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“Walk with me?”
Maybe the simple hope in Lestat’s voice stirred something in Louis. Maybe he was growing tired of stoking slowly burning embers of resentment, with no end in sight.
In any case, Lestat’s words got in through the cracks. They walked the city together as they hadn’t in years, not since Claudia had left them. Carried along by their own feet and a nostalgic November breeze, they talked more easily, even looked at each other from time to time in a way that began to break up the dark bitterness wedged between them. They both left behind the petty jabs that had become a habit, and they found they didn’t miss them.
They carried these new selves back into the dusty townhouse, and their different postures put a new light on everything. How simple it would be to clear some of those old newspapers away. Another shelf for the books scattered on the floor: why, they could find that anywhere.
And how impossible it was to believe that they hadn’t touched each other in months. To deny themselves a pleasure that didn’t take anything but an outstretched hand? What did they stand to gain from that?
By December, they were on the mend, or so it seemed to Louis. They were filling in the hollow places, stitching new threads to replace the frayed ones. In the corners of his mind, Louis could spy old wounds still needing to be dressed, but neither were eager to bring those up. Not yet, not when things were finally good between them.
“What about a tree?” Lestat asked. They hadn’t had one in years.
Louis hesitated. The gray of early morning was creeping into the upstairs windows, but they were slow to leave their bed. They still kept to their own coffins, a habit neither had suggested breaking. Not yet.
“It helps,” Lestat said quietly. He bent to press his lips to Louis’s collarbone; it hid his face. “To mark the time.”
Dreadful words, Louis thought, then amended the thought, a hand tracing up Lestat’s spine. Kind words, gentle words, to endure a dreadful thing.
“Fine,” he said. “That’s fine.” And they brought home a tree. Cleared a space for it, pulled out the boxes in the back of their closet, and began to work.
In spite of himself, Louis was looking forward to it. The sense that it was a betrayal of Claudia felt less convincing now that the tree was here, now that they had a string of lights wrapped around it. It was such a little thing; it would be gone in a moment, and his guilt and his grief would still be here, waiting for him.
Why not have this, while they could?
“Ah!”
Lestat cried out, pulling his hand out from a box of ornaments. He’d pricked his finger. They both stared at the growing bead of blood, which rolled down his finger as the skin below it closed.
And then Lestat looked accusingly at Louis.
“What?” His heart had begun to thud.
Lestat shoved the box, which made an awful rustling sound, under Louis’s nose. Nearly every bulb was broken.
Three years prior, he’d come home to the sharp scent of evergreen.
There it stood in their sitting room: a Christmas tree, glowing with strings of multi-colored lights. Gaudy, offensive, Lestat beaming beside it. He’d gone on and on about the tree: how they’d left it late, this year, and it had been difficult to find something suitable. But Lestat liked the look of this one, it would do nicely, and once you put lights on anything, it takes on a—
“I don’t want this,” Louis interrupted. “I don’t want you to do this.”
“Do what?” Lestat’s smile fell away, leaving an open expression of bafflement. Like he’d stepped backwards onto air.
His sincerity, his complete lack of understanding, was infuriating.
“This…whatever this is,” Louis gestured to the tree. “Trying to make things like they haven’t changed. I don’t want it.”
The openness of Lestat’s expression vanished; everything narrowed. His eyes, his mouth—when he spoke, the words would come out thin and brittle. All of it was unnatural and ugly, a kind of disfigurement. It was a posture Louis had begun to realize he enjoyed drawing out.
“Well, who says I do it for you?!” Each word chipping as he spat it out.
Though sharp, those splintered words were smaller, easier to handle if you didn’t care so much about drawing blood.
Louis hadn’t, and they’d fought. Nothing remarkable was said, from what Louis could remember. The same argument they’d been having since Claudia had left them. It had nothing to do with the tree, not really; the bitterness was ever present.
Eventually, they ran out of words, and Lestat put on his hat.
“I haven’t eaten,” he said to Louis’s glare.
“Take it down, if you really can’t bear it,” he called from the foyer.
So Louis did.
The first one had been an accident. Louis had pulled too hard on the garland, and one of the glass ornaments crashed onto the floor and broke into pieces.
Louis felt a grieflike pang as he collected the pieces. The red and gold set of ornaments had been with them from their first Christmas together: a gift they’d given each other. He’d laid the pieces on a nearby newspaper and went back to work on the garland.
But the more he looked at the tree, at the sparkling ornaments, the less they seemed to mean. Claudia was gone, and Lestat made sure to tell Louis at every opportunity that she would never come back.
And he’d put up this tree, these absurd baubles that remained only because they were more careful with them than with anything that mattered.
Louis let another one fall. This one cracked along its side. The satisfaction Louis took in the sound made him almost laugh aloud. He dropped the next one from a greater height, experimented with his technique. Some bounced, some crushed in on themselves. His favorites were the ones that shattered.
All of them he collected onto newspaper, before funneling them back into their box. When he was finished, he closed the lid and put the box away in the closet.
He put the tree out with the trash to be collected on Wednesday. He was tucked in his coffin well before sunup, though he was not yet asleep when he heard Lestat’s slow footsteps up the stairs. Lestat said nothing about the tree. Not that night, nor any time after.
Louis had long since forgotten about the broken pieces.
Lestat didn’t ask him why. He didn’t ask Louis anything. Just stared into the box.
“I was upset,” Louis said, “I forgot I—you know how it was that year.”
He truly had forgotten. Had he remembered, he’d have disposed of them, made up a story about why they’d gone missing. Anything to stop the closing up of Lestat’s expression.
“Forgot,” he whispered. “Of course.”
“They were already starting to go,” Louis said. “We’ll get new ones.”
“To commemorate what?” Lestat looked at Louis with narrowed, malicious eyes. “Our home’s first rodent infestation?”
So easy, to go back. So terrifyingly easy.
And so pleasurable, in a way.
“You know why I broke them?” Louis said, his voice starting out low. “You want to know why? Because I wanted to see something. I wanted to see if you cared more about this than our daughter being gone. Look at you! This is glass, this is nothing! This whole thing is nothing!”
He’d built the words up to a righteous shout, to something meant to resonate. But Lestat’s face only twisted further.
“No,” he shook his head. “No. Three years. Three years, you hid them away. Waiting for a happier time to spoil? Was that it? Well, have them!” He thrust the box into Louis’s hands. “Have your point! Your nothing giving you nothing—”
“—not what I fuckin’ said—”
“—and when she comes back you can tell her the story.” Lestat said when she comes back like a person might say when pigs fly. “Won’t she be so very proud of you. All your shattered glass. I’m sure that will go a long way towards mending things, right along with your piles of garbage—”
Without stopping his ranting, he left; the front door slammed behind him midsentence. Louis imagined him cursing in French to no one as he paced up the street.
He went upstairs, then back down again when he realized it still smelled of them, the air alive with the promise of only a few hours before.
He left the box of broken ornaments on a side table, lay down on the sofa, and closed his eyes.
The days began to slip away again, with nothing to distinguish them. The tree dried up and dropped most of its needles before one of them finally dragged it outside. Louis didn’t remember who.