“I’d offer to drive but I think I’d – it wouldn’t end well.” He modified his statement at the memory of a Jeep’s unfortunate meeting with a tree, and stared out the windshield. He’d been leery when she’d told him to get in the car, but it had been three lonely days of silence – even in the bedroom – and he was glad for some semblance of normal even if it was…not quite all there yet.
Her hands tightened around the steering wheel as she flicked on her turn signal. The turn for Ridgeline Road came about a mile and a half after Wilson’s Pond, and she shuddered reflexively as her mind replayed Jack’s fall through the ice in stunning clarity.
He stretched his legs out and slunk a little in the seat, content to watch the scenery go by in the comfortable silence. She hadn’t wanted to really celebrate Christmas, which was only two days away – and he’d conned her into it by telling her it was a necessary insight into humanity. He had, of course, maintained a stony silence about whether or not he’d been anywhere in the vicinity of the manger in question at the appropriate time, and ultimately told her it wasn’t something meant for him to comment on.
Jack wouldn’t comment further on the Creator, either, and Mari knew when to back off.
They passed a thatch of tall pines and he thought of the one in the living room. It was small and sparse. Mari had called it a Charlie Brown tree, and the reference had gone completely over his head. For the sake of his cultural education, and much to her amusement, she found A Charlie Brown Christmas on YouTube. He didn’t understand the tree any better, but he’d found a new appreciation for filling in the gaps a truck could comfortably drive through with the many strings of multicolored lights she’d picked up at the hardware store.
“What are you expecting?” he asked, tired of the quiet.
“I don’t know,” she said. She bent forward, looking for numbers on houses or mailboxes. They were only at twelve, and the road climbed further into the heavy woods and mountain foothills. “It could be a trailer, it could be a mansion – I really don’t know.”
“That was nineteen.” He jerked his thumb toward the house they were in front of.
“Next one on the right, then.” Mari reminded herself to breathe normally. There was a break in the trees, and set back away from the road in a natural clearing was a one story Colonial. The empty driveway was plowed and smoke puffed happily from the chimney. She pulled in almost to the closed doors of the unattached garage and shut the car off.
Jack tried to peer around a couple of trees next to the side of the house toward the backyard and couldn’t see a thing.
“This is…not what I was expecting.” Before her courage could desert her, she left the keys in the ignition and got out of the vehicle. Jack did the same, and they crunched their way through the snow on the shoveled path and up the two steps onto the covered front porch.
It looked, from first glance, to be a fairly large house. Why had her mother moved out of it and into something significantly smaller with a tiny barn and a couple of cows?
The tin can containing the keys was behind a decorative shrub by the faded welcome mat, and she fit it with shaking hands into the lock.
There was already a pair of boots on the mat to the right, and she left her boots there, mindful of the polished hardwood floors beneath her mismatched socks. Jack followed closely on her heels, and she felt like she’d stepped out of one fairytale and into another – namely The Three Bears – though she couldn’t say she felt like Goldilocks. Not with Jack Frost breathing down her neck instead of nipping at her nose.
Good Lord if she ever did get this whole fiasco on paper they were going to think she was absolutely bonkers.
An open doorway to her left revealed a dining room with a sturdy oak table and glass-fronted cabinets with delicate matching china. The double doors on the right were closed, and she stepped hesitantly into the family room, complete with a high ceiling and a fireplace on the left. Another set of double doors guarded the next room to the right, and she focused instead on the sounds coming from the open doorway on the other side of the fireplace. She crept closer, mildly aware of Jack’s hand hovering inches from her own.
A woman popped out from around the corner; the three of them froze. Mari looked into the same eyes she saw in the mirror every morning, and Jack had a brief insight into what Alice must have felt as she tumbled down the rabbit hole into uncertainty.
“I’m – do – ” Mari clamped her mouth shut and closed her eyes for a moment before trying again. “Do you live here?”
“No,” the petite woman said as she looked between Jack and Mari with undisguised interest. “I pop over a few times a week to make sure everything is still working well. The worst thing to happen to a house is for no one to live in it.”
“So you don’t own the house?” she asked.
“No.” The woman smiled. “My granddaughter does.”
Mari shifted her hand and clamped her fingers around Jack’s with bruising strength. “Your gran – what…who are you?”
“Amelia,” she said gently. “Amelia Turner.”
Mari leaned her elbows on the kitchen island and studied the woman at the stove. Amelia. Her paternal grandmother. Jack stood ramrod straight next to her, most likely trying to wrap his mind around the latest development in the strange story Mari Turner’s life had morphed into.
Amelia turned away from the tea kettle and pushed the sleeves of her sweater to her elbows. She looked to be in her fifties, her hair cut short to frame her delicately boned face. Mari knew she’d inherited most of her looks from her own mother, but even a blind man would see she’d gotten her eyes through her father’s line.
“You have questions,” she said. “You’re more than welcome to ask. I know who you are, Mari,” she added with a wink. “And I know who you are, Jack Frost.”
Jack paled considerably.
“It’s been years since I’ve seen you, though.” Amelia added loose leaf tea to a bright red teapot. “Not since we lived in Union.”
“Did you used to live here?” Mari asked.
“When your father was still a child, yes. We – my husband and I – moved into a smaller house further up the mountain after Eric came home from college and began seeing Hannah.” She reached over and lightly tapped Jack under the chin; he closed his mouth with a snap. “Don’t look so surprised.”
“How – how do you know me?” His voice came out an octave higher than Mari was used to, and she glanced at him.
“Parents in Maine tell their children the same bedtime stories parents in New York do,” Amelia said. “I’ve also seen you, too.”
His expression became stricken.
“We tell our children we mothers are magic.” She took three mugs from the cupboard and then pulled a tea strainer from a drawer. “What they don’t know is that some of us actually are. My father was a Piper.”
He gripped the edge of the island with white knuckles and locked his knees.
“A different Piper, of course,” she continued conversationally, shutting off the burner before the kettle could scream. “They’re somewhat territorial, and we used to live in Maine.”
“How did you know?” Jack asked.
“Some families do. Others don’t.” Amelia poured hot water into the teapot, put the lid on it, and set the kettle on a back burner. “Our family has always known, and, with the right kind of company, we’re not adverse to talking about it. Julia Holden refused to speak about something we might have had in common. Shall we sit at the table?”
The two of them followed her numbly; Mari sank gratefully into one of the sturdy oak chairs around the table and Jack sat delicately on the edge of his. Amelia settled gracefully, fingers laced together in front of her as the tea steeped.
“My father grew up in this house?” Mari fiddled with her cuffs and didn’t look at her grandmother.
“Both my boys did. Sean was seven or eight when we moved from Union, and Eric was four, maybe.” Amelia carefully poured three mugs of tea and pushed two of them toward Mari and Jack, respectively. “You used to frog around in the snow with Sean,” she said, nodding to Jack. “You and another fae.”
“Matthias,” Jack whispered, palms wrapped around his mug. “We had soft spots for only children and there was so much…Piper’s children call to us more than others.”
She smiled, and the corners of her eyes crinkled. Hannah’s had started to do the same thing, and Mari looked away, biting her lip.
“Do you remember - ”
“I remember everything,” he interrupted.
Amelia nodded. “The snowmen of Ayer Park.”
He grinned widely. “That. Yes, I remember that.” He chuckled. “There was this group of children, and we’d – Matthias and I – given them a foot of new snow. The kind that’s really good for making snowballs and snowmen. They all gathered in this park and made a whole row of them. A good seven or eight, all nice snowmen all decorated with scarves and knit hats. Matthias and I added our own, only we built ours upside down.”
Mari stared openly. If anyone would build an upside down snowman it would indeed be Jack Frost.
“They stole Carol Greenly’s best pair of duck boots from her screened in porch to put on their snowman.” Amelia laughed. “The best of the L.L. Bean catalogue and it was on a snowman.”
Jack shrugged. “It gave Sammy a laugh. He needed it.”
She sensed the shift in conversation and took a sip of her coffee.
“He didn’t suffer long,” he said.
“Sammy Halstead died of leukemia shortly before we moved here,” Amelia explained. “He was undergoing chemo when they went to play at Ayer Park that day.” She tapped her fingers lightly against her mouth. “But these aren’t the questions you want to ask me.”
She played with the ends of her hair, sighed, and asked, “Why haven’t I met you before now?”
Amelia lifted one shoulder in a sort of half-shrug. “Bastian and I tried after Eric died. Hannah wouldn’t have anything to do with us. She seemed to think she had to do it all on her own, and when we didn’t hear from her – or you – we knew she had kept you in the dark. We did what we could, taking care of the house Eric left you when you were barely a year old. Bastian plows the driveway in the winter, and I come turn on the lights and putter in the kitchen a few times a week. It makes the time go faster.” She smiled, reaching across the table and wrapping slim fingers around Mari’s wrist. “We hoped we might get to see you again one day. I can finally tell Bastian you’ve truly grown into the beautiful young woman we suspected you were.”
“My – my grandfather?” she stuttered.
“Yes. Your grandfather. He would love to meet his only granddaughter. Sean had boys.”
“I have an uncle?” She smiled widely. “And cousins?”
“Honey,” Amelia said slowly, “you have an entire family waiting to meet you.”
Jack was expecting a shriek of a sound that would make his eardrums hurt for days. Or maybe a happy dance there in the dining room. There were a hundred other possibilities his mind readily supplied, too, but he was shocked the most by the one he got.
Mari burst into tears, knocking over her tea mug and startling him so badly he fell out of his chair.
“ – I mean, Hannah doesn’t have any siblings, she was an only child, like me, and now there’s – there’s a ton of cousins!” Mari said excitedly from the other side of her dresser. She’d canted it at an angle to create a little door to her closet, and it allowed her to change her clothes with Jack in the room – he could only see her from the shoulders up. “Amelia had siblings, and they had kids who had kids, and Uncle Sean – can I call him that? – he has three boys. Boys, Jack!”
He threw his hair over his shoulder, ran his fingers through it, and in a fit of something he couldn’t identify, he braided it. He refused to think what it said about him.
“Cousins and summer picnics and family reunions in Vermont because it’s halfway between here and Maine and - ” her voice got muffled in the flannel nightgown she shoved over her head. “ – it’s great, don’t you think?” She put her hands on the edge of the dresser and rested her chin on the backs of them. “Jack?”
He pushed his shoulders forward until his collarbone stood out in sharp relief, highlighting the white lines of the snowflake burnt onto his skin. “Mari.”
“I’m freaking you out, aren’t I?” she said with a tight smile.
“No.” Jack adjusted the blankets around his waist and curled his toes against the sheets. The bed was always cold when he first got in regardless if Mari was already in it or not.
Her eyebrows rose.
“I’ve never seen you this happy,” he said softly. “You wear it well.”
Mari blushed. “Thank you.” She stepped out from behind the dresser to hit the light switch by the door. “Did you braid your hair?”
“That was a figment of your imagination,” he said, sliding down the bed and flopping gracelessly onto his side.
“Like hell.” She jogged across the cold floor to her side of the bed, grabbed the bottom part of her nightgown so it wouldn’t ride up, and climbed under the blankets Jack held up for her. She brushed her hair from her face and did her best to ignore the siren’s call of warmth that was Jack’s lower body. Her feet were freezing.
The mattress moved as he shifted. “Just do it.”
She gleefully slotted her toes between his calves. “You’re a good man, Jack Frost.”
He snorted.
“I mean it.” Mari wrapped her fingers around his. “You’re a good man.”
Jack waited until she fell asleep to brush a kiss to her knuckles. I am not half as good a man as you deserve, Marianne, but I’ll do my best. It was the least he could do.