“Keep it. I was there, it’s all in here.” He taps the side of his head as he buttons his coat. “Sometimes it’s the letting go of things that sets you free, Iris.”
I clutch the warm chunk of plastic as if it’s precious metal. This tape, the poster taken on the day my mother discovered she was pregnant…they’re gold dust for me. How strange that they’ve sat forgotten in this lock-up all these years, as if they were waiting for the exact moment to reveal themselves when I needed them most of all. I’m not a superstitious person as a rule—I’ll walk under ladders and much prefer grumpy orange cats to lucky black ones—but there’s an undeniable feeling of cosmic interference here, as if Felipe’s crackly old TV set was a temporary conduit between realms. I finish my coffee and realize I’m finally warm for the first time in days. I put my hand on my left thigh and it isn’t shaking anymore.
30.
I’VE DELETED ADAM’S TEXTS AND blocked his number. He’s become a phantom lurking in every shadow in recent weeks, but I came home from my morning with Felipe and knew exactly what I needed to do. Block. Ignore. Decide he’s dead to me and really believe it this time, because I didn’t claw myself away from him just to let him become my own personal Voldemort. I’m a New Yorker now. What happened to me in London does not define me here.
I’ve spent the weekend working, either downstairs in the noodle house or up here sprucing the place up for Christmas. I’ve draped my mother’s string of golden fir cones over the mirror and tacked warm white fairy lights around the window frame. It was a cold, crystal-clear London morning when we foraged for those fir cones, gilding our fingers with the gold paint afterward. They’ve faded significantly over the years, but they still lend Christmas cheer to this icy Monday morning. The breakfast radio weather guy seemed certain about imminent snow, but he’s had me fooled before so I’ll believe it when I see it.
Something spatters my window—a spray of small stones, I think—and I dash across the room to check the sidewalk, my heart in my mouth.
“Saw this outside the bodega and thought of you,” Gio shouts, shielding his eyes with his hand as he looks up. He’s standing beside a Christmas tree that comes up to his shoulder, his hand out supporting the top of the trunk. I shake my head, laughing as I throw my hands up in the air at him.
I run out on to the landing as he hauls it up the communal staircase, standing it up outside my front door with a flourish and a grin that makes him look about eighteen years old.
“I wasn’t planning on getting a tree,” I say.
“Yeah, you said,” he says. “But where will you hang your whisk if you don’t have a tree?”
I gesture toward the corner as he shuffles it into my apartment, and we both stand back to look at it once it’s in place.
“It looked smaller outside,” he concedes.
“You don’t say.”
“Maybe if we turn it around?” He has a quick go, but it’s so bushy that whichever way round it is the bottom branches flop over the arm of the sofa.
I slide behind it and sit down, parting the branches to look at Gio.
“I feel like I’m staking someone out,” I say.
He pushes the sofa along with me still sitting on it until it’s clear of the tree’s reach. It’s wedged up against the breakfast bar at the other end, but at least I won’t feel like I’m part of a nature documentary every time I sit down.
“Perfect fit,” he says.
I get up and stand beside him. “You know what? It is.”
This is the first real tree I’ve had in years. Adam had a small, sparse pre-lit plastic one from before we met, which he wouldn’t hear of replacing, a woebegone object that somehow managed to make the room even more dispiriting than usual. No baubles, and certainly no gifts piled beneath it.
“Lights?” Gio looks at me and I shake my head. The only string of lights I have is pinned around the window.
“Ornaments?”
I fetch the whisk and hang it on the tree, then step back. It spins slowly, catching the daylight, a solitary splash of color on the mountain of greenery.
“You know what this means,” I say.
He groans. “Please don’t say we have to go back to the Christmas store.”
“We have to go back to the Christmas store.” I rub my hands together like an excited child. “I’ll get my coat.”
* * *
—
MY LIFE FEELS LIKE a Coney Island roller coaster at the moment, a series of euphoric highs and stomach-plummeting lows. Today I’m flying high, sweet as you like, because Gio and I have spent the afternoon dressing the tree and eating panettone from a little bakery he knows over on Mulberry. I had a moment as we walked back home weighed down with Christmas bags. Gio was a few steps ahead of me on the sidewalk, hunkered inside his navy reefer jacket, panettone wrapped with brown paper and string dangling from one hand, Christmas decorations from the other, and the weatherman finally made good on his promise of snow. Gio turned back to look at me, fat white flakes settling on his shoulders as he cast his eyes toward the skies, and I clicked the shutter on my internal camera to save the scene forever.
“It looks like you bought everything in the shop and threw it at the tree,” he says, when I finally declare it to be perfect.
“I love it,” I say. “It’s the best tree in the history of Christmas trees ever.”
It looks insanely festive, a blaze of vintage-colored lights—pinpricks of rose pink, apple green, candy apple reds. I completely lost my head in the Christmas store earlier, bought far too many tree ornaments, and I’m not one bit sorry, because my tree looks like something from a child’s drawing. From my own wistful childhood drawings.
I cook pasta for dinner, and afterward we lie on the sofa and bask in the fairy-light glow, the TV on low and snow falling steadily outside.
“Heavy snow at the Monday Night Motel,” he says.
I adjust my head on his chest. “Maybe we’ll get snowed in.”
“Maybe,” he says, even though we both know it’s coming up to the time for him to leave. Bella’s at the cinema, and he’s walking over to meet her at ten to make sure she gets home safe in this weather.
“It feels like Christmas already,” I say.
“You do have the best tree in the neighborhood,” he says.
“Thanks to you.”