Page 2 of A Guardian for Christmas

Cowen: If you wish to re-open the Bryant Estate gardens to the public this spring, we should expedite the carriage house restoration…

There have been several good days since my parents died. Days when I was eager to oversee this house and the family’s obligations. I went to meetings. Made decisions. Spoke to contractors and experts and architects and event planners. However, once one project began, more problems arose. Now, it’s all too much.

Now, I can’t seem to muster the will to even look at plans, or sit at a table with these people who talk over my head. My head simply goes…elsewhere.

I don’t reply to anyone.

If I engage with Mr. Cowen or the others, they will reply with more questions. I won’t be able to breathe.

I know I’m being impossible, and I don’t understand why the contractor, for one, won’t simply move on to and take on a more lucrative project from someone easier to work with than me.

Scratch that — yes, I do know why. Everybody wants a piece of the Bryant Estate. To show potential clients that you worked on Bryant Estate? That’s worth its weight in gold.

I tap out a simple, “OK,” to Frye. He doesn’t like communicating via text. Too bad, because I don’t like the intercom. It was installed in the 1980s, when my mother was a teenager, and would sulk in this very room for hours. Grandmother added the intercom system so Mother would always be a click away.

Doctors and Grandmother worried about Mother because of her heart condition, so she needed to be constantly reminded to not run up the stairs, not take her mountain bike into the woods, not dance, and for the love of god, no parties and of course no dating. Boys get your heart galloping like a wild little pony, Grandmother would tell her.

What a lot of good it did to try to keep Mother away from boys. She and Father married weeks—not months—after they met while she was studying abroad. She was ready to fall in love the second she was set free from the nest.

In the end, her heart simply gave out, utterly broken after Father got sick and no one could save him after his diagnosis. The disease spread like wildfire, and they were both gone before my 21st birthday.

Dr. White says I have the same condition as Mother.

Frye reads the text but doesn’t respond via phone or the intercom, which tells me he’s satisfied for now. He needs to know I’m still breathing, or else he will pester me until he gathers the tenacity to mount the narrow metal staircase or send someone up to check on me. Poor man.

I snuggle down deeper into the covers.

The blankets and quilt are no match for this drafty room, and my feet get cold. I hate that.

Esme, I say to myself. The sooner you put on socks, the sooner you can get back into bed.

I sit up slowly, willing the vertigo to stay away. Baby steps, as Dr. White says. When I feel overwhelmed, I just have to focus on three things to get me through the next minute — putting my feet on the floor, walking to the dresser, finding socks.

I’m aware of how ridiculous it seems that a grown, physically able woman has to mentally plot out the act of putting socks on.

Carefully, I swing my legs over the side of the bed, and push back the covers, my eyes catching on the small red bird tattoo inside my left wrist.

The sight of it wakes the tiniest spark of warmth in my belly.

And with that spark comes one word:

Sagan.

The feeling passes quickly, but it’s enough to get me to stand up.

Numb once again, I shuffle to my closet and find my favorite socks, sitting on the tufted stool there to pull them on. My feet are warm, finally, but the rest of me is cold.

I pause by the curtained window on my way back to bed. Pushing aside the midnight velvet, I let in the brilliant light of a snowy, clear morning.

Squinting against the whiteness of it all, I wonder if simply going outside will fix me. Does the snow-loving little girl inside me still exist?

Perched on a pine branch outside my window sits a muted red cardinal looking back at me. According to Bryant family lore, a red cardinal at the window is an ancestor coming to check on you.

This one, a female, is my grandmother. Bossy and glaring. The same family of birds has lived at the estate and perched in that same tree for generations. I have a whole mansion at my disposal, yet this is my constant.

The bird cocks its little head as if to say, “It’s already 11 a.m. and I’ve finished half a day’s work. I planned the menu for the scoliosis event. I met with a contractor to discuss the cracks in the south wing chimney. I took all of Dr. White’s vitamins and hiked five miles. What have you done so far today?”

Grandmother was always up before dawn. Sometimes, I think she did it not because she liked to be awake before everyone else but because she enjoyed letting her children and grandchildren know how lazy they were. Ironic, considering how my mother wasn’t allowed to partake in her favorite physical activities, yet she was constantly made to feel lazy because sometimes she was so dejected she couldn’t get out of bed.

---