"I don't think I've ever been so—so—so mad at him," Claire said to the office as she sat on her counselor's warm, pumpkin-colored sofa, one hand at her temple as she leaned on the sofa-arm. A sunset-stained Tiffany lamp lit the little room, the light catching on the beaded mosaics stitched into the couch's decorative pillows. Claire's fingers itched to pick at them.
"But I invited him for the holiday next week anyway," she went on, the counselor saying nothing. "I invite him every year—for Christmas too. He—he doesn't come. Anymore."
Now, the counselor, a polished woman with carefully coiffed gray hair and a pale sage-colored suit, spoke.
"And what do you feel when he does that?"
Claire sat up straight, dropping her hand in her lap.
"What do you mean what do I feel?"
"I meant," the counselor said, gentle and firm, "how does it make you feel when your brother does not come for holidays?"
Claire paused, glancing from the warmth of the Tiffany lamp into the November night slowly flooding the window. The sky outside twisted in the languid whorls of a still red sunset slowly smothered by a deepening, blue darkness.
"Guilty."
[ - - - ]
"All right, Turkey," Claire said. "You ready for this?"
The last Frozen Lil' Butterball Turkey in the city, weighing in at just eight pounds, had finally thawed after spending three days in its future roasting pan and taking up an entire shelf of Claire's fridge. If all went according to plan, it would transform from a soft, pink, beheaded bird into a savory, herb-roasted turkey in just three and a half hours. By 4PM, only she and Martha Stewart (or whoever wrote the recipe) would know what flavorless, flesh-bag horror she had started with.
'I think I'm ready for this.' Claire split the netting, peeled off the plastic wrap, and reached into the stomach of the turkey. One by one, she dragged out its little, prepackaged sacks of liver, heart, and giblets. They slopped into her sink, redness seeping through the mushy bags.
"Okay!" she said aloud, rinsing the gut-juices from her hands. Then, while the turkey waited, Claire started up a basting wash of olive oil, dried basil, and ground sage finished off with crushed sea salt and black pepper—just like Rachael Ray or whoever said.
'I'm too cool for garlic powder,' she thought, deviating from the recipe with two tablespoons of fresh garlic. 'And I haven't got any anyway,' and the grocery stores would be insane until the long-dreaded dinner-hour passed and the madness moved on to the malls opening at midnight.
[ - - - ]
"What does that guilt feel like?"
Claire avoided the eyes of her counselor for the titles of her books, books of social anxiety, depression, and abuse, books that didn't apply to her; she skipped her gaze away, looking into the corners of the ceiling and the floor.
"I don't know," Claire answered when nothing more helpful appeared from the crooks of the room. "It's guilt," she said plainly. "It makes me angry—I'm mad he didn't come—it's—it's not just about missed holidays anymore. It's about—why I came here." She leaned forward, her hands meeting in anxious prayer over her knees. "And how his—his job doesn't end."
"Then, let's go back to why you came here," the counselor suggested.
[ - - - ]
Some long and sticky twenty minutes of stuffing and basting later, the turkey roasted slowly at a comfortable 325 degrees. Other dishes, prepped during the days before, waited for baking in foil trays and glass pans in the fridge. Claire had followed her 'game-plan,' as the cooking magazine had called it, pretty much to a T—besides the garlic and some other substitutes and, um, the turkey-thawing time.
'And I did it all by myself,' she thought, flexing her chef's muscles as she sat in a barstool at her countertop and congratulated herself on her approaching kitchen victory with a cup of chai tea spicy with cinnamon. Cheers! She toasted no one with her mug. Who ever said workaholics couldn't find the time to cook Thanksgiving dinner?
There was only a cake left to put together since Whole Foods made the pumpkin pie and the appallingly expensive organic whipped cream (which the gift card had meticulously not covered the cost of).
But the cake could wait as the clock over the oven read 12:17PM.
'Guests'll be here any minute, I think.' Claire set her mug down with a dull clunk and admitted, 'And turkeys are tougher than I thought—'
Her cellphone rang, a particular jingle singing out through the apartment, as 'BUZZER' flashed across the screen.
[ - - - ]
"I came here because I was kidnapped last week. It's—that's happened to me before," Claire said, "since, well, my—my work-life isn't exactly typical." She paused hard to think, looping slowly back through her anger, her words, and unraveling the strings of feelings, thoughts, and dreaming tangents tangled around the reason she came here. "But that's never scared me before. I always felt, like if I was really in trouble, I could count on Chris.
"And now," she said, "I don't feel like I can anymore. I really needed him—and he didn't come." She stopped again, and the counselor bore the silence regally. But the stillness wrapped Claire, bared its teeth, and tightened its coils around her until she had to continue, even if her voice rattled, stiff and slow, at first. "And he hasn't been coming, and I've been—ignoring it."
The counselor shifted at that, tilting her head just so as her pen dangled, pendulous, at her chin.
"So, what do you plan to do with that knowledge?"
"What will I do?"
The counselor nodded.
"I'm—I'm not going to wait around anymore—right now," Claire said after another long, gripping pause in the python's silence. "I—I can have a good holiday—even if he's not there." Her voice threatened to crack, to hitch, and she swallowed. "I invited some—friends over this year, who don't have a lot of family either. I'm going to cook and everything, the works." And she smiled in spite of herself, and her counselor smiled back, natural and knowing.
"That's wonderful, Claire!" she said, putting her pen down on the empty notepad in her lap. "Is this your first time?"
"Yes—I've—I've always catered before, or Chris cooked. My job's—pretty demanding too."
"Oh, I'm happy for you! That sounds like fun!" The counselor set the book and pen aside and folded one leg over the other. "Half the work is waiting on the turkey; I leave mine to thaw for about four days or so."
"You—what? Four days? It—does it really take that long—"
[ - - - ]
Jake stood, arms crossed, and resisted fidgeting in the drafty entryway. He waited between the exterior and the interior doors with the lobby's cold architecture boxed around him like the narrow, angular heart of a robot. Despite the smallness, the ceiling seemed to rise on forever as towers of steel and glass bound together in triangular-braces overhead. Such modernism did nothing for the chill, and even with all the sleekness, the buzzer still sounded frigging obnoxious.
It was also awkward as hell waiting in the entryway to this—this woman's apartment.
'I can't believe I'm doin' this—' Except he knew he was doing this, committing his day to this, since he'd been informed by a certain 'contact' that Claire would only endorse the check at her apartment on November 28, 2013, and that contact seemed okay with this because she wasn't sure he'd still go otherwise. 'Girls,' Jake grumbled to himself. He had been strong-armed into going already two weeks ago, and he was going to go! 'I said I would!'
All this 'insurance' was totally unnecessary—and the buzzer answered him, a low, metallic tone sounding in the lock of the main doors as they clicked open. Jake grabbed the metal, geometric slab of the handle and stepped inside onto the lobby's massive squares of vanilla marble, the door hesitating on its hinge behind him.
A blast of cold air shot through him from out in the entryway and with it, came a familiar voice: "Hey, wait up!"
He caught the main door before it locked shut again, and Sherry's face lit up, her cheeks rosy from late November's briskness. The color stayed as she slipped inside, still smiling, and ran her fingers through her wind-blown, blonde hair. She left her hair alone and shuddered in the jarring shift from the practically Baltic air outside to the tropic warmth of the lobby, even as she shrugged out of her white, puffy jacket. Her clothes crackled with static.
There was some—some word for her actions and the glow about her face—some adjective that escaped him right now.
"You still cold or somethin'?" Jake asked. They waited together in front of the elevator as Sherry pulled off her gloves and smoothed out her sweater dress, a soft, pearly affair with capped sleeves worn with a gray belt and black leggings, with her bare hands.
"A little," Sherry said. "She's on the twenty-seventh floor."
The doors opened onto a neat, little gray room wrapped with a bold, clear acrylic banister. A sunken alcove sat in the back wall hung with a small wreath. Sherry stepped on, coat folded over in her arms, and waited while Jake took up the opposite wall. The doors shut, and a light carol filled the cabin as the elevator lifted through the floors.
"You look nice today," Sherry said over the soft undertoning of 'It's a Marshmallow World'. Jake had dressed up a bit in a dark green button-down shirt, the sleeves rolled up over his elbows, and pitch-black jeans. His mother would have heard and stirred from sleep of her very grave if he hadn't, and that wasn't how he intended to meet her again.
"Uh, thanks."
And the doors chimed.
[ - - - ]
At the seventeenth door on the twenty-seventh floor, Sherry's voice rang musically up and down the corridor striped in emerald and ivory carpet and lit with the washed out light of a sky sunless and overcast.
"Hi Claire! Thanks for inviting us!"
"Hey!" Claire said, stepping aside in her doorway and morgue's draft slipping in from the corridor. "Did you guys find the place okay?"
"Yup!" Sherry said.
They met in a rustling storm of welcoming noise, rustling coats and squeaking shoes. Sherry stepped out of ashy-blue ankle boots after a bit of fiddling with the buckles. She teetered uncertainly, her coat rolled under her free arm.
"Lemme hold that," Jake interrupted, taking the coat from her.
"Thank you."
"So, did you two come together—" Claire asked, opening up the coat closet and making some space on the crowded rack. Motorcycle jackets and tawny-colored peacoat overstuffed the closet already while a black helmet, some hats, and a football lurked on the upper-shelf. Jake handed over the jackets, Sherry's short, shiny white down-coat and his black, woolen field jacket. Claire took his first and found a hanger for it before she reached back for Sherry's.
"No," Jake said roughly. "We just met up—"
"Oh, I like your sweater, Sherry," Claire continued, hanging up the second coat.
"Thanks! I just got it the other day! I found at Bloomingdale's." Sherry dropped into a thrilled whisper. "On clearance!"
"I'm—I'm not brave enough for Bloomingdale's. Even clearance," Claire said, shoving back the most unruly of her coats and closing up the closet again. "They're a bit out of my price range—"
"You just have to look really hard," Sherry went on.
"Yeah, but I'm not patient enough for that kind of shopping—"
Apparently, no one cared about his explanation.
'Girls,' Jake thought.
And with that, Claire took them through her living room on a brief tour of the two-bedroom apartment overlooking the city draped in cloud. Here was the nexus of her humble abode, with its Spartan bookshelves, hard-wood floors, and leather furniture gathered around a coffee-table and a 32-inch TV sitting in front of the wall-to-wall window, its red curtains tied back. From there, the living room connected to the dining room, the kitchen, and the hallway that fed back to her office and a bedroom.
"Anyway, bathroom's back that way too," Claire said, getting the important geography out of the way. "Do you want anything to drink? I've got some hot water left." Jake shook his head, and Sherry followed Claire into the kitchen to raid her tea bag canister. Their voices carried back to Jake in the muted living room.
"How's 'honey lemon ginseng' green tea?" Sherry asked.
"It's okay," Claire said. "I don't really like green tea. I have some bags of Bengal Spice in there though—if you like that brand."
Jake stepped out of the radius of the other conversation and glanced down into the long drop into nothing outside Claire's window. Twenty-seven floors down, the nothing fell into an intersection where a solitary car pulled away from the light, and a little, old woman with a little, old dog walked the empty crosswalk and into the shadow of the building. The trees below bent and shuddered in a cold wind that dragged at the little woman's coat as she passed the only other person walking on the street, a man distant and small, his coat a smudge of black and gray. The little, old lady's balance tilted on the walk, her purple, floppy hat slipping and a newspaper dancing along the gutter, and the man caught her elbow.
The little dog barked, a brilliant sunspot opening in the gray horizon, and Jake looked out of the light and back into the comfortably dim front room. He left the window and sat down on Claire's sofa, cluttered with striped pillows, and the cushions sunk beneath him. A trio of framed film posters lined the wall above him and the couch. Cowboys sketched in photorealistic, 70s-style posed across them with six-shooters, fistfuls of dynamite, and crooked, gravestone titles: Duck, You Sucker!, My Name is Nobody, and Two Mules for Sister Sara. The apartment around him smelled like seasoned meat roasting and 'Lady,' he thought frankly, a blended scent of sharply cinnamon potpourri, lingering perfumes, and, well, dryer sheets.
"Where do you get all these? I didn't even know they had these flavors—"
The others' voices grew closer.
"My aunt takes me to the Celestial Seasonings factory whenever I go home to visit. She thinks they don't have anything besides Sleepytime outside of Denver. She buys way too much—" Claire appeared from the dining room with Sherry and tea in tow. "You don't have to sit out here by yourself."
"Not much of a tea guy," Jake said, stretching into the pillows like he was comfortable there.
"Well, I hope you like coke," Claire said, putting a chilled can down on the coffee table in front of him. "Coke's pretty manly."
"I didn't need anything to drink—" Jake started again.
"Well, now you don't have to get up when you do," Claire said, sitting in the armchair just opposite him, and Sherry plopped down in the side of the sofa between them. "The turkey needs some time, so we're going to watch—"
"The Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade," Sherry finished, finding a coaster for her mug. "I haven't seen it in a really long time!"
"We're watching a parade?"
"We're watching a parade," Claire said, finding a seat on a nearby armchair and working her TiVo.
TiVo made the hours roll back, and 9 o'clock in the morning on November 28, 2012 reappeared at the corner of 77th street and Central Park West as cart-wheeling clowns spilled onto the empty throughway flanked by colorful walkers on stilts and ground acrobats all moving in time to the pulse of the high school marching band leading the way. The talking heads broadcasting the event cooed and commented, congratulating the high school band opening the parade yet again and hinting at some Euro-pop boy band's performance to come, before they announced the first of Macy's massive balloons, a blue hedgehog, bumping shoulders with the New York skyscrapers, pulled along by a team of blue men.
"Is that freaking Sonic?" Jake asked. Sherry took a messy sip of her tea and put her cup down, giggling.
"Of course it's Sonic!"
'Oh, boys,' thought Claire.
The floats paraded on, and in the middle of the seventh show-choir to dance by, Claire got up to check if her dead bird was an edible turkey yet.
'We're getting there.' The turkey browned nicely in the red glow of the oven, and Claire straightened, meeting the blue appointment card pinned neatly to her fridge with a magnet at eye-level. It reminded her in cool, even penmanship that her next, and second, appointment with Dr. Erika Reeds was still scheduled for the Wednesday after Thanksgiving, December 5th.
Claire took the card down.
[ - - - ]
"I'm making a mistake being so mad about this, aren't I?"
"Why do you say that?" Dr. Reeds asked.
"Just tell me straight," Claire insisted, and Dr. Reeds shook her head.
"It wouldn't help you for me to judge," she said primly. "You have lived an unusual life, Claire, but I am not convinced you need to see me for anything more than a mental check-up." She smiled, the lines gathering at the corners of her lips. "You've also undergone some significant stress lately, but not a level I feel you can't handle." She paused suddenly, dipping her head as her casual and even proud smile thinned. "But I will say that if your brother is not receptive to hearing you out at this time, continuing to see me might bring you some comfort. Let's set an appointment for after the holiday? I want to hear how your Thanksgiving goes."
Claire sat with that in her mind, the reassurance of sanity, the possibility of future pain, and what might be decided in the days to come—if anything at all.
"All right," she said.
[ - - - ]
A small dog yapped out in the hallway, but the noise in the front-room buried its high bark.
'Sounds like someone's having fun,' Claire thought with a grin. She opened the junk drawer in her kitchen and tucked the appointment card away—out of sight. 'Even if we practically had to pull teeth to get him here—'
The dog barked distantly again through the walls, and Claire hunted through her cabinets, bringing down a jar of maraschino cherries, canned pineapple, flour, salt, and sugar, and so many other pieces of a cake that soon grew too small to name.
Again, through the walls, the dog barked, and a door knocker rose and fell in three, militant stops, but it sounded far, perhaps at one of her neighbor's doors. Claire lingered at the counter-side, the ingredients laid out still in chaos, and turned her attentions to boiling up more hot water.
Except they knocked again, and the sound came too fiercely at her own door.
"Is that your door?" Sherry asked. "I can get it—"
"No, don't worry," Claire said, leaving the water to boil slowly. "I've got it." She smiled and stepped out into the living room. Out in the corridor, the barks and grumbling of the dog cleared. 'I know that bark,' Claire though, it belonged to a dog with an adorably old name, Mr. Tuddles, who lived with an adorably old woman a few doors down, Mrs. Benson, and Mrs. Benson, in her adorable and lonely ancientness, sometimes liked to stop by to chat. 'Why not a holiday?'
"Is Buzz Lightyear really in this?" Jake asked with concealed interest.
"Of course, he is," Sherry said. "Didn't you watch these when you were little?"
"No—where I come from this kind-of thing is—frivolous." And Jake said the word like it didn't belong to him.
A quiet fell, and the announcers filled the lull with more hype about the floats to come, a Hello Kitty balloon and a grand finale of a musical performance. Claire slid quickly in front of the TV and left the other two alone for the entryway. She lifted the latch, opened her front door, and paused there in the cool draft of the corridor. The man on her doorstep was an aching stranger, too painfully unfamiliar, but still blood of her blood. 'He looks like…Dad,' she thought, the heavy brows and jaw and the dark and somber color of his eyes and hair finding a place in her memory, a fleeting snapshot of a warm afternoon before a long trip into a night that hadn't ever lifted.
"Chris," Claire gasped. "Chris—Hi."
[ - - - ]
Chapter 3, if not chapter 4, will be up sometime next week, between 12/12 and 12/14. =) Thank you so much for reading. Feedback will motivate me and make writing Chapter 4 go faster! So, do keep that in mind as you pass the review/favorite/follow buttons.
Now, before I go, I must thank my betas, GG and two anon's, for their work reading this piece.