A Christmas Caroline by Camilla Isley
Twenty-three
The End of It
My next step is less audacious, and by the third, my resolve wavers. Halfway through, I chicken out completely and divert toward the restrooms.
Inside, I would splash my face with fresh water or better even fill the sink and plunge my head underwater. But that would spoil the professional makeup I spent an hour at a salon having applied and also ruin my blowout. I settle for opening the tap and let the cold water flow over my wrists to cool down.
I stare in the mirror and whisper encouragements to myself, “Caroline, you can do this, now you’re going to march outside wearing your heart on your sleeve and admit how stupid you’ve been for letting things end the way they have between you two. Then you’ll beg Sam to take you back and put as many children in you as fast as he can. Easy peasy.”
I close the tap and dry my hands on a paper towel, nodding at my reflection. Pep talk received.
I apply a fresh layer of lip gloss and exit the room. I’m fumbling to close the clasp of my clutch, which I stuffed with too many things, and I’m not looking where I’m going until I bump into someone coming out of the men’s room.
“Oh, sorry, I wasn’t—” I say, but then I look up and meet Sam’s gorgeous brown eyes, which widen.
“Caroline?”
“Sam,” I squawk. Then clear my throat, trying to achieve a normal speaking tone, and I repeat, “Sam.” Only now it comes out too low. But third time’s the charm and I finally manage to speak in a level voice as I breathe, “Hi.”
“Hi, I haven’t seen you in…” he falters, because the natural segue would be I haven’t seen you in seven years, not since you refused to bear my children and I had to kick you to the curb. “…in forever,” he saves.
A flush creeps up my cheeks. Things worsen when his gaze roams the length of my body in a subtle once-over.
Under his scrutiny, I feel practically naked. I know he likes this dress, he picked it for me. And I also know how much he’d enjoy taking it off. The mental image makes my nipples go hard and since I’m not wearing a triple-padded nursing bra, I’m not sure if it’s showing. But judging from the way Sam’s gaze flicks lower for a second and his pupils dilate, it is showing.
Sam coughs, embarrassed. “Sorry,” he says. “I’ve been staring. You’re the last person I expected to see tonight.”
Does he mean… oh, downer, what the hell is my ex doing showing up on the most important night of my career? Or did he mean… I haven’t stopped thinking about you for a minute of the past seven years and you’ve never looked more beautiful even in my wildest dreams. Well, he must’ve stopped thinking about me in the two years he spent with Sylvie, but I can’t account for the other five.
And he’s probably thinking neither thing—
“Did you come with someone?” he asks, interrupting my mental digressions.
“No, you?”
“No.” He shrugs in that I’m-so-hot-and-I-don’t-even-know-it casual way of his that makes my knees go weak. “I’m working tonight. I designed the mosaic.”
Work thing. He’s alone. He must definitely be single.
“I know,” I say.
“You do?”
“Yeah, I snatched up an invite to this party sort of hoping we could talk…” His forehead creases with curiosity and surprise, and before I can lose my nerve, I add, “Is there somewhere more private we can go talk?”
“Sure, follow me.”
From the direction he takes, I know he’s guiding me toward the hotel spa. In our previous visit, he showed me every ambient where one of his designs was up.
A server passes next to us, and Sam grabs two flutes of champagne from his tray.
He offers me one. “Does this conversation require wine?”
I take a glass. “Definitely.”
After a quick sip, Sam shows me into the spa welcoming area. I remember it as an underwater castle with mermaids everywhere. But in this world, the walls portray a pond with a waterfall and two leopards drinking from the small lake.
“This is beautiful,” I say, staring around. “I’ve always known you could make your dream come true, no matter what your parents said.”
“Thank you.” Sam stares at me expectantly, as if to say, “But we’re not here to discuss my job or my parents, are we?”
An awkward silence stretches while I try to put my thoughts in a coherent order, but Sam surprises me by asking, “How have you been? I mean, I read about your company and saw the Forbes profile a few years back… it seems like you got everything you wanted, too…”
I look at him. “I have money, and I have a career, but it’s not all I ever wanted…”
Another awkward silence follows. But this time, I take a deep breath and talk first. “Sam, what I’m about to say might sound strange, but please hear me out…”
“Okay,” he says.
“A week ago, on Christmas Eve, I slipped on the ice and hit my head.”
“Are you okay?”
“Yeah, yeah, I’m fine now, just a bump.” Out of habit, I touch the spot at the back of my head. “But I spent Christmas night in a sort of medically induced coma.” Sam’s eyes goggle and I flutter my hands in a, “it’s nothing serious,” gesture. “And while I was in the coma, I had this weird dream, which felt more like I was sent to live in an alternative universe for a couple of months…”
Sam is staring at me with a skeptical but curious expression. “What was the dream about?”
I take a deep breath. “Well, in this other world, you and I had never split up. I’d stopped taking the pill that night you’d asked me and we’d gotten pregnant on the first try with our daughter Jo, Josephine. She is in the first grade now, and smart and pretty and so mature for her age. Will, our middle kid, likes to build bridges with books and he’s such a picky eater, making him eat is torture, but he’s also sweet and cuddly and still young enough that he lets us cover him with kisses whenever we want. And Bram, our youngest, he doesn’t do much yet, but the other day he called me Mommy for the first time and it was the biggest emotion of my life. And you, you’re an incredible dad. Present, and helpful. And we—we’re a great team, really…”
Sam is staring at me, slightly slack-jawed. But now that I’m on a roll, I can’t stop.
“And I’m not saying our life is all a bed of roses. I mean, our house is a mess most of the time, and we live two doors down from my parents. Can you believe that? And I don’t even mind because Mom is a great help with the kids. And our schedule is a nightmare and we have like three mortgages and three college funds to feed so we’re not swimming in cash… and life gets complicated sometimes, like when we try to have sex and my breasts randomly leak milk because I’m still breastfeeding, or when the kids interrupt us, which happens most of the times…”
Sam grins. “Wow, you’re really selling it hard to me now.”
I laugh. “I know I sound completely crazy, but my dream felt so real…”
I stare behind his shoulder, expecting a mermaid and still finding two leopards.
Sam turns to look and then back at me. “You keep staring at the wall. Is something bothering you?”
“No, yes, sorry, it’s just that in my dream this”—I gesture to the room—“was an ocean. The bamboo was a coral reef, the birds were fish and the leopards—”
“—a mermaid,” we say in chorus.
Sam stares at me for a long moment. “How do you know that? I’ve drawn an alternative design, but I never showed it to anyone.”
“I saw it in my dream. You’d chosen the ocean theme because Jo’s favorite fairy tale is The Little Mermaid and she’d convinced you to go with water over jungle. We came here on New Year’s Eve, we left the kids with a babysitter and spent the night in the magnolia suite.”
Sam’s eyebrows shoot high in his forehead. “That’s the room they’ve given me.” He looks astonished, like his head is spinning.
Next to the leopards, an indoor waterfall spurts out of the wall and ends in an artificial stream that runs for the length of the spa reception area. Sam now sits on the small stone wall that marks the riverbed and stares at me. “What are you saying that you saw an alternative future?”
I sit next to him. “I don’t know if I traveled to a parallel dimension, or had a medication-induced hallucination, or a dream. But I want to make what I saw my reality, Sam, letting you go has been the biggest mistake of my life. All these years I thought I was doing great on my own until I saw how happy we could be together. We were disgustingly happy, Sam, like a Hallmark movie level happy…”
“That’s vile,” he says, mock disgusted. “Please don’t tell me we hashtag our Instagram pics #blessed or I’m bailing right now.”
I can’t help but smile. “We don’t, but we could.”
Sam is joking along, but he’s not saying much otherwise. I fidget with my dress and stare away. My gaze comes to rest on the rocks making up the riverbed where the fake waterfall lands. And a sudden inspiration hits me. I search the round, flat pebbles for a mostly dry one and grab a white one.
I don’t have a pen, but I have lip gloss in my clutch. I use the pink brush to write yes on the stone.
Sam watches me, amused. “I don’t think you’re supposed to paint on hotel’s properties.”
I ignore the joke and look at him. “In my dream, you asked me if I wanted to try for another baby because you wanted another girl. And I said I wasn’t sure because, you know, another pregnancy, and we’d have to clear the attic to make room for the baby and start another college fund. So, I said that I’d think about it. And you got super excited, but I told you to cool down because it wasn’t a yes written in stone. But then my Christmas gift to you was a stone, engraved with a single word…”
“Yes?” Sam asks.
“Yes.” I give him the pebble. “What I’m trying to say is that I want a second chance, I want to marry you, and go live in the suburbs, and have three, four, ten kids, as many as you want. And if we can’t make them because you know we’re sort of coming late to the race with my biological ticking clock and everything we can adopt, or I can freeze my eggs…” I trail off, finally out of words.
Sam is turning around the pebble in his hands.
“This would be a good moment to say something,” I say. “I’m sort of dying over here.”
Sam looks at me, deadly serious, every hint of a joke gone from his face. “When I broke up with you, I thought being a dad was the most important thing in my life. What I didn’t realize was that wanting kids was only half of the equation… I also had to find a woman I wanted to have kids with, and after you, that never happened.”
I chuckle nervously. “When I woke up from the coma, I waited an entire day before I had the guts to look you up on Facebook. I was dreading finding out you’d married young and already produced a football team of offspring.”
“No.” Sam’s gaze stays intense. “You’re the only woman I ever wanted to start a family with.”
“If that’s true, why didn’t you reach out? You knew where I was.”
“At first, it took me a few years to come to that conclusion… I might appear all mature and composed now, but I was a mess for a while after the breakup, more so because it had been my decision…”
“And later?”
“Well, the realization that there were women I could be in a relationship with, love even, but that I didn’t want to marry or have kids with, convinced me I had been that kind of person for you… someone okay to date in college but not to start a family with…”
“Oh, Sam, no… back then, I prioritized the wrong things… you were right. We should’ve been young parents and not let work or money come between us. And it only took a coma and an otherworldly experience for me to realize what I had left behind… and in my dream, I realized that in all these years, I never stopped loving you. And I know this is a lot to take in that I’m sounding delirious, but we’ve wasted so much time, Sam, and I don’t want to waste another minute. Not if I can help it.”
“What are you proposing, Caroline? Marriage, a house in the suburbs, three to ten kids with relative college funds?” Sam stands up and offers me a hand. “Am I forgetting anything?”
I take his hand and let him pull me close. “An endless mess, and sleepless nights, and a few arguments along the way… and perhaps infrequent but very intense sex, and endless, disgusting happiness…”
“Endless, disgusting happiness… Yes, Charlie Bear.” He flips the stone in the air once. “Yes. Written in stone.”
With a cheeky smile, Sam throws the pebble back into the river and pulls me even closer, wrapping his arms around my lower back. His lips finally press onto mine just as the boom of fireworks explodes all over the city, signaling the beginning of a new year, of a new life…