— SIXTEEN —
IT wasn’t that she expected dating someone who lived on the other side of the country to be easy. But then it was, for weeks on either side of his trip home for the wedding, so when their first fight happened, over something kind of stupid, it took her by surprise.
Eric’s birthday was almost a month after the wedding, and in the weeks between, a steady stream of boxes had been delivered to their house, that Faith had ordered because she lived in the middle of nowhere and hated shopping in malls, anyway. Mostly presents and birthday party supplies. The vast majority of the time the couriers showed up during school hours, so Eric had no clue, but the few times he had been home and gotten curious about the increase in brown cardboard boxes—“Is that for me? Is it the robot dinosaur I saw a commercial for?”—she’d distracted him with Anne Minelli’s chocolate chip cookies.
She had a regular supply of them now, because Zander had tasked his friends with bringing them to her and Eric. Twice a week, one of the Minelli brothers, or a Foster substitute, would drop off a Tupperware container and a note from Zander. Always something funny and cute and very much PG-13, because it was a guarantee that the “delivery men” would read them.
Everyone had a price for doing a favour, clearly.
So the cookies worked to keep Eric from peeking at the boxes before she could hide them. And Faith kept a checklist in her office of everything she’d ordered, and when the last box arrived, she breathed a sigh of relief. Hiding things from Eric was getting harder and harder.
A few days later, on a glorious, unexpectedly warm day, when she walked to get Eric because it was just that lovely outside, they returned home to find two more boxes stacked against the front door.
“Can I help you open them?” Eric asked hopefully.
She wracked her brain.
“Uhmmm…” She looked at the two packages, then picked them up and inspected the return addresses. The first was definitely for her—lingerie, so he didn’t need to open that one. The second was from a bigger online store, and she was pretty sure it was books she’d ordered a while back. They weren’t presents, he could open that one. “Take the big brown box, sweetie. This one is mine.”
She jogged upstairs and stashed the itty bitty silk scrap of nothing in her bedroom closet.
As she headed back to the kitchen, she heard Eric grunting in determination. His little fingers scrabbling at the tape, then cardboard ripping.
Then a gasp, and a laugh of disbelief. “Skates? No way!”
What?
He repeated the words, this time shrieking them loudly. Yep, he definitely said skates. As in, okay on a cute pair of pyjamas she’d bought him for his birthday, but not so much actually on his feet, what with being blades and causing head injuries and so forth.
Faith skidded to a stop next to the table, where Eric was jamming a shiny black winter-sports helmet on his head. He shook his whole arm, index finger extended, at a pair of black and white hockey skates on the table.
Skates.
“You got me hockey stuff?” His mouth hung open in disbelief.
That made two of them that couldn’t quite believe what was happening.
“This…wasn’t me.” Her mouth dry, she reached past him and grabbed the packing invoice. At the top in big block letters it read GIFT RECEIPT and below that was a message.
Eric bumped into her arm and his little, happy voice read it out loud over her shoulder as she took it in.
Happy birthday, bud. I’m sorry I’m not there. We’ll use these at Christmas.
Zander
Oh, no. No, no, no.
“Can we call him, Mom? This is freaking awesome.”
Awesome? When did her kid start talking like a teenager? Maybe around the same time he somehow wiggled a secret desire to play hockey into a conversation with her boyfriend.
Yeah, she’d be calling Zander all right. “I think he’s probably still at work, baby.” She glanced at the clock. Four o’clock in Ontario meant it was two in the afternoon out in Alberta. “I’ll send him a thank you note on my phone, and maybe we can video chat later.”
She sagged back against the kitchen counter, letting him play with the world’s greatest gifts because there was no point closing the barn doors now that the horses had fled and joined the Calgary Flames.
Or something.
Fingers shaking, she typed out a text to Zander. Skates?
His reply was immediate. They arrived?
She growled and stalked to the craft room for some privacy. She tapped his name, then the phone icon. If he could respond to a text, he could talk on the phone. Hopefully.
He answered on the first ring. “Uh oh.”
“What?”
“You’re calling me instead of texting. Were the skates a bad idea?”
“Yes!” She took a deep breath and lowered her voice. “Zander, why didn’t you ask me first?”
Stunned silence was the only response. She tried to picture his face. Was he annoyed she’d called him during the day and yelled right off the bat? That would be fair. She was overreacting. She couldn’t help it, though.
“Well…” He sighed. “Okay, in hindsight I can see how I may have overstepped. But they’re skates, Faith. Every boy needs a pair of skates.”
“Not my boy.” God, she hated the defensive, brittle tone in her voice. She’d worked so hard to be chill, and it had all been an act. She wasn’t chill in the least when it came to recreational activities. She was uptight and overprotective, and she knew that it was about Greg’s death and entirely irrational. She also didn’t try very hard to curb herself. “Hockey isn’t safe.”
“I’m not going to argue with you, babe.”
“But you don’t agree.” Something creaked over the phone lines, and he sighed again. She echoed the sound. “I’m sorry. I interrupted you at work.”
“I’m just sitting in my office, it’s fine.” Another creak.
“What are you doing right now?” The tension ebbed from her voice and she closed her eyes. “Tell me what your day is like.”
“I thought you wanted to have a fight.”
“Never.”
“It would be our first one. Might be a fun milestone.”
She laughed quietly. “Tell me about your day.”
“We’re planning a week-long Arctic exercise for the end of the month, so I’m filling out forms for that. All computer stuff.”
“I have a hard time picturing you behind a desk.”
“Well, it’s an Army-green metal desk, and my feet are propped up on an ammo can that has my name stencilled on it, if that helps.”
“Are you in uniform?”
His chuckle rumbled through the phone. “Yes. Always.”
“That was a stupid question.”
“No such thing. I’m sorry I didn’t ask about the skates. It was just a spontaneous thing. I was online late the other night, and there was a countdown sale to midnight. It would have been like two in the morning for you, not that I even thought about calling. I just clicked on them because…”
“Every boy needs a pair of skates?” She repeated back his earlier, not incorrect, defense. “Is it a lost cause, me trying to keep him safe?”
“Babe, you can keep him safe while he learns to play hockey. Whether or not he plays on a team, that’s a different question. If he’s ever allowed to play contact, that kind of thing. But just learning to skate? That’s a rite of passage. And can be totally…”
“Boring?” She perked up at the thought of boring skating that might drum an interest in hockey out of her son forever.
“Safe. And still interesting.”
“Not too interesting.”
This time his laugh wasn’t restrained, or quiet. He guffawed hardcore, but it warmed her in a weird way. Like he was laughing at her in a way that meant he’d always be laughing with her.
“Lost cause?”
“Nothing boring about hockey, babe.”
“Shit. I was worried you’d say that.”
In the background, another man’s voice spoke. Zander muffled the phone for a second, then with a rustle he was back. “I gotta run. Can we continue our first fight later on?”
“Sure.” She grinned. “Eric wants to say thank you.”
“Video call?”
“Definitely.”
— —
Zander knew he’d messed up, not checking first, but it had been a genuine mistake and Faith was a reasonable woman.
It would be easier when he was back on the peninsula. He looked at the brown paper envelope on his desk. He had a career planning meeting in two weeks time, and he’d put off signing the discharge forms inside the envelope. He grabbed the envelope and slid out the sheaf of papers. A quick click on the pen he always carried in the breast pocket of his uniform, and he hovered his hand over the signature line.
“Are those your discharge papers, Warrant Officer?”
He looked up and nodded at Captain Diwali, his commanding officer, who’d silently appeared in the doorway of Zander’s office. “They are.”
“You still planning on signing them?”
“Yessir.” Nothing would stand in his way of getting out now. If he was formally asked not to, he’d give that due respect, because there was a way things were done in the forces, and when an officer asked you to wait, you waited. Officially. But this NCO had two important reasons back home to be done with the army. He’d given the crown two decades of service. That was enough.
“I’ll miss working with you. Anyway, that’s not why I stopped by. We’ve been contacted by 32 Brigade. They want to attach to our Arctic training.”
“Another week?”
Diwali nodded. “The week before.”
“As in, three weeks from now?” Zander cursed under his breath. “Who’s organizing troop lift?”
His captain just looked at him blandly.
Zander threw his hands in the air. “Come on.”
“They can do it.”
“But I need to tell them that. Got it.” He scowled at his boss, who retreated to a safe distance. Zander called after him, “You know, this is why I’m signing those papers!”
Diwali hollered something back, but Zander missed the exact words. He was already firing off emails to get an ORBAT, adjust accommodation and weapons requests, and have the safety plan approved. The whole time he was thinking about how he would describe what he was doing to Eric. Teach him that the ORBAT was the order of battle, a fancy word for the list of everyone involved in an operation.
It would have to wait until another day. Some days when he called, Eric was full of questions about the army. Tonight would be all hockey, all the time, and that was just fine by Zander.
Sure enough, as soon as he got home and called them, Eric grabbed the iPad from his mom and propped it up on the table so he could give Zander a very detailed tour of the skates and helmet. Then the skates again.
“They’re pretty nice, bud.”
Eric screwed up his face. “I don’t know how to skate, though.”
“I’ll teach you.”
“But you live a plane ride away.”
Zander nodded. “I know, but we’ll have time to learn at Christmas.” He held up his own skates which he’d pulled out of his storage locker. “See? These are mine, and I’ll bring them home.”
“You’ll definitely be home for Christmas?”
Zander hesitated. It was a knee-jerk reaction. Twenty years in the army, and he’d learned not to promise anything like that. In the background behind Eric, Faith looked up from what she’d been doing with Miriam in the kitchen.
Zander looked back and forth between her and Eric. “That’s the plan, yep. And you know where I’m going in a few weeks?”
“Where?”
“Pretty close to the North Pole.”
Instead of being impressed by Zander’s impending proximity to Santa Claus, Eric just blinked at the screen, his brow furrowed.
“What’s wrong?”
“How long are you going there?”
“Two weeks.”
“How are you getting there?”
“On a military plane.”
“Why can’t you drive?” With each question, Eric’s voice got smaller and smaller.
Faith pulled her eyebrows together and came closer. She leaned over Eric’s shoulder and looked right at Zander. “What’s going on?”
“Nothing.” Shit, no, not nothing. Zander took a deep breath. “I’m going on an exercise up north. I mentioned it earlier. There aren’t any roads that far north, bud.”
“Are there polar bears?”
Faith squeezed Eric’s shoulder. “I’m sure he’s not…” She’d trailed off when Zander tried to give her a look. “Okay, that’s enough questions about top-secret army stuff, right?”
She tried to make light of it. Eric was having none of that. He glared at Zander. “But you’re coming here after that, right? You’re coming back?”
Zander kept his voice calm, even though he had an impending sense of doom telling him it didn’t matter. “Yep, I’m coming back real soon.”
“My dad didn’t come back.” He said it matter-of-factly, but Zander could see Faith’s reaction over Eric’s shoulder. It cut her to the quick.
Zander didn’t have an easy, comforting comeback. There wasn’t one. He tried not to see Faith right there, tried not to feel the pain radiating off her so sharply he could actually feel it on the other side of the country, and he couldn’t just let the silence stretch. “He would have if he could, bud.”
He took a deep breath. Maybe Faith needed to hear that, too. He didn’t know anything about her ex, not really, but he knew something about the human spirit, and he’d lost people over the years due to combat and mental health-related problems. Whether it was an act of war or a tragic accident, every dying man’s last thought was for his family. His wife. His child.
“We’ll go skating, I promise. I love you, and I don’t want you thinking about me not being there, okay?”
Eric gave him a long, solemn look, then turned and glanced back at his mother. “Can I go play now?”
“Yeah, honey. You can for a few minutes. Then it’s story and bedtime, got it?” Faith took the iPad, the video on the screen swinging wildly as she told her mother she was going upstairs for a few minutes. Zander’s heart hammered in his chest. Had he said too much? Overstepped? Fuck, he hadn’t seen that coming.
“I’m sorry,” he said as soon as she was looking at him again.
She didn’t say anything.
“Something else we should have talked about first?”
She closed her eyes and shrugged her shoulders slightly. “Yeah. Maybe.”
Maybe? “I didn’t know what to say.”
Fatigue tightened her brow and tugged at the corners of her mouth. “What you said was fine. Just…Don’t make him promises you can’t keep.”
“I can keep them.”
“You told my son you love him,” she whispered, propping her forehead in her hand. She’d curled up on her bed. He wanted desperately to be there with her, to hold her and let her get it all out. “Do you have any idea what it will do to him if you flake?”
Yeah, he’d said that he loved the kid because he did. But someone wanted to take things slow and it sure as hell wasn’t him.
At least, it wasn’t him now. Shit. He couldn’t remember a time before Faith made him want things that weren’t on offer.
He couldn’t get mad at her. It wasn’t fair. But the burn in his gut didn’t feel fair, either. “You don’t think I know how serious it is to tell someone they’re loved? To tell a child that I’ll never leave them?”
“Do you?” She shrugged, a little gesture that said way too much. “You’re a great guy—”
“Stop saying that.” His voice was cold as ice now. He needed to hang up. They needed to try this again another day when their feelings weren’t so unexpectedly raw. He knew that, and yet he couldn’t stop. “My earliest memory is of my father calling my mother a bitch and walking out. I must have been three. And it happened more than once, until one day he didn’t come back for a while.”
She stared at him in obvious disbelief. “But your parents…”
He laughed, not caring if it sounded hard and unfeeling. “Yeah. My mother dragged him back, and I guess he realized it was easier with her than without. My entire life, I’ve known that my parents love each other, but there’s a part of them that hate each other, too. And we never talk about it, so welcome to my dirty little secret.”
“No,” she whispered. “That’s not true. They’re so happy together.”
He clenched his jaw. “You’ve met them once, Faith. Don’t tell me anything about their marriage.”
She pressed her lips together. Even across the wobbly Internet connection, he could tell her eyes were welling up with tears. “But you get to tell me about my son?”
“No, babe. I was trying to tell you about me. Not Eric. Me. That I’m going to be there for him, no matter what. But you don’t believe that, do you?”
“I said I don’t know.”
“That’s not what you said. You questioned my word.”
“Okay, I don’t know what I meant. I’m…” Tears were flooding her cheeks now and in the background he heard her bedroom door open. Eric asked if she was okay, and she waved him over.
Shit, shit, shit.
He felt impotent to fix his blundering.
“Zander, I gotta go,” she whispered. Her fingers reached for the screen, and he reached out too, wanting to touch her if only through glass and fiberoptic connection, but instead of touching his video image, she disconnected the call.
It took all his willpower to not throw his phone across the room.