Chapter 40 #2
The kids worked around her like a crew that had done this before. And Bella, taller now, stood over the whole operation, directing.
“Remember to start small.” Her voice carried across the snow, happy and bright, and something in my chest went through black ice of its own. “Then roll it.”
Amelie had taught her that, and now Bella was teaching the other kids she was playing with, her friends from boarding school.
It was, objectively, the most peaceful thing I had ever seen.
I had expected watching them to feel like being robbed.
Some nights it did. But mostly it felt like standing outside a lit church, all that warmth arranged in perfect order, none of it requiring me, none of it even aware of me.
I was grateful for it. My family was safe and warm, and happy. All I’d had to do was leave.
I saw my brothers and Bella two Sundays a month now, in a bright room with a social worker sitting in the corner, because Amelie wanted the visits supervised and Kai had said it was nonnegotiable.
I didn’t blame them.
You didn’t get to drop cocaine in the grass where your seven-year-old sibling played and then negotiate trust like a man with collateral.
The twins came out of politeness and spent the hour checking the clock. Bella usually sat with her hands in her lap like a girl at a stranger’s house, and asked, every visit, whether Ruby was going to be there.
I didn’t blame them for hating my house. I hated my house.
I didn’t blame them for hating my wife, either. I hated Ruby, too.
Perhaps it had been my self-hatred that made me marry her.
Self-sabotage. My second marriage existed on video only.
Las Vegas kept records of everything, even the things that happened to men on day four of a bender, in a chapel that took walk-ins at two a.m. I had never watched the footage, though Ruby framed a still from it and hung it in the foyer.
Not because she was madly in love with me, but because she liked any picture where the lighting looked good on her.
Fifteen-year-old me would have fainted from happiness about being married to Ruby Sarafina.
He would have stood in traffic for it. Everything I had was the dream of a fifteen-year-old, and if I could, I’d go back and destroy his dreams.
Because here was the thing I had finally understood, standing in snow up to my shins outside a fence I could buy but couldn’t cross.
Kai hadn’t just given me the life I wished for.
Son of a bitch stuck me with the life he was done with.
The crown. The town. The watching. The bottle, and the little folded papers, and the outside of the glass—all of it secondhand, all of it his before it was mine, handed down like a coat he’d worn through his own worst winters.
He had walked out of this exact darkness into that exact light, and he had needed someone to hold his old place at the window.
And the trade ran both directions. That was the elegance of it.
He didn’t just hand his life down, he took mine.
The house, the noise, the Sunday brunches, the woman who loved me hardest when I had nothing: everything I’d appraised at zero on my way out the door.
People wonder, politely, why a man with his portfolio kept his family in the smallest house he owned.
But I knew. He did his appraisal from exactly where I was standing—the dark side of the fence, the other side of the window—and he knew which of our two lives was the fortune.
I’d spent my marriage trying to be a part of the rich inner circle.
He knew exactly what that life held and merely handed it to me.
Nobody taught you the mechanics of a granted wish. It came true as worded, never as meant. I signed my whole life away without reading the terms, and the fine print had been haunting me since.
Now, he owned my life and I owned his, and the worst of it, the part I choked on nightly, was that I had asked for it.
“There you are. Oh my God.” Boots in the snow behind me, quick and annoyed. “You’re going to freeze to death out here, and I’m not explaining to the tabloids why the Prince of Darster died under a tree in last season’s coat.”
Ruby. Perfume first, then fur, then the face that launched hundreds of magazine covers by using my name. She wanted the prince. She had married the palace and its liquor cabinet, and she performed as a wife the way she performed everything, beautifully, for the widest possible distribution.
She was saying something about dinner reservations. I did the thing I had gotten unspeakably good at and watched the fence instead.
The only woman who had ever loved me when I was nobody, when I had a crappy car and a pawned camera, was forty feet away, on the far side of a split-rail fence, laughing at a lumpy snowman, carrying another man’s child.
And the woman I’d dreamed of at fifteen was standing next to me in fur, itemizing my failures as a dinner companion, married to my money.
I had gotten everything I ever wished for. Every single item on the list.
“Fine,” Ruby said to my silence. “Freeze. I’ll be in the car.” And she clicked back down the path, and the dark closed politely behind her, and it was just me and the fence and the falling snow.
The bourbon, the cold, and the little folded paper from the glove box had their desired effect. My legs quit, and I went down the fence post slowly, wood dragging at my coat, until I was sitting in the snow on the wrong side of everything I loved.
And because no one was there to see, I did what I did some nights, alone, when the watching got too heavy to hold upright.
I pretended.
I conjured Amelie’s hands out of thin air—the way I used to conjure fake fruits and breakfast for the kids when we were poor—and let her thumb run across my brow.
I tipped my head back against the post and let the imaginary weight of her lap arrive under it.
“You’re okay,” she said, in the version of her I kept for this. “I’ve got you. You’re okay.”
Across the fence, real and forty feet away, Bella suddenly shrieked, that pitch of pure joy that hadn’t changed since she was small.
“It’s snowing! Look, look, angels are falling!”
I chuckled. She still believed it. After everything, my eight-year-old sister still looked up at the falling snow and saw it as our mother missing her. Amelie had built that for her, and it had outlasted everything I ever built.
I closed my eyes and let the snow fall on me. Each flake a small cold touch and then nothing, and then another, and another, more than any pair of hands could hold.
In the dark, I lifted my hand and drew Bella and added her to my collection of people I was summoning with my imagination.
Bella was tackling me into the snow the way she used to, and that was why I was lying on the ground now, not because my legs had stopped working.
Next, I drew up the boys with my hands, but the version of them who liked hanging out with me.
The twins ran shrieking circles around us.
My head was in Amelie’s lap, as the snow came down on all of us together, on the inside of the fence.
I held my hands up and caught them because I could. They melted through my fingers, and I understood that the act of catching was worthless when nothing falling was meant for you.
So, I pretended.
I tipped my head and let the snow fall on me, and I pretended they were for me because my family missed me. I smiled because angels were falling and each one was for me.