Magic of Winter

by Martina Boone

  “No, our house,” she said, “and I’ve absolutely no idea.” She climbed out of the Land Rover the moment Brice had pulled it to a stop, and she hurried down the path and threw the front door open. Elspeth and Kirsty Greer met her as she stepped into the hall.

  “I’m sorry,” Elspeth said, sounding a little out of breath. “We were meant to have been done and gone already, but there was more to do than we’d thought, and I’ve had trouble remembering where Morag kept everything.” Her short graying hair was tied back with a kerchief, and she wore an old fisherman’s sweater over jeans that she’d rolled up at the bottom. Added to a smudge of dust on the side of her nose, the outfit made her look entirely unlike herself.

  Cait shook her head. “What do you mean where my mother kept things?” she asked as her father and Brice came through the door behind her. “What things?”

  But her father pushed past her and continued through into the sitting room and something gave a dull thud and then rolled across the floor with a clatter. Cait hurried after him and came through the doorway to see him stopped dead a few feet into the room, staring at a live Christmas tree that Brando’s Emma, Anna MacGregor, and little Moira were busy decorating. Moira held the empty hook of one of the little gold balls that Cait’s mother had hand-painted with holly leaves and the ornament itself lay on the wide deep red tree skirt that Cait’s grandmother Stewart had hand embroidered, a few feet away where it had rolled when Moira dropped it.

  “What the devil d’you think you’re doing?” Donald shouted, glaring at Moira and the rest of them. “Who gave you permission to touch any of this?”

  Cait ran the few steps to Moira and squeezed her shoulders, letting her know it was all right. “It’s fine—clearly they’re trying to give us a lovely Christmas,” she said. “They’re neighbors trying to help.”

  But it wasn’t only the tree that they had come to put up. The emptiness of the sitting room around her was gone as well. The things of her mother’s that Brice had carted up to the attic on her father’s instructions had all been brought back down again to fill the voids they had left behind: the photographs on the mantel, the painting of Santorini on the wall, the collection of her mother’s porcelain figurines, the chess set.

  Anna MacGregor, her expression fierce beneath her dark long curls, came and looped her arm through Moira’s elbow, glaring at Cait’s father like a cat ready to protect her kittens. Moira, wide-eyed, shifted to stand closer beside her, and with Anna there, Cait moved to placate her father instead.

  “It all looks wonderful—” she started to say as she approached him, but he rapped the edge of the little table with his cane and then pointed it at her.

  “Is this why you wanted me out of the house?” he demanded. “You and Brice and the rest of them cooked this up behind my back?” His face was the sort of mottled red that used to go along with a voice that had seemed, when Cait was younger, loud enough to shake the house. He was a little quieter now, but his anger was just as deep.

  “I didn’t know. I promise you I didn’t,” Cait said. She caught his arm, pleading with her eyes. “It’s very kind of them to go to all this trouble, though, isn’t it? They were all trying to give us a lovely Christmas.”

  “If I’d wanted any sort of Christmas, I would have done one myself. This isn’t kind,”—he looked straight at Elspeth Murray who stood behind him in the doorway—“it’s meddling. It’s judging. This will be all around the glen by morning, everyone knowing poor, old Donald Fletcher can’t bear looking at anything that used to belong to his wife. Well, I won’t have it.” He let his glare sweep the room, until it fixed on Brice again. “You,” he said. “You’re the one who put them up to it, didn’t you? Did you think this would get you into my good graces? Or is it Cait’s blessing you’re still after? Should have known you’d never change. You always did have to be the one to win the fight. No matter who got hurt.”

  Cait grabbed both her father’s forearms. “Stop. Stop it now, before you say anything you’ll regret.”

  “Why should I regret a bloody thing?” He wrenched away from her and lost his balance so that he had to take a quick step to keep from stumbling, and the effort only made him angrier still. “My only shame is that I let you come back here again.” He poked her in the chest with his index finger. “Let you take up with him all over again. Don’t you see? It doesn’t matter how much money he throws around, how many houses he builds, how many posh meals he serves up. His father was a drunk who used his fists to show everyone how important he thought himself. Brice is no different. He doesn’t give a thought to how anyone feels, and when you’re with him, you’re no better. You used to be a good girl before you met him. Prickly, aye, but helpful, too, and mindful of how you were raised. Now look at you. Well, I’m tired to death of it. Weren’t for your mother coddling you, you’d have had to pick sides a long time ago, and I’m telling you right now to make a choice. You want to stay in this house, you stay away from him. If you go, stay gone. You leave this house tonight, you’ll never set foot in it again, and that’s a promise.”

  A hot flood of words bottled up inside Cait, ready to throw at him. She wanted to tell him he was wrong, and selfish, and . . . and mean. But he stood in front of her, shaking, leaning on his cane with both hands as if he needed them both to keep from collapsing. He wouldn’t hear a thing she said to him right now anyway, she knew too well to believe otherwise, and if she said even a fraction of what she was thinking, he really would kick her out of the house. Then who would be there to look after him?

  No one. Apart from Brice, he’d managed to chase the whole village away after he’d broken his ankle, and now they’d come back and he’d done the same and worse.

  Turning to Brice and Elspeth, she silently mouthed, “I am so sorry,” then she took her father’s elbow and steered him toward the stairs. On the upstairs landing, Brando and Angus Greer and Connal MacGregor had come out of Donald’s bedroom and stood quietly looking down at the commotion.

  Cait mouthed, “I’m sorry,” up at them, too.

  Her father wrenched away from her and shook his cane at Brando. “What were you doing in there?”

  Brando glanced at Brice and ran a hand through his chin length hair, but it was Connal MacGregor with his jaw set and his famous blue eyes narrowed, who stepped forward and answered him, and it had been MacGregors who’d run the glen long enough that his anger carried weight. “We brought your bed down from the attic and put it back together for you so your daughter could have her own back to sleep on, Donald Fletcher. You surely don’t want to see her sleeping on the floor in her own house?”

  “She can sleep on any bleeding bed she chooses.” Donald made a growling noise in his throat, turned, and limped back into the sitting room. “I’ll be sleeping on the sofa.”

  “Enough!” Elspeth stepped in front of him, hands on her hips. “You’re a grown man, and your Morag would be shamed the way you’re behaving now. Don’t you see that? You think there’s no one else in the world who’s grieving the loss of someone they loved? Regretting mistakes they made? Everyone has regrets. We all go on the best we can. Feeling sorry for yourself and closing the door on the people who care about you, lying to the people who love you, that won’t help anything. You can’t wall away every trace of your old life and pretend you’re still alive. You had us fooled for a while, telling us you were all right, but we’re seeing you clearly now. Clearly enough to suggest you need to find a mirror to look into. Do that, take a good, hard look, and ask yourself if you’re liking what you see.”

  Donald had gone still, a little vein throbbing at his temple. Cait barely had time to brace herself for the explosion before it came.

  “Get out,” he yelled. “Get out, the lot of you! And take all this with you. Take it away!” He swept his cane over the collection of porcelain figurines—the farmer and his wife, the little dancer in green with the red pompom on her cap, the pair of Staffordshire Scottish terriers that Cait and Robbie used to take turns
hiding. The pieces crashed to the floor and shattered.

  It felt to Cait as though the shards had flown straight into her heart.

  She wanted to shake her father, shake some sense into him, but when she turned to him, she stopped.

  He was standing there staring at the broken pieces on the floor, breathing hard, his shoulders shaking. She had never once seen him cry, not when the army had come about Robbie, not when he’d held Mum’s hand while she took her final breath. He’d spilled his tears in private then, and seeing them slipping quietly down his cheeks now, Cait’s anger all seeped away.

  She went and put her arms around him. He pushed her aside and limped toward the bathroom with his back stiff and his shoulders still trembling. He didn’t quite slam the door, but he came darn close.

  When he was gone, there was silence, and no one moved. Cait fought to pull herself together. Clearing her throat, she turned toward the others and spread her hands in a gesture of defeat. “I’m sorry. I know you meant this kindly,” she said, looking around at all their familiar faces, touched by what they’d done but also furious because their timing could not possibly have been worse. “He’s having a hard time with all he’s been through—”

  Connal MacGregor moved down the stairs, his smile a little wry. “The more men know they’re behaving like idiots, the more they’ll fight to the teeth to defend what they’re doing. There’s not one of us who hasn’t been in the same place as your father, one way or another. With less excuse than he has, come to that. No need to apologize for him.”

  His eyes met Anna’s above Cait’s head, and they softened immediately. Anna came and gently touched Cait’s shoulder. “I never got to meet your mother,” she said. “She was too sick by the time I came to the glen, but I’ve heard about how much she did for everyone.”

  Kirsty moved closer, too, absently rubbing the sweet, enormous arc of her pregnancy bump. “Aye, and we’re not here for Donald Fletcher. We’re here for Morag’s sake, and yours. To repay a fraction of what your mum did for all of us. I used to live for the books I got from the library—and she always made sure she had something new for me. She knew what I was going to love, and setting books aside for me the way she did, it made me feel special, as if there was someone who understood me. My mum’s been telling everyone about the photos she brought you to hang up in the Tea Room. All her friends are talking about the old stories they’ve given you. But the rest of us, the younger ones, we don’t have any of that. All we can offer is support and elbow grease, and if it means that you will keep the Library and Tea Room open, we’ll all of us do anything we can to help. I’ll need to take a bit of time off with the babe, but I’d love to come back to work when I can. And I know Mairi and the others would, too, so long as your father’s not there making everybody feel they can’t do anything right.”

  “That would be wonderful,” Cait said, the words feeling heavy and damp and as though they came straight from her heart.

  Down the corridor, the bathroom door creaked open, and her father’s heavy halting footsteps alternated with the thump of the cane on the old oak floor. Unwilling to spoil the effect of Kirsty’s goodwill with another tirade from her father, Cait made a shooing motion with her hands and the others nodded at each other, gathered their coats, and moved to make a hasty exit.

  Falling

  “Sometimes good things fall apart

  so better things can fall together.”

  Marilyn Monroe

  Guilt gnawed at Brice while he drove home, and though he would have loved to put the blame somewhere else, he couldn’t deny it fell squarely on his shoulders. He should have known that having Brando and the others bring Morag’s things from the attic wasn’t a good idea. His mind had been on Cait, hoping to make her happy. Somehow, he’d forgotten that right now making her father happy and healthy was Cait’s first priority. The sad truth was, with the way Donald carried on, it had been easy to focus on what seemed to be overreaction and lose sight of the very real fact of his illness. Brice wouldn’t make that mistake again.

  He parked in the garage beside the house and stayed in the car to dial Cait’s number. It rang and rang and eventually went to voice mail. He could picture her trying to wrestle Donald to bed, or worse, sitting there with him, watching him cry. But knowing her father, crying had likely gone back to shouting. Brice hated not knowing. Rubbing the back of his neck, he left a message for her and disconnected then went back into his house.

  The place seemed colder without Cait.

  He’d liked having her here. Talking to her, doing dishes together. They’d made progress. Come so close to fixing things between them.

  He tried the phone again, but there was still no answer.

  Christ, he needed a drink. In the kitchen, he pulled a bottle of Scotch from the cupboard and started to reach for a glass. But Cait had left the kitchen spotless and he found himself reluctant to change a single thing about the way the house looked since she’d gone, as if not changing it would make it easier for her to step back inside. Which, he thought as he unscrewed the cap on the bottle and took a swig, was an entirely ridiculous notion.

  The warmth of the whiskey slid pleasantly down his throat and started to fill the sunken, worried emptiness in his gut. Carrying the bottle with him, he walked through the house with the ghost of Cait’s presence keeping pace beside him. He stood by the fireplace where the coals of the fire he’d laid after dinner still glowed orange.

  Thinking about the evening, thinking about her and her father, not knowing what to do for either of them, the helplessness of it all got to him. The certainty that she was in pain tonight, and he couldn’t be there for her, left him feeling as though someone had sliced away his skin and left the nerves exposed.

  He wasn’t good at feeling helpless. He’d spent too much of his childhood with impotent fury tearing at him. There were too many people in the world who smelled the faintest whiff of weakness and honed in on it, twisted it, for their own pleasure. His father’d been one of them, and years before he’d gone and gotten himself killed in a bar fight in Glasgow, Brice had learned to armor himself in anger and attitude and never let his own weakness to be used against him.

  For Cait, he’d lay himself bare. Take any blow.

  The pain on her face when she’d seen her father crying, though, that was down to Brice’s own carelessness. He’d caused that. The fact that his intentions had been good didn’t matter. He was the one who had given the key to Brando. He’d seen for himself that Cait was bringing Donald around, inch by inch, but he’d risked spoiling it by pushing too hard and backing Donald into a corner where he had to face everything he’d been avoiding all at once.

  Who knew what Donald was thinking now? What he was saying to Cait?

  And Cait wasn’t the forgiving sort. Never had been.

  Brice looked around the house, and her ghost was suddenly everywhere. Washing dishes in the kitchen, laughing as she found the coin he’d carefully wedged beneath the marzipan icing in Emma’s fancy Christmas cake. Cait’s wineglass stood on the table beside the sofa when she’d set it down to pick up her father’s cane from the floor and folded the blanket she’d draped over him while he was watching the telly. There was a trace of her lipstick along the rim of the glass, a perfect imprint.

  Brice tried her number again. Left another message.

  Turning his back on the emptiness of the rooms where she’d been, he went upstairs to his equally empty bedroom. He wasn’t tired, but he had no desire to go to the pub, or to watch television. If he tried to read, he’d only end up with his mind wandering after every paragraph. He emptied his pockets out onto the dresser as usual, but as he set his wallet down, he stopped and opened it to retrieve the engagement ring he’d been carrying with him since she’d left it with the note inside his mailbox. He’d hoped to give it back to her when the time was right, but now he wondered if they’d ever get there. Whether her father would ever let them get there.

  If Donald Fletcher refused t
o go through with the surgery, he’d have months, maybe years of dying hanging over him. Or years of living, if he decided to have the treatment. Either way, Cait would always be aware that he was on borrowed time.

  Brice didn’t know what was worse, the idea of making Cait sneak around with him like the worst periods of their teenage years, or making her defy her father openly. In which case, Donald might try to make Cait leave the glen altogether to keep them apart. Cait had always wanted so much to please her father, to have him accept her as she was.

  He picked the phone up off the dresser and tried her number again with no more luck than before, then he set the phone down and pulled on a thicker sweater. Taking the Scotch with him again, knowing it was a crutch and not, for the moment, giving a damn, he wandered toward the wall of windows and stood looking out. The angle was wrong, though. Looking uphill toward Cait’s house, the view was blocked by trees. He slid open the door to the balcony and walked out to the corner where the angle was better.

  Her house blazed with light, upstairs as well as down. Even the dormer window in the attic was lit. Maybe she was up there, putting away all the things that Brando and the others had taken down that evening.

  It killed Brice to think of her having to do that by herself. Having to do it at all.

  He breathed in a calming lungful of crisp, night air. Listened to the soothing quiet of the glen, the slow shush of melting snow dropping from a tree limb, the chitter of a night bird in the distance. Below him, a wood mouse scurried across the snow, and a tawny owl burst from a nearby hemlock tree and swooped down only a foot or two from Brice in a blur of mottled feathers.

  Brice flinched back, startled, but the step took him off the corner of the deck, and suddenly there was nothing at all beneath him.

  Moments

  “What matters in life is not

  what happens to you