“Can you drive me to... the nearest town?”
“Sure. That’d be Snow Falls, get in,” he mumbled. Anna weighed the potential dangers of getting in a car with someone who didn’t appear to be fully awake against the discomfort and loneliness of sleeping in the airport—and chose the former. She had to get out of this airport.
“No luggage?”
Anna held up her handbag and shook her head. “Traveling light.” She tried not to think of her lost suitcase, and all the expensive clothes and gifts inside, as the taxi maneuvered away from the airport and through the snowy night. What few cars there were drove slowly, like whales in a large pod moving toward the same goal. Anna felt her nerves begin to calm—until she heard her phone ringing in her handbag.
“Janey, I’m on fumes here,” she said—which was true; her phone battery was close to dead. But it wasn’t Janey; it was Nick.
“I’m about to leave for dinner without you. Have you made any progress on getting out of there?”
“Babe, I told you, I just need to get to a hotel, check in, and—”
“Ahotel? Don’t you know that if you leave the airport they take you off standby?”
Anna sighed. “There are no flights going out tonight to be on standbyfor—”
“And in the morning? What about those flights?”
“You want me to sleep at the airport?” Anna looked out the window—and saw a sign come into view: “Welcome to Snow Falls, Your Happy Holiday Town!”
“Mother doesn’t understand why you aren’t here—”
“Has she looked at the news? This storm is all across the eastern seaboard and apparently it’s just getting started.”
“Anna... are you catastrophizing?”
When they first met, it was one of the things she loved about Nick: that he was always trying to convince her that her problems weren’t really problems at all. But today—and a few times recently—it had felt instead like Nick wasn’t listening to her when she tried to tell him how she felt. Now he continued, in an oh-so-calm voice, “Surely there has to be a way for you to get a flight out of there rather than checking into a hotel. You just need to take a few deep breaths and think of a—”
He was cut off mid-sentence. Anna took her phone away from her ear and shook it. The battery had died.
The taxi driver was looking over his shoulder at her expectantly. “Here we are, Snow Falls,” he said. Anna could just make out rows of low brick buildings, all shops and restaurantsstrung with holiday lights, through the thickly falling snow. She paid the driver and stepped out of the taxi into knee-deep snow. She looked in horror at her brand-new, completely impractical shoes.
“Shoot—wait!” She had just realized that she couldn’t see a hotel anywhere, had no idea where she was—and couldn’t walk more than half a block in three feet of snow, wearing stilettos. But the taxi was already fishtailing on the slippery road as it moved away from her. She felt a surge of frustration with Nick and Janey. If they had stopped pestering her, she would have been able to focus on figuring out how to get herself to the hotel with all the other stranded passengers. Now she was lost.
She took in her surroundings as best she could in the snow. Holiday lights in varying shades of gold, green, and red twinkled at her through the snowflakes. All at once, a sense of peace stole over her. Her phone was dead, and she could no longer receive frantic calls from her boyfriend or her boss. She was lost, yes—but this town was adorable. It didn’t feel real, more like some sort of holiday fantasy world come to life. She had the sudden sense that anything was possible—even the happiest ending you could imagine. The one Anna had been longing for.True happiness. No pretending.
It had been a long while since Anna had experienced such lightness of spirit. She lifted her face up to meet the snow—then impulsively stuck out her tongue and felt a snowflake, crisp and cold, land and melt there. Its brief, sharp tang was reminiscent of her best childhood moments. She made a wish.For the happiest ending possible.
Just then, the door to a restaurant opened in front of her and voices spilled into the cold night air.
“It’s a big game tonight between two division rivals,” came the familiar voice of sportscaster Harry Neale.
“That’s right,” Bob Cole chimed in. “Here come the Leafs versus the Senators...”
Anna followed the sound, picking her way carefully across the slippery sidewalk until she reached the door to a sports bar called It’s the Most Wonderful Time for a Beer.
The place was busy, but one of the bartenders had seen her come in and waved her over to an empty seat in front of him at the bar. Anna plunked her elbows on the smooth walnut surface, letting the warmth in the room filter through her all the way to her feet in the ruined Manolos.
Shelves behind the bar were lined with bottles of peppermint schnapps, winter spiced rum, Irish cream—all the drinks Anna remembered being served at holiday cocktail parties in her childhood home in years gone by. On a screen above the bottles, the Toronto Maple Leafs and the Ottawa Senators were playing a hockey game. The patrons at the bar were clearly divided, half of them in blue-and-white Leafs regalia and half of them in Senators red and black. But all of them were smiling and chatting despite their competing team allegiances. Anna couldn’t help but smile to herself, thinking of how excited her dad used to get about Maple Leafs games. After their move from Toronto, she was happy in Denver, which quickly felt like home—but she had loved their Toronto visits, and knew he always had, too. Maple Leafs games had been a part of that.
As Anna watched the players passing the puck back and forth, she remembered suggesting to Nick that they try to attend a Leafs game as part of their holiday visit. Nick hadthought she was joking. “My perfect Anna at a hockey game,” he had said with a laugh—and then he had moved on to talking about something else, and she hadn’t had the chance to explain that her dad used to take her to hockey games all the time, and she was a fan.
As Anna settled in, brushing the snow off her blazer, Jonas Höglund scored on an assist from Mats Sundin. One of the bartenders, a tall, bespectacled man wearing a Leafs jersey, turned to her. “Mulled wine or hot apple cider is always on the house when the Leafs score.”
“Hot apple cider would be lovely. But could I please pay you for it?” As she pulled her wallet out of her handbag, the bartender held up his hands in good-natured protest.
“No way. It’s bad luck to take payment after the Leafs score.”
