12 Days 'til Christmas ✓

chapter twenty-two

“Fuck,” I hiss, pulling it out and cradling it. I need the shoebox, and I need the dustpan and brush. They’re both in the conservatory. I can find my way there in the dark, the blurry door visible in the weak light from the tree across the room, as long as I can navigate the floor. I don’t know where the glass is. This was a bad idea. I’m tired and blind and I’m not thinking straight, but I can’t stop now else I’ll feel even worse, because the only thing I can do now is to scoop up the remains.

I make it to the kitchen after a couple of bumps, bashing my thigh on the sofa and stubbing my toe on the coffee table, and the light is blinding but necessary when I find the switch. It’s a freezer in here, but not as cold as it is in the conservatory, which has absorbed every negative degree from the snow outside. It’s more like tight, compacted ice now, and my bare feet freeze the moment they hit the tile floor. The minute that it takes me to find what I’m looking for is agonising, my toes so cold that it feels like they’re burning.

Back in the sitting room, I tread carefully until I find the spot where I fell and I drop to my knees, squinting as the lights on the tree fade and come back again, enough to glint off the glass on the floor. Reaching out with the dustpan and brush, I try to sweep as much of it as possible but I misjudge the distance and a long shard slices along the side of my palm, a cry escaping me when the skin splits and I feel hot blood spill out of the wound.

“Beth?” Casper’s voice travels down the stairs and then his footsteps get faster and louder when he sees me. “Jesus, Beth, what the hell are you doing?”

He’s by my side in a flash, hands on my shoulders pulling me up. He hits the light switch and I can see him a little more clearly, though my unaided vision is akin to driving in the rain without the wipers; I can’t read the depths of his irises, but I can make out that he’s frowning.

“What have you done to yourself?” He grabs my hand and I wince when he inadvertently touches my cut. I forgot about the one in my palm, that pain erased by my determination – and the newer, deeper slice. “Fuck, Beth, this looks bad.”

“It looks worse than it is,” I say. “Can you help me sweep up the glass? I can’t see it all.”

“What are you even doing down here? You went to bed ages ago. What’s all this?” He looks down at the mess on the floor, the shattered glass and a few drops of blood that’ll wipe right off the wood. He’s quiet for a long time, both of his hands putting pressure on mine, until he seems to put two and two together and he sighs. “Oh, Beth.”

I’ve never heard him use my actual name so much in so short a space of time. It digs under my skin like a splinter, the nasty little truth that I’ve done something stupid and pathetic and I’ve worried him, and he probably thinks I’m crazy now. I must look crazy, madly sweeping up what’s left of a bauble I smashed, the sister of a bauble that I wept over not twelve hours ago.

It’s only now that sense starts to sink in, that I feel like I’m waking up properly, stepping out of the fugue state that has dictated me for the past half an hour. I see the destruction I’ve created and I feel the sharp pain radiating from the side of my hand, the dull throb coming from my palm; I feel rather than hear the low, mournful cry that comes out of me.

“I’ll sweep that up once you’re fixed up,” he says. His hands are bloody from holding mine but he doesn’t let go, leading me upstairs. The bathroom is too cold and too bright when he pulls the string for the ceiling light, and my undamaged hand flies to shade my weak eyes.

Casper pulls me over to the sink, where he washes blood off my hand, the cold water a shock to my system that has me seething. Planting me on the edge of the bath, my hand raised, he roots through my cabinet for a tube of antiseptic cream and a roll of plaster tape. He works quickly and quietly, even when he has to use a pair of nail clippers to cut the plaster to size, one to cover the small puncture in my palm and another to cover the three-inch gash on the side of my hand.