The Unlikely Romance of Kate Bjorkman (18 page)

I nodded listlessly.

“See you tonight,” she said, pulling on her gloves. Our eyes avoided each other. “I’m going, Nels,” she called to my dad.

“See ya tonight, babes,” he called back.

Her lips turned up at the corners. Fleur was right. They were still in love. I couldn’t stay in love for a week. Depressing.

It took a couple of hours to clear away the tree and vacuum up the needles. I took down the one on the piano too, took down the wreath from the dining room table; the holly and the mistletoe, all dried and curled, fell in broken scraps onto the floor. I allowed time, like a ribbon, to curve back on itself to Christmas Eve and saw Richard’s face close to mine. He had used my name for the first time. “Merry Christmas, Kate,” he had said. He had kissed me lightly on the lips, not once but twice. Had that been real? Had Christmas morning on the ice been real? I filtered back through the whole week, the whole precious week. And then Ashley. I tried to press
down the gnawing emotion that hovered and coiled in my stomach. What was real? What was true?

When I was finished, I went to sit in Dad’s study and listen to
Faustus
, an opera in which the hero gets slaughtered by devils in the end. Perfect.

That’s when I saw Richard out the window that faced the back. I stood in front of it. “What is he doing?” I asked.

My dad, hunched over his computer, looked up at me and then out the window at Richard, who was shoveling snow on a mound already five feet high and several feet long.

“I’m not sure,” Dad mused, “but I think he’s building himself a snow cave.”

I stared. Richard shoveled with an intense, steady rhythm, the hood of his parka thrown back, his breath a floating cloud of steam in front of his face. He never looked up.

“A snow cave.” I was trying to recall.

“He and Bjorn made them when they were Scouts—remember?”

I didn’t.

“They’re supposed to keep you from freezing to death when you’re caught in below-freezing temperatures.”

“You mean he’s going to
live
out there?” I looked at my father.

He shrugged. “Don’t know, but it sure looks like it.”

“Well,” I said, collecting myself. “Maybe he’ll freeze to death.”

Dad gazed out at Richard. “I think that may be a real
possibility,” he muttered, turning back to his computer. “I wouldn’t spend five minutes in one of those things.”

It irritated me that Richard was visible from all the south windows of the house, that I couldn’t escape his presence. “Can’t we make him get off our property?” I asked Dad.

He looked at me wearily. “Technically, he’s not on our property. He’s on the common, but”—he looked over his reading glasses at me—“even if he were, Kate, I wouldn’t bother. I’m too old for these confrontations.”

“Suit yourself,” I said. I left to find a place to sit on the north side of the house. I worked on the puzzle, which was nearly done except for a couple of dozen stubborn pieces. It was hard to concentrate. I went upstairs and stood in my bedroom waiting for inspiration. None came. I crossed the hall to Bjorn’s room and stood back from the window. Richard was scooping out the center of the snow cave, using the shovel, sometimes his hands, sometimes his feet, kicking aside clods of snow. Two squirrels scurried along a branch over his head, paused to watch him, and then scrambled up the trunk of the tree. I moved closer to the window, my warm breath forming icy patterns on the pane. I tried to wipe them away with my fingers, and when I looked down again, Richard stood leaning on the shovel, looking at me, his chest heaving from exertion. My hand was still on the glass. Across the shadowed snow of the backyard, our eyes held. Nobody smiled. It seemed like hours. Then he returned to his shoveling.

I went to the Video Mart and checked out three movies that I hoped would relieve me of the utter sense
of loss I felt. The first one, which I watched before dinner, was a Stephen King horror movie in which a three-year-old returns from the dead to kill his mother and everyone else in sight. It had my complete attention, believe me.

After that I ate dinner with my parents, Mother chatting brightly about a new client she had from White Bear Lake, a Mrs. Duvander, who had one leg shorter than the other. Outside, it was already dark. When I carried my dishes to the sink, I stole a glance across the backyard. An impoverished light glowed dimly from the front of the snow cave. Some kind of lantern, I supposed. I watched the news with my parents, interested mostly in the weather report. Eighteen degrees below zero. That was the night’s forecast. None of us looked at each other.

I watched another horror movie, about a man who ate his victims after murdering them, biting their faces off in some cases. “I’m having an old friend for dinner” was the last line of the movie. Finally I watched a vampire movie in which young, nubile things with white boobs bursting from lacy lingerie had the blood sucked from their necks by a really evil-looking vampire. The young nubile things all reminded me of Ashley. I enjoyed it when they died, when their eyes rolled back into their heads and they sighed their last breaths. “Die, slut, die!” I said aloud just as my mother passed by.

Her eyebrows arched.

“Not you,” I said. “Her,” and pointed to the brunette victim in the throes of a death rattle.

Without comment my mother passed into the study.

We watched the news again at ten. It was now twelve below zero but would get lower. After the news Bjorn and Trish called from Nebraska. I said hi to them from the extension. They wanted to know about Richard. Dad told them he was in the snow cave out in back. “The temperature is supposed to stay just above thirty-two degrees in those things, isn’t it?” he asked.

Bjorn’s voice sounded annoyed. “That’s the theory. I don’t personally know anyone who’s tested one, do you?”

“Actually”—Dad cleared his throat—“no.”

I clicked the extension down and wished I had another horror movie to watch.

In bed, I couldn’t sleep. I kept thinking of this story called “The Dead,” by James Joyce, that Midgely had us read. In it the wife tells her husband of a young lover of hers, who years earlier had stood in front of her house, looking up at her window while it snowed. Had he died of exposure? Had he frozen to death? I couldn’t remember. I only remembered that the falling snow was a heavy-duty symbol in that story. Well, I thought, pulling the quilt over my head, dramatic things like that only happen in fiction. I didn’t know anyone who had frozen to death ever.

Except the Hutchinses. Wendy Hutchins had been a girl in my class in fifth grade and had let me borrow her colored pencils once when we were coloring the different countries of South America and I had left my pencils at home. She and her family had pulled to the side of the highway in a blizzard and they had all frozen to death.
Her mother, her father, her baby brother, and her grandmother. It had been all over the TV.

But I didn’t know anyone else. Yet.

After tossing and turning for who knows how long, I got up and went into Bjorn’s room across the hall and gazed out the window. The lantern was out. The snow cave, a deep purple mound, was barely visible with the trees of the common behind it. I curled up in a fetal position on Bjorn’s bed, under the quilt that lay at the foot, and tried to concentrate on cannibal killers.

When I awoke, late, I knew I could not stay in my house as long as Richard lived in a snow cave out in my backyard, and I decided to spend the rest of the Christmas holiday at Aunt Eve’s. Without looking out the window, I went to the bathroom and then hurried downstairs in my flannel nightgown. I’d announce my plans to my parents and leave.

They both stood by the sink, their backs to me, their faces leaning toward the window. I thought I heard Dad chuckle. I moved across the room next to Mother and looked out to the snow cave. Richard, alive, stood in full winter gear, holding a large sign with red printing on it. I squinted to focus my eyes on the words:
WILL WORK FOR FOOD
.

Something hard and tight in my chest dissolved. “Richard,” I whispered aloud. “He’s an idiot.” A warm feeling rose in me for the first time in two days, making my chin quiver.

Mother handed me my parka. “Talk,” she said.

I pulled on my fruit boots in the back hall and opened the door. The shock of the cold air pressed the
tears from my eyes. I damped my teeth shut to keep them from chattering.

When Richard saw me, he let the sign fall to the ground. We stood facing each other, he with his hands in his pockets, me with arms folded tightly across my chest. I was shuddering.

“You’re crazy,” I said, my chin wobbling, my nose running.

“I was a fool,” he said, his eyes riveted on mine.

I nodded. “You hurt me,” I said. Saying it aloud made my nose run more.

“I know, and I’m sorry—very sorry.” He looked down at his feet and up again. “I don’t have an excuse. I did it, because at that moment, I wanted to. I wish I hadn’t.”

“I trusted you.” I couldn’t control my stupid chin.

“I’ve never been so sorry about anything in my life.” His voice was strained. “If I could take it back, if I could erase the whole thing, I would.” He took a half-step forward. “Kate?”

I wiped my nose on my mitten.

“Are you ever going to forgive me, Kate?”

I think I nodded. I meant to. I wanted to. I think I nodded and said, “I want to.”

In any case,
The Romance Writer’s Phrase Book
is filled with emotion-laden descriptions of what happened next: I mean there really. was “an undeniable magnetism building” between us. A magnetism neither of us could resist any longer, and we were “swept,” yes, “swept” into each other’s arms. I don’t think that’s overstating it—two dinging steel-belted radial tires in that Minnesota landscape.
Richard kissed my face and said he loved me more than anybody in the whole world, which was exactly what I wanted to hear. He even “swung me in the circle of his arms,” all six feet of me, and get this, “his mouth covered mine hungrily.”

Yes, hungrily. And I, dear romance readers, “drank in the sweetness of his kiss.”

 Revision Notes

Should I just let this romance novel be as I’ve written it? Richard charms me out of my anger and we melt into each other? The end? Should I not tell about lying in bed that same night and realizing that making a snow cave and a sign,
WILL WORK FOR FOOD
, was the same as stepping into a bathtub fully clothed, which in turn was the same as sending a dozen roses? Bribery, Fleur called it. Richard himself had called it that. Grand gestures of apology, all of them—but without discussion, nothing was solved.

Should I tell about those discussions with Richard that still continue? How I now know that he has had two serious girlfriends (Karen Holden and Abby Creer) while I, foolishly, lived in a fantasy world of Richard. One-and-Only. What has hurt me is knowing that I too wanted to be a One-and-Only, and it’s already too late. I’m a nineties kind of girl—only the wrong century.

And should I say anything about listening to his voice, so low and smooth, and thinking
Is this Mr. Radio speaking?
I’ve thought of asking Fleur again what exactly she meant by that nickname, but I’m not sure I really want to hear the answer. Not right now.

I began writing this novel thinking it would be a kick, and it has been, really, but it’s also reminded me how easy romance is and how hard (this will sound corny as hell) building a real relationship is. And then too I’ve found that my biggest
supporters aren’t entirely happy with me. For example, Shannon read the whole novel yesterday and called me on the phone to say that she really liked it, but I could tell she was holding something back, so I said, “But?”

“I wish I were in your novel more.” It came out in a spurt of breath. “You do a lot more things with me than you’ve ever done with Ashley, and I’m hardly in it.”

“But the whole story takes place at Christmas and you weren’t even here—”

“I know, I know, but if I’d been here, you would have been calling me on the phone all the time and I would have been at your house hanging around like I do—”

“I just wrote it like it happened,” I said.

“I know,” she said, “but you’re calling it a novel and that’s fiction. Couldn’t you pretend I was home and write me into it? You know, use your imagination.” Sigh.

My parents weren’t any better. Mother read the novel a few days ago in the living room and said, laying the manuscript in her lap, “Is this the way you think I sound? You make me sound old.”

“I do?” I had only tried to copy the way she talked.

“Except for that section where you have me telling about the fight with your dad—I wish you’d take that out. I come off so foolish.”

“But that’s the way you always tell it!”

“Well,” she said, “I wouldn’t have if I’d known you were recording every word and gesture in your brain.” She had rolled the manuscript into a loaf and was squeezing it.

“The point was to show you in a weak moment, because—”

“If I wanted to be shown in a weak moment, I’d call a press conference and show them the scar from my hysterectomy! And don’t quote me!”