New fic: Keeping Christmas, PG-13, Miranda/Andy, Part II
Title: Keeping Christmas
Author: chilly_flame
Rating: PG-13 for the occasional curse
Pairing: Miranda/Andy
Disclaimer: I don’t own anything related to the Devil or Prada, alas. I don’t own “A Christmas Carol” either, which is even sadder.
Notes: Many thanks to politic_x for the firm nudge in the direction of this prompt, although it took about ten days longer to finish than I’d hoped. Also, huge thanks to Xander, who guided me through a journey that was far more challenging than I anticipated.
The prompt: Miranda/Andy - A Christmas Carol take off, girlie_girl_23. Hope it’s something you like!
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Part II.
A breeze caresses Miranda’s cheek; it smells of hyacinth and freshly cut grass. So lovely is the scent that she awakens instantly, as the clock on her phone transitions to 1am.
When she opens her eyes, the room is completely dark. The only light comes from the city outside, illuminating her desk and the sofa in the corner. It’s unnerving, since she’s sure she left the desk lamp on. She reaches for the button, which doesn’t work when she clicks it. In a moment, she notices a glow traveling toward her, closer and closer, until a small figure appears in the doorway, candle in hand.
It looks like a child, but Miranda knows instinctively this is no child. She has a young face, and long hair that flows over her shoulders. Strangely, her hair is a faded auburn, streaked with gray and white. Pearly blue eyes gaze at her with a gentle expression. “Are you ready? I understand you were expecting me.”
Saliva gathers in Miranda’s mouth. She is afraid she may be sick, but she swallows. This small… being is… She was asleep before, wasn’t she? That whole thing with Stan, and the ghosts, was just dreck. Why on earth-
“You must come along. I am the Ghost of Christmas Past.” The girl smiles, and Miranda shivers.
“Go away.” I don’t want to see my past. “I want you to go away from here.”
The spirit approaches to touch Miranda’s hand. It’s like feathers along her skin. “You can’t escape your past, Miranda. It’s with you every day, no matter how fast or far you run.” The hand wraps around Miranda’s, and the touch is so like her mother’s that for a single moment, Miranda believes. She shuts her eyes, and the chair beneath her is gone-she is airborne, not flying, but held aloft, as though gravity has disappeared. She clings tightly to the girl’s hand, afraid, until the strange voice soothes her. “Just hold on and all will be well.”
When Miranda opens her eyes, she is outside the home where she grew up. A puppy bounds toward her-a small, filthy mutt who barks madly. “Charlie,” Miranda breathes. He is so small, and he throws himself at the front door, front paws against it as he cries to get in. The door opens, and the Ghost pulls Miranda through it until they are inside.
Here, on the floor of the entryway, is Miriam Princhek at five years old. Her hair is pale blonde. Her nose seems too long for her delicate features, but her cheekbones are high, and her skin is porcelain. She giggles as she dries Charlie with a fluffy cream towel, and he licks her face in turn.
“Miriam, don’t you let that dog track mud into this house!” comes a voice from the parlour.
“Yes, Mother,” little Miriam says.
Miranda exhales, and the ghost tugs her hand toward the voice, following Miriam and the excitable puppy. “If he gets dirt on my nice clean carpet--”
“I wiped his paws, Mother, I promise. See?” Little Miriam points to the pristine rug, but her mother ignores her, looking down at her needlepoint. Charlie jumps at Miriam’s legs.
“Keep him quiet too, otherwise your father will put him out for the night.”
Miriam shivers. “But-but he might die if he has to sleep outside!”
“Then keep him quiet. We have guests coming and if they’re disturbed, you’ll be sorry.”
Miriam nods solemnly.
“Now go upstairs. Dinner is in two hours.”
“Yes, Mother.” The tiny girl leaves with Charlie nipping at her heels.
Miranda gasps. She’s just realized what day this is-it’s Christmas Eve, the night of the “incident.” That’s how she’s always thinks of it, since she’s been old enough to make sense of it. It’s the night Miranda’s mother caught her father with his hand up a neighbor’s skirt in the garage.
Miranda remembers this night through a child’s eyes-it’s a blur, but she so desperately wants to change the course of events. This night was the beginning of the end of her parents’ marriage, although she’s sure that it had been coming for a long time. Her father was a philanderer, but Miranda believes that it’s only because other people found out that her mother took action.
“I don’t want this,” she tells the ghost. “I lived through it once, I don’t need to see it again.”
“Miranda, to look back on your past is not meant to hurt you. Don’t you understand why we’re here?”
Miranda feels the tears in her eyes almost before it’s too late-she can barely keep them from spilling down her cheeks. “It’s my fault, my fault--”
Around her, time passes in fast forward, until the room is filled with party guests, swilling martinis and cocktails like water. It’s the swinging sixties, and Miriam’s mother is well and truly drunk, even though the wall clock reads 7:08. Little Miriam stares up at the party guests with a frown on her face. Her father is missing, and she wants to know where he is.
Watching her own small face, Miranda remembers her thoughts perfectly. She’d barely seen her father all day, even though it was Christmas Eve! She wanted to make sure he knew to leave out the cookies and milk for Santa, because her Mother wouldn’t remember. She was filled with eagerness, and excitement, and especially anticipation of all the good things that were supposed to happen.
But the Good Things would never come to pass, because after little Miriam searches every room in the house, she decides to check the garage. She turns the knob, and flicks on the light.
Miranda feels the ghost squeeze her hand as she stares at her father, who is on top of the woman who lives two doors down. They are rolling around on the hood of their big Cadillac car, and Charlie starts barking. Little Miriam cries out as her father looks up. Then another man pushes into the garage from behind her and people start shouting. Miranda can only watch in horror as her childhood self is ignored, cowering in the corner as people start to throw punches. Miranda’s mother is there too, in the doorway, and her face is a frozen mask. She doesn’t shout. She doesn’t scream. She looks dead inside.
“Get out,” Miranda’s, and Miriam’s, mother says. The room goes quiet, and Miranda’s father laughs.
“With pleasure.” His eye is swollen, as is his cheek, from where the neighbor hit him. He glances around, his eyes catching Miriam’s, and he actually looks angry. Not contrite. Not sad, or even troubled.
Charlie is barking at his feet, and her father glares down at him with a drunken scowl. In this moment, Miranda sees her father through the eyes of an adult: his eyes are bloodshot, his nose is covered with broken capillaries, his gut falls over the belt of his pants. In the few pictures Miranda has of her father, he is handsome, and smiling. In life, he is far from it.
Her father storms out, kicking the door as he passes through it. Eventually, all the adults leave the garage, and little Miriam is alone. The fluorescent lights hanging above her are tinged with grey and green, and Miranda watches Miriam, weeping as she holds Charlie.
The ghost touches Miranda’s shoulder. “The dog must have been good company for such a sensitive child.”
Although she has never seen herself as sensitive, Miranda nods. “He was very loyal. A couple of months later, I came home from school and he was gone.” Miranda still feels the sting of it-Charlie, her one true companion, who had snuggled with her every night, protecting her from all the things her father hadn’t. “I don’t know how he died. He was only three. My mother never told me anything.”
Sometimes, Miranda’s thinks her mother gave Charlie away. Or drove him to another town and left him by the side of the road. On her worst days, she thinks her mother poisoned Charlie, and buried him in the garden. She has no evidence to support any of these thoughts, but she has always wondered.
Miranda closes her eyes. “My father left that night. They divorced, and from what I recall they barely spoke two words to each other for the rest of their lives. My mother didn’t like to argue, you see? When they fought, my father would shout, but she’d just wait until he ran out of steam. Then she’d just cut him, right to the bone, with a few choice words.” As Miranda says this aloud, she is also thinking about herself, and hating herself. “It’s an extremely effective technique,” she sniffs. “I learned from the best.”
“You were just a child, Miranda. And you were not responsible for what happened between your parents.” The ghost’s head touches Miranda’s arm, rubbing against it like a cat’s. “And you never gave yourself any sympathy, did you,” the ghost says.
“Why should I? I was at least partly at fault--”
“No,” the ghost interrupts. “You weren’t. You never were. No child is at fault for the sins of their parents.”
Cassidy and Caroline leap to Miranda’s mind; she hears their sharp retorts, their bitter remarks during their most recent conversations. They are learning from the best too. “No,” Miranda says, sadly. “No. They’re not.”
“Look upon yourself with compassion, Miranda, and perhaps you will see your childhood, and yourself, differently.”
The garage around them disappears, and they’re in a new home, with a new father, and two new children. There is an enormous Christmas tree in the corner, and opulence surrounds them. Her stepfather is there, at his desk, working, while two-year-old twin boys toddle around the tree, almost bringing it down on top of them. Young Miriam rescues the tree and the twins along with it; she is ten or eleven, and Miranda’s mother’s voice rings out.
“Don’t be such an idiot, child.” She brushes Miriam aside and straightens out the tree. “Go play with your own things and leave the babies alone.”
Miriam’s stepfather glances up momentarily before returning to his work. The twins play in the huge pile of new toys, but they are more interested in the wrapping paper and empty boxes. Miranda sees her young self sit down in the corner with her small collection of books. She has a couple of new records, and a transistor radio. But the disparity in gifts is absurdly obvious- Miriam is now an afterthought. She vividly recalls feeling like a temporary charge to her “parents” after their wedding. Her stepfather barely seemed know her name, and over time, her mother almost forgot it too.
Again, time speeds to later in the day, and Miranda sees her ten or eleven-year-old self playing a record, alone under the Christmas tree. She is talking to herself.
“What were you saying? Do you remember?” the ghost asks, curious.
Miranda creeps closer, trying to listen. After hearing only a few words, the memory comes back to her. “I was telling myself a story, about a beautiful girl who was rescued from the wrong parents. She’d been kidnapped, and when her real parents found her, they barged in one Christmas morning and took her away, and from then on they told her every day that she was loved.”
There’s a long pause. “That’s sounds very sad,” the ghost says. “You must have been lonely.”
Tears are in Miranda’s eyes. “It wasn’t so terrible.”
“Sure,” the ghost replies, stroking Miranda’s wrist.
The scene dissolves again, and more years pass-she sees herself as a teenager, alone, alone, always alone in that enormous house. She sees many Christmases go by in a blur, including the few she spent in the dorm on her own during college and her graduate years. Those were difficult, Miranda recalls, but she was able to study, and survive. But one year, she spent Christmas with her lovely, sweet roommate Janie, and this is where they come to pause once again.
Miranda’s breath is stolen again at Janie’s beauty-she has long dark hair and lustrous blue eyes, with pale skin and a smattering of freckles across her nose. She is short, barely five feet, but perfectly shaped, with small breasts and narrow hips. If she had been taller, she could easily have been a model, and by this time in her life, Miranda (her new name is already in place) knows what a model should look like. She knows fashion, and she knows what she wants out of life, which is to work at Vogue, or Harper’s, or Runway. She has no desire to ever marry or have children.
Miranda watches herself with Janie and her large family-five siblings and two loving parents, three dogs and a couple of cats running around a crowded house. Miranda had refused twice before finally accepting the offer of a place to call home during Christmas.
“It’s not because you feel sorry for me, right?” Miranda had questioned Janie.
“Sorry for you? No way. You’ve got a full ride, girl, and my parents can barely afford to send me here, but I made it and I’m staying. I just want to hang out, and you can be on my team when the boys gang up on me. I need moral support, okay?”
And then it’s late at night, after a marvelous dinner, and Miranda lies in a bed with Janie. It’s Christmas Eve, and Miranda almost believes that she’ll hear tiny reindeer on the roof, because the day has been pure magic. It’s everything she never knew she wanted.
“She’s pretty,” whispers the ghost, as if afraid to disturb the scene before them.
“She was, yes,” Miranda replies, wishing she could go back to this moment and start her life over again. This very moment would be the perfect place. Because she sees Janie reach out and stroke Miranda’s cheek so gently, as though Miranda is precious, and then she leans forward to kiss her. And Miranda watches herself freeze in the bed, and jerk away.
“What are you doing?” young Miranda says.
“Kissing you,” Janie replies. “I’ve wanted to for a long time. I thought you wanted me to.”
“No!” Miranda hisses, her cheeks flushed. “Why would you think that? Do you think I’m a-a dyke or something? That’s disgusting.”
Miranda recalls very clearly that she did want to kiss Janie very badly, only she hadn’t realized it until the second it happened. And then, she became utterly terrified of everything that meant.
“Why did you pull away?” asks the ghost, startling Miranda out of the memory.
“I-I was afraid.” She might as well be honest. “I’d had sex with a couple of boys by this time, I think, and didn’t care too much about them one way or another. But Janie-I didn’t know how much I cared about her until it was over. And it never even started.”
And then she watches Janie turn over in the bed, and her shoulders shake as she cries and cries. Miranda lies next to her, stiff as a board.
With the ghost, Miranda hovers over her younger, foolish self the following morning. Janie ignores her, because she is ashamed of Miranda’s rejection. It’s only now, seeing it from a new perspective, that Miranda realizes how heartbroken Janie is. So many years later, it’s clear that Janie was in love with her, and Miranda never knew, or never wanted to know.
Miranda clears her throat. “We barely talked after that. She moved out. I don’t know where she is now,” Miranda says, and her heart is breaking too.
Then there is a rush of wind, and their surroundings become New York. Right away Miranda recognizes the small Upper East Side apartment she shared with Jeremy when they were first married. There’s a Christmas tree in the corner, with about four ornaments on it, but the rest of the place is filled with baby things. “Oh, my girls,” Miranda breathes, and there they are, lying on their backs on a soft baby blanket on the floor. Miranda’s signature haircut is styled perfectly, the dark blonde color already well into its early transition to white. Her almost forty-year-old self grins down at her children, shaking big plastic keys as they giggle wildly.
The ghost’s voice surprises her; Miranda had practically forgotten she was there. “I thought you didn’t want children, or a husband.”
“It was a good idea to be married, professionally,” Miranda replies, and suddenly she realizes how stupid this sounds. “I just mean that it looked better-well, it was smart.” She frowns. “And the girls…” Miranda doesn’t even want to admit it. “I was on the pill. And I forgot to take it now and then. Sometimes I think Jeremy would notice when I did-I caught him looking at the case, more than once.”
“So they were an accident?” the ghost asks.
“I prefer to call them a surprise,” Miranda says, smiling down at her younger self, and her beautiful girls. They were so darling as babies, and toddlers, too. They behaved terribly, but Miranda never minded. She also had a great deal of help. She could afford it.
Jeremy walks into the room, and he looks grim. “I can’t believe you’re doing this, Miranda.”
Miranda watches herself glance up. “It’s just for a few hours. They won’t even notice I’m gone.”
“Well I notice when you’re gone, for Christ’s sake!” Jeremy says, loudly. The girls whimper; they are about to cry.
“Keep your voice down, Jeremy,” Miranda says quietly, but there is ice in her voice. Instantly, Miranda recognizes her mother’s stern tone. “Don’t upset them. Or me.”
“Believe me, they’ll be upset the second you walk out the door. They need you, Miranda. I need you, but you’re never here! They’re barely seven months old and you’re always at work. They’re going to think Irina is their mother if you’re not careful!”
“Well, Irina is not their mother,” Miranda says, giving the plastic keys a final shake before getting to her feet. “And my ‘work’ happened to pay for this apartment, which I don’t recall you being particularly upset about before now.”
“You bitch,” Jeremy breathes, and the two of them stare at each other, both shocked at the vitriol in his voice.
“That’s awful, Miranda,” the ghost says, and the two of them watch Miranda’s almost forty-year-old self turn her back on her husband, getting ready to go to work on Christmas Eve. The guilt of those early years, leaving her children so much, is still palpable for Miranda. Even back then Irv had breathed down her neck at every moment possible. She was constantly fighting to keep the magazine on track, and the girls, as unexpected a delight as they had been, were often cared for by others.
Just before Miranda leaves, Irina walks into the room holding two bottles, and Miranda feels humiliation coupled with an overwhelming rage.
“Is that the nanny?” the ghost questions innocently, and Miranda can barely nod.
“She lived with us. When the girls were two, I caught Irina and Jeremy together, in our bed.” Miranda covers her mouth, remembering the disbelief and horror at their betrayal. She laughs. “He was right, too. When I left him, the girls cried for weeks. I think they missed Irina far more than they would have missed me.”
“I don’t think that’s true,” the ghost reassures her. “They knew their mother. And they loved her.”
Miranda feels helpless as she watches herself pull on her coat and storm out the door, not saying a word to either of them, or kissing her babies goodbye.
“God, please don’t make me live through more. Please take me back,” Miranda moans, and in the blink of an eye, they’re in her office. Miranda is at her desk, and she feels so much relief she could cry. “Thank you--” she says, turning to the ghost, but the room is empty.
Glancing around, she sees no one, and nothing is out of place. She puts her head in her hands, and closes her eyes.
----
Part III.