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Chapter One
Christopher
WhenUncleTimcancelledthe annual Christmas gathering held at his house, I planned to stay at my place far away from my hometown, drink eggnog in abundance, watch Christmas movies, and call it good.
The call from my mother letting me know she was taking over the hosting duties caught me off guard. We never hosted. It was how I was able to avoid returning to my hometown since leaving for college a number of years ago. Now, here I was traveling back to my hometown—the one I swore I would never go back to.
I tried not to be pissed at Uncle Tim. He had been hosting the major holidays for most of my life. He had a huge, centrally located house. It made sense to do all family celebrations there. But this year he wanted to go on a cruise, which threw a wrench in my plans and my ability to avoid the unpleasantness of being home. But I needed to respect his need for a vacation.
Even if it meant I had to reopen old wounds.
Nicholas.
Why couldn’t I just let him go? I wanted him out of my mind, out of my heart. But alas, that wasn’t the way it worked. The vision of him was burned in my mind, and no amount of time away seemed to dull it.
I took one last look around the hotel room to make sure I hadn’t forgotten anything and grabbed my bag. I was only fifteen minutes from my family home, but I wasn’t ready to go all the way there last night. Shit. I wasn’t ready now, but my parents were expecting me not only as company, but to help. They had invited the entire family to spend the week with them.
After sliding my key in the check-out box, I turned the car on and grabbed the scraper to clear off the windshield, which had been covered with ice and snow overnight. One nice thing about living in the city was my parking garage. I couldn’t remember the last time I even had to warm up the car.
“Hey, Mom,” I answered my buzzing phone.
“Don’t hey me, I’m not a horse.” She giggled over the phone. She had been telling that “joke” since I’d entered elementary school and it had never been funny to anyone but her. She thought it was hilarious.
“Hello, Mom. How are you?” I threw the scraper on the floor of the front seat and climbed inside.
“I’ll be better when you’re here. Your Aunt Kate forgot to mention she was bringing her new boyfriend and his three granddaughters. I have no presents for them, no toddler type foods, and none of that special laundry soap you use with kids’ clothes.”
The sound of a dog barking echoed over the phone. She was outside, hiding from the family. I’d put money on them not even knowing she was upset. It was her way.
“I’m only fifteen minutes from the superstore. I can stop and get things. How old are they?” It was easier than going home and seeing Nicholas’ old house and wondering where he was and why he never returned a single call or letter.
“Two and a half.”
“And the other two?”
“They’re all two and a half. Triplets.”
I was going to be in a house for a week where there were triplet toddlers? I loved kids as much as the next guy, but damn. It was going to be a long week.
“Do they need places to sleep?” I could see them running around while everyone slept. But did kids that age sleep in cribs? I didn’t even know.
“No, but maybe get one of those alarms you put on a door so when it is open it buzzes, so we don’t need to worry in the middle of the night?” She was on the same page I was, only with actual facts to make her page better.
I made the drive to the store, which was away from my mom’s. It was a fun distraction to think of different present ideas for a three year old, or in this case three of them. My aunt had always been one to jump in with both feet, and it sounded like this time she did a cannon ball in. But who was I to judge? She always followed her happy-ever-after.
Maybe if I had been more like her, I’d have followed mine ten years ago. Maybe if Nicholas knew that I loved him, that he was more than just my best friend, that I’d have done anything for him—maybe then he would’ve at least told me where he was going instead of going poof in the night.
His parents had rattled off a story about how going to boarding school when he’d turned sixteen had always been the plan. And maybe it had, but going on your exact birthday? That was peculiar at best. There was also the fact that my closest friend, the one I spent most of my waking hours with for years, never bothered to mention it to me.
His leaving crushed me, but boarding school wasn’t forever, right? He’d come home for vacations, breaks, or holidays. Only he didn’t. They went to see him. At one point I even thought they were keeping a secret from me and that he wasn’t at school, that something bad happened to him. That was when I got my one and only communication with him in the form of a handwritten letter:
Sorry I didn’t tell you. It was better this way. ~Nicholas
That was it, the entire letter. No return address. Every letter I sent back to him had to go through his parents. He replied to none of them. Not a single one. At first I dropped one off everyday. Then it was a few times a week. At college I still sent some back to them, in hopes that they would eventually get through whatever walls Nicholas had surrounded himself with.
But nothing ever came of it.
They were not sappy “come back to me” type letters. They were more a diary, letting him know how my day was, like I would’ve if he was still around. If I failed a test, I told him. If I burnt my first attempt at a meatloaf, it was on the page. It was pathetic. I was pathetic. Harboring a crush for my friend who I hadn’t seen in nearly seven years was insanity. Objectively I knew this.
