You Had Me At Christmas: A Holiday Anthology (45 page)

She lifted a hand, pushing that subject away. “Let’s not talk about that,” she said quietly. “Let’s not—I know what the doctors said. Let’s let them stay—” She hated so much to say “buried” for those three little hopes of children. “Asleep.” In her mind, she envisioned three little mounds covered gently with snow and sighed, but it was a long, quiet, sad sigh. It was one she had made her peace with.

Maybe that long, long frozen year had served some kind of function after all.

Kurt stretched a hand across the distance between them and curved it against her cheek, saying nothing. Tears pricked again. She did not want to ruin his morning completely, but it felt so healing to cry this way, as if the liquid came from snow melting into spring. They were sweeter tears than all the other ones she had cried.

“I meant us,” she whispered. “I destroyed us.”

His fingers tightened against her cheek. “I’m not destroyed.”

Her breath stopped.

“I’m scarred.” He withdrew his hand and closed it carefully into a fist at his side. Again it slid in search of a pocket, but found none in which to bury itself. “I’m battered. But I’m still standing, Kai.”

Sometimes far too many feelings swirled in a body at once. As if a wind had whipped around a snow statue and brought it to life.

“How about you?” Kurt asked.

She could only stare at him. “Are you giving me
another chance
?” How could he? Despite every indication he kept making that he would like for them to be together again—how could he possibly?

His mouth set, that fine, elegant line of grimness he had, this man who tried so hard not to fling his anger around blindly. “I wasn’t aware I had ever terminated your first chance.”

“I thought
I
did. I destroyed my chance.”

His mouth went even grimmer, knuckles white by his side. “What the hell did you think our marriage was, a lottery ticket? To be ripped in half when it wasn’t the winning number?”

Well, if it was, she had certainly shredded it. “What did
you
think it was?”

He shot her a hard look, revealing an anger in which she could at least believe. Unlike the love, the anger was deserved. “A marriage.”

Her breaths came with difficulty, leaving her sick and shaky. “But I
left
you.” After first destroying anything and everything about them with every word she could muster.

“Did you really?” He rubbed his fingers over and over against the white terry towel at his thigh. “I always tried to tell myself that you left—you. That you just had to get away from you for a while until, you know—you could come back.” He pressed his fingertips into the towel and his thigh until white showed where his knuckles bent back. “I was sorry,” he said low, “not to be able to help you with that. I was sorry that everything I tried just made it worse. I was sorry that when you needed it, I couldn’t give you the same joy and happiness that you had given me.”

“It’s not your fault, Kurt. Nobody could have—”

“I wasn’t nobody,” he interrupted harshly and then stopped himself and shook his head. “I wasn’t—well, I guess I was only me.”

“Kurt,
don’t
—”
Don’t say “only”
.

He shook his head again, as if he was trying to shake his thoughts into a new direction. “I think I need to go for a walk.”

He didn’t ask her to come with him, scooping up his clothes and heading toward the door.

“Kurt,” she managed, as he reached it. “Don’t be humble.”
You deserve so much better than me.

You deserve someone who only gives you laughter and happiness.

And that traitorous, evil thought she had laid to rest so long ago snuck back:
Someone who can have babies like a normal person.
She curled her fingers into the sheets, willing it away.

He paused at the door just long enough to look back at her a steady moment with those gorgeous hazel eyes of his. “Kai. You’ve always humbled me.”

H
umbled him when
she gave him all that laughter and life of hers so spontaneously, as if he
deserved
it. Humbled him at their wedding, when she looked up at him with her eyes gone all solemn, but still so, so happy, and said,
I will
. Humbled him when he placed his hand on her belly and thought, awestruck, that she was going to have a
baby
.
His
baby. How did she
do
that? Humbled him when she wept and wept and wept and tried again and all he could do was hold her.

Humbled him when she left him, yes. God, the inadequacy of him to her needs. He’d been worth
nothing.

That anger pressed up through him again, that sneaky bastard monster with all its snaky heads. He knew she didn’t deserve that rage, and he knew he couldn’t let it free, but it reared up in him sometimes, all the same.

I’m sorry.
He saw her face as she said it, her head bowed, tears filling her eyes, and one of the monster snake-heads laid itself down and just slowly dissipated, like a witch’s body touched with water.
I’m so sorry
, she had said another moment, and a second head slunk down to the ground and shriveled into nothing.

He hoped two weren’t going to grow back where each one had been. You never knew with anger. Hers had been a wild thing, out of control, there at the end, and nothing could cauterize where those first heads had been and keep them from sprouting back up again, more numerous and stronger than before. He had tried probably way too many things, ending up with far too many heads to fight and all of them focused on him.

Yeah, if ever she got pregnant again—
please, God, let’s not try that again—

oh, but
shit
, he would have liked to have a little blonde girl with—

let it go, let it go.

But if she ever did, they had to have a pact or something. A written contract, that he could take her to a therapist and she would go, and if everything went so wrong again, he would hold that written promise in her face like some magic charm and
will
it to work.

Yeah. Like that marriage contract had worked. That solemn vow of
I will
. She’d broken that one.

And there it was, that goddamn hydra anger. Heads rearing back up, tongues lashing between vicious teeth, ready to strike at his soul.

No
, he said, and picked up a handful of snow, pressing it to his forehead. The coolness reminded him of her, of playing in the woods with her, and the anger slumped down, glowering at his mastery of it, as he hiked on.

He passed the most perfect little fir for a Christmas tree, just as tall as he was, a little shaggy on one side, but you could turn that side to the wall. His mother wouldn’t have put up with the asymmetry, but Kai wouldn’t mind. He stood for a moment, gazing at it, thinking of all the Christmases they had curled up with a tree in the corner of the room. And then thinking of that last Christmas.

That horrible, horrible last Christmas.

He would like to think they could curl up by a fire and a Christmas tree again one day, but was this Christmas too soon for her? Would it hurt more than heal?

He walked on, glancing back at the fir, and eventually came out at the viewpoint to which the path led. From there, the mountains swept down into the valley, everything hushed with snow, a glimpse glowing through the fog of the giant star the little town below hung up on a crane for the holidays.

He brushed snow off the big rock that helped make this such a perfect lookout point and sat down on it. Gradually, at his stillness, birds began to sneak in around him, and he realized bird seed was scattered on the ground. Three bird feeders had been hung from the trees, made of exquisite, fragile glass. They hadn’t been there the last time he had visited the cabin, which meant Kai had hung them, and as soon as he realized that, he knew why there were three.

Emotion tried to strangle him, and he bent to scrub his face with his hands. Oh, Kai.

Kai, sweetheart.

He wished so badly he could have healed her. Made her forget everything. Made it all go away. He had tried, and that had been part of her fury.
I don’t want to forget. I’ll never forget. You don’t understand! You never cared!

He had cared. Just—she had cared so much more. His care, the care that ripped
him
to pieces, had been focused in a different direction—not on what was growing in her belly, a little knot of cells in which, after the first time, he never again could really believe, but on her. Because her he could believe in. He could see and feel and suffer at what was happening to her.

He sighed heavily and lifted his head to gaze out over the valley again and eye the birds sideways, wondering if she had sighed exactly like that sometimes, right in this spot, if she had lifted her head and taken a deep breath, and just—sighed again. Let it sigh out, sigh on, let some of it sigh away.

Kai, sweetheart.

The birds scattered when he rose and touched each bird feeder, gently and carefully, a tiny stroke of his fingers. He headed back down into the woods and stood a moment under the trees, watching the birds come back, all bright, beautiful colors—goldfinches and cardinals and bluebirds and then the determined brown sparrows.

On the way back down, he stopped in front of that fir tree again for a long time.

B
ook after book
on the phases of grief and miscarriages and postpartum depression filled the screen of Kurt’s iPad when she turned it on. Kai hesitated, her stomach doing this strange ragged twirl as she stared at them. Her fingers hovered, that close to opening one of the books, and then quickly she shut the reader app, determined to just check the weather, her original intention.

But then she saw the photo folder, and she hesitated again. They had never kept things private like this. Computers, accounts, codes—neither had ever had anything to hide from the other. But now . . .

She opened the folder before she could allow herself to admit that she shouldn’t. Just to see what he had been doing, this past year and a half.

But there wasn’t anything from the past year and a half.

All the photos were of her. Of them. A scanned copy of the first photo they had ever taken together, with a camera held out in Kurt’s hand as they pressed their cheeks together, because he had so wanted to capture them as a couple. She was laughing. His eyes were alight with happiness.

Her on a carousel horse at an amusement park she had talked him into going to—fifth date, still teaching him how to have fun—and she was laughing again. A photo one of their friends had caught of them at a cookout, Kai curled up against his shoulder, Kurt’s head angled to look down at her, such a beautiful expression on his face that she wondered why she didn’t have that photo tattooed on her heart.

Photos from their wedding, photos from their honeymoon, photos of their camping trip in Banff, photos at friends’ houses, a photo at one of his Frisbee tournaments when his team had won and he had lifted her up in his sweaty arms in triumph, as if she was his trophy.

The door opened and she lifted her head quickly, so awash in memories that all the hairs on her body were standing on end from them. “I was—I was just trying to see if we were expecting more snow,” she said guiltily.

“And are we?” Kurt asked, scraping his boots in the entrance, not seeming in the least troubled about questions of whether or not she still had the right to look at his iPad without asking.
I wasn’t aware that I had terminated your first chance.
In one hand, he carried a saw, one of the hand-crafted artisan tools with gorgeous wooden handles that his mother had featured in a magazine spread, during that period when Anne Winters frequently used this cabin and the different themes she could associate with it for her magazine and on her show. “I saw a—” Kurt hesitated. “Would you come cut down a Christmas tree with me, Kai?”

Her breath caught. She envisioned it so suddenly: them and a Christmas tree and just being
happy.
Maybe not entirely like they used to be, having passed through sadness, but still
happy again.

“I would like one,” he said cautiously, affirming himself like a man who feared he might be putting his foot down on eggshells. Or glass shards.

“I don’t know,” she said. But she took a deep breath and thought,
I do. I do want one. I do want to be happy.

Oh, God, I don’t deserve him.

She closed his iPad cover carefully over all those photos of them and came to him, standing so close she could feel the cold off his jacket. “Yes, I would.” Water from the snow dust melting off his shoulder curled slowly down his sleeve. She touched it, tracing it back up to the melting remains of snow, that she covered with her hand. “I do,” she said solemnly, feeling oddly like she had the day she had looked up at him in a church and married him. “I do want one.” She took a breath and sighed. “But I can’t promise it won’t make me cry,” she added wistfully. Once upon a time, she almost never really cried, except at sad movies and from happiness. She’d cried when he asked her to marry him. She’d been so happy.

He tucked her hair behind her ear and squeezed her shoulder, without comment. Just—compassion. It made her feel so strange—as if he, too, had come to a place of peace over the past year, a place where he didn’t try to fix her back into the person he had loved anymore, he just . . . loved her.

But how could that be? She wasn’t very lovable now, was she? Wasn’t fun, still cried too much, might ruin any laughing moment by suddenly getting struck with the grief of it. And she couldn’t stand to force herself or fake herself, to pretend to laugh when she didn’t feel like laughing. It was one of the reasons she had lost most of her friends and couldn’t even stand to see her family anymore.

But she did want to get a Christmas tree with him. She did. She did want to try again.

She put on her jacket and her boots.

The fog still clung a little, in wisps, to the snow, and teased through the trees like some winter dance of veils, luring the traveler in. The tramp of their boots on the snow cut through it, and Kurt’s bare hand closed warm and strong around hers, burying both their hands in his pocket as he dragged the fresh-cut tree behind him with his other arm. She let the grief at not being able to share this moment
also
with at least one of those three little kids—
damn you, God, couldn’t you at least have let me keep one of them?
—just ride there quietly, like one of those tendrils of fog. No point chasing it away, there was more where it came from and she would just find herself pursuing its will-o’-the-wisp farther and farther away from the chance of happiness she
did
have and which was holding her hand right now.