by Zoe Kane
Lucy snuggled in closer against her shoulder as Annie stroked her hair, and it was suddenly so clear to her, so blindingly bright, as impossible to ignore as a star shining over the roof of a Bethlehem stable, that she had been wrong about everything that mattered.
I love you, she thought, pressing a kiss onto her soft tangled curls. What will get me through this is loving you. Every one of you.
“Hurry up, slowpokes, come put out the cookies for Santa!”
Maybe even that one.
* * *
After they had tucked the kids in – Lucy snuggled up in bed with Sophia so they could all wake up on Christmas morning together – and given them explicit instructions that they were not allowed to A) wake up either adult or B) touch a single present or stocking until 8 a.m. at the earliest, Annie and Marcus returned downstairs for the Christmas Eve night shift.
Marcus had taken his job seriously, and there were heaps of gifts piled in his bedroom closet to wrap and place under the tree. They decided to divide and conquer, with Marcus filling the stockings while Annie – who was the kind of person whose presents always looked professionally-wrapped since she used a bone folder to create perfect, sharp edges and never used too much tape – tackled the shopping bags.
He had done very well, she had to admit, as she sat at the kitchen table enjoying the tactile satisfaction of pressing crisp, clean edges into the green-and-silver paper. Surprisingly good, actually, even if you weren’t counting the cat. Nearly everything, no matter which child it was for, was something the three of them could share – a boxed set of Narnia books for Sophia, a stack of kid-friendly board games for Isaac, a pile of Disney DVDs for Lucy. They each got a new sleeping bag and a kids’ pass to the science museum and a box of craft supplies and new Christmas socks. Even the most obsessive child, counting his or her gifts in comparison to their siblings, could have found no fault with Marcus’ shopping. And it did something to her heart, how carefully he had thought about giving the children things they could enjoy together. It was as though he was trying to tell them something important about holding onto each other while they still could.
“I should have done this years ago,” he said suddenly, almost as though he could read her thoughts, and she looked over from the kitchen table and turned to him. He was holding Isaac’s stocking in his hand and staring down at it, not looking at Annie.
“What do you mean?”
“Seven years of Christmases,” he said. “I should have been here. Not just shipping gifts from New York and then making excuse after excuse why I was too busy to come and saying, ‘Maybe next year, maybe next year.’ I should have been here. I should have been with my family.”
“Why weren’t you?” she asked, but there was no judgment in her voice, no reproach. It was a simple question. She just wanted to know.
“You want honesty?”
“As a general rule, yes, nearly always.”
“I was afraid his life would feel small to me,” Marcus said, his voice low and embarrassed, waiting to be criticized for it. “I was afraid it would be stifling. Claustrophobic.”
“Is it?” she asked. “Now that you’re here?”
“Not at all. I’m as surprised as you are.”
“It’s funny,” she said thoughtfully, going back to her wrapping. “I’m the opposite of you, I think. You had this big life in New York, full of all these adventures, like Danny’s world would make you feel confined. It was the other way around, for me. I liked my narrow little one-person life. I liked my quiet apartment that was just mine. I was so comfortable there. I was so afraid this – you, the kids, it’s just so many people – “
He laughed at this, and she did too. “You were afraid Grace’s life was too big for you,” he said. “While I thought Danny’s was too small.”
“Maybe we were both wrong.”
“Or maybe people can change.”
“Sometimes I worry whether we can really do this,” she admitted. “But sometimes I think maybe we’re gonna be okay.”
He hung the last stocking back on the mantle, stood back to admire his work, and then turned to smile at her. “We’re gonna be okay.”
Together they hauled all the gifts from the pile in the kitchen and placed them underneath the tree. “Not even midnight yet,” said Marcus approvingly. “That’s not bad. I was afraid it would take us a lot longer to finish before bed.”
“Not quite bedtime yet,” Annie amended, and he looked at her with a raised eyebrow that made her blush, so she busied herself with pulling a pile of gifts, wrapped in lush crimson wrapping with gold ribbons, out from beneath the tree. “I had a few things I didn’t want you to open in front of the kids,” she said. “And it will be Christmas in just a few minutes anyway, so I think it should count.”
He stared at her. “These are all for me? From you?”
“I considered putting them in your stocking and claiming they were from Santa, but I didn’t think they’d fit.” She sat down on the couch in front of the window, her shining hair aglow under its colored lights, and held out her hand for him to come sit next to her.
“Why can’t I open them tomorrow?”
“You’ll see,” she said, as he carefully peeled back the wrapping paper of the first gift. And then he froze, and turned to stare at her.
Inside the glowing garnet wrapping was a very old, very beat-up hardback copy of Treasure Island – with “THIS BOOK BELONGS TO DANNY” scrawled inside the front cover in green crayon.
“I thought after you finish Alice In Wonderland, you could read this to the kids,” she said.
“This was my brother’s,” he whispered hoarsely. “This belonged to Danny.”
“These are all things of Danny’s,” she said. “The contents of the house went to me, technically, although of course you can keep anything of his that you want. But there were a few things of his that I knew I wanted you to have. Except I didn’t want the children – “
“Of course.”
“It felt too private, somehow,” she said hesitantly. “And I thought it would make them sad.”
Marcus didn’t say anything for a long time after that. He set the book down and opened the next one – a flat square parcel containing Danny’s favorite Springsteen records – followed by a beautiful set of vintage boar-bristle shaving brushes with silver handles. “Those were my dad’s,” she said. “He gave them to Danny. They were meant to go to Isaac next, but they can be yours first, until he needs them.”
Marcus set the brushes down next to the book and the records and turned to Annie, his eyes shining with tears. She felt suddenly shy. “I tried to pick things that I thought you might like,” she said, fumbling to explain. “I know it’s strange to give you things that never belonged to me, not really – I mean they do now, on paper, sort of, though they were never meant to. But you’re the person who should have them now. And I didn’t – when you were here for the funeral, I never – “
“Annie,” he said softly.
“I didn’t ask,” she told him. “I didn’t ask if you were okay. I’ve never asked. It’s not just me that this happened to, it’s not just me that lost my family, you lost your brother, and I never asked.” She took his hand. “Tell me,” she said. “Tell me about Danny.”
“He was my best friend,” said Marcus simply, and then he sank into her, he wrapped his arms around her and rested his head on her shoulder, and she held him close and tight and she let him cry.
“We’re gonna be okay,” she said, running her fingers through his hair. “We’re gonna be okay.”
Chapter Sixteen: Auld Lang Syne
The snow stayed through the holidays, and the little bubble of Christmas magic lasted along with it. They went to the science museum with Uncle Mike, they played with their new games and toys, and Bug slowly began to acclimate himself to the chaos of a house full of shrieking children who adored him beyond all reason. Chasing Bug around the house, and then struggling to rescue him when he got his paw or his head o
r his tail stuck somewhere he wasn’t supposed to, occupied an enormous amount of their time. But it was a pleasant kind of chaos, and everyone was happy.
The kids tried valiantly to stay up until midnight on New Year’s Eve, but fell asleep in front of the television by 9:30 in the middle of rewatching Frozen. Marcus and Annie carried them upstairs to tuck them into bed, then returned to the den to tidy up.
“I think I’m going to stay up,” said Marcus. “Are you?”
Annie tried to remember the last time she’d stayed up until midnight on New Year’s Eve (for fun; not counting all the years she’d volunteered to work holiday shifts at Saint Elizabeth’s to relieve other doctors who had families to be with) and couldn’t.
“Sure,” she said agreeably. “But it won’t be much of a party, I don’t have champagne and noisemakers and party hats or anything. You’re probably used to New Year’s being a little more glamorous.”
“I was just going to read a book and have a drink,” he said, smiling, “so don’t worry about the party hats.” And he poured two large tumblers of bourbon, then bent down to add another log to the fire as she retrieved her book from the den and curled up in the armchair by the fireplace. He handed her a drink, then took a seat across from her on the sofa.
On the other side of the window, a wild winter wind howled, kicking up clouds of snow from the ground and whistling its frosty way down the street. But inside, they were warm from the fireplace and the whiskey, the room bathed in gold from the lamp at Marcus’ elbow and the dancing flames and the colorful glow of the Christmas tree lit behind them.
It was quiet, but it was a happy kind of quiet, full of the soft rustle of pages turning, the clink of glasses, the snap and crackle of logs in the fireplace, the hushed tick of the mantle clock, and the muffled faraway sound of the wind.
Over the pages of his book, Marcus watched Annie.
She sat in the large armchair beside the fire, legs tucked up beneath her, a blanket in her lap. She wore a loose, shapeless gray cardigan over her nightgown that had slipped down on one side, baring a creamy expanse of shoulder. Her head was bent over her book, and the hair that curtained her face was gilded with flickering amber lights from the fire. He could hear her breathing.
He watched her read for a long time. She was immersed in her book and had forgotten he was there.
From time to time she would finger the delicate silver chain she was wearing – one of his gifts to her – which he had placed around her neck on Christmas morning, and which she had not taken off since.
It had come up in a conversation with Vera, while he was still in New York; he asked what Annie’s favorite children’s books had been, and if there were any that the kids didn’t have yet that he could buy for her to read to them. Vera told him that her favorite had been a book called Miss Rumphius, about a plucky young girl who grows up to be a world traveler and then settles in a house by the seashore where she plants lupines all over the countryside for children to enjoy.
It wasn’t hard to imagine why Annie, even as a young child, fell so deeply in love with a book whose heroine lives alone her entire life, and yet is never lonely or unhappy.
And so he had found a hardback first edition of the book, which he wrapped to place under the tree for the children, and then called one of Linnet’s many artist friends – this one a silversmith and encaustic artist in Williamsburg. “There’s this book called Miss Rumphius,” he had begun, “and this woman I know –“
“I’m on it,” Phoenix had said without hesitation, or even letting him finish, and four days later had delivered into his care a square pendant with three tiny purple lupine blossoms encased in glass, surrounded by a filigree silver frame with the book’s most famous line: “You Must Do Something to Make the World More Beautiful.” Annie had cried when she saw it, and if the children had not been sitting right there, howling with glee over their Disney sleeping bags, he would have kissed the white hollow of the back of her neck as he fastened the delicate clasp.
He watched her read for a long time, watched her fingers absently caressing the pendant that rose and fell with her breathing. Watched the way she tucked her hair behind her ears from time to time. Watched the way the shadows played across her face.
There were so many things he wanted to say. But he did not know how to say any of them. He was used to wining and dining girls in Versace dresses at impossibly hip SoHo nightclubs and then gracefully parting ways after a month or two without looking back. He didn’t know how to share a house full of rain boots and coloring books and mismatched coffee mugs and the ghosts of Grace and Danny – a house like this, a house that was domestic and permanent, a house that pulled you in and held you in place and said, This is where you live now, Marcus – with a woman in a gray cotton nightgown spending New Year’s Eve reading Sense & Sensibility with bourbon and bare feet while three children slept upstairs, whose hair shone like a new copper penny where the firelight hit it.
This was so much closer to being a husband, to being a father, than he had ever imagined he would reach, and he was terrified down to the very center of his being by how much he didn’t hate it.
Bug made himself known just then with a theatrical kitten yowl, and sidled up to Marcus’ feet. The sound pulled Annie out of her book, and she looked up to see the tiny fuzzball clawing its way up the leg of Marcus’ pajama pants.
She laughed. “One week in and that cat’s already trouble.”
“This may have been a terrible idea,” he admitted, wincing as a claw poked through gray flannel and stabbed him in the shin. He lifted up the cat and set it down on the sofa beside him.
“I have to admit I was dubious at first,” said Annie, smiling. “But it’s going to be good for the kids, I think. Part of me thinks they need as many distractions as they can get.”
“What about you?” he asked suddenly, the words coming out before he could stop them.
She looked up at him, startled. “What about me?”
He set down his book and his glass, then made his way over to Annie’s chair. He gently removed the book from her hands. “Do you need to be distracted too?”
“Marcus,” she said, a note of caution in her voice, but she didn’t protest when he took her by the hand and guided her down to sit on the floor beside him, the fire at their back. “Marcus, we can’t do this again.”
“We can’t, or we shouldn’t?”
“What’s the difference?”
“’We can’t’ means you don’t want to,” he said. “It means you think it’s a bad idea. ‘We shouldn’t’ means you’re afraid that other people will think it’s a bad idea. What do you want, Annie? What do you really want?”
“I want to know that we’re doing whatever is best for the children,” she said. “There’s so much at stake. There’s no room between us for anything to go wrong. The risk is too high.”
“Annie,” he said, and he leaned in so close to her he could taste her breath. She closed her eyes. He rested his forehead against hers and ran an idle fingertip along the skin of the bare shoulder that had made it impossible for the past hour for him to concentrate on his book. “I want to kiss you again.”
“Marcus –“
“Do you want me to?”
But how could she answer him? How could she say, Yes, I want you to kiss me, I can’t stop thinking about the last time you kissed me, or the time before that, every single night there’s a part of me that wonders what would happen if I came down those stairs and knocked on your door and climbed into your bed, but how can I ask for that for myself at the expense of stability for the children, how can I risk something going wrong and throwing their lives into chaos?
“I can’t be trusted with the things I want, Marcus,” she had said to him that first night, and part of her knew it had never stopped being true.
But then his hand found the bare skin of her back and she remembered the feel of his body on top of hers and the way he had felt inside her, and her mouth parted, she moved
in closer, she felt her whole body begin to soften and melt towards him, and he moved in closer too, and there they were, the kiss was so near, it was on its way, it was close enough that they could taste it –
And then abruptly, the picture in Annie’s mind clicked into a very different one. She saw herself as if from above, from far away, lying in Grace and Danny’s bed, nestled in the warm hollow in the mattress where Danny’s body used to lay, and she saw Danny sitting in the chair in the corner of the bedroom, watching with empty, desolate eyes as his brother’s back rose and fell, rose and fell as he thrust into her and she cried out with pleasure, and suddenly she felt sick.
“No,” she said, pulling away from him so violently that he almost lost his balance. “No. No more, Marcus. No more of any of it. There can never, ever, ever be anything between us. Nothing.”
“Annie – “
“Nothing,” she said again, more insistently this time, trying to hide the quaver in her voice. “Not ever.”
“All right,” he said finally. “If that’s what you want.”
“That’s what I want,” she said firmly. “I’m your sister. That’s all. There can’t be anything else.” And she rose from the floor to bolt out of the room.
She was halfway to the stairs when the mantle clock gave a soft chime.
“It’s midnight,” said Marcus. “Happy New Year.”
* * *
Marcus' cell rang just as he was opening the front door, returning home from dropping the kids off at their third day back to school.
"Happy New Year," said Linnet.
"You too."
"How's the cat?"
"I think he's defective," said Marcus, hanging up his raincoat and stepping out of his boots. "I thought cats were smart. This dummy could get lost inside a cardboard box. Sure is cute, though."
