A Vineyard White Christmas

by Katie Winters

  You’re okay. You’re still here. You’re going to get through this.

  Downstairs, he heard Claire, Charlotte, Gail, and Abby’s murmurs. Were they talking about him? Of course, they were; he was the elephant in the room, wasn’t he? He was the black sheep of the family—the one who had run away as fast as he could, only to literally limp home seventeen years later.

  When Andrew reappeared downstairs, a man that looked nearly fifty years old sat on the brand-new couch. He wore a worn baseball hat, a thick coat fit for skiing, and rugged-looking boots. The television was on in front of him; it showed a rerun basketball game for a local college team.

  The girls were in the kitchen, out of sight, if not out of earshot. Andrew stood like a shadow near the staircase and waited for a long moment as the outline of the man’s nose, his eyebrows, his lips formulated a memory of an old-world Steven Montgomery.

  If his calculations were correct, his brother would be forty-seven years old.

  “Steve?”

  The man turned toward the sound. The smile that jumped to his lips was every bit Steve, the brother Andrew had looked up to with adoration and the tiniest bit of envy. He leaped to his feet and extended his arms into a bear hug that required no words. There in Steven’s embrace, Andrew felt for the first time like the little Andy he had left behind in the past. It was crippling, even in how beautiful it was.

  The hug broke and Steven’s arms fell to his sides as he evaluated Andrew. His smile didn’t falter, not even once. Steven’s heart had always been the purest of the pure.

  “It’s so good to see you, man,” Steven said.

  “You too,” Andrew said. He was grateful Steven hadn’t called him Andy. Maybe he recognized how painful it was for him. “I wish the circumstances were different.”

  “Me too,” Steven said as he adjusted his baseball cap. Even in the rapid motion, Andrew caught that Steven had lost quite a bit of hair. “I spent most of the night at the hospital with Mom. I had to put in a bit of work today. Claire called me this morning and said she’d finally gotten ahold of you. I couldn’t believe it.”

  That moment, the screen door that led in from the garage slammed shut. Andrew stepped forward to catch sight of another woman—not the family beauties Charlotte and Claire but an older woman, beautiful in her own right, with eyes filled with sorrow.

  The moment Kelli’s eyes found his, Andrew’s entire right leg spasmed and his heart almost leaped out of his ribcage.

  He gasped and gripped his knee and crumpled against the nearest wall. Steven jumped for him, even as Andrew said, “Don’t worry about it. Just a cramp.” Kelli walked slowly into the room with worry and sadness marred over her face. Andrew had never wanted to cry his eyes out as hard as he did right then.

  “Kelli,” he whispered.

  That was all he had to say. Kelli rushed toward him and swallowed him in yet another hug, the kind that made his heart stop and his mind pray that you could turn back the clock. Gosh, he’d always loved her so much. He had prayed for her and wanted his fist to end all the problems she’d had all those years ago with Mike.

  When she drew back from the hug, he glanced to see that, in fact, she still wore that same damn wedding ring.

  “How have you been?” she asked. Her voice rasped.

  “I’m good. I’ve been good,” he lied. She could always, always tell when he lied. It was a game they’d played, especially when she’d asked, Are you drunk again? Or, Did you skip class today? She understood, somehow, that the traditional life that had been okay for all of them wasn’t right for him.

  She reached up and brushed a few strands of hair from his face. “Do they not have barbers in Boston?”

  “They haven’t invented them up there yet,” he told her.

  Kelli’s eyes shone with humor. “Remember that time I cut your hair? You were what? Three? Four? I was just Rachel’s age, I guess. Fourteen, maybe fifteen. I thought I’d done such a good job, but Mom almost bit my head off.”

  “I think age three is a little young for much memory,” Andrew said. “Although the story’s been recounted enough times for me to have made up a memory of my own.”

  Kelli chuckled. “You were like my little toy doll for those years. Until one day, you came up to me, covered in mud, and you hugged me like your life depended on it. I realized in those moments: oh. This kid is not a doll. He’s a boy.”

  “Horrible. Boys are horrible,” Steven affirmed. “Now that I’ve raised one of my own, I know the truth. Isabella was a dream compared to Jonathon.”

  “Wow. How old are they now?” Andrew asked.

  “Jonathon’s married if you can believe it,” he said. “Twenty-four years old with two kids of his own. And Isabella is twenty. She’s dated half the island, it feels like. She drives me wild in her own way.”

  “And you, Kelli? Sam, Josh, and Lexi...”

  “I’m surprised you remember all their names,” Kelli said softly. “You left when Lexi was just a little baby.”

  “I remember,” Andrew said. “You taught me how to hold her head. Her eyelids were thinner than paper.”

  A tear rolled down Kelli’s cheek then. The emotion between them felt like being in the very center of a horrific storm.

  “I can’t believe you remember that, either,” she confessed.

  Charlotte and Claire appeared in the living room. Claire held a platter of Christmas cookies, which she shoved out in front of the other three siblings. “Come on, guys. Gail and Abby have baked and decorated these all day long. We saved some for Grandpa and Grandma up at the hospital, but we need you guys to taste test.”

  Kelli, Steven, and Andrew all reached in for a Christmas tree or a candy cane or a reindeer-frosted cookie. Andrew tapped his teeth on the outside of his reindeer and was overwhelmed with memories. When all the others had left the house, it had been up to him to help his mother decorate the cookies. They’d had a kind of assembly-line process for it; they’d produced enough for the family and for the Sheridans and for all their neighbors and friends.

  “Is this Mom’s recipe?” he asked Claire.

  “Of course it is,” Claire affirmed.

  “Delicious, girls,” Steven called. “Really. I don’t think I’ve eaten anything all day long. Too nervous.”

  It was decided that they needed to head up to the hospital. Charlotte mentioned that nobody had had the time or the inclination to tell their mother about Andrew’s arrival. “It’s too heavy,” she whispered to him as he headed toward Steve’s truck.

  Steve’s truck was a 4x4 dark blue monster, with loads of tools from his auto shop in the back. When they were inside the truck together, the smell of the auto shop was almost overwhelming, but in a nostalgic way. All those years ago, Andrew had treasured his brother’s ability to make a path for his own future and family. He didn’t need to follow the real estate path or whatever life his parents had wanted for him.

  “This is a nice truck,” Andrew commented.

  “Thanks, man,” Steven said. “I just got it last year. Laura told me I should treat myself after all the years of hard work. Plus, now that the kids are out of the house, we don’t have as many expenses. It’s just us. Us and this truck.”

  Andrew laughed appreciatively as Steven revved the engine. Suddenly, someone placed their hand on the window beside him. When he turned his head, he found Kelli, who called, “Can I ride with you guys?”

  Andrew, being the youngest, shoved into the middle of the truck to allow Kelli the passenger seat. She thanked them and breathed into her hands to warm them. Every single time Andrew noticed her looking at him, she looked ready to burst into tears. So for a distraction, he fiddled with the radio and found a song they all loved. It was Nirvana. “Smells Like Teen Spirit.”

  “I showed this to you the first time,” Steven insisted as they drove to the hospital. “You nearly lost your mind.”

  “I never really got over it,” Andrew said with a laugh. “Me and Kurt thought Kurt Cobain was our Go
d.”

  “He was,” Kelli said. “He really was.”

  ANDREW HADN’T BEEN to the hospital since his injury. As he stepped through the double-wide doors, flash-backs of that horrific time came in droves. The early days of bandages and heavy painkillers and the kinds of headaches that felt like throwing a boomerang around his head. They were nothing he wanted to relive.

  Now, his father was going through something similar. No, ten times worse.

  Kelli, Charlotte, Claire, Steven, Gail, and Abby led Andrew down several hallways, past rooms that made beeping sounds and frantic nurses who hadn’t slept enough. With each step Andrew took he felt like he was headed toward war again. Once upon a time, he thought he was brave. Now?

  Steven glanced at him a few times. His eyes did that little up-down thing as he noticed Andrew’s limp. Andrew hated it, but there was nothing to be done. He gave Steven a half-smile and continued until they appeared before a closed-door, one that, presumably, was the final passageway through which they would find their father.

  “The five of us. Back together again,” Claire whispered.

  Suddenly, a nurse opened the door to reveal an overly white room, the tail-end of a bed where some feet pointed upward, and an older woman, just seventy maybe, with her head pressed forward a bit with her eyes closed, as though she was in the middle of prayer.

  That moment, as though she knew somewhere in her heart, her eyes flashed up. They found Andrew through the crack in the door. Their eyes locked and suddenly, she moved with the speed and agility of a much younger woman. She tore toward the door, grabbed the handle just as the door began to click shut, and yanked it open just enough to hold her little frame. All the while, her eyes had nowhere else to go, but Andrew’s.

  “Andy?” she breathed. She spoke as though she walked through a dream. “Andy, is that you?” She took another step closer as her eyes went wide and the tears rolled down her cheeks. Her fingers pressed against her mouth to contain the shocked gasp that almost escaped.

  Her four children who had stayed behind stepped to the side to allow their mother full access to her youngest son. Yet again, her arms reached out to hold onto him and she drew him tightly against her. Andrew’s cheek fell onto her shoulder; he shook slightly as her hand rubbed his upper back, the way it had when he’d had a fever.

  “Andy. Andy, my boy,” she breathed. “Andy.”

  The tears were heavy and once they flowed freely, everyone had tears in their eyes, with some wiping their cheeks with their sleeve as they watched the emotional reunion. On instinct, Andrew laced his arm through his mother’s and led her toward a breakroom they had passed on the way. He poured them both a cup of coffee and sat across his mother as her tender eyes continued to study him.

  “I never imagined you would be gone so long,” she breathed. “And now, look at you. You’re a man and so handsome.”

  Andrew tried his best to keep it together and gave her a small smile. He reached for her hand and gripped it. “I’m here now, Mom.”

  “You can’t leave before your father wakes up,” she whispered. Her voice was urgent. “He will want to see you. He needs to know you’re all right.”

  Andrew felt like he had been stabbed. According to what his siblings had told him, there was a good possibility that their father might never wake up. It might be too late to make any of their past heartaches heal.

  “I’ll stay,” he breathed. He needed to say this; it was what she wanted to hear.

  “Good,” she said. She took a small sip of coffee and grimaced. When she sat it back down, she brought her other hand over his so that she was totally wrapped up in him. “Andy. Andrew. You don’t know how long I’ve dreamed of this. Here you are. And I have so, so many things to say.”

  That moment, the breakroom door burst open to reveal Claire. Her cheeks were bright pink and splotchy.

  “He’s awake. Mom, Andy. He’s awake.”

  Chapter Nine

  Seventy-one-year old Kerry Montgomery moved like a spritely teen from the breakroom. She burst down the hallway, her flats clacking across the linoleum. Far behind her, her youngest son, Andrew, limped forward and winced with every step.

  Outside his father’s room, the doctor spoke to Kelli, Steven, Claire, Charlotte, Gail, and Abby with soft tones, his forehead shoved forward and his eyebrows lowered. Kerry didn’t hesitate to speak with the doctor. She rushed directly through the door, which remained flung open as Andrew neared it. With the door still open, first Steven, then Kelli, then Claire ambled in as well. Their voices rang out like a chorus.

  “Dad! You’re awake!”

  The nurse who remained in the room hissed at them. “I told you guys. Your father can’t handle all this at once. It’s too much stimulation—”

  Kerry hustled to the other side of the bed and leaned down to gently lay a hand over his father’s still-broad shoulder as she whispered, “Darling, we’re all here for you. Take as much time as you need. We’ll postpone Christmas if we need to.”

  Andrew remained several steps outside the door. He hadn’t yet seen his father’s face. Just the idea of the old man, there lying immobile in a hospital bed, was enough to chill him to the bone. He was reminded of being a little kid, of thinking his father was the strongest man in the universe. Now, they were both crippled, struck-down by the events of their lives.

  And Andrew certainly didn’t have the strength to enter that room. He hadn’t prepared himself and nobody had alluded that the old man would choose his first day to open his eyes.

  “Thank you for heeding the nurse’s warnings,” the doctor said to him, Gail and Abby, who remained even further back in the hall with wide worried eyes, like those of frightened deer. He also grumbled, “I don’t know how anyone expects us to run a tight ship around here when they don’t pay attention to the rules...” as he marched back within the white room to tell everyone to stand back. “There can be only one visitor in the room at a time! We will let you know when he’s strong enough to increase the count.”

  A shaky voice rang out to the left of Andrew.

  “Andy? Is that really you?”

  Andrew forced his eyes from the bottom half of his father’s hospital bed and turned to find a beautiful woman in her mid-thirties. Her eyes were tender, soft, and her raven hair cascaded like a waterfall down her shoulders and toward her chest. She wore blue nurse’s scrubs and scuffed tennis shoes, and she looked at him as though he was some kind of gift.

  It had been a long time since anyone had looked at Andrew like that.

  It only took a split-second for Andrew to realize it was Beth Leopold, Kurt’s sister now standing in front of him. And in the moment of that realization, his heart burst into a million pieces.

  “Beth,” he breathed.

  The corners of her mouth turned upward; her eyes shone with humor and light. “I was worried you wouldn’t recognize me. It’s been so long. Seventeen years?”

  He nodded. There was something about the swoop of her nose, the furrow of her eyebrows. She and Kurt had been only a year apart, Irish twins, and there were certainly similarities, so much so that Andrew could draw out a mental map of what Kurt might have looked like at age thirty-five if he had lived.

  If only he had lived.

  That moment, his siblings piled out of the hospital room. They were angry that they’d been kicked out of their father’s hospital room, yet thrilled to pieces that he’d awoken, especially when the prognosis had been so terrible only a few hours before.

  “Nothing can beat that man,” Claire said excitedly as tears rolled down her cheeks. “He can take out a tree and wake up the next day like nothing happened.”

  Steven smacked his chest with a hand that seemed oiled from his long day at the auto shop. His cheeks were blotched red, but his grin was infectious. He stepped closer to Gail and Abby and said, “He made a joke the second he saw me. He said, ‘So, Stevie, what’s for dinner?’ Can you believe that?”

  Gail laughed nervously. Andrew’s ey
es flashed from Kelli to Steven, then back to Beth. Neither he nor Beth knew what to say. Since his siblings had cleared away from his father, he caught full sight of the old man: the thick bandages around his face and head, and his broken arm.

  At the hospital in Baghdad, that was all I ever saw. Broken people. People who would never walk again. People who’d given everything for their country. And for what?

  “You all right, Andy?” Charlotte said as she stepped toward him. She wrapped an arm around his shoulder, but he’d already begun to shake.

  Nothing could stop it: the PTSD attack.

  The shaking pushed Andrew back toward the far wall. He placed his hands over his cheeks and blinked several times. He tried to will himself back to the world. Dad’s awake in there. He wants to see you. It’s been seventeen years. Seventeen years and enough time to forgive and forget. Pull it together. He doesn’t want to see his son all messed up from PTSD. He wants a confident, able son. Don’t limp. Don’t limp.

  He lost track of everything. He couldn’t hear his siblings, couldn’t make sense of the white walls or the white linoleum floors. At some points, his mind told him he’d entered some kind of blisteringly light world, a kind of heaven, while at other times, the screeching in his ears told him he’d entered a kind of hell. Sweat pooled along his brow and at the base of his neck.

  Maybe it would be better if I wasn’t here at all.

  ANDREW CAME-TO IN AN unfamiliar vehicle. He blinked into the soft grey light of a beautiful Martha’s Vineyard winters late afternoon as snow fluttered down and landed little polka-dots across the windshield. In his hand, he held a water bottle that he didn’t recognize. His knees knocked together as he continued to shake.

  “That’s right, Andy. Just keep breathing.” The voice was angelic, like a song.

  “Where—where am I?”

  “You’re in my car,” the voice told him. “Just outside the hospital.”