Winter Street (10 page)

She will not check her phone. It’s ten after eight. She will not check her phone.

She checks her phone.

Nothing from Nathaniel. Her heart breaks a little.

There are two texts: one from Patrick and one from her mother.

Patrick:
asdhaosihdkqebrkb.
(Butt dial? Or incredibly drunk? Ava doesn’t care.)

Margaret:
Oh, honey…
(Margaret forgot what she was going to say? She got interrupted? Or “Oh, honey” is a general statement of guilt because she can’t take Ava to Hawaii? Ava doesn’t care.)

She sits on the edge of her bed and takes a deep breath. Oxygen.

Why
did she check her phone?

She goes back to the party.

S
he wears a red dress that clashes with her hair; imploring Roger again for the silver Audrey Hepburn did no good. It’s Christmas Eve; it has to be red. The broadcast is light, so light that it primarily consists of footage of Christmas Eve celebrations from around the world—fireworks over the Eiffel Tower in Paris, Pope Francis I saying Mass in St. Peter’s Square.

Margaret smiles into the camera. Her favorite cameraman, Ernest, is five foot three, and he’s wearing an elf hat and a necklace of glowing chili pepper lights.

“For CBS News, I’m Margaret Quinn, wishing all of you a safe and happy holiday and peace for the coming year.” Margaret holds… she holds… This is by far her least favorite
part of the job, smiling into the vacant eye of the camera for all of America when she’s done and ready to move on.

“And… cut!” her producer, Mickey Benz, says. “Good job, Margaret. Enjoy Hawaii.”

Merry Christmas, Margaret, enjoy Hawaii, have fun, you deserve it.
She does deserve it! She spends only twelve weekdays a year out of people’s living rooms—five days in August, Thanksgiving Day and the Friday after, and five days at Christmas. Cynthia, the office manager, has left a bottle of SPF 75 sunblock next to Margaret’s computer with a note that says,
Protect the most famous face in America.
Margaret smiles and throws the sunscreen in her bag. She extends the handle of her suitcase and checks her phone. She has a single text. It’s from Drake. He’s already at Newark, in Terminal C, waiting for her at the outpost of Grand Central Oyster Bar with a dozen Malpeques ordered.

Are you close?

Margaret chuckles. This is exactly what he asks her when they’re making love.

On my way!
she texts back. She’s relieved there are no texts from Nantucket. She assumes everyone is carrying on with his or her Christmas Eve festivities. She’ll call tomorrow.

Then Margaret looks up, and, like a Ferrari smashing into a brick wall, she sees Darcy’s face right up in hers, and Darcy is not happy.

“Margaret,” she says.

Margaret’s heart does a free fall.

“What?” Margaret says. She thinks,
I am two hundred yards from the exit of the building, where Raoul is waiting for me with the car. I have a dozen Malpeques, a glass of champagne, and a very cute surgeon anticipating my imminent arrival. And then Hawaii, Darcy, a suite at the Four Seasons, a level of luxury you have not yet known in your young life. I deserve this vacation—everyone just said so. Please, don’t tell me that Michelle Obama has filed for divorce, don’t tell me aliens have landed on Soldier Field. I don’t want to know. I don’t care.

Darcy holds out a piece of paper that looks suspiciously like a briefing sheet.

Margaret shakes her head.

“Read it,” Darcy whispers.

A convoy carrying forty-five American troops headed out of Sangin, Afghanistan, was intercepted by insurgent forces. The troops are thought to be alive.
They were marched off rather than shot on sight,
Margaret thinks. They will be held, treated abominably, possibly tortured, and used as bargaining chips.

Margaret looks at Darcy. “You don’t have names, do you?”

Darcy shakes her head. No names, nothing definite, and yet somehow Margaret knows why Darcy brought this to her. Bart Quinn is among the forty-five; Margaret feels it in her gut.

She calls Drake to cancel.

“Deck the Halls.”

“Frosty the Snowman.”

“Up on the Housetop.”

“Rudolph.”

“Silver Bells.”

“Winter Wonderland.”

“Chestnuts Roasting.”

“Sleigh Ride.”

“The Little Drummer Boy”—this is Ava’s insertion. It would be too religious for Mitzi, but Mitzi isn’t here!

She says to Kelley, “I’ll take one more.” She bows her head and squeezes her eyes shut. Her hands are inadvertently arched over the C chord, which is how “Jingle Bells” starts—although her heart’s greatest desire this Christmas is that tonight will end without her having to play it.

“Jingle Bells,” someone/everyone yells.

Ava plays “Jingle Bells” and even gives it a little extra gusto as she suddenly remembers Claire Frye and her father, Gavin, and Ava’s vow to play the song in Claire’s honor. Besides, she won’t have to play it again for 364 days. Then she segues into “We Wish You a Merry Christmas,” signaling the end of the caroling. Her father and Scott are at the piano, arms wrapped around each other.

As soon as the last chord evaporates into the pine-scented air, there is the sound of a spoon chiming against a glass. Ava looks up. This is unusual. Normally now is when people start to file out.

Kevin is standing on top of the Igloo boat cooler. He looks like he has an announcement to make; he is probably trying to take over the reins from their father and thank everyone for coming. This will hasten the exodus even more.

When the room quiets down, Kevin hands the glass and the spoon off to a bystander and says, “Isabelle Beaulieu? Mrs. Claus? Isabelle, where are you?”

Huh?
Ava thinks.

Isabelle is now circulating with a tray of hors d’oeuvres, but she turns and gazes up at Kevin.

Kevin pulls a velvet box out of his pocket and says, “Isabelle Beaulieu, will you marry me?”

Kevin and Isabelle—
together?
As in,
lovers?
Kevin is
proposing?

Then a second thought hits her sideways: Isabelle
is
pregnant, and
THE BABY IS KEVIN’S!

People are shocked, stunned, stupefied! No one more so than Ava. But everyone loves an unexpected proposal, especially at Christmas. The room roars!

Ava sways. Scott materializes at her side. She looks up at him in his Father Christmas hat. She doesn’t know which emotion overwhelms her more—surprise happiness for
Kevin and Isabelle, or surprise relief that Scott will not be dating Isabelle. She thinks of Kevin’s reaction when she told him she was setting up Scott and Isabelle—
that
was why he was so angry.

Together, she and Scott watch as Isabelle—it seems belatedly understanding what is happening—approaches Kevin. She is holding both hands over her mouth, she is trembling and crying—with joy, it seems, unadulterated joy. Watching her, Ava tears up herself. Isabelle and Kevin are in love! She can’t believe it!

She involuntarily compares the expression of Isabelle’s face now—she looks like someone who just won ten million dollars and a dream house in Tahiti—with the expression Norah Vale wore when
she
was in Kevin’s presence. Which, even on her wedding day, could be most accurately described as somewhere between dour and snarling.

Ava is so happy for Kevin. He deserves this. Even though Ava had hoped to be the one getting engaged tonight, she feels nothing but elation at the turn of events.

Kevin slips the ring on Isabelle’s finger, and the crowd cheers. Scott lets a wolf whistle fly, loud enough to summon every dog in the neighborhood.

Kevin jumps down to kiss Isabelle, and Ava’s father moves for the magnum of champagne. It’s clearly time for the sabering, and now they really have something to celebrate! Kelley pulls his saber out of the umbrella stand, opens the front door, and holds the bottom of the champagne
bottle against his belt buckle. In one fluid motion, he slices the top of the bottle off; it flies into the yard. This is a trick he learned one year when he went to Paris with Margaret, supposedly taught to him by the personal sommelier of François Mitterrand. It dazzles every time.

As Kelley pours glasses of the Perrier-Jouët, Ava wonders: Did her father
know
Kevin and Isabelle were together? Did he know this proposal was in the works? Does he know Isabelle is pregnant?

Scott accepts two flutes of champagne and hands one to Ava. They clink glasses.

“Cheers!” she says. “I can’t believe it.”

“You were trying to set me up with Isabelle,” Scott says, “weren’t you?”

“Oh, hush,” Ava says. “The two of you would have made a cute couple, too.”

“You were jealous,” Scott says. “I saw it on your face.”

“Was not.”

“Yes, you were. When you took the picture of me, Isabelle, and the Holy Terror, you looked angry. Jealous angry.”

Ava barely suppresses a smile. She drinks her champagne. “Shut up.”

“Admit it.”

“I will not admit it,” she says. “But I will give you this.”

“What?”

“You make one hell of a Santa.”

I
love you,” Isabelle says.

“And I love you,” Kevin says. He holds Isabelle’s left hand and kisses her finger. He bought her the best ring in the store, from a girl he went to high school with named Phoebe Showalter.

Phoebe asked him who the ring was for and he said, “I can’t tell you that yet.”

Isabelle is trembling—whether because of the pregnancy or her delirious happiness, he can’t say.

He almost didn’t summon the courage to buy the ring. He kept thinking of Norah Vale, and how much he’d loved her, how much he had invested in her, and all the ways he’d changed the course of his life to please her. First, he left Ann Arbor, even though he’d been happy there. He liked the other students, liked his professors, enjoyed the school spirit at the football games; he’d also gotten the best grades of his life. But Norah was miserable. She didn’t look for a job, didn’t make friends, and didn’t like the friends that Kevin made.

Poughkeepsie and the CIA were better. A lot of his classmates were tattooed and pierced and did drugs or drank too much, and Norah felt more comfortable among them. It wasn’t so “rah-rah,” she said. She got a job waitressing, at the Palace Diner, but then, in Kevin’s final year, she got fired
for cursing out a family of six who had only left her a ten-cent tip. She screamed profanities at them in the diner’s parking lot and was canned pretty much on the spot.

So it was back to Nantucket for the two of them, where Kelley lent Kevin and Norah enough money to put a down payment on a house. They limped along for a few more years, until Norah started hanging out with a guy named Jonas who drove a taxi and sold heroin, and Kevin had no self-respecting option but to ask her for a divorce. They sold the house; Norah took the money and left.

No more women,
Kevin vowed.

He kept making excuses
not
to enter the jewelry store. He needed a coffee, and then he needed a sandwich from the pharmacy lunch counter. Town started filling with people, and he saw Gibby the inn’s summer landscaper first, then Cheesy, whom he’d gone to high school with, and he stopped to talk. Cheesy had his five-year-old with him, and the kid was jumping up and down, shouting about how Santa was coming and he had made a list, and he was going to leave milk and cookies, and carrots for the reindeer, and glitter in the yard so the reindeer could find his house, and Kevin thought,
I am going to have a child; I had better get my ass into the jewelry store.
Main Street was buzzing with happy, excited energy. The trees were lit up, and the shops had their doors wide-open for last-minute shoppers; most were serving cookies and cider. The Victorian carolers were strolling in their elaborate period costumes, like something
right out of Mitzi’s display at home. As the carolers passed Kevin, he heard them singing “Good King Wenceslas.” Was it going to snow? It was still too warm, but maybe,
maybe
tomorrow…

Kevin lollygagged for so long that it became time for the red-ticket drawing, run by the Chamber of Commerce. If you bought anything from a Chamber member during the month of December, you received red tickets. Now that it was three o’clock, the tickets were being pulled by the town crier. There would be five one-thousand-dollar winners and one five-thousand-dollar winner.

Kevin found a strip of seven red tickets in his wallet. He thought about how great it would be if he won.

The five one-thousand-dollar winners were picked. Not his number, not even close. He nearly left because he knew Ava would be on the verge of a nervous breakdown, wondering where he was.

But then, the big moment! The five-thousand-dollar winner was…!

I will pay my mother back,
Kevin thought.
Or I will put the money right into an account for the baby.

But the number called wasn’t Kevin’s. The winning red ticket belonged to Eric Metz, who was a mechanic at Don Allen Ford and the father of six kids, one of whom was severely autistic. The crowd roared! It was always best when a local person won, not to mention a person so deserving. Five thousand dollars would mean a lot to the Metz family,
especially at Christmas. But when Eric Metz went up to turn in his winning ticket, he announced that he was donating the entire five thousand dollars to Nantucket Hospice, which had taken such excellent care of his mother when she was dying of lymphoma.

The crowd was silent for a second—perhaps acknowledging that they might not be so generous with a sudden windfall—then there was an even louder roar of applause, whistles, and calls of approval.

Kevin experienced an unfamiliar feeling. He knew he had just witnessed an act of grace, and all he could think was that he wanted to emulate Eric Metz going forward.

He had walked right into the jewelry store and told Phoebe Showalter he needed a diamond ring.

And now, he and Isabelle are suspended in a bubble of bliss.
Please
, he thinks,
nobody pop it.

He makes a vow silently.

He will be a good husband and an even better father. He will buy a place for the three of them; he will marry Isabelle, and she will get a green card and, hopefully, become an American citizen.

Kevin lays Isabelle carefully down across his bed. He lifts the hem of her Mrs. Claus dress, and starts peppering her stomach with kisses.

She says, “Oh no, Kevin! Everyone is awake!”

“So?” he says.

“So I should be helping to clean.”

“Ava will clean up,” he says.

“They’re going to think you just proposed, and now we are back here…”

He takes one of her braids in his mouth.

“Kevin!” she says. “Stop! Your family just found out about us. I am sure they are still… so shocked.”

“Who cares?” he says.

“I care!” Isabelle says. “I am still a worker here. And, listen—it sounds like something is going on.”

Kevin tries not to lose his patience. He finally has Isabelle in his bedroom without it having to be a covert mission. She is his fiancée, and he would like to make proper love to her immediately. But he closes his eyes and listens. There does seem to be some kind of ruckus in the main room of the inn.

“Maybe the tree fell over,” Kevin says.

“Maybe is Mitzi!” Isabelle says. She hops to her feet, incited by this thought. Kevin knows she would like to give Mitzi a good, sound slap across the face. Mitzi brought Isabelle into the family and then left it herself. “I would like to go out and see.”

“Let’s not and say we did.”

“Kevin,” Isabelle says. “It is your family.”

“
Our
family,” he says, and he’s so tickled by this thought that he doesn’t even mind following Isabelle out into the hallway.

The main room is freezing because the front door is standing wide open. There is a loud, strange noise like that of a trapped or hurt animal, and Kevin sees his father embracing someone wearing a dark coat. Ava comes rushing out of the kitchen, followed by Scott in his Santa suit.

“Patrick?” Ava says.

Kevin is confused until he realizes that the figure his father is hugging and shushing is indeed the crown prince of the Quinn family. Patrick is
crying,
but to say he’s crying doesn’t begin to describe it. He’s sobbing, bellowing, howling. Kevin hasn’t seen this kind of emotion out of his brother since childhood—one scary afternoon at Nobadeer Beach when Patrick was ten and Kevin was nine and a wave took Patrick by surprise. It turned him upside down, inside out, and backward, and then there was another wave on top of that, and then another wave on top of that. Kevin had been too stunned and far too cowardly to make any move to help his brother, although he could see if someone didn’t come to the rescue, Patrick was going to drown.

Kelley had run down from where he and Margaret were sitting on the beach, and he pulled Patrick out. Patrick is crying now much as he had cried then—as if his life were in danger.

Ava says, “What… what is
wrong?
”

Isabelle squeezes Kevin’s arm and heads back to the kitchen. She is family now, but he can’t blame her for not wanting to jump right into this mess. Scott follows Isabelle
into the kitchen, so then it’s just Kevin and Ava and Patrick and Kelley in the main room, plus a fifth presence, which is Patrick’s enormous sadness.

Kevin shuts the front door. He’s happy Patrick is here. He can’t wait to see the look on Patty’s face when he tells him he’s getting married and having a baby.

Ava is standing a few feet away from the melded figures of Patrick and Kelley, looking confused and bereft. She doesn’t like being left in the dark; she always has to know what’s going on.

“What is
wrong?
” she asks again.

Kevin decides the proper course of action is to pour shots of Jameson all around. They are, after all, a family of Irish heritage, their great-grandfather Quinn hailing from County Cork, so whiskey is acceptable in any emergency. Kevin brings the bottle and four shot glasses over to the sofa and coffee table in front of the hearth. The fireplace is laid out with birch logs as decoration for the party—it’s always too hot in the room to light it, plus Mitzi thinks fires lead to inhalation of secondhand smoke—but now Kevin opens the flue and stuffs a bunch of used paper napkins and some kindling under the logs. The room is cold, it’s Christmas Eve, they are a family in crisis, and, along with whiskey, they need a fire.

“Come,” Kevin says once he gets the fire started. “Sit.”

In general, Kevin doesn’t have much luck when he tries to tell his family what to do, but tonight his voice is strong and clear and authoritative. Ava sits, and Kelley leads Patrick
over, at which point Patrick collapses on his back, hogging most of the room.

Kevin pours the shots and hands them around. Patrick already smells like a distillery and probably needs a shot of Jameson like he needs a hole in the head. He’s wearing rumpled suit pants and a white dress shirt with a weird yellow-purple stain on the front. It looks like a bruise. He hasn’t shaved in a couple of days. He’s not wearing socks, just fancy Italian suede loafers that probably cost as much as Kevin makes in a week.

Kevin raises his shot glass, and the rest of his family follows suit. Kelley takes a breath as if to say something—perhaps to impart some fatherly wisdom, which, Kevin realizes, they all desperately need. It has been
so long
since it’s been just the four of them alone doing anything. In Kevin’s memory, the four of them haven’t been alone together since Kelley moved out of the brownstone and into that weird executive apartment on Wall Street. That was during the year of transition: Margaret was gone, and Mitzi had not yet arrived. Patrick and Kevin and Ava used to take the 2/3 train down to see their father every other weekend, and they would always visit the South Street Seaport because the rest of the financial district was closed up. Once, Kelley took them to Windows on the World, at the top of the World Trade Center. Ten years later, on September 11, all Kevin could think about was that dinner. He and Patrick had stared out the window and wondered if anyone could jump and survive.

No.

They,
however, have survived. Sort of.

Kelley seems to realize that there isn’t anything wise or even appropriate he can say, and so the four of them merely touch glasses and throw the shots back, then set the glasses back on the table, all of this nearly in unison.

Ava wipes her lips. “I miss Mommy,” she says.

This starts Patrick crying again, and for a second Kevin feels like crying, too. For a second, the four of them are nothing more than refugees of something broken that they all wished could be whole again.