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No one could fault Camille for her attention to design. The décor of the living room was modern enough in its aesthetic, meaning that everything was a soft white with accents of blue, but it still managed to feel comfortable, even homey. The rug was silk and had an intricate pattern that wove blues and purples in and out of the main beige background. It looked expensive because it was expensive—imported from India, where old saris were reworked and then woven into the patterns. Camille and Audrey had spoken for a good hour about the rug at Easter last year, right after the decorator had finished the room. The tree was in an alcove, tucked into their giant front windows. It glittered with silver and gold accents, all the decorations matching in a way that made me think Camille had hired her decorator to come in and make the place festive. There were absolutely no personal touches to any of it. The room could have found its way onto the pages of any design magazine in Canada, it was that well put together. Even her presents were professionally wrapped with beautiful paper and massive bows. The few that Rob and I had contributed, hastily dressed by me and even more generic in thought, stood out like awkward second cousins at a family reunion.
“Rob,” Camille said, laying her hand on his shoulder, “you do the honors. It’s your year to be Santa. Oh, I almost forgot, the stockings. They were too heavy to hang from the fireplace proper. Let me get them, we’ll start with those first.”
Rob left with his mother to help her carry the stockings, and his dad was busy with the fireplace. The room descended into that uncomfortable silence that defined these family occasions. Stephen and Audrey were speaking in hushed, happy tones to one another, and I sat watching my foot bounce up and down, trying to figure out how to tell my sister that she had to make a big deal of her pregnancy announcement to make up for me treating Rob so poorly. When I looked up, Arthur was standing beside the long couch, looking at the fire, which was perfect. He had such a kind smile, and he looked so content. Perhaps I was too hard on all of them. I set the champagne flute down on a coaster, half finished.
“There’s the perfect amount of snow this year,” he said. “Good for skiing but not so much it halts the entire city.”
“Have you been out to Collingwood much? I’m sorry, I have no idea if ski season has started.”
“Technically it started at the beginning of December. But we’re not much of a ski family until the real cold sets in after the holidays. Camille and I are going to spend three weeks at the condo in January. I’ve taken something commonly known as aholiday.
“To be honest,” he continued, his eyes sparkling a little, “I’ve been contemplating retiring. I want to travel less for work and more for pleasure. I’ve only got so many more years to live.”
“Dad,” Stephen interjected, “you’d be bored in an instant if you retired now. I mean, the Halsberg case alone.”
“Halsberg is something for us to sink our teeth into. I wish we could be more forthcoming about the details, but still, I’m ready.”
I wondered if I could spend my entire adult life being this polite. Why couldn’t Arthur spill the juicy details about the Halsberg case? It had been all over the news—a high profile stockbroker-turned-CEO had been taken down for insider trading and inappropriate corporate behavior, and every time we turned the television to the local news, Arthur was on the screen.
Quiet descended upon the room again. Where were these stockings? In the deepest, darkest, most remote part of the house? How heavy could they possibly be?
“When I was growing up in New Brunswick,” Arthur said, “there was this storm on Christmas Eve. My father worked as a logger, and we were afraid the weather would trap him at camp. My mother, she was a worrier, paced up and down for days, bouncing my youngest brother—I was one of nine, did you know that?” He looked at me and I shook my head. “My father got home just as the weather turned for the worst. Two days later, after we’d had dinner, after we had settled down from the excitement of the holiday, my grandfather opened the door to try to dig us out and the snow stood well over his head. That was one of the happiest Christmases of my life. We were inside, all of us together. My grandmother was still alive—she only made it to the next February. And we had precious little, nothing like what Camille organized for my two spoiled boys growing up.”
“Hey!” Stephen protested. “We’re grateful, not spoiled.”
If we’d had to wait this long to open presents at my mother’s house, there would have been a complete uproar. Presents were the first order of the day on Christmas morning. We had no civilized breakfast; there was coffee, tea, and the crush of everyone scrambling to be the first under the tree to get at their goods.
Arthur continued, “My mother, barely five feet tall, cooked a giant batch of pancakes smothered in apple butter. I had no idea that Christmases like the ones Camille puts together were even something that happened.”
“Dad, what was your crazy uncle’s name, you know, the one who snowshoed from one end of the town to the other during that storm to make sure the mail got delivered?” Stephen asked. “The one who eventually died in a snowbank, years later?”
“Richie.”
“Right.” Stephen laughed. “He was a batty old drunk. He’d show up to our Boxing Day lunch already plastered and Mom would pitch a fit.”
Audrey giggled, a little tweet. She deferred completely to Stephen. Until recently, I had been disdainful of Audrey, of her completely backward approach to modern feminism—getting the man, keeping the man, the ring, the whole unbearably archaic aspect of her personality. These days it was plain to see that she was desperately in love and would have done anything to keep her relationship moving forward. As much as I would have liked to, I couldn’t fault her for that. She had a will that I admired and respected, especially because the idea of throwing yourself headlong into marriage and motherhood before thirty-five terrified me.
Audrey, however, seemed happy. No, she didn’tseemhappy, shewashappy, to her core, in that aching, finally belonging sense so many girls my age demonstrated at their weddings or their baby showers. There wasn’t something wrong with them, but maybe there was something wrong with me. Or maybe we were all simply different and that was okay too. I made a promise to myself to be kinder to both Stephen and Audrey, if only in my mind.
Like Beth with Raj, Audrey made a good partner for Stephen. She was a Camille in training, open to the idea of giving up her consulting job, raising her kids, perhaps starting a mat-leave business that would be all the rage, and never questioning her next steps. All her steps had been taken. Maybe there would be a couple more babies, maybe her business would fail, maybe Stephen would have an affair—who could know what the future would hold? But I was willing to bet that she would be the one standing at the finish line.
Arthur had begun another story about his mother, about how she had come over from England with his father to escape a life in the Birmingham factories. “They wanted wide-open space. Never understood why I left New Brunswick to come to school in Toronto. They never liked the city.”
The ring felt heavy on my finger, reminding me that what Rob offered was a partnership, but the gnawing nature of its permanence weighed upon me. I wanted to fit in. I wanted to feel like a part of this, to become as natural in this environment as Audrey was. Still, a nagging thought echoed in my mind: What on earth would I talk to Rob about for the next forty years? We loved each other, there was that, but we had precious little in common. He saw that as a positive, said it gave us each room to be ourselves without any pressure to be the kind of couple that did everything together.
“I’d hate that,” he’d said one afternoon when we were walking around downtown. We’d run into a co-worker of his who was married to an assistant in their department. They spent every lunch hour together, traveled to and from work together, and had never spent a night apart since they had first gotten together after a drunken mess of a cruise around Toronto Harbour that one of their biggest clients had paid for as a thank you for making him an obnoxious pile of money. “To be smothered by someone you see every day in every aspect of your life? I love that you’re so different from me. We’ll be able to complement each other our entire lives.”
In my life, Garrett stuck out like an endangered species, the very last leatherback sea turtle. He was the person with whom I could talk naturally and intensely about the things that mattered to me: making films and documentaries, and how much I wanted to do that with the rest of my life. Garrett would often start sentences with, “When you’re an award-winning filmmaker, Kelly,” or “When you leave us all after selling your treatment to someone in Hollywood for millions …” And even though I knew he was bolstering my confidence, he knew what I wanted out of life: to become an outlet for people to tell their stories.
As much as Rob wanted to be there for me, and as much as he believed that he was, there was a giant, gaping hole in our relationship. Rob didn’t read books or even really like movies beyond their ability to inform him about the markets or entertain him on a rainy afternoon. He never read in bed and skipped right past the arts section to move on to theFinancial Times. I was constantly bringing home dubs of great documentaries and trying to get him to come with me to Hot Docs when I had tickets from work, but he always begged off. “You’ll have more fun if you take Meghan or Beth. Or call Tanya, she’d love to go.”
I didn’t know if the pure act of being together could sustain us in a lifetime of being forever tied to one another by metal bands around our left-hand ring fingers.
Audrey rested her head on Stephen’s shoulder and closed her eyes. Rob and Camille returned with their arms filled with expensive-looking stockings that were stuffed so full it was a wonder their contents didn’t spill out onto the floor. We spent the next forty-five minutes cooing appropriately over one another’s gifts. The opulence of the packages and what was inside them was not lost on me—big, luxurious packages expertly wrapped by the elves at Holt Renfrew, boxes that contained far too much tissue paper and were filled with exquisite objects made out of cashmere. When I said thank you, it was genuine. Camille’s kindness and inclusion were not lost on me. I knew it was hard for her too.
As I sat quietly on the couch, the room started to spin ever so slightly. I tried not to glance at my watch or fiddle too much with the ring, and I avoided my BlackBerry entirely. The minutes stretched out around me, and I felt like I was stuck between stops on a crowded subway.Deep breath. I closed my eyes.Deep breath.
“We should probably think about going,” Rob said. “You’ve got to prepare for your next meal.”
