Breath on Embers (11 page)

She straightened and held up her hand. “Oh, no,” she said. “I don’t...I don’t need—”

The boy cut her off. “Plenty for everyone,” he said, then leaned a little closer. “It’s part of the show.”

A second later she was holding the candle while the boys hustled to distribute more to the rest of the crowd, then used lighters to light the candles on the very furthest edges of the horseshoe of people gathered around them.

“Pass it along, folks,” the skinny kid who sang bass said. “It’s almost the darkest night of the year. Pass the light. We all gotta pass the light, you know?”

Once assured these clueless Upper East Siders had the idea, the boys clustered together, shoulders touching, as one boy snapped out the rhythm with his fingers. Then their voices raised once again, this time in a few bars of harmony before the sweetest tenor voice started “Silent Night.”

Pure, tight harmony. Thea’s throat thickened as the notes rose over the hushed crowd. The boys did nothing fancy with the song, simply sang in their vocal range, eyes closed, staying in tune and rhythm as much by their swaying bodies as by watching each other. They knew, Thea realized. They knew each other well enough to make singing together into light against the darkness that hovered all around.

Flames dipped and bobbed in the night as one person passed the light to the next. Light danced on the cold-reddened face of the woman next to Thea. She smiled at her as she tipped her candle to touch the wick of Thea’s, and just like that, Thea was holding a lit candle as music washed over her, into the void.

Just like that, she was crying. Soundless tears slipped down her cheeks and plunked on her wool coat.

“Y’all’s turn now,” the leader said when they came to the last verse. The boys lowered their volume so the gathered group could sing the last verse. They were off-key, some lagging, some rushing, but it was beautiful in the way only people striving together were. She couldn’t force the words from her tight throat, but the singing shattered the wall, sent the pieces soaring into the night sky over Manhattan, leaving her with a single desire.

Ronan.

More than she wanted to live behind the black, impenetrable wall of grief, she wanted Ronan. Being with him
was
different, and that truth, once accepted, meant she couldn’t go back or unlearn that awareness. She’d gotten so accustomed to deadening her soul that she’d missed when the grief became a habit, not a feeling. Maybe in the beginning she fought out of a sense of loyalty to Jesse, maybe she was just scared. But it was time to move on. Time to live again.

Just like that, she knew what she had to do.

The applause this time was louder and shot through with calls of
Merry Christmas!
The boys took bows as people came forward to drop bills into the hat. Another boy brought the box back around to collect candles. When he got to Thea she was still holding it, her cheeks wet.

“Whoa,” he said, leaning back, then crouching to peer into her eyes. “You okay?”

“It’s that time of year,” she said shakily.

“You keep it,” he said, nodding solemnly at the candle. “We got plenty.”

The crowd was dispersing. Thea kept the still-lit candle upright as she fumbled in her wallet for all the bills she had, and dropped them into the hat. Then she straightened her shoulders and climbed the granite stairs to the imposing brass doors of St. Ignatius. One of the priests who’d watched the impromptu concert smiled at her. “Welcome, and Merry Christmas.”

“Thank you, Father,” she said, then looked around the Baroque interior, the illuminated domes glowing with golden light. “I’m just... I wanted to light a candle.”

Smiling gently, he pointed her to the niche filled with candles. Thea stood in front of the brass candle stand for a long moment, watching rows of tiny flames flicker in votive cups. So small. So easily extinguished, and yet the only thing that provided any light against the darkness.

She tipped her candle forward and lit one votive in the very last row. She’d met Jesse in the back row of an anthropology course in college.
I like the back row
, he’d said when he sat down next to her.
Interesting people sit in back rows
, he’d said.
I’m dull as dirt
, she’d replied, then mentally kicked herself because he was cute and hot and smart, all at once.
You look all bright and shiny to me
, he’d said.

For six years, the light in his eyes lit her up, too. When he died, that light went out in her, plunging her into an interior darkness. But she’d been so focused on shades of black she’d missed the light shining from someone else’s eyes. From Ronan’s eyes.

She was alive. She loved Ronan. These facts were neither right nor wrong. They simply were, now.

The light’s never enough against the darkness, but it’s all you’ve got.

She heard Jesse’s voice as clearly as if he stood behind her. All the hair rose on the nape of her neck, and the tiny flame flickered and danced in the draft. But she didn’t turn around.

How do you move on after life-shattering loss? You live into the light. Step by step, kiss by kiss, you live into the light.

“I love you, Jess,” she said quietly. “Goodbye.”

The little flame flickered merrily away in the back row, and in her hand, just enough to light each step of the way into Ronan’s arms.

People were filling the church, and Thea glanced at her iPhone. Five-thirty, so people were arriving early for good seats for the six o’clock mass.

Ronan went off duty at six.

She swiped at her tear-streaked cheeks with her gloved hand, took a deep breath, and then blew out the candle she was holding. The wax began to harden in the cold air as she hurried along Eighty-Fourth Street to Madison. Three weeks earlier she’d crossed these same streets dressed as Santa’s sexy helper, using every tool at her disposal to feel nothing at all. Now, in this moment, everything was different.

The wax had dried in runnels along the taper. She slipped the candle into her pocket.

Then she broke into a run.

* * *

The firehouse was quiet on Christmas Eve, but it wouldn’t stay that way for long. Candles, grease fires, flaming desserts and combustible holiday spirits combined to make a busy work day for firefighters. But Ronan’s shift ended when the lieutenant he’d subbed for slumped into the desk chair in the duty office.

“Jesus, I’m full,” his replacement said as he rubbed his belly. “My mother-in-law made extra pies for us. They’re upstairs in the kitchen. Go get a piece, then get out of here.”

“Thanks,” Ronan said, but he didn’t feel much like eating. He’d have to find his appetite before tomorrow, when he caught the train to Long Island for his family holiday or his mother would start fussing. “Merry Christmas.”

He pulled on his coat, this time not bothering to search for his scarf, tugged gloves over his hands, wished everyone on duty a Merry Christmas, and headed out into the night. Wreaths and pine boughs draped the firehouse’s red doors, and the flag hanging alongside the big double doors hung limp without a breeze. He paused by the oak frame housing the pictures of the firefighters lost on 9/11, his gaze lingering on Uncle Lance’s smiling face. His uncle wore the same smile when he met Ronan at Penn Station. A quick hug, a ruffle of hair even when he outgrew his uncle, then the same sentence, every year.

Let’s go get a tree, boyo.

The ones you’d loved and lost never really left. You said goodbye, kept on living, but their words, their voices drifted in your soul like the scent of peppermint after a mocha, or the way pine lingered after you took down the tree. The brickwork and photographs blurred in front of his eyes. Blinking, he shoved his hands in his pockets and looked around. It was a good night to go buy a Christmas tree. Not too cold. Not too windy. A few snowflakes drifted from the sky, making the cityscape almost picturesque. He’d done this before, bought and decorated the tree by himself. He’d do it again.

He shoved his hands in his pockets and set off toward Lex. Each year he bought his tree from a family who grew Christmas trees in Nova Scotia, and came down to the city for three weeks a year to live in a van and sell Fraser firs and blue spruces to Manhattanites. They rented a little courtyard in an apartment building off Lexington, and they wouldn’t close up until late tonight. You just never know when someone’s going to appear and want a Christmas tree.

Waiting in the darkness between streetlights, sheltered by one of the dormant deciduous trees optimistically planted along the street, stood a woman in jeans, boots, a dark coat. A black watch cap covered her bent head and blond hair spilled over her shoulders as she looked down at a single taper candle, the flame flickering in the darkness. As he drew near his heart did this funny, odd thing, a kind of hitch-thump in his chest and his brain lit up, but he shook it off. The odds of Thea waiting for him on Christmas Eve, carrying a candle, were less than zero. Then the woman raised her face from the candle and looked him straight in the eye.

Thea.

His steps slowed involuntarily until he was standing in front of her. Her gaze searched his face as the silence stretched between them. “Hi,” she said finally.

“Is that a candle?” he asked in disbelief.

She nodded. He pulled off a glove and held his palm over the flame. Heat lifted into his cupped hand.

“It’s real,” she said calmly. “I’m here.”

“My brain says you are,” he said. “My heart...not so much.”

Keeping the candle carefully upright between them, she went on tiptoes, put her hand on his chest, and kissed him, just a light brush of lips across his that sent a bolt of electricity straight to his heart. His heart lifted and thudded hard against his sternum as it shot from regular rhythm to express train speed in seconds.

Ka-thunk-a-thunk. Ka-thunk-a-thunk. Ka-thunk-a-thunk.

Definitely here.

He lifted his head and looked into her eyes. She’d been crying, but no impenetrable black walls hung cold and dark between them. Instead, Thea was alight, blazing from the inside out, her face radiant through the tracks of her tears. She was here, meeting his gaze, not looking away.

“I thought you didn’t like candles,” he said cautiously.

A little smile curved the corners of her mouth. “I didn’t. But they hold back the darkness,” she said. “I don’t want to live in darkness anymore.”

“Yeah,” he said, ridiculously. He shoved his hands in his pockets and looked around, then back at her face. “Okay. That’s good. Glad to hear it.”

His tongue-tied response made her smile. “If the offer’s still open, I’d like to help you decorate your tree.”

The hope shining in her eyes tightened his throat. Later he would find out what happened, but tonight...tonight he would just be with Thea. “It’s still open,” he said.

She drew in a shuddering breath. “I’m glad.”

His hands still in his pockets, he offered her his elbow. She blew out the candle and dropped it into a Dean and Deluca bag, then picked up the bag with one hand and slid the other through his offered arm. They walked through the gathering snowflakes across Lex to the tree lot. The selection was pretty picked over, but they found a nice Fraser fir at the back of the tiny lot. Ronan stood it upright and gave it a little shake. A couple of needles drifted to the pavers, so it wasn’t too dry.

“What do you think?”

Thea eyed it judiciously, then inhaled. “Smells like Christmas,” she said. “Is it too tall for the ceilings?”

The bleary-eyed attendant, bundled into a hooded sweatshirt and a down vest to battle the cold and hunched over an ereader, brandished a hand saw. “Not a problem,” he said.

“We’ll take it,” Ronan said.

After sawing four inches off the butt, Ronan paid the man and hefted the bottom of the tree. Thea reached through the needles at the top and got a good grip.

“What’s in the bag?” Ronan asked over his shoulder as they set off up Lex, heading for home.

“Just a few things I hoped we’d need,” she said as they crossed Park, the tree bouncing gently between them. White lights wrapped around the bare trunks and limbs in the planters glowed all the way down the avenue. “Last week I saw someone get on the bus with a tree. It wasn’t a big tree and they’d covered it with a trash bag, but she was on the crosstown bus, with a Christmas tree.”

He smiled. “What did the driver say to that?”

“He made her pay twice. Said since the tree took up as much space as a person, it should pay the regular fare.”

“Welcome to Christmas in New York,” he said.

When they got to his building, Rick was standing outside, smoking a cigarette. He tucked it away and opened the door for them. “Merry Christmas,” he said.

Ronan returned the greeting, but Thea just smiled at him. They got the tree into the elevator, but left it in the hallway while he took the stand and the lights down from the top shelf in the hall closet. He wrestled the tree into the living room, then into the stand while Thea shed her coat and unpacked her sack from Dean and Deluca. She paused long enough to hold the tree straight while he tightened the screws and added a quart of water to the stand. When he finished she carried steaming mugs of hot cocoa into the living room.

The scent rising with the steam made him smile. “Peppermint,” he said.

She smiled back at him, her face lit by the light in the kitchen and that glow that came from within. “I thought it was time to start a new tradition,” she said.

He studied her face. “You’re sure you’re okay,” he said.

“I’m okay,” she said.

Okay was all he needed for now. They worked together in silence, pausing for sips of peppermint cocoa between testing and winding a dozen strands of lights around the tree. When they finished with the light strands, every inch of the tree had a tiny white bulb glowing in the darkness of his living room. “There’s not much space for ornaments,” she commented.

“We never did ornaments,” Ronan admitted. “Uncle Lance said the lights were enough.”

She studied the tree judiciously, then set her empty mug on the glass end table. “Trees don’t need ornaments,” she said, and went back into the kitchen to return with a brown and white box wrapped up in white ribbon. “But they do need presents under them,” she said, and knelt to set the box on the red flannel tree skirt.