God, she hadn’t realized how much ice she had inside her. She had forgotten how very, very cold everything had grown, so used to that cold that it had begun to seem just the way the world was: a severe and ugly place best suited for hibernation.
Her lips trembled upward at the corners as she traced over his hip. She still did not know if she wanted to wake up again, to come down out of those snowy clouds and be a human being again.
But he was beautiful. She could not touch him if she stayed up in the winter clouds. She could not feel that warmth at her fingertips.
Kurt’s lashes lifted slowly, for an instant his eyes wary, as if he, too, was afraid of shifting from a dream into nightmare. But then he smiled at her like a deliberate choice, like those daffodils pushing their heads up through the snow, and he touched her cheek.
The moment reminded her of the morning after their wedding, when she had wakened to find him gazing at her like that, faces so close, and he had smiled, a slow blush climbing up his cheeks so that anyone would have thought he was some teenage bridegroom who had just made love for the first time.
“You don’t think this will just make everything harder?” she asked low.
“No,” he said quietly and fiercely. “Not trying would have been harder. Spending another Christmas like last one would have been harder.”
She took a deep breath, struggling with it. Because it felt harder to her. Far, far harder than what she had been doing these past few months, trying to float above the surface of her grief and loss and just somehow find a way forward.
“But—” Watching her, he sighed and for a moment looked so tired. His hand curved around her cheek. “I can’t speak for you.”
“Kurt.” She turned her face into his hand, hiding in its shelter. “You’ve, ah—” Her throat clogged. “You’ve always been worth me doing something hard. It just—I couldn’t, I couldn’t—”
His fingertips shifted gently on her forehead, his thumb against her temple. “I figured out that you couldn’t. It took me a while. Until the day you walked out and I didn’t chase after you, I guess. I wanted to chase after you so badly.”
Her mouth twisted against the heel of his palm. “I’m sorry. Did it take you a long time to get over it?”
A short silence. And then, so carefully the air could have been crystal and any word would shatter it into shards that pierced their hearts: “The babies?”
He hadn’t had trouble over the babies, that old lash of anger twitched her. Nothing like hers. Of course he had gotten over them. Her babies. “Me leaving.”
Another silence. She breathed in the scent of his palm. “Get over isn’t the right phrase.”
“Move on,” she said carefully. Her throat felt full of fog, and when she spoke each word seemed to puff that wintry whiteness over him. “You—know.”
He left the bed abruptly, grabbing one of yesterday’s abandoned towels to wrap around his waist, and went to stand by the great window. Outside, too, fog lowered over the snow, the air so thick that the tiniest blink from a snow queen’s eyes would crystallize everything. His towel was white against the white past the glass, only his body, even at its winter palest, still bringing a hint of warmth, of life, to the scene. She knew those windows were double-paned, and yet his position next to that great expanse of glass seemed like a very cold place to be.
“It’s funny how two people can love each other, and live together for years, and still not realize how very differently they think about things,” he told the glass. His hands curled into fists and slid across his towel, failing to find pockets in which to bury themselves. “I haven’t gotten over it, or moved on. It never occurred to me to try.”
Against that glass and winter world, he looked so lonely she thought she would die. But that wouldn’t cure anyone’s loneliness problems, would it?
“I’ve been waiting,” Kurt told the glass. Something spasmed across the profile of his face, some violent twisting of despair, endurance, hope. He pressed his forehead against the pane until his neck corded. “Waiting very hard.”
Oh, God, she couldn’t even think. Feelings were swelling up too big, threatening her wholeness. And yet they seemed—stronger, different, than those old feelings that had torn her apart. Almost as if she had turned into a shrunken old balloon and they were stretching her back out again. “Waiting—for me to come back?”
She saw his throat muscles work. “God, Kai, you don’t know. You don’t know how many days I tried not to get through on the hope that when I walked back through the door, you would be there, telling me how sorry you were. You don’t know how many days I tried not to think about that, tried not to hope for that.”
Tears rushed up into her eyes. Would she never come to an end of crying? But she could see him. She could see him, his car slowing as he turned down the street to their house, his heart tightening. She could see him telling himself, when her car wasn’t in the drive, to stop hoping, that was it, she wasn’t there—and still hoping a little, nevertheless, as he got out of the car, as he turned the key in the lock. She could see him doing it a shade too slowly, trying to put off that moment when he looked into the house—and saw it was empty. Still. “I’m so sorry,” she whispered.
His mouth twisted in what was maybe supposed to be a smile. “But I haven’t been waiting for you to come back, although if you had, it would have been a sign that I’d waited long enough. I’ve always been willing to chase after you. I was waiting for you to heal enough that being near me didn’t just rip your wounds right open again with every breath I took.”
She sat up, clutching the sheet to her, utterly stunned. Being near him had felt exactly like that. The rawness of her soul, the ragged ripping at it of his existence, her need to hide, hide, hide from anything that held more feeling, to bury herself as deep as a bear in some cave of snow.
“I should have forced you to go to a therapist somehow. I just—you weren’t suicidal, and you weren’t homicidal, and I could hardly have you committed, Kai. I knew you weren’t normal, but I couldn’t tell what part was some kind of postpartum depression and what part was the real grief and anger that you had to find a way to work through.”
She swallowed with great difficulty, as if she was trying to squeeze some huge marshmallow down her throat whole. “Neither could I,” she whispered, hanging her head. “I still can’t.”
He angled his head against the glass, and she felt him watching her, but she couldn’t look at him. She couldn’t. I’m so sorry.
And then he walked back across the room, sat down on the bed beside her, and put his arm around her, pulling her into his warm chest and pressing a kiss to the top of her head. He didn’t say anything. After a moment, she slipped her hands up to his chest and buried her fingertips in her palms so that she wouldn’t clench tight fistfuls of his skin. Closing her eyes, she focused on the feel of his arms around her, his body against her face, the scent of him, the warmth. She focused so hard that it made every hair on her body shiver up, and then subside, and then shiver up again.
He brought his other arm to join the first, wrapping around her, but he never said a word. A couple of times he kissed her head again.
“I joined a group here,” she said finally, low. “After a while. That first winter, I couldn’t be near anybody, I couldn’t stand to let anybody in. If your mother hadn’t let me have this cabin, I—I don’t know what I would have done. Hiked the Appalachian Trail maybe, except I probably would have just curled up and died mid-route.” Her mouth twisted in some ghost of her old humor, so strange to feel it this way, about this subject. “It’s hard to curl up and die so easily in a warm luxury cabin without the help of hypothermia.”
“I wish I could have been there,” Kurt said, strained. “Kai—I wish I could have fixed it.” His hands flexed against her, his voice deepening grimly. “Instead of making it worse.”
She said nothing. What could she say? Every single thing he had tried had made it worse, and yet he had tried so hard. After a
moment, she pressed a kiss into his bare chest, for everything words couldn’t give him.
“I love you,” he said quietly. “Kai.”
She began to tremble. Her stomach shook so badly she felt sick from it. She wanted to cover her ears and bury her face to shut out this thing that couldn’t possibly be true.
And if it was true, if it was true—oh, God, it made her sick how little she deserved it. It made her feel terrified and broken, to try to construct something on the ruins of their old happiness. She could not do it. She had failed. She was too afraid.
She forced herself away from him, not all the way, but enough distance to make one fact clear to both of them: I don’t deserve this. This can’t be. “You can’t possibly.”
His lips compressed, such sudden anger blazing up in his eyes that it caught her there, hands still touching his chest, staring back into it. “I’ll be the judge of what I’m capable of doing,” he said harshly.
She took a shaky breath.
“Fuck,” he said wearily and stood again from the bed. Once he had taken a step away from her, though, he just stopped, running his hands through his hair as if he had no idea what to do with them.
“I’m sorry,” she said, too low, that marshmallow impossible in her throat. “I guess I can’t stop destroying things.”
This morning. That beautiful moment when he opened his eyes and smiled at her. Couldn’t she have at least stopped herself from destroying that?
“Destroying things?” He half-turned. He really had such a beautiful body, all that elegant, intense strength. “Have you started blaming it all on yourself again? Kai, the doctors said—”
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.”
CHAPTER 9
Humbled 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 th
e 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.
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