“I thought about cutting down a real baby tree,” he mumbled with suspiciously pink cheeks. Was he blushing? “But then we’d have to water it, the water would freeze in here, and the tree wouldn’t get any fresh air. And then they were all sold out of mini trees and ornaments—”
“Is this the top of a regular sized artificial tree?” I blurted out, stunned by his creative thinking.
“Uh, yeah. It wouldn’t stay upright, so I used this box for the base and poked a hole in the top.” He lifted the full sized tree skirt he’d tied around the wire base of the tree top to reveal how the tree was duck taped to the box. “And I was thinking, since all the mini ornaments were sold out, we could, I don’t know, make our own?” He lifted the tree and the lid it was attached to, revealing how the box was full of scissors and glue sticks and packs of Christmas cards and gift wrap.
How had he known how much I was missing getting to decorate the tree with my family? It was one of the best parts of the holiday. I bit my lower lip as my eyes stung.
“It was a stupid idea, I know,” he said. “I wanted you to have a tree, but—”
“No, I love it,” I said, daring to look at him though my eyes still threatened to overflow. “It’s brilliant really. Way better than any tree I could have come up with. It’s the sweetest thing anyone’s ever done for me.”
“Aw crap, don’t cry,” he muttered then leaned around the tree to give me a quick kiss. “It’s not that great. It doesn’t even have any lights or decorations yet.”
“We’ll make it beautiful.”
The next twenty minutes felt like being back in kindergarten as we cut strips of paper and glued them into a tiny chain that we draped around our tree. I couldn’t help but laugh a little as I caught Hayden struggling to fit his big hands into a tiny pair of children’s scissors. He was trying so hard. It was incredibly cute.
Unfortunately the time flew by far too fast and eventually we had to stop. Figuring we would be missed, we packed up all the craft supplies in the tree’s box base again, then headed back to the house.
It was the last bit of real happiness we’d have for a long time.
Two hours later, one of the parents in our house got sick, followed by one of the older kids.
The house smelled like a display for Lysol. And it was quiet, unnaturally so considering the number of people packed inside its walls. Mike and Hayden tried to keep the kids happy with card games when they weren’t fetching more buckets of water. I spent all my time helping Pamela, grinding herbs for potions in the kitchen, switching out cooling washcloths on the patients’ foreheads, making teas and terrible smelling pastes until we had to crack open one of the living room windows just to get some fresh air.
But nothing seemed to work.
Then came the knock at our door, and a message from one of the other houses. Despite all our precautions, the sickness had spread. Hayden sent around a message calling for all the healers and sick people to gather at our house. Clearly this was a tougher strain of flu than Pamela had experienced before. We needed to stop the virus in its tracks. Now.
Worried, I stood with Hayden in the master bedroom doorway as two new healers gathered with Pamela around Bud, who was still the most dangerously ill of all the patients. We set up the three new patients in here with him to make it easier to treat everyone.
After several long minutes of silence, one of the new healers, a lady in her fifties or so, growled in frustration. “It’s like chasing after a mouse.”
“Exactly!” Pamela muttered. “Every time I get close, it races off somewhere else. I can’t get it pinned down long enough to get rid of it, or even to figure out what it is.”
The other healers hummed in agreement. Then they noticed us watching.
“What can I do to help?” I said.
Pamela shook her head, her jaw clenched. “Nothing right now. We’ve just got to keep battling this thing till we find a way to beat it. Why don’t you two go grab some fresh air for a few hours? We’ve got others coming to take a shift. I don’t want you two getting too tired and lowering your immunity to whatever this virus is.”
Frustrated, I went outside, making a beeline for the truck. I needed something manual to do, something that would take my mind off my lack of ability to help the situation in any real and meaningful way.
Hayden followed at a slower pace, hanging back probably because my frustration wasn’t too subtle right now. He hesitated a few yards away from the truck after I got in, then he turned towards the flatbed trailer, which he’d unhitched and left a few yards behind his truck. A few minutes later I heard him tear into the tiny house kit. A smart choice since I didn’t want to take my anger out on him but couldn’t figure out how to stop being angry in the first place. Hearing him working on his own thing outside while I had some alone time to cool off and reset my thoughts was soothing on its own. The mindless task of cutting out Christmas card designs to hang as ornaments on our tree took care of the rest.
An hour later, I felt like an idiot for getting so angry in the first place. After stowing all the craft supplies again, I climbed out of the truck and joined him by the flatbed trailer, which had been transformed from an orderly, plastic-wrapped cube into a huge mess across the snow. It looked like a home improvement store had exploded.
“Want some help?” I said.
“Does Pamela need us yet?”
I shook my head. “If she had needed us, she would have sent one of the kids for us. She’s probably busy working with real healers now.” Even to my own ears, I could tell I’d failed to keep the bite out of my tone.
One corner of Hayden’s mouth twitched, but wisely he didn’t laugh at me. Instead he offered me the kit’s instruction booklet. “I can’t find part A, B or C. Everything’s got a sticker on it, but there’s a million pieces to wade through first just to find what we need to get going.”
We didn’t make a lot of headway that afternoon. Our bulky gloves made it hard to pick up the smaller stuff, but taking them off was pure agony in the cold. We did get everything more organized and a couple of sections of subflooring down, though, which was a start.
“I think Grandma Letty just gave me that kit to tick me off,” he joked as we headed back to our house to warm up.
“No, it just requires patience.”