6
There is a crucifix over the bed (an apt position if there ever was one, she remarks) and a rosary in the night stand, a small silver cross over the dining room window and a larger one over the front door.
This was comforting to him, as he grew up in a Catholic household with crosses over all the doors and one around his neck. Growing up in a secular house, she is less prepared. The crucifix she associates (appropriately) with sacrifice and she shudders at it. He decides not to describe the crucifix he saw weekly in his church growing up to her.
Christmas Eve they go to a midnight mass (vigil, he says) at a church nearby. It is the first year he has gone without his mother. It is the first year she has gone.
The Catholic service is an hour long and familiar to him, and she catches on quickly, sometimes surprising him by being able to respond at the same time. She looks exquisite in a crimson sweater and leather jacket and boots and her cheeks are flushed from the cold. He can remember white Christmases from the few he spent back East growing up and the few he spent in France, but she is praying for her first.
Her eyes shine in the candlelight of the church and she leaves the mass exhilarated, thrilled with the tradition and sanctity of it all. She links arms with him and presses into his side, her breath making little clouds, one gloved- hand expressing herself as she breaks her silence to gush about how she's never done anything like that before.
On their way to the car, she slows down, pressing her fingers into his arm, scanning the sky. "It'd be nice," she says, playing with the long cashmere scarf that he wrapped around her neck twice before they left, "if we could all be led in the right direction by some star, wouldn't it? Like they were? Of course, you'd have to be observant and then you'd have to hope that you got there before sunrise- but it's a nice thought."
He opens the car door for her and closes it once she's pulled legs in, walking around to enter. When she's like that, with her innocent questions and pawing for attention, there is no definition between who she is and who she was and who she will be. He likes that.
Once home, he starts a fire in the fireplace and they curl up on the sofa, the stereo in the next room on playing Christmas music on the radio, and they're enveloped in gold. Christmas as a child for her, he knows, was never the thrilling event it was for him, and they are both quiet as they contemplate the lack of stockings hanging from the mantel, of a Christmas tree, of piles of presents. He misses his mother's gateau de Noël and wonders what those he's left behind are doing for Christmas.
She says his name quietly, her head against his neck, her fingers entwined with his. "Yes?" he replies.
"What do you think she's doing right now?"
He is momentarily stunned, wondering how she has read his mind. Knowing that she is many things, but clairvoyant is not one of them, he asks, "Who?"
"Your wife."
The word hangs heavily in the air, and he feels a chill stab him at the base of his skull and skitter down his spine, stretching along his limbs and ending at his fingers, which feel foreign and alien with hers. He has all but forgotten his ring banished to the lining of his wallet. The image of his wife's face is slightly hazy now, and he finds he cannot recall the sensation of her touch, or the exact locations of creases and birthmarks. He is well aware of how different that is from the way he could chart Sydney's body, even two years after her death. Guilt lodges itself in his stomach, and he cannot understand what would've possessed her to bring it up.
He had thought that his half-life during her absence was off-limits, like their various aliases and homes and their flights and their friends and everything unrelated to the present was.
She brings a hand to his cheek and murmurs his name again, her eyes all liquid with anxious sympathy.
Thankfully, on the radio, 'Have yourself a merry little Christmas' starts, and her face screws up and before the water works start he bounds into the other room to turn off the radio. When he returns, she has valiantly rid herself of tears and is staring into the fire.
"You know," he says, "Santa will never come if you don't go to sleep."
She smiles shortly and offers him her hand to pull her up, and when she stands she wraps her arms around his neck and kisses him. She doesn't tell him that she loves him, because that would be trite. Instead, she nuzzles herself against him and allows herself to be tucked into bed. When he crawls into next to her, she whispers "Merry Christmas" and snuggles into him and he realizes that they can live in limbo indefinitely.
New Years Eve is quiet for them. She buys them a bottle of champagne and they make a fire in the fire place and they put the TV on in the other room and listen to the merriment of the crowd. At midnight, while the television broadcasts Big Ben chiming, they step out on their snow-covered balcony to listen to the peals reverberating in the crisp winter air.
She turns to him, the apples of her cheeks flushed and pink and her eyes sparkling, and for a moment he can forget that the hair that whips around them both is honey-colored and not brown and she presses against him and kisses him. "Happy New Year," she whispers, and it is, for a little while.
They do not offer each other resolutions. Later, in bed, with his arm around her neck and her fingers linked with his she'll kiss his fingertips and tell him mundane things- she wants to go to Scotland, maybe Ireland; she wants to reread Anne of Green Gables; she wants to send her father a birthday card (March 16th, he doesn't try to figure out how she'll work it out); she's going to get a hair cut next Thursday and she's thinking of scheduling a manicure.
And he will pretend, just for now, that things are not horribly strange and dangerous, and that he has something to occupy his days and that he doesn't have an entirely separate life somewhere back West and that they are married and normal.
She mutters suddenly that she's starving and going to get the carton of ice cream they'd opened earlier. She disentangles herself from him and crosses the room without barking her shin once, her hand finding its way to the light-switch effortlessly.
"It's amazing," he says, "you memorize places like you do everything. I still run into things and I've got bruises from when I've walked into things in the dark- but you, it's like you've been here forever."
She turns around sharply, her face pale and eyes large as she faces him, deer in the headlight. "What?" she asks harshly.
He remarks that she seems at home here, bewildered by this reaction. She forcibly relaxes her stance and a strained smile graces her face. "You want anything?" (She slides away from what bothers her) and he shakes his head and decides not to wait up. She turns off the light and makes her way to the kitchen without incident.
That night, she has three nightmares, and after the third, which wakes her up at four in the morning, she stays awake, sitting beside him, stroking his hair. He wakes occasionally, taking in the comfort of the caress before asking thickly, what is it? Her tone is poignant as she exhales and reassures him that it's nothing, and he doesn't bother to argue. He moves closer to her as he drifts to sleep. He loves her too much not to.
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