“I’ll never adjust,” Nancy said vehemently. “Never, as long as I live!”
Later that night she asked Kirby tearfully, “Are you ‘adjusted’? I mean, really?”
“I think so,” Kirby said. She paused, thinking about it so that she could be sure she was answering honestly. “I felt funny when Mom said that word, ‘custody.’ It was so official, sort of, and so final. But when I see the way she’s settled down here, how happy she seems and how many good friends she has, I feel better about it. She fits here, Nance. She never really did fit trailing along after Dad.”
“I don’t think you love Dad the way I do,” Nancy said. “You couldn’t and still feel that way.”
“I do love him,” Kirby said. “It’s just that he and Mom have made their decision, and it’s their lives. It would be nice if it were different, if Dad were a quiet, settled-down sort of man like Mr. Duncan—”
“Like Mr. Duncan!” Nancy’s shriek of outrage shook the room. “That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard in my life! How can you even say their names in the same breath—how can you compare stupid Thomas Duncan to Richard Brendon Garrett! I don’t care if the divorce is final, that doesn’t mean anything. People get divorced and marry each other again. It happens all the time! Look at celebrities—they’re always doing it! Once Mom sees how lonely and miserable it is not to be married, she’ll go back to Dad!”
“I don’t know about that,” Kirby said. “She’s like a bird that’s been looking for a nest and finally found it. She’s got a home, and her job, and friends, and us…” Her voice wandered off. Her mind had gone slipping away without her and was dancing the Snow Queen. She was leaping and whirling across a stage in a deluge of snowflakes, and her parents and Nancy and everyone else in the world were left far behind.
The weeks before Christmas were filled with rehearsals, and on December 23 there were two performances of the Nutcracker, one in the afternoon and one in the evening. Nancy and Brendon attended the matinee. They came backstage afterward, their faces flushed with anger.
“How could Madame Vilar have given the Fairy part to that stringy girl!” Nancy exclaimed without even bothering to lower her voice. “She’s crazy, that’s what she is! You’re a much better dancer!”
“Hush, Nance.” Kirby glanced quickly around to see if her sister had been overheard. “You can’t say things like that, even if you think them. Madame has her reasons for what she does. She has to balance the entire cast.”
“Oh, please,” Nancy said. “You always think Madame is perfect, no matter what. That Wright girl looks like a piece of string.”
“She dances like a windup toy,” Brendon said, to his sisters’ surprise. It wasn’t a Brendon-like comment, and he had never seemed to notice much about dancing before.
They both grumbled about it all the way home, and their mother, who was attending the evening performance with Mr. Duncan, said, “Don’t ruin the whole experience for me, you two. If Kirby isn’t upset, I don’t know why we should be.”
The evening performance was primarily for adults, and they did not go backstage, but waited out front in the entrance hall. Kirby changed out of her costume and hung it on a rack in the dressing room. Then she took the package containing the glass swan and left it on the desk in the little front room that Madame used as her office.
By the time she reached the hall where her mother was waiting, many of the other parents had already left. Elizabeth Garrett and Tom Duncan were standing together over by the doorway. They were so engrossed in conversation that they did not see Kirby when she entered the room. Elizabeth was wearing a new red dress in honor of the season. The color was reflected in her cheeks, and her eyes were shining. She was talking gaily and animatedly, and Thomas Duncan was gazing down at her, smiling. His face held a look that Kirby could read half a room away.
Oh my god, he’s in love with her, she thought. Mr. Duncan is in love with Mom!
So that was why Nancy had never been able to like him! She had sensed the emotion there from the very beginning. “There’s a different feeling about him!” she had cried on that first night he had come to their home.
And Mom, Kirby wondered, does Mom feel it? She looks so special tonight, so bright and sparkly—
And at that moment, Elizabeth looked up and saw her, and broke off what she was saying.
“Darling!” she cried, holding out her arms to Kirby. “You were wonderful, just wonderful! You were a beautiful Snow Queen, and I was so proud of you!” Hurrying forward, she caught her daughter in a tight hug.
“She’s right, Kirby. You were excellent.” Mr. Duncan held out his hand. “Congratulations. I had no idea you were so accomplished.”
“Thank you, sir,” Kirby said as she took his hand. Then she raised her eyes and looked for a long moment at his face. It was a pleasant face; not handsome, but nice to look at. An ordinary type of face with sandy hair and light eyes, true and a little shy behind horn-rimmed glasses.
She pictured her father with his great laugh roaring up out of the depths of him, the force of his personality shooting out like sparklers in all directions.
Poor Mr. Duncan, she thought. It’s not fair. It really isn’t.
Because now that she was with them, she could see that the glow on her mother’s face was for Christmas and for friendship, and for her pride in a daughter who had danced the Snow Queen. If the potential for love was there, Elizabeth still did not know it, and with Nancy so determinedly against it, there was little chance that she would ever find out.
Brendon was the first one awake on Christmas morning. He was relieved when he opened his eyes to see that it was morning. He had been waking up once an hour all night just to check, and he had almost decided that some crazy thing had happened to the sun and night was going to last forever.
Now, however, he could see the furniture in his room, dim shapes in the faint dawn light, and he got up and went downstairs in his pajamas to see if he was right about what would be waiting there. He had guessed it first when he saw the long, flat box in the back of his mother’s car. It was the kind of box things came in when they had not yet been put together. Then when Mr. Duncan had come over on Christmas Eve and Brendon had been sent up to bed early, he had been almost sure.
They hadn’t even allowed him out of his room long enough to get a drink of water.
“How is Santa ever going to come if you keep wandering around like that?” his mother asked. Elizabeth still pretended to believe in Santa Claus, and Brendon had never had the heart to tell her that he had long outgrown the fantasy.
Later in the evening, when the girls had gone to their room and couldn’t tell on him, Brendon came out into the upstairs hall to listen. His mother and Mr. Duncan were in the living room, and he could tell by their voices that they were struggling hard to put the thing together.
“I think those screws go here,” Mr. Duncan was saying, and his mother asked, “Then what do we use to attach this piece to the handlebar?”
I hope they got it right, Brendon thought as he hurried down the stairs. I don’t want to spend all Christmas morning reassembling it.
The bicycle was there in the living room, just as he had anticipated. It was a Mongoose Override Freestyle BMX. Brendon examined it carefully and sighed in relief. Everything seemed to be connected correctly except for the kickstand, and he could fix that easily.
With a grin of delight, he rushed back up the stairs to wake up the family.
He bounded into the girls’ room and bounced onto the foot of Nancy’s bed.
“Hey, wake up, you lazy dorks!” he shouted. “Santa was here!”
“Cool it,” Kirby said good-naturedly before rolling over and opening her eyes. Kirby always came awake quickly, as though she had never been sleeping at all. “Honestly, Bren!” she said as her eyes adjusted to the dim light. “It’s not even daytime yet. I bet the sun isn’t even up.”
Nancy groaned and pulled a pillow over her head.
“Give m
e a break!” Brendon said. “You can sleep anytime. Today is Christmas!” He reached under the covers and gave her a good hard pinch, and she screamed and came up out of the pillow. Brendon leaped off the bed just in time.
Hitting the wall switch so the overhead light would keep them from going to sleep again, he ran down the hall to his mother’s room.
“Hey, Mom!” he yelled. “Merry Christmas!”
“Is it morning already?” Elizabeth blinked the sleep from her eyes and smiled drowsily at her son. Her hair was soft and mussed across the pillow, and her face, without makeup, looked too young to belong to a mother.
“We must have sat up talking too long last night,” she said. “It feels as if I just went to bed two minutes ago.”
“Santa’s been here,” Brendon told her. “I looked down the stairway and I could see the stockings by the fireplace. They’ve all been filled!”
“Then it must be Christmas!” Elizabeth sat up in bed and looked around for her bathrobe.
On the little table beside the bed, there was a small white box. She glanced over at it, and Brendon, following her gaze, asked, “Is that for me?”
“It certainly isn’t,” his mother said firmly. She reached over and lifted the lid. The box was lined with cotton, and lying against it was a little gold heart on a chain. Elizabeth removed it from the box and raised her arms to fasten the clasp around her neck.
“Mr. Duncan gave it to me last night,” she said. “Isn’t it lovely? It’s exactly like one I used to have a long time ago.”
“It’s pretty,” Brendon said politely, but his whole mind was downstairs with the bicycle. “Let’s go down and see what Santa brought!”
It took them over an hour to open all the presents. Brendon had been so concerned with his inspection of the bicycle that he hadn’t really looked past it to the piles of other gifts that all but buried the lower branches of the tree.
“We’ve never had this big a Christmas!” Kirby said, gasping in delight over the framed reproduction of a Degas painting of a whirling ballerina who looked almost like Kirby herself. “We’ve always done fun things on Christmas—gone to a play or concert or something—but we’ve never had piles of presents.”
“We were never able to,” her mother told her. “With all the traveling around, we couldn’t carry a lot of possessions with us. Now that we’re settled, I think it’s time to buy some of the nice things that make a place homey.”
There were pictures for each of their rooms and books for the bookshelves. There were white curtains for the girls’ room and blue-and-green ones for Brendon’s. The girls got clothes, package after package of them, dresses and sweaters and T-shirts and jeans.
Each of them received a book from Mr. Duncan, and their father had sent Swiss watches for all of them, tiny, delicate, gold ones for the girls, and for Brendon a husky, waterproof, shock-resistant one that could be used as a stopwatch to time races.
Kirby got a barre to attach to the wall of her room, and Brendon a bunch of video games, and Nancy an atlas, from Kirby, and from her mother a pile of sheet music.
“That’s for you to grow into,” Elizabeth said when she opened the package of music. “As soon as you get out of the beginners’ book, that is.”
“How nice,” Nancy said politely, and Brendon couldn’t help feeling a stab of sympathy. Nancy was never going to get out of the “Three Blind Mice” book, and she knew it.
It seemed terrible to Brendon that anyone could do the things that Nancy did to a piano. She played so badly that just to listen to her was agony. The worst of it was that their mother did not seem to realize how hopeless Nancy was. She herself could sight-read, and Nancy was learning her notes, but neither of them could pick out the simplest tune unless the music was right there in front of her. Even then, when they accidentally struck wrong notes, they didn’t know the difference.
After the gifts had been opened, they ate breakfast, a big one with pancakes and syrup, and then Elizabeth got out the turkey and began to prepare the stuffing.
“If we get it into the oven now,” she said, “it can be cooking while we’re at church. I told Tom we wouldn’t be eating until late in the afternoon.”
“You told Mr. Duncan that?” Nancy looked up from the new book she had been leafing through. “You mean, he’s coming for dinner? On Christmas?”
“He seemed glad to be invited,” Elizabeth said. “Christmas is a lonely time for people without families.”
“That’s just it,” Nancy said. “It’s a family time. He isn’t one of us. Dad’s alone this Christmas. You don’t seem to be worrying about him.”
The glowing, happy look went out of Elizabeth’s face, but her voice was slight and steady.
“Your father will never be alone if he doesn’t want to be,” she said. “He has friends all over the world who would be delighted to have him join them. If he had wanted to come here for Christmas, he could have, you know. You are still and always will be his children, and he can visit whenever he wants to.”
“I think we ought to have Mr. Duncan,” said Brendon, who always liked company. “He gave us those books, and he gave Mom that gold thing on a chain. I bet that was pretty expensive.”
“He gave you a present?” Kirby said. “I didn’t know that, Mom. What is it? Can we see it?”
“Of course.” Elizabeth drew out the little gold locket. She held it out on the flat of her hand so they could all look at it. “Isn’t that pretty?”
“It’s lovely,” Kirby said. “It’s just like you, Mom, so dainty and feminine.”
Nancy got up from her chair and came over to examine the necklace.
“It’s a heart,” she said.
“That’s right.”
“I don’t think that’s an appropriate present to give somebody’s mother,” Nancy said.
“Oh, honey!” Elizabeth turned to her in astonishment. “Tom Duncan’s an old, old friend! He knows I used to have a little locket like this when I was a teenager. It’s gotten lost over the years—I don’t know where—it was probably left behind in a hotel room someplace. I’ve always regretted losing it, and so he’s replaced it for me.”
“Did he give you that first locket?” Nancy asked.
“On my sixteenth birthday.”
“Was he your boyfriend?”
“Oh, Nancy, really!” Elizabeth made a little gesture of exasperation. “That was years and years ago. I wasn’t much older than you and Kirby. I’ve had a marriage and children—an entire half-lifetime—since then. Tom is now just a dear friend from my childhood.”
“Then why does he—?”
The telephone rang. Nancy stopped in the middle of a sentence. A light broke through the scowl on her face.
“That—” She could hardly bring out the words. “That’s—Dad!”
“Is it really?!” Kirby was closest to the doorway and she flew into the living room. An instant later her voice rang out loud and happy. “Oh, Dad! Merry Christmas!”
“That’s not fair!” Nancy cried. “I told you who it was!”
“Let me talk to him!” Brendon shouted.
They surrounded Kirby, who was chirping madly into the receiver. She was delivering a long, involved account of the Nutcracker and her ballet lessons and the extra instruction she was getting from Madame Vilar.
When she had finished she handed the receiver to her mother.
“Hello, Richard,” Elizabeth said. “Where are you? Oh, good—that’s nice. I was sure you’d be with someone.” She paused and then said, “We’re fine. Just fine. Yes, everybody’s healthy. Have a happy Christmas. We will, thank you. Here’s Nancy.”
The way Nancy grabbed the receiver Brendon knew that he might as well sit down, because it would be a long while before his own turn came.
When the phone was his at last, he took the receiver slowly, suddenly unaccountably nervous.
“Hello,” he said.
A little tinny, as if he were speaking in a tunnel, his father’s voice spo
ke to him.
“Hello there, big guy!”
Across the miles and months of time between them, Richard Garrett came rushing to him, great and warm and filled with the excitement of living.
“How are you, son?” he asked. “How do you like it in Florida?”
“It’s okay,” Brendon said. “Where are you? What are you doing? Are you still in a war zone?”
“I’m in Rome,” his father said. “But it’s just for the holiday. I’ll be out again tomorrow. There’s a lot of political stuff going on, Bren. I won’t try to go into it now. Did you get the watches?”
“We sure did,” Brendon said. “Mine is great. We’ve got presents for you, too, but we didn’t know where to send them.”
“You hang on to them for me,” his father told him. “We’ll have a second Christmas the next time I’m in the States.”
“When are you coming?” Brendon asked eagerly. “Soon?”
“Probably not till this summer. Maybe we can take a vacation together somewhere. Would you like that?”
“Definitely,” Brendon said. “If we don’t take the girls along, we can explore the Everglades.”
He didn’t tell him about the boat. The boat would be a surprise.
“Let me have the phone back, Bren,” Kirby said, snatching at it. “I forgot to tell him about the Cecchetti exams.”
“See you this summer!” Brendon managed to say before the receiver was yanked from his hand.
He turned to his mother, who was standing quietly in the middle of the room, looking oddly alone there.
“He’ll take us on a vacation,” he told her. “In June or July or sometime.”
“That will be nice,” Elizabeth said. “It’s hot then in Florida. It should be a good time for you to get away.”
“You can come with us,” Nancy said. “I know he means all of us. You’ll need a vacation too, Mom.” She went over to Elizabeth and took her hand. “Is he really just an old friend? Mr. Duncan, I mean? He’s just like any other friend? Just someone to talk to?”
“Of course,” her mother said. “I already told you that, Nance. What does this have to do with anything?”