“Yeah, just kind of surly and sheepish. It’s some woman thing.”
“I’ll call you back.”
“Merry Christmas, Santa!” David shouted. “Am I’m getting the new Robosapien with the laser eyes?”
“You betcha, little dude.” To me, “Is he, Thomas?”
“He is now.”
“Ooops. Bye.”
“Bye.”
I straightened. The party had gone quiet. Someone had even turned Bing Crosby off. When I turned, dozens of laser-surgeried and eyebrow-lifted eyes—and that was just the men—gazed at me in fascination. John and Monica wore open-mouthed smiles. Everyone else looked as if they’d just heard the bum in the corner owned a Ferrari and had season seats next to Jack Nicholson at Lakers’ games.
“Cathryn Deen?” a man asked. “That Cathryn Deen?”
Monica couldn’t resist. “Yes,” she told everyone loudly. “That Cathryn Deen. She and Thomas are an item!”
“You heard it here, first, folks,” John announced, grinning. “Cathryn Deen has a thing for my big brother’s bed.”
Everyone crowded around me, questions posed on their tongues. I began backing toward a door. The women looked at me as if I was hung like a porn star. The men looked at me as if I knew some secret to attracting world-famous beautiful women that didn’t require being hung like a porn star. Just as I’d become a kind of morbid VIP after nine-eleven—a touchable, collectible commodity like the other survivors of that day—I was now elevated to celebrity status by winning a movie star’s personal attention. Now these people could drop my name into a conversation at the gym or the office. As Thomas Mitternich said to me the other night—he’s one of the heroes of nine-eleven, and he’s dating Cathryn Deen—as he confided to me over drinks . . .
I’d been spotlighted by sly gods who know every person’s darkest desire is to be special for something, anything, even by mere association.
I dodged outside into the frigid Chicago night. There, alone in the suburban semi-darkness of my brother’s patio, I took a deep breath. The darkness filled my lungs, connecting me across the curve of the earth to the deep mountain darkness at Wild Woman Ridge, to Cathy. I put aside what strangers saw and thought just this: She was worried about me sleeping too near the fireplace. She was worried about me.
Cathy
Macy—sweet, deceptively nice Macy—ratted me out. Something about “promoting an honest examination of honest motives,” or so she claimed. When Delta asked around at the café’s Saturday night quilting bee to see if anyone had any clue who might’ve re-decorated Thomas’s cabin, Macy dropped a dime on my tractor trip. That tip led to my capture.
Now everyone in the Crossroads and greater Jefferson County was gossiping about my mysterious obsession with Thomas’s furniture. I was so humiliated I locked my gate and stayed home for the rest of Christmas week. Delta wheedled, cajoled and threatened. “Please come to Christmas Eve dinner at my house. Please. Don’t you want to come see Cora and Ivy open your gifts? I’m keeping the girls for the holidays. Laney’s gone again. Spending the holidays in jail up in Nashville. Her and her boyfriend got caught forging checks at liquor stores.”
I groaned. “I told Ivy to call me for help the next time her aunt disappeared. Thomas gave her his number, too.”
“Ivy’s never going to ask anybody for any kind of help, no way. She’s scared of the social worker in charge of their case, one ‘Mrs. Ganza,’ over in Asheville. Mrs. Ganza is on the verge of hauling Ivy and Cora to foster care, again.”
“No! We need to keep them here, where they’ve got a home and a chance to make friends. What I can do to help? If it’s about money—”
“Hon, it’s about friends and community, and we’ve got plenty of both here. Dolores and the Judge caught wise to the girls’ situation when they noticed for two straight days that Laney’s car wasn’t parked at the cottage. They let Pike know. He practically had to hog-tie Ivy. Poor little Cora just tagged along, talking to some invisible friend. ‘Santa won’t forget about us like our aunt did. Thomas and Cathy won’t let him.’”
“Oh, God.”
“Don’t worry about them, I’m tellin’ you. They’ll have a good holiday. Thomas sent them a bunch of gifts. Add those to the pile of gifts from Neiman Marcus on your nickel—Anthony said his whole UPS truck smelled like some kind of perfume by the time he delivered everything to the Crossroads—and those little girls are going to have the best Christmas of their entire lives so far. Hey, by the way, what did you get me out of the Neiman Marcus catalog? I’ve been shaking the box. Let me guess. It’s a gift certificate for a custom Jaguar with my monogram on the vanity plate. Or a solid-gold spatula.”
Actually, my Christmas gift to Delta was a diamond pendant in the shape of a biscuit. “I’m staying home for the holidays,” I told her again. “I have a Lean Cuisine turkey-and-dressing dinner in my new little freezer. I have a microwave oven. I have the Log Splitters’ ‘Goddess Holidays’ CD. I’m staying put. Tell everyone they can gossip about me freely. My holiday gift to the community.”
“Oh, honey, people think what you did was ... well, okay, they don’t understand about you moving the bed, but they think the door decoration was mighty sweet. In fact, you’ve sparked a new fashion among the trendwatchers. A bunch of Turtleville’s social divas have put pine boughs tied with scarves on their front doors.”
“I don’t want to be a trendsetter. And I don’t want reporters to start poking around here.”
“Honey, other than somebody from HGTV looking for you to do a show about decorating with scarves, I doubt you’ve got much to worry about. Come to dinner.”
“I’m staying home. Really. I’m happy. I’ve got heat, a bed, a vibrator.”
“Speaking of love machines, Thomas isn’t mad at you. He told Santa. Said what you did to his furniture was between him and you, and nobody should bug you about it.”
“When’s he coming home?”
“He didn’t say, but I hope he’ll stay at his brother’s until New Year’s. Get himself off to a fresh start for next year. Anyhow, please come to dinner.”
“Delta, just knowing I have an invitation is enough for me. Thanks, but no thanks.”
“I’ll come pick you up. You don’t have to drive. You know, maybe you should buy a tractor. Now we know you can drive one of those. Why, you could get you a great big Kubota or a John Deere with a front-loader to scare off on-coming traffic, and drive it all over the county. Pike wouldn’t give you a ticket for driving an unauthorized vehicle on a public road. He’d look the other way.”
I groaned. Now everyone knew I was afraid to drive a car. My humiliation was complete. “I’ll talk to you on Christmas Day. I’ll call you. I promise.”
“You’re a hard cousin to browbeat,” she said sadly.
On Christmas Eve, I ate my microwaved dinner in my warm but still unfurnished house, listened to Alberta and Macy sing folk songs about the empowerment of Mrs. Santa Claus, then crawled into bed with my vibrator. It wasn’t a dildo-type but one of those giant massage wands. It had a vibrating head like a flying saucer and three speeds. I called them First Kiss, Second Date and Weekend in Las Vegas.
“Merry Christmas, Thomas,” I whispered, and flicked the switch to Vegas.
The next morning, shivering next to my space heater on the living room hearth, I carried a microwaved cup of coffee to the window and pulled back the quilt-drape for a look at Christmas morning weather. Cold and clear and . . .
Christmas tree?
Someone had covered a wild cedar at the edge of the forest in colorful ornaments, garland and tinsel, with a cheerful plastic star on top. I grabbed my shotgun and crept outside. I’d padlocked the new driveway gate. No one could have gotten here by car, only a trespasser on foot. Looking around furtively, I didn’t see anyone lurking in the forest. I sidled over to the tree. A note dangled from one branch.
Goldilocks seen in neighborhood. Porridge eaten, beds moved. Three bears call cops. But me? I like
her style. Thomas.
Thomas. He was back. He was home.
I gently carried the note inside and set it on the living room shelves among the jars, the old photos I’d found in Granny’s attic, Cora’s fake ruby and Ivy’s drawing of the ruby-mining sluice.
My Christmas keepsakes.
PART FIVE
Taking joy in living is a woman’s best cosmetic.
—Rosalind Russell
I’m not happy, I’m cheerful. There’s a difference. A happy woman has no cares at all. A cheerful woman has cares but has learned how to deal with them.
—Beverly Sills
Chapter 20
Thomas The Dark Side Of Winter
I thought I had a better handle on the January depression now. I told myself Cathy was all the inspiration and motivation I needed to stay in the light. But when the calendar clicked past New Year’s Day a black pall settled on me, just like every year since nine-eleven. I couldn’t think straight. I returned to drinking with a vengeance to stop the nightmares and the flashbacks.
I should have known it would happen. Many nine-eleven survivors are serious head cases, still fighting off bleak moods and random fears. At least my January mood could be linked to a specific cause. A package always arrived from Ravel in the third week of the month. The contents always flattened me. Dread squeezed me like a vise.
The vodka bottles on my shelves emptied themselves one by one into my bloodstream. I looked and felt like hell, and I didn’t want Cathy to see me that way. Snow closed in and everything froze hard for nearly a week. I sat by my fireplace and drank, and waited for the package, and talked to myself.
Just get past that package, and you’ll be okay.
Cathy
“Cathy, I want to warn you about something,” Delta said as she drove my Hummer along a narrow, winding two-lane perched high along the rocky banks of Upper Ruby Creek in downtown Turtleville. I huddled in the passenger seat, sweating inside sunglasses and a heavy, hooded jacket, clutching a small fire extinguisher in my lap.
“That we’re going to die a fiery death in the river gorge if you don’t slow down?” I said in a shaky voice.
“I’m only doing thirty.”
We flashed by small shops and pretty little houses clinging atop boulders that looked down on the river. Dapples of cold winter light dropped like pearls through bare hardwoods and the feathery limbs of tall evergreens, flickering across the road before disappearing down the ravine into whitewater currents. I hugged the fire extinguisher. “This is a road for trapeze artists with safety nets. Not cars.”
“Try to think about something else. Listen to me. I want to warn you. Thomas has dived back into the bottle. That’s why you haven’t seen him since Christmas.”
Instant alert. I craned my head at her and forgot the road. “What’s wrong? What’s happened to him?”
“Same ol’ same old. He always gets worse around certain dates. September eleventh, naturally. And his little boy’s birthday. But January is the worst. It’s his wedding anniversary.”
“Well, of course he still grieves for his wife, even if their marriage was shaky.”
“No, this isn’t about grievin’. It’s about that cold-hearted sister-in-law of his, up in New York. She always sends him something that makes him feel like shit. Every year, the day before his anniversary, a package comes. One year she sent him his wife’s diary from when she was a little girl.”
“Why?”
“The sis-in-law had red-lined all the parts where Thomas’s wife fantasized about marrying a prince or a movie star and living to be an old lady with lots of kids and grandkids.”
“Oh, my God.”
“Another year she mailed him a letter his wife wrote to her family when she and Thomas were dating. The letter said how Thomas was the man of her dreams and how she just knew he’d die to protect her. Had a line in it something like, ‘He’d throw himself into a burning building if I were trapped inside.’ Thomas nearly jumped off Devil’s Knob after his sis-in-law stabbed him with that poison dart. Jeb and Santa followed him around like guard dogs for weeks.”
I groaned. “Why does he humor his sister-in-law’s viciousness that way? Why does he even open the packages?”
“Because he can’t resist pouring salt into his wounds. The sis-in-law knows he can’t resist. The mean bitch. She doesn’t ever want him to make peace with what happened. In her crazy mind, he didn’t try hard enough to rescue his wife and son.”
“Maybe she won’t send a package this year.”
“Oh, she will. After he called her for help back when you were in the hospital? She was smug and furious. That woman’s armed for bear, this year.”
“Called her? About me? What do you mean?”
“Gawdamighty, I never mentioned what Thomas did to get your phone number in the burn ward?”
“No!”
Looking grim, Delta told me how he’d used his sister-in-law’s connections in the hospital industry. How he’d bribed her with an antique pocket watch that had been both his wife’s family heirloom and his sentimental keepsake.
I sank back on the seat. “Oh, Thomas.”
“Hmmm uh. He might as well have cut his chest open and told his sister-in-law to rip out his heart. She let him live, but she’s been biding her time ever since.”
We crested a ridge. Suddenly Delta turned the Hummer down a steep road overlooking a vista of mountains. My stomach lurched. “Let’s intercept the package,” I announced as I reached for a pill bottle in my jacket. “Does it come through the post office? Just set it out where I can happen to notice it, and I’ll steal it and throw it away.” An Internet headline flitted through my mind. Cathryn Deen’s Bizarre Behavior Continues—Now Feds Charge Her With Mail Tampering. Complete with a bleary, disheveled mug shot. All right, for Thomas I’d take my chances. “Does it come through Anthony, the UPS man? Then tell him to leave it where I can accidentally find it.”
Delta sighed. “You think I haven’t considered doing that? If it came by Anthony, well, no problem. Anthony’s aunt’s husband’s brother’s wife is a New York City policewoman who’s been on anti-depressants ever since nine-eleven, so he’s sympathetic, and he’d throw the package in a ditch to save Thomas more grief. But Thomas’s sis-in-law is no dummy. She always sends the damn package by special courier, with Thomas’s signature required—so the delivery guy comes to the café, calls Thomas from there, and Thomas comes down from the ridge and picks up the package. Just like a sacrificial lamb knowing it’s headed for the altar.”
“But the courier has to meet him at the Crossroads. So you’ll know when the courier gets there. You can let me know.”
“And then you’ll do what?”
“Be there when Thomas comes to get it. I’ll talk to him about it. I’ll talk him out of looking at it. I have influence. He’ll listen to me.”
She clucked her tongue. “Cathy, where this thing is concerned, nobody can talk him out of it.”
Delta swung the Hummer into the gated entrance of a mountain estates community. Blue Ridge Vistas, Estate Homes, Private Golf Community, Mountain Views, said an elegant wooden sign set on a stacked-stone foundation. As we careened to a halt at the guard’s office, she turned to me sadly. “Hon, when that package comes the Thomas we know will disappear even deeper inside himself for awhile. And all we’ll be able to do is wait and pray that he comes back safe and more-or-less sound, like always.”
As she drove into the resort subdivision with a security pass hanging from the Hummer’s rearview mirror I frowned and hunched down in my seat. Pre-scars, I’d always been able to wrap men—and their moods—around my little finger. Thomas’s depression would have been no match for my geisha-beauty-queen skills. Now I had to rely on reason, personality and tact.
A challenge, but I’d try.
I was still deep in thought when Delta turned into the cobblestoned driveway of a miniature villa. “Okay, here we are,” she said cheerfully. “Like I told you, Toots Bailey and
her husband used to own an interior decorating business down in Atlanta, and she says this living room furniture she wants to sell you is the bonafide 1920’s mission style you’re looking for. Solid cherry wood and leather cushions so deep you can lose your butt in ’em.”
I barely heard a word. I stared at the vintage Trans Am in the driveway next door. Black-and-gold, late nineteen-seventies model. With the firebird emblem on it. Exactly like the one I’d crashed. Cold shivers went through me, and I threw up some bile in my throat. Delta shoved her door open and began climbing out, not realizing I was frozen in place. “What you waiting for?” she chirped, peering at me. “If you sit still too long around this neighborhood, you’ll get hit by a golf ball.”
“Delta, I . . . I don’t know if I feel all right. Maybe we can come back later—”
“Delta, help!” Our furniture-selling hostess, Toots, burst out of the house yelling and waving a phone as she ran toward the Hummer. By the time she reached Delta she was gesturing wildly up the street. “You remember Frank and Olinda Hunsell? They own car dealerships over in Tennessee. Olinda left Frank this morning! Now Frank’s drunk and he’s out in their backyard waving a gun and threatening to shoot her poor little dog and its puppies! I’ve called Pike, but I don’t know if he’ll get here in time!”
“Damn,” Delta said, stabbing a hand into the oversized leather tote on her shoulder. “The one day I left my pistol at home. Come on, Toots, I’ll try to talk some sense into him.” She tossed her tote in the Hummer. “Cathy, you stay here and hold the fort, okay, hon?” Then she slammed the door and followed Toots across the neighboring lawns at a chubby trot.
“Frank has a gun!” I shouted belatedly. Delta and Toots disappeared around the corner of a two-story shingle-and-stone bungalow several doors down. “I don’t believe this,” I said weakly, dabbing my forehead with a gloved hand. I looked up the street in the dire hope I’d see Pike’s patrol car right away.