You Had Me At Christmas: A Holiday Anthology(94)

She grabbed the edge of a wax paper snowflake stencil too clumsily and left her fingerprint in the snow around it. Damn it, she hated it when she messed things up. Once she had been able to tolerate her mistakes, be patient with herself as she fixed them, but then everything had gone to hell and she had to—she had to—at least get something like the damn sugar snow right.

It was only in the past few months that she had started to calm that raging intolerance toward herself back into something sane again. She had worked so hard for that calm. She had taken so many long walks and deep breaths and forced her mind to think so many beautiful, strong thoughts. Now Kurt at the window had made all her intolerance surge up again, intensely, like its last stand.

“I just couldn’t,” she said low, to her finger smudge in the snow. Her voice sounded rough, unused. She talked to people up here—her support group, her clients—but it had been a year and a half since she talked to him. Or fought. Funny, a year and a half later, the first sounds out of her mouth sounded as if her voice was still rubbed raw from screaming. “I couldn’t open up anymore, I couldn’t try. I just couldn’t.” I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry. She fought not to bow her body over the granite, not to clutch the edge and ruin all her work, in a plea for forgiveness for something else she had ruined beyond recall.

She had begged for pardon everywhere, after the second miscarriage. I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, what’s wrong with me, what did I do wrong, doctors, tell me what to do.

Kurt had told her it didn’t matter. He had said that, stroking her hair back from her wet cheeks as if he was trying to do a good thing: “Kai, it doesn’t matter. Don’t worry about it.” Yes, he had said that. It had been true for him.

The third miscarriage had been the end. The end of her hope. The end of her. The end of them.

She didn’t even want forgiveness. Forgiveness hurt.

A moment’s silence. His hands in his pockets, his body long and straight, he watched her, even more intensely contained than she remembered. “I didn’t ask you to try. In fact, I told you to stop trying.”

That old pain swelled up in her so hard she couldn’t understand why it didn’t just break her. She had begged it, so many times, to break her, to go ahead and split her apart so she didn’t have to be anymore. “I know.”

She drew a breath. Grief and its pain came in waves; after a time she had learned the grief counselors were right about that. This was just one of those waves, kicked up high by him, her world’s earthquake over there by the window. The calm was on the other side of it and would come back in a moment. Maybe after he left. Oh, God. And the snow would fall, and there she would be, watching it as it cut her off from all the world, her arms wrapped around her knees.

Three months after she left him—maybe when he finally accepted she wasn’t coming back—he had sold their house, without talking to her about it. It had been in his name, bought just before they met. Half the proceeds had appeared in her bank account, and information on a storage account and the code to access it had arrived in a formal printed letter, as if an email might bring them too close, might encourage a response. She had never gone to look at the storage, because . . . what if, in his over-careful way, he had decided he didn’t have the right to get rid of the baby things for her? Or what if he had packed up their wedding photos? The terror of that had stuffed itself down her throat and choked her.

For weeks on end after that, she avoided her mailbox, but every time she steeled herself to work through its pile of envelopes, no notice of divorce proceedings had ever arrived. She still braced for it, every time. And it still never came. Maybe for him, too, divorce was a last wrenching, heart-breaking act he couldn’t quite stand to face. When he did finally move to divorce her, it would doubtless mean he had met someone else, a new, fresh love who motivated him to clean up his past so that he could move on from it for the new woman’s sake. At a distance, Kai had gotten used to that idea. She even knew that she should actually want that for him, a new, bright love without all the stains she had left on theirs. She was supposed to want that for him. It was her fault she had made him so unhappy.

Some of the money from the sale of the house had gone to rent this luxury cabin from his mother, and she had sat up here, with her arms wrapped around her knees, watching the snow fall, so peaceful, so freeing, shutting her off from everything, including him. She had thought the grief would kill her then. That she would literally die and no one find her body until spring. But it hadn’t worked out that easy.

“But I couldn’t stop,” she said, and her breath came out too hard, skittering sugar across the granite landscape.

He nodded and looked out the window, hands in his pockets. He had such a beautiful body. It had always worked just right for her, that long, rangy over-analyzed athleticism, the way he could keep it so carefully fit and yet not quite know how to have fun with it, until he met her. She remembered, still, the first time he had ever burst into laughter for her. It had been their third date, two weeks after they met at his mother’s enormous estate while Kai was setting up a spring flower-food photo shoot for Anne in her beautiful gardens.

For their third date, Kai had suggested a hike, because Kurt’s carefully planned dinners just weren’t working out the way their instinctive rapport in those gardens had suggested they would. Fascinated though she was by his over-thinking, she had wanted to get him away from it for a little while. They had rested in a glade on that gently sunny afternoon, him stretched out with his arms behind his head, thoughtful and serious, and her sitting with her legs folded, knees nearly but not quite brushing his ribs, fingers just itching to touch that stretched-out body, the body that he so carefully did not offer to her because he was so busy plotting how to get his approach to her just right that he didn’t realize how right for her it already was.