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ChapterOne
Sadie
Who answers an ad to spend their Christmas holiday with a stranger?
Crazy people. That's who.
Essentially, that's me.I'm crazy.
Six weeks ago, I answered an ad I stumbled across to spend the holiday—Christmas—with a woman I don't know. A woman who, sadly, is as lonely as me. We started emailing. We spent two days writing back and forth before we were lured by overly compatible online conversation, into chatting on the phone. Conversations with her came easy. She's sweet. She's interesting. She reminds me ofMom.
The knot around my heart cinches a little tighter at the thought of Mom, but I force it away.
Mrs. Emerson talks about drinking wine on the patio and sitting around a fire. She talks about moonlit dinners and falling in love. She talks about her husband.
She talks about him as though he is still alive, but that can’t be right—I know it’s not right—because her ad soughtlonely soul for lonely soul this Christmas. It was because of this I figured she lost him recently. The love of her life. Her person. The other half of her soul…
Like Mom, she’s a romantic. I'm not. It’s not by choice, either. I've just never had that.Romance. It's never really been in the cards for me. If it were, I’d be a romantic. I’d be the biggest romantic there was.
Mom always said my romance would come when it was right. That I would find my love. The thing that made me happy.
Thepersonthat made me happy.
I'm not so sure. I've dated, but I've never felt for somebody what Mom felt for Dad. And if I don't feel that, then it's not worth it. Because it's not real. It's not love. It's not what Iwant. It's not what I promised myself I would hold out for.
So even though they're gone, I don't want to spend Christmas alone. The emails turned to calls and the calls turned to video chats.
I really like her, Mrs. Lucy Emerson. I like her so much that if she had a son, I think I’d agree to a life with him just to make her my mother-in-law. I know, I know, I’m crazy.
We’ve established this.
I’m also lonely. Terribly, painfully, deeply lonely.
It’s this crappy boat of lonely that we’ve found ourselves in that inspired her to make the ad that initiated our contact, established our friendship, and led me to now.
In the back seat of a car with a man I don’t know. In a snowstorm.
I’m an Arizona girl. A Yuma girl, in fact. We don’t do snow.
So, this blizzard has me clutching the door with one hand, and the seat next to me with the other. The weight of the falling snow is so thick, it swirls like a dream I can't see through. I can't escape.
I want to escape right about now. Like I said, I'm a Yuma girl. We do sun. We do sand dunes and wide-open blue skies. We don't do blizzards. We definitely don't do blizzards that we can’t see through. And we most certainly don't drive in these blizzards. But the man who picked me up from the airport—Mrs. Emerson's driver—hedoes blizzards. He does blizzards at a speed that has my nails digging into leather and my skin crawling over chilled bones.
I think I'm going to be sick.
These roads aren't for the faint of heart.
Mrs. Emerson misled me. She doesn't live in the beautiful scenery of Colorado. And she doesn't just have a Mountain View. She livesupthe mountain. Way up the mountain, all the way to the frickin top.
That's how it feels, anyway. We've been driving for forever, and he's not crawling the way he should be in this blizzard, on these slick roads. His body isn’t pitched forward, his eyes squinted in a foolish attempt to see through the hypnotizing swirl of white.
I've asked him to slow down twice. Because as lonely as I am, I happen to want to keep my life. I'm not ready to join Mom and Dad. Not yet. Although I'm lonely, and what brought me here is being so lonely that I couldn't imagine spending my Christmas holiday under the crushing weight of the silence that has become my life, I’m not ready to be dust, either.
I also couldn’t imagine spending this Holiday as I’d spent the last. At my best friend’s dinner table, surrounded by the joys of Christmas cheer and family—pretending the sympathetic gazes filled with pity didn’t bother me. That I didn’t notice them. That they didn’t make the loss so much more acute.
Pity could hurt a man with a shell of stone. I don’t have a shell of stone. I’m soft inside and out. Mom always said I was a bleeding heart with an ooey gooey center. So, when people look at me with pity, I don’t deflect it—can’t deflect it.It seeps right in through my skin to that gooey center, and it hurts so much. Because when everyone around you looks at you as though you're broken, you start to believe it as fact. When they look at you like you’ll never be happy again, the same applies. Because whentheydied, they took that happiness. They took that ability from you, and you won't ever get it back.You can’t.
It makes the hope that you can heal feel hopeless. And feeling that around a holiday table is brutal. So here I am in a car with a man I don't know. A man who has balls of steel, and I'm driving up a mountain to spend Christmas with a woman I've had six weeks of conversation with.
