Chapter 2
Chapter Two
The next morning, Fiona stood in her nightie with the refrigerator door open, cold air spilling down her bare legs.
She couldn’t make herself shut it. Her muddled mind couldn’t process her new reality.
Her parents were on their way to Arizona. They would not be here for Christmas.
On the middle shelf sat the dinosaur lunch bag her mother packed last night, topped with a yellow Post-it.
Gammie loves you, Jam-Jam. Have a good day at school.
Her throat constricted. Oh Mom, I can’t do this without you and Dad.
For a moment, self-pity washed over her, but she shook herself. No. None of that.
Fiona took out the sack and closed the fridge. Her parents were fighting a bigger battle. She leaned on them too much. Time to stand on her own two feet.
Jamie sat at the table, his dinosaur placemat squared against the edge. The milk in his cereal bowl exactly at the blue mark. A line Pap helped him measure and create. Her son needed marks and measures. Visible proof that things stayed the same. Without them, Jamie dysregulated.
For her son, consistency and routine were the keys to a peaceful world.
She nibbled a thumbnail. If this were a normal day, in fifteen minutes her parents would climb the steps, collect Jamie, and take him to school.
But today…
Outside, a car door slammed.
Fiona jumped.
Jamie’s head snapped up, hovering his spoon above the bowl. “Pap? Gammie?”
Oh goodness. She should’ve told him the second she woke him up, but he was hard enough to get out of bed in the mornings, and she convinced herself waiting was the right choice.
Now she had left it too late.
Box breathing.The calming technique her therapist, Molly, taught her. Inhale for four counts, hold for four, exhale for four, and hold again. She must be strong for this moment. Keep it together for her son.
“Jamie, Pap and Gammie aren’t coming this morning. I’ll take you to school today.”
Her son straightened, his gaze fixed, not really seeing her; instead, he stared at something beyond her.
She knew that expression. Anxiety reached inside her chest and squeezed her heart in a tight fist. “It’ll be okay.”
“Pap and Gammie won’t be taking me to school?” His face scrunched.
“No, they needed to go out of town.” How much should she tell him? Deal with the present moment. Don’t even mention Christmas. Climb one mountain at a time.
He canted his head, but the rest of his body stayed rigid, unmoving. “They left? Without telling me goodbye?”
“They wanted to, buddy, but they had to get on the road before you woke up.” She kept her voice calm, the way Jamie’s therapist drilled into her, even while her insides roiled.
“No.” Denial. The countdown started.
But it wasn’t a given yet. At this point, she could still stop the implosion.
“We’ll have so much fun.” Don’t babble. “We’ll swing by McDonald’s and get an ice cream cone.” She rarely wasted money on fast food or bribed him with treats, but she was flying blind here. “How does that sound?”
“I want Pap and Gammie.” Demands. Step two.
Deescalate.
“You know what? After school today, we’ll put up the Christmas tree. How does that sound?”
He glowered, folding his arms over his chest. Defiance. Step three. “Pap puts up the tree with me.”
Quick, what would Molly suggest?
Routine. It was always the answer. But that drove away with Pap and Gammie.
“Finish your cereal. Brush your teeth. Shoes. Backpack.” She injected a no-arguments tone into her voice and hoped for the best.
His spoon clanked the bowl. “Pap puts the tree up. Pap does the lights first, bottom to top, left to right. Then the garland, wrapped clockwise. After that, the star. Last, I hang Dino Santa.”
Okay, dog-with-a-soup-bone stage.
“I know Pap’s procedure. I’ll do it his exact way. Eat your breakfast, and I’ll get out the decorations.” Bargaining. She would try anything at this point.
Jamie shook his head. “You’ll mess it up. Pap checks every bulb. Three hundred and fifty lights. Only Pap does it right.”
“Jamie, honey, I hear you.” She moved toward him.
Both arms shot up, his message clear: back off.”No tree means no Christmas.” He beat the air with his arms and flapped his wrists like he was about to take flight. “The pattern is broken. The house is broken. Everything is broken!”
Uh-oh. Here we go. She had to snap him out of this before he pitched over the point of no return.
She rushed to the hall closet, yanked the door open, grabbed the red-and-green tub from the top shelf, and carried it back to the kitchen.
“Here. See? Ornaments.” She took the lid off the container. “This is happening. As soon as you get home from school.” She dug around inside, found the ornament Jamie loved so much, and pulled it out. “Ta-da! Dino Santa.”
Tears ran down Jamie’s cheeks, but his eyes stayed blank. “I need Pap. Call Pap. He must come back.”
She moved toward him and stretched her arms to hug him. He retreated.
The stab of his rejection followed a well-worn path. It wasn’t personal; she knew that, but it hurt every single time. When she was a new mother, it devastated her. Now, she understood he just needed space.
She returned to the box, started pulling out more decorations, keeping Jamie in her line of sight but acting as if everything was just hunky-dory.
“Look what we have here,” she said, injecting high-noon sunshine into her voice. “Gammie’s glass angel she bought in Germany.”
But Jamie wasn’t looking. He paced, arms still flapping, muttering, “Pap, I need Pap.”
After Jamie’s autism diagnosis, when he was three, her ex-husband Richard walked out and never came back. From then on, her father became Jamie’s role model, the only father figure he knew.
How could Fiona ever hope to fill her father’s Sketchers?
“Let’s see what else we got.” Desperation sent her pawing through the Christmas ornaments, searching for anything to calm him.
Boring colored ornaments without designs, nothing interesting to divert him. Garlands, ribbons, bows, a Ziplock of hooks, and a white box she had never seen before.
Where had that come from?
Inside, she found a bundle of old Christmas cards wrapped with a rubber band. “Jamie, Christmas cards!”
The brittle band snapped in her hand. Cards fell and scattered across the floor in a messy fan.
One landed face up.
Thick paper, the edges browned with age. It appeared quite old. The front showed a hand-painted winter scene. A cowboy leaned against a rough-hewn shack, mountains rising behind him. Across the top, in faded red script, Merry Christmas.
Fiona crouched and picked it up. The card was signed in the right corner on the front. Jeb Ortega.
The artist painted the man in golden tones, his hair the color of wheat catching golden hour light, and a square jaw softened by a shadow of stubble.
His coat hung open, broad shoulders filling it out as if no weather could bend him.
One hand rested easy on his hip, casual, but his whole stance spoke of strength held in check.
And the eyes!
Pale blue and piercing, they met hers even through the brushstrokes, like he was staring straight into her.
Heat flickered in her belly, ridiculous at a moment like this, but she couldn’t shake it.
She flipped the card over. On the back, written in brown ink:
Rhett Kelsey. 1878.
Her heart slammed hard, and she swallowed her breath in a strange cough-burp.
The same ink. The same script. Just like the card Tessa showed her last night at the Rusty Spur. The one she swore materialized Cade Sullivan out of thin air and dropped him in Evergreen Springs. Eliza said she found a similar card before Wyatt appeared in her life.
Now here she stood, holding a hand-painted Christmas card of her own.
A third card. A third cowboy from 1878.
“Pap. Pap. Pap.” Jamie pounded his forehead with his palm every time he said the word.
Forget the silly card. Her son needed her. He was hitting himself. Fiona hopped up and ran to Jamie, the card forgotten on the floor.
But he just hit himself faster, harder. “Pap. Pap. Pap.”
“We’ll call him.” She grabbed her phone off the counter. Getting him to school was out of the question. What mattered was quieting him before he hurt himself. “I’m calling Pap now.”
“No!” He let out a high-pitched shriek that rattled every bone in her spine. Not a tantrum. Tantrums chased want. This noise belonged to rupture. The structure beneath his world collapsed, and he along with it.
He ran in circles, slapping himself, endlessly repeating his grandfather’s name. She tried to catch him, to hold him still, but he gnashed his teeth and kicked at her.
Dad would have hummed to him. Mom would have gotten out the weighted blanket. But they weren’t here, which was what triggered the whole meltdown in the first place.
Oh! She made a mess of things.
“Sweetheart, listen to me.” She wrung her hands. Overwhelmed, overloaded. She could not do this alone. “Jamie, breathe with me. In for four—”
Screaming, he dropped to the floor, his entire body rigid and quivering as if having a seizure. Fiona knelt beside him, but when she tried to touch him, he began banging his head on the tile floor.
Ground zero.
She slipped her legs beneath him, anything to keep him from cracking open his skull. He beat his head against her thighs. The force left her reeling.
“Please,” she prayed. “This is beyond me.”
She placed a hand behind her to brace herself through the onslaught, and her palm landed on the hand-painted Christmas card of Rhett Kelsey.
Fiona glanced down at his strong, handsome face, felt warmth from the card radiate up her arm, and then she did a very foolish thing.
“Rhett Kelsey, if you’re real, I need you more than I’ve ever needed anyone.”
The minute the words left her mouth, the entire apartment lit up with an otherworldly glow, and in an instant, Jamie fell silent.
* * *
Rhett Kelsey turned the small wooden top between his fingers, feeling the smoothness where his knife shaved it. Cedar curls littered the porch of the winter cowboy camp shack.