The streets, usually occupied by at least one car and one dog walker, are empty and blanketed with snow.
When it snows on this street, a mysterious hush falls all around. Everything seems soft and glittery and beautiful. It's an atmosphere that just begs for snow cream and hot chocolate, and the magic just increases when it's Christmas, as it is this morning.
A magic beyond magic, if you will.
On Christmas morning, children in footie pajamas creep down stairs furtively to make absolutely sure Santa has come before running shrieking back up the staircase to wake up their mommies and daddies. Adults are unhappy about being woken up too early, but as soon as they see the delighted smiles upon their children's faces, they can't help but smile too. Newlyweds wake up and share kisses, exchanging tiny, meaningful gifts in velvet boxes.
And one woman cradles her phone in her lap, staring at a lopsided Christmas tree. She had made a cup of tea that morning, but it sits forgotten on the coffee table, growing cold like the tip of her nose and her fingers. She catches a glimpse of herself in the mirror, before she takes up her post on the couch, perched on the edge. She could take flight at any moment.
XXX
Interestingly enough, her first glance of him had been upside down, through eyes that almost seemed to be dripping blood.
But in reality, it was just a cut on her cheek.
XXX
There's a little bird on the mantelpiece—a brightly painted figurine with a three-letter name etched on the side. The seated woman looks over at it briefly. It almost seems to be smirking at her.
She swears at it under hear breath and goes back to staring at the phone in her lap She wishes she could let her fingers dance over the buttons, do a tango in miniature form…but her fingers don't know this dance.
They never learned it.
The sun colors of the bird almost seem to laugh at the storm colors of the woman's eyes as she steals another glance at it.
"Damn it all," she mutters. Her stomach growls. She puts the phone in the pocket of her loose pajama pants and goes to fix a pathetic breakfast for one.
XXX
"Look, there's a reason why you can't go." He sounded…amused.
"I know! I know!" Her tone was frustrated, and all her body language suggested that she would like nothing better than to spring up and punch something, anything. But she was not able to. "You think I haven't noticed that I can't see my toes?"
"Well, I'm sorry for putting you in this mess, then. Next time, let's try to restrain ourselves and it won't happen again." His temper was rising, his mustache blustering.
She rolled her eyes in the way she did when she knew she had to concede, and struggled to her feet. "Look, I'm not mad at you. But you won't be home for…"
He looked uncomfortable. "I'll try, okay? I'll try."
XXX
The mantle's never had more than one picture on it.
XXX
"I don't want to spend Christmas by myself," she admitted as she hovered around him. He was packing an old leather suitcase, the one he'd had for practically decades.
He shrugged. "Nothing I can do about it, unfortunately." When she looked hurt, he hugged her with difficulty, owing to the large bulge in the area of her stomach. "Hey, baby," he said, and he wasn't talking to his wife.
She smiled in spite of herself.
XXX
The woman on the couch looks at the calendar, hung innocently on the wall. A picture of a puppy in a sleigh gazes out at her. The date is right, but the day of the week is wrong.
Probably because no one's touched that calendar in three years.
The phone stays silent and cold in her lap.
XXX
"There's no point looking up anymore, Commander."
"I know," she said, but still her head didn't go down, her nose pointed toward the unending sky above.
"What's the due date?"
"A week before Christmas," she answered, still not looking at the lowly private next to her. He was somewhere up there, somewhere up in that sky.
"Well, best of luck to you."
"Thanks."
XXX
She had made a plate of eggs, but they now sit forgotten, congealing and drying into lurid yellow shapes on the coffee table. A fork balances on the edge of the plate, hovering in the air with just one support point. The woman watches it idly without seeing it.
She remembers a long time ago, when Christmas would be full of breakfasty smells, because he was a good cook. Syrup quickly replaced Mexican hot chocolate as the aroma she associated with December.
The phone is still silent.
XXX
"Sweetheart…"
"Don't call me that."
"Look, I'm sure he's just busy."
"He said he would call."
"But you know that the satellite phones are sketchy."
"February."
"What? I mean, come on, remember that time that…"
"February."
"What?"
She looked pained, holding her stomach. "I…I…"
The other woman's eyes nearly popped out of her head. "Oh. My. Dead. God. What should I do?"
"GET THE CAR, YOU DUMB BITCH!"
"Hey!"
"Just…just do it! Go!"
XXX
The woman eventually takes the bird off the mantle and sets it next to her.
It's nowhere near a substitute, not even in the realm of possibility. But its smooth back might give her some semblance of comfort.
XXX
"JESUCRISTO," she screamed. "Oh, God…"
"You'll be okay, you'll be okay," the only person from her old life that was there for her assured, wringing her hands and scurrying out of the doctor's way. "Just…they said push. So, like…push…"
But her last words were drowned out by another terrible shriek from the bed.
"I see it!" someone in the room shouted. The place was an array of people in pea-green pajamas, running every which way.
The screams grew deafening, and for a second it seemed assured that the woman's throat would tear, but then, all of a sudden, they stopped.
The room was silent.
Everyone was waiting, waiting…
But they were waiting for a sound that didn't come. A sound that never would.
"Oxygen, stat," the head doctor proclaimed, and the place exploded again.
XXX
The woman hasn't cried in over two years. Now, she can feel one small drop, almost like a pinprick, sliding down her cheek. It gathers at the corner of her mouth. She licks it. Salt.
XXX
February held her as she cried.
"It was going to be a piece of him," she sobbed, her damp hair plastered to her back. She'd let it grow long in the years past. Like it used to be. "Both of us! It was mine!"
"She," the doctor corrected. They hadn't noticed he was standing there until he spoke. "It was…a she. I'm sorry, Commander."
Her sobs renewed, and February gave the doctor a scary glare over her shoulder. "Leave, please," she said. It was not a request.
"I thought I was tough," the woman sobbed.
"You are," February assured her.
"No. No, I'm not. Everything was going to change today. I wanted it to."
"Sssh," February said, making noises of comfort since she couldn't think of anything else to say.
XXX
The hours go by.
The clock on the wall keeps the time, as it is supposed to and has for years. And this woman, this woman with scars on her stomach and on her heart, never moves more than an inch away from the telephone.
"He said he would call," she tells the Christmas tree. Her voice sounds hollow and empty in the big, silent, lonely house.
The phone does not talk to her.
The tree does not respond.
The bird does not move.
The first strains of Silent Night fall onto her ears. There's a caroler group camped on the doorstep of the house. She can pick out the voices of children, and young women with high, soaring notes as their allies.
The sound is beautiful, and she does not want to hear it.
She looks at the phone. Maybe the carolers would tell her what she needed to know.
And maybe she was just dreaming.
But they weren't, and she wasn't.