Magic of Winter

by Martina Boone

  but what you remember

  and how you remember it.”

  Gabriel García Márquez

  Calming Cait’s father down involved a glass of Scotch and a bit of patience finding something soothing on the telly—something that he’d seen enough times already that he could easily let himself drift off to sleep before it was over. Not that she was anywhere near done with him yet. He wasn’t going to get out of a tongue lashing quite so easily.

  She put in a DVD of Monarch of the Glen for him to watch, then sat down beside him on the sofa as the credits rolled. “Is this what you were like when people tried to help you after I left?” she asked. “If so, it’s a wonder you’ve any friends left at all.”

  “Don’t need friends,” he said, leaning back against the cushion with his long arms crossed over his stomach.

  “You can tell yourself that all you like, but everyone needs friends. If you cut yourself off from human contact, it’s no wonder you don’t think life’s worth living.”

  He leaned forward and fumbled for his cane. “Can’t you let me sit here in peace for one bloody minute? Especially since you don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  Cait put her hand on the cane to stop him trying to get up and walk away. “Then tell me. Talk to me. You can’t push the memories of Mum out of your life. It isn’t healthy, and why would you want to anyway? You had a wonderful life together.”

  “She would have had a wonderful life with anyone,” her father said, trying to wrestle the cane away from her. “She should have had a better life than the one I gave her.”

  Cait went still. “Is that what this is about? And you think breaking the things she loved is going to fix that or make you remember her life any differently?”

  “I don’t want to remember it at all!” His voice was filled with such an ache of regret that Cait didn’t know how to reach him.

  It stung, too, this stubborn insistence that he wanted to forget, because she herself was part the life he was trying so hard to leave behind. Her and Robbie.

  “Is that why you didn’t want me to come home?” she asked. “Do I remind you of things you’d rather forget?”

  He stopped fumbling with the cane. “Of course you remind me of her.” His Adam’s apple bobbed as he swallowed hard. “More and more every day, you shame me the same way she did, showing me the things I’m not strong enough to change about myself. Pride, Caitie. It’s a powerful thing, and a hurtful one.”

  “The fact you’re seeing it means you’re strong enough to change it.”

  His knuckles went white against the dark glossed wood. “Change takes more energy than I’ve got left.”

  “I’m not leaving again,” she said very quietly. “I’m going to make the Tea Room a tribute to Mum and all the women of the glen. I told you that already, and I’m not planning to change my mind.”

  “Aye, you told me. I heard you.”

  “Well, just so you know.”

  Headlights flashed by on the road, and Cait wondered briefly if everyone who’d been over had gotten back to their own homes already, their own Christmas Eve’s spoiled after they’d tried to be so kind. She’d need to make up a plate of cookies or something to take around on Boxing Day with apologies.

  “I was a coward myself, running off to London. I see that now,” she said. “There were things here I needed to resolve, but I couldn’t bear to stay and face them. The problem is that we can’t outrun the things inside ourselves. You can’t hide them away forever in the attic, either. You break them and you break away pieces of yourself.”

  He wrenched the cane away when she wasn’t expecting it and stood up. Looking down at her in the dim light, in that moment he was as large and terrifyingly stern as he used to seem when she was little. Then she saw that he was shaking, and the impression faded.

  “I’m already broken,” he said.

  “You don’t have to be.” Cait stood up beside him. “And I’ve no intention of putting Mum’s things away.”

  “I’ll do it myself, then. If you won’t.”

  She put a hand on his arm, her face turned up to his with all the hurt and hope that was inside her laid bare. She’d tried anger, and defiance, and recklessness, and none of those had ever worked on him at all, so she had to be smart enough to try something else.

  “I remember you telling Robbie that cowardice is the saddest type of human failing,” she said. “Do you remember that?” She pointed to a spot by the doorway. “He stood right there in his brand-new uniform with his duffel bag across his shoulder, and you told him he was a coward, turning his back on his obligations, on his family.”

  “Aye, I told Robbie that, and he set out to prove I was wrong and got himself killed for his trouble.” Her father’s words came out raw, as though each one was ripped from his heart.

  Cait’s chest squeezed in sympathy and tears suddenly filled her eyes. Her own throat ached. “Is that what you think? That Robbie was trying to prove his courage? You knew him better than that. Robbie would have done anything in the world for someone he loved. Given anything. That was who he was, who Mum—and you—raised him to be. You taught him that the Fletcher name was something to be honored, but Mum taught him to honor life. You know him better than to think for a moment that he would throw himself away for the sake of honor or courage or anything abstract. It was people who mattered to him. He would never have regretted giving his own life up to save someone else.”

  “I can regret it for him. But maybe I am a coward, if that’s the point you’re making. They say you hate in others what you see inside yourself.” He stumbled toward the bathroom, and as he reached the door he said. “If you want to keep your mum’s things out, keep them. I won’t sleep in the bedroom with them, though. I’ll stay down here on the sofa.”

  Cait couldn’t help feeling that if she’d won a victory at all, it was small and hollow. She brought down her father’s pillow and sheets and quilt from the bedroom and made the sofa up for him as best she could. She brought down his pajamas, too, and over his objections, helped him take the walking cast off his ankle. Only once she had him settled and watching the last of the Monarch of the Glen episode did she quietly sweep up the shards of porcelain from the floor while he deliberately looked the other way.

  Back in the kitchen, she emptied the dustpan into the bin and brewed herself a cup of tea. While it steeped she rearranged the few things that Elspeth and the others had put back not quite where they belonged. The Royal Crown Derby salt and pepper shakers belonged on the counter by the stove, and the red and white checkered calendar frame had hung above the photographs on the bookshelf. She would need to buy new pages for it soon. The cookbooks had always been in order from largest to smallest, held in place by the Staffordshire poodle bookends that her mother had claimed looked more like sheep than dogs. Finally, Cait put the book of Stewart family recipes in pride of place back where it belonged. Where it would stay.

  The progress she and her father had made was small, but at least he was talking to her. Being honest with her. And she had Brice to thank for it. The thought stirred up a warm glow inside her.

  He was more dangerous now than he’d ever been. And she didn’t even mind.

  It was nearly midnight. Christmas. Walking to the kitchen door, she watched her own reflection getting closer, and she realized that in spite of the upset with her father, despite the chaos and his outburst, despite the way his admission had made her ache for him, she looked almost . . . content. Hopeful.

  If only there was a way she could tip the scales and make him see that there was still plenty to live for, and that his guilt over Mum and Robbie was needless. The problem was, like the doctor had said, it was hard to calculate the quality of a life. Neither Mum nor Robbie had lived nearly long enough, Robbie especially, but they had measured their lives in smiles.

  Those were the memories that Cait wished her father could remember. All those smiles that added up to a joyous life.

  But why couldn’t s
he give that to him?

  Here he’d been telling himself that Mum had somehow missed out on something by marrying him and staying in the glen, when the proof of her happiness was tucked away in the attic with all the photographs. Cait had an empty tree to decorate, didn’t she? Photographs could make the perfect ornaments.

  Tip-toing up the stairs so she wouldn’t wake her father, she climbed up to the attic and sorted through the old albums and loose photos looking for the individual moments that would tell the story of her mother’s happy life—a happy life that had included Robbie and made him the kind of man who could become a hero in a country far from the glen. There were so many of them: the one of Mum looking down at a newborn Robbie and Robbie looking back; Cait in her pink newborn hat with Robbie holding her and Mum hovering, smiling from ear to ear; Mum pulling Cait and Robbie on the red toboggan across the frozen loch; Mum laughing as she hung the new yellow curtains in Cait’s room the summer six-year-old Cait had decided she hated anything pink; Mum and Cait years later, repainting the front of the Library and Tea Room in an even bolder pink than the one that had been there before; Mum standing by her old Nissan unloading a new (to the library at least) box of books she’d found to stock the shelves.

  These and others like them were the memories that her father needed to see so he could finally remember that Morag Fletcher wouldn’t have wanted any other life than the one she’d had.

  Descending the stairs with a box full of photos to go through and copy and miniaturize, Cait stopped in the doorway of the sitting room to make sure her father was still asleep. He was snoring faintly, and he’d dislodged the blanket from his feet. One of his socks badly needed mending—his big toe peeped out like a bald and ugly newborn swaddled in black cloth. He looked so frail lying there, frail and alone, but he still had her. Family was what Christmas was for, arguments and gifts and memories that all had meaning only because there was so much history and love behind them.

  Cait set the box down and covered him with the blanket. Then she retrieved her purse from where she’d left it on the floor in all the fuss, and when she checked her phone she discovered that Brice had left her seven different messages. She’d switched it to vibrate earlier, so she hadn’t heard it ring, and now she dumped the purse on top of the box and rang him straight back even as she walked toward the kitchen.

  It was already very late. So late that, twining around Cait’s legs, Mrs. Bogan did her best to pretend that it was time for breakfast, and when Cait didn’t immediately stoop to pick her up, she went to her bowl and sat beside it, black-tipped tail nicely wrapped around her paws and her blue eyes so intent on Cait that they appeared even more crossed than ever.

  “It isn’t nice to beg,” Cait said to her while the phone rang and rang and rang. “You’ve already had all the food I’m going to give you, and I have enough guilt in my life already without you trying to add to it.”

  Mrs. Bogan threw herself onto her belly beside the bowl as if her strength had given out.

  “Drama queen,” Cait said.

  Brice still hadn’t picked up, but when the call went to voicemail, she disconnected and rang him back again instead. There was still no answer.

  And suddenly, Cait thought back to the way he and the others had left, to what her father had said. To all the things she hadn’t said to defend Brice, though now she wished she had.

  She mashed the play button on the first of his voicemails. “Cait? I’m so sorry about that. Brando and I were only thinking you deserved to have a Christmas. We—I—didn’t mean to hurt your father’s pride and make things worse. Call me back, would you? We can figure a way to fix this.”

  The second message was essentially the same, but by the third he was getting anxious. “Please call me back, Cait. At least to let me know you’re all right. I’ll come and work it out with your dad tomorrow somehow, only don’t shut me out again.”

  The seventh message was the worst of the lot. “All right, if you don’t want to talk to me, I understand. I’ve made a mess of everything again. I usually manage to, somehow. I want you to know, though, that I am not my father. Just as you aren’t yours. I know you’re likely thinking he’s the only family you have now, but he isn’t. You are all the family I have ever needed, and I will always be here for you. Right here. Waiting.”

  The warm shimmer of feeling she’d had earlier swelled into an emotion too big for Cait’s heart to contain. She tried his number again, and when he still didn’t answer, she left a message. “I’m not not talking to you, Brice. Far from it. If you were here, I’d kiss you for all you’ve done and tried to do, and I’m an idiot. I’ve been an idiot. Call me back.”

  She hung up and tried not to be impatient for the phone to ring. In the meantime, she made up a quick batch of salt dough, cut it into frames of various shapes, and pressed pretty snowflake designs into the surface of them using one of her mum’s old lace doilies she’d found in the back of a trunk upstairs. When she’d slid the two cookie sheets full of frames into the oven, she dialed Brice again. But there was still no answer.

  The warm glow inside her had started to fade by then, replaced with a niggling worry that something wasn’t right. Brice never went far from his phone, and he slept with it beside his bed. Even if he’d been in the shower the first time she had rung, he would have been out by now. Duncan and Flora always closed the pub early on Christmas Eve, so he couldn’t have been there either, and there weren’t many other places where he wouldn’t have heard the phone ring.

  She picked through a few more photographs distractedly and set them in a stack to scan and print in sizes small enough to fit the frames that she had made, but she found herself less and less able to concentrate. She put the stack aside and went to retrieve her keys and coat. Ignoring Mrs. Bogan’s inquiring meow, she ran out to her car and headed down toward Brice’s house.

  Fear

  “Do not be afraid; our fate

  Cannot be taken from us; it is a gift.”

  Dante Alighieri

  Inferno

  Lights still flooded Brice’s house both on the ground floor and upstairs when Cait arrived, but the door was locked and no one answered when she rang the bell. His Land Rover was in the garage; she discovered that much by climbing up on the hood of her own car and peering through the small windows at the top of the automatic doors.

  Shivering from more than the cold wind that blew flurries of snow from the surrounding trees, she tried to think what to do. She rang his phone again, then searched the online directory for a land line. All she found was the garage number and a listing for MacLaren of Balwhither—Sports Car Restoration. The garage had been dark as she passed it, but she tried both numbers anyway without success. Then she stepped back from the house as far as necessary to peer through the lighted windows deep into the upper floor. There was a sitting area along the front, and a small empty room, but no bedrooms were visible. Needing to see deeper into the house, she gathered her coat closer and stomped through the few inches of snow around the side of the garage.

  Lights blazed on that side of the house as well, though the ground itself was shaded by the decking and lit only by the moon shining between the trees. Cait moved carefully, picking her way around brush and rocks and what she suspected were the foundations of future flowerbeds. Then the moonlight glittered on a bit of broken glass in snow that smelled of whiskey. That smell was odd, but she didn’t have time to dwell on it. Beyond the broken glass lay a darker form, man-shaped. Unmoving.

  Fear knifed through her, skewering her in place like a cold steel blade at the same moment instinct told her to rush forward. Still uncertain what she was seeing, she made herself move cautiously, her heart thudding, wanting—needing—to find herself mistaken. But she recognized the curve of Brice’s back, the nape of his neck that stood out taut as a bow as he lay on his side curled in around himself.

  “Brice?” she called, moving closer. Her voice was thin with fear, so she tried again. “Brice?”

 
He didn’t answer.

  The snow around him had been disturbed, she noted that, as if he had floundered around and dragged himself some distance. There were no footsteps, not from the area that lay beyond him. She looked back the way she’d walked and saw only her own coming from that direction. Only then did she look up, and she saw the sliding glass door standing open on the upper level, the lack of railings around the balconies.

  She had her phone out dialing 999 before she’d even moved to kneel beside him, but though she longed to touch him, to shake him, she refrained as she gave the dispatcher the location and information. The rise and fall of his chest and the small clouds of breath from his nose told her he was alive. That was all that mattered.

  She hadn’t known how much it mattered until this very moment.

  Holding the phone against her shoulder, she brushed his hair out of his face and watched him breathing as she talked, willing him to breathe. She pulled his hands out of the snow and tried to warm them, wishing she dared to lift his head and put her coat beneath it.

  He groaned as she rubbed his hands, and her heart thudded. She leaned forward, dropping the phone into the snow. “Brice?”

  He groaned again. His eyes opened. Blinked. Focused on her. “Cait? You came. Oh, Christ, it feels like I was hit by a truck.”

  “You fell. Do you remember? Do you know where you are?”

  He tried to lift his head.

  “Shh, careful. They’re sending the air ambulance. Don’t move until it gets here.”

  “It’s bloody cold.”

  “Does your neck hurt?”

  “Everything hurts,” he said, and he started to roll over onto his back and gave a grunt of pain, grimacing. “I wasn’t drunk. It was an owl going after the wood mouse. It surprised me. You have to know that, Cait. I was drinking but I wasn’t drunk.”

  “Shh,” she said again. “It doesn’t matter.” She shrugged out of her coat and lay it behind his head so that if he did roll over again, he would have it as a pillow, but still she said, “Don’t move. You could hurt yourself even more.”