I’d prefer to find somewhere there’s not a party. I could show you the cabin Erin turned into a showplace, but I don’t have any ‘before’ pictures. Or we could take a drive, park in the woods and make out like teenagers.” He grinned at her playfully. Hopefully.

  “You’re overconfident,” she accused.

  “I’ve been told that. It’s better than being under-confident, in these circumstances at least.”

  “I have to speak to Uncle Nathaniel,” she said.

  He touched her cheek with the knuckle of one finger. “Permission?”

  She shook her head a little. “Courtesy. I’m his guest. Grab our coats.”

  The walk across the bar to her uncle was very short and in that time she realized that Drew wasn’t overconfident—Glen was overconfident. He preened, and had always managed to strike a pose that accentuated his height, firm jaw, strong shoulders. Drew clowned around. Laughed. Drew seemed to be pretty easygoing and took things as they came. But she’d known him for two whole hours. Who knew what secrets he harbored?

  But what the hell, Sunny thought. I can experiment with actually letting a male person get close without much risk—I’m never going to see him again. Who knows? Maybe I’ll recover after all.

  “Uncle Nate,” she said. “I’m going to go with Drew to see if anything fun is happening in Fortuna or Eureka. If you’re okay with that.”

  “Well,” he said. “I don’t actually know—ow!”

  Annie slugged him in the arm. “That’s great, Sunny,” she said. “Will you come back here or have Drew take you home?”

  She shrugged and shook her head. “I don’t know. Depends on where we are, what’s going on, you know. Listen, if the cells worked up here, I’d call, but...”

  “Your cell from Fortuna or Eureka to my home phone works. Or to Jack’s landline. We’ll be here till midnight,” Nate said. Then he glared briefly at Annie. “Jack, can you give her your number?”

  “You bet,” Jack said, jotting it on a napkin. “I’ve known Drew and his family a couple of years. You’re in good hands, Sunny.”

  “Does he have four-wheel drive?” Nate asked.

  Sunny grinned. “Oh, you’re going to be a fun daddy, yessir.” Then she walked back to Drew and let him help her slip on her jacket.

  “Where did you say we were going?” Drew asked.

  “I said Fortuna or Eureka, but I want to see it—the cabin.”

  He grabbed his own jacket. “Hope I didn’t leave it nasty.”

  “And is that likely?” she wanted to know.

  “Depends where my head was at the time,” he said. He rested her elbow in the palm of his hand and began to direct her out of the bar. As they were leaving he put two fingers to his brow and gave the gawkers a salute.

  Sunny was trying to remember, what was the first thing Drew had said to her? She thought it was something simple, like “Hi, my name is Drew.” And what had been Glen’s opening line? With a finger in her sternum he had said, “Yo. You and me.”

  Five

  “I’m not sure that was the best thing to do,” Nate Jensen said right after Sunny and Drew left. “I’m supposed to be looking after her, and I let her go off with some guy I don’t even know.”

  “She was laughing!” Annie stressed. “Having fun for the first time in so long! She didn’t need your permission, Nate. She was being polite, telling you where she was going so you wouldn’t worry.”

  “You did fine,” Jack said. “Drew’s a good guy. A doctor, actually—in his residency now.”

  “But is he the kind of guy who will take advantage of a girl with a broken heart?” Nate asked. “Because my sister...”

  “I don’t know a thing about his love life,” Jack said. “He said he’d had a breakup, so that might make them sympathetic to each other. I’ll tell you what I know. Every time I’ve talked to him he’s seemed like a stand-up guy. His brother-in-law was a disabled marine in a nursing home for a few years before he died, and Erin said that Drew, along with the rest of the family, helped take care of him. Erin thinks that had an impact on him, drew him to medicine. And...he has four-wheel drive. That should put your mind at ease.”

  “She was smiling,” Nate admitted. “You should’a been there last year. Sitting in that church, waiting for the wedding to start. Just like in all things, the rumors that the groom didn’t show started floating around the guests, maybe before Sunny had even heard it. It was awful. How do you not know something like that is coming? How could she not know?”

  Jack gave the bar a wipe. “You can bet she’s been asking herself that question for about a year.”

  * * *

  “Tell me about the photography business,” Drew said as they drove.

  “You don’t have to ask that,” she said. “I can tell you’re a gentleman and that’s very polite, but you don’t have to pretend to be interested in photography. It bores the heck out of most people.”

  He laughed at her. “When I was a kid, I took pictures sometimes,” he said. “Awful pictures that were developed at the drugstore, but it was enough to get me on the yearbook staff, which I only wanted to be on because Bitsy Massey was on it. Bitsy was a cute little thing, a cheerleader of course, and she was on the yearbook committee—most likely to been sure the lion’s share of the pictures were of her. I was in love with her for about six months, and she never knew
I was alive. The only upside to the whole thing? I actually like taking pictures. I admit, I take a lot with my cell phone now and I don’t have any aspirations to go professional, but I wasn’t just being polite. In fact,” he said, reaching into his pocket for his cell, “I happen to have some compound fractures, crushed ankles, ripped out shoulders and really horrible jaw fractures if you’d like to—”

  “Ack!” she yelled, fanning him away with her hand. “Why in the world would you have those?”

  “Snap ’em in E.R., take ’em to report and explain how we treated ’em and have the senior residents shoot us down and call us fools and idiots. So, Sunny—how’d it happen for you—picture taking? A big thug named Rock who liked to pose for you?”

  “Nothing of the sort,” she said indignantly. “I got a camera for Christmas when I was ten and started taking pictures. It only takes a few good ones before you realize you can. Take good pictures, that is. I figured out early what they would teach us about photography in college later—to get four or forty good pictures, just take four hundred. Of course, some subjects are close to impossible. Their color, angles, tones and shadows just don’t work, while others just eat the camera, they’re so photogenic. But...” She looked over at him. “Bored?”

  “Not yet,” he answered with a grin.

  “It was my favorite thing,” she said. “My folks kept saying there was no real future in it and I’d better have a backup plan, so I majored in business. But friends kept asking me to take pictures because I could. Pretty soon I had the moxie to ask them to at least pay the expenses—travel costs like gas for the car, film, developing, mounting, that sort of thing. Me and my dad put a darkroom in the basement when I was a junior in high school, but right after that we went digital and got a really good computer, upscale program and big screen. I built a website, using some of my stock for online advertising, and launched a price list that was real practical for people on a budget—but the product was good. My darkroom became a workroom. I could deliver finished portraits in glossy, matte, texture, whatever they wanted, and I could do it quickly. Friends told friends who told friends and by my sophomore year I was booked every weekend for family reunions, birthday parties, christenings, weddings, engagement parties, you name it. The only thing I didn’t have when I dropped out of school to do this full-time was a studio. Since I did all my shooting on location at the site, all I needed in a studio was a desk, computer, big-screen monitor, DVD player and some civilized furnishings, plus a whole lot of albums and DVDs and brochures of photo packages. The money was good. I was set up before I was set up. I was lucky.”

  “I bet you were also smart,” Drew said.

  She laughed a bit. “Sort of, with my dad running herd on my little business all the time. He wasn’t trying to make me successful, he was looking out for me, showing me the pitfalls, helping me not fail. When it became my means of income, I think he was a little ambivalent about me quitting college. And my mom? Scared her to death! She’s old-fashioned—go get a practical job! Don’t bet on your ingenuity or worse, your talent!”

  “Your guy,” Drew asked. “What did he do?”

  “Highway Patrol. He liked life on the edge.”

  “Did he like your photographs?”

  Without even thinking she answered, “Of him. He liked being in front of the camera. I like being behind it.”

  “Oh, he was one of the photogenic ones?”

  “He was,” she admitted. “He could be a model. Maybe he is by now.”

  “You don’t keep in touch?”

  “Oh, no,” she said with a mean laugh.

  “Not even through friends?”

  “Definitely not through friends.” She turned to look at him. “You? Do you keep in touch?”

  He shrugged but his eyes were focused on the road. “Well, she’s going to marry one of the residents at the hospital. We’re not in the same service—he’s general surgery. But she turns up sometimes. She’s polite. I’m polite.” He took a breath. “I hate that. I don’t know how she feels, but I don’t feel polite.”

  “So you are angry,” she said, a note of surprise in her voice.

  “Oh, hell yes,” he replied. “It’s just that sometimes the line is blurred, and I get confused about who I’m angriest with—her or me. She knew what she was signing up for, that residents don’t have a lot of time or money or energy after work. Why couldn’t we figure that out without all the drama? But then, I’m guilty of the same thing—I was asking way too much of her. See? Plenty of blame to go around.”

  There was quiet for a while. The road was curvy, banked by very tall trees heavy with snow. The snow was falling lightly, softly. The higher they went, the more snow there was on the ground. There were some sharp turns along the road, and a few drop-offs that, in the dark of night, looked like they were bottomless. He drove slowly, carefully, attentively. If he looked at her at all, which was rare, it was the briefest glance.

  “Very pretty out here,” she said quietly.

  He responded with, “Can I ask you a personal question?”

  She sucked in her breath. “I don’t know....”

  “Tell you what—don’t answer if it makes you the least bit uncomfortable,” he suggested.

  “But wouldn’t my not answering tell you that—”

  “Did you fall in love with him the second you met him? Like right off the bat? Boom—you saw him, you were knocked off your feet, dead in love?”

  No! she thought. “Yes,” she said. She looked across the front seat at him. “You?”

  He shook his head first. “No. I liked her right away, though. There were things about her that really worked for me, that work for a guy. Like, for example, no guessing games. She was very upfront, but never in a bitchy way. Not a lot of games with Penny, at least up until we got to the breaking-up part of our relationship. For example, if we went out to dinner, she ordered exactly what she liked. If I asked her what she’d like to do, she came up with an answer—never any of that ‘I don’t care’ when she really did care. I liked that. We got along, seemed like we were paddling in the same direction. I wanted to be a surgeon, and she was a nurse who liked the idea of being with a doctor, even though she knew it was never easy on the spouse. When I asked her if she wanted to move in with me before the residency started she said, ‘Not without a ring.’” He shrugged. “Seemed reasonable to me that we’d just get married. I’m still real surprised it didn’t work out that way. I really couldn’t tell you exactly when it stopped working. That’s the only thing that scares me.”

  She stared at his profile. At that moment she decided that if she ever broke a bone, she’d want him to set it. “But by then you were madly in love with her, right? By the time you got to the ring?”

  “Probably. Yeah, I think so. The thing is, Penny seemed exactly right for me, exactly. Logical. Problems that friends of mine had with wives or girlfriends, I didn’t have with Penny. Guys envied me. I thought she was the perfect one for me.”

  She heard Glen’s voice in her head. I thought you were the best thing for me, the best woman I could ever hook up with for the long haul....

  “Until all this fighting started,” he went on. “Things had been so easy with us, I didn’t get it. I thought it was all about her missing her friends, me working such long hours, that kind of thing. I’m still not sure—maybe it was about another guy and being all torn up trying to decide. But really, I thought everything was fine.”

  “What is it with you guys?” she said hotly. “You just pick out a girl who looks like wife material and hope by the time you get to the altar you’ll be ready?”

  Drew gave her a quick glance, a frown, then looked back at the road. And that’s when it happened—as if it fell from the sky, he hit a buck. He knew it was a buck when he saw the antlers. He also saw its big, brown eyes. It was suddenly in front of the SUV—his oldest si
ster’s SUV that he had borrowed to go up to the cabin. Though they weren’t traveling fast, the strike was close, sudden, the buck hit the front hard, was briefly airborne, came down on the hood, and rolled up against the windshield with enough force for the antlers to crack it, splinter it.

  Drew fought the car, though he could only see clearly out of the driver’s side window. He knew that to let the SUV go off the road could be disastrous—there were so many drop-offs on the way to the cabin. He finally brought the car to rest on the shoulder, the passenger side safely resting against a big tree.

  Sunny screamed in surprise and was left staring into the eyes of a large buck through the webbed and cracked windshield. The deer was lying motionless across the hood.

  Drew turned to Sunny first. “Sunny...”

  “We hit a deer!” she screamed.

  “Are you okay? Neck? Head? Back? Anything?” he asked her.

  She was unhooking her belt and wiggling out of it. “Oh, my God, oh, my God, oh, my God! He’s dead! Look at him! He’s dead, isn’t he?”

  “Sunny,” he said, stopping her, holding her still. “Wait a second. Sit still for just a second and tell me—does anything hurt?”

  Wide-eyed, she shook her head.

  He ran a hand down each of her legs, over her knees. “Did you hit the dash?” he asked. “Any part of you?”

  She shook her head. “You have to help the deer!” she said in a panic.

  “I don’t know if there’s much help for him. I wonder why the air bags didn’t deploy—the SUV must’ve swept the buck’s legs out from under him, causing him to directly hit the grille, and since the car kept moving forward, no air bags. Whew, he isn’t real small, either.”

  “Check him, Drew. Okay?”

  “I’ll look at him, but you stay right here for now, all right?”

  “You bet I will. I should tell you—me and blood? Not a good combination.”