Between Here and the Horizon(70)
Amie’s gift was just as impressive. At first it looked like a box full of random, sanded and varnished pieces of wood. All three of us stood over the open packaging, eyeing the contents with frowns of confusion on our faces until Amie yelped.
“I know what it is! I know! I know!” She dropped down to the floor and began pulling out the pieces and laying them out in front of her, at which point it dawned on me, too: they were bones. Dinosaur bones. Sully had hand carved her a simplified, to-scale skeleton of what turned out to be (after many hours of playing where-the-heck-does-this-piece-go?) a Velociraptor.
Amie was uncontainable.
Rose showed up in the afternoon, and together we made Christmas dinner. We exchanged gifts—I’d bought her a new Coach purse online. She’d bought me a beautiful cashmere scarf all the way from Scotland—and once we were done with the food and the gifts, and the children were crashed out face first on the sofa, she turned to me and said, “Off you go, then.”
“I’m sorry?”
“Don’t play coy with me, girl. I may have pretended I didn’t know what was going on before, but I’ve witnessed my fair share of Fletcher-infatuated women to recognize one when I see one now. So go. And tell him Merry Christmas from me, okay? I nailed a sock full of coal to his front door this morning. I’m sure he saw the funny side.”
I sat there, debating whether I should stay and argue with her, denying any knowledge of this Fletcher-infatuation she was referring to, or whether I should just gracefully accept defeat and come clean. In the end, there was only one thing for it.
“I’m really sorry,” I told her, groaning. “It wasn’t meant to happen. He’s just…he’s so infuriating. He gets to you, and then he gets to you some more. Before you know it, he’s all you can think about, and you find yourself wishing you’d never laid eyes on him in the first place, but it’s too late, and—”
“And he’s the one.”
“The most inappropriate, unorthodox, unreliable one there ever was.”
Rose gave me a pitying look. “Don’t we all just know it? Funny how the knowing doesn’t change anything, isn’t it?”
I hung my head, feeling pretty sorry for myself. “It’s the worst.”
******
I hadn’t opened Sully’s gift. I sat in the car outside the lighthouse, too afraid to get out of the car and go inside, knowing that he must have heard me pull up. I held the small present he’d left for me in my hands, turning it over and over, worrying the corners of the paper under my shaking hands. I was scared. What if it was something and nothing? A pair of socks? A gift certificate to a bookstore? The box was the wrong size and shape to be either of those things, but the thought was still there. What if it was a throw away gift that meant nothing? Was that worse than him giving me something that meant too much? Jewelry? Something personal and handmade like he’d given to the children? Either way, I was screwed.
The passenger door to the car opened all of a sudden, scaring the crap out of me. I’d been staring so intently down at the gift that I hadn’t noticed Sully leave the lighthouse and make his way over to the car. His cheeks were flushed red from the cold, and his wavy hair was swept back out of his face. Still the handsomest man I’d ever seen.
He climbed up into the car and made himself comfortable in the passenger seat. Not looking at me, he slammed the door closed and then stared straight ahead out of the windshield. Neither of us said anything at first. And then, “Aren’t you going to open it?”
“I’ve been thinking about it,” I admitted. “The children loved their gifts. Thank you.”
Sully shrugged, blowing onto his hands. “No big deal.” He was trying to pretend that it wasn’t, but both he and I knew how much effort he’d put into those gifts. How long they would have taken him to make—hours and hours. Both gifts were labors of love. It really was a big deal. “It smells like Christmas threw up in here,” Sully observed.
It really did. I’d set aside a plate of food for him when we’d dished up dinner without really thinking about it. A flask of mulled wine leaked cinnamon and spice smells into the car, which mingled with the scent of turkey, stuffing and gravy to produce an undeniably festive oratory assault.
“If you don’t want the food I can always take it home with me.”
“Are you kidding? I’ve been waiting for you for hours. I’m starving.”
“How did you know I was coming?”
Sully glanced sideways at me, mouth open in a smile. “There’s this part in The Sound of Music, where Maria’s trying to deny her true feelings for the stuffy old Von Trapp bastard. He’s fallen down some stairs or some shit, and everyone thinks she won’t go to him, that she’ll let him figure out his shit for himself or whatever because he’s been a grade A cunt to her, but then at the end of the film, just as the Nazis are about to cart old Von Trapp off to Auschwitz, Maria shows up with a machine gun and rescues his ass. Well, she tries to rescue him and gets herself captured in the process, so he actually has to save her in the end, but it all works out.”
I just look at him blankly. “Have you ever actually seen The Sound of Music, Sully?”
“Of course I have. Everyone’s seen The Sound of Music.”