The Light That Wraps You

Wherever you were, I was sure that you were laughing at me.

Lux and I had spent the entire morning in several different malls, dodging crowds and attempting to cut the down the extensive lists that the two of us had. I had already bought presents for my mother and my stepfather, for the guys on the team and for some friends back home in Montreal. But she had arrived and had thrown all of my careful plans out of orbit, leaving me alone in space to worry about what she could possibly want.

I had never seen her away from the rink, and it was devastating. Rather than her usual severe bun, she had left her hair down, and it fell to the middle of her back in blonde waves that rippled like sunshine. She wore a simple pair of jeans, boots, and her coat, but with it, she had placed a Pittsburgh Penguins beanie on her head, and just looking at her made my heart ache. When she smiled at me, she was just so adorable. I was overcome with the desire to kiss her more than once. My resistance was wearing thin and I knew that by the end of the day, if I hadn’t kissed her, you (wherever you were) would be sorely disappointed with me.

She laughed constantly, tugging at my heartstrings. Everything was funny to her; everything was bright and magical and beautiful. She loved the holidays, she told me, because people were happier then. I pointed out that some people were also sadder, but she shook her head. “Those people just need something to be happy about,” she said. “If you look around and really see, there is always something to bring you joy. Always.”

Right there, in that moment, she was bringing me joy. I wanted the day to last forever.

I helped her purchase gifts for the guys on the team, as well as for some members of the Bruins organization. That made me jealous, but I didn’t say anything. Still, because she was her, she seemed to know so she distracted me by telling me stories, either about her childhood holidays or stories of Christmas and its origins in different cultures. She was enchanting, as vivid as the colorful lights that decorated the arched ceilings of the mall.

By the time she had made her way down our roster, skipping purposely over my name because I was with her, we were carrying so many bags that I had no idea how she planned to keep shopping. We were idiots, we soon discovered, fools to leave all of this to the last minute. Every hour or so, she would remark aloud with a smile, “Mon Dieu, we will not survive this madness.” But we would, I knew it. I just didn’t know how we would get all of this stuff back to her house, because after she announced she had finished “gifting the Penguins”, as she put it, she still had all of the operations staff, the equipment staff, and the ice girls to buy gifts for.

“You are joking.” I didn’t phrase it as a question.

Her eyes were large and unflinching. “No, Kris, I mean it. When I said I wanted to buy gifts for everyone, I meant everyone.”

So, we had lunch. Intermission. We talked endlessly, about everything that we could think to talk about. She immediately reverted to French, because she knew it was more comfortable for me. Also, seeing as there was no one else with us, it just made sense. I loved it. I was able to talk more freely, to express exactly what I was trying to say and get my point across. She listened to me with a rapt attention that unnerved me at first in its utter devotion. Other people might have looked around, might have nodded and smiled and added in their own comments and fiddled with their hands, but she just stared, her eyes always on mine, her half-smile telling me that she was hanging on absolutely every word.

There were no words--in French or English--to describe how much I loved her for that.

After we ate, she sent me away. “I cannot buy something for you if you are with me,” she said in her lilting French, shooing me with her bundles and parcels. “I will meet you back here in two hours. Hopefully by then, I will be done with everyone--including you.” I watched as she turned and disappeared into the throngs of people, waiting until I could no longer spot her flaxen hair.

My legs twitched. I wanted so badly to follow her, but I refrained. Instead, I set out to buy the perfect gift for her.

But what could I give her that she didn’t already have? She was not a very materialistic girl; I never saw her wearing jewelry. No rings, no necklaces, nothing on her wrist except a watch. She was practical, sensible, and very down-to-earth, all qualities that I admired about her. I wandered around for what felt like a lifetime, strolling through shops and boutiques, laboring over windows that held boring, useless items that were everything she wasn’t. I began to panic.

Which is why you would be laughing at me. “She is a girl,” you would say, “you love her, you know her deep in your soul, and the holidays require a gift. Think. Act on what you know.”

Books. Lux loved reading. Often, before take-off, she would sit beside Craig Adams and they would discuss concepts very foreign to me: philosophy, history, mythology. He could also speak French, and I would catch snippets of their conversations as I boarded, taking my usual seat by the window up front. He would ask if she had read certain books, and he would recommend the ones that she hadn’t, and they would eagerly discuss the ones she had. She was a thinker, a girl who loved to learn, and it hit me so suddenly that I stopped dead, right there in the middle of a crowded mall, the noise of conversations and children crying breaking over my head like waves.

I went in search of a bookstore. She had mentioned that The Gargoyle was her favorite book, but she already had a copy of it (a copy that was sitting in my living room, with a bookmark sticking out of it). So what book could she possibly want? I didn’t know where to begin.

I was standing in the Biography section when a salesman came over. “Can I help you with anything today?”

I nodded. “Yes, I…” I shook my head. I was speaking in French. French off, English on. I made the switch, smiling apologetically. “Sorry. I need help buying a Christmas gift for…”

“A girl?” He smiled like he knew. Maybe he did. Maybe that was why he worked here, because he existed in the same realm as I did, with an intelligent, beautiful girl who lived in books when the real world became just a trifle less magical than she preferred. Maybe we were brothers in that simple shared attribute alone.

“Yes.” I described to him Lux’s personality as briefly as I could, though I could have gone on. I could’ve spoken for days, until I lost my voice. I could have written entire novels, the pages stretching endlessly around the world, before I found myself out of things to say.

“I think I have just the right books for you and your special lady.”

We traversed through the shelves together, bound by our journey. The pile of tomes in my arms grew. John Milton, Dante Alighieri, Homer, James Joyce, Victor Hugo, Gaston Leroux, Oscar Wilde, the classics went on and on, but then there were the modern twists thrown in for fun: the faerie tales by Holly Black, the epic sagas by George R.R. Martin, the disturbing thrillers by Chuck Palahniuk, the memoirs of ordinary people with extraordinary lives like Jeannette Walls. All of it was stacked on the counter at the end of my two hour time limit, and before the man even asked, I had reached a decision.

“All right, have you decided which of these you’d like to buy?”

“All of them.”

The salesman looked faint. “All of them?”

“Yes.”

He didn’t dispute. He rang up my purchases, and as I was standing there, I noticed the small display to the right of the counter. In a glass case, they had strange items for sale: old boxes of stained Tarot cards, pewter figurines, brass chess sets, and letter openers in the shapes of swords. There was also a little legion of carved figures, hunched in the corner. One of them in particular caught my eye, and I pointed to it.

“That, too. I’ll take that.”

The man’s smile only grew.

It took three trips to get all of my purchases into the back of my Range Rover, and by then, I was worried she would think I had abandoned her. Yet, when I practically ran to our meeting place, she was there, standing by herself and looking as lovely as ever. She immediately knew why my hands were empty.

“Quick thinking,” She said briskly, nodding her approval. “Here, you can carry some of mine then! And no peeking.”

By the time we arrived at her rental house, it was dark. We had spent the entire day together, and though I was exhausted, I had never felt more excited in my life. I couldn’t wait for her to open her gifts.

She turned on every single light in the house, and the two of us shucked our heavy coats. She put on some Christmas carols, made us hot cocoa, and dragged an enormous box of wrapping supplies out of a spare room. She immediately got busy, pulling items out of bags and gently placing them in gilded boxes, binding them with sparkling ribbons, but I was distracted. I noticed, with a faint twinge of sadness, that she had no Christmas tree. Suddenly, I realized she would be spending Christmas very much alone.

“Lux,” I said suddenly, and she looked up from the sweater she had been wrapping for Staalsy. It was a sky blue that matched his eyes perfectly and would make his mother happy, she had said when she bought it.

“What? What’s wrong?” My tone had alarmed her; her stormy eyes were concerned.

“Did you have plans, for tomorrow?”

She sat back on her heels. Slowly, she shook her head. “No. My family knows that, while I would love to see them, that you have a game the day after Christmas. They know I have a duty to remain here. There is no point in traveling, only to have to come back so soon.”

“New Brunswick is not that far. Neither is Boston.”

She smiled. “Perhaps I like it here. Maybe I want to spend a Christmas in a city that I never have before.”

“But… alone?”

Her smile softened, deepened, turned into something else that stirred the depths inside of me. “Are you offering me company, Kris?”

“Well, yes. Nobody should spend Christmas alone.” I shrugged like it was nothing, but my heart was racing painfully.

“Well, no one is going to. We’ll go to your house, I think. I haven’t seen it yet. Dinner will be at five-thirty, and you get to pick the wine.” With that said, she turned back to the sweater and resumed her joyous packaging, humming along to Deck the Halls.

She said it so decisively that I was stunned. She had taken my offer and turned it around on me; now my head was spinning, but pleasantly. I liked that she had taken control, and I liked even more that she would be coming to my home. I could already see the two of us in the kitchen, her singing along to Christmas carols in that soft, luscious voice of hers and me pouring the two of us glasses of rich red wine as we sat down at my table piled with delicious food.

We finished wrapping our presents for the guys, and I helped her with those she had purchased for the rest of the staff. I was still amazed that she had done that. Some of them would be late, she admitted, because she knew they would be spending the holidays with their families and she didn’t wish to interrupt, but it was “better late than never”. The gifts for her friends with the Bruins would arrive by New Years, which was “more or less the second Christmas anyway”.

It was only when she let loose an enormous yawn that I realized it was past eight o’clock. Neither of us had eaten, and as I stood, stretching and aching in all the places that had been stationary for so long, my stomach grumbled.

“We shouldn’t eat this late,” She protested half-heartedly, as I dialed out for food. “We’ll be up all night.”

Now that was an appealing thought. I ordered Chinese, and while we waited, I decided to present her with the gifts I had bought.

“Kris, it’s not time yet!” She exclaimed as I nudged them towards her.

“Yes, but I have more than one gift for you.” I didn’t bother wrapping them. What was the point? She would know them for the words on their pages the moment she held them in her hands, and nothing like thin, colorful paper would stop her. I simply handed over the shopping bags; all of them, except one.

She pulled each book out one by one and her face was a timeless work of art that broke my heart into pieces with its beauty. She glowed with awe, wonder, happiness, surprise. She read each title out loud, her fingers dancing over the covers and spines like they were friends, as familiar to her as breathing. Paradise Lost, Inferno, The Iliad, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, The Phantom of the Opera, A Picture of Dorian Gray…

“Oh, Kris,” She breathed when she had stacked the last one on top of the pile. “I… I don’t know what to say.”

Say you’ll stay.

“Do you like them?”

“I love them. I have read a few of them, but I’ve never had copies of my own. This is magical. I…” She cleared her throat, looking down, but before she did I saw her eyes were bright with tears. Yes, so magical that I had made her cry.

She read my mind, as she always could. “Happy tears,” She said, wiping her eyes on the back of her hand. “I am so very, very happy. Thank you. You don’t know how much it means to me.”

She carefully picked up the stack and set them aside, promising that as soon as the holiday was over, she was going to immediately devour them all. “And buy a bookshelf,” she added with a grin. Then she asked me something I would never forget.

“Kris, do you believe in love after death?”

I smiled. “What sort of question is that?”

She laughed. “Yes, I know it is ridiculous. After all, I am a woman of science, of logic. But humor me: do you believe in love after death? Do you believe that love can span lifetimes?” She sat back down and leaned against the couch, right next to me. She rested her head on her elbow, gazing at me with half-lidded eyes that were still tear-bright.

When I didn’t answer, she went on. “In the Ancient Greek myths, they believed that people were born of Eros, the god of pure love and sexual desire. He was related to Aphrodite, the goddess of love and beauty, though he was often much kinder. In Roman mythology, he was known as Cupid.”

“The little cherub boy?”

She laughed again “That is one of his representations, yes. Most people believed that he was a man, beautiful to behold and impossible not to fall in love with. The myth goes that out of Chaos, Eros was born. From his pure love came sex, and from the act of sex came everything else: the mountains, the sea, the sky and eventually, human beings. You see, in this myth, love is the driving force behind all Creation. Love is what brought us forth into being, and then as humans kept the cycle going, by falling in love, having sex, having children, and then dying. Those children would do the same, and the circle would remain unbroken. So, if you think about it, sex and the act of bringing a child into this world is almost god-like. It’s a divine power.”

I thought of all the things I had heard, from Duper, from Johnny, from Disco Dan himself, from all the fathers on the team. From what I had heard, that was exactly what being a parent was like. “Yes?”

“And so, if we are born from love, does that mean it’s always a part of us? Even after we die?” She smiled, not waiting for my answer. “How far are you into The Gargoyle?”

I didn’t question how she went from one thought to the next. It was enough to just have her this close to me and talking of love and sex. “I have almost finished it.”

“Do you believe? Do you really think Marianne and our unnamed author have been part of a love spanning hundreds of years? Do you think they were reborn with the simple purpose of finding one another and resuming that love?”

“I…would like to believe that, yes.”

“But?”

“But I don’t know.”

She smiled. “I’d like to believe, too. I think we all would. After all, that’s why so many people turn to religion, to God. They don’t want to feel that when they die, they will be alone. I know that I won’t.”

“And how do you know?”

A look passed over her face, something beautiful and sad all at once, and she put a hand to her chest, over her heart. “Because I--”

The doorbell rang, resonating through the mostly quiet house and interrupting her. It was the Chinese food, finally arrived. She jumped up and went to the door, pulling a wad of cash from her back pocket. She chatted jovially with the delivery boy, making him laugh before he disappeared back into the snowy night. She carried the food into the kitchen, babbling excitedly about dim sum and spring rolls.

“I love you,” I whispered, as she was pulling out cartons and setting them on the counter.

That is why you would laugh. You would smile sadly and shake your head. “Mon ami,” you would groan, ever-exasperated by me. Because yes, while I had finally said it aloud, proving it to be true, I hadn’t said it to her face. I hadn’t done more than whisper it.

And already that tiny noise had faded, leaving me to wonder if I had even spoke at all, or if it had all been a dream.