by A. E. Radley
“You’re too loyal for your own good sometimes, you know that?” Mel said to my back.
“I love Karen,” I said without turning around.
“I know you do,” Mel said, her tone softening. “But it’s not the same as with Hope. And it’s never going to be.”
That’s not what I need to hear right now, I thought, but I didn’t say it out-loud. “I guess I’ll see you and Andrew on Tuesday for our training session,” I said over my shoulder, and I trotted down the rest of the stairs before Mel could say anything else.
I didn’t go home right away.
I drove around the sleepy tangle of streets that made up the edge of Mel’s neighborhood, listening to music, then wandered further into the quaint center of downtown Calvin. The city had decorated all the lampposts with Christmas wreaths and tinsel candy canes. Christmas. It was only three weeks away. I’d gotten so wrapped up trying first to convince Hope to stay and then trying to rehab her that I’d lost track of the days.
The Counting Crows came on, and I turned the radio up.
A long December and there’s reason to believe
Maybe this year will be better than the last
I let out a short laugh, because how appropriate. It had been a long December already, and we were only one week in. And yes, anything would be better than what this past year had been.
I can’t remember the last thing that you said as you were leavin’
Now the days go by so fast.
And it’s one more day up in the canyons
And it’s one more night in Hollywood
If you think that I could be forgiven I wish you would
Forgiveness.
Hope had asked why I’d forgiven her, but now I was the one who needed forgiveness. Whose forgiveness did I need more? Karen’s? Hope’s?
I pulled the car over beneath a tinsel-covered lamppost, wiped my hand down my face, let out a heavy sigh while the Crows sang their “na-nuh-na-na” bridge.
My own forgiveness. That was what I needed most.
I turned the radio up further, leaned my head back on the headrest and sang along with Adam Duritz. His sorrow became mine, mine became his.
I guess the winter makes you laugh a little slower,
Makes you talk a little lower about the things you could not show her
And it’s been a long December and there’s reason to believe
Maybe this year will be better than the last
I can’t remember all the times I tried to tell myself
To hold on to these moments as they pass
EARLY DECEMBER, PART 3: “BACK TO BLACK,” AMY WINEHOUSE
HOPE CALDWELL
[ BRIDGE ]
You went back to what you knew
So far removed from all that we went through
And I tread a troubled track
My odds are stacked
I’ll go back to black
It took until Chicago before anyone recognized me. It probably wouldn’t have happened at all if I’d stuck to the hoity-toity airline lounge like I normally did, where I would’ve had relative privacy or at least be surrounded by people who could generally be counted on for politely ignoring the presence of a best-selling artist.
But it was snowing in Chicago, my flight was delayed, and I stood next to the plate glass with my nose to the window, watching the snow drift down in lazy swirls onto the wet tarmac below.
I didn’t even notice the college-aged boy who’d come up behind me until he tapped me on my shoulder.
I started, spinning around. He stood there with floppy brown hair and an equally floppy grin.
Be gracious, I told myself. I pulled Amy Winehouse out of my ears just as she sang
We only said goodbye with words
I died a hundred times
“Uh, hi,” said the boy. “You’re Hope, aren’t you?”
I smiled and nodded. It was the best I could do, given the circumstances.
“I knew it!” He punched a fist into his palm and glanced over his shoulder. I followed his gaze and saw three more college-aged guys standing a few yards off, watching us. The boy nodded vigorously, waved them over.
Great.
I kept the smile pinned to my cheeks.
The other three boys ambled over cautiously, like I was a safari animal they’d found who might spook and run off.
Run. I laughed silently at my private joke. Clearly these boys weren’t acquainted with my recent past; I’d probably never run again.
“Do you mind if we, uh, is it okay if we get some selfies with you?” asked the floppy-haired one.
“Of course,” I said. “But could you do me a favor? Don’t tag me on social media or tag our location for a couple more hours? Otherwise… I just kind of don’t want to get mobbed at the airport, if you don’t mind.”
“Oh,” said the boy in surprise, as if he’d only realized in that moment that I was a human in addition to being a pop star. “Yeah — sure, of course, of course.”
I graced him with an even bigger smile. “You’re sweet,” I said, and gave his bicep a little squeeze through his ski jacket.
His friends had gotten close enough by that point to see the gesture, and one of them nudged the kid next to him, as if to say, “Did you see that? Hope just touched Floppy Hair!”
I spent the next five or six minutes posing with different arrangements of the boys while they traded phones and took photos and selfies. The whole affair was starting to attract the attention of other curious onlookers, who were all trying to figure out what was going on. I wasn’t in an emotional place where I could handle any more attention with proper public figure grace.
“Boys, I have to go,” I said.
“Is your flight boarding?” Floppy Hair asked, looking around in confusion.
“No,” I said. “It’s delayed like everything else. But I’m going to head to the airline lounge to rest.”
“Oh,” said one of his friends, a guy who looked like he was Indian or Pakistani. “Ohhhhhhh,” the guy said again, as if he’d just discovered some key fact he’d missed before. “You have to rest because of your leg? Does it still hurt from being shot?”
That’s one of the strangest things about being famous. People think that they have some sort of intimate knowledge of your life because they read a few blog posts on a few websites. I doubted these young men even listened to my music. And yet they thought they had the right to ask me the most personal of questions.
I forced a smile. “My leg is coming along. But all the tramping around airports today is definitely taking its toll.”
It was more than that. Complex regional pain syndrome was often triggered by emotions. The kiss I’d shared with Julie, rather than the travel, was probably what made my leg ache so badly. It felt like a second heart down there, throbbing in its sorrow.
“We’ll carry your bags,” said an eager third friend. He reached for my carry-on.
“No, no,” I said, scooting the bag out of his way. “It has wheels. I can take it.”
Eager Friend looked disappointed.
“Is it hard being back here?” asked Floppy Hair. “In Chicago? This is where the shooting happened, right? At Wrigley Field,” he added, as if he was answering his own question.
Angela Wright
Bobby Hart
Taylor Redding
LaKeisha Harding
Gregory Wu
The drumbeat of names came on their own accord. This time I couldn’t force the smile to come.
“Yes,” I finally managed. “It’s very hard being here.”
Awkward silence.
“I’m sorry,” said Floppy Hair. “I didn’t mean to… I mean…”
“It’s okay,” I said. “It’s just… it’s been a lot to absorb.”
“Please let us help you with your bags,” said the one who’d been silent up to that point. He gestured for my carry-on. “Please,” he repeated.
“Alright,” I said. “But only as far as the lounge
. Then you guys have to give me some space, okay?”
They all nodded like synchronized cartoon characters, and I found my smile again. I gave them all hugs the way a well-behaved pop star when we got to the airline lounge, then disappeared inside gratefully. Soon enough, I found a leather armchair to sink into, put my earbuds back in, and got back to the business of watching it snow.
You go back to her and I go back to
Black, black, black, black
Black, black, black
I go back to
I go back to
TUESDAY, DECEMBER 20: “LAST CHRISTMAS,” WHAM!
JULIE ARON
[ THIRD VERSE ]
The first sign that something was wrong when I arrived home was the absence of Christmas music. Karen had kept her Christmas playlist on repeat for almost two solid weeks, blasting it so loudly from the living room that Wham!’s “Last Christmas” had practically given me an aneurysm more than once when I walked through the front door.
Last Christmas, I gave you my heart
But the very next day you gave it away
This year, to save me from tears
I’ll give it to someone special
But now as I stepped into the house and dropped my keys in the bowl next to the door, I didn’t hear anything. Not “Last Christmas,” not Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas is You,” not even Justin Bieber’s version of “Drummer Boy.”
The next sign that something was wrong was the way Wilson and Spalding danced up to me. Anxiety filled their big blue husky eyes.
“Hey guys,” I said, bending down to ruffle their ears. “Where’s your other mama, huh?”
Wilson let out a slight whine. Spalding, who’d always been the more skittish of the two, tucked his tail between his legs and backed away.
“Karen?” I called. She should’ve been home by now.
That was when I noticed that it wasn’t just the music that was missing; the fancy Bluetooth speaker Karen had purchased six months earlier to play music from her phone was also gone.
My pulse quickened. Had we been robbed? Was that why the dogs were acting so weird?
“Karen!”
I walked from the living room into the kitchen. Here, too, things were missing. The coffee pot. The blender Karen used to make her morning shakes. The knife set her parents had gotten us last Christmas.
With my hand shaking, I pulled my cell phone from my pocket, dialed Karen. How would she react when she found out we’d been broken into?
I went from one room to the next while the phone rang, mentally tallying all the things that were gone. Even the fancy embroidered hand towels were missing from the bathroom. Karen was going to be so upset; she loved those hand towels.
“Call me when you get this,” I said to Karen’s voicemail. “I think we’ve been robbed.”
I hung up and texted her the same thing.
“They’re only things,” I said to the half-empty house, practicing what I would say to Karen when she finally got my messages and called me back. “It could have been worse. The important thing is that you’re okay, I’m okay, and the dogs are okay.”
I sat down heavily on a footstool in the living room, holding my phone loosely in my hands. Wilson came over to me, pushed his wet nose against my forearm.
“You guys are really crappy guard dogs, you know that?” I told him. Spalding laid down a few feet away, resting his face on his paws and watching me with cautious eyes. I laughed, but it came out sounding a little maniacal. “What happened, somebody offered you guys a fresh bone and you were like, ‘Sure, help yourself to whatever you want’?”
My phone dinged with an incoming text.
No one robbed us,
read Karen’s message.
I left you a note on the kitchen table.
You didn’t find it?
read the second.
Confused, I got up from my spot and walked into the kitchen, picking up the note from under the saltshaker.
Dear Julie, it began, It’s time we both stopped pretending we’re still in love.
The note went on from there, but I could barely comprehend any of it past the first line. She was leaving me, she said, because she needed to be with someone stable, someone ready to act like an adult, not someone bent on chasing one dream after another like a teenager. She was going to Tybee Island for Christmas to be with her family without me, and when she got back, she’d move the rest of her belongings out of the house.
I ran a hand through my hair and tried to read the note again, tried to force the words to make sense, but I could hardly read them through the tears that had filled my eyes. Wilson whined again, and I absentmindedly reached down a hand to scratch him behind the ears.
Karen had left me.
She’d left me.
Zombie-like, I stumbled out of the kitchen and back into the living room, collapsing onto the sofa. The sofa that Karen planned to take as soon as she got back from Tybee Island and finished moving out.
CHRISTMAS DAY: “LET IT GO,” IDINA MENZEL (FROZEN)
I turned down Melody’s offer to have Christmas with her family. Maybe I should’ve known better, maybe I should’ve been more “adult” about it, but I wasn’t in the mood for holiday cheer. Karen had left me five days earlier; Hope had hardly spoken to me since she fled Georgia after Thanksgiving. So I felt very “bah-humbug” about Christmas, very Grinch. I wanted to spend the day with my dogs, wallowing in my half-empty house and drinking by myself.
There was nothing about the day that felt like Christmas. Thanks to climate change, the day was sunny and in the mid-sixties. But cold weather wasn’t the only thing that was missing. It was a Christmas Day defined more by what wasn’t there than by what was. There was no Bluetooth speaker anymore, and because there was no speaker, there was no Christmas music. And because Karen had always been the one to handle holiday decorations, there was no Christmas tree. And with no tree, there were no lazily spinning golden ornaments, no tinsel littering the floor and sticking to socks and shoes, no brightly wrapped presents beneath the tree. There were no wreathes, no Christmas lights, no stockings hanging from the mantel of the fireplace. There was no cheery banter, no talk of going to visit our friends, no discussion of what we should do to ring in the new year.
There was only me. And the dogs. And fortunately, a full six pack in the refrigerator.
“We don’t need Karen to have a merry Christmas, do we, guys?” I said to the dogs. “You know what we can do? We can have a Harry Potter marathon, and she won’t be here to tell us it’s a stupid idea. Or we could watch all the Lord of the Rings movies again — would you like that, Wilson, huh?” He panted happily and wagged his tail. “You always liked Gandalf better than Dumbledore, didn’t you?”
I turned on the television, about to hit the button for Netflix, when it occurred to me that some of my favorite channels might’ve thought up an even better movie marathon than the ones I had in mind. And besides, despite my Grinch attitude, I decided I wouldn’t mind catching one of the holiday movies they always played this time of year. Home Alone, maybe, or Love Actually — but no. Not that one. I didn’t want to watch a romance. But I wouldn’t mind one of the classics. A Christmas Story might make me laugh. It’s a Wonderful Life could be fun.
Yeah, that was it. Maybe if I could get myself to watch It’s a Wonderful Life and have a few beers, I could shake the feeling of wanting to hide from the world. Maybe I could fake a happy tone long enough to call my mother and wish her a merry Christmas without arousing her suspicions. Maybe I’d even call my little brother while I was at it.
I punched in numbers on the remote, trying to remember where to find the major network stations. Zero one one? No, that was local Fox. Zero zero five? I put it in.
I caught the tale end of a toothpaste commercial, then another commercial came on, this one advertising the station’s Christmas line-up. They’d decided on animated Christmas classics — a whole evening of Frosty the Snowman, Rudolph the Red
-Nosed Reindeer, Mickey’s Christmas Carol, How the Grinch Stole Christmas, and finally, late enough that the littlest viewers would be asleep for the scary parts, The Nightmare Before Christmas.
The hard, brittle shell that had settled around my heart since the day I’d come home to find Karen’s note on the kitchen table cracked. Only slightly, but it cracked. I checked the time. Frosty the Snowman would come on in less than half an hour. I could watch whatever else was playing until then.
I fetched a beer from the fridge and cracked it open as I walked back into the living room, just in time to see the words “A Star-Studded Christmas” flashing across the screen and a pan of a smiling, applauding, holiday-festive audience. The camera pan moved from the audience to a stage, which was dimly lit with red and green lights. A drum set and its drummer came into view, then a stylishly scruffy man with a black newsboy cap and a scraggly beard standing behind a keyboard. The camera cut to the front of the stage, and I froze in place in the doorway between kitchen and living room, the beer stopping halfway to my parted lips.
Because there in the center of the stage, perched upon a stool and holding her acoustic guitar, was Hope.
The cheering of the audience died down, and I scurried into the living room, pulling the footstool away from the couch and sitting on its edge a few feet from the screen.
Hope adjusted the microphone, said into it, “When they asked me to be part of ‘A Star-Studded Christmas,’ I said no at first.” She paused, glancing down. “I haven’t performed since the shooting in Chicago.”
The audience clapped — not in a celebratory way, but lightly. Like they were encouraging her with their applause. The camera panned again, showing people nodding and smiling and generally looking sympathetic, then it zoomed in on a middle-aged woman wiping tears from her eyes.
“And on top of that, I just wasn’t in the mood for cheery holiday music. I told the organizers so. But they were persistent, and they promised I didn’t have to choose anything traditional, that I could pick whatever I wanted.” Hope chuckled, a twinkle in her eye. “They also promised I could pick one of the three charities the proceeds for this concert would go to. So I picked an organization that’s trying to get common sense gun laws passed in this country. I hope you — ” Her voice was drowned out by cheers; she waited a few seconds for them to settle again. “I hope you understand. And I hope you like the song I chose for you tonight. This one…” She strummed the guitar absently as she paused, and my mind went back to all the times I heard Hope tell a story on stage, the way she always managed to draw the audience in, no matter how big or how small. “Well, I got stuck in the Chicago airport not long after Thanksgiving, right as that huge blizzard began, and it made me think of this song. It’s been in my head… and in my heart… ever since.”