Five Kids, One Christmas (The Brannigan Sisters)

by Ramin, Terese

  "Yes," Helen said, smiling tightly. "We do." She turned her hand to clasp his. "One for all?" she asked.

  Nat squeezed her hand hard. "And all for one," he said. Between them, where their palms touched, awareness burned and scorched and augured dilemmas of its own, while from above them, children dressed for school flooded down the stairs.

  ~ICE–FORMING MOON~

  There had to be a solution.

  Restless, Nat stalked the night, unable to sleep, stuck in a limbo not of his own creation. Images of Helen–Zach–Helen–Kids–Helen–Emma–Zach waylaid his dreams at every toss and turn, accosted his wakefulness with every step. He knew there had to be a solution, but what?

  Using his cane to make sure Helen hadn’t moved any furniture to ease the day’s frustrations, Nat felt his way to the French doors leading to the screened side porch, then went out.

  The air was brisk, the slate tiles cold beneath his stockinged feet, and he tapped quickly east, searching for the thick rug he’d helped Helen drag out of the basement, hang over the backyard barbecue and beat to get the dust out. They’d laid it out here only this afternoon. Working through a conglomeration of rising tensions, she’d called it. Making herself tired enough to sleep tonight so she’d wake in the morning with The Plan. A grin worked its way across his mouth. Even in memory, her voice around the two words made them sound capitalized and faintly evil.

  She’d then flatly announced that they’d put up the storm windows out here tomorrow to be sure no piddly–minded keeper of Emma’s complaints could come in here and mark them down for leaving the screens up so late in the season, thus ensuring the house would not be warm enough for the children’s health and well–being, even though Emma herself had admonished Helen from the start to be sure to leave the children’s windows open a crack at night so the air could circulate. This despite the fact that Max had been clutching his inflamed left ear and complaining that everything connected to it hurt.

  Fortunately, a quick trip to the doctor, a course of antibiotics and some children’s non–aspirin analgesic had relieved the worst of Max’s misery, but it had not improved relations between Emma and Helen—or him and Emma, for that matter. Especially not when Helen deliberately marched off, found the storm windows for the boys’ room, put them up, then closed the inside windows, locked them and caulked them shut for the winter in front of Emma while the woman read Max a story and soothed him to sleep. Nat and Zach had done the same thing to Jane’s nursery and the older girls’ room.

  Again a grin toured his face. He could just imagine the tight line of Emma’s mouth, her lips pursed with insulted disapproval, as she tried to ignore the open attack, the blatant changing of the guard—or guardians, as the case might be. No doubt about it, some of the battles were probably a trifle petty, but…

  The grin faded. But it was the petty things that could so easily be distorted and blown out of proportion—the way they’d been at the end of his marriage. The seemingly inconsequential things—like Emma’s choice of the verb forced to describe the children’s consumption of a simple vegetable at dinner—that could undermine the construction of this family, his family, Helen and all, for good.

  His cane struck softness; his feet found the edge of the carpet, cushy and warm. The air through the screens was frosty by comparison; it was a clear night, by the feel of it. He turned left, reached out with the cane to find the rattan couch, made sure of its location behind him and sat. In his imagination, the sky was full of stars, visible despite the city lights, and the porch and yard were full of shadows. According to the calendar page Cara had turned to and read them this morning at breakfast, tonight was November’s full moon, at one time known as the Full Beaver or Ice–forming Moon, winter’s warning of the freezing weather to come. He could feel the truth in the tale—less, he suspected the result of the season than of the cold war he and Helen were unwillingly being brought into.

  He understood why Emma was doing this: she was afraid, somehow, that despite the fact that neither he nor Helen had denied her and Jake access to the children so far, they would eventually. Afraid that despite the laws protecting grandparents’ rights, she and Jake would somehow lose the last pieces of their daughter that Zach and Cara in particular represented. Afraid that Nat would and could—without real and extreme provocation—prevent any of the children from seeing any one or more of their four sets of grandparents.

  The fear and bitter distrust that pervaded so many divorces was truly a horrible thing. The fact that Nat and Amanda had managed to make their divorce civil and cooperative regardless of the custody arrangements had nothing to do with how Emma dealt with it now or ever. The devoutly Catholic Sanders family simply did not get divorced. That Amanda had done so and remarried must mean Nat was the Worst Person in the World; it was the only possible justification.

  Understanding did not make Emma’s actions easier for Nat to swallow.

  A gust of wind swept autumn dust through the screens, brought the sounds of skittering leaves and branches scratching roof tiles to his ears. He lifted his face, shut his eyes to taste the draft more clearly, the irony of succumbing to a habit no longer needed not lost on him. The tang of winter coming, holidays approaching, tingled on his tongue, slightly bitter with the fragrance of cloves mixed with the tartness of apples from the dish on the rattan table beside the settee.

  A lot like life these days.

  Sighing, he traced a pattern in the tapestry cushion beside his right knee. He hated inactivity, thought without action; forced himself to remain seated rather than pace uselessly in a space he wasn’t completely familiar with, knowing that to do so risked crashing into any number of things that hadn’t been there yesterday and waking the entire house. He was a man for whom movement was second nature, for whom passion and chaos and being in the thick of things was synonymous with life. He understood these things about himself, dealt with them daily.

  Understood that sometimes life also required idleness and tolerance, thought and indulgence, however much he often equated the lack of physical activity with standing still.

  He also understood, whether he wanted to or not, who had punched Emma’s buttons, caused her overreaction: Zach.

  Unhappy, rebellious and filled with the lack of self–esteem and resulting insecurities that being eleven carried, Nat’s son was at the stage prone to misinterpretation and unintentional misrepresentation, an age where he believed everything that didn’t go his way was a personal attack. An age where nothing was his fault, where personal responsibility and accepting the consequences of his actions were somebody else’s lookout, where the nature of hormones and physical growth spurts frequently left him at odds with himself and almost everyone else.

  It was a phase, Nat’s mother and those of Helen’s sisters who had older boys assured him; Zach would outgrow it within six months—probably. And Nat himself had passed through it. But in the meantime it was Zach whose intense unhappiness over Amanda’s and John’s deaths, whose general discontent with the world he inhabited but didn’t really want to change, whose thoughtless exaggeration of what it was like for the children to live with Helen and Nat had provided Emma with the… excuse, for want of a better word, she’d been looking for to question Nat’s rights to her daughter’s children. Nat’s children.

  Zach, who’d given his grandmother the fuel to try to take him and his siblings away from his father—in part simply because Amanda’s will dictated that, in order to gain guardianship of his own kids, Nat had to live in the same house with the single woman in the world who visibly, publicly ignited sparks and made his body zing by merely stepping into a room.

  A woman to whom he was not married.

  The specter of an idea ghosted through his consciousness, fled with the unexpected scrape of leaves on concrete—or perhaps slippered feet on slate.

  "Nat?"

  The voice was soft, a part of his thoughts or borne on the wind. Wishful hearing, or was she there?

  He turned, expecting the
former, finding the latter when her fingers grazed his shoulder, seeking him in the darkness. He started at her touch, caught off guard by her again.

  He’d tried to keep her out of his mind, tried not to think how near her end of the hall was to his by sitting out here in the cold and thinking of other things, other people. But she’d found him anyway.

  "Helen?" If chaos bore another name, he was sure—judging by the hyperawareness of every nerve and instinct he possessed—it would be Helen.

  "You couldn’t sleep either?"

  "No."

  They were silent a moment, not quite awkward, but hardly on an even keel. Nat cocked his head toward her. She had something on her mind; he could hear it in the way she rubbed her hands together against the cold, then smoothed them down whatever fabric covered her thighs. Terry cloth, perhaps. It had been a long time since he’d made—wanted, taken—the opportunity to pay close attention to a woman in dishabille in the night.

  He heard Helen loose a breath, then there was a plop near his feet and the cushions beside his knee depressed beneath her weight.

  "Heard you sock–foot–it down the stairs and brought you your moccasins," she said mildly, using a foot to shove the fleece–lined chukkas against his feet where he could find them. "Figured your feet ought to be about frozen off by now."

  Nat laughed quietly, reached for the footgear and slipped them on without asking her how she knew he hadn’t simply carried something downstairs with him to put on his feet. In less than a week he’d already learned better than to ask her things he wasn’t a hundred percent sure he wanted to know. "They are, thanks. And sorry, I didn’t mean to wake you."

  "You didn’t." Helen’s laugh was rueful. "Took care of that my own self, thinking too much."

  "Emma?" he asked.

  She sighed. "Among other things."

  Restlessly she rose, wandered the porch, returned to stand in front of him.

  "I have to ask you," she said, "and I don’t want to do this."

  He lifted his face to her—a courtesy. Felt for her hand, squeezed her fingers in a gesture that was friendly and without deeper import.

  Deeper import burned his palm, anyway.

  He ignored it—sort of. "Talk," he said softly.

  "Don’t do that." She yanked her hand away from him, put space between them. "I can’t think with you touching me."

  Surprise coiled and shuddered inside him. She’d violated the unspoken cardinal rule, the only thing that had helped them endure the last week so close to the fire they’d dismissed for years: don’t speak of it and it won’t exist, we won’t have to deal with it.

  Keep it light, he advised himself. And ignored himself immediately. What the hell, advice was cheap.

  "You can’t?" he asked. Easily. Carelessly. Attentively. He couldn’t help himself; something in the way she’d said it encouraged his response.

  "You know damned well I can’t," Helen said flatly. "I’ve never been able to. You know that, too."

  So much for hoping she’d back away from the flame first. Or that she’d pull on the "tough colonel" facade and pretend she’d said nothing at all. He should have expected that "tough" for Helen would be facing the truth first, last and in the middle, whether anyone wanted her to or not.

  "Yeah, I guess I do." The admission was harder than he’d thought it would be. Too much depended on them not losing their heads over one another now. Yet.

  Maybe ever.

  He rose and moved toward the sound of her voice. "You know the same thing about me, don’t you." It wasn’t a question exactly. More of a query, an experiment. A chance to see if either of them was as blind as they sometimes appeared. "Do you really want to go into this now?"

  "No, Nat, I don’t." She tossed up her hands, let them slap helplessly against her thighs. "But it was third on my list when I came down here." She flicked her thumb against the first three fingers of her right hand, ticking off the items. "Emma, Zach, you and the impossibility of remaining a sane woman—"

  He swallowed a grin he hoped she didn’t see. He wasn’t about to tell her that half of his attraction to her lay in her, er, unique perspectives and her apparent, er… close associations… with life’s lunatic fringe despite the straight–arrow eagles she’d earned the right to wear on her collar.

  "—or getting a good night’s sleep with you down the hall. In that order. And wanting to, um, discuss any of those subjects with you or not has nothing to do with anything. When you’re preparing for battle, it’s best to—to…" She hesitated. "To acknowledge the—the flaws in your defenses beforehand. We can change the order, but we have to cover them all."

  "Emma, Zach, me." The grin was in his voice now; he could hear it: inexplicable melody in the discords of chaos, rhyme in cacophony. Helen making him sense something in the madness—the sadness of John’s and Amanda’s deaths, Emma’s fears, Zach’s forlorn exaggerations of the truth—that he hadn’t before. Something that, if asked, he couldn’t yet explain, could only say he was glad that it existed. "I see."

  She heard the laughter in his voice, too. "It’s not funny, Nat." Impassioned, pensive, hopeful. She wanted there to be something to catch hold of, hang on to. Even a single frayed thread would be better than the nothing clutched in her fist at the moment. "This is our lives here, the kids’ lives—"

  "I’m not laughing, Helen."

  "—and Emma’s and Jake’s, and my mother’s, and your parents’, and John’s parents, and if you’d told me ten days ago that I’d be standing here at all, let alone standing here in the moonlight saying this to you, of all people, I’d have called you a liar. Or worse."

  "Me of all people?"

  The laughter was simmering now, inappropriately close to eruption, the thing inside him causing this irreverent response, chuckling like a madman out of control. Like the photographic artist he’d once been, pursuing pictures through his lenses whatever the danger or the cost because he had to, because the vision, whatever it was, kept breaking through, looking for a means of expression. He almost didn’t recognize himself, it had been so long since the vision had been upon him, but he didn’t care; humor felt good, far better than sitting in the dark alone, grinding the salt of recognition into his own wounds.

  Throwing caution to the night, pursuing the sound of her voice, her scent in the air, he advanced on her carefully, hands at his sides, intent—for reasons not quite clear to him—on not spooking her. The ghostly idea that had eluded him before flitted back toward him now. He breathed gently and ignored it, willing it to come close enough to catch.

  Helen’s slippers scraped the rug when she backed up a pace. "What are you doing?" she asked.

  "Satisfying my curiosity," he returned, canting his head to zero in on the location of her voice. "Indulge me."

  Helen backed into a chair, edged around it. "I don’t know you well enough to indulge you."

  "You’ve known me for years. We simply weren’t on speaking terms for a while." His shin found the same chair the backs of her knees had found. Ah. He grinned, dragged his hand along the chair arm to guide himself around it. If he had himself oriented correctly—and judging by the strength of the wind along his right arm, he did—she’d be stuck in a corner soon. Fine by him. "We’ve been living in the same house for a week—"

  "Six days," Helen corrected, a stickler for details, especially when they didn’t matter. "And between kids and chaos and lawyers and laundry and what–have–yous, I don’t think that counts."

  "Six days," Nat agreed. "Whatever. And I’ve spent almost all of it wondering—"

  "Oh no." Helen gulped. "Not that." Not if he’d been wondering the same thing she’d been wondering, anyway. Life was plenty complicated enough without either of them speculating about that. Truly, she was certain, the better part of valor would be to leave that well enough alone. Despite how much she really rather wanted it.

  She edged out of the corner behind the chair, keeping it between them, desperately trying to change the subject, rega
in control of a situation over which she’d apparently never had any. "Zach said something to Emma that set her off, didn’t he?"

  "That’d be my guess." Nat nodded and switched directions in turn. "Don’t change the subject."

  "I thought that was the subject."

  "Not anymore—or at least, only indirectly."

  "Indirectly? Probably at least twenty thousand—" an exaggeration, but that’s how she felt "—lives are at stake right here in this house tonight and a good five of them are minors and they’re only indirectly the subject?"

  "Yep," Nat agreed. "That’s what I said. Is there an echo in here?" Instinct caught the sound of her starting to move before she made any move at all; reflex swung him about, had him lunge across the arm of the chair to snag her when she did. "Hi," he said, using her hand to guide himself the rest of the way around the chair, keeping her in the corner behind it.

  She was breathless, giddy, a little ticked and wishing she was in uniform so she wouldn’t have to behave like a civilized civilian. Wishing his nearness didn’t make her feel so out of control. "I thought you were supposed to be blind."

  "As a bat with radar," he confirmed. "And no ‘supposed to be’ about it. I thought you came down here to figure out a solution to our problem."

  "This isn’t it."

  "How do you know?" He reached for her, slid his hands up her robed arms—terrycloth, as he’d thought—and held her by the shoulders. "It might be."

  "No." Helen tried to hang back as he drew her forward, but it was a losing battle she didn’t really want to win. "This is just asking for trouble—in fact, it’s buying trouble retail. It’ll put us right in Emma’s hands."

  "Not if…" Nat let his fingers glide up her shoulders, drift into her hair. She lifted her face and leaned into him because she couldn’t help herself. He brought his mouth close to hers, "…we’re married," he said, and kissed her.

  She heard the words and tried to struggle, but his mouth was warm, he tasted rich and sinful and heavenly, and her hands, instead of settling on his biceps to push him away, fluttered weakly for a moment, then caught at his elbows and hung on. The thunder inside her head reproved her: Colonel, you are out of your gourd. But the soft rain, the mist of melting ice following close behind, smiled gently and said, Call me Helen. Please.