Holidays in Blue

by Eve Morton

  Chapter Seventeen

  Cosmin returned to his father’s house two days after Christmas to gather the materials for his last show. When he walked by the kitchen island, memories of Eric rose to the surface—which was to say, he became aware of the constant buzzing in his own mind. He pushed it aside once he took sight of an orange key sticking out of the small space between the microwave and the stove. He’d not seen it before, but with all the shifting to find matches, candles, and flashlights during the storm, it must have been knocked around and had now resurfaced. He realized it belonged to a mailbox—P.O. box, not the standard mailbox he’d been checking for his father’s hydro bills.

  Perhaps it was for business, or something he had let lapse, Cosmin wasn’t sure, but his hands shook slightly as he called the number at the bottom of the key. It seemed significant. It seemed important. He already knew he was crafting a story about all of this, assigning so much meaning, as he was told by a very young-sounding woman on the phone that yes, George Tessler had a box here. Cosmin informed her of his death, and that he’d be picking up the letters.

  The box was nearly stuffed to the brim. Most of it seemed to be junk, fliers, and some magazines, but Cosmin quickly noted several envelopes addressed to his father but written in cursive. Isabelle Carter was written on the return address. She was from a town over. Cosmin didn’t know the name, but he opened one of the letters right away to see what this was.

  Dear George,

  It’s been a while since you’ve written but I wanted to tell you about my upcoming holiday plans. Diane and her wife will be coming on the twenty-third, but I’ll be available by the twenty-seventh. I know it’s still a long way away, but I’m excited for you to possibly meet her. You really should...

  Cosmin went on and read the letter, then the next, slowly piecing together his father’s love story with a widow named Isabelle who had a gay daughter. When he examined some of the magazines in the mailbox, he realized one of them was for a PFLAG organization; he’d no doubt met Isabelle because they both had gay children. The letters stopped in November. His father must not have been well enough to check the box leading up to his death.

  And then no one had told Cosmin that there was a mailbox—or an Isabelle—that he needed to worry about. No one had told him anything at all about his father, including his father. His omissions were no longer a past-tense issue. They were present tense. They were still ongoing. They were still happening, and now Cosmin was left with a handful of letters from a stranger and wasn’t sure how to tell her anything at all.

  Surely she knew. She had to know. Cosmin had put out an obituary; there’d been a funeral. But Isabelle lived in another town, so most likely didn’t see that newspaper, and Cosmin didn’t remember anyone unfamiliar from the funeral. He’d called all the people he could find in his father’s phone directory, too, but the surname of Carter had no meaning. The stamps and pens, along with the condoms, in his father’s bedside table suddenly made sense. So did the sudden halt to his journals; no matter how hard Cosmin looked, he could not find anything past the mid-2010s. He must have started to write to Isabelle then. He wrote letters so someone could read them, like Lily had read his journals.

  Cosmin looked at the corner of the letter. Before he even left the post office, her address was programmed into his phone’s GPS. Forty-five minutes later he found a bungalow just outside the highway painted in a light pink. Christmas lights hung around the small frame and over the garage. A silver-and-purple wreath hung on the door.

  When he knocked, a woman in her late sixties, perhaps early seventies, answered the door. In spite of her hunched appearance and shock of white hair, she seemed remarkably spry and agile. She also smiled the moment she saw him. “Are you Cosmin Tessler by any chance?”

  “I am indeed.” Cosmin opened the screen door between them and extended his hand. “We’ve never met, but I know your name is Isabelle.”

  She invited him in for tea and Christmas cookies that her daughter had made. Over drinks, he learned that they’d met through her daughter and not through a PFLAG organization; Diane had been one of the home care workers Cosmin had hired to look after his father during the first cancer scare, but he liked talking to her since she apparently reminded her of Cosmin. “I think it was just because Diane mentioned her wife. It gave him permission to talk about your husband. I mean former husband. He did say you broke up.”

  Cosmin nodded. While she filled in the blanks about her first husband, dying of pancreatic cancer at age fifty-eight, he also filled in the details about Julian. Why not? This woman was kind and caring; she was loquacious with sugar; and she was the closest person he had now who was close with his father. She knew him like he knew him: a cranky old man, almost always obstinate, except for when he wrote things down.

  “So we wrote things down,” she said. They saw one another face to face as well, but it was always for short periods of time. “I like being alone. And again, he’s much better at writing.”

  Though Cosmin nodded along, there was another part of him that couldn’t believe what he was hearing. His father. In love. His father writing again. He had closed so many doors in his life, but he was also capable of opening them again. To Cosmin’s great relief, Isabelle had known that George had died. She’d not gone to the funeral, but her daughter caught the obituary.

  “I was very sad to hear of his death,” Isabelle said. “We were close. I can only imagine how you’re faring.”

  Cosmin wanted to reply with his standard “My father had been dying a long time” but he couldn’t anymore. His father hadn’t been dying. He’d only seemed that way. He looked down at the bottom of his tea mug instead. He was lucky, wasn’t he? He was finding this out, and he was not too late. He could see all of this as dumb hope once again, but he refused. This was luck. This was his own search for meaning. He could have gone for decades never seeing this side of his father. He could have lived so much of his own life in regret. But he wouldn’t now.

  “Oh, dear.” Isabelle touched his hand. It was a kind, caring gesture. It only made him think of Eric.

  “I’m fine. Thank you. I do miss him, but I’ve been going through his things so much the past little while that it feels like I got to know him all over again.”

  “He was a bit of a hoarder. I told him it had to be cleaner if I were to come over.”

  “I can imagine,” Cosmin chuckled. “I have some of his boxes. Would you like them?”

  “Oh. I don’t think that’s—”

  “They’re mostly his journals. He wrote a lot before he wrote letters to you. He would have shared them, I’m sure, but he didn’t quite know how. There’s also a lot from his wife and Suzanne. And some from me.”

  Isabelle drew her hands into her lap. Her thin lips creased as she thought. “And you don’t want them? Not even your box?”

  “Definitely not my box. I’ve seen enough, honestly.”

  She seemed to think of it a moment longer. Then she nodded. Quiet and reserved, but it was a nod. Cosmin felt his heart shudder with relief, with release. He already had so many of the boxes in the back seat, and so it was that much easier to give them away. There was no need to double back and rethink it all. He merely brought the boxes into her house and set them up by her couch so she could go through them at her leisure. With nothing left to say afterwards, he gave her a hug.

  “Take one thing in return,” Isabelle said. Cosmin wanted to tell her that he had no room for anything else, but she insisted. She left for her bedroom, using a cane and so starkly reminding Cosmin of his mother, and came back with a bundle of letters. Already, Cosmin knew it was his father’s responses to her. And already, he knew that this was what he’d read on the air.

  One of many stories, he hoped. He hugged her one last time before he got into his car. With the letters on the passenger seat, Cosmin drove home.

  * * *

  “Good af
ternoon, everyone. I’m Cosmin Tessler and you’re listening to Sleep Alone.” Cosmin took a breath and couldn’t help but smile at the familiar sensation against the mic. “Thank you so much for joining me on this snowy New Year’s Eve afternoon. It’s T minus twelve hours before the big ball’s going to drop, and for the next six of them, it will be me and my show instead of The Countdown. It’s a special show, one that will be bittersweet because it’s Sleep Alone’s last. Yes, I know. I was also quite shocked. But I suppose that all things must come to an end—especially sleeping alone.”

  Cosmin paused. He was speaking too fast. He felt like that boy the first day he’d met Suzanne, and all the words he’d yet to use were tumbling out. He breathed in and out, he counted, and then he picked up one of the first letters from his father to Isabelle to act as a talisman guiding him.

  “As I said, my last episode of Sleep Alone will be a special one. Not only is it six hours long—with musical accompaniment so you all won’t be too aggravated by my voice—but I also have a rather long story I want to tell.

  “I normally don’t talk about myself. I figure I’ve heard it all before, so why bore someone else? But today you’re going to hear about me. And my father. And my sister, and my mother. And a couple more people yet to be named. I want to tell you a long saga about a couple who were plagued by sadness and then found a mute boy in an orphanage in Romania, and then soon found a girl in the Canadian foster care system years later.

  “I want to tell you about another tragedy, followed by another, and how both the son and his father never quite repaired their relationship but learned to see better parts of themselves in the aftermath of pain and suffering, eventually finding different meanings, which allowed them to live. But that’s not until the very end of the show, and I don’t wish to get too far ahead of myself. For now, here’s a song to get us in the mood.”

  Cosmin pressed Play on one of the first Canadian content songs he was contractually obligated to play, and which he knew he needed in order to break up his own story. It was only the beginning and he was already emotional. He’d spent the past five days preparing everything in order to make sure it was perfect, but no matter how many times he spoke aloud in his condo, it didn’t remove the emotion from the words.

  They were loaded. They were heavy. They were all his.

  He would start with his parents’ love story, how their romance led to tragedy of losing kids, but had also led to the twisted fate that brought them to find and take Cosmin home. He had an informative passage on the Romania abortion ban during that time period to add context, and several more informative asides for Suzanne’s story about the foster care system. The show was about raising awareness as much as telling a good story.

  From these adoption stories, Cosmin would then talk about the crash, the tragedy that came out of it, but also how it led his father and himself in two different paths. He would tell Isabelle’s story, since he’d obtained her permission, and then, hopefully, he’d end with Eric’s story, and how their lives had intertwined again during the ice storm.

  And, from there, he and Eric could begin something stronger, better, longer. Hopefully.

  Eric just had to show up. He’d said he would a week ago, but Cosmin felt the absence between them. He’d considered dropping in on Eric’s parents numerous times—but each time he drove by, the lights were off. He’d emptied his father’s house and added a For Sale sign to the front lawn, his gaze lingering with each trip. Most of the ice had now melted and been replaced by snow. Everything seemed so different, but Cosmin hoped that Eric would still be the same.

  He moved through the first three hours of his broadcast seamlessly. In between the segments of his story, he played music and answered the phones. Most people called in to relate or express sadness that Sleep Alone was ending. Cosmin put some of them on the air and had a few brief conversations.

  Sherry had sent an intern to help Cosmin for the latter half of the show, and once they showed up, Cosmin focused solely on his stories. The intern answered the phones and put on the songs, and occasionally got him water or asked if he needed food. Cosmin declined the food in favour of some more pie he’d picked up, but said yes to the water.

  When he reached the point in his broadcast where he spoke of Isabelle, Cosmin found himself growing nervous. There had still been no sign of Eric. He’d asked the intern on numerous breaks if anyone had called in asking specifically for him, but it had just been the standard calls. Another person was let on the air and shared a similar story about finding their grandmother’s love letters after her death. For a while, it felt as if the show was going to go perfectly. The audience was great. The intern handled the calls and music beautifully. The radio station felt like home.

  But as the last hour approached, and there was still no sign of Eric, Cosmin realized he’d have to go off script.

  “And that brings me to December. To the ice storm that left half the city without power and me trapped in my father’s house for a long period of time, surrounded by nothing but these journals.” Cosmin sighed. Would mentioning Eric violate whatever experience they’d had? Would it remind him of his own failure at relationships? He should have thrown the journals out sooner—but then he’d never have had a chance to meet Isabelle. All the choices he had made had led him to this moment on the air, still with no one in his bed. He was still sleeping alone.

  “I wasn’t alone during that storm, however,” Cosmin said. “I had so many memories to keep me company. Then the next day, when the roads opened and the sun melted some of the ice, I came to see a friend of mine in the hospital.”

  Cosmin’s academic, lecture-focused mind had taken over. He had no idea why he was telling this story—or if Sherry would have even given approval—but it was too late. He was filling dead time now. “She was there because she thought she was trapped. She’d surrounded herself with all these ideas she couldn’t live up to and had trapped herself by her body. My father had trapped himself with his books. And so I told this woman in the hospital what I wished I had told my father: write down all your can’ts so you can remove them from your lexicon. You must make room for things that can.”

  Cosmin went on to describe what had happened with Cassidy. He’d heard no update or incoming call from Sherry, which he took as a good sign for Cassidy’s health, and now, for his sharing of the story.

  “And so, poof!” Cosmin said. “She tore up the paper. She removed all the can’ts. I know it sounds corny. But I wish I could have done that with my father. I wish we both could have written down all the I can’t statements in our heads. I can’t love you. I can’t live with you. I can’t see you throw away your life.” Cosmin listed each one, emotion in his voice growing. “I can’t become you. That’s the last one, I think. I wish I could tear those up and show him.

  “Instead, I gave his books filled with I can’t statements to his girlfriend. And I tell you, dear listeners, all that I couldn’t tell him. I can’t live like my father lived. I have no more room for suffering. I must shut the door on that life and open up to something else instead.”

  Cosmin hit the button to make his mic offline. The intern scrambled for a moment to get a song on without an intro to set it up. Cosmin left the booth. He paced the hallway, his skin flushed with tension and utter relief. He walked into the bathroom and splashed water on his face. All this time, speaking into the mic, he’d been so afraid he was talking to no one.

  But people had called. Even if Eric wasn’t one of them, enough people called to let him know that he wasn’t just speaking into dead air. His audience was diminishing, sure. Even if this show was a roaring success, it wouldn’t be enough to save him. But it was definitely enough to remove some of the I can’ts not only from his lexicon, but from his life.

  When Cosmin walked back into the booth, there were twenty minutes left. Six hours had sped by, and yet it didn’t seem like enough. How could he even fit all of the experie
nces he’d had with Eric into that timespan? Why hadn’t he given less time to something else and made more time for this? He wasn’t sure. He was tempted to let the intern keep playing music, but he had to sign off. This was his last show. He wasn’t going to just walk away.

  “Again, everyone,” Cosmin said into the mic. “I want to thank you all for tuning in tonight. I was just thinking that even though I called this show Sleep Alone, it’s never felt like a lonely journey for me. I want to thank you all for being there and listening. I think it’s what I needed most of all during the past ten years. And it’s definitely been what’s kept me going during the past week.”

  A flash of colour distracted Cosmin. The intern had moved to answer the door. When Cosmin saw Eric standing in the booth, face slightly red and chest rapidly rising and falling from running, Cosmin smiled. He gestured for him to come inside.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” Cosmin said. “I’m afraid I only have ten more minutes of designated air time. But, we have another story. We aren’t quite done yet. So I wonder if you’ll be patient with us as Eric tells us a fascinating story.”

  Eric smiled as he leaned close to the mic. His laboured breathing had all but disappeared. He approached the mic like a natural, like he was totally in his element. After all, for the past few years, he’d been earning a living recording audiobooks.

  “Hello, my name’s Eric Campbell, but I’m hoping some people know me better as Ash Erikson. I did a show a few years ago called Crime Bot. Totally awful, totally trashy. But let me tell you, it changed my life.”

  * * *

  Once Eric’s story was done, it was half an hour past the time Cosmin should have signed off. They hadn’t had a commercial or music break in that time, and the host of The Countdown was angrily pacing on the other side of the door.

  But Cosmin didn’t care. Eric was here. And he’d told the surreal story of the chance meeting with Christopher Ren, then the inheritance nearly a decade later. It wasn’t quite the romantic adventure story Cosmin had wanted to end with, but when Eric slipped his hand over Cosmin’s, he figured they were heading that way. He just needed to wait a moment longer and remain committed to the meaning he wanted to make from this.