“Are you needing her maybe too much?” he asks me, kind of hopefully. “Maybe let up on the needing just a little, so she’ll come back. She’s scared of snow. Maybe it’ll snow, and she’ll come back.”

I don’t tell him my mother has bought some snow boots. She’s ready.

“What are you going to do for Christmas?” I ask him.

“Oh, I’ll go to Natalie’s in the morning and watch her kids plow through their presents. And then I’ll probably go watch some golf. And I’ll call you and your mom.”

“That sounds nice, except for the golf,” I say. “At least you’ll be with Natalie and the children.”

“Yup,” he says. “Don’t pick on the golf channel. Golf on Christmas. Lots of fun there.”

It snows on Christmas Eve, which both my mom and Fritzie think is the most incredible thing to ever be orchestrated by the galaxy, and which both of them act like I somehow arranged.

“It’s like Christmas in a movie! Or in a book!” says Fritzie.

She and my mother go outside on the stoop and try to catch snowflakes on their tongues. Despite my heart feeling empty, I make hot chocolate as one is required to do on a snowy Christmas Eve, and we walk down the street, scuffing our feet in the snow and admiring the big fat flakes falling under the streetlights. I try to see this through the eyes of both Fritzie and my mom. Life can be difficult, but there are moments that are beyond anything you expected. Moments of almost piercing beauty. That’s what I’ve learned through the last years, isn’t it? Be grateful for the evening, and the snowfall, and the expressions on Fritzie’s face, for the warmth inside, and the tree. And send a thought to Patrick, who is fighting not only himself but also a dead woman. Maybe I should go in and challenge her to a duel. I think maybe I will look in the spell book for a potion that will banish her.

Fritzie, being crazy, naturally wants to walk backward down the middle of the street instead of forward, and she starts singing “Jingle Bells” at the top of her lungs, and then she wants to know if we can ring people’s doorbells and sing them Christmas carols when they answer, just like they do in movies. I say no, but my mother says, “Really, why not?”

We go to Lola’s house and sing to her and William Sullivan. It takes them forever to come to the door. We’ve nearly exhausted our repertoire, which only includes “Deck the Halls,” “Silent Night,” and “Jingle Bells.”

“Come in! Come in!” says Lola when she and William answer the door. They’re getting ready to head to Florida, she says. They always spend January and February where it’s warm.

“I don’t think carolers are supposed to come inside and bother people,” I say. “We just wanted to say Merry Christmas to you.”

“Oh, so sweet. And I’ll miss you while I’m gone,” she says. “Is everything okay?”

See? Such a small question—most people can sail right through answering a question like that. But there I am standing on her stoop trying to remember verse two of “Silent Night,” and I am with my mother who wants to cheat on my dad, and Patrick is holed up in his two-room prison with the ghost of Anneliese, and Fritzie is a lunatic and I love her, and all I want is to answer the question in some kind of positive, affirmative way. I would like to answer her that everything is great; really, I mean to do that, but the trouble is that my eyes fill with tears just then, without any warning. No one notices except Lola. My mother and William Sullivan are talking about their favorite Christmas carols, and Fritzie is picking off the berries on the wreath on their door and tossing them into the street.

“It’s going to be okay,” Lola says softly. “Come in. We’ll pretend I need to give you something. Which, now that I think of it, I actually do.”

And she takes me into her house, a house that used to be so lonely and sad until four years ago when she finally gave in and let herself fall in love with William Sullivan, a matchmaking project orchestrated by Blix and then completed by me.

“Listen, you,” she says and takes my hand. “I know it’s hard right now. Heavens, we’ve all gone through this kind of darkness, haven’t we? And we’ve come out of it. I trust in Blix’s predictions, honey, and she was firm on the point that you and Patrick belong together. Okay? Just remember that. She had something real. She knew what I needed, and she knew what you needed. So you’ve got to just hang tight.”

“Will you take me to Florida with you?” I ask her, only half kidding.

“Nope,” she says, “but what I will do is leave you my house key. Maybe at some point your mother would like to move over here. I think it’s going to be important for you and your Patrick to resume a real life. Moving back into the same bed could be a good start.”

“He won’t do it,” I say.

“I bet he will,” she says. “Don’t forget that I’ve seen that man make amazing changes in his life.”

“Well, not lately.”

“No, not lately. But let’s not give up on him, shall we? I’ve known Patrick for years, and if there’s anything I know for sure about him, it’s that he loves you very much. He feels safe with you.”

When I get back home and get Fritzie put to bed and my mother situated in front of her computer, I make cups of hot chocolate piled high with whipped cream, and I take them over to Patrick’s studio. I intend to say, “It’s Christmas Eve, let’s have sex!” or something equally jaunty and free.

But here’s the thing: I get to the studio door, and it takes me approximately fifty-four deep breaths and thirty-six self-talk reassurances before I can even bring myself to knock on the door. And why do I have to knock, anyway? That’s what my mind keeps demanding to know the answer to. Since when do two people who love each other find themselves having to tiptoe around?

When I finally do knock on the door, Patrick comes and opens it up. His face is drawn, but I can see the effort he’s making to arrange his expression into a smile. He invites me in, and we sit and sip our hot chocolate together on his futon. We are being so careful not to stray into the territory of bad feelings that it seems like we hardly know each other.

After I’ve been there for a few minutes, he gets up and goes into the other room and brings back a little box. He’s made me a wire necklace with a clear blue stone wrapped around and around in the wire. All I can think of when I look at it is that the poor sweet stone looks trapped by knots. My eyes fill up with tears, but I brush them aside quickly.

When I go to kiss him, it’s like kissing a stranger.

Neither one of us suggests having sex. I remember then that the spell book mentions that to get rid of a ghost, you need to put salt in the corners of every room. Maybe next time I’ll bring a sack of salt with me. Throw it around the whole damn place.

The next morning Fritzie gets up crazy early, as children all over the world are supposed to do, whether their caretakers are thrilled about it or not. I am so cheerful, I am in danger of going into Cheer Overload. Really, my cheeks actually hurt from so much fake holiday smiling.

My mother, who has made a career of creating life-enhancing Christmas holidays for children, pitches in by suggesting we play guessing games with Fritzie to keep her from insisting on opening her presents before Patrick rouses himself. I start a pot of coffee and put some cinnamon rolls and a breakfast casserole in the oven. By eight o’clock, when Fritzie can’t take it any longer, I let her zoom into his studio and jump on him. I can hear her screaming, “It’s Christmas, Patrick, it’s Christmas!”