Five Kids, One Christmas (The Brannigan Sisters)

by Ramin, Terese

  "And what about love? Will they accept it if we say it to them but not each other, or does it really matter if we say it at all? Can I assume where I stand with you, or do I have to worry that the minute I say something to the kids, you’ll come along and say the opposite? How do we handle the finances—split everything down the middle, each pay for our own kids and divide Max and Jane between us? It’s damned dark in here where I am right now, Nat." She came back to him, placed a hand on his chest to make sure she had his attention, asked softly, "How ’bout it, Nat? Can you reach the lights or aren’t there any?"

  "God, Helen, I don’t know."

  His hands clenched. Her hand was warm on his cooling skin and he wanted to feel that warmth elsewhere on him, all over him, the way he felt her earlier.

  He knew then he should move away from her. Wanted to and couldn’t. Wanted to reach for her and couldn’t do that, either.

  Instead he tipped his face to the sky, felt the drift of snowflakes on his cheeks, beneath the tangle of damp hair on his brow. They were clean and cold and known. "It’s pretty damned dark where I am, too, and huge, and nobody’s bothered to show me where the walls are so I can feel my way along ’em, let alone find out if there’s a light switch so you can see where you’re going, too."

  "So what do we do, Nat? You were so sure about this from the beginning. I had to trust you because I was afraid of all of it and I knew I couldn’t be, or at least couldn’t let it show, and I figured that if maybe you knew where we were going, I could just climb on for the ride and pray. But then Zach…" Her voice trailed away, not sure how much farther to go.

  Nat turned away from her, wrapped himself inside himself, knowing he was probably about to hurt her. Not wanting to.

  "Zach asked me if I…" He rocked his head, still disbelieving; laughed without humor. "He asked me if I bonked you in the laundry room this afternoon."

  A sharp pain in the vicinity of her heart made her suck in her breath. "Excuse me?"

  Nat turned back to her, nodding. "That’s what I said, so he repeated the question, then translated it into cruder… euphemisms, figuring he’d either shock the hell out of me or finally come up with ones I understood. I don’t know, he must have seen me go in and not come out or something…."

  "God, Nat."

  "Yeah. He shocked the hell out of me and I understood every single damned one of ’em, but he shouldn’t. I’m not sure he really does, but he’s got the words and he’s got the act and I didn’t know how to respond. I still don’t. I told him that what happens between married people—between you and me—is between us and none of his business unless it involves him directly, so he proceeded to tell me what he’d observed between John and Amanda and he shocked me all over again, as I’m sure he intended. I can’t imagine—hell, I don’t want to imagine—where he learned this stuff. Psychologist I went to after my accident told me kids from bitter divorces sometimes have real problems with their emotions—real confusion. That they have a tendency to act out when it comes to changes in their routines or their parents finding new partners and a lot of other things, but I didn’t realize…"

  "He still wants to go live with Emma and Jake, doesn’t he?" Helen asked. It cost a lot to keep the tremble out of her voice, to keep it neutral.

  To not turn tail and run away.

  Nothing anyone had ever done to try to keep from winning her place in the army had ever hurt like this.

  "Yeah," Nat said, "he does. Jake told him they’ve got a room for him anytime he needs it, but Emma told him he couldn’t come, that they stood a better chance of getting custody of him and the rest of the kids if they could show the courts what a bad environment the children had been forced to live in, how… confusing our sudden marriage and our resulting sex life and I don’t know what all else is for them. I don’t know, I think that’s the gist. He was ranting at the time."

  Helen stared at him, astounded. "She can’t have told him all that."

  "Who?"

  "Emma. Why would she say those things to her own grandson?"

  "I don’t know, Helen. People say and do stupid things when they’re in pain, and Emma’s been in pain for years."

  "She’s not in pain, she’s ill, Nat, if she’s trying to use a little boy in that way. Did you tell him that?"

  "What was I going to say to him, Helen?" He threw out his hands, frustrated. "Your Grammy’s a cruel and vicious woman who shouldn’t be allowed anywhere near you if she’s going to say things like that? He loves her. You and I are the virtual strangers in his life, not Emma. If I tried to tell him something like that we’d lose him for sure. Not to mention that the way he overreacts to everything these days, it’s hard to distinguish between what Emma or anyone else might have actually said as opposed to what he thinks he heard. Eleven is not the most rational age for boys, if my memories of Jed and me at his age are anything to go by."

  "But can’t we—shouldn’t we…" Helen floundered, helpless. "We have to do something… Don’t we?"

  Nat released a painful laugh. "Hell, Helen, how do I know? What can we do tonight, anyway? It’s getting late, I’m getting cold and I’ve got a field trip in the morning with thirty–three fourth–graders. For now I want to go to bed and forget about it. Maybe the answer’ll come in my sleep."

  Helen found his shirt where he’d tossed it, brought it to him. "Share it with me if it does?" she asked.

  He caught the hand that handed him his shirt, squeezed it hard. "You got it," he promised, and let her lead him inside.

  * * *

  They checked on the children, rearranged kicked–off covers, went to their room and undressed in darkness. In separate corners, they listened to the quiet rustle of clothing tossed aside, to the house settling for the night, the sounds of the city outside.

  Helen used the bathroom first, washed up, brushed her teeth and crawled into bed, leaving it free for Nat. She listened to the water run, the sound of the brush on his teeth, the toilet’s flush, and tried to imagine what it must be like to inhabit the world Nat inhabited. To understand how inconvenient it must sometimes be to have to get about in a five–sense world with only four senses, depending on other people to match his clothes, set up other aspects of his life so he could live it.

  Having to trust people he barely knew to play fair with his questions.

  Be my lover, be my lover…

  When she and John had gotten married, she’d kept her Brannigan surname for a variety of reasons that had seemed relevant at the time: pride, no male Brannigans to carry down the name to the next generation, her sense of her own identity, principle, career identification and other reasons she couldn’t even remember anymore.

  Later, when things between her and John had begun to be… less than satisfactory, she’d wondered whether if she had taken—or at least hyphenated her name with his—if it might have cemented their unity more than a simple piece of paper and Libby ever could. If things would have been different, if they’d have felt more like a family….

  Well, the ifs were a little murky by now, but nonetheless potent for all of that. Were part of why she’d chosen to change her name to Crockett both on the marriage license and everywhere else this time. Because the reasons not to had ceased to matter with the passage of time.

  The other part—as everything else—was for the children. There were enough surnames floating around in this household, enough confusion of identity between the Crocketts and the Maximoviches and the Crockett–Maximoviches without adding Brannigan to the mix. And so she was, for the duration, Colonel Mrs. Crockett. Not Brannigan hyphen Crockett nor any other variation on the theme. No other ambiguities, simply Helen Marie Crockett, Colonel, U.S. Army, Active.

  It didn’t change who she was in the least and it simplified life considerably from the children’s standpoint. But she hadn’t spelled her decision out to Nat. He hadn’t asked, had maybe assumed what so many people assumed: that a woman automatically took her intended’s name without any thought whatever going into
the process.

  But Helen had thought about it a lot, and maybe he needed to know what he was unable to see.

  Be my lover, be my lover…

  She’d asked Nat a lot of questions tonight that only time could possibly answer; he’d asked her only one: where do I stand with you, what do you expect of me? And suddenly she knew it was the one question she could—and wanted to—answer before any more time passed.

  She got out of bed and went to lock the bedroom door.

  Everything about their relationship was already backward, anyway, so maybe that was the way it was supposed to work for them: back to front, inside out and sideways instead of the old–fashioned, linear start from A and wind up at Z. It was only a middle–of–the–night theory, mind you, but she sort of liked its lack of logic in the midst of all this chaos. The simplest principle she knew of to describe the science of chaos, after all, was the one she’d learned from Jurassic Park: that no matter what you did to it, no matter how illogical it seemed, in the long run somehow life would find a way.

  She grinned. Life lessons from the movies—"life will find a way." Gumpisms such as "life is like a box of chocolates" and "stupid is as stupid does"—homilies from fictional lives to describe a reality that had begun to read like fiction. Maybe eventually they could get their real lives to mesh like fiction did, too; work out—at least a few days at a stretch—the road to happy ever after.

  Or as reasonable a facsimile thereof as they could manage with chaos as their guideline.

  She was glad when Nat came out of the bathroom and the distraction allowed her to discard her thoughts.

  He dropped his watch, pocket change, wallet and comb on the nightstand, paused at the rustle she made drawing back the covers for him.

  "Helen?"

  "Can I… say something to you?" she asked quietly.

  He sat on the edge of the bed, rubbing his neck, hesitated a tick over his answer. "Sure," he agreed finally, guardedly.

  She didn’t blame him.

  She slid up on her knees behind him, slipped her fingers under his on his neck. "Stiff?" she guessed.

  He nodded, still wary. "You play a rough game."

  "You’re no slouch in that department yourself." She worked her thumbs and fingers into his tight muscles, felt them begin to relax—barely. For a few moments longer she worked his muscles in silence, deciding what she wanted to say. "We asked each other a lot of questions tonight."

  "One or two," he agreed wryly. "Is this going someplace? Because, I’m sorry, but your hands on me aren’t the most relaxing things in the world. In fact, I’m starting to feel just a little more tense than I did before. And warm."

  "Yeah, well…" Helen spread her knees along the back of his hips, pressed closer along his back. "That’s kind of what I wanted to say to you."

  Again she paused, adjusted her position.

  He turned his face toward her. "What is?"

  She moistened her lips, gathered a breath of courage. She didn’t think he’d reject what was on her mind, but the risk existed nevertheless. "I can tell you where you stand with me—at least in this room with the door locked."

  He kept his voice neutral, even while the heat began to flow and a current seemed to electrify his bloodstream. "You can."

  "Yes."

  He shifted further around, hooked a knee onto the bed. "And is the door locked?"

  "Yes."

  He leaned back against her slightly, felt her bare breast on his upper arm. His pulse chugged faster. "And?"

  "And I’m naked."

  "Ah." He kept his breathing steady, but it was work.

  "Yes." Her hand brushed his forearm, eased up under the cutoff sleeve of his sweatshirt, caressed his chest. "And I wish you were, too."

  His breath snagged in his throat. "You do."

  She leaned in closer, brought her lips to his ear. "Very much."

  He groaned. "Helen, I… You’re sure?"

  "You are my husband," she whispered. "I am your wife. This afternoon we became lovers. I don’t understand most of what’s going on outside this door, but I understand what happens when you come near me, what belongs to us in here. Physical attraction and five kids is what we have to share, so let’s. While we learn the rest of whatever we’ve got to learn, make whatever adjustments we’ve got to make for the kids, in here at least, I want neutral territory, something for you and me and nobody else. We need something between us that doesn’t belong to anyone else, something we can count on."

  She swallowed, touched his face, let her hand drift down until it rested on his. "I want to be your lover, Nat. I want you for mine. Be my lover, Nat. Be my—"

  He hushed her with a hand over her mouth. An arm wrapped around her waist, hauled her naked body into his lap. "In here, Helen? Only in here? What about out there? What about in the laundry room? What about any damned place it gets away from us again? What do I say to my son when he makes crude remarks about my wife? Tough luck, kid, we’ve got a piece of paper and it makes it okay? I always kind of thought I’d tell him that the key word in the phrase making love is love, Helen, not bonking."

  "You’re right," she said calmly, but there was steel in her tone, "love is the key word in the phrase. And no, a piece of paper is not all that makes it okay because a piece of paper is just… Mushed up tree fiber until two people make it mean something more. And since we’re the two people in question and we haven’t had time to even consider love as part of the equation, we start with what we’ve got—five scared kids and two frightened adults entrusted with their keeping and the awesome responsibility of turning us, you and me and them—into a family."

  Earnestly, she took his face in her hands. "Nobody said it would be easy. Hell, you probably know better than I that nothing worthwhile ever is, so there we are. And damn it, Nat, sex is part of a marital relationship, part of the way the bonds are formed. Lust, then kids, then marriage, then sex, then shocking questions we can’t answer from hormonal preadolescents may be the backwards way to go about… everything, but the mark of people who… people who… Hell, I lost the damned word, but it’s got something to do with winners.

  "And that’s us, Nat. If we want to win not only this battle but the whole blasted war, we need to be creative, work with what we’ve got, and this is what we’ve got, damn it. This room, this bed, a few minutes of privacy a day, and if we’re lucky and give ourselves permission to lust after each other as spouses, we’ve got a lot of little seconds throughout the day to create anticipation, show Zach that marriage is more than a thoughtless bonk in the middle of the afternoon. It’s us, you and me, workin’ at it even if we don’t say I love you to each other. We say it to them and we mean it where they’re concerned and—"

  "And maybe our actions will speak loudly enough to let them believe in the fairy tale until they don’t need the fairy tale any longer," Nat finished for her.

  "Yes." Helen dropped her hands from his face. "Sometimes I think we all need a fairy tale to believe in."

  "Okay." Nat stroked her face. It was an apology. "I can buy that. You speech real well when you throw your heart into it. Ever consider selling used cars?"

  "Nah." Helen shook her head. "I got asked once if I’d be willing to sell used tanks in the third world, but I turned that down. No challenge."

  His lips quirked. "Not to mention you’re a terrible liar and if you had to appear in front of a senate subcommittee, nobody’d be safe from the truth as you see it."

  "Well…" Helen agreed modestly.

  He traced her lips, outlining her mouth, taking stock of details he hadn’t paid attention to before. The fullness of her mouth, smoothness of her cheeks, the fact that her nose turned up just a little at its tip. How long her neck was, how sensitive the path along her collarbone, and how incredibly fragrant and silky the skin of her chest was. How impossibly, tantalizingly full her breasts.

  "I think I’m going to enjoy making love with you," he muttered. "A lot."

  "A lot as in very much?" He
len wondered, arching to him. "Or a lot as in often?"

  "Mmm–hmm," Nat said, and tumbled her onto the bed.

  "One other thing maybe you should know…" she murmured before he had a chance to kiss her.

  "Oh, God." He flopped onto his back, laughing and groaning at once. "Do I have to? Every time you decide to reveal something to me it seems like hell comes to call."

  "I’m just… So enamored of your revelations, too," she responded tartly. "I mean, please… ‘Did you bonk me?’ Couldn’t you at least have translated that into something like ‘did we do it?’ and spare my feelings that much?"

  Nat rolled onto his side, slid his hand across her belly, hiked her closer. "Yeah, well, you’re the one wondering if Max throwing up on the rings is some kind of omen. Where’d that come from, anyway? Ida?"

  "No," Helen admitted. "She said the idea was hogwash, that kids throw up on wedding rings all the time—especially once they’re on your finger. No, I’m afraid it was Edith. She loves a good disaster almost better than anything—except planting ideas where they do the least good."

  "Your entire family seems to enjoy doing that."

  "I know. We can’t help it. We were raised to be interesting, or barring that, controversial. Or at least," she amended, finding Nat’s left hand and linking hers with it so their rings touched, "I used to think it was nurture and not nature until this last month with Libby. Now I just think it’s a dominant trait passed along with the rest of the genes. Which is pretty scary when I look at Grandma Josephine and realize I’m descended from that."

  Nat rubbed his thumb across her palm, smiled when Helen’s skin quivered in response. "Grandma Josephine? Was she at the wedding? I didn’t meet her."

  "No." Helen withdrew her hand from his, let it glide up his hip to the ragged hem of his sweatshirt. "She turned ninety–eight this year and isn’t going out as much as she used to. I imagine she’ll jet in from Phoenix for Christmas though, so be warned."