Breath on Embers (6 page)

“You’re making cookies? Christmas cookies? That’s awesome! Good thing I locked myself in the pantry, not in the bathroom. We have Berenstain Bears and
Car and Driver
in the bathroom, not cookbooks.” She heard Erin shifting things, then books opening. “Okay. Got a pen? Ten tablespoons of butter, that’s a stick and a quarter, softened. You should get the butter out now if you haven’t already.” Erin listed the rest of the ingredients, then said, “Now. Grammie always substituted cornstarch for some of the flour. That’s what makes it so light and fluffy. Cornstarch doesn’t develop gluten. Do you have cornstarch? If you want that Grammie flavor, you need cornstarch.”

Her older sister had taken to watching cooking shows to combat the tedium of mothering young children. Thea jotted down the basics. “I don’t have cornstarch or powdered sugar, but I can run to the store if this job ever finishes.”

“I heard you were getting a storm.”

“Yeah, but short of a strike or a hurricane, the subways keep running. Anyway, it’s just across the street.”

“If you lose power, be careful with candles. Candles and Christmas trees are two common causes of home fires.”

“Well, that won’t be a problem,” she said, striving to keep her tone light. “I don’t have either in my apartment. Just a big flashlight.”

A pause. “You don’t have a Christmas tree up?”

“Nope.”

“Why are you making cookies?”

“Cooper Bensonhurst sponsors a soup kitchen with three other investment banks, and once a month our employees staff it. This month we’re bringing gifts for the people who come, and Christmas cookies as the dessert.”

“That’s nice,” Erin said. “A nice thing to do. You and Jesse used to sponsor a family at the holidays, didn’t you?”

A hard, thick lump formed at the back of her throat. “We did,” she said. “We were blessed.”

Silence on her sister’s end of the line, broken by her nephew’s shrill voice.
“Go! Go! Go! Higher! No! Higher!”
Then a scream, followed by the thump of a little body and what sounded like a million shards of glass crashing to the floor.
“Man down! Man down!”

“What are they playing?” Thea asked, alarmed. Her niece’s hysterical giggles reassured her. Giggles meant no blood.

“Something involving mechanical hamsters and the Lego launch pad set. I think the hamsters are going into space to bring back rainbows for the princess, but they’ve got the hamster special ops assault gear on, so maybe they’re invading the Death Star. I’m pregnant.”

A small sound escaped her, involuntary, gut-deep. She hoped her sister couldn’t hear it over her nephew’s death throes. “Oh, Erin,” she said. “Oh, sweetie. I’m so happy for you.”

“We’ve been trying so long,” Erin said. Thea could hear the tears in her sister’s voice. “Ever since Kaylie was just a few months old. I’d stopped paying attention, and I’m tired all the time as it is, so I didn’t think anything about it. Jamie was the one who noticed my boobs are bigger.”

Thea laughed even as she wiped away tears of her own. “Typical man. How far along?”

“Twelve weeks. I wanted to wait until thirteen to tell people. I’m thirty-four, and you just never know.”

“Still young,” Thea protested. “You’re young and healthy. It will be fine.”

“I didn’t think it was going to happen. I felt greedy, because we were so lucky. We have two happy, healthy kids when so many women...”

Thea swiped her hand under her nose, and fought to keep her voice steady. Two years ago, she’d been one of those women, trying to start a family. “You want another baby and you have love and attention to give,” she said firmly. “That’s not greedy. That’s generous.”

Her sister must be in the full grips of pregnancy hormones because her words came between sobs. “I wanted to tell everyone at Christmas, but you’re not coming home. Who’s going to be my backup coach? You’re my sister. You’re supposed to be my backup coach.”

“When are you due?” Thea asked desperately. She never knew how to handle this kind of thing. “I can take time off. I’ve got vacation time. I can be there.”

The practical questions settled her sister down. “You’re just like Jamie,” Erin said with a shaky laugh. “So logical. I’m all weepy and emotional, and you’re dealing with vacation schedules and plane fares.”

Because Erin was pregnant, new life growing inside her, and Thea wasn’t. She took a deep breath. “So, when
are
you due?”

“Late June or early July. We’ll know more when we get the ultrasound done.”

“I’ll be there. I promise,” Thea said, and checked the job. It had finished. She kicked off the next one. “I have to go buy powdered sugar and cornstarch.”

“I have to go throw up,” her sister said. “It’s not morning sickness this time around. It’s all-day nausea. Bye, honey.”

“You take care of yourself,” Thea said, but it was to a
call ended
screen on her phone. She set the phone down on the counter and looked around her living room. She hadn’t bothered to turn on any lights but the ones in the kitchen, and the pile of wrapped presents stacked by her door looked lonely and forlorn. Presents were meant to be kept under a tree. Every year newscasters warned people to keep presents out of sight, in case burglars cased the house and saw tempting gifts. Her mother openly scorned that worry and started putting presents under the tree the moment the tree went up.

But these presents weren’t hers. They were for homeless people, and families too broke to afford gifts. The committee leaders had found a reluctant volunteer to dress up as Santa and hand out the gifts to the kids while other people distributed vouchers for a Christmas meal to the adults. All she had to do was collect them and get them to the soup kitchen on the twenty-third. Ronan was handling that for her. He’d sent her a text telling her to leave the presents with her doorman that day, and he’d make sure they got to the church basement on time.

A memory bloomed, of her brother-in-law’s possessive hands on her sister’s belly. She quivered a little as another memory followed, of Ronan’s erection, bare and slick, sliding into her in the dressing room at Idylle.

Another image of Ronan’s mouth on her swollen breasts and belly. Fantasy. Not memory. Too potent to hold.

She shoved it aside, stamped into her boots and pulled on her down coat, then took the elevator to the lobby. The snow blasting by the big glass doors seemed sharp enough to scour skin. Thea turned her head against the wind and crossed the street to the tiny grocery store. Inside, Manhattanites crammed the narrow aisles, grumpily banging tiny shopping carts into each other. The baking section was pretty picked over, but Thea grabbed the last bag of powdered sugar and the only box of cornstarch. God only know how old it was. New Yorkers didn’t use their ovens to bake. They used them for storage.

As she waited in the checkout line she surreptitiously scanned the other shoppers’ faces. At this store she’d literally run her cart into one pushed by a national news anchor shopping with her two daughters, and twice seen a colleague who lived in the neighborhood, but this trip she saw no one she knew. Her sister didn’t understand how empty Manhattan really was, how possible it was to remain completely alone while surrounded by people. In a place like this she didn’t even need the earbuds. The city’s noise and clamor drowned out all thought, all feeling.

The checkout woman wordlessly scanned her two items while Thea swiped her debit card. “I’ll just take them,” Thea said to head off the automatic double-bagging. She carried the items through the storm, into her building. Back in her apartment she shucked off boots and coat while the butter softened in the microwave, then turned on her iPod, tucked the earbuds into her ears and set about mixing up the recipe. Butter and sugar, flour and cornstarch, all measurements doubled to make a bigger batch. The dough formed into a ball as the hand mixer’s beaters whirred and knocked against the sides of the bowl. Thea lightly floured the granite counter, then scooped up the ball of dough and set it on the floured surface. She collected the stray bits of dough and tamped them into the ball as she flattened the dough to an even thickness. When she finished, it hit her.

No cookie cutters.

Do what others say/I’m here, standing hollow/Falling away from me/Falling away from me

When she moved to Manhattan she’d left most of her old life behind, bringing only the basics for furniture—her bed, sofa, coffee table, a tall, slender bookshelf. Plates and glasses, minimal cookware. She bought a small table with two chairs at the IKEA in New Jersey on the way into the city. The rest of her life with Jesse she’d boxed up and stored in her mother-in-law’s basement. Somewhere in those boxes was the set of Christmas cookie cutters given to them as a wedding present from one of the scores of relatives.

She rubbed her forehead with the back of her hand. The temptation to simply sweep the dough into the trash and turn on a marathon of
Storage Wars
swept through her, but she was invested in this now. Her gaze flicked to the few Christmas cards on her counter, one smiling family enclosed in a border of holly and ivy, and from there to her San Francisco coffee mug holding scissors, pens, a ruler and a silver handle of an X-Acto knife.

As if the screaming noise in her head allowed creativity to surface, a possibility bloomed in her brain. She unrolled a length of waxed paper, then transferred the dough onto it. This time, using rolling pin, she smoothed the surface of the dough, then took up the X-Acto knife and delicately trailed the blade over the dough. She stayed close to the edge until she got the hang of the jagged leaf patterns. Head bobbing to the beat, she carved the leaf edges and cut away the excess, then inscribed the veins and stems to give individual leaves texture, and pressed the rounded X-Acto handle into the dough for the berries.

There. It wouldn’t win any
Top Chef
awards but the design was pretty, neatly executed. Absently she licked a morsel of dough from the inside of her index finger. Unable to detect any taste at all, she tugged her earbuds from her ears and did it again. This time something registered. It tasted almost inert, a hint of sweet and butterfat eventually spreading across her tongue to the taste buds that discerned sweet from salty, sour, or bitter. When did the dough become a cookie? Despite dire warnings against salmonella poisoning from eating raw eggs, chocolate chip cookie dough was a favorite treat, the chips still crunchy, the sugar gritty against teeth. White sugar and chocolate chips made it sweet on its own, but shortbread held only butter, flour and powdered sugar, and it wasn’t sweet.

She transferred the waxed paper to a cookie sheet and slid it into the oven. After washing her hands she crossed the hall to her neighbor’s apartment. The family in residence had two kids slightly older than Erin’s; a little surprised by the interruption, they happily gave her a couple of dollops of red and green frosting. Back in her apartment she put her earbuds back in and alternated between checking the job’s progress and checking the shortbread. She’d rolled it pretty thin so it would burn quickly if not carefully monitored. The bottom was a golden brown, the top just barely beginning to darken when she pulled the tray from the oven. The aroma filled her nostrils, and without warning tears spilled down her cheeks.

The apartment smelled like Grammie’s kitchen. She’d died the year before Jesse, and they’d agreed they’d bake her cookies in her memory each year. But Jesse died too early in the holiday season to bake Christmas cookies, and while his mother insisted on a big baking party “for the grandkids,” Thea stayed home, in their darkened house.

The tears welled up and trickled down her face while she slid the waxed paper onto the counter to cool enough to frost, but it was as if her eyes were completely detached from the rest of her body. She breathed normally, no sighs or sobs or gasps, but the tears kept coming, so she found a spot in the living room where she couldn’t see the shortbread or the stacked presents and sat on the floor to wait out the tears.

Time passed. How much, she wasn’t sure, but the scent faded as the cookie cooled. The storm outside continued unabated as she got to her feet and went about dotting the holly berry imprints with a dab of red frosting, tracing the stems of the ivy with just enough green to give the whole thing a hint of color and texture. And all the while, tears ran down her cheeks. She wiped them away with her sleeve, working steadily. When she finished she laid another sheet of waxed paper over the decorated top, then carefully placed the whole thing in a long, flat Tupperware storage container and sealed it for the trip to the church.

She pulled her earbuds out to wash her hands and face. Sirens rose and fell in the swirling snow, filtered through her windows and sank into her empty, aching head. Ronan. His parting words at Idylle surfaced through the dark void.

You keep trying to drown this out. I’ll keep doing my thing, but I’m not going to help you go under.

So determined. But, she thought as she looked at her pale face in the mirror, the only color her red-rimmed eyes, she was barely hanging on at the end of each day. How on earth could she possibly get involved with a man like Ronan? He’d been through so much, and stood on the opposite shore with grace and courage and resolve. He deserved more than a woman who couldn’t handle making a simple shortbread recipe without losing it entirely.

Never in a million years had she thought he’d get attached to her. On St. Patrick’s Day she saw a pack of men in uniform, drinking, prowling, and she’d taken her therapist’s advice and met someone new. Her therapist had in mind coffee or maybe a lunch date, but Thea couldn’t imagine sitting across a table from a man, searching for small talk in the void. She could, however, imagine a far more primitive need: sex. Small talk emerged from the front of the brain. Sex came from the reptile brain, the stem that governed the most basic functions of life. Food. Fight. Fuck. That’s all she had in her, all she wanted from Ronan. All she had to give.

It was all she’d ever have to give.

And it wasn’t fair to him. This had to end, before he got hurt again. Tomorrow, after he’d delivered the presents to the soup kitchen, she would end this.