Chapter 11 #3
“Oh,” I said slowly. “Well, you don’t have to see him. Nobody’s going to make you.”
“I also want to,” she said. “A little.”
“It’s confusing,” I commiserated, and she nodded again. “He isn’t supposed to come until Christmas Day. I think.” We still weren’t exactly sure. “You have a little while longer to decide.”
“Will Silas be mad if I don’t want him to come? Because it’s his dad, too.”
“That’s very considerate of you,” I said, swelling with pride. “That’s so nice that you’re thinking of your brother. But no, he’ll be ok with whatever you choose. He only wants you to feel comfortable with it.”
She seemed unconvinced. “I wish you were going to be here. But you need to go see Belle and Harry. They’d be sad without you.”
I managed, barely, to keep myself from bursting into tears. “I wish I could be here, too. I wish I could be in two places at once.”
“That can’t happen because of science,” she explained. “When you come home, can we play catch in the basement?” Silas had made great strides in cleaning it out, although it was dark and a little damp, and I was still very wary of spiders.
“We’ll definitely play.” A little awkwardly, I patted her shoulder and I left my hand there. She didn’t seem to mind it.
It was very, very hard to leave the next day. Very. “Cammie, don’t cry,” Silas warned. “You won’t be able to see well to drive.”
“I’m not crying,” I answered, but due to my tears and the thickness in my throat, he might not have understood. I got myself together to hug Lyra and to whisper with her about presents and stockings, and then she ran inside because saying goodbye made her sad.
Me too. “Will you call me?” I asked. Texting from his stupid flip phone was a nightmare. “Call me a lot. Let me know when your dad gets here. Let me know if it’s snowing. There’s a thirty-percent chance for tomorrow and Lyra would love a white Christmas.”
“Flurries,” he said. “I’m glad you won’t be driving in that.”
“Call me when the pie goes into the oven,” I urged. “Call me when she opens her stocking. Call me…just call.”
“I will,” he promised. “I will. There are a few extra things in your trunk from me and Ly for your parents and for you, too.”
“For me?”
“Yeah, you. You’re the only other person out here freezing in the driveway.”
“You’re the one who won’t wear a coat,” I reminded him, but he never really seemed to need that extra layer. I was also the only one whose teeth were chattering. “You don’t have to tell me to drive carefully. I will.” I thought that I shouldn’t prolong this, so I started to leave.
But Silas hugged me. He pulled me against his chest, holding me tightly against the hard muscle.
“Be careful. Be careful when you stop, even for gas. Be aware of your surroundings. Lock your doors.” He had more warnings but I was so happy to be held that I missed most of them.
I put my arms around his waist and I wished that I wasn’t wearing the extra-thick down coat that went down past my knees and the long-sleeve T, the fleece, and sweatshirt underneath it. I wanted to feel more of him.
“All right.” He put his hands on my shoulders and stepped back so that I lost that warmth, comfort, and love—not love, but maybe affection and caring? Friendship? A simple connection with another human?
It was gone, no matter what it was, and I felt much colder than before. “All right,” I echoed, and got in the car to drive to Kentucky. I cranked the heat but I still felt the chill, and the tears on my cheeks made it worse. I was really, really going to miss them.
But when the long, tiring trip was finally over, I determined that I would put on my “content and serene” expression for my parents.
First, I didn’t want them to suspect that I would rather have been elsewhere and second, I knew what my mom was thinking.
She had probably told my dad so that he was thinking it as well.
She worked around to it gradually on Christmas Eve. “How is the speed dating, Cammie?” she asked me.
“What?” I had my phone in my lap, hidden by my napkin so they wouldn’t know that my attention was partially diverted from the beautiful dinner.
I’d just received a short text from Silas’s phone (all the flip phone texts were short since they were such a pain to write): “Hi. L.” I simultaneously got teary and also smiled.
“You can put your phone up on the table, honey,” my dad advised. “What are Lyra and Silas doing?”
“Excuse me,” my mom said, lowering her eyebrows at him. Then she repeated her question to me. “How is the speed dating?”
“I haven’t tried that yet,” I answered. I did place my phone next to my plate, after I made the font bigger so that my dad could read what Lyra had sent. “I’m still doing a few different apps but I haven’t met anyone in person yet.”
“Then how is that dating?” she asked.
“I guess that it’s more like browsing,” I admitted. “I’m putting myself out there, though.”
“Tell Lyra that I found your first glove in the attic,” my dad directed me. “Tell her that I cleaned it with saddle soap and oiled it up, and it’s ready for her to use.”
“You did? Daddy, that’s so sweet. She’ll love it,” I said. “Silas and I are looking at teams for the spring. The signups start pretty soon.”
“Excuse me!” my mom said again, and drew down her brows. Unlike other people who could pull off “threatening” very well, my mom just looked cute. “Let’s talk about you seeing other men,” she said pointedly.
That was what worried her: she thought that I had chosen the wrong guy to fall in love with.
Again. As we washed the dinner dishes, I tried to reassure her.
“Silas and I are friends,” I mentioned. I tried not to think of the feeling of his body against mine when he’d hugged me in the driveway, and of the shivers I had gotten.
It was just nice to be touched, that was what it was.
“He did make it very clear that he’s not interested in a relationship,” she pointed out, and that was true.
He had no interest in getting married and he’d expressed his relief that he didn’t have children.
Even when I showed him extremely adorable videos of babies on my phone, he never did anything more than grunt and he never watched the whole thing.
To be fair, my father (who loved actual babies, in person) was equally uninterested in those videos, but still. It was something of a sign.
We had been to church on Christmas Eve so the next day, the actual holiday, I had nothing to occupy my time except to stare at my phone and wait.
Well, I had brought legal work with me but my mom had made me put it away.
Up until now and as he’d promised, Silas had been calling frequently.
We’d discussed his strategy for preparing their Christmas dinner (he was making steaks, which I thought was ambitious) and he’d told me about his Santa strategy, too.
We’d talked until it got pretty late and I was whispering so that I wouldn’t disturb my parents in the room next door.
“I never did much about Christmas,” he had told me.
“I remember being pretty little and asking my mom if Santa would come and bring me a…I think I was asking for a truck to play with, but that part’s fuzzy.
She started to cry and told me no. Then she explained that Santa was actually parents but she didn’t have any money, and she’d tried to get me what I wanted at one of the toy giveaways but she’d waited too long so they only had some baby dolls and makeup stuff left.
I told her it was ok and we didn’t bother with Christmas after that. ”
“Oh.” That had made me very sad, but Silas had kept talking matter-of-factly, as if it didn’t bother him.
“I guess that’s why I like to do the Santa stuff for Ly.
I was sneaking around the yard ringing the sleigh bells earlier tonight, and I went over to Mrs. Alford’s and did it there, too.
I told her first so that she wouldn’t come out and beat me with a stick, and she was pretty happy. Gave me some saltines.”
“We have cheese you can add to those.”
“I’m full from dinner,” he assured me. “And Lyra’s stocking is also full, so much that it’s about to explode right now.”
I really had gone overboard. “Do you see a stocking for yourself?” I had asked.
“There’s one here with my name on it, and it looks like someone made it out of yarn. Was that what you were doing when you kept putting a pillow over your lap and saying, ‘It’s nothing?’”
“Do you like it? I think your favorite color is black, but I wanted it to be more festive.”
“I love it,” he had told me. “There’s something sticking out of the top that looks like a turtle with a tail made of hair.”
“That’s a papier-maché bust of you,” I’d explained. “It’s an amazing likeness.”
He’d laughed very hard but had said that he was absolutely not going to laugh when he saw it again on Christmas morning. I knew that, because he would never have hurt Lyra’s feelings.
“Is there any news about your dad?” I had asked, and it had felt like tension suddenly filled the air around me, even hundreds of miles away.
“Last I heard, he’s coming. He still won’t give me a time but in the final message I sent, I told him that I will let him in between the hours of eleven AM and twelve noon, and that’s it.
If he comes before or after, there’s no entry.
So I guess we’ll see if he can tell time, and if his dying wish to see his daughter is going to trump his lifelong ambition to be the most selfish person on the planet.
That guy sucks,” he sighed. “He’s like a candy cane you already licked and then you find a hair stuck to it. ”
We had eventually hung up, and I hadn’t heard anything more this morning.
We had opened our own stockings, which my mom still loved to fill for me.
It was mostly candy and little treats like that, and I remembered when I’d realized how they scrimped and saved to get me the Christmas presents that I asked for.
That was the moment when I had resolved to stop asking for expensive stuff.
I loved the candy instead, and my parents loved the little things I got for them, too.
But here I was staring at my phone. I had gone for a run and then fed the animals.
I’d gotten dressed and gone out again for a short walk with my dad, the two of us arm-in-arm.
We put on the old Christmas movies that I had always watched and I had texted the old flip phone and called a few times, but there hadn’t been any answer until I got a call from another number, with the area code indicating Detroit.
“Hello?” I asked cautiously.
“It’s Lyra,” she told me. “Silas lost his good phone that folds up, so I had to call from this one. First he couldn’t remember your number.”
“Oh, hi, honey!” In my happiness, I didn’t even realize what I’d called her. “Merry Christmas! Did Santa come?”
“I think so,” she told me. “Somebody did because my stocking was full of so much good stuff. Also, I heard the bells again!”
“You did? That’s amazing!”
Her voice dropped to a whisper. “I think it’s Silas, but I’m not going to tell him. He likes to pretend.”
“That’s nice of you,” I whispered back. I looked at the time and saw that it was noon. “Um, what are y’all doing now?”
“We’all are going to have lunch and then cook dinner. Did that sound like I was from Kentucky?” She’d been trying to do my accent, which I tended to let out more at home with her and Silas. It was now full-blown since I was with my parents.
“You sounded great,” I complimented, but that hadn’t been the information I’d been after. “Just the two of you for lunch?” I didn’t want to come out and ask about her father, but I did want to know if he had arrived within the specified window of time or if there was any word about his whereabouts.
“Yeah, me and Silas,” she agreed. “He saw the bust I made and he said he couldn’t believe it. Boris thought it was a turtle but Silas said no, it’s just like him and he loves it.”
“It’s beautiful.” I gave up on the hints. “Tell me about your presents.”
She had a lot to say, but eventually, she did run out of steam and announced that she was going to pass the phone to her brother. But before she did, she had a final question. “Are you coming home tomorrow?”
“The day after tomorrow,” I said.
“Oh.” She sounded disappointed—could that have been right? I might have been reading too much into that one little word and I tried not to get excited. “I guess I’ll see you later.”
“You can text me from this phone, if you want.”
“No, this is only for work and dumb stuff. The other phone is the important one,” she explained. “That’s why Silas was upset because he thought you might have been calling on it but he couldn’t find it. Here he is.”
“It has to be here somewhere, probably under some wrapping paper,” he said when he took over. “Were you trying to get ahold of me?”
It was better to admit the truth, since he would see the number of missed calls on the screen when he did manage to find the flip phone. “Probably about twenty times,” I said. “Also, I was texting. I was worried.”
He also lowered his voice to a whisper. “He’s not coming. I fucking knew it.”
“I’m sorry,” I sighed, because I really was, for both of them. “Is Lyra—”
Silas cut me off. “A brand-new pickup truck just stopped in front of the house. That can’t be my dad.”
“No, it’s not,” I said. “Probably not. I got you a present.”
“Yeah? What? Hold on, someone’s at the door.”
Then he found out what I’d given him.