What a difference a year makes. 

December, 1999.  A week before Christmas, we were nearly to his boss’s front door when Keith stopped.  It was a cold, clear night.  The house glowed, warm and inviting.  Good cheer and good times beckoned from all the windows.  Waiting patiently, just for us it seemed, on the other side of the grand double-doored entrance.  Each door sported an enormous and bountiful holiday wreath.  One of those things must have cost a fortune, I thought, let alone two.

This was our first Christmas party at Dick’s, our first invitation inside the gates, to his nationally known-golf course sited home.  He'd been hosting this party for the upper echelon of the company for years.

“Let’s get in there,” I said impatiently.  I was cold.  And I wanted to see the inside of that house.

He cleared his throat.  “Look at me.  I just want to give you a friendly reminder.  For when you’re talking to everyone, making your rounds.  Yapping with the bigwigs and Dick and his wife.  Don’t slip up and call him Dick.  Please remember that.  Please be careful what you say.  This may be a party but it’s not like all the other ones.”

He had that right.

Keith called him Dick even though his name was Don.  Never to his face, of course, only when he talked about him to me.  He couldn’t stand him, quietly despised him.  The guy was a numbers man through and through.  Keith said he had no vision, no sense of humor, couldn’t care less about the people that made that company what it was.  When he’d make an appearance at the store Keith managed, all he wanted to talk about was the bottom line.  “Show me the numbers,” he’s say, no lead in, no small talk.  As long as the numbers were better than the previous quarter, that’s all he cared about.

Now Keith was nearly out from under his thumb.  This shindig was his coming out party, in a way.  He was the one with a vision and it had paid off, handsomely, no thanks to Dick.  He first took it to him, Keith always tried the rules first.  But it was quickly shot down as too risky, too pie-in-the sky.  Multiple times.  He didn't want to hear the details, he had no interest in all the years of lonely late night planning and plotting that gave that vision substance. 

So he finally went right over Dick’s nay-saying head to his bosses and made his case.  They bit.  Now Keith was on equal footing with him and most everyone was singing his praises.   And Dick had to suck it up, in his own home.

“For God’s sake,” I said.  “Have a little faith in me.  At least I won’t be drinking.”  I was four months pregnant.  Number four.  Besides, it wasn’t likely I’d be talking much to the bunch that figured into Keith’s future.  What did I have to say to them; their business was computers and even though it was retail, they all lived and breathed them and loved talking about them.   Not me.   I’d gravitate to the wives and girlfriends; he didn’t have to worry about me.

I broke away and rang the doorbell.  Those double doors swung wide open in a welcoming embrace.  The light and warmth and noise poured forth, drenching me.  Then I was inside, among the laughing crowd.

Oh it was glorious, everything I’d expected and more.  The house, the food, the sky-high tree in the two-story great room, the second tree in the four-season room off the huge gourmet kitchen where most of the women congregated.  I loved them all, loved it all, looked forward to it all for me, for us.  Someday, maybe soon.

I loved Nina, wife of Keith’s right-hand man Adam.  I didn’t know either one of them well but I would in the coming months.

She was pregnant too, with their first.  Due in a week, maybe even on Christmas Day.  We were both having girls.  I was sure they’d be the best of friends, because their dads already were. 

Getting pregnant hadn’t been easy for them, not like it was for me.  Over the years, there’d been miscarriage after miscarriage, some even in the fourth or fifth month.  I felt sorry for them, so sorry.  We’d sent flowers each time.  I couldn’t fathom it, all the dashed hopes, all that wasted effort.

It was all good now though.  We laughed and we talked and we bantered about how they should spell the name they’d decided on:  'Melody', but he liked it with a ‘y’ and she wanted an 'i.' 

Such momentous decisions.

Y2K was the buzzword that year and it was great for business and for party talk.  No one worried about it in that crowd.  I loved them all, even Dick.  I didn’t slip up and call him that, I was so good, everyone liked me, they all did, I know they did, I made him proud, I know I did because Keith even told me later.  “You done good honey.  You made quite an impression.” 

I remember hesitating for a moment and looking back at that house just before I got in the car and we drove away.  It shimmered and shined in the frigid night air.  The new millennium beckoned.

~

He told me about it later, how it happened, even though I didn’t want to know.  In June, after we somehow fell into a weekly routine of going to lunch every Tuesday.  I had the baby in May and he visited me every day for the five days I was in the hospital after the C-section.  He was at my house all the time too, Adam was, because the office was five minutes away and because he didn’t want to go home.  He even asked me if he could be in the OR with me and I had to tell him no, it wouldn’t be good for him and they wouldn’t allow it, my sisters-in-law were the only two and anyway what would Nina think.  Same hospital and all.

So he told me about it at our first lunch.  Keith had given me only the barest details, which was fine by me.

Three days after that party, they were all in the conference room, talking about big things, around the big, polished wood table, when the door opened and the receptionist came in without knocking, holding the phone out in front of her.  He knew immediatelyshe was coming for him.

No, he thought, not this time, not again, give it to someone else, but she kept coming and thrust it at him.   Nina’s doctor.  Get to the ER now, he said.  Right now.

He left them, all of them staring after him, and he drove and drove and wanted to drive forever but he kept going, gripping the steering wheel, pounding his head against it, he just wanted to keep driving but then there he was in the ER, someone tearing off his jacket and another one shoving his arms into a gown and then he was in there and all he remembered was blood.  Her blood.  The floor, the ceiling, the walls, he said it was like an abattoir.  She was hemorrhaging, dying right there in front of him, refusing a transfusion, refusing to push, he had to convince her to live even though he wanted to die.  He had to convince her to push. 

So much blood.  Hysteria.  Madness.  And just in time for Christmas, a dead baby girl.  He cradled her in his arms and told himself, “She looks like me.”  He got his choice for the name's spelling.  "Melody."  Nina didn't care one way or the other.

This time, we sent them cookies.  A tray of cookies from an upscale bakery.  I stared at him across the table.  “That was my idea.  I’m sorry, I didn’t know what else to do.  Not flowers again.”

I felt sick.

He smiled.  “They were good.  I ate them all.”  Then, “Want to see her picture?” 

No I do not want to see your dead baby’s picture.

“Of course I do,” I said and relief flooded his face.

“She looks just like you,” I told him.

He was there in that same hospital again in April, three weeks before I had my baby.  Came up right behind me as I was leaning over him, stroking Keith’s forehead, wondering why there was a tube sticking out of his mouth and should I ask them to take it out.  He was flat on his back in in his briefs and nothing else.  I heard someone behind me and I turned around and there was Adam although I didn’t recognize him for a moment.  I should cover you up, I thought.  Kind of embarrassing for your colleague to see you this way.

We talked about that too.  “He looked good, didn’t he,” I said inanely.  “Good color, like he was asleep.”

“He was ashen,” Adam said and looked away.  “He taught me everything I knew. Everything I know about people, he taught me.”

“Even her,” he added. “How I should be talking to her.  Even though I can’t.”

Fuck you Adam.  I told you your dead baby looked like you even though she didn’t.  You don’t get to tell me what color my dead husband was.

“He was not ‘ashen’,” I said stubbornly.  “He looked healthy, like he was asleep.”

Adam took a long swallow of his whiskey and soda and said, “She’s not holding up her end, you know?  It’s been six months and I’ve been doing it all, I mean everything, tying up loose ends and selling the house and busting my ass to wrap up my job and trying to make sense of this crazy move out of the country that she says will cure her.  I’m doing it all and I want no part of it and she sleeps all day.”

He wanted his wife back, she wanted her baby back, I wanted my husband back, and none of us was going to get what we wanted.

They left at the end of July.  Our house was the last stop on their way out and after hugs and kisses and pictures with my kids and assurances of keeping in touch and how as soon as they were settled in their little beach town in Mexico, they wanted us to come and visit (fat chance I thought, me traveling to Mexico with three kids and a baby), they rolled out of town.

I never heard from them again, except through the rapidly withering grapevine.  They split up; she stayed down there, he took off.

~

December, 2000.  I stopped by the office.  I made some excuse, I don't know why I did, but for some reason I had to see it one last time.  Closure, maybe, although I'd been learning there was no such thing.  I ran into Dick on my way out.  We hemmed and hawed about nothing for a minute or two and then I said, “Who took over for them?”  I didn’t want to know but I felt like I had to ask.

He looked surprised.  “No one told you?"  I thought of his lovely home and wondered if he’d had a Christmas party.  “Don’t keep in touch with anyone here,” I said.  “I never got to know anyone well enough other than Nina and Adam."

“Oh.  Well we shuttered it.  I’m sorry, I just thought you knew.”  Then he must have seen my face.  “It wasn’t a wasted effort, believe me,” he added quickly.   “We learned a lot from what they did.  The effort wasn’t wasted.”

About a week before Christmas I heard the doorbell.  I was sitting on the couch doing nothing, staring mainly, which had become my habit, so my mother answered the door.  The woman had more or less moved in with us and a good thing she had.  Raising four kids is hard work, especially from one's perch on a couch.

A year ago, the doorbell seemed to ring non-stop.  Lots of things coming down the pike for the newly anointed manager of national business sales, all featuring high-tech vendor and corporate logos. Bottles of champagne, boxes of gourmet chocolate.  Gift baskets of fancy fruit and nuts and other goodies, glorious holiday floral arrangements, bathrobes, polo shirts, all to court his favor.  So much stuff, that I donated most of it to charity. It just kept coming.  It seemed like it would never end. 

I heard someone say, “This is something from everyone who worked with Keith.  We were thinking of his family.”   

My mother dragged it into the living room, it was big, and my kids hopped around excitedly.  Not the baby of course, but the two-year-old and the other two.

“Do you want to open it,” she asked me.  She didn’t wait for my answer since she knew what it would be.  She’d been doing everything else for so many months now.

It was full of clothes and toys, for the kids.  But as they pulled things out and held them up, they looked confused.  These weren’t the kind of things their dad and I would have bought for them. These things looked tired and old.  Used. 

My daughter held up a girl’s sweater.  It was a strange color.  “This is kind of pretty,” she said uncertainly.  The label had been torn out of it.

My mother snatched the sweater out of her hands.  “No it’s not,” she said.   Her mouth was set in a grim line.  “Give me that stuff.”  She shoved everything back in the box and my kids helped her take it out to her car.  I don’t know what she did with it and I never asked.

Even so, I briefly thought about writing a thank-you note but I just couldn't seem to muster the effort.