You Had Me At Christmas: A Holiday Anthology (37 page)

She concentrated as hard as she could.

“It was the cruelest thing you ever did to me,” he said evenly. “When you cut me off like this. And you never even told me why.”

Her heart seized. Her eyes stung, as if it was a year-and-a-half ago again. She set the sieve to the side and considered the effect of the sugar.

“Can you tell me why now?” He had developed that even voice, she imagined, in law school or maybe in boardrooms afterward or maybe just growing up in his mother’s household. No matter what the tensions or what was at stake, he could manage to stay steady, calm. No one who knew him would ever believe the fights they had had, there at the end of all things. Once she had even made him weep. “Or is it still too soon?”

She grabbed the edge of a wax paper snowflake stencil too clumsily and left her fingerprint in the snow around it. Damn it, she hated it when she messed things up. Once she had been able to tolerate her mistakes, be patient with herself as she fixed them, but then everything had gone to hell and she had to—she
had to
—at least get something like the damn sugar snow right.

It was only in the past few months that she had started to calm that raging intolerance toward herself back into something sane again. She had worked so hard for that calm. She had taken so many long walks and deep breaths and forced her mind to think so many beautiful, strong thoughts. Now Kurt at the window had made all her intolerance surge up again, intensely, like its last stand.

“I just couldn’t,” she said low, to her finger smudge in the snow. Her voice sounded rough, unused. She talked to people up here—her support group, her clients—but it had been a year and a half since she talked to him. Or fought. Funny, a year and a half later, the first sounds out of her mouth sounded as if her voice was still rubbed raw from screaming. “I couldn’t open up anymore, I couldn’t try. I just couldn’t.”
I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.
She fought not to bow her body over the granite, not to clutch the edge and ruin all her work, in a plea for forgiveness for something else she had ruined beyond recall.

She had begged for pardon everywhere, after the second miscarriage.
I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, what’s wrong with me, what did I do wrong, doctors, tell me what to do.

Kurt had told her it didn’t matter. He had said that, stroking her hair back from her wet cheeks as if he was trying to do a good thing:
“Kai, it doesn’t matter. Don’t worry about it.”
Yes, he had said that. It had been true for him.

The third miscarriage had been the end. The end of her hope. The end of her. The end of them.

She didn’t even want forgiveness. Forgiveness hurt.

A moment’s silence. His hands in his pockets, his body long and straight, he watched her, even more intensely contained than she remembered. “I didn’t ask you to try. In fact, I told you to stop trying.”

That old pain swelled up in her so hard she couldn’t understand why it didn’t just break her. She had begged it, so many times, to break her, to go ahead and split her apart so she didn’t have to be anymore. “I know.”

She drew a breath. Grief and its pain came in waves; after a time she had learned the grief counselors were right about that. This was just one of those waves, kicked up high by him, her world’s earthquake over there by the window. The calm was on the other side of it and would come back in a moment. Maybe after he left. Oh, God. And the snow would fall, and there she would be, watching it as it cut her off from all the world, her arms wrapped around her knees.

Three months after she left him—maybe when he finally accepted she wasn’t coming back—he had sold their house, without talking to her about it. It had been in his name, bought just before they met. Half the proceeds had appeared in her bank account, and information on a storage account and the code to access it had arrived in a formal printed letter, as if an email might bring them too close, might encourage a response. She had never gone to look at the storage, because . . . what if, in his over-careful way, he had decided he didn’t have the right to get rid of the baby things for her? Or what if he had packed up their wedding photos? The terror of that had stuffed itself down her throat and choked her.

For weeks on end after that, she avoided her mailbox, but every time she steeled herself to work through its pile of envelopes, no notice of divorce proceedings had ever arrived. She still braced for it, every time. And it still never came. Maybe for him, too, divorce was a last wrenching, heart-breaking act he couldn’t quite stand to face. When he did finally move to divorce her, it would doubtless mean he had met someone else, a new, fresh love who motivated him to clean up his past so that he could move on from it for the new woman’s sake. At a distance, Kai had gotten used to that idea. She even knew that she should actually want that for him, a new, bright love without all the stains she had left on theirs. She was supposed to want that for him. It was her fault she had made him so unhappy.

Some of the money from the sale of the house had gone to rent this luxury cabin from his mother, and she had sat up here, with her arms wrapped around her knees, watching the snow fall, so peaceful, so freeing, shutting her off from everything, including him. She had thought the grief would kill her then. That she would literally die and no one find her body until spring. But it hadn’t worked out that easy.

“But I couldn’t stop,” she said, and her breath came out too hard, skittering sugar across the granite landscape.

He nodded and looked out the window, hands in his pockets. He had such a beautiful body. It had always worked just right for her, that long, rangy over-analyzed athleticism, the way he could keep it so carefully fit and yet not quite know how to have fun with it, until he met her. She remembered, still, the first time he had ever burst into laughter for her. It had been their third date, two weeks after they met at his mother’s enormous estate while Kai was setting up a spring flower-food photo shoot for Anne in her beautiful gardens.

For their third date, Kai had suggested a hike, because Kurt’s carefully planned dinners just weren’t working out the way their instinctive rapport in those gardens had suggested they would. Fascinated though she was by his over-thinking, she had wanted to get him away from it for a little while. They had rested in a glade on that gently sunny afternoon, him stretched out with his arms behind his head, thoughtful and serious, and her sitting with her legs folded, knees nearly but not quite brushing his ribs, fingers just itching to touch that stretched-out body, the body that he so carefully did not offer to her because he was so busy plotting how to get his approach to her just right that he didn’t realize how right for her it already was.

And finally she had just reached out and dove her fingers with devilish precision into his ribs. He had twisted uncontrollably—she had
known
someone that careful had to be ticklish—and then burst out laughing. He had grabbed her wrists to stop her and when that pulled her body into a lean over his, looked up into her face with his hazel eyes brilliant with that unexpected laughter and something else, something even more hungry and delighted. It had been the first time they kissed. (Because he was
so careful
, so courteously respectful when he said good night those first two dinners.) If a couple of hikers hadn’t passed about fifteen minutes later, it would have been the first time they made love, too.

He’d always liked to make love outside in the grass when he could find a spot, ever after. It just always seemed to make him so happy.

She’d always seemed to make him happy. As if she brought ease and laughter into his whole life.

Until she hadn’t.

Until she had destroyed all that ease and taken all his laughter with it.

It had been the most terrible thing in her life that she had ever done. Her body had killed three other dreams of laughter and life and happiness, but at least she hadn’t had control over those decisions.

She wiped the smudge mark she had made completely clean with a bit of sponge, then took a tiny pinch of powdered sugar and rubbed it between her fingers to let it fall over that cleaned spot, hoping to repair the damage in a way that did not show, that would not make her start the whole thing over. Did that look right? Sometimes she focused on a food styling issue so long that she lost all perspective.

She removed the other four snowflake wax patterns without smudges and stood back to evaluate the look of the black granite forms showing through the white sugar. Were the snowflakes a too obvious choice? Should it be Christmas trees? That seemed so facile. Stars maybe? If she did some stars eight-pointed and some six-pointed, to reach more than one demographic, would that make the holiday shot over-reaching, ruining the whole effect?

“It was always fascinating to me,” Kurt said, that steady, modulated voice of his just
hurting
her skin, “how you were so cheerful and careless everywhere else, as if life was pure fun and you weren’t going to let anxiety over details get in the way of embracing every glorious part of it. And yet when you set up a shoot, you were always so obsessively careful. As if you, too, under all that fun, felt the same need to get everything, somewhere, exactly right.”

He had such perfect diction, so New England, so educated. But he was never cruel with it, not on purpose, not like the infamous devastation his mother could wreak with a few cutting words, when people did not perform to her standards.

That had always been one of the things Kai loved about him so much: the way she could see his mother in him in a thousand small and big ways, and yet there was this kindness that was the very opposite of what his mother was known for, as if he had made a deliberate choice, in the face of great environmental odds, to be someone whose goodness was personal and direct and one-on-one, whose interactions were honorable and reliable and did no damage. All his choices had always been thought-out and conscious and deliberate, except that one choice—which wasn’t really a choice, was it? rather a thing that swept over a person’s life and changed it—to fall in love with her.

Her throat closed, and she couldn’t talk anymore. Not to him. Not ever again to him. She didn’t deserve him.

“You’ve lost so much weight,” Kurt said. “Haven’t you learned to love food again yet?”

No. She still could love its looks, the way she could get it absolutely right for a photograph, but that urge that had always kept those extra twenty pounds rounding her hips—to taste everything around her in those photo shoots, to tilt her head back and just sink into all those delicious flavors—had died. She had lost the people she cooked for casually—him, her friends, her family, all of whom she had fled—and so she had stopped cooking altogether. She hadn’t realized until she was getting by on peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, alone, chewing mechanically, that enjoyment of food really depended on a belief in life and a belief that you could nourish it.

And who could believe in that?

All three of the pregnancies had left her so viciously nauseated, as if her body was some war zone, and she had always thought, if only she could have made peace with the food, if only she could have kept some of it down, things might have turned out differently, that getting her body to accept the food and getting her body to accept the pregnancy were the same thing. The doctors had said it didn’t work that way, that it wasn’t a mind-game she could control, but . . . the sense of failure and enmity remained. Food had let her down. Had betrayed her, when she least expected it. Had not nourished life.

“I wonder if I did the right thing, waiting,” Kurt said low, his hands curled in his pockets.

Her heart tightened. She took a breath and managed to speak, to release him from this hell: “If you’re worried about the snow, go ahead and go. You’re probably right, that they’re not coming.” She couldn’t blame him for wanting to get away before he got stuck for days alone with her. She had hurt him so much. The utter devastation of all that happiness he had found in her.

When Anne had succeeded in convincing him to come so that she could work on contracts and this winter wonderland magazine shoot at the same time, Kai had thought his agreement meant that he, too, had moved on. That he had managed to reduce his tears, too, to this half-frozen quiet inside him. That he was at a place where he could see her again and survive it. Maybe he had met that woman who would make him happy again and he wanted to broach the discussion on divorce.

She had tried hard to get ready for it, to be brave enough for it. She had reminded herself that she, too, had moved on, not to someone else—God, no,
never
again to open herself up that way—but to a calm, healed place. Or it had felt calm, it had felt healed, that cold slushy of grief had been almost comfortable, until he got there before everyone else did and she stood at the window watching him get out of his car, his long body moving with such controlled grace.

She set her equipment on the counter behind her, studying the snowfall of powdered sugar and its snowflakes. If Anne and her team weren’t coming, none of this really mattered, but she couldn’t let it go. She had to get it right. It was the only thing she had left to hold on to.

Silence stretched between them, the inside of the cabin as soft and as still as snow falling on an ancient forest. That silence was soothing. It was better.
No, let’s not talk. Let’s make at least that one thing easier on both of us. You can just go, Kurt. It’s—it’s okay.

I’ll manage to survive it somehow. I’ve survived everything else.

Yes, one thing she had learned about herself that she had never known before: that she did, in fact, survive things she hadn’t thought she could possibly bear.

Kurt left the window, and she startled. Scarier still, he didn’t head out of the room but straight toward her. By the time he reached the other side of the island, her heart was beating so hard she thought she might be sick with it.
Don’t try to kiss me good-bye or anything, Kurt. Not even on the cheek. Please don’t.

Don’t say
anything, like, “Well, I hope you have a happy life.” Or, “Good-bye, Kai.
”
Please, please don’t.