I have a plan.
“You’ll see.”
The snow must be four inches by now, maybe more. Our feet slosh in it and the legs of our pants become soaked. We walk for a while, until the cabin is no longer in sight. We’re on a mission, and that in itself is vitalizing.
“Ever cut your own Christmas tree?” I ask.
She looks at me like I’m nuts, like only some crazy hick would cut their own Christmas tree. But then I see that hesitation flee. She says to me, “I’ve always wanted to cut my own Christmas tree.” Her eyes light up like a child’s.
She says that at her home, it was always fake. Real trees were messy. Her mother would never go for it. There was nothing fun about Christmas in her home. It was all for appearance’s sake. The tree was decked out with all these breakable crystal ornaments. She’d get yelled at for coming within three feet of the thing.
I tell her to pick it out, whichever one she wants. She points to a sixty-foot fir.
“Try again,” I say. But for a moment I stare it down and wonder if I could.
I convince myself that she’s having fun. She doesn’t mind the cold or the way the snow gets caught in the ankle of her sock. She says that her hands are freezing. She presses them to my cheeks to feel, but I can’t feel a thing. My own cheeks are numb.
I tell her that as a kid, my mother and I forgot about Christmas. She’d drag me to mass, but as for the presents and trees and all that shit—well, we didn’t have the money. And I never wanted my mother to feel guilty about it. So I just let December 25th come and go like it was any other day. Back in school the kids would all brag about what they’d gotten. I’d always make something up. I didn’t feel sorry for myself. I wasn’t one to feel sorry for myself.
I tell her that I never believed in Santa Claus. Not one day of my life.
“What did you want?” she asks.
What I wanted was a dad. Someone to take care of my mother and me, so I didn’t have to do it myself. But what I tell her is Atari.
She finds a tree. It’s about five feet tall. “You want to try?” I ask and hand her the ax. Holding it in her hands, she laughs. It’s a sound I’ve never heard before. She gives the tree a whack.
After four or five tries she hands me the ax. I examine the base. She’s made a dent but not much more. It’s not like it’s easy. I tell her to stand back as I whack the hell out of it. She’s watching with the wide eyes of a five-year-old child. I’ll be damned if I don’t cut down this tree.
The entire world is quiet. Everything is at peace. I’m sure I’ve never experienced a night as perfect as this before. She tells me that it’s impossible to believe that somewhere out there, the world is at war. People are starving. Children are being abused. We’re removed from civilization, she says, “Two tiny figurines in a snow globe that some child has turned over.” I picture it: us trudging across ceramic mounds while glittery snow encircles us in our own bubble.
In the distance I’m certain I hear an owl hoot. I stop her and say, “Shhh,” and for a moment we listen. This is where the snowy owl migrates in the winter. We’re freezing to death, but he comes here to keep warm. We listen. It’s quiet. She looks toward the sky and watches the clouds burst at the seams. They shower us with snow.
The tree is heavy. We haul it in together, her in the front, me in the back. We slide it across the snow, and four or five times one or both of us slides on the snow and falls. Our hands are so cold, they’re hardly able to grasp the trunk of the tree.
When we get to the cabin, I take the base of the tree. Moving backward, I heave it up the steps. She stands at the bottom. She pretends to help, but we both know that she does nothing.
We force it through the front door and prop it against a wall. I collapse. The tree must weigh a hundred and fifty pounds, sopping wet and overflowing with heavy snow.
I kick off my wet shoes and gulp water right from the kitchen faucet. She lets her hands wander across the juvenile leaves, still filled with snow. She smells the pine. It’s the first time neither of us complains of being cold. Our hands are raw, our noses and cheeks red. But under layers of clothes we sweat. I stare at her, her skin alive from the cold.
I go into the bathroom to clean up and change my clothes. She wipes the moisture from the floor, from under the tree and where our shoes pooled snow. I can smell the pine on my hands. I feel the sticky sap. I breathe hard, trying to catch my breath. I drop to the couch when I return.
She heads into the bathroom to strip the wet clothes from her skin. She sinks into an extra pair of long johns that had been drying on the window curtain, and when she comes out she says, “No one’s ever given me a tree before.”
I’m rekindling the fire as she passes through the room. She watches my calculating hands manipulate the wood just right, bringing the fire to life. She says that I do everything that way, with a certain expertise I pretend doesn’t exist. I don’t say a thing.
I sit back on the couch and drape a blanket over my legs. My feet rest on a coffee table. I’m still breathing hard.
“What I would give for a beer,” I say.
She watches me sitting there for I don’t know how long. I can feel her eyes on me.
“You, too?” I ask after a minute.
“A beer?”
“Yeah.”
“Yeah,” she says.
I remember the two of us sitting side by side, drinking beer in that bar. I ask her if she remembers and she says yes. She says it seems like a million years ago, long before someone glued us to the lid of an empty baby food jar and filled our world with glitter.
“What time is it?” she asks.
My watch rests on the table beside my feet. I lean forward for a look. I say that it’s 2:00 a.m.
“Are you tired?” she asks.
“Getting there.”
“Thank you for the tree,” she says. “Thank you for getting us a tree,” she adds. She doesn’t want to be presumptuous.
I stare at the tree, leaning against the log wall. It’s misshapen. Homely. But she says it’s perfect.
“No,” I say. “It’s for you. So you stop looking so damn sad.”
I promise to find lights for it. I don’t know how, but I promise I’ll do it. She tells me not to worry about it. “It’s perfect the way it is,” she says. But I say I’ll find the lights.
She asks if I ever ride the “L.” I give her a dumb look. I say yes, of course I do. You can hardly get around Chicago without riding the “L,” the city’s rapid transit system. She says that she rides the Red Line most of the time, flying under the city as if all that commotion aboveground doesn’t exist.
“Do you ever ride the bus?” she asks.
I wonder where the hell she’s going with this. “Sometimes.”
“Go out. To bars. Stuff like that.”
“Sometimes.” I shrug. “It’s not really my crowd.”
“But you do?”
“I guess. Sometimes.”
“You ever go by the lake?”
“I know a guy who’s got a boat at Belmont Harbor.” And by that I mean some lowlife like me. Some guy working for Dalmar who lives in a boat, a used cruiser he keeps gassed and docked, in case he needs to run. He’s got enough provisions on that boat that he could last for at least a month, traveling up the Great Lakes to Canada. This is how people like us live. Always ready to run.
She nods. Belmont Harbor. Of course. She says she runs by there all the time.
“I could have seen you before. We might have passed on the street, ridden together on the bus. Maybe waited underground for the same ‘L’?”
“Millions of people live in Chicago.”
“But maybe?”
“I guess. Maybe. What are you getting at?”
“I’m just wondering...” Her voice
trails off.
“What?” I ask.
“If we would have ever met. If it wasn’t for...”
“This?” I shake my head. I’m not trying to be an ass. It’s just the truth. “Probably not.”
“You don’t think so?”
“We wouldn’t have met,” I say again.
“How do you know?”
“We wouldn’t have met.”
I look away, draw the blanket to my neck and lie down on my side.
I ask her to turn off the light, and when she hovers in the kitchen, I say, “Aren’t you going to bed?”
“How can you be sure?” she asks instead.
I don’t like where this conversation is headed.
“What difference does it make?” I ask.
“Would you have talked to me if we did meet? That night, would you have ever talked to me if you didn’t have to?”
“I wouldn’t have been in that bar in the first place.”
“But—if you were.”
“No.”
“No?”
“I wouldn’t have talked to you.”
The rejection slaps her across the face.
“Oh.”
She crosses the room and turns off the light. But I can’t leave it like that. I can’t let her go to bed pissed.
In the darkness I admit, “It’s not what you think.”
She’s defensive. I’ve hurt her feelings. “What do I think?”
“It has nothing to do with you.”
“Of course it does.”
“Mia—”
“Then what?”
“Mia.”
“What?”
“It has nothing to do with you. It doesn’t mean anything.”
But it does. It does to her. She’s walking toward the bedroom when I admit, “The first time I saw you, you were coming out of your apartment. I was across the street sitting on the steps of some four flat, just waiting. I’d seen a picture. I called from a payphone on the corner. You answered and I hung up. I knew you were there. I don’t know how long I waited, forty-five minutes, maybe an hour. I had to know what I’d gotten myself into.
“And then I saw you through the little windows on the side of the front door. I saw you jog down the steps with your headphones on. You opened the door and sat down outside to tie a shoe. I memorized your hair, the way it fell over your shoulders before you took these long arms and tied it back. A woman passed by with like four or five dogs. She said something to you and you smiled and I thought to myself that I’d never seen anything so... I don’t know... I’d never seen anything so beautiful in my life. You went off running down the road and I waited. I watched cabs drive by and hordes of people walk home from the bus stop at the corner. It was six, maybe seven o’clock. It started to get dark. The sky was one of those dramatic fall skies. You were walking when you returned. You passed right in front of me and then jogged across the street, waving to a cab that slowed down to let you pass. I was almost certain you saw me. You dug in your shoe for a key and let yourself in, up the steps where I couldn’t see you. I saw the light in your window and your silhouette. I imagined what you might be doing inside. I imagined myself in there with you, what it would be like if it didn’t have to be like this.”
She’s quiet. And then she says that she remembers the night. She says she remembers the sky, so vibrant, as the sunlight was scattered by particles in the sky. She says that the sky was the color of persimmon and sangria, shades of red only God could make. She says, “I remember the dogs, three black Labs and a golden retriever, and the woman, all ninety-some pounds of her, swept away in a tangle of leashes.” She says she remembers the call, though at the time it left her unfazed. She remembers sitting inside feeling alone because that damn boyfriend of hers was working but, more so, because she was glad he was.
“I didn’t see you,” she whispers. “If I did I’d remember.”
She lowers herself onto the couch beside me. I open the blanket for her and she slides in. She presses her back into me, a vacuum seal. I can feel the rhythm of her heart pressing against me. I can feel the blood pulsing through my own ears. It’s loud enough I’m sure she hears. I wrap the blanket over her. I reach across her, find her hand, and our fingers lace together. Her grasp is reassuring. In time, mine stops to shake. I slide my bottom arm under the crevice of her neck. She falls into every gap there is until we become one. I rest my head onto a mat of dirty blond hair, close enough that she can feel the exhalation of air on her skin, reassuring her that we’re alive though inside, we can hardly breathe.
We fall into oblivion this way, into a world where nothing matters. Nothing but us.
* * *
She’s gone when I wake up. I no longer feel her pressed into me. Something is missing, though it wasn’t that long ago that there was nothing there.
I see her outside, sitting on the porch step. She’s freezing her ass off. It doesn’t appear that she minds.
The blanket is wrapped around her shoulders and she’s wearing my shoes on her feet. They’re huge. She’s kicked the snow off the step, though the ends of the blanket lie in it and get wet.
I don’t go out right away.
I make coffee. I find my coat. I take my time.
“Hey,” I offer as I step outside in my bare feet. I hand her a mug of coffee. “Thought this would warm you up.”
“Oh.” She’s startled. She eyes my bare feet and says, “Your shoes,” but before she can get them off, I stop her. I say that I don’t mind. I like the look of it, her in my shoes. Her lying beside me in bed. I could get used to this.
“It’s cold out here,” I say. It’s fucking cold. Maybe twenty degrees.
“It is?” she asks.
I don’t answer.
“I’ll leave you alone,” I say. Seems to me someone who chooses to freeze their ass off on a day like today wants to be alone.
It’s not as though anything happened, but lying beside her for all those hours just for the hell of it, just to be close to her, to feel the softness of her skin and the way her chest rattled when she snored, that happened.
“Your feet must be freezing.”
I glance at my feet. They stand on a thin layer of snow and ice. “They are,” I say. I turn to go inside.
“Thanks for the coffee.”
I don’t know what I expect her to say, but I expect her to say something.
“Yep,” I say and let the door slam closed.
I don’t know how much time passes—enough that I start to get pissed. Pissed at myself for being pissed at her. I shouldn’t care. I shouldn’t give a shit.
But then she appears. Her cheeks are ruby-red from the cold. Her hair cascades around her. “I don’t want to be alone,” she says.
She drops the blanket at the door.
“I can’t remember the last time anyone told me I was beautiful,” she says.
Beautiful doesn’t do her justice.
We stare at each other across the room, taking it all in. Reminding ourselves to breathe.
When she comes to me, she moves humbly. Her hands touch with caution. The last time I pushed her away, but the last time was different.
She was a different woman.
I was a different man.
I run my hand the length of her hair. My hands move down her arms. They memorize her fingers and the shape of her back. She stares at me with this look I’ve never seen before, not on her or any other woman. Trust. Respect. Desire. I commit to memory every freckle, every blemish on her face. I learn the shape of her ears and run a finger across the arch of her lips.
She takes my hand and leads me to the bedroom. “You don’t have to do this,” I say. God knows she’s no longer my prisoner. What I want is for her to want to be here.
r /> We pause in the doorway. Her lips find their way to mine, and I hold her head in my hands. My fingers stroke her hair. Her arms are locked behind my back. She doesn’t let go.
* * *
What changes is the way we touch. There’s contact, something that we used to avoid. We graze past each other when we enter a room. She runs her fingers through my hair. I let my hand linger on her back. She traces the lines of my face. We share the same bed.
Our hands and fingers memorize what our eyes could not. An uneven scalp. Patches of dry skin.
There is nothing frivolous about it. We don’t flirt. We’re beyond that. We don’t dredge up past relationships. We don’t try and make the other jealous. We don’t create pet names. We don’t mention the word love.
We kill time. We talk. We list all the crazy things you see in the city. The homeless pushing shopping carts around. Jesus freaks walking around with crucifixes on their backs. Pigeons.
She asks my favorite color. I say I don’t have one. She asks my favorite food. I let a spoonful of slop drop into a bowl. “Anything other than this,” I say.
She asks what would have happened to her if we didn’t come here. If I’d handed her over and collected my reward.
“I don’t know,” I say.
“Would I be dead?”
We learn things we didn’t know before. That skin-to-skin contact helps keep us warm. That SpaghettiOs and baked beans do mix. That two can fit on the shaky armchair.
We’re eating some meal. What it is, I don’t know. We eat out of necessity. There’s no such thing as breakfast, lunch or dinner. It’s all the same. It all tastes like shit.
She’s staring at me with those eyes of hers. They demand an answer. “I don’t know,” I say again. I see her being ripped from my car and tossed into the van. Her hands bound and her eyes blindfolded. I hear her cry.
I push my bowl away. I’m not hungry. I’ve lost my appetite.
She stands and reaches for my bowl. She says she’ll do the dishes tonight, but I gently clench her wrist when it comes within reach and say to her, “Leave it.”
We settle by the window where we watch the moon, a sliver in the sky. The clouds flicker by and sometimes we see the moon, sometimes we don’t.