Christmas Under the Stars

by Karen Swan

  There hadn’t been that same eureka moment for Meg’s sister and her best friend. There had never been a bonding adventure or gradual understanding between them; if anything, they became more polarized as the years wore on, and when Meg had asked them both to be her bridesmaids, they had disagreed on everything from the colour of their dresses (Lucy liked lilac; Ronnie preferred navy or black), to how to celebrate Meg’s bachelorette party (Lucy wanted strippers; Ronnie an expensive spa weekend at Chateau Louise), with the relationship hitting an even further low when Ronnie had had to miss it anyway on account of an emergency at the hospital. Meg could only wonder how they would have got on today if Mitch hadn’t died, if this had been their wedding day after all, and it made her feel worse than ever to see them being nice to each other today.

  ‘Do you need me?’ Meg asked flatly.

  ‘No, no, I was just checking up on you. Thought you might need this.’ Lucy held up the jacket hanging limply in her hands. ‘I hadn’t seen you for a bit and got a little worried. I didn’t realize you were having a sisterly chat.’ She looked hesitant. ‘But . . . I should go, I’ll leave you to talk—’

  ‘It’s fine,’ Meg murmured. ‘Isn’t it, Ron?’

  ‘Sure, we just wanted to catch some air. It’s getting stuffy in there. You’ve . . . you’ve done a fantastic job getting this organized.’

  ‘I wanted to do it. He was my friend too,’ Lucy said with rare understatement, even though she’d been run off her feet all day, preparing the food and getting everything ready for the reception, as well as having to man the usual front-of-house duties that came with keeping a hotel full of guests happy. Her father had left them when Lucy was sixteen, the same year she’d met Meg – following a divorcee guest back to Minnesota – leaving her and her mother to run the oldest hotel in town: sixty-four rooms, one hundred and forty-eight covers for breakfast and dinner each day, all year round, even over Christmas; skiers and boarders were replaced with hikers and bikers in the summer months.

  Meg glanced across at her friend, hearing the protectiveness in Lucy’s voice and loving her for it. Though they had had a slow start, what Tuck had said in there was true – their foursome had become as tight as a knot. ‘What do you miss most about him?’

  Lucy was silent for a few moments, her eyes too following the eagle in the sky. ‘His laugh, weirdly. I mean, it’s not like he was the biggest laugher.’

  ‘No,’ Meg agreed. Mitch’s sense of humour had been dry and understated, and he preferred to be the one making people laugh, than doing the laughing himself. Meg had always thought it was a control thing – choosing to observe rather than partake, something she had put down to his mother dying when he was barely five and him losing trust in the world; but Lucy used to quip that it was a necessary result of his friendship with Tuck, who was always laughing, always at the centre of things. ‘The town couldn’t support two jokers,’ she’d mutter.

  ‘You?’

  Meg felt her bones set at the question. How could she reduce her loss – him – down to one thing?

  ‘His hands.’ She looked at her own – petite and pale – as she said it. His had been the exact opposite: large and brown (even in the winter) from a life spent outdoors, always warm, the skin calloused and hard, the nails square and uncomfortably short. They had been hands that did things: grabbed rock overhangs on Sunday-morning climbs out back in the gullies, cut and planed the snowboards that were beginning to attract wide attention and big money; chopped the logs, built the cabin, tiled the roof, dug people to safety, held her at night . . . Those hands had shaped her world and now they were still and pale and cold.

  They were all quiet together, watching the wind skim the mountaintops, the snow itself skiing off the cliffs and curling up into the sky in gossamer sheets. Was he up there – out there – somewhere?

  ‘Well, it’s too cold out here for me. I think I’ll go and warm up inside,’ Ronnie said after a while as the silence lengthened, and Meg knew her sister felt as though she was intruding.

  ‘Sure, we’ll come and find you in a bit,’ Lucy said, straightening up with a cheery smile, the chilly breeze lifting her fringe and parting her coat.

  ‘Oh, Lucy, I’m sorry, I didn’t know!’ Ronnie exclaimed suddenly. ‘Congratulations. When are you due?’

  Lucy’s mouth parted in surprise, her face frozen in horror. ‘I . . .’

  There was a stunned silence, eyes sliding from one to the other like skaters on the ice as Ronnie realized her slip-up too late. ‘Sorry, I . . .’ She bit her lip. ‘I’ll just go inside.’

  Lucy watched her go, the background hum of conversation peaking sharply and then becoming muffled again as the door opened and closed behind her.

  ‘You’re pregnant?’ Meg asked, her voice quiet, her eyes on the barely noticeable swell of her friend’s belly as she felt the earth shift beneath her feet, the winds whip, the temperatures plunge. She felt as though she was falling, plummeting through a crevasse, away from the light. But when she blinked again, nothing had changed – and yet everything had.

  ‘Meg—’ Lucy said, her voice a croak. ‘I wanted to . . . I didn’t think—’ Her shoulders slumped. ‘I’m so sorry.’

  ‘Why are you sorry?’

  ‘Because it’s not the right time.’ Lucy stared at her, her eyes swimming with regret. ‘It wasn’t planned, you have to believe me.’

  ‘Lucy, you don’t need to explain yourself to me.’

  ‘But I feel so guilty.’

  ‘Why? Because something good has happened in your life when something bad has happened in mine? That’s crazy.’

  Lucy lowered her eyes. ‘Say you forgive me.’

  ‘You don’t need me to forgive you. There’s nothing to forgive. I’m . . . I’m so pleased for you both. Come here.’ Meg held her arms out and Lucy walked into her embrace. Meg hoped Lucy couldn’t feel her shaking through the depths of her parka; she hoped her expression was backing up her words.

  ‘How are you feeling?’

  ‘Wiped out. And sick as the proverbial dog. Three times this morning.’

  Meg tried to smile sympathetically. Just tried to smile. ‘Oh, my God,’ she mumbled. ‘Tuck’s going to be a father. What did he say?’ She closed her eyes; just saying his name made her blood burn.

  Lucy shook her head. ‘He doesn’t know yet. I only just found out myself . . .’ Her voice trailed away. ‘And anyway, he’s been too upset. It’s not the right time.’

  Meg frowned. ‘But how many weeks are you?’ She looked down, taking another look at Lucy’s small bump. There wasn’t much to see, if anything. Meg probably would have mistaken it for a little extra weight herself, but she supposed Ronnie had a sharp eye as well as a professional one; nothing ever got past her.

  ‘Five weeks.’

  ‘Five weeks!’ What did her sister have – X-ray vision?

  ‘Part of me thinks it’s the best thing I could do, telling him – it would give him something positive to focus on. The other part’s frightened he’ll hate the baby.’

  ‘Why would he do that?’

  ‘For making him feel guilty for being happy, when he feels he should be sad.’ She looked away again, swallowing hard. ‘The timing’s wrong. Everything’s wrong, Meg.’

  Meg put her hands on Lucy’s shoulders and tried to summon a conviction she meant in theory but couldn’t yet feel. ‘No. It makes everything right. Tuck just stood up in front of all those people and told them we have to find a way to move on.’ She took a steadying breath, trying to believe what she was saying. ‘What could be more wonderful than this? Mitch would have been so delighted if he’d known. This is exactly what he’d want for you guys.’

  Lucy stared back at her friend, her brown doe-eyes shining, her head shaking from side to side. ‘It’s too soon.’

  Meg took another deep breath, like a swimmer in an underwater cave, breathing in an air pocket, trying to survive the waves. ‘No. This is exactly what we need. You, Tuck, me – all of us. It’s the firs
t step on our new path. It’s how we find the courage to move forwards.’

  Lucy rolled her lips together, the tears sliding down her cheeks. Meg wasn’t sure she’d ever seen her friend cry before. ‘You really think so?’

  ‘I know so,’ Meg lied, gathering her into her arms again and feeling a single tear sliding down her cheek, Lucy sobbing into her shoulder. ‘That baby’s going to keep on growing and our world’s going to keep on spinning, Lucy – whether we like it or not.’

  Chapter Seven

  Thursday 27 April 2017

  Badger’s ears drooped, watching from his spot on the front seat as she unlocked the padlock and pushed back the corrugated doors. He knew exactly where they were. He knew what it meant when she reversed the blue snowmobile out of the small concrete lock-up (Martin Hughes had had it towed down from the cabin and repaired for her whilst she’d been staying with Lucy and Tuck). He knew just where they were going.

  Meg jumped back into the truck beside him and slowly drove it into the narrow parking space where the snowmobile had been. She pulled up on the handbrake with a tug and glanced down at him as she released the keys from the ignition.

  ‘Hey, don’t be so sad,’ she said placidly, ruffling the top of his head. ‘Come on.’

  Badger whined and lay down in the seat, his muzzle between his front paws, the cast over the broken one now grubby and worn. Meg tutted impatiently and jumped down, loading the shopping from the truck into the sled attached to the back of the snowmobile. Moving fast, moving a lot, worked best. It didn’t do to think too much – that led to feeling, and burying her fiancé on their wedding day had been a horror she could barely stay conscious for.

  It had taken its toll: she had dropped a ton of weight in the intervening weeks and her hair felt thinner when she brushed it; her eyes seemed to protrude from her face like globes; her lips were bloodless and thin. When she stood, very often her head buzzed and her vision pixelated, and voices sounded muffled and far away as though she was listening through walls.

  That evening with Lucy on the deck nearly four weeks ago hadn’t proved to be the turning point she’d hoped it would be. Learning about the baby as she watched the sun set on what was supposed to have been the greatest day of her life . . . she felt entombed, buried in emotions too dark and heavy to share. She wanted to feel happy for her friend but something in her couldn’t quite reach that shore. No matter what she’d said to the contrary, it was too soon.

  Not that there was any celebrating going on. Tuck still didn’t know he was going to be a father – Lucy dithering and looking fretful every time Meg brought it up – and of course, he hadn’t noticed that his wife was pale and puffy, alternately off her food or bingeing, and most conspicuously of all, not drinking. Most of the time he was too drunk to stand, the other times coming in so late, they’d already gone to bed. Several times Meg had been woken by what she’d thought was the sound of him crashing into the furniture in the room beside hers, his voice slurred and raised, Lucy shushing him desperately to keep the noise down.

  Evening after evening, Lucy and Meg had made a sorry sight trying to eat their dinner, Tuck’s chair empty, Meg struggling to swallow the food down, Lucy battling the severe nausea that was getting harder and harder to hide. But Tuck was never around to see it, sleeping late in the mornings, out all day, and the days slipped past, Lucy getting gradually bigger, Meg getting thinner and Tuck getting drunker.

  Meg was convinced the three of them living together was toxic, her grief cancelling out their possibilities for happiness – how could they laugh when she couldn’t even cry? – her presence fuelling their guilt. (Tuck had stopped trying to make eye contact with her since the funeral.) But Barbara – keeping an eye on them all from the hotel across the yard – was adamant Meg couldn’t return to the cabin until she’d proved she was capable of looking after herself.

  So Meg tried harder to hide her grief than Tuck, knowing everyone was watching her, waiting for signs that she was starting to ‘get over it’ and beginning to move on. She began faking it – the smiles, the conversation, the appetite. She had gone back to work almost immediately after the funeral, perfectly aware that Dolores was reporting her every move to Barbara; she stayed out in the workshop at the back, away from Joe Public, who didn’t realize she was the walking wounded, her head bent over the skis as she adjusted the bindings with her box of tools. Occasionally, when they were really busy and it was unavoidable, she’d come out and wordlessly measure toddlers for ski heights and fit them for helmets, but several times she’d caught them watching her – big-eyed and still as she adjusted their chin straps – somehow knowing, sensing she was incomplete now.

  Once in a while, the fakery had been interrupted with moments of genuine feeling – Dolores made her laugh till she almost cried when she accidentally put salt instead of sugar in her coffee and pulled a face of such shock and horror, Meg could now summon the image at will; a couple of times she had felt hungry from her long days at the shop and went for pancakes with Dolores at Melissa’s Missteak after they locked up; she could sometimes sleep without dreaming, wake without gasping. Every tiny, incremental milestone felt epic.

  Until she had woken up today and known it was time to move back to the cabin. Lucy had known it too – from the way Meg stood at the door, the very look in her eyes, the way she cleared her plate of food at breakfast and brushed her hair.

  ‘Are you coming?’ she asked now, holding open the truck door.

  Badger sat up and whined again. Meg sighed and gathered her arms around him, lifting him gently to the floor and watching as he trotted out of the garage in his strange hobbling gait. Then she locked up, the padlock hanging heavily on the chain, and lifting him onto the saddle in front of her own seat, threw her leg over the snowmobile and strapped them both in.

  Helmet on, the engine started first time, and she sat very still for a moment as the what-ifs of that night ran through her mind again. What if the starter motor hadn’t broken? What if she’d let Mitch fix it in the blizzard after all? What if Mitch had been able to take it out in the storm? Might he have crossed the couloir before the snow slipped, taken a different route altogether?

  She let the questions reverberate through her, knowing they wouldn’t be denied anyway, before revving the throttle and leaving them scattered in her wake like toppled skittles in the snow as she sped away, too fast to catch.

  She cut a line across the meadow, her tracks sharp and clean, heading straight for the innocuous, narrow pass between the trees where the steep incline up the mountain began, which she and Mitch always used as the private access to the cabin. There was that same familiar rush she always experienced as the snowmobile covered the ground quickly, eating up the hectares, the wind pinking her cheeks.

  In the forest, sound altered as the view changed from clear sky to powdered trees. The throaty thrum of the engine was dampened, the slicing of snow clear to her ear as she turned a sharp left by the pylon, doubling the power for the short steep drag by the escarpment that could be icy on skis.

  She glanced down at Badger, his ears flying back, eyes closed, comforted by the feel of her arms around him on the handlebars. He was more anxious about coming home than she was. He had none of the defiance that had driven her this past week, the burst of anger that was suddenly propelling her back to her own life and up this mountainside, as though by staring down the horrors that had claimed them she could somehow change them. He didn’t have that to sustain him; he just missed his master, plain and simple.

  Meg revved the throttle harder, feeling the gradient pitch up. She saw an elk in the distance, head nodding beneath the weight of its palmate antlers as it slowly picked a route along a narrow ridge, the tiny-footed tracks of hoary marmots criss-crossing a lattice in the thinning snow outside a cluster of rocks; red-hooded pine grosbeaks perched on fanned branches, sending down showers of snowflakes as they took flight with a flurry of wing flaps, ground squirrels scampering up and down trunks, fir cones safely c
lamped between their jaws.

  And then quite suddenly, too soon, they were there, the snowmobile swinging round the pine tree with their initials carved in the base and which heralded the small clearing of their land.

  Meg’s hands flew off the handlebars, stalling the vehicle and sending her and Badger lurching forwards, her heart rate rocketing as she took in the tiny space she called home, robbed of speech at the very sight of it – not because she was assailed by the memories of the storm or of the years she and Mitch had spent there, but because of the years they hadn’t – and now wouldn’t.

  The cabin was bedecked in flowers, the roof a carpet of roses, wreaths of berries and lisianthus at the window frames and door, garlands of buds twisted round the porch struts and the balustrades – and every single one of them dead, the once-bright colours bleached into powdery pigments as though an ash cloud had sieved itself over the plot.

  Meg let out a cry, her fingers stumbling to release the seat belts, her knees buckling as she tried to stand, to walk towards the hut. Badger whined, jumping down awkwardly after her, trying to fathom the changes to his home.

  Meg sank into the snow, panting as though she’d run up the mountain, her body trying to help her brain work harder to understand, dredging a vague memory of a promise of a surprise, Mitch teasing her – knowing full well she couldn’t bear them keeping secrets from each other, even good ones – saying he’d got something planned for when they came back from honeymoon.

  Honeymoon.

  The very word was a shock, another jolt of remembrance. They were supposed to have gone boarding in Vail for a week but it hadn’t once entered her head in all this time, unable to get past the wedding day itself. Had . . . had someone cancelled it for them? Barbara or Lucy or Ronnie? Or had everyone been too stunned, too busy organizing the funeral and it had slipped through, forgotten, the hotel baffled by their newlyweds’ no-show and the unreturned calls to the cabin?