THE LAST YEAR
She thinks that now she understands why, of all the ways to enter a house surreptitiously in the dead of night, her family opted for the chimney.
It’s not for any complicated reasons, and not for any to do with physics or angles. No, Anna muses as she shuffles down the aforementioned structure. Her family chose the chimney because no one else did. Therefore, who’s to expect them?
Even so, Anna thinks frustratedly as she struggles her way down, aren’t there some other unpredictable entrances to a house? Ones that aren’t lacking in space and don’t have gravity as a fatal factor?
The bag is stuck, caught between the two walls above her. Anna scowls and tugs at it. At its refusal to budge, her frown deepens. “Déjà vu, anyone?” she growls. Gathering her strength, she gives it one more pull, and thankfully, it does move, but not so thankfully, it moves onto her.
Clearly, my family could not think of an entrance that did not have gravity as a fatal factor, Anna answers her own question as the sack makes contact with her chest and both of them are sent plummeting downwards. She lands heavily in the fireplace, the wind being blown out of her with a heavy oomph, and the sack follows suit, hitting her straight in the gut.
“Ouch,” Anna groans, lying flat on her back and squeezing her eyes shut in an attempt to dispel the stars swimming in her vision.
“Are you alright?”
Kind features and blonde hair come into her line of vision, and even lying down and observing him the wrong way up Anna can recognise him. She sits up quickly, ignoring how dizzy it makes her. “Jonathan,” she breathes.
“Hello, Anna,” he replies, and now, when she can see him a little better, she can make out the hint of something in his eyes. Maybe sadness. She isn’t sure.
“Hi,” she chokes out. They stay like that for a moment, Jonathan standing over her while she sits and thinks about how grown-up he looks, then he shakes his head, as though jolting himself out of a trance, and offers her his hand.
Anna stares at it for a second, then slowly reaches out her own to take it, letting him pull her up to his height.
“Hi,” she repeats quietly, eyes are still the same.
“I, uh...I haven’t seen you in a while,” he says, shifting a little, and suddenly Anna sees a younger Jonathan, twenty-five and kneeling over his brother’s broken body in the snow.
Just go!
“Are you okay?” He’s a little closer now, a concerned expression on his face, and before she knows she’s doing it, Anna takes a small step away from him, not missing the hurt that blooms in his eyes when she does so.
“Fine,” she breathes out, then clears her throat. “I’m fine.” There’s a long silence. She wonders how they got here, two strangers who love each other, one who gets older and one who doesn’t. “How’s Cassie?” Anna asks eventually, her tone quiet.
Jonathan’s eyes widen. “You know about Cassie?”
“I, um, I mean – yes,” Anna fumbles. “Did you two, you know...” she trails off when her eyes land on a framed photograph on the mantelpiece that answers the question she couldn’t finish.
“She looks beautiful,” she says, voice soft. Jonathan follows her line of sight to the photo, and understanding seeps onto his face as the two of them survey a younger Cassie and Jonathan, beaming at each other in wedding attire.
“Yeah,” he agrees in a similar tone. They lapse back into silence, and Anna feels her toes curl in discomfort. Jonathan McQueen used to be the only person she could tell anything to. Now she can barely keep up a conversation with him for more than two minutes.
“You’re up late,” she observes, stepping away from the fireplace to head over to the Christmas tree in the corner, delicately decorated. Cassie’s handiwork, she supposes.
“Yeah, I...” Jonathan trails off, and even though she’s not facing him, she can imagine what he’s doing, ruffling his hair and scratching the back of his neck in that way he has whenever he can’t articulate himself. “I was leaving stuff in Flynn’s stocking.”
Anna freezes at the name, a small wrapped box in her hand halfway between her and the floor beneath the tree.
“Not that Flynn!” her reaction must’ve been visible, because Jonathan hurries to clarify. “Flynn is my, uh...”
It comes crashing down on her with terrible clarity, and Anna swallows before setting the present down and slowly reaching into her bag for the next one. “Your son,” she finishes calmly.
“Yes.”
“Well, you know, that’s my job,” Anna makes a valiant attempt to keep her tone light and steady, but it wavers a little on the last few syllables anyway.
“I...”
She places the last present under the tree and gets up, facing him. “How old is he?” she asks.
“Almost a year.”
Anna feels the corners of her lips quirk up slightly in a smile. Whether it’s bitter or sad, she isn’t sure.
(She can barely tell the difference any more. God, what an old Scrooge she’s turned out to be.)
“Still a boy,” she murmurs.
“Yeah,” Jonathan nods, trying to smile. “They just grow up so fast, you know? Sometimes you feel like all it’ll take from you is a blink and bam, they’ll be grown up with kids and...” he trails off and his eyes widen slightly as he realises the implications of his words.
Anna can feel her jaw beginning to clench, like it always does when she’s struggling not to cry. “Yeah,” she manages. “I get what you mean.”
Jonathan sighs and runs a hand through his hair. “Anna...” he begins, then seems to think better of it, and trails off.
She looks at him for a few seconds, but quickly becomes unable to bear the silence any longer, and crosses to the fireplace and begins to fill up Flynn's stocking with things she digs out of her pockets, toy cars and tiny picture books and a shaker.
Anna can feel Jonathan's eyes on her as she does so, and when she's done, and she pauses to take a closer glance at his wedding photo, feeling warmth course through her at the smile on his face only to be quelled by a rush of sadness at the realisation that it’s just another thing to add to the list that seems to be growing by the second, Times I Have Not Been There For Jonathan.
“So you moved back to Georgia,” she observes, eyes shifting to the next frame along, which contains a photograph of a tiny boy, with blonde feathery hair and brown eyes and a laugh which could most likely melt chocolate.
“Yeah. I, uh...I missed it here.”
Tell me about it, seventeen year-old Jonathan whispers excitedly in her ear. What it’s like in Hong Kong and London and Paris.
“Did you?” she inquires in a murmur.
Perhaps he remembers. How he once used to wish for anything to leave Athens, Georgia, escape what he saw as boundaries keeping him fixed in place. Maybe he picks up on the irony. Junior in high school would probably see twenty-eight year-old Jonathan as a traitor, a prisoner who’d managed to escape his prison only to turn himself back in. Behind her, Jonathan clears his throat.
“Yeah,” he repeats. “There are things here I forgot. That I – that I made myself forget.”
Anna still has her back to him, fingers resting on the cool mantelpiece. She doesn’t think she can even turn around, knows that she can’t look at Jonathan, not look at him, not without...
“Like what?” she asks, not facing him.
“Like...Flynn,” and Anna hears the unsteady waver in his voice when he says his brother’s name, and it’s enough for tears to spring back to her eyes, but not enough for her to turn and look at him.
“I...” Jonathan trails off, then she hears him take a deep breath. “I wasn’t just up to leave stuff in Flynn’s stocking.”
“Why, then?” she manages to choke out, and now she’s turned around, the impulse too strong.
There’s a long silence. A solitary tear rolls down Jonathan’s cheek.
“Force of habit, I guess,” he replies in a broken whisper, and suddenly he’s crying properly, sobs wracking his tall frame, and Anna doesn’t even think before she’s closing the distance between them, wrapping her arms around him and pushing his head down onto her shoulder and stroking his hair as she feels his tears steadily soak through her sweater.
“Oh, Jonathan,” she whispers, still brushing her fingers through his hair.
“I’m so sorry, Anna,” he chokes into her shoulder through his sobs, “I’m so so sorry, Anna – ”
“Ssh, sweetheart,” she murmurs soothingly. “You have nothing to be sorry for.”
“I – I can’t ever – I lost you, I lost you and him in one Christmas, it was my fault – ”
“Of course it wasn’t,” Anna hushes him, rubbing circles into his back.
“You – I stopped,” he whispers.
“I know,” she tells him.
“I stopped believing,” he says, voice still shaking.
“No, you didn’t,” she murmurs, corners of her mouth quirking up in a soft smile. “You just forgot for a while.”
“But now I’ve remembered,” he looks for all the world like a small child, desperate for affirmation and comfort.
“Now you’ve remembered,” she smiles, running her hand through his hair one last time before pulling back.
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be.”
“I can’t not be, Anna, I – ”
“I’ve forgiven you,” she interrupts gently. “So you should forgive you too.”
“I lost you,” he says after a long time.
“I’m still here.”
And she is, of course she is. Isn’t she always waiting for Jonathan McQueen, jumping down his chimney and leaving presents for him? The boy Christmas fell in love with?
There’s another stretch of silence, but it’s different to the one a few minutes before. Jonathan takes a deep breath. “Do you – do you still – ?”
“I never stopped,” she replies quietly, answering his unfinished question, and she can almost see the baseball bat in his hand, hear the matter-of-fact Santa Claus doesn’t actually exist.
“Okay,” he gives her a half-smile, and that is all she has ever wanted from Jonathan, a smile and goodbye to tide her over until the next year, but Anna doesn’t think there will be a next year after this one.
“I have to go,” she whispers, the familiar words falling between them in the darkness. She doesn’t look at him, only moves to press a soft kiss to his cheek, then heads over to her fireplace.
He follows her, though, and there’s something to be said for his smile when he says: “Do you need some help getting up there?”
The words send a jolt of aching nostalgia through her spine, but she decides to play along.
“I’ve managed to get up the past forty-one million chimneys quite easily, actually,” she sniffs.
“If you’re sure...” Jonathan steps back from the fireplace, but there’s something in his eyes that she never thought she’d see again, and she thinks that perhaps she should be thankful, that the last conversation she has with Jonathan McQueen ends with this and not with something a lot...sadder.
Anna gets around halfway up and can probably make the rest of the distance, but it doesn’t stop her from calling down and saying okay, maybe it would help if Jonathan gave her a one-up. Or three.