“One!”
Mags nodded, and pushed with her shoulders away from the house, then Noel pushed her right back—pinning her as much as he was hugging her as much as he was crowding her against the wall.
He kissed her hard.
Mags hooked both arms around the back of his head, pressing their faces together, their chins and open mouths.
Noel held on to both of her shoulders.
After a few minutes—maybe more than a few minutes, after awhile—they both seemed to trust the other not to go.
They eased up.
Mags petted Noel’s curls, pushing them out of his face. Noel pinned her to the wall from his hips to his shoulders, kissing her to the rhythm of whatever song was playing inside now.
When he pulled away, she was going to tell him that she loved him; when he pulled away, she was going to tell him not to let go. “Don’t,” Mags said, when Noel finally lifted his head.
“Mags,” he whispered. “My lips are going numb.”
“Then don’t kiss,” she said. “But don’t go.”
“No…” Noel pushed away from her, and her whole front went cold. “My lips are going numb—were you eating strawberries?”
“Oh, God,” she said. “Chex mix.”
“Chex mix?”
“Cashews,” she said. “And probably other tree nuts.”
“Ah,” Noel said.
Mags was already dragging him away from the wall. “Do you have something with you?”
“Benadryl,” he said. “In my car. But it makes me sleepy. I’m probably fine.”
“Where are your keys?”
“In my pocket,” he said, pointing at her, at his jacket. His tongue sounded thick.
Mags found the keys and kept pulling him. His car was parked on the street, and the Benadryl was in the glove compartment. Mags watched Noel take it, then stood with her arms folded, waiting for whatever came next.
“Can you breathe?” she asked.
“I can breathe.”
“What usually happens?”
He grinned. “This has never happened before.”
“You know what I mean.”
“My mouth tingles. My tongue and lips swell up. I get hives. Do you want to check me for hives?” Wolfish.
“Then what?” she asked.
“Then nothing,” he said. “Then I take Benadryl. I have an EpiPen, but I’ve never had to use it.”
“I’m going to check you for hives,” she said.
He grinned again and held out his arms. She looked at them. She lifted up his striped T-shirt.… He was pale. And covered in goose bumps. And there were freckles she’d never known about on his chest.
“I don’t think you have hives,” she said.
“I can feel the Benadryl working already.” He dropped his arms and put them around her.
“Don’t kiss me again,” Mags said.
“Immediately,” Noel said. “I won’t kiss you again immediately.”
She leaned into him, her temple on his chin, and closed her eyes.
“I knew you’d save my life,” he said.
“I wouldn’t have had to save it if I didn’t almost kill you.”
“Don’t give yourself too much credit. It’s the tree nuts who are trying to kill me.”
She nodded.
They were both quiet for a few minutes.
“Noel?”
“Yeah?”
She had to ask him this—she had to make herself ask it: “Are you just being melodramatic?”
“Mags, I promise. I wouldn’t fake an allergic response.”
“No,” she said. “With the kiss.”
“There was more than one kiss.…”
“With all of them,” she said. “Were you just—embellishing?”
Mags braced for him to say something silly.
“No,” Noel said. Then, “Were you just humoring me?
“God. No,” she said. “Did it feel like I was humoring you?”
Noel shook his head, rubbing his chin into her temple.
“What are we doing?” Mags asked.
“I don’t know.…” he said eventually. “I know things have to change, but … I can’t lose you. I don’t think I get another one like you.”
“I’m not going anywhere, Noel.”
“You are,” he said, squeezing her. “And it’s okay. Just … I need you to take me with you.”
Mags didn’t know what to say to that.
It was cold. Noel was shivering. She should give him his jacket.
“Mags?”
“Yeah?”
“What do you need?”
Mags swallowed.
In the three years she and Noel had been friends, she’d spent a lot of time pretending she didn’t need anything more than what he was already giving her. She’d told herself there was a difference between wanting something and needing it.…
“I need you to be my person,” Mags said. “I need to see you. And hear you. I need you to stay alive. And I need you to stop kissing other people just because they’re standing next to you when the ball drops.”
Noel laughed.
“I also need you not to laugh at me,” she said.
He pulled his face back and looked at her. “No, you don’t.”
She kissed his chin without opening her mouth.
“You can have all those things,” he said carefully. “You can have me, Mags, if you want me.”
“I’ve always wanted you,” she said, mortified by the extent to which it was true.
Noel leaned in to kiss her, and she dropped her forehead against his lips.
They were quiet.
And it was cold.
“Happy anniversary, Mags.”
“Happy New Year, Noel.”
Someone is in the garden.
“Daniel,” Miranda says. “It’s Santa Claus. He’s looking in the window.”
“No, it’s not,” Daniel says. He doesn’t look. “We’ve already had the presents. Besides. No such thing as Santa.”
They are together under the tree, the celebrated Honeywell Christmas tree. They are both eleven years old. There’s just enough space up against the trunk to sit cross-legged. Daniel is running the train set around the tree forwards, then backwards, then forwards again. Miranda is admiring her best present, a pair of gold-handled scissors shaped like a crane. The beak is the blade. Snip, snip, she slices brittle needles one by one off the branch above her. A smell of pine. A small green needle rain.
It must be very cold outside in the garden. The window shines with frost. It’s long past bedtime. If it isn’t Santa Claus, it could be a burglar come to steal someone’s jewels. Or an axe murderer.
Or else, of course, it’s one of Daniel’s hundreds of uncles or cousins. Because there isn’t a beard, and the face in the window isn’t a jolly face. Even partially obscured by darkness and frost, it has that Honeywell look to it. The room is full of adult Honeywells talking about the things that Honeywells always talk about, which is to say everything, horses and houses and God and grouting, tanning salons and—of course—theater. Always theater. Honeywells like to talk. When Honeywells have no lines to speak, they improvise. All the world’s a stage.
Rare to see a Honeywell in isolation. They come bunched like bananas. Not single spies, but in battalions. And as much as Miranda admires the red-gold Honeywell hair, the exaggerated, expressive Honeywell good looks, the Honeywell repertoire of jokes and confidences, poetry and nonsense, sometimes she needs an escape. Honeywells want you to talk, too. They ask questions until your mouth gets dry from answering.
Daniel is exceptionally restful for a Honeywell. He doesn’t care if you are there or not.
Miranda wriggles out from under the tree, through the press of leggy Honeywells in black tie and party dresses: apocalyptically orange taffeta, slithering, clingy satins in canary and violet, foamy white silk already spotted with wine.
She is patted on the head, winked at. Someone in cloth of gold sa
ys, “Poor little lamb.”
“Baaaah humbug,” Miranda blurts, beats on. Her own dress is green, fine-wale corduroy. Empire waist. Pinching at the armpits. Miranda’s interest in these things is half professional. Her mother, Joannie (resident the last six months in a Phuket jail, will be there for many years to come), was Elspeth Honeywell’s dresser and confidante.
Daniel is Elspeth’s son. Miranda is Elspeth’s goddaughter.
* * *
There are two men languorously kissing in the kitchen. Leaning against the sink, where one of the new Honeywell kittens licks sauce out of a gravy boat. A girl—only a few years older than Miranda—lays soiled and tattered Tarot cards out on the farmhouse table. Empty wine bottles tilt like cannons; a butcher knife sheathed in a demolished Christmas cake. Warmth seeps from the stove: just inside the Aga’s warming drawer, Miranda can see the other kittens, asleep in a crusted pan.
Miranda picks up a bag of party trash, lipstick-blotted napkins, throwaway champagne glasses, greasy fragments of pastry, hauls it out through the kitchen door. Mama cat slips inside as Miranda goes out.
Snow is falling. Big, sticky clumps that melt on her hair, her cheeks. Snow on Christmas. None in Phuket, of course. She wonders what they give you to eat on Christmas Day in a Thai prison. Her mother always makes the Christmas cake. Miranda helps roll out the marzipan in sheets. Her ballet flats skid on the grass.
She ties the bag, leaves it against the steps. And here is the man in the garden, still standing before the window, looking in.
He must hear Miranda. Surely he hears her. Her feet upon the frozen grass. But he doesn’t turn around.
Even seen from the back, he is recognizably a Honeywell. Lanky, yellow-haired; perfectly still, he is somehow perfectly still, perfectly posed to catch the eye. Unnaturally natural. The snow that is making Miranda’s nose run, her cheeks blotchy with cold, rests unmelted upon the bright Honeywell hair, the shoulders of the surprising coat.
Typical Honeywell behavior, Miranda thinks. A lovers’ quarrel, or else he’s taken offense at something someone said, and is now going to sulk himself handsomely to death in the cold. Her mother has been quite clear about how to behave when a Honeywell is being dramatic when drama isn’t required. Firmness is the key.
At this last thought of her mother, Miranda has some dramatic feelings of her own. She focuses on the coat, sends the feelings away. It is quite a coat. A costume? Pilfered from some production. Eighteenth century. Beautifully cut. Not a frock coat. A justacorps. Rose damask. Embroidered all over with white silk thread, poppies and roses, and there, where it flares out over the hips, a staghorn beetle on a green leaf. She has come nearer and nearer, cannot stop herself from reaching out to touch the beetle.
She almost expects her hand to pass right through. (Surely there are ghosts at Honeywell Hall.) But it doesn’t. The coat is real. Miranda pinches the damask between her fingers. Says, “Whatever it is that happened, it isn’t worth freezing to death over. You shouldn’t be out here. You should come inside.”
The Honeywell in the justacorps turns around then. “I am exactly where I am supposed to be,” he says. “Which is here. Doing precisely what I am supposed to be doing. Which does not include having conversations with little girls. Go away, little girl.”
Little girl she may be, but Miranda is well armored already against the Honeywell arsenal of tantrums, tempests, ups, downs, charm, strange.
Above the wide right pocket of the justacorps is a fox stitched in red and gold, its foreleg caught in a trap.
“I’m Miranda,” she says. And then, because she’s picked up a Honeywell trick or two herself, she says, “My mother’s in jail.”
The Honeywell looks almost sympathetic for the briefest of moments, then shrugs. Theatrically, of course. Sticks his hands in his pockets. “What’s that got to do with me?”
“Everyone’s got problems, that’s all,” Miranda says. “I’m here because Elspeth feels sorry for me. I hate when people feel sorry for me. And I don’t feel sorry for you. I don’t know you. I just don’t think it’s very smart, standing out here because you’re in a mood. But maybe you aren’t very smart. My mother says good-looking people often don’t bother. What’s your name?”
“If I tell you, will you go away?” the Honeywell says.
“Yes,” Miranda says. She can go in the kitchen and play with the kittens. Do the dishes and be useful. Have her fortune told. Sit under the tree again with Daniel until it’s well past time to go to sleep. Tomorrow she’ll be sent away home on a bus. By next year Elspeth will have most likely forgotten she has a goddaughter.
“I’m Fenny,” the Honeywell says. “Now go away. I have things to not do, and not a lot of time to not do them in.”
“Well,” Miranda says. She pats Fenny on the broad cuff of the sleeve of his lovely coat. She wonders what the lining is. How cold he must be. How stupid he is, standing out here when he is welcome inside. “Merry Christmas. Good night.”
She reaches out one last time, touches the embroidered fox, its leg caught in the trap. Stem stitch and seed stitch and herringbone. “It’s very fine work, truly,” she says. “But I hope he gets free.”
“He was stupid to get caught,” Fenny says, “you peculiar and annoying child.” He is already turning back to the window. What does he see through it? When Miranda is finally back inside the drawing room where tipsy Honeywells are all roaring out inappropriate lyrics to carols, pulling Christmas crackers, putting on paper crowns, she looks through the window. The snow has stopped. No one is there.
* * *
But Elspeth Honeywell, as it happens, remembers Miranda the next year and the year and the year after that. There are presents for Miranda under the magnificent tree. A ticket to a London musical that she never sees. A makeup kit when she is thirteen.
The year she is fourteen, Daniel gives her a chess set and a box of assorted skeins of silk thread. Under her black tights, Miranda wears a red braided leather anklet that came in an envelope, no letter, from Phuket. The kittens are all grown up and pretend not to know her.
The year she is twelve, she looks for the mysterious Fenny. He isn’t there. When she asks, no one knows who she means.
The year she is thirteen, she has champagne for the first time.
The Christmas she is fourteen, she feels quite grown up. The man in the justacorps was a dream, or some story she made up for herself in order to feel interesting. At fourteen she’s outgrown fairytales, Santa Claus, ghost stories. When Daniel points out that they are standing under the mistletoe, she kisses him once on each cheek. And then sticks her tongue in his ear.
* * *
It snows again the Christmas she is fifteen. Snow is predicted, snow falls. Something about the chance of snow makes her think of him again. The man in the snowy garden. There is no man in the garden, of course; there never was. But there is Honeywell Hall, which is enough—and seemingly endless heaps of Honeywell adults behaving as if they were children again.
It’s exhausting, almost Olympic, the amount of fun Honeywells seem to require. She can’t decide if it’s awful or if it’s wonderful.
Late in the afternoon the Honeywells are playing charades. No fun, playing with people who do this professionally. Miranda stands at the window, watching the snow fall, looking for something. Birds. A fox. A man in the garden.
A Honeywell shouts, “Good god, no! Cleopatra came rolled up in a carpet, not in the Sunday supplement!”
Daniel is up in his room, talking to his father on Skype.
Miranda moves from window to window, pretending she is not looking for anything in particular. Far down the grounds, she sees something out of place. Someone. She’s out the door in a flash.
“Going for a walk!” she yells while the door is swinging closed. In case anyone cares.
She finds the man navigating along the top of the old perimeter wall, stepping stone to stone. Fenny. He knocks a stick against each stone as he goes.
“You,” he say
s. “I wondered if I’d see you again.”
“Miranda,” she says. “I bet you forgot.”
“No,” he says. “I didn’t. Want to come up?”
He holds out his hand. She hesitates, and he says, “Suit yourself.”
“I can get up by myself,” she says, and does. She’s in front of him now. Walks backwards so that she can keep an eye on him.
“You’re not a Honeywell,” he says.
“No,” she says. “You are.”
“Yes,” he says. “Sort of.”
She stops then, so that he has to stop, too. It isn’t like they could keep on going anyway. There’s a gap in the wall just behind her.
“I remember when they built this wall,” he says.
She’s probably misheard him. Or else he’s teasing her. She says, “You must be very old.”
“Older than you anyway,” he says. He sits down on the wall, so she sits down, too. Honeywell Hall is in front of them. There’s a copse of woods behind. Snow falls lazily, a bit of wind swirling it, tossing it up again.
“Why do you always wear that coat?” Miranda says. She fidgets a little. Her bum is getting cold. “You shouldn’t sit on a dirty wall. It’s too nice.” She touches the embroidered beetle, the fox.
“Someone very … special gave it to me,” he says. “I wear it always because it is her wish that I do so.” The way he says it makes Miranda shiver just a little.
“Right,” she says. “Like my anklet. My mother sent it to me. She’s in prison. She’ll never get out. She’ll be there until she dies.”
“Like the fox,” he says.
“Like your fox,” Miranda says. She’s horrified to find that her eyes are watering. Is she crying? It isn’t even a real fox. She doesn’t want to look at the man in the coat, Fenny, to see if he’s noticed, so she jumps down off the wall and begins to walk back toward the house.
When she’s halfway to the Hall, the drifting snow stops. She looks back; no one sits on the wall.
* * *
The snow stops and starts, on and off all day long. When dinner is finished, Honeywells groaning, clutching their bellies, Elspeth has something for Miranda.
My True Love Gave To Me: Twelve Holiday Stories Page 3