The Christmas Room

  Maddie really didn’t feel like talking yet. “You use ginger in cooking and love it.”

  “That’s different.” Cam bent his head for a moment to study his lap. When he looked back up, his blue eyes were filled with worry. “We need to talk.”

  “About?”

  “Your health. Something’s wrong. I’m sorry it’s taken me this long to realize it, but you were gone for so long to Missouri visiting Aunt Naomi, and then when you got back to California, I was here in Montana looking for land. After I got you moved here, I was busy, either working on the land or just plain working to find some real estate leads. I didn’t notice. But Caleb’s right. You’ve lost a ton of weight. And your color isn’t good. You’re getting sick every couple of weeks as well, but I never hear you cough or sniffle, so I know you haven’t caught something that’s going around.”

  Maddie put forth a cough. Then she plucked a napkin from the wooden holder and blew her nose. “I did get something, Cam. What is it with all this detective stuff?”

  “I’m worried about you. You’ve always been so healthy, hardly ever catching a cold, let alone a stomach virus.”

  Maddie took a much-needed sip of her tea, which she hoped would be the first fluid she would be able to hold down in forty-eight hours. “Well, I’m not made of iron, Cameron, and I’m getting older. Of course I catch stuff easier than I used to.”

  He shook his head. “You’ve dieted off and on all your life, trying to be slender. Name me one time that it ever worked.”

  Maddie patted his knee. “I’m just naturally plump, I think. Thank goodness your father liked me that way.”

  “But, Mom, you’re not plump now. What’s up?”

  Maddie felt as if he was backing her into a corner. “I saw a doctor week before last, and he said I’m in perfect health.” That wasn’t a lie. The oncologist was a doctor, and he’d pronounced her to be cancer free. “Maybe the weight loss is due to me getting more exercise.” Maddie felt so tired. She didn’t want to waste her already depleted strength on a needless conversation with her son. “In California I had household help. All the animals were taken care of by others. Here I’m forced to get my butt up out of my writing chair and walk all over that property we bought. I also take the dogs for jaunts every day.”

  “You walked in California,” he argued. “You were always worried about your sedentary profession and got outside to exercise. If the weather was bad, you worked out in the home gym.”

  Maddie angled for some levity. “Yes, I spent an hour on my exercise bike every single day. Sometimes I even pedaled.”

  Cam’s mouth thinned into a grim line. “You’re stubborn, Mama. And you’re one of the strongest women I’ve ever known. I remember when you finally told me Dad was dying of cancer. You bore the worry and sadness of that all alone until you absolutely had to tell me, because it couldn’t be hidden anymore.”

  “Your father didn’t want you to know, Cam. He wanted all the time with you and Caleb that he could have without you fawning over him and feeling sad. He wanted things to be normal for as long as possible. I didn’t make the decision to wait and tell you when we had to. Your father did.”

  “Well, whoever decided, I didn’t like having things kept from me.”

  You don’t want to know about this, she thought. My chemo run is almost over. If I have my way, you’ll focus on that young woman you love and your son. That last thought reminded Maddie of her concerns about Caleb. “If you’re going to worry about someone, Cam, worry about your son.”

  “Why should I worry about Caleb?”

  “Hello? He’s been uprooted from friends he’s known all his life and moved to the northern reaches of our country. Has he mentioned a single new friend to you? He has apparently lost interest in horses and cutting, which used to be his mainstays, and now he’s passionate about playing violin. Do you see nothing off-center in that picture?”

  Maddie felt awful the moment she spoke. Cam’s eyes reflected even more worry. “Do you think he’s having a hard time at school?”

  She thought carefully before she spoke. “Possibly. He seems like the same happy boy he’s always been, and he hasn’t said a word to me about problems at school. But where did his sudden desire to become a string-instrument maestro come from?” Maddie truly was concerned about Caleb, so she pushed away her feelings of guilt. If her son was going to fret about someone, Caleb was the needier candidate. “You’ve always spent so much time with him, and now you can’t. He loves Christmas, and this year he may have to celebrate in a tent. He’s young, and he’s faced so many changes. Maybe tonight you can involve him in a game of canasta. Here he goes upstairs to do his homework, and you can’t go up. Start asking him to work down here so you can join him at the table. You were always so good about doing that.”

  Cam gestured around them. “We’re in Sam’s house, Mom. He cements himself in his recliner every night. I feel guilty about even watching a show with Caleb. We shout and carry on when we play canasta. Sam reads. We’d disrupt his life if we carried on as usual.”

  Maddie could see Cam’s point. “Sam has isolated himself for more than six years. Maybe, for whatever reason, God planted us here so we can disrupt that cycle. He’s a very lonely and sad man. He needs life to buzz around him. He needs to hear laughter and shouting. This gigantic house became his badger hole after Annie died, and whenever he emerged he was snarling.”

  “It’s not my place to save Sam from being a mean old recluse.”

  Maddie shook her head. “Leave Sam to me. If he gets out of sorts, I’ll ask him to move his recliner to the den. He doesn’t have to sit out here in the living room like a rock and make everyone tiptoe around him.”

  “It’s his house, Mother.”

  Cam never called her mother unless he was upset with her. Maddie would take it, and with gratitude. At least now he was worried about his son and not her. She needed fluids in her body, most important her ginger tea, which was now cold.

  • • •

  Caleb cut classes for the day and went home, not to Sam’s house, but to their camp. His gram loved the holidays, and Caleb worried that she’d have to celebrate Christmas in this helter-skelter mess of tents and dwellings, with no one place they could call home and decorate. Normally Caleb didn’t mind the camp living, but it wouldn’t do for December. Sam’s house was beautiful, and he’d made them feel at home there, but it was temporary. Caleb’s father would surely be recovered enough by Christmas to come back to their camp again.

  An ache filled Caleb’s chest as he went from Gram’s trailer to the cook shack, the storage tent, and then to the cabin. Without his family here, it all seemed so dreary and lifeless now, kind of like a ghost town. They’d never decorate for Christmas again at Gram’s big house in California. All the friends he’d grown up with were lost to him unless he made the long drive home to see them. Yeah, like that’ll ever happen, he thought.

  He set off from camp to their building site. It was changing every day. The framing was finished, so he could try to imagine what the rooms would look like. He could also see how big the workshop was now, which would eventually be where he and his dad would weld and do woodworking. The building crews had been hurrying so that they could move into the garage area after it was insulated before the snows came. They’d pull Gram’s trailer inside and move the cabin to sit next to the building.

  Caleb stood inside the cavernous room, wondering how long it might take for everything inside to be finished so they could pretend it was a house while the interiors of their actual residences were completed.

  “Hello, Caleb!”

  Caleb jumped at the loud voice. He turned to see Murphy, the construction crew boss who kept all the teams coordinated and working. He was a big redheaded man with crinkly green eyes, a coppery beard and mustache, and shoulders almost as broad as Caleb’s dad’s. According to Gram, she’d never seen a buildi
ng go up with such attention to detail, so apparently Murphy was good at his job.

  “Hi,” Caleb replied. “I was just trying to picture everything.”

  Murphy walked around with Caleb in what would be Gram’s residence. “Here’s where her work island will be,” he said. Then he pointed to a framed-in window that didn’t have glass in it yet. “Under that will be her kitchen desk.”

  It made Caleb feel better just to imagine it all. “I’m mainly worried about the workshop area.”

  Murphy nodded. “So am I, son. So am I. We’re racing against time to get you folks inside out of the weather before the snow comes.”

  “Are you going to make it?”

  “Not as fast as we hoped,” Murphy replied. “We were aiming for before Thanksgiving. But you should be in a few days afterward.”

  “Will we have electricity and walls?” Caleb asked.

  “You sure will, and your dad’s installing a propane heater as well, so it’ll be toasty in there.” Murphy led the way back out to the workshop area. “It’ll be one big space, and once you get all set up, it should be pretty comfortable.”

  Because of his dad’s injury, Caleb didn’t know if they’d come home to live on their land until almost Christmas. Gram had said that she’d like to provide Christmas dinner for some of the friends she and Dad had made in Rustlers’ Gulch and other nearby towns. Gram had joined a book club and was teaching writing classes, so she’d met lots of people who would be alone over the holiday. In California she had entertained a lot, so they had heaps of folding tables and chairs in the storage units that he could set up. He could find all Gram’s china and glassware. He could dig out all their decorations and make this place look awesome.

  Caleb started to feel excited. Maybe they had left home for good, but he could re-create it here. Gram would be able to see all the decorations that Caleb, his dad, and his aunt Grace had made for her over the years. He could get a permit and cut a mile-high blue spruce that would outshine every Christmas tree they’d ever had.

  • • •

  Sam got in late that night from rounding up cows to find Cam, Kirstin, and Caleb playing a card game at his dining room table. They were laughing and playfully slugging one another’s shoulders. As he walked to the coat-tree to hang up his jacket and hat, he spotted Maddie reclining in Cam’s spot on the sofa. She looked like a rag that had been wrung dry. He couldn’t help but be worried about her. Now that he’d come to know her better, he suspected that she hadn’t been feeling well the day of the windstorm that nearly destroyed her family’s camp. And she’d still been under the weather when Cam got hurt, barely able to walk in the hospital hallways without collapsing.

  Since coming to stay at his place, she’d been sick twice more. It seemed to hit her in a cyclical pattern. For days on end, she’d be fine. Then without any warning, such as signs of a virus, she’d be weak, pale, and trembling again. It took at least two days for her to recover. She’d lost weight since he first met her, and he had no doubt that all the vomiting she’d done Friday and Saturday would trim a few more pounds off her.

  Why did no one else notice that something was going on with her? Sam wanted to sit down and ask one more time if she was ill. But he knew she’d only say she was fine. So instead he greeted her and adjourned to the kitchen to eat his dinner, which Mrs. Alvarez always kept warm for him.

  He sat at the unoccupied end of the table to eat. Gabriella had made meat loaf, creamy mashed potatoes with gravy, and corn with Mexican spices. It was all delicious.

  Cam stood up to gather the cards. Sam observed aloud, “Well, it looks like your leg is doing better.”

  “It is. I get a little more feeling in it every day. I still don’t trust it to hold me up while I walk, though.”

  Sam guessed that Cam had more than all the usual reasons for wanting to be completely recovered. He was in love with a beautiful young woman, and he undoubtedly felt like he was half the man he needed to be for her. So far as Sam knew, Cam hadn’t used the wheelchair path to visit Kirstin after his son went to sleep at night, but realist that he was, Sam knew that would start occurring soon.

  He finished his meal, got his dishes into the machine, and went to visit with Maddie until bedtime. An electric jack-o’-lantern sat on the windowsill behind her, illuminating her head with an orange glow.

  “Feeling better?” he asked as he sat beside her.

  “Very much so, and I hope nobody else gets sick. The big day is almost here, you know.”

  Sam tried to think what big day she meant.

  “Halloween, Sam.” She smiled, but her eyes didn’t light up with warmth as they usually did. “It falls on Tuesday this year. I hope we still get oodles of trick-or-treaters, despite it being a school night.”

  There’d been no kids on Sam’s porch since the Halloween after Annie died. But he was ashamed to tell Maddie why. Better to pretend that children would come and let her guess as to the reason why they didn’t.

  The sound of laughter erupted from the dining room again. Sam sighed and relaxed against the cushions. It was nice to have his home echoing with voices and good cheer again. There had been a time when that was the norm. The sense of family. Coming in from the land at night, knowing good company, food, laughter, and closeness awaited him. Having the McLendons under his roof wasn’t the same for him as when Annie had been alive, but it was a damned close second. Sam cared for Maddie, and he had come to like Caleb. The boy was smart and respectful, and wasn’t afraid of hard work. On weekends he had been trying to help Sam and Miguel move cattle back to the ranch. As for Cam—well, Sam still struggled with that. He liked the young fellow and never fell asleep now without thanking God that Cam had been there to protect Kirstin from Satan. But—and for Sam this was still difficult to accept—Cam was becoming Kirstin’s everything. Sam saw it in her expression. Saw it in the way she smiled when she looked at the younger man. He wanted to be happy for her. He truly did. But a part of him still wanted to latch onto her with both hands and never let go.

  • • •

  After the house fell quiet and Cam felt pretty sure everyone was asleep, he put on his jacket and quietly slipped from the house. He had often used the wheelchair ramp to go for physical therapy or to work, but he’d never used the path that led to Kirstin’s house. He felt like a teenager sneaking out after curfew. About halfway there, he stopped pushing, not to rest, but to ask himself if he should really do this. His leg was better. Though he still used his crutches only occasionally, he could tell that his ribs were healing well. But what if he started to make love to Kirstin and had to give up halfway to the finish line?

  He nearly turned back, but he yearned so badly to hold her in his arms that he forced himself to keep going. The grounds lighting guided him to her place without mishap, and he was incredulous when he saw that Sam had added a ramp for him on Kirstin’s porch so he could scale the steps. Hmm. Maybe Sam really was coming to accept their relationship. Or maybe, Sam being Sam, he was hoping that Cam would come here too soon and make a fool of himself.

  Before he could change his mind and turn back, the huge hand-carved entry door opened. Kirstin stood on the threshold wearing the Australian shepherd T-shirt he remembered so well. In the dim illumination, he saw her lips curve in an impish smile that dimpled her cheek. “Well, miracles will never cease. I was starting to think you’d never come see me.”

  Cam couldn’t help but grin. “My heart and other parts of me have been yelling at me to come for a solid week. But the coward in me kept chickening out.”

  “Why?” She sounded completely bewildered.

  “I’m not fully recovered yet, Kirstie. When we’re together again, I don’t want to be a big flop, and I mean that literally.”

  She jutted out one hip and planted her hand on it. “Get your sexy ass in here. You won’t be a big flop. I promise.”

  Cam pushed forward and as
cended the ramp. She stepped back to allow him entry. He was glad the opening was wide enough for a wheelchair. Kirstin closed the door behind him and sat on his lap to kiss him. The melting sweetness of her mouth nearly took his breath. He had forgotten how delicious she tasted. And how fabulous her soft body felt beneath his palms.

  Between kisses, she whispered, “I love you.” Then, “All I really, really need is to have your arms around me, Cam.”

  He felt confident that he could deliver on that request. He wheeled them both into her bedroom. After she scrambled to her feet, he was able to stand by himself and get on the bed, where the covers were already pulled down. Kirstin slipped in beside him and sighed with a sound of contentment that resonated within him, because he felt the same sense of rightness.

  Chapter Thirteen

  For Kirstin, being in Cam’s arms again was the most beautiful moment of her life. She’d loved him before his accident, but during his recovery those feelings had deepened, making her understand what true love actually meant. And for her, it was no longer only about physical attraction or having incredible sex with him. Even if Cam never completely recovered, she would love him, and they would find ways to be intimate that pleased both of them. With Cam, it would be fabulous, no matter what.

  He turned on his side to face her and gathered her close against him. She placed her head in the hollow of his shoulder and breathed in the scent of him. “I want one of your T-shirts after you wear it so I can keep it under my pillow.”

  She felt him smile against her hair. “How about a T-shirt with me in it every night, and you don’t keep it under your pillow?”

  “Even better.”

  He kissed her then and ever so slowly began making love to her. Ribbons of pure delight coursed through her body. Cam. His name became a song in her mind. She floated with him on currents of desire that soon crashed over her in waves. When the moment came, she took the top position, something she’d never done, and along with the indescribable pleasure of being one with him again, she experienced a feeling of feminine empowerment, no longer only a recipient of physical pleasure, but also giving it.