9. Chapter 9
What Noelle Knows
Meredith
Noelle and Dasher’s quarters sat at the far edge of the compound, past a stretch of pine that muffled the sound of hammering and shouting drifting from the wreckage I’d left behind.
Outside the main area of Santa’s compound, I stood in the quiet and breathed.
It felt like the first time I’d taken a breath since this whole nightmare began.
“Breathe. It’s okay,” she said. “I’ve been in your shoes.” She walked toward a one floor log cabin. The trees surrounding it were missing bark, and the lowest branches were missing.
I took my time, letting the air wrap around me, blanketing me in its chill, grounding me in reality. I turned and looked at Santa’s village, a marvel of stereotypical buildings I’d seen in movies and on television. Huh. Who would have thought this shit really existed?
Inside Noelle’s cabin, it looked less like a fantasy and more like somebody’s actual home.
Half a dozen mismatched mugs sat on open shelves; a handmade quilt rested over the back of a worn couch, and she had pinned photographs along one wall in no particular order.
They drew me in. The first was of a much younger Noelle, maybe aged 10 or so, standing next to a massive reindeer with her hand pressed flat against his side, both of them looking at the camera like they’d just been laughing about something.
“See the first one? The one where I was a child?”
“Yeah. You knew your Dasher since you were a pre-teen?”
Noelle laughed. “No. My parents took me to the North Pole to do the touristy thing because what kid doesn’t love Santa and his reindeer? Well, I saw the reindeer and wanted a picture with it. My parents were both petrified, but he reached out and pretended to eat my hair.”
“So that’s not your Dasher?”
“No, but I’d find out later, fate has a funny way of pulling us in and leads us down the path it thinks we should take. For ease of this conversation, that was the Dasher my Dasher replaced.”
“Oh… so the Old, Old Dasher.”
“In a sense.”
The one right next to it was in black and white; the reindeer slightly smaller than the one in the photo with Noelle as a child, hitched to a glorious sleigh, while Noelle smiled for the camera, her hand on the reins.
“Sit, please. Make yourself at home,” she said, nodding at the couch, and busied herself at a small stove in the corner, pulling down two mugs as if this were any ordinary afternoon and not the day my life had come apart at the seams. “I’m making tea.
You look like you need to hold something in your hands, even if you don’t drink it. ”
“I don't need tea, but thank you.” My voice came out sharper than I meant it to. To her credit, she didn’t flinch. She kept moving, unbothered by my tone.
“No, you don’t,” she agreed. “You need someone to tell you the truth without dressing it up like a pig in lipstick first. I can do that. Truth? The tea’s just so my hands have something to hold while I share our world with you.”
Despite my protests, she set a mug in front of me anyway and folded herself into the massive plush chair across from the couch, legs tucked up under her in a way that told me this place had been her home for a long time and she was comfortable here.
“How long,” I asked, because it was easier than any of the questions floating in my mind, “have you been out here?”
“Seventy-two years.” She said it as if she were sharing the weather. “I was twenty-six when I met him. Younger than you, I’d guess, by a few years.”
“Seventy-two years?” I turned the mug in my hands, not drinking, watching steam curl up off it. “And you’re still…I mean, you look…” I put the mug down. “Ugh, no matter what I say or how I say it, it’s going to come across as rude.”
“I know what I look like.” She pinned me with her gaze, a look of resignation in her eyes. “I look twenty-six, Meredith. I’ve looked twenty-six for seventy-two years, and I imagine I’ll keep looking young for a good while yet.”
I couldn’t say anything. She let me sit with her advanced age in silence. Outside, the wind moved through the pine, and I heard my pulse rush too loud in my ears.
“Nobody told me that,” I said, the words coming out slowly.
“Nobody tells anyone that. Not up front, at least. I think they’re afraid if they lead with it, nobody will stay long enough to hear the rest.” Noelle wrapped both hands around her own mug, not drinking either, just holding it like ballast. “The bond with your Dasher doesn’t just tie him to you.
It changes you too at a cellular level, once it’s settled fully.
Your body stops keeping time the way it used to.
You don’t age. Not slower, you stop aging.
Whatever you look like the day it fully takes form, that’s what you look like for as long as he’s alive, and Santa’s reindeer live a long time, Meredith. A very long time.”
I set the mug down before my hands could give away how badly they’d started shaking.
“Impossible.”
“It’s not.”
“It’s not…” I stopped, and started again. “You’re being literal? No metaphors in sight?”
“Literal as it gets. I stopped celebrating birthdays around year sixteen or maybe twenty. It got too strange watching the candles multiply and my face stayed the same in every photo.” A ghost of something crossed her face, not quite a smile.
“My mother thought I got good genes. Until her dying day, she never knew the truth, because I didn’t know how I’d ever tell her without her thinking I’d lost my mind. ”
“How do you?” My voice cracked, and I hated it, hated that this was the thing that finally cracked it after everything else that had happened this week.
“How do you live like that? Watching everyone around you get older? What about your family? Your friends? Everyone moves on, while you stay the same?”
“Some days, badly.” Her voice remained neutral, but I sensed she told me the truth.
“I won’t lie to you and tell you it’s easy, because it isn’t, and anyone who tells you it is hasn’t actually lived it.
I’ve buried my parents. I’ve watched my sister go gray and lose her husband while I stayed exactly as I was the day I met my Dasher.
There were years I hated him for my lack of aging.
I hated the whole shape of what he’d made my life into, even though none of it was his fault any more than the weather’s his fault. ”
“Then why stay?”
She looked at me for a long moment, and her face softened. “Love.”
“How can you love someone you just met?”
“I didn’t. Not at first. At first, it was physical, and the best sex of my life.”
I flushed, my mind bouncing back to earlier. “Understandable,” I murmured.
“To add on to my answer, because the alternative was living a normal span of years without him in it, and I did the math on that more than once, believe me. Every time I ran the numbers, the answer came out the same. I’d rather have this strange, long relationship with him, as complicated as it is, than a shorter life spent missing something I knew I’d never find again. ”
I pressed the palms of my hands against my eyes, because if I didn’t do something with them they were going to shake again, and I didn’t want her to see that, even though some part of me suspected she’d already seen worse from other women sitting exactly where I sat now.
“I don’t know what I’m more scared of,” I admitted.
“Tell me what’s on your mind.”
“I don’t want to lose myself in this craziness.
My brothers, my friends… everyone I know will grow old around me while I stop.
Stay frozen. I’ll watch it all happen from the outside like I’m not even really living it anymore.
” I dropped my hands, forcing myself to look at her.
“Or my other option is walking away and knowing what that does to him. I’d know I’m the reason he ends up…
” I couldn’t finish that part. I didn't have the stomach for the words Noelle’s Dasher used, not put down like an animal, not out loud, not sitting in this warm little home with tea going cold between my hands.
“Those are the only two doors,” Noelle said, her voice gentle with no judgment in it. “I won’t pretend there’s a third one hiding somewhere I haven’t mentioned. I looked for one too, back when it was me sitting where you’re sitting. There isn’t one.”
“That's not fair.”
“No,” she agreed. “It’s not. Nobody asked either of us if we wanted this particular brand of unfairness handed to us on a silver platter, and I’ve spent seventy-two years being angry about that in one form or another.
Some days, quieter than others.” She sighed.
“Our males have been stolen from their planet as well. They didn’t have a say in their fate either.
You have the choice to suffer alone, or with someone who understands in his own way, about the choices taken from you.
” Noelle reached across the space between us and closed her hand over mine.
Her touch was warm and steady for my shaking nerves.
“But I’ll tell you what I wish someone had told me back at the start, instead of just handing me the fear and letting me sit alone with it.
Whatever you decide, decide it because you have looked at all the benefits and drawbacks of it.
Go into it with your eyes and your heart open.
Don’t do it because you’re running from one fear straight into the other.
Both doors cost something, but only you can say which cost you can actually live with. ”
I sat on the couch a long while after that, staring into a mug of tea gone lukewarm, then cold, listening to the wind move through pine outside a window that looked out on a life I hadn’t asked for and couldn’t picture yet.
Underneath all of it, stubborn and undeniable, sat the memory of my Dash’s mouth against my throat, his voice groaning out my name, and the way my whole body leaned into him like it had already decided something my mind hadn’t caught up to yet.
I didn’t know which door I was more afraid of.
Sitting there in Noelle’s cabin, I only knew that for the first time since I found a bleeding stranger on my porch, I wasn’t entirely sure fear was going to be the thing that decided my fate for me.
“It had to be tied to Christmas too… didn’t it? ” I muttered.