23. Christmas （Baby Please Come Home）
Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)
HENRY
There was a man who was not Aidan pacing outside the door of my apartment when I returned.
“Can I help you?” I shakily asked, fingers primed in my pocket on the pepper spray I kept tethered to my key ring just in case.
“I should hope so! For Christ’s sake, you pay triple for holiday delivery, and you don’t even have the courtesy to be around for the scheduled drop,” the man said, stepping into the reach of the streetlight on the corner.
He appeared to be in his mid-twenties with a scraggly beard.
He held a hard-plastic teal kennel like the one I took Topher to the vet in.
I relaxed, but only slightly. “I’m sorry. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“You’re not Henry Aster?” he asked.
“I am,” I said, though I second-guessed giving away my identity to this random stranger. A flapping sound emerged from the crate he held. It was too dark to see what was inside, but light enough to detect frenetic movement.
“Sign here.” He thrust a digital tablet and a pen in my face. I needed this to be over with, so I signed even though it was a senseless move. He shoved the carrier at me.
“What is this?” I asked, taking it.
“What you ordered! Christ on a cracker.” He marched away, revealing a tall cardboard box leaning up beside my door.
“Wait! Did you deliver this, too?” I called.
He spun around. “That was here when I arrived. Two hours ago! Merry Christmas, I guess.”
“You, too?” I said automatically. “Not the ‘I guess’ part, just the—” He was gone.
My heartbeat climbed at the same rate I summited the stairs. I had the carrier in one hand and the burdensome box tucked under the other. The door fought me hard. I hoped nothing breakable was in the box because it fell from my hands and smacked the floor as soon as I stumbled inside.
Topher, who’d been there anticipating my return, darted into the bedroom for cover.
I kicked the box into the apartment and slammed the door behind me. “Aidan?” I called to no answer. Could he be in the bathroom? Out on the balcony? Or was he ignoring me?
I set the carrier on the kitchen table and peeped inside.
A plump, round bird with a red beak and red-ringed eyes stared back at me.
It let out a noise that sounded like old windshield wipers set to high during a light drizzle.
A tag dangled off the lock: THIS IS PICKLES.
HE IS A CAPTIVE-brED CHUKAR PARTRIDGE. Below, care and feeding instructions were listed.
Who was more confused, me or the bird?
I knew immediately who was most excited.
Topher reemerged from the bedroom, slinking out to inspect the source of the new sounds he’d heard.
“Oh no, you don’t,” I chided, probing the room for a safe place to put the carrier. I ended up setting Pickles atop the tall, mostly-for-show bookshelf and blocking off Topher’s usual spring spots. He leered at me.
The cardboard box on the floor had no identifying markers on it other than my name and address, so I grabbed a box cutter. Several wax pears rolled out, followed by a pop of fake branches. I didn’t need to shimmy the whole thing out to understand that it was an artificial pear tree.
A partridge.
A pear tree.
My true love gave to…
Aidan.
My heart clenched around his name, and the slightest laugh of surprise escaped me.
At that point, I checked the bedroom, the balcony, and the bathroom for the man who’d gifted me the sweetest yet most misguided present in human history. I even drew back the shower curtain and checked inside the closets on the off chance that he was poorly hiding from me.
“Have you seen Aidan?” I asked Topher, who was perched on the armrest of the couch. He was too busy staring up at our new roommate to answer. Plotting, probably.
I plopped down on the couch and texted Aidan: Where are you?
In a separate text, twenty minutes later, I sent a heart emoji.
A half hour later: Can you at least let me know if you’re okay?
On the hour, I called him, but it went straight to voicemail. “I got your gifts. They are… well, they’re so you . They’re lovely. I’m really sorry about tonight. Please come back to the apartment so we can talk about it.”
The hours rolled by with no response. Around midnight, I plunked down to the shop to retrieve an old vintage birdcage I’d used once in a spring display along with some carved wooden birds wedged inside.
Standing in Isla’s Attic, knowing it would no longer be there after the first of the year, flooded me with unmatched sadness.
Visions of Isla and me pricing items, reorganizing the sections, and installing new speakers were all suspended there in the space like hazy, upsetting apparitions.
Alexa and Sid would surely come in and rip this place up. Make it over until it was unrecognizable. I probably wouldn’t even be able to stomach a trip inside.
The only person—and yes, he was a person—I wanted to vent about all this to was Aidan.
I needed his strong embrace to keep my parts together, and his muscular shoulder to cry onto.
I needed his patient ears and his kind, if somewhat hollow, advice.
I needed him to forgive me for the callous words I’d said outside of Alexa’s and help me rebuild my life.
I cursed myself for never turning the locator app on for his phone, and for being so nearsighted and selfish and rude in general.
Before retreating upstairs, I called Aidan again. Voicemail. I could only utter two words through the sudden onset of tears. “Come home.”
AIDAN
After Henry left me on the curb, I picked a direction and started walking.
In each window I peered through, families talked and laughed and kissed under sprigs of mistletoe. On the sidewalk, friends parted with hugs and promises to call in the New Year. I mumbled a Merry Christmas to each as I passed.
The identical houses eventually stopped and gave way to an open field lined with short stone pillars.
An arched iron gate was chained and locked, but the freezing fence was low enough for me to easily climb over.
I could not risk walking back the way I came for fear those awful negative emotions were waiting there to jump inside me again.
I minded my step as I pulled out my phone and clicked on the flashlight. The low beam of brilliant white illuminated grave sites. This was a cemetery. I was alone, on Christmas night, without a coat, in a cemetery.
Fear should’ve stopped me from venturing any farther, but I marched on.
Each gravestone had words carved into it, usually the person’s name, a little tagline or quote, and the dates of their birth and death.
Some were well-maintained and had flowers laid out across them or tiny flags staked into the ground.
Others were grown over as if the earth were swallowing any proof that that human had ever existed.
Was being buried under the ground a fate worse than replasticizing?
I couldn’t say. All I knew was that nobody would be leaving flowers for me once I was gone.
I’d go back to the shop window for eternity, or maybe Henry wouldn’t be able to look at me any longer after all this.
He’d toss me in the dumpster, I’d end up in a landfill somewhere, and in the next twenty to five hundred years, I’d decompose.
Though if my Google searches were to be believed, I’d never go away entirely.
I’d just get smaller and smaller and smaller.
I felt small then anyway, so how could that fortune be so different?
If humans could feel anger and hurt this deeply, maybe I didn’t want another however-many-years of this type of pain.
The cemetery spat me out on a different road with different styles of houses.
Once again, I picked a direction at random and sometime later I stumbled upon a motel.
I’d hoped to discover a struggling yet quirky inn or a charming family-owned bed-and-breakfast for the night, but this would have to do because my feet ached.
The word VACANCY shone out like a neon beacon in the night.
A few cars speckled the gravel parking lot. Weathered signs pointed me to a lobby.
The doorknob seemed seconds away from coming off in my hand. I gently closed it behind me. A brown-skinned man with a thick head of hair and chip dust on his hands watched a TV set on which a sweaty, dirty man in a tank top prowled through a fancy room with a very large gun.
“Excuse me?” I said.
The man held up his finger. “One second. This is my favorite line.”
The man on the screen whispered into a walkie-talkie, “Yippee ki-yay, mother—” and he definitely didn’t end that last word with “goose.”
“Such a badass,” the receptionist muttered to himself before giving me his attention. “What can I do you for?”
“I’d like a room, please.”
“How many nights?”
“I haven’t decided,” I said.
“Make your best guess,” he said.
“Two?” At least that gave me Christmas night to cool off and the following day to get my head on straight (before someone else started doing that for me again).
“We take Visa, Mastercard, and Discover,” said the receptionist, pushing a credit card reader toward me.
“Would you take cash?” I asked.
His upper lip rose in surprise. “You don’t strike me as the pay-cash kinda guy.”
“I don’t have a credit card,” I explained.
“It’s 2025. Who doesn’t have a credit card?”
“Me.”
“Well, it’s eighty-four a night. You got eighty-four a night plus a security deposit?”
I counted out the cash in front of him. Henry’s gift proved useful after all. I wondered momentarily if he’d received mine. The partridge and the pear tree. Did he like them? Did it matter if he liked them when he didn’t love me?
Room 12 was dank and dark. Only one of the two lamps worked, and the TV got few channels, none of them the Christmas Movie Channel. The bathroom smelled like mildew and the carpet, when I stripped my socks off, squished in a way I was certain it wasn’t supposed to.
The bed felt like tiny cactus needles were prodding into me every time I rolled over.
Through the right wall, a shouting match ensued. Through the left, the sounds of wild sex seeped in. I turned the TV up (the yippee ki-yay guy movie had started over on basic cable) to drown both out.
Lying on the bed in my street clothes, I imagined Henry beside me, even though he’d hurt me.
I checked my phone for the first time in hours. I’d turned the ringer off at dinner.
A barrage of messages from Henry waited for me.
I scrolled through the texts and listened to the voicemails.
“Come home,” the last one said.
I replayed it once. Then twice. Then a third time.
While it was nice to hear Henry’s voice, his sentiment fell flat.
His apartment wasn’t my home. His family wasn’t my family. He wasn’t my true love. He’d made all of that clear when he ran from my proposal.
It occurred to me that I still had the ring box in my pocket. I fished it out and flipped it open. The ring looked shabbier in the grayish hotel lighting. It really was just a metal circle. It couldn’t make Henry love me any more than a how-to list could make me human.