A Nantucket Christmas (5 page)

Or was the tree
too much
? Would Sebastian’s heart sink when he saw it, would he realize with horror that the woman he married lacked all sense of refinement? Nicole worriedly crunched the candy cane.

“I’m home!” Sebastian’s voice boomed out as he came in the door, bringing a blast of cold winter air with him.

Nicole glanced up nervously. “Did you have a nice lunch?”

Sebastian strode across the room, pulled her to her feet, and kissed her soundly.

“My,” she sighed. “What’s that for?”

“That’s for the tree,” Sebastian told her. “You should come out and see it from the street. It’s great. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

She laughed with pleasure. “It’s not too big for this room?”

He studied it. “It’s big. It’s so big it reminds me of the trees my parents used to put up when I was a little boy.” His face softened. “So long ago.”

“Oh, you’ve still got a bit of little boy in you,” Nicole teased him, nuzzling his neck.

Sebastian grinned. “Don’t you mean big boy?” he joked.

“Why, Sebastian.” She hugged him, turning her head sideways to gaze at the tree, feeling warm and loved and smug and absolutely brimming with holiday spirit.

The ferry from Hyannis to Nantucket was like a game of bump-’em cars Maddox once had been on at a friend’s birthday party. The big boat raised up, then smashed down, and waves slammed into the giant boat’s hull, making it shudder. Maddox thought it was
awesome
.

His mommy didn’t like it much, though. She lay on a bench, wrapped in her coat, hands clutching her belly.

“Let’s go up top, Mad Man,” James said, taking his son by the hand.

This was awesome, too. Maddox rarely got alone time with his daddy, who was always working. Maddox felt secure with his tiny hand tucked inside Daddy’s large warm hand. They went up the stairs, taking care because of the heaving boat, and stood by the high windows looking out at the water. His daddy lifted him up into his arms so Maddox could see better, and Maddox inhaled deeply of his daddy’s masculine scent, his aftershave lotion, his wool sweater, his cotton turtleneck. Maddox wrapped one arm around his father’s neck and leaned against him slightly, so he could feel the raspy skin on his face.

“Maybe we’ll see a whale out here,” his daddy said.

“How do they stay warm?” Maddox asked.

James explained, “The animals and fish that live in the water have different bodies from human beings. They can breathe in the water, and they never get cold. But they can’t breathe in the air like we do, and our air is much too dry for them.”

Maddox marveled at this thought. He gazed out into the waves, which were dark blue, crested with frothy white, rolling relentlessly toward the boat to crash into the sides, making the boat shiver and the waves explode into fizzy silver suds.

He tightened his hold on his father. The world was so big, and this view of it on such a cold December day made him feel very small. In preschool, he’d seen a picture book depicting Santa Claus traveling to an island in his sleigh. The sleigh was drawn by porpoises, seals, walruses, and whales, and it skipped over the top of the waves while Santa held the reins.

The book had made Maddox uneasy. Santa was supposed to fly through the air. Maddox had seen pictures of the sleigh in other books. What did Santa do with the reindeer when he used the porpoises? And if he crossed the water with the sea creatures, what happened when he got to the island? If what his father said was right, porpoises couldn’t breathe on dry land, so how did Santa get up to the chimneys of the houses? It was hard to understand how the world worked, especially on an island.

A funny
yip
interrupted Maddox’s thoughts. Looking down, he saw a yellow puppy tugging the laces of his daddy’s sneakers.

A lady with gray hair and earrings shaped like Christmas trees rushed over. “I’m so sorry,” she apologized pleasantly. She picked up the puppy and held him in her arms. “This is Chips,” she told Maddox and his father. Holding the puppy’s paw, she waved it in a hello gesture. “We’re taking Chips to give to our granddaughter for Christmas.” Seeing Maddox’s face, she asked, “Would you like to pet him?”

Maddox nodded solemnly.

“I’ll put him on the floor. You can play with him. Be careful, he bites, well, not actually
bites
, he nibbles, he’s got his baby teeth, and he’s only two months old. He doesn’t mean to hurt.”

James set Maddox down on the floor next to the puppy. Maddox held out his hand. Chips licked it and wriggled all over. Maddox patted the puppy, then scratched behind his ears. Chips turned circles and flopped over onto his back, exposing his fat white belly. Maddox rubbed it and Chips wiggled in ecstasy, kicking his hind legs as if he were riding a bike. Maddox giggled.

“Here.” The lady handed Maddox a short rope. “He loves to tug.”

The second Maddox took the rope, Chips snatched the other end in his sharp white puppy teeth and yanked so hard he pulled it right out of Maddox’s hand.

“Hey!” Maddox yelled, reaching out to capture the rope, but Chips ran away. Giggling, Maddox chased after him. They went only a few steps when Chips tripped on his own feet and somersaulted head over heels, never once letting go of the rope. But Maddox caught up with him and clutched the rope, and the boy and the puppy began to tug. It was so much fun. Maddox laughed and laughed. The puppy let go of the rope and actually jumped onto Maddox, who was on his knees. Chips sort of latched onto Maddox with his puppy paws and began licking Maddox’s face all over, as if Maddox tasted delicious. Maddox fell over on his back, delirious with happiness as the puppy’s wet pink tongue slurped his eyelids, his cheeks, and once right up his nose!

“Maddox, darling? Why are you on the floor?” His mommy stood at the top of the stairs, clutching the railing, pale and anxious. “Are you all right?”

The older lady quickly bent down and lifted Chips off Maddox. “Hello,” she said to Kennedy. “I’m sorry, I was just letting Chips play with the child. I’m afraid I’m rather boring for the poor puppy.”

His mommy smiled. “That’s so kind of you. Maddox would love to have a puppy. I’m just not sure I could deal with one now …” She put her hand on her belly.

The older lady nodded her head. “Wiser to take your time. You can always get a puppy later.”

Maddox glanced back and forth between the older woman and his mommy, who seemed to be communicating without saying all the words.

James hefted Maddox into his arms. “Look,” he said, pointing. “We’re almost there. I see the lighthouse. Soon we’ll be nice and warm, and Nicole will serve us a delicious meal.”

“Goodbye,” the woman said, waving Chips’s paw.

Maddox’s daddy said, “Kennedy, let me help you go back down the stairs. You shouldn’t have climbed them by yourself, not with the boat rocking so much.”

Supporting Maddox with one arm, and Maddox’s mommy with the other, his strong daddy carefully escorted them down the steps to the main cabin. They were almost on the island!

Kennedy was so blissed-out she was miserable.

After their arrival yesterday afternoon, her father had helped James carry in the bags. To Kennedy’s surprise, the room at the back of the house behind the kitchen had been transformed into a bedroom. This way, Nicole had pointed out, Kennedy wouldn’t have to climb the stairs. The room had been called the birthing room when the house was built back in the eighteen hundreds, because it was near the kitchen and easy to keep warm. When her parents were married, this room was the TV room.

Kennedy had worried that Maddox would be afraid to be on the second floor, so far away from his parents, but Nicole had decorated the spare bedroom in a spaceship theme, with posters of rockets and a bedspread printed with comets. All around the ceiling, small stickers of stars, planets, and meteors glowed gently in the dark. A bookshelf held building blocks, children’s books, and tractors, dump trucks, and fire engines. Maddox loved it. He immediately called it
his
room.

Last night, Nicole had served a delicious meal, even though the calorie count was over the moon. Pork loin with apples and onions, roasted squash risotto, broccolini, beets with orange sauce, and fresh, homemade, whole wheat bread with butter. She’d bought the kind of veggie burgers Kennedy had requested and cooked those for Maddox, who ate all of them, as well as his broccolini and beets.

This morning, Nicole and Kennedy’s father had taken Maddox out for breakfast in town, allowing Kennedy and James to sleep late and spend time alone in bed snuggling, something they had been unable to do for months.

Then
, because the day was sunny and surprisingly mild, her father and Nicole had suggested having a picnic way out on Great Point, where Maddox could see the lighthouse and the big fat seals who lounged about on the shore, grunting, lolling, and snorting.

The last thing Kennedy wanted to do was to be bounced around in a four-wheel-drive vehicle along a sandy beach path. Her lower back was twinging with such force she felt like a grunting seal herself.

When she begged off going, to her utter amazement, Nicole had cooed, “Of course you should stay home. Why don’t you settle on the sofa? I’ll have your father build you a nice fire. I’ve got a stack of magazines and light reading you might enjoy. Go on, put your feet up. Get comfy.”

Kennedy had lowered her bulk onto the sofa and raised her heavy feet up to a pillow. Instant ecstasy. Before she left, Nicole brought in a tray. On it were a plate of sandwiches, a bowl of carrots and red pepper strips, and to Kennedy’s childish delight, a selection of homemade Christmas cookies. Gingerbread men and women with white icing faces. Irresistible sugar cookies with snowy icing covered with multicolored sprinkles shaped like reindeer, wreaths, and angels. Finally—in a white pot decorated with green holly and red berries—there was steaming, rich, milky, homemade hot chocolate to pour into a matching mug.

Kennedy’s father, James, and Maddox were hefting a picnic basket, several wool blankets, and a couple of thermoses out to the Jeep Grand Cherokee.

“Bye, Mommy,” Maddox called.

Nicole came back into the living room, wearing jeans, a green Christmas sweater with a snowman on it, and hiking boots. “All set?” In her hands she held a red and green plaid down blanket trimmed in satin. “I’ll just tuck this in around you.” She fluttered the cover over Kennedy’s legs and nudged it in around Kennedy’s feet. She scooted the coffee table close, just within Kennedy’s reach. “Anything else?”

“This is great,” Kennedy admitted grudgingly. “Thank you.”

“Bye, then. See you in a few hours.” Nicole fluttered her fingers and left.

A few hours? A few hours alone in the house with cookies, hot chocolate, and peace and quiet? Kennedy almost wept with relief.

Although … something about being tucked in with a blanket unsettled her, brought up memories from the far distant past that filled her with a melancholy longing. Now she was the one who made sure her child was covered with a blanket, but there had been times, she could almost remember, like reaching out through a fog, when her own mother had fluttered a blanket down over her.

Katya hadn’t ever cared much for the messiness of motherhood. She’d always had babysitters, or nannies, and of course, housekeepers. Kennedy’s father was always working. From an early age, Kennedy was encouraged to be a good girl, a “big girl”—meaning no fussing, no running, no whining.

Kennedy worried that she wasn’t a natural mother. She never felt the rush of exultation when Maddox was born that she’d read other mothers had. True, she’d had an epidural, which Katya had advised her to have, in order to avoid the pain of labor and birth that, Katya said, would savage Kennedy. Even with an epidural, Kennedy was shattered for days, which stretched into weeks and months. When Maddox was about seven months old, he started sleeping all night, and after that Kennedy very nearly felt like a normal human being. But when he started crawling and toddling, her fears for him, the need for constant vigilance, the shrieks he sent out when he fell, wiped her out all over again.

She loved him more than her life. He was her joy, her angel, her darling boy. After he was a bit more steady, she and Maddox had entered a kind of honeymoon period, when they had such fun together. He was her darling pal.

It was during that spell when she submitted to James’s desire for another child. She had prayed for a girl, but the ultrasound tech said it was another boy. Kennedy tried to be content with that. Certainly it made James feel manly, as if every cell in his body was masculine.

This pregnancy had been as difficult as the first. Morning sickness came early and lasted for months, spiraling nausea through her system day and night. Even though she scarcely ate, the baby grew inside her as if her umbilical cord were an enormous beanstalk attached to a giant. She was uncomfortable, awkward, blotchy, waddly, and incontinent.
Cranky
.

Now she had this dreadful week to get through with her father and his new gushy wife. Nicole had never had children, she probably had no idea of the difficulties of keeping a four-year-old boy amused and under control. Kennedy was terrified that Nicole would feed Maddox so much sugar he’d never sleep. Plus, the environment Nicole had provided—the huge tree, the toy crèche, the stockings hanging from the mantel—they would over-stimulate her already active son, causing him to spin out of control.

Kennedy wanted to go home. She wanted this Christmas fuss to be over and done with. She wanted Maddox back in preschool and her days quiet and calm, so she could sleep and rest up for the coming baby.

Although, Kennedy admitted to herself as she poured a cup of hot chocolate and nibbled a sugar cookie, this wasn’t so bad. Pretty nice, actually.

So, fine. Nicole was obviously doing her best. That didn’t mean that Kennedy had to like her or be glad that her father had gone and
married
her.

Why couldn’t her father understand that women had midlife crises just like men? Obviously, Katya had been bored with her husband of thirty years and had just needed some excitement. Perhaps Katya was beginning to feel—not
old
, Katya would never be old—but less alluring than usual. After all, Katya’s daughter was grown up and married now, and Katya had become a
grandmother
with its connotations of gray hair in a bun and flapping upper arms. Kennedy totally
knew
her mother had run off with Alonzo to prove to herself that she was still desirable. Instead of divorcing Katya, Kennedy’s father should have gone after her, wooed her, and won her back. He still could, if he hadn’t married that damned Nicole.