I can’t believe I told her. I can’t believe I told her.
For the entire thirteen-step journey from the kitchen into the Christmas tree-dominated living room, Clark could only repeat those words. Then the thought mutated. I can’t believe I’m happy I told her. I can’t believe I’m relieved I told her. I can’t believe I trusted her. And still trust her.
Clark couldn’t remember the last time he’d thought about his parents for any stretch of time, much less talked about them. He treated his memory of them like a precious, finite resource. The more he shared them, the less he had for himself. If he talked about them too much, he feared, he’d lose them forever. He wanted to protect the pieces of them he could.
But talking about them with Kate liberated him. Secrets he’d been jealously hiding all his life came to the surface, excavating the pieces of his heart he’d buried long ago.
Before his parents died, they spent most of their winter holidays here, visiting for a few days between Christmas and New Year’s, reveling in the time they got to spend with their family. The living room hadn’t changed. At least, it hadn’t physically changed since Clark saw it last. No one came in and threw extra tinsel on the mantel or hung more fake icicles from the ceiling. But as night cloaked the Woodward House, the quality of light changed inside the opulent family room. Instead of another room in a house on a cold winter’s day, it grew into a safe harbor of golden light, a refuge from the black night settling in outside of the walls. Kate turned the key in the fireplace, igniting the flames within and adding to the invisible layer of coziness wrapping itself around Clark’s shoulders. It reminded him of the time before, of the winter evenings spent here with his aunt and uncle, his mother and father.
“I’m guessing you haven’t decorated a tree in a while either?”
“I did a couple of times at school. That sort of celebration was mandatory.”
As a kid, Clark did everything to get out of the festivities required of boarding school boys to make them feel more at home during the season. Thinking about Christmas brought up those memories he fought so hard to hide and hold onto; participating in the jolly holiday with his schoolmates only made things worse. He feigned illnesses. He tried to get in-school suspension. He claimed religious exemption, even going as far as to wear a yarmulke for three months. All to no avail. The administration allowed him to remain on campus for the holidays, but refused to excuse him from celebrating that same holiday during term time.
“I guess you made handprint wreaths and stuff,” Kate ventured as she dragged a stack of boxes out into the middle of the room. Clark raced to help her, taking the top three boxes away to lighten her load. He followed her lead, opening the tops and exposing the blinding treasure trove of glitter, red paint, and homey paper stars tucked inside.
“We mostly made pinecone reindeer. Our teachers were not the most imaginative bunch.”
“That’s a shame. The teachers here in Miller’s Point are amazing.” Kate picked out a chain of paperclip stars. Their lopsided shapes assured him they were the handiwork of school children. He wondered if any of them hated Christmas as much as he had when he was a boy. Did anyone in Miller’s Point hate the season, or was he the only Grinch in sight? “Help me untangle these?”
“Yeah, sure.”
With delicate fingers, they picked apart the tangled knots of nickel. Clark paid special attention not to bend them out of shape. Frivolous as he thought the exercise was for a classroom—when he was a boy, he threatened to file suit because Christmas activities robbed him of the teaching time his family paid for—someone still spent their time and effort on this chain of stars. He didn’t want to ruin them. As they worked, Kate talked, stupefying him more and more with every word out of her mouth.
“Miss Monzalno, the second-grade teacher, she teaches her kids how to make advent calendars. And Miss White takes her kids to Dallas every year to serve at a soup kitchen right before they get out for Christmas. I don’t know if she still does it, but when I was there, Miss Elias took all of us to plant our own trees.”
“You know so much about this town,” he said, causing her to balk. A swift tug of her wrist sent the paperclip strand flying out of his hands.
She deflected. “It’s mine. It’s special to me.”
“Not even Michael knew so much as you do.”
“Miller’s Point is my family.”
“I don’t know that much about my family.”
He didn’t mean it as an accusation. But she took it as one.
“You’re not the only one with a tragic backstory, Clark.”
“You…?” She faced the world with the blinding optimism of someone who’d never been hurt before. He’d assumed she had a brimming family with many siblings. Every time he so much as imagined her home life, he pictured a Norman Rockwell painting, a white picket fenced house with a table of smiling cousins and grandparents.
She made herself busy with the ornaments, taking them out one at a time and arranging them on the tree’s branches. They sparkled ironically as a shadow took hold of Kate.
“My mom wasn’t ever really in the picture and my dad was…not a good father.” Those words hung in the air for a moment before she amended herself. What came next was a confession, one he wondered if she’d ever shared with another person so explicitly. “He was an alcoholic. I started volunteering with The Christmas Company when my teacher—Miss Sanders—wanted to help get me out of the house. I liked it so much, I never wanted to go back
home. The town became more of my family than my family ever was. Not exactly tragic. It’s really a happy ending, if you think about it.”
Each word was worse than a kick in the teeth. It took Clark a long, solemn moment before he recovered enough to speak again.
“Only you could see it that way.”
“See it what way?”
“Horrible people treated you horribly and you think it’s a blessing?” he asked, furrowing his brow. Kate only shrugged, picking up a small, golden star and hanging it up on a branch. The rustle of needles filled Clark’s nose with the scent of pine, a scent he’d forever associate with this moment and this confounding, exceptional woman.
Her shoulders were so slender for someone who carried the weight of the world on them without so much as bowing beneath the pressure.
“If I was a normal person with a normal life, I never would have found anything spectacular. You know, bad things aren’t the end of the story. Well, I guess they can be, but only if you let them.”
A million incredulous, confused responses bubbled to Clark’s lips. He didn’t speak any of them. She offered him simplicity. What was the point in complicating something that clearly guided her and gave her happiness? Changing the subject before he could contemplate whether he could have lived his life like she lived hers, Clark reached for the nearest box of ornaments. He cleared his throat.
“How do you decorate this thing? And where did all of these come from?”
“It’s all Christmas Company stock,” she explained, “but we have this tradition where every year everyone who works for the festival brings one ornament and adds it to the collection. That’s why they don’t match.”
“And what’s the point of that?”
“I don’t know. It’s just fun.”
“But why?”
“Because it’s a tradition.”
“But why is it a tradition? How did it start? What’s the big deal?” Clark honestly wasn’t trying to be an annoying jerk. He simply didn’t get it, like his twelve-year-old self didn’t get the point of the Christmas traditions at boarding school. Everyone bought into the rituals and empty gestures; he didn’t understand why.
“It just is.” Kate’s hands hesitated over a small puppy ornament, searching for something to offer him. Clark held his breath. “Like your mom putting out the Santa candle. It didn’t actually do anything. It’s just meaningful for its own sake.”
“Wait…you mean Santa isn’t real?”
He chose to joke rather than acknowledge his own investment in his mother’s tradition. That was different. It earned him a good-natured shove from his partner.
“Of course he’s real. Shut up and decorate the tree.”
Obediently, Clark collected a few ornaments out of the box, inspecting each one with keen interest. They didn’t come out of a two-for-one sale from some big box store. Each one came from a person here in town. Each one carried meaning. They were, like the paperclip stars, special to someone. Maybe if he knew why, everything would become clear.
“Can you tell me about them?” he asked.
“The ornaments?”
“Yeah. Do you know anything about them?”
“I know them all. I keep the record books about who gives us what.” She collected a few herself. “Why don’t you start putting them up and I’ll talk you through them?”
Clark nodded, then reached up on his toes to place a toy X-wing fighter up towards the top of the tree.
“What’s the deal with this one?”
“It’s heavy!” Kate held out a hand to stop him, her fingers barely brushing his. Panic gleamed in her eyes. Clark reminded himself how important these little trinkets were to her. Breaking even one would break a piece of her. “Put it on a low branch. The high branches aren’t strong enough to hold it.”
“Right.”
Great move, Clark. Now she thinks you’re a triple moron. You don’t get Christmas and you made her confess her life story to you and you don’t get basic physics. He placed the miniature space plane on the appropriate branch, ignoring the heat rising to the tops of his ears. If she noticed the red splotches undoubtedly forming there, she was decent enough not to mention anything.
“Teddy Cooper gave us that two years ago. He got it in a happy meal, said it was the “happiest meal of his life,” and so he turned it into an ornament so he could always remember.”
“Wow. Okay…” Clark scraped his memory for the last time he’d laughed as much as he laughed today, only to come up empty. Brushing that thought away, he picked up a tiny gold band turned into an ornament by an interlocked strand of clear fishing line. He dangled it so close to his eyes his lashes brushed the circlet of metal, trying to discern what it could possibly be. “What about this one?”
“Condola Walker. She broke off her engagement and that’s the ring.”
“What?” The urge to throw the ring across the room fought his urge to run into town and return the jewelry to this Condola person. Who would give up something so expensive when they could have just pawned it? Kate, unmoved by his indignation, rolled her eyes.
“It was, like, twelve dollars or something. Believe me, she was glad to be rid of it. Keep ’em coming. We’ll never get this tree decorated at this rate.”
Shaking off the abject strangeness of someone just giving away their engagement ring, Clark hung it up towards the top of the tree. It caught the light, spinning in the gentle breeze of the drafty old house. Even if he wasn’t inclined to like her—which he was, he’d admitted defeat in his battle against his affection for Kate—he’d still be the first to admit how impressive Kate’s instant recall of the facts of the town was. Like a close-hand magic trick, Clark all at once wanted to move in closer and step further back. Her confession about her childhood rattled him; the distraction of decorating didn’t prove as distancing as he hoped. She’d been so broken by her family that she’d devoted her life to everyone else in this town.
No wonder they all came at her call today. No wonder they decorated his house and cooked a banquet at her request.
“This one’s a tiny fake tree,” Clark said, twirling the small carving. Kate wedged herself between the wall and the tree, trying to decorate an unseen portion of branches, so this one demanded some description.
“Does it have little red baubles on it?” she asked, muffled by the tree between them.
“Yes.”
“That one’s from Mr. and Mrs. Simon. Their little grandbaby died, and Mrs. Simon built the coffin herself out of a tree in their backyard. She took a piece of the scrap wood and carved that.”
Clark cradled the tiny ornament in the palm of his hands, staring down at it reverently as he searched for a word to properly describe the empty cavern opening in his chest. He hadn’t felt this way in so long.
“That’s sad.”
“Don’t worry. There are plenty of funny ones in there.” Kate came to the rescue as Clark placed the tiny tree in a high place of honor upon the larger tree. “Do you see any paper flowers made out of thick paper? They should have music notes on them, if that helps.”
Digging around, he finally found not one, but about twenty of those flowers tucked into a shoebox in the bottom of one of the ornament crates.
“Yeah.”
“Those were given to us by Pastor Mark, but he didn’t make them. He caught a bunch of boys making paper airplanes out of hymnal pages, so he decided if they liked folding paper so much, they would take all two hundred of the out-of-date hymnals and make paper flowers out of them. They spent six days of Christmas vacation making those things.”
They carried on in this fashion for longer than Clark cared to admit; even worse, he hung on her every word. He actually invested himself in the intersecting and interweaving lives of these strangers. A born storyteller, Kate shared every story she remembered, dragging him deeper and deeper into the melting-pot mythologies of Miller’s Point.
His attention slipped only once, when he pulled out what seemed like the millionth star-shaped trinket. Only, this one was different. It struck him. Multiple shades of ugly green and brown glass had been melted together to form a sort of patchwork glass star. Its edges created an outline out of twisted wire. The most similar thing he could think of was a stained-glass window, but those were beautiful. This wasn’t quite beautiful. It was sublime, perhaps. Holding it up to the light, he let the color play on his face, losing himself in the warped surface of the star.
“What’s this one?”
“That’s one of mine,” Kate said, her voice dipping low. The pride she’d taken only a few minutes ago in her stories and shared histories vanished.
“What is it? Did you make it?” Clark squinted, coming up closer to a raised etching along one of the corners. He could hardly make it out. “Is this a whiskey label? I didn’t know you drank.”
“I don’t.”
“Was this like an art project or something?”
After hours of learning about her town and these ornaments, he should have known none of these were just anything. They all carried their own weighted tales. To think Kate’s wouldn’t was the height of foolishness.
“When my dad died, right after my eighteenth birthday, I went to his apartment and cleaned it all out. I hadn’t been living there for, like, two years. Emily’s family took me in. So, I went through the whole house, throwing almost everything away. And then I got to my old bedroom. It was covered in broken bottles, like he’d just thrown them all at the wall and let them shatter. There had to be a hundred of them. He used my room as a garbage can, basically.” She laughed a wry laugh.
It occurred to Clark then how unfamiliar they were, and yet how close at the same time. They’d only met yesterday, but they’d both exchanged their most painful memories without a second thought. Maybe it was the magic of the season or her persistence or a little bit of both, but they trusted one another even when they had every reason to protect their own secrets.
He’d broken her once. He told her he didn’t care. He lied. But this moment was different. She wasn’t broken; she wasn’t hiding. But he still wanted to wrap her in his arms and hold her together.
“Kate—”
“Anyway,” she brushed him off. “I cleaned the whole house, but I couldn’t get rid of all that glass. I mean, I could have. But when the whole house was clean and I was left with a handful of broken glass shards, I didn’t want to. I wanted something of his, even if he hated me. I asked Michael to help me make this. My dad wasn’t a good dad. Or really a dad at all. But he was mine. And I didn’t want him to be erased. I wanted to always look at the tree and remember.”
“Remember what?”
Her arms froze over the tree. The whiskey bottle star halted over the greenery. Her face knitted tightly in an expression he’d never seen come across her face before.
“I don’t know,” she confessed. “Remember him. Remember that I survived. Remember that I forgave him and loved him even if he wasn’t good to me.”
“You forgave him?”
Kate blinked. Her long eyelashes were wet with tears, but none fell down her cheeks. Her stare melted into confusion, as if he was a student who’d just asked what the capital of their own state was, as if the answer was so obvious as to render the question absurd.
“I had to.”
“Why?” He asked.
Somehow, Clark and Kate had gotten so close he could feel her breath on his skin. He wanted to kiss the wrinkle between her eyebrow away. He wanted to hold her and tell her nothing could ever hurt her again.
“Because we can’t survive if we’re always carrying dead bodies around, you know? That’s no way to make a happy life.” The sting of conviction stole the breath from Clark’s lungs. He was guilty. He’d been dragging around dead bodies his entire life, robbing himself of any chance of happiness just so he could forget his own pain. Kate rolled her eyes, an attempt to clear the air of tension. “Besides, he was kind of a jerk. He probably would have resented my forgiveness. No better way to get revenge, right?”
She moved to step away, but Clark caught her. He couldn’t help but touch her. Their intimacy demanded it. His cold hand reached up for her left cheek; he cradled it, commanding her eyes. Her breath hitched. His heart stumbled. Kiss her, you moron argued with don’t ruin what you have by kissing her, you moron. He’d gone most of his life without friends, and tonight he’d found one. Learning from her and basking in their friendship had to be more important than kissing her.
“How do you do it?”
“Do what?”
“Stay as hopeful as you do. I don’t understand how it’s possible for one person to be this optimistic all the time. I was awful to you and you didn’t flinch. Your life hasn’t been great but you count it as a blessing… How do you do it?”
“You really want to know?”
“Yeah.”
She bit her lip, an adorable gesture Clark never got in movies but now understood completely. She grew increasingly sheepish as she interrogated his motives.
“You promise you won’t make fun of me? It’s pretty cheesy.”
“Promise.”
“Cross your heart?”
“Yeah.”
She shot him a look. Apparently, she wanted him to actually cross his heart. He did so, all while struggling to maintain a dignified, solemn expression. When she was satisfied, she shoved her hands into her back pockets, staring up at the tree. In the glow of the lights, she looked more than beautiful as she whispered the simple truth that had sustained her through her entire life.
“I keep Christmas with me all year long. It’s the one time of year when I find it impossible to think the worst in people. If I pretend every day is Christmas, it makes life so much easier to live. And people so much easier to love.”
“I wish I could do that,” Clark breathed. He tried to move his hand away from her cheek, but Kate got there first. She held him there, this time forcing him to give her his eyes. A sweet smile encouraged him. Challenged him. Filled him with hope.
“You can.”