Page 38 of Winter Solstice
One night during the holidays, when the kids were teenagers, Margaret called the inn from the back of the car; it was after a broadcast and Raoul was delivering Margaret to her apartment. The kids were decorating the Christmas tree, hanging ornaments, eating popcorn, and drinking hot cider in front of the fire. That they sounded so happy only made Margaret feel more lonely and miserable. It was Kevin, her sensitive child, who noticed something melancholy in Margaret’s tone, because he dropped his voice to a whisper and said, “The cider Mitzi made is really terrible, Mom. I’m only drinking it to be polite.”
Margaret stares into the camera. She wants to somehow convey that her career has not been all glory. It has entailed an equal amount of heartbreak. Margaret is a broadcasting icon now, but she is also a person—one who made choices, one who made mistakes. She wants Darcy and every other Millennial woman out there watching—many of whom idolize Margaret and think of her as a pioneer who broke through very thick, very real glass ceilings—to know that success always comes with a price and that greatness often doesn’t allow for balance.
In the end Margaret defaults to her trademark qualities: she is calm, she is reserved, and most of all, she is professional. To nail the landing here doesn’t require a display of emotional fireworks. It requires only gratitude and grace.
“It has been my privilege to bring you the news each evening. Thank you for allowing me into your homes and into your lives. Over the past sixteen years, I have visited faraway places. I have dined with presidents and princes. I have seen unspeakable horrors—those inflicted by nature, and those inflicted by man. But I have been buoyed and inspired by the people of this diverse and magnificent country, and by the indomitable strength of the human spirit. God bless each and every one of you. For theCBS Evening News,I’m Margaret Quinn. Good night.”
The montage plays, but Margaret can’t watch. She tells everyone that if she sees photographs of herself from sixteen, twelve, even five years ago, she’ll bemoan how much she has aged, but the truth is that the magnitude of what she is leaving behind will make her cry. After the montage ends, the screen goes black. A second later one sentence appears, written in white type:THANK YOU, MARGARET QUINN.
“And… we’re out,” Mickey says.
There is silence, during which Margaret stares at her desk.
Then Darcy gives a resounding whoop, and the studio bursts into a round of applause.
It’s over.
BART
It takes him three days to come to his senses. He doesn’t call Allegra and doesn’t text her, although her name starts withAand is right there at the top of his contacts.
He knows he’s being stubborn, stupid, and rude. When he dropped Allegra off at her house on Lily Street after his birthday party Tuesday night, following some pretty serious kissing in the front seat, he said, “I’ll call you tomorrow.” By “tomorrow” he meant Wednesday. But Wednesday came and went and Bart didn’t call, and then Thursday came and went.
What was his problem? Was he being a typical male, playing games? Was he enjoying the thought of Allegra Pancik wondering what had happened, checking her phone in anticipation, possibly even pining for him?
No! Not at all! It was something else; it was the same old thing, his neuroses, his mind sickness. He didn’t call Allegra because he didn’t feel he deserved to be happy. If the eighteen fallen Marines couldn’t feel the sweet sensation of a woman’s lips meeting theirs, then Bart didn’t deserve to feel it either.
Centaur. He kept thinking of Centaur.
Bart’s very best friend in his platoon—his brother, forall intents and purposes—had been Centaur, baptizedCharles Buford Duke. Centaur was born and raised in Cosby, Tennessee, in the foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains. He was a huge Volunteers fan; he bled orange and white, he said, and he told Bart about the boats that would line both sides of the Tennessee River on game days. You could walk a mile at least, going bow to stern on those boats, and be enthusiastically offered a cold Budweiser on each one. Centaur didn’t have the temperament or the grades for college himself, but when Centaur and Bart met at basic training, Centaur had a girlfriend named Ruby Taylor, who was a freshman at UT, rushing Chi Omega.
How many hours did Bart listen to Centaur talk about Ruby Taylor—how pretty she was, how sweet, how devoted? Centaur had fallen in love with Ruby in third grade at Cosby Elementary. She had kicked him during recess and left a dark-purple bruise, and that was that. Bart had never known a person as blindly besotted as Centaur. Bart saw Ruby’s picture. She was no beauty; she had red hair, as expected, but her skin was pasty, her eyes sunken a bit too far in her face, like raisins pushed into dough, her smile too wide, her hips a little wide as well. But that, somehow, made Bart admire Centaur’s devotion even more. When they were running around Munich hooking up with buxom blond fräuleins right before they deployed to Sangin, Centaur remained true to Ruby Taylor. It wasn’t a hardship to resist temptation, he said, when you were in love—and he hoped that someday Bart knew what that felt like.
Centaur was intending to marry Ruby Taylor as soon as he got home. Even in the darkest days of their capture, even on Centaur’s final day, he was talking about marrying Ruby, buying land, building a house, having kids. He wanted five: four boys and a girl, in that order.
Centaur has now been dead for nearly a year. Back in June, Bart received an e-mail from Ruby Taylor, saying she was getting married after her graduation from Tennessee—to one of her teaching assistants, a South African fellow with an unpronounceable Dutch last name. Not even an American. And certainly not an American hero like Charles Buford Duke.
Bart never responded to Ruby’s e-mail because he didn’t want to hear the story. He already knew the story. When Bart and Centaur’s convoy went missing, when they stayed missing for nearly two full years, everyone gave up hope. (No, Bart thinks, not everyone. Not Mitzi.) But Ruby Taylor gave up hope. She fell crying into the arms of her teaching assistant, who smoothed Ruby’s hair and told her the future still held promise and light. This all may have happenedbeforeCentaur died.
What is Bart to think but that girlfriends, women, love, and marriage are pursuits best left to others.
On Friday, Bart wakes up and feels just the opposite. He thinks that if Centaur could see him, he would scream in his face like Sergeant Corbo, the meanest, ugliest, toughest drillmaster in the USMC, and tell Bart to “GO GET THE GIRL!”
Bart spends $150 on a bouquet from Flowers on Chestnut, and he walks right in the door of Bayberry Properties. Allegra is sitting at a desk in the very front of the office. She is wearing a soft white sweater, a patchwork suede miniskirt, and a pair of suede boots. She looks even more beautiful than she did when she was dressed as a geisha. Her dark hair is now long down her back.
“Special delivery,” Bart says, holding out the flowers. “For Miss Allegra Pancik.”
Allegra sees him and the flowers and puts two and two together, and whereas she has every right to tell him to buzz off for not calling or texting when he said he would, she gifts him a radiant smile.
“I thought you forgot about me,” she says.
“Forgot aboutyou?” he says. “Impossible.”
Allegra floats around the office, holding the flowers up like a trophy.
“I need to find a vase,” she says. “And I want to introduce you to my aunt and uncle.” She beams at him. “I thought I’d imagined everything that happened Tuesday night. I thought I’d dreamed it.”
“Not a dream,” Bart says. He suddenly remembers that when he blew out his birthday candles, his wish was that he and Allegra would live happily ever after. “I just had stuff to do the past few days. My family was all visiting, and I pretty much ignored them at the party, so…”
