I sat on the little concrete ledge outside the room where the Christmas party was going on and watched Aaron walk away. As the snow drifted softly down onto my bare head and shoulders I didn’t even notice the cold. My heart felt like it had gotten trapped in a vice and someone was tightening it every few seconds. I wasn’t capable of feeling anything beyond that. I watched him get in his car and drive away and I knew that any other woman faced with the same situation that I was in, would be disheartened enough to give up. I pushed myself up off the little ledge and went back inside wondering why I wasn’t. Was there something wrong with me, or was this how you felt when you finally happened up on the other half of your whole? When I got inside the door, Max was the first person I saw.
“You’re all wet. You’re going to catch your death in cold.”
I smiled at him, weakly. “I’ll be fine. I have an awesome immune system.”
Max raised an eyebrow at me, but he let it go. “How’s the ankle?” he asked, instead.
“What?”
“Your ankle, didn’t you hurt it?”
“Oh… oh yeah, it’s fine, thanks. I mean, it’s better. I just needed to stay off of it for a bit.”
“Is Aaron still out there? I don’t think he’ll be in the office before he leaves for his trip and I had a question for him.”
“No… I guess you’ll have to call him. He’s gone,” I told him. “I think he had all the Christmas party he can stand.”
Max laughed, “Yep, just the fact that he keeps coming to these things every year surprises me.”
“Why?”
“Why what?”
“Why does it surprise you that he keeps coming? What is his problem with Christmas, Max?”
“I don’t know. I just know that when he hired me, it was right after Halloween; Janice took me aside after I got the job and told me not to mention the holidays any time after Thanksgiving in Aaron’s presence. She told me that he would take really good care of us and we’d get some really good benefits and bonuses around the holidays, but I wasn’t going to get far with him on a personal note at all unless I was willing to act like Christmas didn’t exist in his presence. Janice doesn’t even know the source of it all, and she knows more about him than any of us do.”
“Wow, I didn’t get the memo about not mentioning Christmas,” I told him. I started wondering if I had taken it too far. Had I not only jeopardized any possibility of a relationship with Aaron, but had I possibly jeopardized my job as well?
“Things are too politically correct these days,” he said. “The company has grown a lot since I was hired. Winters Inc. has absorbed over twenty companies in the past five years. I have no idea how many people work for Aaron now, but in our office alone we have over three hundred full-time employees. It’s not something we can really talk freely about around the office without putting Aaron at risk of some type of backlash, or lawsuit. You know, someone saying that he disrespected their customs or something silly like that. It’s all the rage these days. Instead, it’s just something that somehow we all come to know without talking about it. In truth, this is the fifth executive position I’ve had in my career with a major corporation, and I’ve never been taken care of so well around the holidays. I just don’t mention them around Aaron and I never send him a Christmas card.”
“Something terrible must have happened to him around Christmas time for him to feel so strongly about it. I wish I knew what it was. It’s so sad for someone to be all alone at Christmas, even if it is by his own choosing.” I said that more to myself than I did Max. I didn’t really notice I’d said it out loud.
“You have feelings for him…”
Panic constricted my chest. I could hear the rumors now. Trying to waylay it I said, “He’s a nice, interesting man, that’s all. I feel strongly about Christmas and I just have a hard time understanding others who don’t. I really, firmly believe that holding Christmas in your heart renews your spirit for the upcoming year.” He was looking at me strangely so I asked him, “Is that naïve, or silly, you think?”
“No Robyn, it’s not silly. It’s how you feel, but just because you feel so strongly about it, doesn’t mean that you can convince other people to feel that way too.”
I was nodding. He was making a valid point, but although I knew it wasn’t possible to make everyone believe, it had to be possible to convert a few. People convert religions all the time, maybe Christmas could be the same. Maybe Aaron was one of the ones I’d get lucky with if I tried.
“Are you okay, Robyn?”
“I’m great,” I told him. “It’s three days until Christmas. I’m never not okay at this time of year.” I smiled at him and went back to the party to continue my role as the life of it. I wasn’t really pretending either; my feelings for Aaron didn’t rule my life. I still loved Christmas and I still felt the magic of it all around me. My feelings about Aaron were always there though, at least in the back of my mind.
I woke up the next morning feeling restless, but unsure what to do with myself. I knew that Aaron planned on leaving on Christmas Eve for his trip, and I considered calling him, just to wish him a good trip. I didn’t, instead I got out my laptop and I typed his name into the search engine. I got over ten million hits. I was flabbergasted. I couldn’t imagine ever being known that well. I started thinking about what that must be like, for your life to be at someone’s fingertips.
I searched through the hits I got for a history. I found the history of him founding the company and I was able to follow him through to today, but before that it was like he didn’t exist. Where did he come from, and what happened to him to make him guard his loneliness like a shield? I closed the laptop in frustration. I was probably never going to find out what it was about Christmas that bothered him so badly, unless someday he chose to tell me himself.
I gave up looking for it and thinking about it for the moment and went out to the mall. I was hoping a lot of Christmas music and shopping and merriment would make me feel better. Just in case I also had a large cup of hot chocolate and a couple of chocolate chip cookies. If the Christmas merriment failed, the sugar was a sure fire cure.
AARON