"The Oak and the Ash" (7/9) by Parda August 2004 CHAPTER 5 - ADVENT ===== EDINBURGH ===== The house was still empty when Connor got back from his visit with John and Gina and little Davey on the last day of November, and everything in the garden was wilted and dead. Time to redo the basement apartment. Connor had been meaning to replace the paneling and the carpeting down there for years. He unpacked his things, took a quick shower, and went shopping for groceries and supplies. His cell phone buzzed in the evening on the fourth of December, and Connor immediately flicked the unit on. "Connor!" came the cheerful hail, but it wasn't the voice Connor had been hoping to hear. He swallowed his disappointment with the last of his whisky (a celebratory drink after ripping out the carpet) and greeted his kinsman. "Duncan." "How are things?" "So-so," Connor answered. "You?" "Can't complain. Alex still in Spain?" "Yeah," Connor replied, trying to keep the word simple and uninflected. "Must be some dig," Duncan surmised, and Connor didn't bother to correct him. The dig was like most other digs--cold and muddy some days, brutally hot and dusty on others, punctuated occasionally by the bizarre joy of archeologists whenever they found something minutely more interesting than a potshard, or so Connor gathered from Alex's e-mails. She hadn't called or written him a real letter once. Nothing but the short daily posts that said nothing much--cheery details about the archeological dig, comments about the people she was working with, the occasional joke--bland, empty meaningless e-mails she could have sent to a hundred people on a mailing list, with absolutely nothing real in them at all. Connor's replies to her e-mails had been equally short and equally bland, and he hadn't tried to call her, as she had asked right before she'd left him fifty-two days ago. "Please, don't push me," she'd said. So he hadn't, but by God! it wasn't easy. Especially today, on her birthday. He'd sent her a present last week, and she'd written to tell him that she planned on opening it today. He wanted to know if she'd liked it. He wanted to hear her voice again. He wanted her home. "She'll be home soon, right?" Duncan asked next. "Hard to tell," Connor replied, because he had to say something, and he didn't want to lie. "Look, about Christmas ..." "I'll let you know," Connor answered. After he'd finished the call with Duncan, he poured himself another drink and went to check his email. A letter from Alex was waiting. "The necklace is just beautiful," she'd written. "It's gorgeous. Thank you, Connor. And I'll bet the black opal is a perfect match to those earrings you gave me on the 119th anniversary of snooker." She'd win that bet. Connor had gone to seven different jewelers, looking for just the right stone. Good thing she'd left her earrings at home for comparison. Her letter had more exclamations of how pretty it was, and she'd written something about the other women in camp liking it, too, but there was nothing about looking forward to having him put it on her--or about having him take it off. That was how Alex usually-- That was how Alex used to let him know she was pleased. But she wasn't interested in sex now, Connor reminded himself. Maybe that's all it was. Or maybe she'd thought he was pushing her for more than she was ready to give. Connor cursed and tossed back his drink. Maybe he should have just gotten her a book. He poured himself a third whisky before he began his reply. "I'm glad you like it," he wrote. "And you're right about the stone, so you win the bet. Let me know what kind of winnings you want to claim." He leaned back in his chair, wondering if he should leave that last sentence in. Usually the winner of their bets claimed a special favor in bed. The hell with it. They were still married, and married people slept together, and he'd had enough of these damned games. He finished with "Happy birthday, Alex," and he added "I love you" before he typed his name. Then he added, "P.S. Got plans for the holidays?" Casually, as he might say to an acquaintance he saw once or twice a year. It was almost twenty-six hours before he got a reply. "I'll be back for Christmas," Alex promised, and Connor closed his eyes in relief and joy. She was coming home. She'd just needed some time, as she'd said. Alex was coming home. "I'll be in Edinburgh on the twenty-second," the e-mail went on. "But I'd like it to be just you and me. Can we tell Colin and Sara they're on their own this year?" "Sure," Connor typed immediately. "They're almost twenty. We don't have to play Santa Claus anymore." Not for the twins, anyway. Connor sent the message and went out shopping for Alex right away, braving the holiday crowds. After the basement was finished, he decorated the house, and the week before Christmas he made cookies, singing along with the Christmas carols on the radio. He saved decorating the tree, as always, for their ceremonial Christmas Eve "draping of the tinsel." Alex was coming home. ===== "Here we are," the taxi driver announced, and Alex roused herself from a light doze to look at the house, smeared gray by rain and a dirty window. It still looked pretty, though, with a green wreath wrapped with a red ribbon on the door, and more greenery woven into the decorative iron fencing along the sidewalk. The windows were dark, so it looked like Connor wasn't home, but then, she'd told him she'd be arriving at five, and it was only three in the afternoon. This morning, after going to two stores and dealing with the crowds, she'd decided to cut short her planned shopping expedition in London and come straight to Edinburgh. There were still three more days until Christmas; she could finish her shopping here. "This is your house, isn't it?" the driver asked. "This is where you live?" Alex shook herself fully awake and started to move. "Yes. Yes, of course." She opened her purse and paid him, then unbuckled her seatbelt and fumbled with an umbrella while he unloaded her bags. "You need help with these?" he asked. "Getting up the stairs?" "Yes, thank you," she said and handed him a generous tip, but after he left with a wave and a "Happy Christmas!" she found herself standing next to her bags in the pouring rain and wondering where she'd left her house keys. She'd planned on putting them in her purse at the rail station, but somehow, she'd forgotten and now she had to dig them out of her travel bag. The wind gusted, the rain came harder, and the umbrella just got in the way. By the time Alex found her keys and got the door open and the bags inside, she was dripping wet and cold. She was also exhausted; it had rained every day during the last week of the dig, and packing out had been a mess. Yesterday, she'd overslept and almost missed her train to Madrid, then the plane to London had been delayed, and she hadn't slept well in the hotel last night. She hadn't slept on the train to Edinburgh, either, just dozed a little in the taxi. Coffee, she decided. Hot, sweet, and strong. "Connor?" she called out as she walked down the hall into the kitchen, but as she'd expected there was no answer, only that quiet sense of waiting a house gets when no one is home. Truly quiet now--Connor had written to tell her that Callie, Colin's calico cat, had passed away ten days ago at the venerable age of thirteen. It was for the best, Alex supposed. Callie had been lonely since Catkin had died two months ago. But it was odd to have a house with no pets at all. The kitchen smelled of pungent freshness and crisp sweetness: cut evergreens and Christmas cookies. Newly baked bread and an apple pie sat on the counter. Connor had been busy. While the coffee was brewing, Alex wandered through the downstairs, looking at the Christmas cards neatly arranged on the table in the hall, the undecorated tree in the parlour, the greenery and fruit display on the dining room table. The faded paper Santa Claus and snowman that Sara and Colin had made sixteen years ago occupied their customary place of honor on top of the piano. Alex set Connor's gifts under the Christmas tree then, alerted by the enticing aroma, went toward the kitchen for her coffee. She stopped dead in the library, staring at a face in the mirror. The eyes were bruised with exhaustion, and the dirty-looking white hair was a damp straggle of lank strands. Wrinkles lay deeply etched and starkly obvious against too-pale skin. It was the face of an old, tired woman. It was her face. It was the face of Death, waiting. She didn't like looking this way, but she could bear it. What she couldn't bear was to have Connor see her looking this way, too. She couldn't do this at all. ===== Alex called around noon on Christmas Day. Connor walked into the kitchen to listen, then picked up the receiver just before the phone finished recording her message. "Hey," he started, the word rougher than he wanted. He cleared his throat, but he ended right where he'd begun, with that single sound. "Hey," Alex said back, and coming from her, the word was softer and smoother ... a little amused, and more than a little sad. "Merry Christmas." "Merry Christmas," he replied without thinking, even though it wasn't true. The house was empty and recently undecorated, and he was alone. The gifts they had bought for each other waited, unopened, in a pile near the hearth, because Alex wasn't back home for Christmas after all. "Maybe Alex and I'll come to New Zealand for Christmas next year," Connor had told Duncan a few weeks ago. But maybe not. Maybe never. "Listening to the phone-recordings again, Connor?" Alex asked him, a gentle amused nagging that had never bothered him before. "Just screening my calls," he replied, then added with deliberate sarcasm, "I get so many." That wasn't true, either, and she damn well knew it. The silence between them stretched painfully thin. "I'm at my mother's," she said finally, the words coming just before the silence broke and split into an uncrossable chasm. "You said you would be here," Connor reminded her, clamping his teeth together to keep from adding the frustrated whine of a child: You promised! "I was." Oh, yeah, she'd come back on the twenty-second, just as she'd said, but on an earlier train. She'd come back for an hour, maybe less, while Connor was out buying her flowers and a bottle of wine for her special welcome-home dinner. Then she had left, leaving only his Christmas presents under the tree, a note on the kitchen table, a still-warm pot of coffee, and the lingering scent of her perfume in the air. "I can't see you yet," she'd written, the handwriting shaky and blotched with tears. "I'm sorry." And then on the next line, "I love you. Please believe me. I do love you, Connor. I just need more time." She'd even signed it, "Your loving wife, Alex." He'd never seen that signature before. She'd never needed to convince him before. And then she had left. "You never even gave me a chance, Alex," Connor said, bewildered. "You didn't even wait for me to come home." "I'm sorry," she whispered. "I couldn't ... I didn't ..." She took a deep breath and tried again. "It's not anything you've done, or anything you haven't done, or even anything you could do, Connor. It's me. I'm the one having problems, Connor. I'm sorry," she said again, and she even sounded sincere. "I needed to go home," she explained then added quickly, "I mean--" Connor knew what she meant. Home wasn't with him anymore. "I needed my mother, Connor," she continued, sounding lost and frightened, even ashamed. He tried to be gentle, soothing. "Alex, I'm your husband--" "And that's precisely why I can't talk to you about it," she replied briskly, all hesitation gone. Connor abandoned the soft approach. "You haven't even tried!" Alex paused, that quiet moment of hers that heralded an attack, much like the deep breath of an infant right before it really starts to scream. Connor had heard--and dreaded--that silence before. "Do you willingly face an opponent before you're ready, Connor?" she asked. "Or do you practice and train, and then chose the day?" "You and I aren't opponents, Alex! And this is supposed to be a marriage, not a war!" "For you, our time together is a marriage. For me, it's the rest of my life, and it's the only life I get." And how the hell could he argue with that? "You're almost five hundred years old, Connor," Alex reminded him gently, and now she was the one taking the soft and soothing approach. "Can't you wait a few months for me?" He could wait forever, but he and Alex didn't have that kind of time. There was never enough time. But he could either push her now and lose her immediately, or wait for her to "find herself," and hope she came back before it was too late. He closed his eyes for a moment, then said, "OK. I'll wait." "Thank you," she said, so softly he could barely hear the words. "Any snow there?" he asked, a safe enough topic. "Some," she responded with obvious relief. "The roads are clear, but in the hills it's deep enough for skiing." She stopped short, that "safe" topic unleashing an avalanche of memories for both of them. Winters spent skiing together in the Highlands, teaching the twins almost as soon as they learned to walk, John slaloming down the side of an Alpine mountain, Alex challenging Connor to join her on a black diamond trail, the tip of her nose and her cheeks pink with cold, her eyes matching that flawlessly blue winter sky. The doctors had recommended she never ski again, not with that shattered ankle and injured knee. "Go with John and Gina," she'd urged him last year in Colorado, and "Go with Duncan," the summer before that, when they'd been in New Zealand and the seasons were upside down. Eventually, Connor had gone, for a day here and there, but not for the weekend or the week, they way they used to do. He'd come back to find Alex at her computer or reading a book, or maybe cooking an elaborate meal, but never outside. "Too windy," she'd say, or "Too busy," but never "Too cold," though Connor knew that she suffered from the arthritic aches in her bones. She used to like the cold. "Having a good Christmas?" he asked her. "No." "Me either." "I'm sorry," she said again, but Connor wasn't listening to her apologies anymore. "I didn't know where to send your presents," he said and then added, quite deliberately, "I didn't know where you were." More silence between them, more hurt and more anger, until Alex reached across it with more words. "I would have told you where I was going, Connor, but I didn't know." "Just wandered about?" he suggested with cruel sarcasm. "Somehow got on a plane in Edinburgh and found yourself in Pennsylvania?" "Something like that," she said evenly and let out a careful sigh. "Look, Connor, I don't want to argue. Not today. Not on Christmas." Neither did he. "Then we should hang up." He heard her draw a quick breath of surprise at that, and he added sharply, to keep himself from saying something truly vicious, "Now." "I love you," she offered, sounding near tears. Connor couldn't take that from her, not right now, and he couldn't give it in return. "Tell your mother Merry Christmas for me, Alex," he said and turned off the phone. He stood and stretched, then walked into the library and perused the selection of whiskies. Talisker, he decided and poured himself a double, planning on getting seriously drunk. It wouldn't be the first Christmas he had spent this way, and he doubted it would be the last. ===== (continued in part 8)