Chapter Text
It’s December 23rd when Shiv lands at MSP and spills the last dregs of her lukewarm coffee all over her lap as the plane skids across an icy runway. That’s what she gets for flying fucking Delta, trying to keep this trip under the radar, trying to keep her own secrets from her brothers since they’re clearly so desperate to keep her in the dark these days.
Her phone explodes with notifications when she turns off airplane, half of them Connor asking which roast vegetables worked best for Christmas Eve Supper, which she hasn’t yet told him she won’t be attending. She sighs and likes one of his suggestions, then opens her most recent text from Tom.
Text me when you land!
She doesn’t, just puts her phone in her pocket and files off the plane with the rest of business class. Everyone around her is so revoltingly cheery, happy to be home for the holidays, relaxing into the burst of freezing wind that greets them in the boarding bridge. Shiv shivers and hauls her carryon into the void airport waiting area, searching for a spot to recluse herself and figure out what the fuck she’s doing in Minnesota now that she’s lived the great girlish catharsis of buying a plane ticket and running away from home.
In her pacing, she accidentally bumps into a wayward toddler, knocking the girl sideways, making her drop a Kermit the Frog stuffed animal and startling her into tears.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” Shiv says quietly, steadying the girl as she wails and glancing over to where her mother’s ears have perked up.
“Mandy,” the mom calls firmly, herding the child back over to where her family is waiting to board, waiting to start their sunny holiday in Orlando together. She doesn’t address Shiv at all, doesn’t even look at her, and that’s when Shiv shamefully realizes that she’s started crying, too.
She sits for a moment to compose herself, wondering what proportion of this outburst is hormones, grief, envy, resentment, the simple anxiety of being somewhere so out of place. She bites her lip, takes a long sip of water, and texts Tom to come get her. She registers that in these moments of weakness there’s always some stubborn, hated part of her that’s waiting for Tom to come get her. She promises herself she won’t take that out on him this week.
“Hey honey,” Tom greets cordially on the curb at pickup. He’d gotten out of the car, but he makes no move to touch her, and Shiv is both grateful and demolished by that grace.
“Hi Tom,” she responds, willfully keeping the tears out of her voice. “Merry Christmas,” she adds with a forced smile, crossing her arms in front of her as the winter air chills her. She knew it would be worse than New York, but feeling it in person now is so viscerally different.
“Yeah, Merry Christmas,” he agrees with an almost embarrassed smile, then opens the passenger side door for her, suddenly spurred into action by her discomfort. He takes her— their luggage and lays it carefully in the back seat, and Shiv slips into the passenger seat, embraced by the warmth of the heater he’d left on for her.
She can’t remember the last time she rode in the front. It makes her feel like a big girl, finally calling shotgun and winning, though that’s a narrative stolen from someone else’s nostalgia.
Public radio is playing quietly while Shiv waits in isolation for Tom to take the driver’s seat. The Minnesotan accent is clearly distinguishable, and she has to laugh for a moment to throw off all the feelings welling up in her throat.
“Hm?” Tom prompts as he buckles up beside her, mirroring her amusement despite himself.
“It’s like Fargo,” she notes, a tad mischievous, a sprinkle of the past diluting the cold. Tom cracks, the smile crinkling his big hopeful eyes, and switches the car into drive.
“You’re in for an amusing week with the in-laws,” he concedes. The tires slosh through weeks worth of snow slush as they turn out of the airport road, and Shiv winces slightly. “Big city girl spending Christmas in a snowy town with all the colorful locals,” he continues, painting her apprehension in only the warmest of lights. “It’s like a Hallmark movie.”
They never talked about this visit, never talked about how his family might or might not welcome her after their divorce debacle. He’d just invited her to spend the holidays here, away from her brothers and Waystar and all the building fallout from the election, and she’d accepted his invitation. Shiv hadn’t booked a hotel room. Tom hadn’t asked. They sit in the car in silence, narrated by MPR’s segment on F Scott Fitzgerald, and Shiv wonders where they are going and how it is she still trusts Tom to get them there.
Flurries started falling as they turned off the highway and into a neighborhood plucked straight from a snow globe. Tom’s expression lightened like a little boy’s, and he lowered the volume on the radio as he started pointing to features around them.
“They used to set up an ice rink in that park around this time,” he explains, squinting critically through the dark trying to find it. “It was very unofficial, just over a frozen lake. Everyone’s mothers would tell us not to skate there, because one year some idiot tried when the ice was too thin and fell in and had to have a couple toes removed. But we all met up there anyway.”
Shiv peers through the dark, but she can’t find the outline of an ice rink, either. She wonders if he’s always held such fondness for deadly things.
“Oh, and that’s where I went to elementary,” Tom comments, pointing at the small, cross-adorned Catholic school lit by a nativity scene. Tom’s family was Catholic in the same way Shiv’s was, educational institutions included. Shiv suddenly had a vision of herself in that awful plaid skirt, sitting alone in the corners of classrooms and scoffing at the idea of reconciliation. “I wasn’t a popular kid, but the teachers all said I was a pleasure to have in class,” Tom adds, some irony coloring the boyish pride. Shiv knows without a doubt she would’ve looked down on him if they’d gone to the same school.
They turn onto a more well-lit boulevard brimming with smaller shops and restaurants, string lights and college students bustling around in the flurries. Tom chuckles fondly at a storefront proclaiming ‘Authentic French Patisserie’.
“My mom used to take me there for hot chocolate after a youth league hockey game,” he explains, then scrunches up his nose, as though it pains him to connect these events. “I also had my first kiss there.”
Shiv snorts quietly at that, at how perfectly that coincidence sums up the Tom she’d loved. Eager for gentleness, for affection. She can almost hear him, awkward teenage voice cracking as he asks some sweet, foolish girl, “Is it okay if I kiss you? Do you like this?” There’s a small ache in her heart witnessing all his integrity like that, recognizing him ages before she met him, and it makes her feel like crying again, but she just smiles at him reassuringly.
The truth is that it’s strange to see where Tom grew up for the first time, stranger after years of him living in the very same rooms where she became a woman. She envies the severe separation he’s had from his roots. Everywhere they go is unrelentingly cold and dark, lit by feeble Christmas lights carefully strung from trees, and Shiv thinks maybe that explains some things about Tom she’d known but never quite understood.
She wishes they could keep driving these streets, keep looking at all the Christmas lights forever. Wishes they could just be entombed in this car, perpetually rolling over ice sheets and pot holes, glowing in the heater’s warmth and listening to the familiar sound of Tom’s past for eternity.
But eventually, they pull into his driveway and step back out into the cold.