You Had Me At Christmas: A Holiday Anthology

by Karina Bliss

  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.

  Chapter Ten

  Book 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.

  Yes, she had chased her grief well off the beaten path more than once already. She didn’t need to follow it now. She could concentrate on his hand. On this chance which he claimed was not her second one. On the two of them. They had been very, very happy once, just the two of them, before they had gotten that dream to make their happiness even bigger.

  To spread it around. To pass it on.

  Oh, God damn it, there was that grief again.

  But she breathed it in, breathed it out, letting it drift around her, its wisps teasing as she focused on the feel of Kurt’s hand. That beautiful, strong hand, that she had never thought to feel holding hers again.

  “You never even thought about moving on?” she asked, low.

  He frowned. “No.” And after a few crunchy steps, very, very low indeed: “Did you?”

  The tree dragged behind them in a soft shush. She let the sound of it slide over her a long time before she finally spoke. “I thought I had to. I thought I had ruined any other choice.”

  His hand flexed on hers in his pocket, and six slow, steady steps measured out the pause before he spoke. “Kai, I’m sorry if selling the house made you think that. I just really couldn’t stand it anymore. It got so I would do anything, rather than come home.”

  Her throat tightened as she imagined him again, imagined how much it must have hurt. She had been so focused on her other hurt that it had been a long time before she had also had to deal with the fact that she had lost him, too. “I’m sorry,” she whispered.

  He let go of the tree and picked her up, sandwiching her between him and the nearest pine, as he kissed her. Just kissed her. Tender and gentle but very thorough, taking his time. “I know you are, sweetheart,” he said softly, and kissed each of her eyelids closed, and kissed the tear away. “I know.” He kissed her again, longer this time, deeper, hunger rising up through his body, pressing into her. “God.” He lifted his mouth. “I could drag us into a cave and just be an animal with you for days, do you know that? Just—feel.”

  “Me, too.” She squeezed herself up against him. A cave sounded beautiful. Nothing but darkness and bodies, their bodies, them.

  “Unless you’ve discovered an actual cave around here that I never did, let’s quit hiking so damn far from the house,” he said.

  But he must know perfectly well that they needed those hikes as much as the time in the cave.

  At the house, he made his own cave out of her comforter, pulling it over them in the big bed, so that the only thing that existed was the heat of their bodies. Even when it got too hot, she didn’t want to come out from under it, and whenever he shrugged the comforter back to breathe cool air, she hid herself under him, pressing into his chest. And he came back to her, kissing her and kissing her, hands running all over her, a silent, intense love-making out of time, no beginning and no end, just the two of them. Just the two of them. The two of them filling their whole world, all that mattered, all that ever need matter.

  “You’re the most beautiful thing that ever happened in my life,” Kai whispered suddenly, clutching at him as if he might melt out of her arms. His arm tightened under her bottom, driving himself deep, deep. “I don’t know what I did to deserve you.”

  She’d thought giving him happiness and a family was what she was doing to deserve him. Once upon a time. And even then, he had always seemed so special to her, with that care and strength and intelligence and that way he had of looking at her across a room. She had always known that she couldn’t ever entirely deserve him, that partly she was just lucky. That partly she was just the happy girl who had been smart enough to take him on a hike.

  Kurt kissed her deeply, shutting off all words, and she let them go, let all the thoughts in her go, let herself become just an animal, an animal. Let herself wallow in it mindlessly, wallow in making him an animal, too. Neither spoke again. Maybe you couldn’t speak your human language to another and do some of the things they did.

  Kurt left her dozing eventually, still under the comforter, still out of time.

  She didn’t know how long she stayed in the comforter-cave, in no hurry to wake or think or come out. But when she eventually did, she found the tree standing in the corner of the great living room, a careful distance far from the fire, and Kurt was at the granite island with half the supplies from his mother’s old craft room spread around him, making Christmas ornaments.

  Incredible Christmas ornaments, too, the kind that appeared in his mother’s magazine and that no average person could get to look like Anne Winters’s. Not that Kurt had ever been average, no matter what he thought about himself. “I take it that it’s genetic?” Kai said, both amused and impressed. While she rarely applied her own ability for precision to crafts, preferring the work with food, she understood exactly what went into that level of perfect craftsmanship.

  Kurt looked around and smiled at her, a small, warm smile. He was halfway through something elaborate with ribbons and glitter, and his hands were occupied. “No, but who do you think she kept testing those kid crafts of hers on when I was little? We both had a hard time of it when I was five and could never get any of her visions for kid crafts to actually work out beautifully, like I was supposed to. But by the time I was eight, I was the model crafting child.”

  “You have hidden talents.” Kai came forward. Glitter streaked across one of his cheeks, little sparkles of white that caught the light every time he shifted his head. “I guess it makes sense, but I’ve never seen you do anything like this before.”

  “I started rebelling against it all when I was about ten.” That would have also been the age when his father divorced his mother, unable to put up with her ever-increasing need for control, and moved to California. “And moved into sports and, you know, boy things—the kind of thing that drove her crazy. By the time you met me, we’d more or less found an even keel between us, but that didn’t mean I had to do crafts for her.” That glimmer of his wry smile that she loved so much, the way it was so restrained and yet all that brilliance and subtle humor of his showed through. “Just all her legal contracts.”

  He finished tying the ribbon and set the ornament on a pan with a dozen others already made: snowflakes, some two-dimensional, some three-dimensional, their heavy card stock thickly covered in fine white and silver glitter. In his hands, per his mother’s training, the snowflakes became a very sophisticated, adult craft.

  “You can pick the next ornaments,” he said. “Are we doing a two-color theme or a hodge-podge?”

  They were going to do crafts together? That was so—sweet. So optimistic, so happy. She took a deep breath, trying to make sure she had enough room to let that sweetness come all the way into her soul. She couldn’t refuse him in this, not Kurt. Even to protect herself she couldn’t. “Have you ever done cinnamon dough ornaments? They’re my favorite. They scent the whole house. You can leave them this rustic brown with pretty ribbons, or your mom did an issue where she covered them with glitter. If we did that, we could do birds pecking through the snow, cardinals, bluebirds.”

  He looked up at her suddenly. Their eyes held. “Kai, don’t do something sad,” he said softly.

  She hadn’t thought about it, and now she did, her little bird feeders and . . . “Oh.” She took another deep breath as her heart tightened, and then she sighed it out. “Well, growly brown bears in the woods, and stars, and stockings, and holly. And—and maybe some birds. I can have some birds if I want them.”

  He took her hands in his gluey, glittery fingers and pulled her between his thighs to kiss her. “I think I got glue in your hair,” he said, when they surfaced. “And you glitter now.”

  She smiled at him, wondering if this was her Christmas miracle—that he still seemed so determined to love her. No matter what.

  Oh, but how could he? It coul
dn’t be as fresh and bright and happy as it had once been, could it? It never could be again.

  She pressed her head down on his shoulder just a moment, drawing strength or belief, and then went to get the cinnamon and allspice.

  It was so easy to start laughing, making Christmas crafts together. It was so easy to have fun. Kurt was insanely good at making them, for one thing, and he made her laugh more and more and tease him as he came up with one thing out of his childhood after another. Why had they never done this before? Well, she supposed because Christmas crafts were the kind of thing a mom typically pulled out to work on with her kids, for one—the grief squeezed and sighed and let her be—and probably Kurt had more than had his fill of Christmas crafts as his mother’s only child. As a couple, they had kept with her own tradition of collecting ornaments wherever they traveled and filling the tree with those. She had saved the crafting sessions for what she thought would be their later, that time in their lives when kids would fill their house.

  That time that had just not been meant to be.

  So now they went all out. They even tried the white feather Christmas trees from his mother’s latest December issue, and when Kai looked up and discovered Kurt concentrating fully on his craft, oblivious to the feather glued to his cheek, a giggle burst out of her, and she clapped her hands over her belly in surprise, not quite sure where it had come from. Once that first giggle had bubbled itself out of her, more came suddenly, like a pot that had finally been brought to boil, and she giggled and giggled, until she felt as effervescent as a glass of champagne. Kurt upended the bag of white feathers over her head in punishment for laughing at him, and then pulled her to him again, kissing her and kissing her, as the feathers drifted off her hair, gliding softly over her cheeks and tickling his hands.

  The scent of cinnamon and cloves filled the house. She made cookies again, while the cinnamon dough was baking in one oven and the glue on the snowflakes was drying, and that added scents of butter and sugar and everything homey. Then she realized it was past lunchtime, and she heated up last night’s soup and then, while she was thinking of it, started a stew in the Dutch oven for that night. Through this flurry of cooking, Kurt chopped onions, carrots, and whatever he was told, looking very happy.