Chapter 4 #2
Window six was the same town, from far away, on Christmas Eve night.
It was the whole town, the station and the pond and the church and the house on the hill, all tiny and glowing under a dark blue sky.
In the middle of the town square stood a huge tree.
And in front of the tree, with their backs to the glass, stood a man and a little girl.
The girl was sitting up on the man’s shoulders.
She was pointing at the star on top of the tree.
Above them, very small and very high, a single white light was sweeping across the sky.
It took the crowd a second.
Then an older woman near the front said, “Oh,” out loud, and put her hand over her mouth, because she had been coming to the lighting for thirty years, and she knew who the girl was.
Caroline had built window six in September.
She had built it for her father, for the thirtieth lighting.
It had nothing to do with Connor. It had been finished for months before Friday night.
But standing in front of it now, on the cold sidewalk, with a camera on her, she felt it come up through her chest and into her throat, all of it at once.
The girl on her father’s shoulders. The light going across the sky, looking for somebody.
She did not let it reach her face.
“It’s called The First Lighting,” she said. “Merry Christmas, Philadelphia.”
And the crowd on Walnut Street, at seven-forty-eight in the morning, in eighteen degrees, clapped.
* * *
By nine, the clip was everywhere.
Luz showed it to her in the stockroom, and then the gift-wrap ladies showed it to her by the ribbon counter, and then a girl from the shoe department came up to her with her phone out and said, “Mrs. B, have you seen this?” as if Caroline might not have been there.
It was the part about the hour and a half.
Somebody had cut it down to twenty seconds and put music behind it.
Under the video, people had written things.
QUEEN. She said what she said. Somebody give this woman her own show.
Nine seconds and a whole marriage, and she’s out here doing JOKES on live TV in the freezing cold. I could never.
By ten, a woman came into the store with a plate of homemade Christmas cookies wrapped in foil and asked the doorman to give them to Mrs. Bradshaw.
By eleven, there were three plates.
At noon, Stephanie texted her a link to the radio station.
It was the same morning host who had said thirty seconds on Saturday.
Now he was playing the window clip over and over, and laughing, and saying that he’d been on the air for twenty-five years, and that was the best interview he’d heard anybody in Philadelphia give, ever, and if the husband had any sense, he’d be at home right now with a paper bag over his head.
Team Caroline, Stephanie wrote. It’s a hashtag now. I’m getting a shirt made.
Please don’t get a shirt made, Caroline wrote back.
Too late. It’s pink.
At twelve-thirty, Caroline went into her office and shut the door and sat down behind her desk and put her face in her hands.
She wasn’t crying. She was shaking. It had been in her all morning, since the moment Rick lowered his microphone, and she had held it down and held it down, and now it came out of her in waves.
Her hands shook. Her knees shook under the desk.
Her heart was going as fast as if she’d run from Walnut Street to the river.
She had stood on a sidewalk and made jokes about her husband kissing another woman. The whole city had laughed. It had been the right thing to do, and it had worked, and she felt like she had cut herself open on live television and smiled while she did it.
Nine seconds and a whole marriage.
A stranger on the internet had said that. A stranger had said the truest thing anyone had said to her in three days.
There was a knock on the door.
“It’s me,” Luz said. “Can I come in?”
“Yes.”
Luz came in with a paper bag from the deli on Sansom Street. She set it on the desk and pushed it toward Caroline. Then she sat down in the chair across from her, took off her glasses, and let them hang on their chain.
“Eat,” Luz said. “You didn’t eat breakfast. I watched you not eat it.”
Caroline opened the bag. It was a grilled cheese and a pickle. She tore off a corner of the sandwich and ate it, and it tasted like cardboard, and she ate some more.
“Jenny called me back,” Luz said.
“And?”
“And she wanted me to know a couple of things.” Luz crossed her legs.
“One, the station’s getting more calls and emails about this morning than they’ve gotten about anything since the Eagles won the Super Bowl.
Two, her boss wants to know if you’d come back on the show on Friday and talk about the windows some more.
Three—” Luz paused. “After the segment, Jenny went back to the van. Brittany followed her. She wanted to talk about messaging.”
“Of course she did.”
“Jenny says she told Brittany that the store had made it pretty clear who speaks for the store, and that she didn’t need anybody from Mr. Bradshaw’s office on her sidewalk next time.
” Luz almost smiled. “Rick was in the van. He told Brittany she could stand behind the barricade with the public. Apparently he said it pretty loud.”
Caroline set down the sandwich.
“And then,” Luz said, “the whole crew watched her walk to the corner and stand there for about a minute, all by herself, on her phone. Nobody from the crowd would look at her. A lady with a stroller said something to her. Jenny didn’t hear what.
” Luz put her glasses back on. “Then she got in a car and left.”
Caroline sat very still.
She had wanted, in her office, to feel good about that. She waited to feel it. Instead, something colder and quieter and more certain settled in. She called the station. She stood behind the camera. She wanted me to break.
Brittany had not stumbled under a spotlight into a stupid moment. Brittany had come to the sidewalk this morning for a reason.
“Luz,” Caroline said slowly. “When Jenny talked to the woman from Mr. Bradshaw’s office on Saturday. Did she get a number?”
“I’ll find out.”
“Find out quietly.”
Luz looked at her for a moment. Then she nodded, once, and got up and went out.
* * *
Stephanie made spaghetti that night, badly, and they ate it on the couch with the pink shirt spread across Stephanie’s knees, because the shirt had in fact already been made. It said NINE SECONDS on the front in white letters. Caroline laughed until she had to put her plate down.
At nine-fifteen, someone knocked on the door.
Stephanie looked at Caroline. Caroline looked at the door.
“Did you order something?” Caroline said.
“No.” Stephanie set her plate on the floor and stood up. “Stay there.”
“Steph—”
But Stephanie was already at the door, and she had already opened it, and she was already saying, in her courtroom voice, “Absolutely not,” and starting to close it again.
“Please,” Connor said.
Caroline stood up.
He was standing on the landing in the dim yellow hall light.
He had walked up three flights of stairs, and he was breathing hard.
He was not in a suit. He was in jeans and the old navy peacoat he’d owned since before she met him, the one with the torn pocket she had sewn up twice.
He had no flowers. He had no bag, no gift, no letter.
His hands were empty and hanging at his sides.
Stephanie kept one hand on the door and the other on the frame, like a bouncer. “She doesn’t want to see you. Go home.”
“I know,” Connor said. “I know she doesn’t. I’m sorry. I’m not staying.” He looked past Stephanie and found Caroline. “I just need to—I’ll only take a minute. Please.”
Caroline walked to the door. Stephanie looked at her. Caroline touched her arm, and after a long moment Stephanie moved back half a step. She did not go far. She stood right behind Caroline with her arms folded, like a very angry lamp.
Caroline stood in the doorway and looked at her husband.
Up close, he looked worse than Saturday. He had not shaved today. There were deep lines around his mouth that she did not remember.
“You promised,” she said. “No people. No statements.”
“I know. I didn’t—” He stopped. “Somebody called the station on Saturday. From my office. I found out this afternoon. I didn’t know. I swear I didn’t know. I’ve told her—” He stopped again. “It won’t happen again.”
“You said that on Saturday, too.”
“I know.”
They stood there. Down the hall, somebody’s TV was playing a Christmas movie. A dog barked in the apartment below.
“I watched it,” Connor said. “This morning. In my office. I had it on the TV on the wall. I always watch the windows. I know you think I don’t, but I do.
Every year.” He swallowed. “I watched you walk down that line in the freezing cold and make the whole city laugh. And then you pulled the curtain. And I saw that window.”
She didn’t say anything. She couldn’t.
“I watched it four times,” he said. “I sat there with the whole building outside my door, and I watched my own wife on TV four times, and I kept thinking—” His voice went rough.
“I kept thinking, I know her. That’s Caroline.
That’s the woman who talked me into climbing a ladder at three in the morning.
That’s the funniest person I’ve ever met.
And I couldn’t remember the last time I’d heard her be funny.
Because I wasn’t there. I wasn’t in any room she was in. For a year, I wasn’t in any room.”
Caroline held on to the door frame.
“I don’t know what I came here to say,” Connor said. He looked down at his empty hands as if he had just noticed them. “I got in the car. I drove here. I walked up the stairs. And I don’t have anything. I don’t have a single thing to say that’s any good.”
He stood on the landing and looked at her, and for the first time since she’d known him, Connor Bradshaw had no idea what to do next.