But Marlene seemed impervious to Edward’s disdain. “Honey, your father didn’t approve of me. He told me never to come around, and you may as well know that right now.”
Keti couldn’t bring herself to say, Why not?
If Edward was a pimp, was Marlene a prostitute?
Keti doubted that. Marlene was refined, classy.
“You see, I own some brothels, and that didn’t sit right with your father. It may not sit right with you, either, but there’s no use in pretending I’m anything but what I am,” Marlene said.
She seemed to feel no shame in the admission. And why should she? Keti shocked herself by thinking. It was just a way to make a living. And Keti had understood the importance of having money often enough in her own life to have few scruples about how people chose to earn it. Clearly, Aunt Marlene was good at what she did.
But I can’t be part of that, she thought.
People would be scandalized.
Martin Collins wouldn’t like her.
What makes you think he ever will, Keti Whitechapel?
She was like a sister to Martin. No more, no less.
But for some reason, Keti was keen not to lose his respect. She said, “I think for now, I should live with the Collinses.” Then, because Marlene looked disappointed, she added, “Just, maybe, until I finish school. Bounty’s always been my home.” There were still pinpricks of sadness in Marlene’s eyes, however, and Keti needed to make those go away. “Will you come and see me again?”
“Yes, Keti.” Aunt Marlene completely ignored Edward’s smirks. She leaned forward and kissed Keti’s cheek. “I certainly will.”
Chapter 5
A different world, six Christmases later
When the fog swirls away again, Keti sees lights. Unexpectedly, they are the lights outside the Empress Mine, tall bright lamps that illuminate the gravel-and-dirt parking area in the winter evening.
“I don’t want to see this,” she tells Edith. “I don’t want to see any more.” Her memories of working in the Empress Tunnel are in some ways happy. But she remembers keenly and with some bittersweetness the one Christmas Eve when she was on shift at the mine.
Edith says, “What are you afraid to see here?”
“Nothing. And it’s not fear, anyhow. I just don’t want to look back. I always look ahead.”
“If you truly looked forward,” Edith says, “truly saw the future you are creating, we wouldn’t be doing this, looking back at Christmases past.”
Keti ponders the statement, wondering what it could mean. I do look ahead. I’m an expert at looking ahead, and that’s why I’ll never be poor again.
She crouches down on the sidewalk in her nightgown and wraps her arms around Marley. She doesn’t want to see, doesn’t want to remember these times that are gone, because they are gone. And she can’t bring them back.
Even using earplugs, Keti always experienced the noise within the Empress Tunnel as completely deafening. The drilling, the loaders, the many machines, huge and small, that brought ore out of this tunnel to be processed.
Her shift was almost over. She stepped near the rib and lifted up a long pole to knock free a small slab from the roof. Then she approached the face again, taking up the drill, whose power shook her entire body. She made sport of drilling as fast and well as a man, as well as her father would have drilled.
Marlene, of course, told her she didn’t need to work down here. She was willing to lend Keti money to start a business of her own. But Keti was leery of borrowing from anyone, for any reason. At the age of seventeen she’d found she actually had some money, after the settling of her father’s estate. A court-appointed trustee oversaw her small inheritance until she was eighteen. Keti spent as little of it as possible, and she hung on to her father’s house, continuing to live in it. People loved the little ski resort that had opened in Bounty. This wasn’t a bad place to own a house, especially since she could add to her modest pile of wealth by working in the mine.
The only money she’d spent had gone to the orthodontist. The Collinses had offered to pay, almost insisted upon it. But Keti had refused to take from them what her father, she’d believed, had been able to afford. And when the inherited money was hers, when she found she had enough, she used a portion of that each month. Three years of braces, and then another year with a retainer day and night. But now, at twenty-two, she had straight teeth, although one of them was still chipped.
Now, she was considered good-looking. The men of the Empress Mine gave her a hard time; she was a woman, they were miners, and though this wasn’t as bad a mine to work as some, Keti put up with a certain amount of crudity.
Her arms trembled with the force of the drill, and she thought of what Marlene had said to her. You’ll ruin your lungs working down there, girl. Silicosis. Isn’t that what all the hard-rock miners get?
Keti’s partner, a guy her own age named Dylan, set the charges.
Blasts of the whistle, and they headed for the mantrip, to be out of the mine when the charges went off. For Keti, it was the end of the shift, and the cage took her up, up, up, with fellow workers; two out of the other fourteen were women. She nodded at Debbie Wilson and Mandy Skiff. When the cage rattled to a stop after a slowish ascent—not the eight hundred feet per minute of the descent—she followed them to the big doors leading out of the mine, heading for the women’s dry room.
Lucille Harold was already there, and she said, “There’s a man waiting for you, Keti.”
“For me?” She couldn’t imagine who that would be. There were no men in her life—not in the way Lucille’s expression seemed to imply. Men did occasionally ask her out, and sometimes she went, and she’d had a boyfriend for a while and done what he wanted, but she hadn’t liked it much and had broken up with him soon afterward. She’d thought sex should be something…Well, a little mysterious and transcendent and beautiful. And her couple of experiences with the miner who had finally gone to work in Montana had been prosaic and disappointing.
She showered, scrubbing hard. It was Christmas Eve, and she would be both welcome and expected at the Collins house. Aunt Marlene had invited her to Las Vegas, but Martin was supposed to be coming home. Home from Vietnam.
She connected the “man” waiting for her with Martin Collins. Could it be him? It wouldn’t be Mr. Collins, not the way Lucille had referred to the person who was waiting. She hurried out of the shower, hoping to ask Lucille for more details, but her coworker was gone. She caught Debbie, a thirty-five-year-old former barmaid, who’d discovered how much more money she could make mining. “Did Lucille say anything about what this guy looked like?”
Debbie shook her head and ran a brush through her hair before pulling on a red parka. “What are you doing tonight?” she asked Keti.
“Oh, I have somewhere to go,” Keti said, feeling grateful for the fact. It couldn’t be Martin outside. He’d have no reason to meet her at the tunnel.
Martin Collins stood in the falling snow just outside the entrance to the mine. Amy had written to him that Keti was working here, and someone inside had just confirmed that she was on the job and that her shift was about to end.
The snow was cold and clean, so unlike all the horror, the messiness in the country. He had been an idiot patriotic kid, wanting to do the all-American thing, the old-fashioned thing, the traditional thing.
He’d enlisted. He’d decided, halfway through medical school, to enlist. To go to Vietnam.
It had been the stupidest thing he’d ever done. But at the same time it hadn’t been a mistake. A wound had shifted him from that world, too, in spite of everything, a beautiful land and a place where he’d received more medical training, irreplaceable experience. Where he’d begun to live on adrenaline and fear and the strange high that came from functioning superbly in terrifying situations. His injuries had brought him to Walter Reed Army Medical Center, and he’d spent two months there. Members of his family had come from Nevada to Washington, D.C., to be close to him, but then he’d eluded them, too.
Now he stood in the gravel parking lot feeling that cold, clean snow falling on his hair and face. He was in Bounty. He was here.
But he wasn’t ready to go home quite yet.
And so he’d turned his secondhand Mustang toward the Empress Tunnel on a whim. Miners worked all hours. The mine might even remain open Christmas Day. Some people worked holidays—for instance, the prostitutes at the line of legal brothels just outside the Bounty city limits. That line had grown, too, now supporting three such establishments. Martin hadn’t stopped. He had seen more of the world in Vietnam, too much for comfort, but he wanted to shut the ugliness out. He wanted the purity and simplicity of the mountains, of his hometown.
But he wasn’t quite ready to return to his childhood home, nor to see his family. They wouldn’t really know him, not who he was now, and he couldn’t make them know him.
He was outside and he liked that, liked the wide Nevada sky, liked the brisk, thin air.
Martin watched one woman leave the mine, but it was someone with dark hair. Why did he want to see Keti? Maybe because she was part of his family and yet not part of it, exactly how he saw himself now. He watched the woman miner. He had known women while he was away. He remembered them with sadness and wondered if his whole life would now be tinged with sadness and rage, if that was all he’d brought back from Vietnam.
Except, of course, his wound.
And that was healed.
She appeared, then, exiting from the mine, and he knew her at once. Her parka was light blue, and she wore a matching ski hat. He recognized her slim hips, her lean yet voluptuous body. She looked both ways in the parking lot, then spotted him and strode toward him, that loping, floating walk.
Keti—and yet not Keti.
The face he remembered had become streamlined. With her teeth fixed—all but the chipped tooth—she resembled Grace Kelly. The teeth had been such a distraction, always drawing the eyes away from her other features. Her hair was the white-blond of a Norse goddess, and her mouth was sensitive-looking, mobile, unexpected.
He noticed a tingling throughout his body. Why shouldn’t he, even if this was the first time he’d felt this…since? Yes, his wound had healed, physically.
But something had happened to his mind, something that made sex seem so trivial that arousal could no longer happen automatically, by reflex. And this was no simple reflex, more like something he’d awaited, awaited his whole life.
I should be home already, he thought. Instead I’ve been lurking outside the mine, waiting for her to emerge.
Now, he would have to go to the house. And confront his mother’s tremulous face, his father’s quiet solemnity. Their relief that he hadn’t been killed in a foreign jungle, tending fallen comrades, fallen friends, some friends he hadn’t been able to tend, to reach, to help or save. Now his family would want to help him, and none of them—not his brothers or sisters or either of his parents—would have the slightest idea of what to say or how to look.
If only he could be alone here in these mountains. But Bounty wasn’t that kind of place. For now, the one person he could face was Keti Whitechapel.
Martin looked so different, it frightened her.
His hair was too long, dark, almost black, and wavy. His brown eyes—the change was most dramatic there, she thought. He wore an olive drab parka over an old olive shirt—fatigues—and underneath that, a long-sleeved T-shirt and jeans.
But he was still handsome, his face still chiseled, that cleft in his chin still so appealing, so that she longed to touch it.
And she felt a rush through her whole body.
He’s like your brother, Keti, and that’s all you are to him—a kind of sister.
She strove to be sisterly. After all, it wasn’t as if she had too much experience being anything other than sisterly. “Are you all right? Of course, you’re not.” He’d left medical school and enlisted. People in Bounty had respected him for this. They had all been proud.
And then he’d been wounded.
A groin wound, Amy’s letter had said. Underlined.
But Amy had also confided that her brother had somehow come through with “everything intact.” Now, he was out of the hospital. He was here.
And his groin was none of her business.
She stood close to him in the falling snow. If things had been different, if he hadn’t so obviously been through something, she would have backed far away. She wanted only to comfort him now. “How long have you been home? I can’t believe they let you come out for a walk so soon after you got back.”
“I haven’t been home yet.”
Something strummed through Keti as she digested this bit of information. He came to see me. But it was more than that. She understood at once that he didn’t want to go home; even if home was probably the best place for him. There was a shakiness to him, but he didn’t appear to be on drugs. Undoubtedly he’d seen—and perhaps done—terrible things. But his family loved him, and they would help.
“I thought,” he said, “I’d see what you were doing.”
Getting off work, Keti almost said. Obviously.
“Living in my dad’s old house.” She shrugged. “I’m doing all right.” She was talking about how she was doing financially, but she realized as she spoke that it wouldn’t occur to him to think about how she was getting on in terms of money. He wasn’t wired that way.
She didn’t know what to say about Vietnam, whether or not to mention it. But she thought if she could say the right thing, that would be best, so she tried. “Are you having culture shock, being back here?”
He shook his head. “It’s not that. But it’s not the same here. It’s different from what it used to be.”
The snow fell over and between them as Keti watched Martin and waited.
“I’d rather be there. I miss it,” he said. “Sick, isn’t it?”
“No,” she said. “I imagine you made friends.” And saw some of them die.
He seemed to be thinking the same thing, because his eyes stared a thousand yards away from her.
“I’ve never felt that alive,” he said.
Outside the mine, near the soft drink machine, the ice dispenser chattered.
Martin jumped, alert.
Suddenly he looked hollow-cheeked, wary, different.
Then, he tried to shrug it off. “How do you like my car?” He gestured to the nearest vehicle, a cactus-colored ’69 Mustang, dappled with snow.
Keti said nothing, but met his eyes. Now, he’s lost his innocence, she thought, and she was profoundly sad for him. She’d grown used to her own cynicism, her own lack of interest in so many things, her single-minded pursuit of survival. But her own feelings made the innocent humanity of others seem more precious, something to be appreciated and guarded.
So she smiled. “I’m glad that you came and found me.”
He followed her to her own house and came inside, waited in her plainly furnished living room, while she went into her bedroom and changed for Christmas Eve at his parents’. When she reappeared, she found him examining a photo of her with her father—Keti on Luther Whitechapel’s shoulders at a company picnic.
He turned, stretching his tall body, and scrutinized her outfit. Flared jeans, peasant blouse, long leather coat she’d gotten cheaply at a jumble sale, high platform boots. “Don’t suppose you have a couple of pairs of snowshoes around?”
Keti stared. “Why?”
“We could hike to the Old House hot springs.”
Keti examined her boots. Another jumble sale purchase, but not for hiking. Though she owned hiking boots, of course. Old ones, from high school. She remembered the Old House hot springs and how, back then, groups of kids would drive over to Bounty to sit in the steaming water, which reeked of sulfur. Sometimes they’d be naked. Sometimes they’d brought beer.
She’d never been part of these excursions.
It occurred to her that Martin was further postponing his return home.
“Dad’s snowshoes are around somewhere,” she said. “And I have some others that might work. I haven’t been on them in years.” Even as she spoke, she wondered if she should argue with Martin instead, or tell him that it would be okay to go home.
He said, “It’s worth checking out. Trying to get to the hot springs.”
She thought, selfishly, about how she simply wanted to be alone with him. He was so handsome, with that dark hair sweeping across his forehead, his brown eyes hiding things that she imagined to be deep, meaningful, sensitive, lost—everything ridiculous a teenager might think was there. And she was no teenager anymore, and he was just like her brother.
Except she’d never been able to make it feel that way.
“Do they know you’re coming?”
“Christmas Eve or Christmas Day.” He shrugged. “Sometime.”
The steam rising from the foul-smelling pool was so thick that Keti could barely make out the shape of the Old House itself. It was a relic of the early mining days and had once been a baron’s mansion. Now it was a Victorian ruin. She and Martin had opened the door and peered in, and she’d thought of Great Expectations, which she’d read in junior high. She imagined an old lady waiting inside in a yellowed wedding gown.
Then they’d gone to the edge of the pool and stripped off their clothes under the night sky, shielded by the dark and the mist.
Martin was muscular, still beautifully built, and still more handsome because now he was a man. She remembered the gentleness, the inner quiet she used to feel from him. Was it still there? she wondered. Or had war torn it away completely?
Keti watched him across the water, leaning back in the steam, the shades and shapes of his face at peace.
She said, “I’m sorry you had to go through…everything that’s happened.”
He didn’t reply but quickly ducked his head and resurfaced with wet hair, with his straight nose, like an eagle, and the dark eyes that were just hints in the night. His father claimed the Collins family was “Black Irish.” Keti had been assured by at least one Irish miner since then that no such group was acknowledged in Ireland. But the Collinses were a handsome family, in a strong and wholesome way. They always seemed to know who they were, and Keti had never seen them in doubt.
Till Martin appeared outside the Empress Mine at the end of her shift.
So clearly unanchored.
What could she say? What are you going to do, now that you’re back? That would sound like pressure.
He would return to medical school, she assumed. Maybe the army would help him somehow. She was reluctant to press him for details. But Martin would be okay in the long run. After his family surrounded him with their stable, certain love.
She saw his eyes resting on her face, then shifting to her shoulders. Just as he had done, she dunked her head, letting her shoulder-length hair fall back in loose, sleek waves. But not letting her breasts show above the water. Here she was, naked with Martin, as if she did this kind of thing all the time.
But she didn’t.
And she’d never before done anything at all like this with him.
He couldn’t possibly see her well. But she felt him studying her.
“Darkness is kind,” she said, because she didn’t want him to forget what she actually looked like in daylight.
He smiled the ghost of a smile. “You think you’re not pretty?”
She shrugged, glad he couldn’t see her blushing, which she knew she must be. “Not exactly.”
“You don’t exactly think you’re not?”
She tried to think that one through.
“Keti, you’ve always been pretty. Some people just couldn’t see it till you got braces, I guess.”
“All people,” she corrected.
“You think,” he said.
She took the compliment he’d just given her and treasured it, knowing she would think more about it later when she was alone.
But she felt something else in the way he watched her now. It wasn’t predatory. But she could tell he was thinking some things through. His voice touched her as he asked, “Are you a virgin?”
“God,” she said, and momentarily sank beneath the water again. “No.” She didn’t look at him.
He came closer to her and pressed his hands against hers under the water, palms together. He didn’t try to raise her out of the pool, just laced his fingers with hers. Keti could not breathe, could only feel that his body was separated from hers by a few inches of water—and less. And less. And his forearms, his biceps and triceps, his shoulders, all of him was big and strong, and his hands were much bigger than hers.
He said, “I haven’t taken things for a test drive since I was hurt. So to speak. Could be a disaster.”
She thought, He’ll risk a disaster with me.
He said, “I don’t want a disaster with you.”
Her breath caught in her throat. But she couldn’t make herself ask what exactly it was that he wanted. Because everything she wanted—which was everything, all of him, inside and out—made the stakes much too high.
Martin drew her to him in the water, touching the silkiness of her arms, feeling the strangeness of it all. Keti’s touch seemed part of the mineral spring and part of the snow around them and part of the gray of the darkening sky. In the steam, she was an oread, a mountain nymph. He touched her mouth, her firm chin and smooth jaw. He moved closer and kissed her.
Yes, he could want.
Yes, yes, yes.
She kissed him back, and after a moment he said gently, “So you’ve had lovers?”
She shrugged. “One.”
His mouth touched every part of hers, caressing each nerve, one by one.
“It seemed like even when he wanted to please me,” she explained, “it was all about what he could make me feel. I always thought it could be different then, but I don’t really think that anymore.”
“Giving up at your age?”
“Don’t laugh at me!”
“I’m not.”
And their bodies brushed against each other, and she felt her breath grow shallow with the pressure of her breasts against his chest, and more, and more, as he pulled her closer.
“I’m just not naive any longer,” she said, surprising herself with the bitterness she heard. And I don’t want you to break my heart, because you can, Martin. You are the only person who can!
He touched her face with hands that seemed to be twice the size of hers. These were a man’s hands, rough, strong-fingered working hands. Martin’s hands she liked.
His lips caressed hers again, and his hands moved down her body.
This was what frightened her most.
That it was Martin touching her; Martin, the only person she could imagine truly wanting to touch her. It was the crest at the top of a roller coaster, like the roller coaster in Las Vegas she’d once ridden.
They kissed again, and now Martin’s mouth traveled over her shoulders and down between her breasts. The water was too hot, and Keti let him ease her up to its edge, let him help her find comfort on the wet rocks. She let him open her legs and kiss the insides of her thighs. And touch her.
She cried out, warm and shuddering and liquid, and his hands were there, clasping hers, giving her something to hold on to.
In the fog, with Edith and Marley
Keti’s eyes are filled with tears. Martin was her first true lover. That time was the first she’d really loved, really fallen in love.
The truth is, she’d never been in love with anyone but Martin. Could never imagine loving anyone else. Though she’d tried. Oh, how she’d tried.
And so she and Martin nurtured each other there in the hot springs, and she trusted him, trusted he would never hurt her. She’d given her heart to him long ago.
Now to her guide, she says, “I’ve seen enough, Edith.”
The skinny dog beside her whines, and Keti crouches down to stroke his fur.
“My time grows short!” says Edith. “Quick!”
The Collins house, that same Christmas
“Martin! Martin’s home!” exclaimed Amy, all wild, curly long hair and dangling beaded earrings. She whispered to Keti, “You brought him. I didn’t think he’d really come.”
Keti embraced her friend gladly. Though Bridget was her own age, it was Amy to whom she’d been closer when she lived with the Collinses. Amy with her irreverent sense of humor and her unblushing observations on all aspects of life.
“Oh, Martin! Martin!” said Mrs. Collins.
The entire family was there, from teenage George and Paul to Bridget and newly-married Amy with her husband, Ely, whom she’d met her first year of college.
“Your room is ready for you,” Peggy Collins told her son, plucking at Martin’s sleeve almost as if she was afraid he’d be taken from her.
“Thanks, Mom.”
Keti saw shades of the old Martin then, the Martin who wanted to lighten his mother’s load.
They sat around the tree eating Christmas cookies, and Martin opened gifts, going through the motions of acting normal and then, in a quiet moment, clasping Keti’s hand.
Amy, in the process of reaching for another cookie, lifted her eyebrows and flashed a look of amusement at Keti. Then, with her parents out of the room, George quietly reading and husband Ely trying to work out a puzzle someone had given him, she focused her gaze on her oldest brother. “So does everything work?”
Her husband dropped his puzzle. “Amy!”
George lowered his book.
Martin moved gently toward his sister and calmly took her forearm, holding it firmly as he began to tickle her.
“No! Help! Mom! Help! George! Someone! My husband, please!” Amy shrieked, hysterical with laughter, thrashing about until he pinned her other arm, as well.
Ely deliberately picked up his puzzle and resumed his study of it.
Through the window, in the fog
Keti gazes at the face of the young Amy, her best woman friend back then.
“She had a large heart!” Edith declares.
Marley sniffs some bushes nearby and lifts his leg against one.
“So she had,” whispers Keti.
“She died a woman,” Edith says. “And had children.”
“One child.”
“That’s right. Martin’s niece, Tiffany.”
Keti feels uneasy, remembering the poinsettia on her table, the imperiously-worded yet harmless invitation from Tiffany. “Yes.”
What would Amy think, if she knew with what scorn Keti treated her only child—her orphaned child?
Tiffany’s an adult, Keti tells herself. I owe her nothing.
But she remembers that today, December twenty-fourth, is Tiffany’s birthday.
Well, I sent flowers. Her assistant did, anyway. Keti had written a note about it the week before. Now, she sniffs it off, all of it. Flowers are generous, under the circumstances. In any circumstances.
A station wagon outside Bounty
“Please stop, Ely!”
Snow was falling heavily, and Amy was in the back on the folded-down seats, alternately lying on sleeping bags and then kneeling on all fours.
Keti crouched beside her friend and repeated the plea to Amy’s husband to pull over. They were not going to make it to the hospital. Even in the dark, Keti could see something she was pretty damned sure was the baby’s head. In all her twenty-five years, she’d never experienced anything that remotely compared to this.
They had been to the hot springs together, the three of them. Amy was overdue, and the warm water had seemed like a good idea. It had done something, all right. When Amy’d stood up, to get out of the hot springs, her waters had broken, splattering and steaming onto the cold rocks, washing over the dusting of snow.
It had been Amy’s dream that Martin could be on hand to catch her baby. But he was a resident now, in New Hampshire, and he would be on call over Christmas. So, there he was still in New England, and Amy’s baby was almost here and they were not at the hospital.
Martin wouldn’t be in Bounty for Christmas. The thought that had occurred to Keti so many times over the past weeks, had translated itself into, Martin is missing the birth of his sister’s baby. But this point also mingled with a resentment entirely of Keti’s—not over his finishing medical school, finishing his internship, finishing his residency and becoming the person he was meant to be. It was a resentment that somehow she, Keti Whitechapel, was once again not good enough for Martin Collins.
Their love affair was behind them and yet it seemed to resume whenever he was home. But there was something tentative in all of it. As if Keti were on trial. No, her values were on trial. And she didn’t like that at all.
But now Martin was away and Keti was here, and Amy’s baby was about to be born right now.
I have never seen anything like this. God, you better make this work right, because it’s happening, and none of us can stop it.
Ely had obediently pulled over and climbed into the backseat, as well.
Amy pushed out the baby’s head in one pop. Keti said, “Oh, God, wait. I think I should check for the cord or something, shouldn’t I?”
But she felt no cord around the baby’s neck. How did anyone hold on to these slippery things?
Then the baby whooshed into her waiting hands, and her forearms came down to rest on the sleeping bags as she stared in shock and wonder at the strange and perfect infant who had just arrived from another world.
Chapter 6
The fog gives everything a wet kind of coldness. It is an unnatural fog that has Keti clutching Marley’s fur, and she thinks that the dog needs a collar and a name tag. I like a dog, she realizes in wonder. I like having a dog, and Marley is my dog.
She recognizes the tree outside the Victorian dwelling. She recognizes the Victorian itself and thinks dimly, It didn’t look so great, did it? I’ve really made it look nice.
Because it is her house at the time, painted a rather revolting blue with a peeling trim that had originally been burgundy, and as she and Edith approach the porch, Keti recognizes the griffin door knocker. There is a wreath on the door circling the knocker. Keti herself put up that wreath—a twenty-six-year-old Keti, that is.
A Keti who believed in Christmas, sort of.
A car pulls up to the curb in the fog. It’s a Mercedes.
“Marlene!” cries Keti, but the other woman neither hears her nor sees her. Marlene climbs from the car, wrapped in fake fur—fake Dalmatian puppy fur, appallingly—and she seems so young, her face completely unlined. Marlene had always been willing to make time for Keti. The woman who’d once been rejected by her nephew, Keti’s father; the woman once considered too immoral to be part of Luther Whitechapel’s family circle had always been there for Keti.
But now Keti shivers, remembering her encounter with her great-aunt in the bedroom of this same house, remodeled, perfect, outfitted with every conceivable luxury. Her meeting this Christmas Eve—the meeting that introduced the ghostly Edith. A spectral Marlene in handcuffs.
Keti lets go of that thought, allowing herself the easier comfort of loving the Marlene she remembers.
The Victorian on the Christmas Eve of Tiffany’s first birthday
Keti is twenty-six
Keti opened the front door and saw Marlene sweeping up the front steps in her ridiculous Cruella De Vil coat. Marlene paused dramatically, letting her gaze sweep over the three-story structure, Keti’s new home, one of the old miner baron homes of Bounty. “Well, you have your work cut out for you, Keti.”
Hurriedly, Keti yanked on a pair of indoor-outdoor mukluks and rushed onto her porch and down to the cracked walkway. She embraced Marlene and arm in arm with her turned to gaze up at the building. “Imagine the possibilities, Marlene. I bought this for half what I sold Dad’s house for.”
“Is the roof sound?” Marlene asked doubtfully.
“Barely. I had to do some quick patching for winter, and I’m redoing it properly in the spring. But there are no rodents or spiders or disgusting things—anymore. And I’ve given you my room. You’ll like it.”
“Well, where are you going to sleep?”
“In one of the others which is more, well, still a work in progress.”
Marlene paused, turning in her high white boots to let her eyes sweep the street. Her Mercedes and Keti’s old pickup were the only vehicles beyond the low wrought-iron fence. “Is he coming?”
“Yes,” said Keti, “but I’m glad you’re here first. Let me grab your bags for you.”
“No, dear. We’ll let your Martin get them.”
“I can carry the bags,” Keti said. “I don’t want him waiting on me…”
“On me. Leave it, Keti,” Marlene ordered.
Keti shivered in her thin, red wool sweater. She should have put on a parka before coming outside. “Well, come on in,” she relented. “Look, Marlene, here’s the thing. Can we not talk about the brothel while Martin’s here?”
“Of course, we won’t,” Marlene agreed. “It’s a business matter.”
“What I mean is, can we not talk about the fact that I’ve bought half of the Palomino Palace,” Keti clarified.
Her great-aunt gave her a sharp glance. “You’re not going to tell him?”
“I am. At the right time. But that might not be tonight. I mean, I don’t think any of the Collinses is going to be wild about the idea, and I need to think of exactly what I’m going to say.”
Marlene gave an understanding shrug. Following her niece up the porch steps, she said, “Well, if you ever figure out the right thing, please tell me. Because for some people…Well, I’ve never found words that satisfy them. So I’ve stopped trying. The only time it has ever really mattered,” she added as Keti opened the front door, “was when it made a difference as to whether or not you would let me help you after your dad died.”
Keti paused in the doorway to hug her only living relative. “It never made any difference at all.”
Later that same Christmas
Martin gazes up at the cracked ceiling above the brass bed that Keti had bought at a yard sale. The bed frame is used; the mattress, new. There is another new mattress on the four-poster Marlene is sleeping in. That bed was a Whitechapel family heirloom—which means it was Keti’s mother’s, actually. She brought it to Bounty with her when she was married.
Keti had been to the Collins house that evening, with Marlene, to celebrate Tiffany’s first birthday and also Christmas Eve; Martin had driven them there and then brought them back home.
Martin, the physician.
He would be in Bounty only for a short time, and Keti considered simply not mentioning the brothel. She could let Amy—or more likely, Bridget—write to tell him about it. Because he wasn’t exactly planning on hanging around.
No, he was going to India. To work.
“You could come with me,” he told Keti now.
“To Calcutta?” She tried to conceal her dismay. Why would he think she’d be remotely tempted by that suggestion?
“You could get nurses’ training there. We could be together.”
Keti was touched. But she was touched that Martin thought her the kind of person who would become a nurse in an Indian slum? No. She was touched simply by the fact that he wanted her with him. She hadn’t expected that. And she had no idea what to do about it. She did want to be with Martin. But at the price of living and working in slums, possibly among lepers? No. That wasn’t for Keti. It would be one thing, maybe, if they could actually make money there. But Martin was volunteering—or something like that. He wouldn’t come home with anything more than he’d had when he left—if, that was, he avoided catching whatever terrible diseases they had over there, which Keti doubted he’d manage to do.
So why tell him about the brothels, at all? After all, it would be some time before even Amy or Bridget found out, as long as Keti avoided shouting the news from the rooftops.
Finally, she said to Martin, “I don’t think I’m cut out to be a nurse.” The problem with not telling him about the brothels was that Keti loathed deception and she especially loathed deceiving anyone about who she was. Because if you pretended to be something other than the person you really were and people loved you, they wouldn’t actually be loving you—they’d be loving someone else.
In any case, though Martin lay on top of her patchwork bedspread with her now, he wasn’t making any romantic moves. He’d come upstairs to see the rest of the house, after Marlene had turned in for the night. And now here he was on Keti’s “spare room” bed. The spare room being the only bedroom besides her own that was fit to sleep in.
“You think you’re cut out for running a mine office? Or whatever it is, exactly, that you do? Speculate in real estate? Buy and sell stocks?”
Keti did a little bit of all of it. She’d bought stock in the ski area, for one thing, and that had worked out exceptionally well. In fact, she now owned almost forty percent of the resort business. And her holdings in the Empress Mine had also done well for her—plus, there was the sale of her father’s house. The brothel in which she’d bought a stake was just another way to increase her income, so that she could buy more of the ski area and also invest in another ski area over by Lake Tahoe. The downhill skiing industry was really going to take off soon, and Keti was getting in just in time. She only wished she’d had the toehold she had now ten years ago.
Marlene assured her that Nevada’s legal brothels could make her the kind of fast money she needed to increase her real-estate holdings. And so Keti had decided to buy an interest in one of Marlene’s operations.
“I think,” Keti told Martin, “that I’m cut out to make money. Anyhow, maybe I better, so you have someone to support you when you come back from India.” She was half joking and half serious. Was he ever going to get interested in actually making a living? Or did he plan to live out his entire life as Saint Francis of Assisi?
Martin laughed, taking no offense at her remark.
But Keti had a feeling close to certainty that he would take offense when he learned about the brothel.
She wavered again. He doesn’t need to learn about it from me. It’s none of his business, anyhow.
“No, seriously,” Martin said. “Don’t you want to…contribute something to the world?”
Keti searched her heart. Contribute something? She had no calling to be a doctor, for instance, as Martin had.
No, Martin would not understand about the brothel. Martin simply didn’t think money was important. As for contributing something to the world…
“Not especially,” she said.
And she felt him look at her differently after that, felt him see her as someone who didn’t care about others.
Well, let him. It was better for him to see her as she was.
Outside her home, with Edith
“All right, he wasn’t happy about the brothels,” Keti admits. After all, there was more than one, after her first venture into the business succeeded so well. She didn’t want to see any more of these Christmases with Edith. What was the point?
But already they were outside Bounty, away from the trees, beneath a neon sign that jutted out against the wide Nevada sky.
The Christmas Eve of Tiffany’s second birthday
The brothel lights were a small part of Palomino Palace’s Christmas decorations.
“Yo, ho, my girls!” said Marlene, stepping back inside. “No more work tonight. Christmas Eve, Carlene! Christmas Eve, my sweet Keti! Christmas Eve…”
Keti had turned twenty-seven this year, and she’d decided not to go to the Collins house for Christmas Eve despite Mrs. Collins’s and Amy’s repeated invitations. It won’t be Christmas without you, Keti!
And it was Tiffany’s birthday.
And she, Keti, was Tiffany’s godmother.
Well, she would like to oblige Amy in this, in spending Tiffany’s second birthday with the Collins family, but the price was too steep. She simply wasn’t going.
Not after the things Martin had said and done the last time they’d talked, when he’d returned from India in October to set up a practice back home.
The bastard.
St. Martin, M.D.
Now, at the Palomino Palace, somebody plugged in the jukebox and people began to dance.
The phone rang, the private office line, not the main business phone. Keti got up, walking toward the office in her tight purple stonewashed jeans, on her pink patent leather heels. Christmas clothes. Fun clothes.
She spent little time there. Now she owned it outright and paid Marlene to run it, which her great-aunt did as well as managing her own brothels. Keti, it’s a good business, but you don’t want to be involved in the running of it.
Keti couldn’t have, if she’d wanted to. She didn’t have that kind of time, now that she was so busy managing her other investments, especially the mine company, and serving on the board of directors for the corporation that owned the Bounty ski resort and its sister area near Lake Tahoe.
Passing two of the girls—two of the prostitutes—in flannel pajamas and fluffy slippers, carrying packages, Keti reached the office and picked up the phone. “Hello?”
“Keti.”
She tensed. Why on earth was he even bothering to call? She didn’t want to hear anything he had to say to her, unless what he had to say had changed, which she doubted. “Hello, Martin.”
A silence that wasn’t entirely silent, because she could hear, faintly, all the usual happy sounds of the Collins house at Christmas.
She had loved Martin dearly, but she didn’t love him now. She couldn’t love anyone who sat in judgment of her for being who she was.
Martin had refused to give Bounty’s brothel prostitutes the health checks that were required by the state of Nevada, leaving it to his partner to handle that part of the practice. Which saved both of them from nasty lawsuits. Because Martin never said that he wouldn’t do the health checks. It was simply the case that his partner did them all.
“It doesn’t seem the same here without you,” he said.
“Thank you.” Her voice was toneless. She wasn’t spending much time in Bounty these days, anyhow. Her most time-consuming work was across the state, in the corporate offices of AmeriMetals in Elko. She could have worked from Bounty, but Martin’s silent—and articulated—disapproval had eroded all the love from their relationship, leaving only a need within her to be free and do what she wanted to do. Which was the entire point. If you had enough money, no one could hurt you.
Martin disagreed. Martin helped the poor families of Bounty, willingly serving all those who had been affected by the Empress Mine’s closing. And acting as if the mine’s closing, which Keti hoped would be brief, was her fault.
People had to go where the work was and where the money was, and it was that simple. It was what she’d done. In Elko, an AmeriMetals silver mine continued to flourish.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
He knew where she was—he’d called the brothel, after all. How he’d known where to find her, she couldn’t guess. Still, he would have known that she would spend Christmas with Marlene.
“Oh, Marlene closes for Christmas Eve and Christmas—well, till six tomorrow evening.”
“You close,” he replied.
“Well, yes. It’s Marlene’s decision, but it’s fine. Though we could stay open. Men keep leaning on the bell outside. And the girls here would work. They like to make money.” They choose this life, Martin. Nobody makes them. Don’t you get it?
“Like you.”
“Alas. The great crime. Capitalism.”
“That’s not what I mean.”
“You don’t need to elaborate,” she told him, vividly remembering the last time he had done so.
“You fear the world too much, Keti.”
“I’m not listening to this, Martin. I do not fear anything.”
“Other people, maybe?” he said.
“If I’m not afraid of you,” she said, “who else would I be afraid of?”
He laughed. Tenderly.
Unexpectedly, her eyes watered.
“All your other hopes have merged into the single hope of being absolutely ‘secure,’” he said. “I’ve seen your nobler aspirations fall away one by one, as you’ve come to focus entirely on Gain. Haven’t I?”
“What nobler aspirations?” she asked, with a brittle smile he couldn’t see. “I was never like you, Martin. I was never good.”
“I thought you were. You used to lie yourself blue in the face to keep the rest of us out of trouble. When we were young kids, and when we were teenagers. Sometimes you let yourself get into trouble so that no one else would be punished. And you used to like knitting things for people. When you lived with my family, remember you knit secret presents for some of the kids in town.”
“It was a church project! I had to do it. Don’t credit me with your own generosity, Martin. It’s just not me, all right?”
“Wrong. You are changed. You’re a different woman.”
“And before I was a girl. Whom you never looked at, because of at least one thing I didn’t have that money could buy.” She was thinking of braces, straight teeth. Not to mention fashionable clothes. But straight teeth on their own would have made such a difference back then. “Remember?”
“I remember that we were happy when we were one in heart.”
Keti considered hanging up the phone. “We never have been.”
“Come home. Free yourself from that world. Keti, you bought a brothel. Those women are prisoners.”
“These women,” she replied coldly, “would be insulted to hear you say that. They make good money, and that’s why they’re here.”
“And you make good money, too, from what they do.”
Silence.
She wondered if he was reflecting on his own generosity and benevolence.
They’d had this conversation before. Even before Martin had gone to work in India, they’d seemed to be drifting further and further apart. Yet the attraction remained.
Until this summer.
No, I’m not attracted to you any more, he’d said. How could I be, knowing the kind of person you’ve become?
He’d made her cry, and afterward he’d apologized, but the apology had been meaningless.
Keti wasn’t sure anything had ever hurt so much.
And she’d decided she didn’t like him.
“This doesn’t affect you,” she said now. “It has nothing to do with you. It’s not like I’m your wife or even your girlfriend. In fact, I’m not a family member at all. It would be different if you were actually part of my life.”
He said, “I can’t live with money made that way, Keti.”
That was it. “Nobody has invited you to,” she said firmly. She set the receiver back in the cradle and calmly gave it the finger.
Carlene, one of the girls, paused in the doorway, grinning slightly. “Who pissed you off?”
A foggy night, on a snow-covered mountain road
“I’m stuck with you right now, aren’t I?” Keti asks. “I can’t escape what you intend to show me.”
“What is it that you don’t want to see?” Edith asks.
Keti considers the question. She thinks most of all about Martin. She has made it a practice not to remember—not to dwell on the past. I can’t have Martin. That’s why I stopped thinking about it.
She hadn’t continued to hate Martin as she’d hated him that one Christmas. He’d apologized, and he’d really meant it, and he’d told Keti that he loved her.
Still, she doesn’t answer the ghost of Edith, the ghost who is about to unfold another Christmas Past.
Two years on, Christmas Eve
Keti’s Mercedes convertible was not made for the snow, and there was plenty of that in Bounty this year. So she’d left it in Elko and rented this Jeep. Aunt Marlene would be joining her at the Collins home the following morning. But tonight Marlene was visiting her brothels and distributing gifts to her girls.
Keti was working and living in Elko now, though she still owned her home in Bounty. She wouldn’t have agreed to return to Bounty for Christmas if it hadn’t been for Amy and her husband’s deaths in a car crash—which had left poor Tiffany an orphan, to be raised by Bridget.
And Bridget, even for Keti, could never replace Amy.
She and Martin had simply called a halt to all discussion of her brothels, her mines and what he referred to as her “pursuit of Gain.” Maybe, Keti thought, the realities of maintaining his own medical practice had begun to sink in. He had to pay for little necessities like malpractice insurance, after all.
But the population of Bounty was still inclined to canonize him.
Well, that was fine. What he did with his life didn’t affect her.
She’d promised to meet him at his house, an old Victorian “shotgun,” long and narrow, and ride with him to his parents’ home.
His Nissan truck was parked outside, coated with fresh snow. Keti sighed when she saw it.
If only Martin were different—or if she were different. She still had precious recollections of those few months they’d shared right after he’d returned from Vietnam, when the two of them had been everything to each other. But then he’d gone back to medical school, and his vocation had become both his wife and his mistress, and their relationship had headed downhill from there.
Too much trying to change each other.
Too much of Martin trying to change me, that is.
In recent years, there had been a couple of other men in Keti’s life. Two, to be exact. Neither had offered even a single enjoyable experience. Neither had succeeded in making her forget Martin. The lovemaking that she’d known with him was still the only real lovemaking of her entire life. Yes, other men had been with her. But she’d never enjoyed it. Not once.
What she still longed for, sometimes, was to be with Martin again as they used to be.
But that would require her to play by his rules. And clearly she was not a saint and not a do-gooder. Early on, she’d been on the receiving end of plenty of that sort of energy, and it had driven her to stand on her own feet.
Parking at the curb in front of his house, she climbed out of the rented Jeep. It wasn’t much of a house. He could do better, Keti knew, if only he would save some of his money instead of giving it away to all and sundry, including his parents and Bridget. Granted, there was nothing wrong with the upkeep on the house. The pale yellow siding and white trim had both recently been painted. And his mother had sewn the curtains that hung in the few windows.
A cat leaped to the porch as Keti approached. It was a grey tabby with three legs. Honestly, Martin. Can’t you even get yourself a decent pet?
Martin opened the door before she reached the first step.
At thirty-two, he was even more attractive than he’d been as a boy. His features, rough, angular, seemed so much better suited to a grown man. He wore canvas pants and a dark red pile sweater with navy trim on the cuffs, collar and pocket. He said, “Hi,” and embraced her briefly and casually.
The distance between them yawned like a chasm, and Keti yearned for things to be as they’d once been. They can’t be. I’m too different. And he doesn’t like who I really am.
While all the time, she continued to love and admire him. Which was, she thought, pathetic.
Keti now wore her blond hair shoulder-length. The curls bounced against the collar of her sheepskin jacket. She was dressed in suede pants and boots. She’d done everything she could with her appearance, yet Martin didn’t seem to notice.
It was freezing outside. She hoped his heater worked. “Let’s go in my truck,” he said. “You can leave your vehicle here.”
This seemed positive to Keti. There’d been no clear discussion about where she should sleep. She said, “Are you spending the night there?”
“I thought I would. My parents like it on Christmas Eve. And they’re planning to have you stay with them, as well.”
Keti knew.
She’d agreed to sleep over, like one of the family, instead of returning to her own house, the Victorian whose restoration was the closest thing she had to a hobby.
If she left the Jeep at Martin’s, she couldn’t duck out of the celebration at the Collins house if things became uncomfortable there. Of course, the thing most likely to make things uncomfortable was Martin himself. But hadn’t she agreed to stay with his parents especially because she wanted to see him?
Hopeful, always hopeful, like a puppy. No wonder she didn’t like dogs. Or cats, either.
“I’ll ride with you,” she said.
Martin helped load her luggage and her bags of gifts into his pickup. He carried out his own bag, which had been sitting by the front door, as well. He did not invite her to have a look around his house, but said only, “You need to use the bathroom or anything?”
“No. I’m fine.” You break my heart with every word you say, Martin Collins, you self-righteous jerk.
“How’s your practice?” she asked, ignoring the fact that he still refused to perform health exams on the girls from her brothels. She chose to pretend that despite this decision he still respected her. But in her heart, she knew he didn’t.
“Can’t complain. Actually, I love it. I feel close to everyone in town.”
He’d just been named Bounty’s citizen of the year.
“Still getting along with your partner?” she asked. The physician he shared his practice with was ten years older than Martin.
“Yes, but actually he’s moving and I haven’t found a replacement yet.”
“In that case, I assume you’ll be prepared to take care of the health checks for my girls,” she said.
He opened the passenger door of the truck for Keti, then got in on his side and looked at her. “How can you be okay with it, Keti? How would you like to be one of them?”
It was an argument they’d had many times before, and now Keti really felt like fighting. “I could have been. But I never chose to be. They’ve chosen it. What’s more, they’re safe. In my brothels, they have physical protection and their health is safeguarded, too. Prostitution has always existed and it always will.”
“Sure. But how can you make money from it, Keti? How would you like handing over fifty percent of your earnings to a female pimp?”
She fastened her seat belt. “If my fifty percent was what those girls are making, I wouldn’t mind in the least.” She considered. “Though, being me, I’m sure I’d try to find a way to keep it all.”
“But surely you wouldn’t turn tricks,” he said.
“I don’t know. Maybe I would have,” she replied, not certain it was the truth but saying the words anyhow. “Of course, now I make better money doing what I do.”
He started the engine. “You could do something good with your life, Keti.”
He was, she told herself, such a judgmental pain. She only loved him as a brother. And she changed the subject. “How are your folks doing?”
She asked because of Amy and Ely’s deaths.
With all her business travel, she hadn’t seen much of the Collins family this year. And given these kinds of scenes with Martin, it had been more comfortable that way.
“Somehow, they take everything in stride. But it made them older, for sure. They look older. They’ve focused on Tiffany, though, on making sure she has everything they can possibly give her.” He pulled away from the curb.
“How is she?”
“I’m not sure. Bridget is such a different kind of mom from how Amy was.”
Keti didn’t need that explained. Bridget had always been more uptight than her older sister. “You must miss her,” she told Martin. “Amy, I mean.” I do, she thought. Martin might judge her, but Amy never had.
“Yes.” The roads were white with fresh snow, and Martin drove slowly. “You were there when Tiffany was born, Keti. You caught her as she came into the world. You took care of Amy and her baby. That was noble.” He bit back whatever else he might have said.
Keti remembered the Christmas Eve Tiffany was born in the back of that station wagon. It was, she thought, the best thing she’d ever done.
But now Amy was gone, and she could hardly stand to remember it.
“Well,” she said, “it’s not the kind of thing I could do for a living.”
“Why not?” he asked.
“Be serious. I’d have to go to medical school, and I’m not smart enough. And I’m already twenty-nine. I’m too old.”
“You’re definitely not too old. Anyhow, I wasn’t suggesting that you become a physician. You could be a maternity nurse. Hell, you could work in my practice. Or you could become a midwife, though that takes a little more training.”
“None of those jobs pay well enough,” she replied bluntly.
“Why do you need more money?”
“Because that’s what I’m good at,” she said. “It’s the most important thing in the world to me. I write down my financial goals every year, and I achieve them.”
Martin drove slowly down the street and turned onto the evergreen-lined avenue leading to his parents’ house. “But you don’t do anything with the money, Keti. I mean, you have nice clothes and a nice car and some nice property. But all those things are just…things.”
“Just things?” She squinted at him and shook her head. “They matter to me. And I give my ten percent to charities, just the way a good Christian is supposed to.”
She saw, again, a pursing of his lips that told her he was biting his tongue.
“Just say it,” she snapped.
“Jesus didn’t put the figure at ten percent.”
“You are so holier-than-thou I’m sometimes astonished you’re still walking among us, Martin Collins. Any day, I expect you to be officially recognized as a saint.”
He blushed. His cheeks were freshly shaven and Keti plainly saw his color change.
Then he laughed softly. “I think I need you around, Keti, to keep me in my place.”
Her heart warmed, and she almost dared to hope again. It was foolish to be a grown woman capable of loving only this one difficult man. Martin hadn’t invited her to spend Christmas with him so that they could renew their old romance. But, yes, she had come with the hope of, well, renewing what had been.
And what if she was as he wanted her to be? She could imagine herself a nurse in his practice. But she couldn’t imagine not being at the helm of her own businesses.
She wished she was a better woman, but she felt miserably that she never could be. She would so much rather have money and things and certainty— much rather that than do and think the kinds of things that would make a positive difference in the world.
And when it came down to it, she always faced the fact that if he couldn’t love her as she was—well, he couldn’t really love her.
Keti had never seen Mrs. Collins cry, and this Christmas was no different. “I am so thankful,” she said repeatedly, “for the four children and three grandchildren I have.” Bridget and her husband had two children, in addition to the orphaned Tiffany, who was four years old tonight. “I’m also thankful for you, Keti. My bonus daughter.”
Keti was touched. And she believed that Mrs. Collins actually felt what she said, actually believed it; she was grateful for her lot in life. It was no wonder, Keti thought, that Martin had turned into such a good person when he’d been raised by such a woman.
The whole family walked to midnight mass, Martin carrying Tiffany, who was sound asleep in her red velvet dress, white tights and navy coat.
Keti couldn’t help smiling as Bridget’s two daughters whispered in the row behind Keti and Martin and snickered over the priest’s unusually high voice. Bridget cast them a furious look, but that did nothing to settle them down.
Impulsively, as she sang, “Silent night, holy night…” Keti touched Martin’s arm. Little Tiffany lay asleep on the pew between him and his mother.
He took Keti’s hand, and his fingers interlaced with hers and squeezed, and he did not release her.
“Holy infant, so tender and mild…”
His baritone was strong and tuneful beside her alto. At the kiss of peace, Martin embraced her and looked into her blue eyes with his warm brown ones. “Merry Christmas, Keti.”
Oh, God, she thought. If I could only stop loving him.
Bridget’s girls and Tiffany went to sleep in Bridget’s old room. Keti would sleep in the room that she and Amy had once shared, directly across the hall from Martin’s on the second floor.
She was dressed for bed in soft blue flannel pajamas decorated with white snowflakes when there came a knock at her door. Expecting Mrs. Collins with a last offer of extra blankets, Keti went to the door and opened it.
Martin stood there with a small box wrapped in red paper and adorned with a gold ribbon. He held it out to her.
Keti gave a dry laugh. “I thought you didn’t get me anything.”
“I have never given you nothing for Christmas.”
“Actually, you have.” That first year they were lovers. But then he’d given her something so much better than a gift—himself. Now she would gladly trade whatever was in the package for some affection, for the smallest sign that he still loved her.
Well, maybe the gift was that sign.
She thought of her present to him, a recent novel, beneath the tree downstairs. Hardly intimate. Deliberately sibling-like, that gift was. She’d wanted it to be so.
Now she unwrapped the box and lifted the lid. She had to fold back red-and-gold tissue paper to see what lay within. A watch.
It was exquisite, Black Hills Gold in three colors. The cuff-style band was decorated with a design of hearts and leaves. The face was black, with gold filigree hands.
“Look inside,” Martin said.
She turned it and read the inscription on the smooth interior of the band: Bah! Humbug.
Keti tried not to frown, tried not to show the hurt she felt. There was teasing, and then there was mean teasing. Nonetheless, she understood. Martin still hoped for some change in her. “I’m not a Scrooge, Martin.”
“It was affectionately meant.” Then, he swore and pulled her into his arms. “Keti, I didn’t mean to hurt you. I wouldn’t hurt you for anything.”
“You hurt me all the time!” she exclaimed, unable to keep from saying so. “You always want me to be some other person, someone I’m not, some imagined person you create. And I’m so far from that it’s not even worth my trying to be better, by your rules.”
“I love you as you are,” he said fiercely, and she saw his eyes were on hers. “That’s what that watch means, Keti. I’m not laughing at you. I’m doing what you said, loving you.”
“Scrooge.”
His hands tipped back her head as he kissed her face. “I know why you do it, Keti.”
“Why I do what?”
“Why you live the way you do.”
“I don’t want to talk about this,” she said, struggling for self-control.
“We don’t have to. I’m just saying that I understand why you feel as you do about money. You’re scared. You’ve been poor, and you never want to be poor again. But the only true wealth in this world, Keti, is the people around you.”
“Will you stop? Just for five seconds, please stop trying to change me, and stop preaching. It’s not your most attractive habit.”
She saw him grapple with the fact that he had been preaching, as she’d said. He stopped, bent his head to hers and their lips touched.
They moved to the single bed, and Martin wrapped himself around her. Keti was safe, then. This was the only safe place. It seemed to her, for an instant, that if she could just be the woman he wanted her to be, she would always be safe.
The only trouble was, she wouldn’t be herself.
And now Keti was torn between the joy she felt in his arms and the sense that his love for her now was in no way linked to commitment. This was a love that acknowledged their differences and their different paths, a love that imposed a casualness on even this meeting.
And yet their mouths together produced the same desire.
Martin had a condom.
“I’m appalled,” she said, “that you’re prepared.”
“You’re the only one I make love with,” he said flatly. “Why wouldn’t I be ready?”
The words soothed her troubled spirit. You’re the only one I make love with.
Martin felt comfort in his own torn spirit once more as he entered her body, trying to understand her, hungry to be inside her every cell, to know her utterly. Wanting to be enough for Keti.
Enough.
That was always the thing with her. What was enough?
No love could ever be sufficient. Over the years he’d known her as an adult, he’d learned to face that fact. Keti loved money, and to her it was like air—an absolute essential. Not an ordinary amount of money, but an amount she believed would make her completely invulnerable.
And this financial success was having its effect, he knew, because he could see the signs that she had grown calloused.
The brothels.
With the starlight and moonlight and Christmas lights outside the window, Martin could see Keti’s pale hair, her smooth features. She was lovely.
He touched her lips and felt her writhe beneath him, trying to draw even closer, and the shudders of her orgasms, those multiple orgasms that seemed to go on forever, that brought him deeper into her, trying not to cry out himself. Letting go.
“Why can’t this be enough, Keti?”
Keti’s head snapped up. “Why can’t it be enough for you? I don’t notice you trying to see me more often, even as a friend. I don’t notice you asking me to marry you. Because I’m not enough.”
“That’s not true.”
She waited for an explanation, an elaboration.
None was offered.
Martin saw that she wasn’t going to change, even though his definition of love was that two people who loved each other would make each other better.
The way for Martin to become better, if he were to be with Keti, was to learn to tolerate the differences between them.
He didn’t know why it was so hard for him.
Or why he was so attracted to a woman whose values were so repellent.
She said softly, “I don’t see what it matters to you anyway. You don’t…Well, you don’t want to be with me in any permanent way.”
It was the second time tonight she’d said that. “I would, Keti.”
She seemed to hesitate—over what, he didn’t know. “Would, if what? If I was different?”
“I…” Words caught in his throat. “I can’t visualize it, with you as you are. But I want it.”
And he felt how tightly she clung to him, as if she were drowning and only he could keep her head above water.
Through that cloudy water, he imagined a disturbing illusion and he wondered if it was becoming real. Could it be that Keti was as she was and becoming more that way, greedier, more selfish, because he was as he was?
No. I make my choices. She makes hers. One doesn’t create the other.
But if all people were connected, couldn’t it be true that his withholding love and commitment from her worked as a catalyst and made her less loving, in turn?
Christmas Day, the same year
“Keti!” Aunt Marlene took her great-niece in her arms and kissed her. “How beautiful you look.”
“You, too,” Keti said truthfully. May I age that well, she thought.
But fresh from Martin’s arms, now only hours away from the memory of his touch, she was also thinking that Marlene looked harder than she, Keti, remembered.
“And Martin,” Marlene said, embracing him next. “Bounty’s physician looks so well.”
“Thank you.” His smile was quiet but unreserved.
The Collinses were gushing over Marlene, and Peggy took her white fur coat to hang up, exclaiming, “Isn’t this beautiful?”
Marlene had brought gifts for everyone. For Bridget’s daughters and for Tiffany there were Barbie dolls and a Barbie Dream House and a pink Corvette. For Martin’s brothers, ski sweaters from Norway—and the same for Martin and his father. And so on. Much more expensive gifts than Keti had brought, but Keti wasn’t comfortable making such a big splash. It was simply unnecessary. She and Marlene sat together on the couch in the living room, admiring the Christmas tree and catching up on each other’s lives. When the others in the room were busy playing a game of Skittles, Marlene quietly asked Keti, “And what about Martin?”
“What about him?” Keti replied, just as quietly.
“Are you two still feuding?”
“We don’t feud. He just wants me to be different from how I am. From who I am,” she added, almost to herself.
“It’s dangerous,” Marlene told her, “to change yourself for a man.”
“Don’t you think I know that?” Keti hadn’t meant to snap. “Anyhow, I couldn’t if I wanted to. So that’s that.”
And then she showed Marlene the watch that Martin had given her the night before.
When she read the inscription inside, Marlene laughed, then squeezed her great-niece’s hand. “Don’t worry, Keti. I love you. And so, I suspect, does he.”
So he says, Keti thought, smiling ruefully as she clasped the watch back on her wrist.
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