She reads the briefing sheet: four troops killed in Afghanistan, an apparent serial killer in Alaska strangling Inuit girls with piano wire, rumbles heard from Mount St. Helens for the first time in nearly thirty-five years, and SkyMall declares bankruptcy.
“Boring,” she says to Darcy, her assistant. “Or am I just jaded?”
“Boring is good,” Darcy reminds her. “It’s Christmas.”
So it is. Margaret looks around the newsroom: There are tabletop trees and strings of colored lights draped over cubicles. There are fake wrapped presents in a studious pile on top of the filing cabinet; those empty boxes sit in a storage closet for eleven months, gathering dust, until Cynthia, the office manager, brings them out the Monday after Thanksgiving. This thought strikes Margaret as unbearably sad. In so many ways, her life is an empty box, prettily wrapped.
But no, she won’t go there. She is due in Wardrobe, something green or red tonight, unfortunately. Both colors wash her out.
When was the last time Christmas meant something? she wonders. She has to harken back twenty-four years, to when the boys were in middle school and Ava was five years old, with her freckles and bobbed haircut, wearing her pink flannel nightgown with the lace at the collar. Margaret can picture her clear as day, creeping down the stairs of the brownstone, finding Margaret and Kelley passed out on the sofa in front of the dying embers of the fire after drinking too many Golden Dreams. Thankfully, they had put out the presents and remembered to eat the cookies left for Santa. Ava had unhooked her stocking and come to open it in Margaret’s lap, oohing and ahhing at even the smallest item—the compact, the root beer lip gloss, the lavender socks with polka dots. Margaret inhaled the scent of Ava’s hair and petted her soft cheek; nothing had been more delicious than the feel of her children’s skin. And then, a while later, the boys would trudge down—plaid pajama pants and Yankees T-shirts, mussed hair, deepening voices, smelly feet, the two of them splay legged on the floor, ripping open their gifts while Kelley paged slowly through the David McCullough biography and Margaret excused herself to pour a glass of really good cold champagne and stick the standing rib roast in the oven. Their Jewish neighbors, the Rosenthals, came for dinner every year, and Kelley’s brother, Avery, came up from the Village with his partner, Marcus.
That had been Christmas.
No one in the newsroom would believe that Margaret Quinn had ever cooked a standing rib roast.
This year, when Margaret finishes with the broadcast at seven thirty p.m. on the twenty-fourth, her driver, Raoul, will take her to Newark, where she will fly first-class to Maui, for five luxurious days in a suite at the Four Seasons. Drake is supposed to fly in and meet her, although he has yet to fully commit, which Margaret, perhaps more than any other woman in the world, understands. (An earthquake in California, another school shooting, an assassination attempt, or a dozen things less serious could instantly quash Margaret’s vacation plans.) Drake is a pediatric brain surgeon at Sloan Kettering, and the thing Margaret likes best about him is how busy he is. It’s a relationship without guilt or expectation; if they both happen to be free, they get together, but if not, no hard feelings. If Drake comes to Maui, they will sleep, have good, fast, goal-oriented sex, and talk about work. Drake likes to drink excellent wine, and he will golf nine holes if Margaret gets off her laptop long enough to go to the spa for her facial and hot-stone massage.
Drake doesn’t mind when Margaret is recognized—which she is, everywhere.
It’s not exactly Christmas, but it’s better than Chinese takeout in her apartment with only Ava’s paper angel for company, which is how she’s spent some holidays in the recent past.
She’s in Wardrobe—green tonight. It’s a silk boatneck sheath dress that she thinks makes her look like Vanna White, but Roger, her stylist, says they have to stay in holiday colors. He passed up a silver beaded cocktail dress because he thought it was too Audrey Hepburn.
Margaret yearns for the silver. She says, “Is there really such a thing as ‘too Audrey Hepburn’?” But Roger won’t budge.
She says, “You do know, right, what the Nasty Blogger is going to say about this dress.”
“I have never pandered to the Nasty Blogger before,” Roger says. “And I’m not doing it tonight. You’re wearing the green, my love.”
Margaret sighs. There is a blog written by someone called Queenie229, who criticizes Margaret’s fashion choices, the color of her hair, and seems to hold a special vendetta against Margaret’s watch—a Cartier tank watch with a custom lizard band that Kelley gave her after Ava was born. If Queenie229 can’t find anything to particularly dislike about Margaret’s outfit, she will resort to picking on what she calls “that hideous watch.”
“Please, Roger,” Margaret says. “The silver.”
Roger ignores her. She takes the green Vanna sheath to the dressing room.
Darcy intercepts her in the corridor. “Message for you,” she says. “Kelley.”
“Kelley?” Margaret says. “My former husband?”
Darcy nods, and Margaret looks at the pink slip. Please call immediately. She thinks of Kelley’s son, Bart, who was deployed to Afghanistan last Friday. She thinks of the four soldiers killed that day. Oh God, no.
She hands Darcy the green Vanna dress and runs down the hall to her computer, where she brings up the names of the four dead in Afghanistan. None of them Bartholomew Quinn. Hugh exhale of relief. It’s something else, then.
She calls Kelley back, even though she really doesn’t have time.
He picks up even before the first ring is finished. “Mitzi left me,” he says. “She’s gone.”