Chapter Ten
CHAPTER TEN
LIESEL
“ I definitely had one more than you!” I tell Coop on the way back to the hotel. He and I are in the backseat of the “party bus,” and Candace and two of the data engineers are talking and laughing in front of us. “You forgot the Naughty List puzzle?—”
“That was Paul, not you!” Coop says.
“No, it wasn’t! Paul got the crossword, but I did the—” I stop myself. “Rats. It was Paul.” I groan and bump my head against the back of the seat. Coop closes his eyes and rests his head on my shoulder. I shove him off, knocking his hat to the bench in the process. I scoop it up before he can and put it on my head. I get a whiff of his peppermint shampoo in the process.
Oh, wow, that’s nice.
Coop takes his hat off of me and returns it to his own head, his wavy hair poking out from the bottom. “A hoodie is one thing, but no one wears my hat.”
I give a disbelieving laugh. “It’s a hat. You probably have a hundred.”
“No, I have one. And a backup at home.”
I take it off his head and put it back on mine.
He takes it back off and returns it to his own head.
“You don’t understand. Finding a hat that fits me is like … Cinderella’s glass slipper. It’s a perfect fit. I can’t let anyone wear it.” He pinches my nose. “Not even you.”
I don’t let myself smile or blush at his implication that I’m special. I mean, I squeal inside a little, but that’s because I’m tired and not thinking straight. It’s almost eleven, and I hardly slept last night, what with having to fix the roster.
I yawn. “Coop, you wear a hat every game. And this is a team hat.”
“Yeah, and I’ve tried every single hat New Era sent me. Hundreds of them. This is the only one that doesn’t make my head look weird.”
“Don’t blame the hat,” I say. “It’s your weird head’s fault it looks weird.”
He pushes me all the way over, and I start giggling against the seat. And I can’t stop.
“Whoa,” he says, laughing. “Someone’s getting punchy.”
My laughter stops.
“What? You okay?” he asks. He pulls me up, and suddenly, tears spring to my eyes. “Liesel, are you okay? What happened?”
I shake my head, trying to shake my frown off with it. “It’s nothing.”
“Liesel, you went from laughing like a schoolgirl to looking like I murdered a puppy in front of your face. What’s up?”
I don’t want to say anything, but I’m tired and have lost my filter and too much inhibition. “I get silly when I’m tired.”
“I see that.”
“My brothers always had late games and tournaments, and when I’d get tired on the drive home from a game, my family would do dumb stuff to make me laugh. I’d start giggling and wouldn’t be able to stop, and my mom would always say, ‘Someone’s getting punchy!’” I give him a sad smile and wrinkle my nose. “I haven’t heard someone say that in a long time.”
Coop’s lips stretch into a thin line, and the street lights reflect the warmth in his eyes. He puts an arm around me and pulls me against his chest. “I’m sorry,” he says.
“Thanks,” I say. My throat aches with emotion, but he’s holding me tenderly, and it feels nice and cozy and … distracting.
“What was your mom like?”
I’m not positive how close we are to the resort, but it took fifteen minutes to get to the escape room, and it’s probably been half that time since we left.
“She was kind and funny and competitive, but not mean. And she loved Christmas. She started decorating the day after Halloween.”
“The day after Halloween? What about Thanksgiving?”
“She was Canadian—she and Dad met in college—so she always joked that the real Thanksgiving is in October. She thought it was ‘morally repugnant’ that people could start decorating for Halloween on September first but had to wait until the end of November to decorate for Christmas.”
“‘Morally repugnant?’ That’s strong even for me,” he teases. His right arm is slung around my shoulders, giving me my first real glimpse of his scar. It’s a huge, puckered, deep purple gash, and suddenly, it makes me see this larger-than-life superstar as just another guy. A guy who can get hurt, who can bleed, who can cry. And that softens my heart the rest of the way.
“She was sick for a long time—Lou Gehrig’s disease, or ALS as it’s called nowadays. She used to joke that she loved baseball so much, she made sure she even got the baseball disease.”
“Ouch,” Coop whispers.
“She lived a lot longer than most people with it, though. We were lucky we got so much time with her.”
“You weren’t lucky?—”
“We were,” I insist. “I met kids in the hospital whose parents passed away after only a couple of years with it. We got almost ten years. They were hard, but they were ours and they mattered.” I feel Coop nodding, but he doesn’t say anything. My voice drops, almost matching the hum of the passenger van. “For the last several years of her life, she couldn’t put up decorations, so I spearheaded all of it. I did the Christmas cards and all the baking. I made sure we watched all the movies on the right days, ate all the right snacks, went caroling. I planned the menu for Christmas Day and gave everyone their assignments. I went over the top making sure each Christmas was the best it could be because it could be the last. And then one day, it was.” My lower lip trembles. “She fell into a coma on Christmas Day two years ago, and she never woke up.”
“I’m sorry,” he whispers.
“I know it’s probably an insult to her memory, but I haven’t been able to enjoy holidays since then. If anything, the longer we’re removed from her passing, the more I hate them, especially Christmas. My dad and brothers keep trying to get me to relive all the best traditions , but the traditions don’t matter. It’s who we did them with that matters, and she’s gone. So what’s the point?”
I wipe away a tear as it rolls down my face. Coop’s arm around my shoulder squeezes.
“What do they say?”
“Nothing. I haven’t told them how I feel. I just avoid them all season long. It’s too hard to be with them and pretend that everything’s okay. They say that it feels like Mom is with them at Christmas but I haven’t felt anything except pain. I don’t want to make new memories without her. I don’t even want the old memories. They hurt too much.”
The tears are falling faster than I can wipe them, and when I use the sleeve of Coop’s hoodie—the hoodie I’m wearing—to sop up my wet, snotty mess, I hiss. “Shoot, I’m sorry! I swear I’ll wash this before I give it back.”
“Don’t worry about it,” he says. “Take it. It’s yours. Unlike a hat, hoodies really are universal.”
“I’m glad to hear you say that,” I tell him. “Because I wasn’t planning to give this back. Employees don’t get swag.”
“I thought you didn’t like things that weren’t earned.”
“Stealing is work.”
He laughs, and his shaking chest makes me shake. Then he exhales slowly.
“Can I offer a different perspective about Christmas?”
“I’d really rather you not.”
“Okay.”
Guilt nips at my chest. No, not guilt, reality, maybe. Some part of my brain buried deep down knows what I’m doing isn’t healthy. I flap my lips out like a horse. “Fine. I’ll trade you the hoodie for your perspective so I can say I earned it.”
“If you say so,” he says. “It sounds like your mom created more than just Christmas rituals that require her presence to have meaning. These are etched into the soul of your family. If it hurts to remember her, that’s not a bad thing. If it hurts to celebrate Christmas because you can’t stop missing her, that’s okay. Your family’s traditions are strong enough to hold your grief. And maybe they could heal some of it. The scar will always be there, but sometimes you have to take the bandage off a wound to let it heal.”
“But I don’t want to see the wound. I want to forget about it.”
“That won’t make it stop hurting. It’ll only make it fester.”
My lips tug down deeply. “What if you’re wrong?”
“Could it possibly hurt worse than it does now?”
I think about his question. Some days, the pain of missing my mom is so intense, it steals my breath. I can be walking through a grocery store and smell someone wearing her perfume, and the trigger has me running to the grocery store restroom to sob.
Other days are fine. Some are even good. But I always feel a little like I’m betraying her for having a good day without her, like I’m being untrue to her memory by smiling or laughing. I know that’s crazy. All she wanted was for me to be happy. I know that.
Christmas just makes it hard.
Coop is probably right that participating in our rituals and traditions couldn’t make me hurt worse than I already do. Seeing me grieve would hurt my dad and brothers, though. They protect me like a Momma Bear, even if I’m the one who kept the house running all those years and who still organizes our schedules around when we can see each other during baseball season.
Besides, deciding that I’ll be involved at Christmas is like deciding to get the travel vaccines I needed for my internship in Costa Rica. Yeah, not getting diphtheria sounds great, but you’re still scheduling your own pain.
I don’t want to.
“I liked you better when I thought you were a dumb jock,” I say.
“Nah,” Coop says. I can hear the smile in the way he talks. “This is all part of the Cooper Kellogg appeal,” he teases.
“Believe me: opening your mouth ruins the Cooper Kellogg appeal.”
He laughs hard. “In other words, you think I’m hot, but annoying. I’ll take it.”
The van pulls into the resort, and we all file out. Coop offers me his hand, and I’m tired enough to take it.
We walk into the hotel with the rest of the group and say goodbye to them. Coop walks me over to my private elevator. He tugs on one of the strings of his— my —hoodie. “Do you need anything for tomorrow?”
“Like what?” I ask.
“You know,” he says flatly.
I moan. I forgot about our bet. Our stupid bet!
“We counted ‘em up, and a girl like you can’t get mad at math.”
“Watch me.”
“A deal’s a deal, Liese.”
“Liese, huh?” I say as my elevator approaches. “Everyone calls me Lee. Well, except for the old building gossip who thought my name was Lisa. And I guess half my apartment complex still thinks that’s my name?—”
“Are you trying to avoid admitting what we both know is coming?”
“Maybe.”
My elevator opens, and I step on, glaring at him as the doors close.
The last thing I hear him say is, “Sweet dreams, Sugar Plum. You’re going to look hot in my jersey.”