Winter Storms (16 page)

Bart had been trained by the best drill instructors, men and women far tougher than the enemy; he had learned the finest combat techniques. His body was strong, his mind stronger. He would have found a way to survive.

Kelley tells Mitzi that the cancer is back, now in his brain, and that the only treatment Dr. Cherith can recommend is thirty more days of radiation.

Her bottom lip quivers and then her chin drops. He kisses the part in her hair. She smells vaguely of cigarettes. She's back at it. But under the circumstances, Kelley really can't blame her.

“I'm going to beat it,” he says.

Mitzi says something he doesn't hear. She's weeping.

“What's that?” he says. He rubs her shoulder.

“We,”
she says.

As with all things related to events around Bart, Kelley expects a lull to follow. It may take weeks or even months for the Pentagon to move on the intelligence they received from Private Mackie. But a scant week later, the Monday following Christmas Stroll weekend—which Kelley passed quietly while Mitzi and Isabelle tended to the guests; no parties or celebrations this year—the phone at the inn rings. It's four o'clock in the morning. Mitzi answers right away, as though she has been waiting up for the call, but she is trembling so badly, she hands the phone to Kelley.

Kelley clears his throat. “Hello?”

It's Major Dominito, calling from Washington, DC. Navy Seal Team 6 was deployed and the major reports that they have recovered all of the missing Marines, alive and dead.

The major asks Kelley if he is in a place where he can receive news about his son.

Kelley pauses before he answers. He's safe in bed with his wife. The inn is quiet; most of the Stroll guests checked out the day before. But if the major is calling to say that Bart is dead, then no—he is not in a place where he can receive that news. He will never be in a place where he can receive that news.

“Yes,” he whispers. He imagines the flower blooming or the squid sinking its tentacles into his brain. He will take this diagnosis, this cancer; he will take death.
But please,
he thinks,
let Bart live.

“Your son, Private Bartholomew James Quinn, was one of the lucky ones,” the major says. “He's alive.”

Kelley can't answer; he is crying too hard. This is, of course, unspeakably cruel to Mitzi, who is vibrating like a live wire next to him.

“He's alive,” Kelley says, and his voice cracks. Did she hear him? Did she
understand
him? “Our son is alive.”

Mitzi goes to wake Ava while Kelley calls Patrick, Kevin, and Margaret.

Bart is alive!

Thirty minutes later, Ava, Kevin, Isabelle, Genevieve, Mitzi, and Kelley are all gathered in Bart's bedroom, where the light has been on for twenty-three months, one week, and two days. They join hands and through his tears—they just won't stop—Kelley says a prayer.

Thank you, God.

 

I
t's the biggest news story of the year other than the election (including the election, if you ask Margaret), and it's one she reports on somberly, out of respect for the seventeen American families who each lost a soldier and a son. Inside, Margaret feels not joy but relief.
There but for the grace of God go I.

Bart Quinn is alive. The troops have to undergo a medical evaluation at Ramstein and then a ten-day debriefing. Even so, Bart should be home by Christmas Eve—in time for Kevin's wedding.

It's a Christmas miracle, sent especially for Kelley, who is sick again, sicker, Margaret suspects, than he's letting on. If everything goes according to plan, he will see his son on Christmas.

 

B
y anyone's standards, Mitzi is a Christmas person. But this year, she goes nuts, bonkers, off the reservation, completely and insanely all out in decorating for Jesus's birth.

It's not just for Bart, she says. It's for everybody celebrating Bart's return. The entire family! Plus, Kevin and Isabelle are getting married, and the Beaulieus are coming all the way from France!

Bart is in Germany, although they've all talked to him on the phone and done video chats. His cheekbone was broken, the skin punctured; he has bruises and bandages; but still, it is Bart, Ava's baby brother, and when the family sees him for the first time, they all blubber while Bart waits with no expression on his broken face. His head is shaved; all of the surviving soldiers have lice, scabies, ringworm, and dysentery. Bart has lost sixteen pounds, which is far less than most.

They aren't allowed to ask him any questions about what happened. Not yet. So mostly the conversations are Ava, Mitzi, and Kelley filling Bart in on all the family news since he's been gone. They do not, however, say anything about Mitzi's affair with George the Santa Claus and her lost year in Lenox, nor do they tell him about Kelley's cancer, although nearly the first thing he says is “Geez, Dad, you look worse than I do.”

Bart is due to arrive in Boston on December 22. Paddy, Jennifer, and the boys will pick him up and drive him to Nantucket. The Chamber of Commerce called the inn to see if they could organize a parade, give him a hero's welcome, but Kelley turned them down. He and Mitzi are united in their desire for privacy in regard to Bart's return. They just want him home—not only on Nantucket but inside the inn.

Mitzi announces that her Christmas theme this year is joy. Ava doesn't recall Mitzi having a Christmas theme in previous years but she understands how joy might be at the forefront of Mitzi's mind. Mitzi makes a Christmas playlist on her iPod that she plays on the inn-wide stereo system; it consists of twenty-five versions of “Joy to the World.” At first, Ava objects on principle, but actually, the renditions are so varied that the effect is quite soothing.
And heaven and nature sing!

Mitzi and Kelley venture out to Slosek's farm and buy a fourteen-foot-tall Douglas fir. The tree grazes the vaulted ceiling, and Kelley has to climb a ladder to secure the top to one of the exposed beams. Ava worries about her now-frail father on the ladder and so she volunteers to decorate the tree with Mitzi, a job that takes four hours and sees them drinking nearly six poinsettias (champagne with a splash of cranberry) apiece. They try to follow Jennifer's three cardinal tree-decorating rules:

In Mitzi's case, the showpiece ornaments are the handcrafted ones she received from her mother, who made an annual ornament for family and friends for over thirty years.
Mitzi then sets up her impressive nutcracker collection on the mantel amid greens and giant pinecones she ordered from Colorado. She co-opts the round mail table at the inn's entrance for her Byers' Choice carolers.

Let every heart prepare him room!
All this is pretty much as it has been in previous years, before Mitzi left with George, before Bart was a Marine, before, before, before.

But… there are a bunch of new ideas!

Mitzi painstakingly wraps each and every hardback book on the shelves in contrasting plaid paper. She bakes and decorates two gingerbread houses and uses them as bookends.

She hangs huge illuminated letters over the fireplace above the nutcrackers:
J-O-Y.

Ava smirks, thinking that the letters are for the deaf guests who haven't heard the playlist.

On her leaf-peeping trip this past fall with Kelley, Mitzi bought sap buckets, and she now plants baby evergreens in them and places them outside the front door, draped in white fairy lights, of course. Also on the porch is an artful display of a Radio Flyer sled hauling bundles wrapped in brown butcher paper and tied up with twine.

Ava and Mitzi study the porch tableau from the street. “I think it announces that this is a joyful Christmas house,” Mitzi says.

There can be no doubt about that. From the outside, the inn is a stunner. There is an enormous wreath on the front door illuminated by a spotlight and in every window, a smaller wreath dangling from burgundy velvet ribbons over a single lit candle.

“You've done a good job, Mitzi,” Ava says, squeezing her stepmother's arm.

“I'm nowhere close to finished,” Mitzi says.

Mitzi hangs a pair of antique skis in the hallway. She has replaced the hall rugs with candy-cane-striped runners, and one day when Ava comes home from school, she finds even her bedroom has been decorated. There is a wreath hanging from her scrolled walnut headboard, and her bed has been dressed up with a red flannel comforter and crisp white sheets with red piping. On her dresser is an arrangement of greens, pinecones, and holly, and next to that a fat white pillar candle that Ava recognizes as Mitzi's favorite scent, Fraser fir. Are all of the bedrooms like this? Ava has to check.

Yes! Kevin and Isabelle's former bedroom has been decked out with the Christmas linens and headboard wreath, as has Kelley and Mitzi's and… Bart's! (Ava can't believe Mitzi was brave enough to decorate Bart's room. Despite the fact that it
still
smells vaguely of pot smoke, it has been treated like a shrine.) But an even bigger surprise is that the room that used to be Genevieve's nursery has been transformed into a Christmas workshop. Mitzi bought a pine table and is using it as a wrapping station, but along with the predictable paper, bows, and tags are stuffed elves sitting on chairs and chilling on the windowsills. There's a new red brocade wingback chair and a matching footstool where another elf sits, staged so it looks like he's stringing a popcorn garland. And in the corner of the room is yet another Christmas tree, this one decorated with tiny musical instruments—a snare drum, a violin, a harp, a harmonica.

But no recorder, Ava notices.

When Ava calls Potter that evening, she says, “I feel like I'm living at the North Pole.” She explains the wrapped books and gingerbread houses, the antique skis and Santa's workshop. She has also noticed that the Christmas china is out, that there is mistletoe hanging in the kitchen, and that on the windowsill over the sink someone has arranged Scrabble tiles to read MERRY CHRISTMAS. By the back door is a forest-green stepladder on which Mitzi has secured all of the Christmas cards and pictures she has received so far.

“I can't wait to see it,” Potter says. “I could use a little holiday cheer.”

“Next week!” Ava says. She knows Potter's December has been anything but joyful. He's dealing with final exams, and his son, PJ, is spending the holiday with his mother and the British teaching assistant. They are traveling to Stratford-upon-Avon to celebrate a Shakespearean Christmas.

“In front of the Yule log?” Ava asks. “Why did Shakespeare never write a Christmas play?”

“He did.
Twelfth Night,
” Potter says glumly.

Ava loves Potter's erudition!

“I'm sorry I'm in such a funk,” Potter says. “I'll feel better the second I can hold you.”

When he says things like this, Ava melts. The first night
she spent with Potter—back in New York over Thanksgiving—
she confessed that she thought he was too good-looking for her. Oh, how he had laughed! He'd wiped tears from the corners of his eyes and said, “There isn't a man alive who is too good-looking for you, Ava. Not Clooney. Not Tatum Channing.”

Ava had grinned. “Channing Tatum.”

“Him either.” Potter had taken Ava's face in his hands and said, “I think you are the most beautiful, most captivating creature I have ever laid eyes on and I've thought that since I passed you running in Anguilla.”

“Stop,” she said.

He had kissed her deeply, then carried her off to bed.

She is taking things slowly with Potter. This is her new, adult self in action; she doesn't fall all the way in love immediately, as she's done in the past. She preserves her privacy, her personhood. But there's no denying she's besotted, and his feelings seem to match or exceed her own.

A week before Christmas, Ava admits to Shelby that she's officially seeing Potter. He's going to be her date for Kevin and Isabelle's wedding and not just because he has a talent for making Quinn family nuptials fun. He's staying through Christmas. At first, Potter felt bad about leaving Gibby alone but then Ava suggested Potter bring him up to Nantucket as well.
The more the merrier,
Ava said.
And when you get here, you'll see I mean that.
Potter agreed this was the ideal solution and he booked Gibby a room at the Castle, which is where George and Mary Rose are staying. And surprise, surprise! George is bringing over his 1931 Model A fire engine for the first time in three years, and this will be the vehicle that transports Kevin and Isabelle from the Siasconset Union Chapel to the inn, with George dressed as Santa Claus behind the wheel.

“It's a little scary,” Shelby says. “Your family's devotion to Christmas.”