43. Christmas Eve Eve
forty-three
Christmas Eve Eve
F or a moment I can’t breathe or move. My eyes shift to my exotic relation perched beneath her own doorway, and still nothing, as I blink up at Great Aunt Josie.
He said he’s fallen in love with me.
Something stirs inside me, and I look around the room for shoes, my coat, keys—
A cool, boney hand attached to sharp, acrylic, mauve-colored fingernails squeezes gently into my forearm before I can take a step.
“Darling, is this any way to greet your presumed potentially dead great aunt?” She leans in and kisses my cheek.
“We figured you were still kicking due to the lack of paperwork, Helen’s gag order, and your missing Range Rover.” Archer tips his head in a nod toward my great aunt. He always did know how to speak Josephine Amherst.
He stares at me from across the room, and I feel the tension Kourt left in the air from the heat of his glare.
“Archer, darling. Come. Come.” Aunt Josie throws her arms around his neck. “Whatever brought you to Blitzen?”
She’s as coy as a cat as she glints her eyes my way then slaps Archer on the back of the head. “It took you long enough, my darling. Too long, I’m afraid. Did I just witness Kourt McClain declare his love to my great niece in my former living room?”
Aunt Josie turns her attention to Helen who is still reading her phone alerts.
“Helen. It’s only been three days since we spoke, and the wheels have already fallen off.” Josie sashays to Helen and, placing both hands on her cheeks, kisses her forehead. “Nice work.”
Aunt Josie means it. She’s not being facetious. The opposite game is her style.
Helen looks up from her phone to acknowledge Josie. “Trust me. It was all them. Those two are—”
“Made for each other.” Aunt Josie claps her jeweled hands together and looks at me, her lashes high, and her eyes wide.
“I knew you had it in you, duck. For some reason, you and I have never been able to participate unless it is a great love. I suppose we’re rare that way.
Or lazy. If it’s not earth shattering— why bother . ”
She smiles a crooked smile as Helen leaks out a small gasp behind us.
“How bad, Helen?” I don’t recognize my voice as I demand answers, still ignoring Aunt Josie’s antics. All I care about right now is the man who walked out that door.
“Erika,” Helen turns her phone toward her, hiding the screen from me, and looks into my eyes with worry.
“I know what you’re thinking, but you can’t get down there.
The lumber mill is massive. It covers acres, and if these news reports are right—it’s worse than you can imagine.
You heard Kourt. They called in every fire department in the surrounding counties.
There’ll be a line for them to get through.
We’ll just be in the way driving down there. ”
“What are you even saying to me, Helen? You just told me that Kourt walked out of here to fight a fire that’s worse than I can imagine.”
“And why are you so upset about it?” Archer chimes in.
“Archer!” I can’t even look at my best friend right now. He and Great Aunt Josie are about as warm and comforting as an iron gate.
“Aunt Josie.” I run to her regardless. It’s my last appeal, grabbing her boney, yet oddly strong arm. I shake my head. “Don’t you know someone? Don’t you know everybody? Can’t you call, or—or get me to him? I have to be there. He has to know—that I—”
“That you what?” Archer’s really pushing it tonight.
“Yes, darling. Use your words. You’ve always had an explicit vocabulary.
I like to give our travels together credit.
But I’m just an old woman reminiscing. Never mind you three.
Chop. Chop. If you’re hell bent on going after your hero, my little heroine, you’re not going alone.
And you sure as hell aren’t taking the Beetle. ”
Aunt Josie makes a dramatic display of twirling solo to the door. Her gold wristlets jingle like Christmas bells as the charms clank together.
The woman looks like she robbed the store windows of Saks Fifth Avenue and an Arabian dancer back-to-back. “Come Helen, she must see this through. How I do love arriving in the nick of time.”
None of us move.
We stare at her from our spots in the living room. She’s bluffing. I know her. This is how she would say no to me as a kid. She pretends the world is your oyster, then makes you feel guilty for wanting to swallow it.
“It’s too dangerous. For us and all the people trying to help.” Helen serves it dryly, trying not to play into Josie’s little scene. She must also know her all too well by now.
“Oh. Well, darlings, if Helen says we shouldn’t, then we shan’t. She’s a smart woman that one.” Aunt Josie tosses her coat back on the rack and ignores it when it doesn’t catch but falls to the floor.
Archer runs behind her and hangs it up.
Sucker.
“In that case, we’ll finish the tree and start from the very beginning. Oh, how we do seem to have so very much to catch up on. Where’s the egg nogg?”
I glance over the three of them and I think I might crumble. Something sinks low in my gut. My pulse flipflops between heavy slow thuds and racing out of my veins. I’ve never felt this level of… panic.
“Erika, I think there’s a box with icicles in the hall closet coming out of the loft.” Aunt Josie all but demands and I trudge up the spiral staircase. “You should have seen the gold icicles on the tree in the lobby of the Four Season’s Doha.”
“Is that where you where?” I hear Archer below.
“No, darling. Not this time.”
I roll my eyes as Aunt Josie’s ambiguous answer fades in the background.
She and I both love vintage icicles. Guess I adopted that from her.
It’s not a tree without that final touch.
My heart thunders as I make it up the top step and land on the silver tinsel tree I moved up here to make room for the real tree.
It’s Kourt’s tree. We had the same one, or strikingly similar as 1960’s silver tensile style trees go.
“Helen,” I yell down form the top step.
“Erika, it’s only been five minutes. We made a rule. We’re checking every twenty minutes.”
My stomach swirls with warmth and butterflies when I think of standing by his tree and the glow of his fireplace just before he touched me in a way neither of us could come back from. I think I knew then that he loved me, but for him to say it out loud, tonight, in front of them… He means it.
Maybe the hurt of the mixtape was really embarrassment on my part.
I was humiliated that I thought it was mine when that couldn’t have been further from the truth. It was just overwhelming in that moment. Here I’ve been fearing he walked away from me that night—when it might have been the one time I should have gone after him.
Now, I can’t. I can’t even tell him I love him back.
He was my everything before I mentioned that damned mixtape, and now he’s walked away from me yet again. What if that’s the takeaway or the real sign… that it wasn’t my tape or destiny and this is the third time he’s left me standing somewhere speechless.
“Hey.” Archer stands behind me. I didn’t even hear him come up the steps.
“I know this is bad timing, but the trouble is, it’s never been the right time to bring it up. Can we talk about work?”
“Archer. I know all about it. They emailed me. Multiple times. There’s a reason it’s never the right time to talk about it. I don’t think that job is right for me anymore.”
“Right. Because of him. What? Are you going to hull up here in the Appalachian Mountains and make jam, or start an opioid addiction?”
“This has nothing to do with him, or Blitzen. It has everything to do with me.”
“And what do you mean, they emailed you? Did they renege on the deal?”
“They doubled their offer.”
Archer falls to his knees and fake begs. “Then what’s the fucking problem?”
“Archer, I think you’re missing one inherent point that must mean more to me than it does to you. They didn’t want me. They didn’t believe in me. They didn’t trust that I could do the job.”
“Erika, people don’t always see things right away. Maybe they have to get used to it, or think about it a little longer, before it hits them over the head like a brick and they—” He turns away from me. “They fly out from Chicago to bring it back.” He mumbles incoherently.
“What did you say?”
“I’m saying this happens all the time, especially to people’s careers. You’ve got to work, right?”
“Yes, Arch. It does happen. But it happened to me one too many times, and I don’t need them to work. Look at the two of us. You’re talking about the longest running Zoom meeting of all time. I can work from home, from—”
“Here?”
“Well, yeah. If I want to.”
“Do you think you might want to? Is that what this is about? Him?”
“No Archer. It’s about the fact that I don’t have to prove myself to them to be successful. I can apply for a job at a place that values what I bring to the table.”
“What about me?”
“What about you, Archer? Do you really need the firm to know your worth? I know you don’t need their money.”
“Says the one who just got an email that most likely makes her my boss on the Harmon account.”
“Archer, you’ve brought in more accounts than Sloan. We could open our own company. I’m just saying. I don’t need to be with anybody that didn’t want me in the first place.”
“Icicles darlings… the Douglas fir is waiting!” Aunt Josie interrupts from below.
I pass Archer to grab icicles from the hall closet. “You coming?”
I look over my shoulder.
Archer’s hands are stuffed in his pockets and he seems deep in thought. “Yeah.”
He sounds defeated.
But he has to know, I gave my all to that firm. I have nothing left for them. I place a heavy foot down on the first step of the spiral staircase. Something hits me I can’t quite place.
“Archer.” I turn on the step to face his direction, my hand on the rail to head down. “Thank you.”
“For what?” His hands stay in his pockets as he brings his face up inquisitively, to meet mine.