Christmas Under the Stars Read online

  ‘I don’t feel up to . . .’ Her voice trailed off like a candle being blown out and Barbara patted her hand again.

  ‘You just rest, honey. We’ll look after it.’

  Meg didn’t notice her go. Badger had risen to a sitting position, his head perfectly positioned beneath her limp hand, and she automatically stroked his brow, seeing the way his eyes closed gratefully at her continued affection. It was just the two of them now. His spirits had been as low as hers and many times, she had wondered about his night up there in the storm, his distress as he must have dug and dug in the raging winds with only one good paw, the snow hole filling up again faster than he could clear it – until eventually even his hope had died and he was forced to keep watch instead over Mitch’s still-warm body, far below in his snow tomb. Making sure his master was found was all he could offer in the end.

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen.’ Tuck’s voice, as familiar to her ear as Mitch’s, filled the room and a respectful hush descended almost immediately. Tuck was standing on a stool by the massive full-height windows, the spectacular panorama of the Canadian Rockies blushing in the sunset behind his right shoulder. His famously blue eyes were wide and fearful – Lucy had said his behaviour had been verging on the manic and Meg could see for herself that he had lost a lot of weight in just a matter of days – and his blond hair was sticking out at awkward angles just like when he and Mitch would come back from one of their filming-camping trips. But his ready, cocky smile that had won over most of the girls at school before he finally set his sights on Lucy, was nowhere to be seen. Meg couldn’t decide if he looked like a little boy again or an old man.

  ‘I want to thank you all for coming,’ he mumbled, his eyes skipping over the crowd, as though trying to memorize the faces, or recognize them. ‘Mitch would . . . he would have been very proud to know you all came out for him today.’

  Meg watched as Tuck dropped his face down to his shoes for a moment and she tried to understand why he should have lived when Mitch had not.

  He inhaled deeply and looked up again. ‘Most of you here know what he was to me. My best friend in the world.’ He nodded, his voice shaky. ‘He’s pretty much my first memory, actually . . . I remember him standing on our back porch. Red shorts, he was wearing. And he had, uh . . . this Hot Rod toy car that I just wanted so badly but didn’t get for my birthday. And he offered for me to play with it, with him.’ He shrugged. ‘And that was that. Instant, lifelong friendship. We were brothers. Did everything together. Fished, learned to swim, learned to ski, to skate, play football . . . Of course, he was better at it all than me too – except poker. He couldn’t lie as well as me, but that was all I had on him, the only thing.’ He shook his head. ‘And I never minded, no, I didn’t. I was so proud of him. I was just so proud to call him my frien—’ His voice rose up, like a corner being ripped off a sheet of paper, and he fell silent.

  Everyone waited, heads cocked at sympathetic angles, brows furrowed with sadness and concern.

  ‘We were so close, I think we both wondered if it could last, especially when we met our girls, Lucy and Meg. Most friendships can’t maintain that balance when there’s another relationship competing for your attention, but . . .’ He looked out across the crowd. ‘It wasn’t like that for us. We just all blended. We became a family.’

  Meg stared at her hands in her lap.

  He swallowed, his bottom lip trembling from the effort of remaining stoic. His stop-start delivery reminded Meg of a heavyweight boxing match, just a few parries, one or two touches, and then heavy-breathing silence as the fighters leaned on each other, trying to get their breath back.

  ‘And as much as Mitch was . . . like, this golden guy, Meg was the best thing that ever happened to him. She made him even better than before. He was so happy – you could just see it in him when they were together.’ He looked over at her – broken, sorry – but she looked away, refusing to give him the forgiveness she knew, suddenly, that he wanted from her. It was a moment before he looked back over the sea of faces, another few moments before he could remember his place in the speech.

  ‘He’d always had this . . . kind of edge, a reckless streak that could be sorta scary sometimes – like, things that should scare you, didn’t scare him.’ Tuck looked over at her again and she wondered what he saw of her there – pale and immobile in the chair, too grief-stricken even to stand. ‘But when Meg came along, she smoothed the worst of that out of him. Don’t get me wrong, he was still a freak in what he could do . . . but for the first time, she gave him someone to care about more than he cared about himself.’ He gave a weak, lopsided smile. ‘And Badger too. Christ, I mustn’t forget him . . . Mitch adored that dog. If anyone took my place in his life, it was the damned dog.’

  A spatter of laughter speckled the crowd, before everyone sifted into silence again.

  ‘But now he’s gone. Mitch has left us. He wasn’t scared that night and he should’ve been. He wasn’t selfish either and he should’ve been.’ Tuck’s voice cracked and he dropped his head, drawing in a shaky breath, perilously close to losing his composure.

  Meg stared hard at him now. Was he going to say it, tell them all? ‘It was my fault.’

  ‘He put other people first and he died for it – there is more honour in his death than there will be in my entire life. He was a giant among men and nothing will ever be the same again – not our family, not this town. We are diminished by his absence. We’ve lost the brightest star in our sky.’ Tuck looked out at the faces staring back at him, his own eyes shining with tears. ‘So it’s up to us all, now, to find a way to carry on without him, to re-form our lives without him at the heart . . . And I guess we will, somehow. Life will go back to normal, perhaps sooner than some of us –’ he looked straight at Meg, one tear sliding down his cheek, her own cheeks bone dry – ‘sooner than some of us are ready for it to. But he would want that for us, I know he would . . . so we’ll have to try.’

  He reached into his inner jacket pocket and pulled from it a folded sheet of lined paper, his childish writing distinctive to Meg’s eyes even glimpsed through the back. ‘I’d like to finish by reading this to you.’

  He took a deep breath and Meg felt her heart rate quicken as he began reading the famous Auden poem ‘Stop All the Clocks’, which most people had learnt from the film Four Weddings and a Funeral. The irony wasn’t lost on her that a film of her life would be called No Wedding and a Funeral.

  Someone sniffed. Others dabbed handkerchiefs to their eyes.

  Meg stared back into the fire, feeling alone in the crowd, betrayed by her own desiccated grief and wondering when she would cry, when those first tears would come. Ever since she’d seen his body being flown across the sky, wrapped up in that red plastic stretcher, she’d felt mummified too.

  Suddenly she was up on her feet and pushing against the door that led onto the deck outside. She needed the cold air to slap her, the punch of shock to bring her back to her full senses, to stop her from standing in there and screaming to them, ‘No! He was my North! My South!’

  The evening chill was at its finest and she began to shiver almost immediately as she did what everybody did upon walking out there: looked up at the crest of mountains crowding around and bringing the horizon to just a few kilometres’ distance, like a belt that cinched in the Earth. The sky was the colour of a blood orange, casting a pink tint onto the snow below, the skiers’ tracks above and through the pine trees indiscernible from here. It would have been a beautiful day for wedding photographs, a beautiful day to film his tracks in the snow, a perfect day to have set off on the rest of their lives . . . it almost made her head spin to think of how many better ways today could have been than this version.

  ‘Hey.’

  She twisted back to see Ronnie closing the door quietly behind her, a padded jacket in her hand. ‘You OK?’ she asked, wrapping the coat around Meg’s shoulders. Meg gripped it gratefully and nodded, wondering if her sister could really comprehend the scale of her loss
. She’d never really done the boyfriend thing, she hadn’t yet lost her heart to anything other than her career – she’d known she wanted to be a doctor from the age of eight – and deep down, Meg knew her sister pitied her life choices, silently disapproving of her choice to forgo a university education for a cabin in the woods with her high-school boyfriend.

  It hadn’t really mattered back then, back when everything was normal. They had each made their choices and respected the other’s but now as Meg’s entire world lay in fragments at her feet, she felt a gulf separating her from her sister, for whom grief was a part of her day job. These words – ‘I’m sorry for your loss,’ ‘How are you doing today?’ – she repeated on a daily basis, the features on her face readily assembled to convey compassion and empathy before she walked out the door to repeat them to the next patient.

  Meg looked back into the fire. Her sister’s physical resemblance to her was sometimes unnerving – growing up, when their height differences had evened out, some people had thought they were twins. There was only a year and a half between them, after all, and they both shared the same slim build and long, thick, dark hair. The biggest and most obvious difference had been their eyes – Meg’s were hazel-green, Ronnie’s dark and rich and round, like chocolate buttons, emphasized by heavy black ‘nerd’ glasses that she somehow made look cool – and Meg couldn’t bear to see this new vital departure between them: one happy, one sad; one successful, one broken.

  ‘Can I get you anything? Another drink?’ Ronnie asked, reaching for her hand, her fingers accidentally brushing against Meg’s engagement ring and startling, as though aware of the wedding ring that hadn’t quite made it.

  Meg shook her head and turned to look back in on the wake through the picture window. Tuck had finished his speech now and everyone was clustered in groups again, heads shaking sadly as people no doubt reminisced on Mitch’s short life. She saw his father standing at the other end of the room by the opposite fireplace, the skin on his face seeming to droop and fall off him. They had celebrated his sixtieth only three weeks before, Mitch remarking at the time that he hoped he aged as well as his father who could have easily passed for an early-fifty-something, with not a hint of grey in his dark hair – but he had aged significantly in that period. He had a glass of whiskey in one hand and was ostensibly listening as someone spoke to him, but Meg knew from that distant look in his eyes that he was as absent from the proceedings as she was. This wasn’t how it was supposed to have gone. It was against the natural order of things. Wrong.

  She turned away again and looked up at Mount Norquay, the local ski mountain, casting the longest, deepest shadow over the town. The lifts had stopped for the night now but it was almost perverse to think of all the people who’d been up there today, enjoying the views and seeking their thrills, sunbathing at lunch and making the most of this clement weather, blissfully unaware of the hole that had been blown in the centre of this town as surely as if an asteroid had hit Banff Avenue, the main street. They would have skied and boarded, drunk beer and hot chocolate and then shopped and eaten, and all the people serving them, looking after them – they would have been on autopilot, doing their jobs, feeling like frauds as they told their customers to ‘have a nice day’, knowing exactly how thin was the thread between thrill and terror, beauty and despair. This landscape was savage and merciless, relentless and unpredictable. You had a nice day if it let you. Meg didn’t think she’d ever get on a snowboard or pair of skis again. She’d spent her late teenage years and early twenties out on the slopes every chance she got, sitting beside Lucy with a packed lunch by the half-pipe and watching as Mitch and Tuck worked on their jumps and tricks. It hadn’t been so much a sport as a lifestyle, and then latterly a business – but there was no space in her head for that right now.

  She caught sight of a bald eagle wheeling on a thermal high above the black run, knowing they liked to build their eyries in the crags there; she watched it glide, high and free, the black rooks in the sky’s lower echelons taking care to keep their distance. That was how she felt – alone and unanchored. People had been coming up and hesitantly offering their condolences all day, anxious lest they upset her fragile balance, wary of her dry-eyed grief. They didn’t recognize that the requisite for polite smiles and some sort of feedback from her was exhausting. They didn’t understand that she barely heard their words or felt their sympathy; they didn’t realize that just to breathe, to blink, was as much as she could manage, that all she could see through her open eyes were imagined images of Mitch twirling her in her white dress, of him whisking her upstairs to the bridal suite, in a hurry to officially make her his wife.

  The bedroom in Lucy and Tuck’s bungalow had become her tomb; for the first three days after Mitch’s death, she hadn’t risen from bed at all, sleeping hard and constantly as though she could double-bluff death with her own unconsciousness. But it had disorientated her, waking at odd hours and finding herself in the strange, too-big bed. More than that, the moment after waking – when she remembered and the desolation rushed at her like baying wolves – was somehow worse than the numbing endurance that came from living and breathing through these first days.

  ‘Well, you’ve got through today,’ Ronnie said, watching the eagle too. ‘They say that’s the hardest part done.’

  Was it? Was it really? She glanced across at her sister, wondering if she’d even heard the tactlessness in her voice. ‘Yes . . . Just the small matter of the rest of my life to get through now,’ Meg said quietly.

  Ronnie looked pained. ‘Meg, I didn’t mean—’

  ‘I know.’ She sighed, looking away and feeling bad, and then instantly feeling angry that she now felt guilty on top of everything else. She and her sister didn’t know how to communicate with each other any more. Ever since their mother’s death, they had been like stars in the sky, pulled towards other planets and drifting out of each other’s orbits, so that Meg wasn’t sure she’d be able to call to her sister, even if she wanted to.

  They fell quiet.

  ‘Are you going to stay down here again tonight?’ Ronnie asked, stuffing her hands deep into the pockets of her own coat. The clear sky meant the temperatures were icy.

  Meg shrugged. ‘I expect so. I seem to have very little say in the matter.’ She hadn’t returned to the cabin since Patterson and Hughes had brought her back to town to officially identify the body; no one would let her go and she didn’t have the energy to fight them. She didn’t know Patterson had told Barbara and Lucy and Tuck that she needed watching, that his years in the field meant he could read from a person’s first response exactly how their grief would play out over the ensuing weeks. Those who wept and cried and shook their heads and pleaded – they coped, burning through the grief like a flame up paraffin rope. But those like Meg who became silent and calm, outwardly rational but emotionally unreachable – they were the ones to worry about; they’d seem reasonably fine, he warned, but that didn’t mean there wasn’t a time bomb ticking away inside them, it didn’t mean the fuse wasn’t lit.

  ‘It’s just because they’re worried about you. We all are.’

  ‘I’d feel better at home – it would make me feel closer to him.’

  ‘Or it might make you feel worse.’ Ronnie tilted her head, watching her. ‘And you wouldn’t eat or look after yourself. There’d be no one to keep an eye on you.’

  ‘I don’t need—’

  ‘You do, Meg,’ Ronnie said, cutting her off and wrapping an arm around her. ‘We all would in this situation. You’ve just buried your fiancé.’ She stopped short of adding, ‘On your wedding day.’

  Meg squeezed her eyes shut, feeling the weak sun on her face.

  ‘You need time to process it.’

  Meg sighed, turning her face away and denying the truth; Ronnie’s fingers on her shoulder slackened their grip.

  ‘Besides, Badger needs to keep seeing the vet. It was a bad break.’

  Suddenly the hum of conversation inside the reception increa
sed sharply in volume and they both turned to see Lucy stepping out onto the deck, another coat in her hands.

  ‘Hey, I’ve been looking for you. I thought you might want th—’ She smiled. ‘Oh, hi, Veronica.’ Her smile faded, her body language becoming more closed. ‘It was good of you to come.’

  ‘Hi, Lucy,’ Ronnie replied, nodding nervously, her arm dropping off Meg’s shoulder altogether as Lucy leaned in to kiss her cheek. Meg looked away again – Ronnie and Lucy had never been close. Lucy used to moan that Ronnie looked down on them, ‘like she’s superior just because she’s got a degree’; Ronnie would complain that Lucy was too territorial about Meg: ‘How can she be jealous of your sister?’

  It was true that Meg and Lucy’s relationship was intense. They had been friends since Meg’s first week at school when her hair had caught light over a Bunsen burner and the amount of hairspray in it meant she’d not only almost burned off her hair but almost burned down the school as well, earning her kudos from Lucy – no mean feat.

  Lucy had a fearsome reputation as the don’t-mess captain of the ice-hockey team and possessor of a withering sarcasm, and when Meg had started dating Mitch, both Tuck and Lucy had been forced into an uncomfortable foursome. If Lucy enjoyed a certain hard-core notoriety, Tuck was acknowledged as the school heart-throb and it was generally easier to count the girls he hadn’t dated, than those he had; something which became more pointedly awkward the longer he went on seeing Lucy not as a ‘target’ (his phrase for the girls he wanted to date) but as collateral to Meg’s presence, which was in turn collateral to Mitch’s – a sort of necessary evil to endure. To Meg and Mitch, they were a clear match: Lucy was the only girl in school not falling at Tuck’s feet, which had to be a good thing for keeping his ego in check; and Tuck was the only person with a smile sexy enough to be able to coax Lucy down from one of her rages when she felt the world was against her. But whether it was Lucy’s quick wit that scared him off for so long, or whether Lucy was deterred by Tuck’s bad-boy tag, when she’d walked in at Senior Prom with a game-changing haircut and body-con dress, Tuck had finally seen what had been under his nose all along and it had been fireworks ever after.