SaraBeth tossed an envelope onto the bed.
“Have a nice day.” She turned and slouched out.
Seamus eyed the blue envelope suspiciously. Amber had written his name in full, in childish writing with a heart over the i. He reached for it slowly and tore it open. The card was a generic photo of a bunch of blue flowers with Thinking of you in gold script across the top.
He opened the card and read the childish inscription.
“Hey, shithead—don’t forget who your real friends are. Love you. Amber.”
A small foil package fell from the card to the floor. He bent over and picked it up, pressing it between his fingers, feeling the contents. He tossed it onto the top of the trash in the can beside his bed, and stared at it intently as he sat back and started crying again.
CHAPTER 36
NICOLA LAY ON HER BED in the middle of her new bedroom. She looked to the right, and then to the left. She’d never had so much space around her bed. The walls were so far away. She gazed at the gray sky outside the huge three-panel window. She wondered if it would rain.
“Dear Santa,” she said quietly. “I’d like it to rain for Christmas.”
She felt a gust of warm air as the central heat kicked back in, and collapsed into her bedding. She looked at the pristine flat white ceiling of the apartment. She hadn’t realized how much she hated the stale gray popcorn ceiling at the old place. Glancing at her phone, she realized she’d been lying there for nearly forty-five minutes. The Rolling Stones record she’d put on before she came into her bedroom had ended a while back, but she couldn’t be bothered getting up to flip it over. Kara and Billy had decided at the last minute that they just couldn’t be without a Christmas tree on Christmas Eve. They’d been gone since lunchtime, and it was about to start getting dark.
Forcing herself off the bed, Nicola let her feet sink into the soft dark-gray carpet. Every time she touched the carpet, she told herself that it alone justified the apartment’s $3,200 monthly price tag—a price she hadn’t been able to bring herself to tell her mother. She walked slowly into the kitchen and pulled a bunch of finger-food packages out of the freezer. She turned the oven on and pulled out her phone just as the door opened and Billy’s ass entered the room first, followed by the rest of him, carrying the trunk of a rather long but spindly tree, the end of which was being carried by Kara in a floor-length red North Face puffer, a scarf, and a matching wool cap. It was sixty-five degrees out.
“Looks like it’s gonna be a very Charlie Brown Christmas,” Nicola quipped as Billy and Kara leaned the forlorn tree up against the bare wall near the television.
“It was the last tree in the lot; we felt sorry for it,” Kara said, rubbing her shoulders for warmth.
“Ignore her, K,” Billy said. “Let’s go back and get the rest of the stuff from the car.”
And they were gone again.
Nicola walked over to the record player and flipped the record. She dropped the needle to her favorite song, and Mick Jagger started singing to Angie, asking when the clouds would disappear. She gazed around the nearly empty, vast open-plan living space, their old couch and dining table occupying opposite corners and nothing in between, and she suddenly felt the same chill that Kara was apparently battling.
She checked her phone again. Nothing. Two days after her only visit with Seamus in rehab in late October, he had inexplicably checked out and moved to a high-security rehab facility outside Seattle. This time he did not have access to a phone, and his seventy days had started all over again. She hadn’t heard from him in two months, but Bluey had kept her updated, and assured her that Seamus was taking it seriously “this time,” which worried her. The other day he had let slip that Seamus had earned pay phone privileges, and she wondered why he hadn’t called. She hated herself for feeling so needy, but dammit, it was Christmas Eve.
The door opened and Billy and Kara tumbled in, dumping armloads of shopping bags onto the carpet.
“Look, Nico,” Billy exclaimed proudly. “Nothing says Christmas like Home Depot and the ninety-nine-cent store.”
“Gurl, he basically forced me into the ninety-nine-cent store at gunpoint,” Kara joked. “The last thing I need is to get papped having a ghetto Christmas.”
Nicola shook her head. Maybe it had been a mistake to forgive Kara and continue to live with her. At least this time it was Nicola’s name on the lease. The increasing obsession with fame was getting tiresome. But hey, she chided herself, it’s Christmas. Let bygones be bygones.
“So what’s in the bags?” she asked with as much enthusiasm as she could muster.