You Had Me At Christmas: A Holiday Anthology (48 page)

Hours later, Kurt
lay stroking the length of his wife’s body, from shoulder to hip, quietly, watching the Christmas tree, too contented to go to sleep and risk waking to find her crying and leaving him again. He knew his distrust might not be fair to her, but he probably wouldn’t lose that fear for a long, long time, the same way he hadn’t lost the heartbreak of his parents’ divorce—and what it meant to him, the essential loss of his father—for years and years, the same way she wouldn’t lose the grief over those miscarriages ever, not completely. Life was like that. It dealt you some things that changed you and that you had to deal with, even when you thought they were too cruel, even when you believed that no human should ever have to deal with a blow so cruel. He would have done anything to keep Kai from learning how much life could hurt, but he hadn’t had any more ability to stop those losses than she had.

So he stroked her body, profoundly happy to be able to, yet sad, too, because—well, he knew what day their third try was supposed to be born as well as she did. He was glad she was sleeping through midnight. That damn miracle birth hour. He’d had to turn off the radio the day after Halloween last year and listen to nothing but classical music and audio books—usually on dealing with grief—to get him through until January. All those fucking songs about a sweet child cherished by a tender mother, laying his head to rest in a manger and all that. Fuck God, that’s what he had thought.
You can get a virgin to give birth to
your
kid
,
but you can’t let my wife have ours? Fuck You.

Fuck Santa Claus, too, while he was at it, and all the songs about him. He would have liked to play Santa Claus. See a little kid’s eyes light up at all the presents under a tree.
Fuck.

Those hydra heads rose, and the anger was catching at him, trying to drag him under, when Kai drew a deep breath and started to sing.

Very quietly, her voice so soft. “
Silent night
—”

Oh, fuck, Kai, don’t. Don’t sing that. Don’t rip us to shreds again. Don’t do that to yourself. Don’t do that to me, God damn it.

“
Holy night
—”

Oh, shit. He tightened his arm around her waist. But she didn’t stop, her voice trembling just a little bit. And so he laid his tenor under hers, giving her voice that support because what else could he do? He couldn’t carry the baby. He couldn’t drown under a tidal wave of hormones when he lost the baby. He could only support.

“
All is calm, all is bright
.”

He wrapped his arm around her waist, settling his body more closely against her back. His voice nearly gave out on him at the line
mother and child
. But hers didn’t, soft and quiet and sure.

“
Holy infant, so tender and mild.
”

And very, very softly at the end, their voices blending: “
Sleep in heavenly peace. Slee-ep in heavenly peace.
”

A white light from the Christmas tree sparkled once over her golden hair as her voice faded away, a tiny caress of light that only he saw. When he tried to touch it, it was gone, and yet his fingers tingled from it. She gave a very long, slow sigh and turned her body into his, nestling into him and wrapping her arms around him.

And then she really did sleep. And so did he.

M
orning dawned quietly
happy. The happiness stayed cautious, clinging closely to them, afraid to fling itself about too joyously on this delicate day. And yet, it was there—in the air, in the touch of hands, in the way they didn’t look each other too long in the eyes, in case they scared it away by staring at it too hard.

Kai made hot chocolate and French toast, and Kurt did the strawberry hearts, proving that the model crafting child could branch out from stock paper and glitter when he wanted to.

Then he gave the strawberries funny faces, and then he set a line of them marching across the whipped cream like little strawberry soldiers to attack her French toast fortress, on the snow-cream top of which her heart was guarded.

She started to laugh, a sound that made his face relax in relief, and kissed him. “Merry Christmas, Kurt.”

“Merry Christmas, sweetheart. I love you.”

For their Christmas present to each other, they curled up on the couch and looked at all their old photos of happy times, and Kurt talked softly and persuasively of that old trip idea of his.
Could we now, Kai? Could we please? Just the two of us, escape somewhere crazy, for, I don’t know, a month, two, pack our lives with something vivid and fun. Hell, we can take a year and do a whole world tour if you want. Ride elephants. Get chased by rhinoceroses. Set a prayer wheel spinning on top of some Tibetan mountain.

He braced after he said it, doubtless still remembering the way she had screamed at him the last time he suggested this idea. But that level of rage, at least, had faded a long time ago, as her hormones rebalanced.

The hurt hadn’t left with the rage, of course. If anything, the rage had been a protective shield against the fullness of that hurt. Even six months ago, it would have been too soon still to bring up this trip idea. Some wounds couldn’t be “fixed”, no matter how much someone else might want to fix them; sometimes they just needed a lot of time to heal. But now—

She nodded, firmly, and his face lit, and they called up maps and guidebooks and plotted where they would most like to go. It was a little difficult—anticipating
fun
and
life
felt all rusty—but it got better with practice, as if each little touch, each little smile, each photo of a possibility was another drop of oil.

When his mother called and asked Kurt if he was coming to Christmas dinner, and he asked Kai, she said yes a little warily, because it was her first step back into the world. Still, the thought of his mother’s cool control was a relief compared to her own family’s chaos of wrapping paper and playing nieces and nephews. She could start back into the world with baby steps. “Although I never could figure out what your mother meant by letting me have this cabin. It’s almost as if she
wanted
us to be separated.”

Kurt was silent for a moment as he helped them off the couch. “I always thought it was proof that my mother actually has a heart.”

Kai whipped her head up to stare at him. People close to Anne rarely suspected her of having a heart, Kurt least of all. And she didn’t see how the cabin proved the contrary.

“I was seven and nine when she had her own miscarriages,” Kurt said very quietly. Shock ran through Kai, a strange woman-to-woman current of pain, of understanding.
Oh. Oh, you know, too.
It was as if there should be some little sign, a woman’s hand touching her belly maybe, this secret code of a sorority of sorrow. “I didn’t really understand back then what happened to her, why that cold crept in on her and she got even more controlling, so difficult my father just left her.”

Oh, Anne.
Kai saw the frost-blond bob, the strong jaw and ever-controlled profile, felt against her cheek the little air-kisses of the woman who never let herself get too close. Whose media presence and role of perfectionism was its own force field around her, creating a bubble where she could get everything right.

“I just knew I couldn’t reach her myself,” Kurt said low. “And never have been able to reach her again. Not so I could tell.”

Oh, Kurt. Kurt, Kurt, Kurt.
The sudden, incredible realization that he had braved the greatest pain from his childhood, for her: that of having his world fall to pieces, of being shut out. He must have been as helpless against that destruction then as he had been when his life was destroyed a second time as an adult, and yet, for her—he had still tried his hardest to fight it. He had still faced it.

“I think she gave you what she needed for herself back then and never had, because there were too many things she couldn’t step away from. But of course, given that it’s my mother, it’s hard to tell.” His mouth twisted wryly. “She did agree to give me an excuse to come up here, though, when I asked her. And she was the one who made the decision to leave us here alone—without warning me, I should mention. I had planned to have people here for more padding. More”—he flexed his fingers, almost as if he was testing the fit of a glove—“armor.” He shook his head and closed that hand firmly around hers, warm and sure. “Stupid armor,” he murmured so softly she didn’t think she was meant to hear. “As if you ever got to wear any.”

She hesitated and gestured around to the snow-covered mountains, the isolated cabin.

“Ah.” He nodded. “Maybe if you can’t have armor, you do need a lot of distance from the world. When you’re—wounded.” The oddest look crossed his face. “My mother—the person who understood.”

“My family never could,” she said. “They were too—happy.”

“Yes, I thought of that, how happy your family always was. I had had to learn how to deal with my parents’ divorce. And, you know, my mother. She takes a certain amount of strength. But you never had any practice at all, did you?”

No. Happy childhood, happy family, easy time in school, happy marriage to the most wonderful man . . . it had been so easy to have a beautiful life, up until then. She had thought working in top kitchens was the most brutal thing possible in life, and she had shifted away from that brutality into the calmer intensity of food styling, easily enough. She had had no idea. How could
she
not have the babies she wanted? She was—she was
happy.
Unhappy things were for—unhappy people.

What an idiot she had been.

A happy idiot, though.

Images flashed across her mind of all the women in her support group, of her own mother-in-law, the cool, distant Anne. One of the leaders of her support group often said that they weren’t supposed to think about
deserving
and
not deserving
, that it was a cruel concept made to hurt. But Kai struggled with it, as with everything else.

In her bedroom—their bedroom now?—she touched her jewelry box, stroking it a moment, eyeing him sideways as he buttoned a pressed, white shirt. She had always found it so hot when he dressed for dinner with his mother. It had
always
made her palms itch with the desire to unbutton him again, to wrinkle his shirt, to tousle his hair, to make him late, but to make him late laughing, every cell of his body sated and relaxed.

His wedding ring glinted from time to time as his fingers moved on the buttons.

She swallowed and looked back at the jewelry box. And then, on a breath, she opened it and reached into the little secret compartment in the back. Beside her, Kurt’s hands went still on his buttons.

Taking the rings out, she bit her lip, looking up at him. And then she held them out to him tentatively, afraid to ask, despite everything he had said and done, still afraid to hope that much for forgiveness.

But he fisted his hands and thrust them into his pockets. “I didn’t take them off in the first place,” he said low and harshly. “If you want them back on your finger, Kai, you put them the fuck back on. You make the choice.”

She stared at him, and then her eyes filled with tears because he was so right about that. She started to slide them onto her fingers, wedding band first.

His hand closed suddenly over both of hers, stopping the act. “But if you put them on—they stay on,” he said roughly. “You promise me—you
promise me
—that if ever anything like this happens again, you’ll let me take you to counseling. We can put it in writing, if you want, so I can hold the damn contract up in your face when you balk and make you stick to it.”

Kai laughed despairingly. “You can’t—I can’t put you through this
again.
If this happens again, you have to find someone else.”

He stared at her and then suddenly grabbed her chin, too hard, to force her to look at him. “Kai,
no, I don’t.
We don’t
know
what might happen. You
might
decide one day that you want to try one more time, and we don’t know how that might work out or how much it might hurt if it doesn’t. We might adopt, and something happen. One of us might get cancer. Someone might get in a car accident and have brain damage or lose a limb.
We don’t know anything.
We’re not the same people who couldn’t imagine much worse in our lives than maybe breaking a toe playing Frisbee. But that doesn’t mean I don’t love you,
God.
” He flung his hand away from her chin. “That’s what I promised to love you through.”

She bent her head, her eyes stinging, so humbled by him. “I love you, too,” she whispered. “I just—I just couldn’t drag myself out of it.”

“I know. Kai, I’ve read every book there is to read on the subject. I may never feel it the same way you feel it—it hurt you so much worse than it hurt me—but I
understand.
I would have done anything I could to make it better. That’s why I let you go, in the end, because it was the only thing left to do. The only thing you thought would work.”

“I’m so sorry,” she whispered, as if she could never say it enough.

“So am I, Kai. I’m sorry that I couldn’t help. I’m sorry that I couldn’t bear it for you. I’m sorry that all I did was make it hurt you so much worse, until you had to get away from me. My God, I’m sorry. Do you know how fucking
small
it is, to be a man, and watch my wife be destroyed for
my
sake, as she tries to have
my
kid, and not be able to do one damn thing about it? I’m sorry. And I’m angry. And like you, I just have to get through that. To the other side. But Kai—” He stretched across the distance between them and closed both hands strongly around hers. “There’s no point in getting to the other side, if it’s not with you.”

She took a deep breath, sucking in all his strength, all his persistence. “I know. That’s one of the things that was so hard, after I started getting over the depression. Knowing I didn’t deserve you any more.” Oh, damn, there was that word again, that her support group tried to stop themselves from using. “That I’d lost you.”

He stared at her. “You don’t—
deserve
—fuck, Kai. Are you
kidding
me?
You didn’t come back to me because you didn’t think I’d take you
? God, Kai. I would have crawled on my hands and knees. You were so damned brave. You tried so damned hard. I was
worthless
. I don’t even know what you think the word
deserve
means.”