You Had Me At Christmas: A Holiday Anthology(115)
Emotion tried to strangle him, and he bent to scrub his face with his hands. Oh, Kai.
Kai, sweetheart.
He wished so badly he could have healed her. Made her forget everything. Made it all go away. He had tried, and that had been part of her fury. I don’t want to forget. I’ll never forget. You don’t understand! You never cared!
He had cared. Just—she had cared so much more. His care, the care that ripped him to pieces, had been focused in a different direction—not on what was growing in her belly, a little knot of cells in which, after the first time, he never again could really believe, but on her. Because her he could believe in. He could see and feel and suffer at what was happening to her.
He sighed heavily and lifted his head to gaze out over the valley again and eye the birds sideways, wondering if she had sighed exactly like that sometimes, right in this spot, if she had lifted her head and taken a deep breath, and just—sighed again. Let it sigh out, sigh on, let some of it sigh away.
Kai, sweetheart.
The birds scattered when he rose and touched each bird feeder, gently and carefully, a tiny stroke of his fingers. He headed back down into the woods and stood a moment under the trees, watching the birds come back, all bright, beautiful colors—goldfinches and cardinals and bluebirds and then the determined brown sparrows.
On the way back down, he stopped in front of that fir tree again for a long time.
Chapter Ten
Book after book on the phases of grief and miscarriages and postpartum depression filled the screen of Kurt’s iPad when she turned it on. Kai hesitated, her stomach doing this strange ragged twirl as she stared at them. Her fingers hovered, that close to opening one of the books, and then quickly she shut the reader app, determined to just check the weather, her original intention.
But then she saw the photo folder, and she hesitated again. They had never kept things private like this. Computers, accounts, codes—neither had ever had anything to hide from the other. But now . . .
She opened the folder before she could allow herself to admit that she shouldn’t. Just to see what he had been doing, this past year and a half.
But there wasn’t anything from the past year and a half.
All the photos were of her. Of them. A scanned copy of the first photo they had ever taken together, with a camera held out in Kurt’s hand as they pressed their cheeks together, because he had so wanted to capture them as a couple. She was laughing. His eyes were alight with happiness.
Her on a carousel horse at an amusement park she had talked him into going to—fifth date, still teaching him how to have fun—and she was laughing again. A photo one of their friends had caught of them at a cookout, Kai curled up against his shoulder, Kurt’s head angled to look down at her, such a beautiful expression on his face that she wondered why she didn’t have that photo tattooed on her heart.
Photos from their wedding, photos from their honeymoon, photos of their camping trip in Banff, photos at friends’ houses, a photo at one of his Frisbee tournaments when his team had won and he had lifted her up in his sweaty arms in triumph, as if she was his trophy.
The door opened and she lifted her head quickly, so awash in memories that all the hairs on her body were standing on end from them. “I was—I was just trying to see if we were expecting more snow,” she said guiltily.
“And are we?” Kurt asked, scraping his boots in the entrance, not seeming in the least troubled about questions of whether or not she still had the right to look at his iPad without asking. I wasn’t aware that I had terminated your first chance. In one hand, he carried a saw, one of the hand-crafted artisan tools with gorgeous wooden handles that his mother had featured in a magazine spread, during that period when Anne Winters frequently used this cabin and the different themes she could associate with it for her magazine and on her show. “I saw a—” Kurt hesitated. “Would you come cut down a Christmas tree with me, Kai?”
Her breath caught. She envisioned it so suddenly: them and a Christmas tree and just being happy. Maybe not entirely like they used to be, having passed through sadness, but still happy again.
“I would like one,” he said cautiously, affirming himself like a man who feared he might be putting his foot down on eggshells. Or glass shards.
“I don’t know,” she said. But she took a deep breath and thought, I do. I do want one. I do want to be happy.
Oh, God, I don’t deserve him.
She closed his iPad cover carefully over all those photos of them and came to him, standing so close she could feel the cold off his jacket. “Yes, I would.” Water from the snow dust melting off his shoulder curled slowly down his sleeve. She touched it, tracing it back up to the melting remains of snow, that she covered with her hand. “I do,” she said solemnly, feeling oddly like she had the day she had looked up at him in a church and married him. “I do want one.” She took a breath and sighed. “But I can’t promise it won’t make me cry,” she added wistfully. Once upon a time, she almost never really cried, except at sad movies and from happiness. She’d cried when he asked her to marry him. She’d been so happy.
He tucked her hair behind her ear and squeezed her shoulder, without comment. Just—compassion. It made her feel so strange—as if he, too, had come to a place of peace over the past year, a place where he didn’t try to fix her back into the person he had loved anymore, he just . . . loved her.