Twelve Days

by Steven Barnes

  “This is wonderful,” Olympia said, forcing the corners of her mouth up. “How did you convince them?” So … three she liked, and one who scared her, just a little.

  What did that make Terry?

  Terry sipped punch. “Well … actually I just let them convince themselves.”

  Uh-huh. More likely, they were alone for the holidays save for each other, and needed this. A little light music and laughter.

  Mark sat in a corner of the main room, performing his Santa routine as a line of kids waited to sit on his lap. “Have you been a good little girl this year?” he asked the next tyke in line, a Muppet-sized Latina blonde.

  “You bet!” Mischief danced in her eyes.

  “No, she wasn’t!” a reasonable replica of the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Boy insisted.

  Mark’s eyes narrowed. “Know what elves really are?”

  “What?” she asked.

  “Bad little kids who get dragged back to the North Pole to make toys for the good kids. So watch your butt.”

  The girl blinked and drew back, horrified. Scrambled off his lap. The Marshmallow Kid howled in mirth.

  Father Geek wheeled up behind Mark and punched him in the shoulder. “You are such an asshole.”

  “My father was an asshole,” Mark said. “My grandfather was an asshole. Just upholding a long family tradition.”

  Olympia laughed, still glowing with recent memory. “I … haven’t seen Hani like that in a very long time.”

  Not since twenty-four hours ago.

  “He’s a good kid,” Terry said. “He deserves a very special Christmas.”

  Was he reading her mind?

  “Mistletoe!” Mrs. Robbins chirped. “Better be careful. Merry Christmas!”

  The Jackson 5’s piping voices proclaimed “Santa Claus Is Comin’ to Town,” Olympia’s contribution to the soundtrack. After two years of Bing Crosby, she’d managed to season it with at least a few R & B memories from her own childhood Christmas gatherings. When a pair of couples began to bop to the rhythm, she raised an eyebrow, and Terry snorted laughter.

  “Not this year,” he said. She smiled, masking a sharp stab of disappointment. But when the music slowed, he took her hand and led her onto the floor. Two other couples swayed to the music, but Olympia didn’t think about them. She was trying not to think about how Terry’s body felt against hers, experiencing the contact not as pressure but as heat cascading through her body. He held her frame beautifully, not really much of a dancer but with a fine sense of rhythm and a mastery of motion that translated very well indeed. She remembered. Damn it, she remembered too well.

  Somehow they had maneuvered each other under a mistletoe sprig dangling by a string from the ceiling. She didn’t think that either of them had planned it, but there it was. Their eyes floated to the twist of green and red, and then to each other. For a moment they were both terribly amused, and then embarrassingly serious.

  “Here we are again,” he said, and she could see that he was pulling back, trying to give her room to breathe.

  Damn it, she didn’t want to breathe.

  “Shut up,” she said, gripping the back of his head and pressing her lips against his. It was innocent at first, then inquiring, and then hungry. They melted into each other and she didn’t give a damn who witnessed the blossoming of her hunger, caring only that he tasted and smelled and felt so good, so very good, and it had been such a terribly long time.

  CHAPTER 17

  We are, as human beings, traveling a road between birth and death. We attempt to somehow blend the dreams of our childhood with the deepest values we will hold sacred upon our deathbeds. Every action of our adult lives should concern itself only with fulfilling our obligations to family, to society, or ourselves in accordance with these two beings, always with us: our child selves, and our death selves. What those two say about our lives is the only thing that matters.

  —Savagi, The Myth of Love

  Her house was quiet, and had been, even as their mutual heat had built, and raged, and finally subsided. Olympia had filled her mouth with pillow and bitten down hard as she crested, convulsed again and again by pleasure that rocked her like depth charges in a night-dark sea. When her eyes met Terry’s, she felt a flicker of uncertainty, perhaps even fear. And she heard her own unspoken words reverberating in her mind, almost as if asking for permission, or approval, for her volcanic response. Is it all right? Am I safe…?

  * * *

  They had always been startling together physically, like two starving halves of a creature that knew hunger without end, that strove and strove together in endless tidal rhythms as old as the moon and as new as a breaking wave.

  Sex just hadn’t been enough. It never is.

  The yellowish streetlights drifted through the window, casting valleys of golden light and chocolate shadow across her body, her limbs luxuriantly arranged beneath the sheets. She stretched, and grinned at him.

  “You’re like a big cat.” He traced his finger along her thigh.

  She purred loudly and reached out to him, pulling him close enough to feel his rising response brush her thigh as their mouths and bodies fused again.

  It was more this time, trembled on the edge of a statement, ending in a question for which no man or woman has ever had a perfect answer. Just … a yearning for more questions.

  And it was only with great effort that, again, she stopped herself from speaking the words aloud.

  Who are we? Why are we here?

  Are you the one? The one who will hold me and love me through my life? If I give you all that a woman can, now, while I am young … will you care for me, let me care for you, hold my hand as we reach the end of our road?

  Are you the one?

  Then the heat receded, the vast raw vulnerability healed again, and the questions they had asked, the mutual view into each other’s souls … vanished like an echo in the heart, until both could pretend it had never been there at all.

  Terry was the first to find words.

  “Everything works,” he said. “Especially us.” He waited to say the next thing, and a shadow of the deeper questions resurfaced.

  “What went wrong?” he asked, eyes shifting, as if sorry he had spoken. After a moment of silence, he laughed at himself, making light of the intimacy they had shared. “Sorry. Is that kind of a girly question?”

  His tension somehow relieved hers. She giggled, then became serious again. “I’ve thought about that for almost a year,” she said. And now, something horrible, pale, cold, and dead writhed in her darkness, fought its way to the surface of her consciousness. Something she barely even thought to herself was about to be spoken aloud.

  God help me.

  “Any answers to share?”

  “Raoul, my husband,” she whispered, and with that, took a gamble she wouldn’t have believed herself capable of.

  * * *

  Husband? Terry thought.

  Sex as a reminder of death? A denial of it? He remembered his father once saying if you can remember your name immediately after sex, it hadn’t been very good.

  And another witticism from Captain Dad: if the first thing a woman says after sex is about today, or her past, it’s a screw. If it’s about the future, it’s a relationship.

  What if the first thing that comes up is her dead husband, Pop? I suspect that breaks the rules, don’t you think?

  A long, long pause, and then she dropped the bomb: “I lied about him. Nicki and I both. He didn’t die.”

  The bottom fell out of his stomach. “What?”

  “He’s not dead.”

  Questions swirled and collided in his head until they triggered vertigo. Anger. Confusion. And … curiosity. “Where is he, then? What happened to him?”

  “We were living in Miami at the time,” she said, whispering like a supplicant in a confessional. “I was at the Herald. He left us,” she said. “Just … left. Couldn’t handle Hani.”

  Terry was silent. He envisioned it, and realized
that it made so much sense of so many different things he had sensed or noticed … “So he left. What about Nicki? What did he say to her? How in the hell could he…”

  “He told Nicki he’d be back in twenty minutes,” she said. “Went out for pizza and just never came back. Sent an e-mail saying he needed to work some things out. The next I heard was from his lawyer. We haven’t heard from him in eighteen months.”

  So the entire family pretended that Daddy was dead. Dear God. Love means pain. Trust means pain. Daddy equals pain.

  “So how … when did you start lying about it?”

  “It wasn’t me,” she said, her voice so timorous and guilty she could have been a child. “It was Nicki. She knew the truth, and just … freaked out. I kept hoping Raoul would come home to us … that I wouldn’t have to say anything. But after three weeks, Nicki exploded and told Hannibal that Daddy was dead. He screamed and actually hurt himself throwing his body against walls and chairs … and then pulled inside. I didn’t have the nerve to tell him the truth. To build up his hope and then have Raoul never come back. The lie seemed easier, somehow. Simpler.”

  His tongue felt numb. In his silence, Olympia soldiered on.

  “I’d been offered a job at CNS, here in Atlanta. I took it. We packed up, moved up, and started over where no one knew the truth.”

  “How did Hannibal react?”

  “He’d been making progress, like someone swimming up out of a deep, dark hole. When that happened … he just sank.”

  She made an awful chuckling sound, laughter without the slightest trace of humor to soften it. Breaking to a sob. “Oh damn, what did I do? What was I thinking? I just screwed everything up, didn’t I?”

  An entire family, pretending a terrible thing had happened so that they wouldn’t have to face an even greater horror. Words failed him.

  “Then when you and I…”

  “Yes,” she said, and then fell silent. The silence stretched. Cloaked. The look in her eyes had changed, becoming not anxiety, but challenge. I told you my secret, she seemed to be saying. I told you what an awful person I am. Terrible wife. World-class bad mother. I showed you my wounds. Show me yours.

  Bleed with me.

  He felt his mouth open and close, words crowding the back of his throat. He longed to speak, to share his story, to tell her, to have someone who understood who and what he was, and the hellish moral minefield he was staggering across …

  But he just couldn’t. And at that moment, he knew which of them was stronger.

  And so did she.

  As if to be certain, she waited another minute before speaking. “I think you should go now,” she said. “I really think that would be best.”

  Her body had gone cold and rigid. I was afraid to trust you, she had just said, without those words crossing her lips. I began to want to, so I pushed you away. And I just trusted you again, and that puts me and my family in danger.

  Her family. Her little bulwark against the night, and the cold.

  Once upon a time, she had trusted a man named Raoul, and given him two beautiful children. And Raoul had utterly betrayed them all. And she had made a horrible choice to protect her son. As Nicki had to protect her brother.

  Mother and daughter locked in a lie that had poisoned the family … but just maybe had protected the boy who had once run into Terry and bounced off toward the swimming pool, to be snatched giggling from the air.

  Precious, unique little boy.

  And now she was a woman who split her heart and her sexuality into two separate buckets. The liar called Terry Nicolas could play in one or the other. Could be either friend or lover. But he couldn’t keep a foot in both buckets. That would be too dangerous, by far.

  He wasn’t certain, but her story might have been the most heartbreaking thing he’d ever heard.

  Terry watched her breathing there, curled on her side, staring out into the moonlight. Perhaps for the first time, he really saw her. It was strange, but he seemed to be looking at a child within the woman, curled into a fetal position, as if she were pregnant with her own past, more innocent self. Glowing in the moonlight.

  Better to be alone than to trust the untrustworthy. Did that include all of humanity, or just men like Terry?

  “Please go.” Tears choked her throat.

  Terry rolled up to sitting position, couldn’t think of anything to say, and then slipped on his pants. Then he remembered their frenzied undressing and plucked his underpants off the floor, balled them up, and pushed them into his pocket. Feeling clumsier by the moment, Terry pulled on his shirt and left the bedroom.

  The house, the night was so quiet he could hear private conversations from the pool house. Light from the downstairs kitchen cast a wedge in the upstairs hall, where he stood. Nicki’s room was down the way, the door open enough for him to see stuffed animals, a makeup table with little pink lights, and wall posters of Tyrese and Justin Bieber. A slightly surrealistic combination, but there you go.

  Hannibal’s room was kitty-corner to Nicki’s, the door open very slightly.

  He couldn’t help himself. Terry tiptoed down, and nudged the door open with his fingertips. The pale, reflected light widened in a wedge on the room’s floor.

  Hannibal still slept in a red plastic car with crib-like walls. A bed with raised edges. A crib that pretended to be a Formula One car. At the moment, Hani sprawled blissfully asleep, his trusting eyes closed. His rounded cheeks looked soft and warm.

  A crib like a racer. Raised edges, sunken mattress. Why? Style? No. Terry blinked. He was suddenly dealing with an image, something almost as clear and strong as actual sight, of Hannibal in another, ordinary bed. Tossing in his sleep, and falling out of that bed, onto the floor.

  That was the reason for the raised edges. Odd. It wasn’t just a thought, it was a sight, like a reflection viewed in a window, bleached but clear.

  Poor boy. He’d been so startled, awakening with screams. And … Nicki had reached him before his mother. Yes.

  Terry reached out, came within an inch of touching Hani’s cheek, but then hesitated. What was it like to live within Hannibal? Were his dreams like those of other children? Did he understand how he was different?

  Did he have the slightest idea how incredibly precious he was?

  Strange. In the darkness, Terry’s eyes played tricks on him. A paper-thin layer of light seemed to float around Hani’s skin. Oddly, when he looked in the room’s mirror, the illusion vanished like swamp mist in sunlight.

  Hannibal moved. He was asleep, or nearly asleep, but reached up. His entire fist wrapped around Terry’s forefinger, holding with a butterfly’s gentle touch. For ten breaths Terry stood there, not wanting to pull his finger away.

  He knew that touch. It was an are you my daddy? touch. A doesn’t someone want to love me? touch.

  No. He could not bear that contact. It was too real. He could lie to the mother. To the daughter.

  Not to this precious boy. That … could not happen.

  Then the butterfly pressure eased. Hannibal released his finger, a tiny smile curling his perfect lips. Then his face relaxed as Hani sank more deeply back into dream.

  What are you dreaming, Hani? Do I even want to know?

  Terry slipped from the room, down the stairs, and outside, where the breeze nibbled his skin with frozen teeth.

  * * *

  Mr. Terry had looked through the windows, and then backed away.

  Hannibal had watched him come and go, safe no matter what Terry decided.

  Good-bye, Terry. Good-bye.

  You’ll be back. You’ll be my daddy, one day.

  The Game was different, since the woman had touched him. Or … perhaps he only saw it differently now. Felt it differently. Something was wrong, something irritating him like the taste of sour milk or the squeal of a mosquito, coming from somewhere in the house his family lived in, and somehow penetrating into the Game.

  The walls of his mansion were translucent, and in them he could see piping
… electrical wiring … so much else. That odd new growth of vines and unfamiliar trees. And some of the wiring was frayed, some broken or tangled. And he ripped out the walls and began to play with the cables. There was work to be done.

  Through one of the windows, Terry’s handsome face peered in at him, curious and friendly. He waved but Terry couldn’t see him, which was sad.

  As he turned back to the wiring, little Indra wandered in, watching patiently.

  “That’s good work,” she said. Her skin was darker than his, like peanut butter.

  “Just wait,” he replied. So much to do. There was burned and melted wiring, but Madame Gupta had been right: there were ways around the damage. Ways to knot and mend things together. It was strange, but when he did, entire rows of Christmas tree lights lit up, so that he could see what was right.

  And sometimes when he did, things got so bright that it hurt his eyes.

  And then the little brown girl took his hand. Her skin was warm, and soft, and tingled where they touched. She led him through the bright halls to the room with the control panels, and placed his hands upon them. And he turned the dials, and the lights went down, or became less agonizing (which was the same thing) and after he did that it felt better, and he was able to get back to work.

  So much to do. And suddenly he felt that urgency again.

  There was a reason he wanted to build his house stronger. A reason to repair. A reason to want not to be limited by how bright and sharp the entire world seemed to be. He didn’t know quite what that reason was … but he knew it existed.

  “Who are you?” he asked.

  She smiled sweetly. “They call me Indra,” she said. She took his hand, and kissed his palm.

  He felt dizzy.

  “That’s your name,” he said. “But who are you? Where did you come from?”

  She smiled very mysteriously, and offered no reply.

  Indra led him to a room he hadn’t seen. In fact, the entire floor was different. Not frightening … but the shadows were different, and the lighting strange. He hesitated.

  “Come with me,” she begged him.