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SHELBY

It’s that sad, dead week between Christmas and New Year’s where everything feels weird and you are allowed to eat stocking chocolates or cheesecake for breakfast, so I sit inside the front office at work and nibble the leg of a deranged-looking gingerbread man, trying to keep the dark thoughts away.

It took a year of therapy and a couple dozen self-help books to begin to feel grateful to be alive. Gratitude is the only way to escape the spiral down into the depths, they say. So I try to say a list out loud in the morning, counting all the blessings in my life. I am grateful for my girls, for my husband, I am grateful for the heat in my car and my job that I love, I am grateful for the sky, and slipper socks, and the air in my lungs, and gravity, and this fucking gingerbread cookie. And sometimes it helps a little, but it doesn’t pull me from the depths as promised.

They found you just in time, be thankful . But when I look at my girls, and think about their fear, being locked in the car wondering where I was, there is no gratitude for being alive. There is nothing but white-hot rage. I can erase the terror I felt as the pain turned to numbness and then the world went dark. I can sometimes push the memory away for a whole day on a good day, but when I think about my babies crying in that car, I just… I have to stop the thought before I let it go any further in this moment, so I throw the rest of the cookie in the garbage and try to take a few deep breaths.

I carefully push myself to stand. One foot has a partial amputation. I’m lucky, they say. I can still walk and I lost two fingers on my left hand, what a miracle it wasn’t worse. I know they mean well—every lovely friend and acquaintance who tries to say something positive like that, I know that. What the hell can you really say to someone after something like this? But also fuck them for trying to make anything about this positive.

I peer out into the rec room and see Millie sitting in front of the TV watching Die Hard and drinking from a jug of sangria, and Florence and Bernie playing chess at a card table covered in tinsel and Hershey’s wrappers. I can tell from here that Mort is in a filthy mood by the way he holds his book in front of his face, silently protesting the movie choice, but still peers over the cover now and then to scowl at the screen.

It’s the residents at Oleander Terrace who really pull me out of the depths, at least for short spaces of time throughout the day. The Ole is a small assisted living facility I manage where the residents have their own rooms and shared living space rather than their own apartments, but most of them are quite independent and only need limited care. I think most chose this place over fifty-five-plus apartment facilities because of the community. It’s not a nursing home. They mostly do what they please. It’s small and there’s always poker or pottery class or dance nights and just people around in the common area to fill the void, but it still doesn’t cure the loneliness. I may be jaded and half-crippled now, but I can still see that much clear as day.

Herb walks into the rec room in shorts and flip-flops despite the fact that it’s nineteen degrees below zero outside. He cracks a Miller Lite and sits in a battered recliner next to Mort.

“Christmas is over,” he says.

“So?” Millie snaps.

“So I recorded the Giants game, no more Christmas movies for cryin’ out loud.”

“ Die Hard is not a Christmas movie, Herb.”

“Bruce Willis is literally wearing a Santa hat as we speak,” he says, gesturing to the screen.

“Mort, is Die Hard a…?” Millie starts to ask, but he cuts her off.

“It’s a controversial question. I’m not getting involved.”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” she says, refilling her cup from the sangria jug. Florence puts Bernie in checkmate and then sits at the table behind the sofa to continue a jigsaw puzzle that’s been sitting half-solved for days. Herb takes the remote and puts his game on, and Millie gives him a passive “Up yours, Herb,” as she opens a mini candy cane and starts playing Candy Crush on her phone instead.

I go into the rec room and sit across from Florence. The puzzle is a thousand pieces and features Big Foot walking through the woods. I try to shove a couple of pieces into place.

“I don’t know the point of these,” Florence says, tucking her white bob neatly behind her ears and blowing on a mug of coffee. “After I put all this work in, then what? Destroy it and shove it back in the box?”

“That’s life, Flor. We put all that work in and what’s the point? We end up in a box,” Herb says without even taking his eyes off the game.

“Oh Jesus. Here we go,” Millie mumbles.

“Hey, I wanted to ask you guys something.” I change the subject and I have to be careful with my approach because we lost our security guard, Kenny, who moved to Duluth last month and we’re required to have one. And let’s be honest, there is nothing more I want than a security guard when I know the psychopath who did this to me is still out there somewhere, but we have no budget for it because we have lost most of our funding and are at risk of shutting down. That is the last thing I want any of them to know. I do, however, want to find someone who will work on the cheap; a college student, maybe. The residents have all lived in town for decades, and even though everyone knows everyone around here, they really know everyone and Millie usually somehow knows all their personal business too, although I haven’t worked out how she does it.

“I need to replace Kenny after the New Year. Any thoughts? I want it to be someone you like having around too.”

“Ohhh, what about Griff Barlowe? I saw him down at the Y looking delightful in his swimming underpants… What are those called?” Millie asks.

“Griff is an accountant, why would he be our part-time security guard?” Florence asks.

“She said she wants it to be someone we like having around,” Millie says.

“I don’t think he’ll be wearing his swimming underpants instead of a security uniform around here anyway,” Bernie adds.

“No way we’re hiring Griff. First off, we’re not hiring a guy who wears a Speedo,”

“Speedo, that’s it,” Millie says.

Herb continues. “He’ll literally bore us to death. He probably has tax jokes stored up to victimize us with. No. Plus, he’s ugly as a pan of worms. Get your eyes checked, Millie,” Herb says, still not taking his attention off of the TV.

“Evan Carmichael is back in town,” Millie says, ignoring Herb.

“Right, I heard that. That’s an idea,” I say.

Now that I think about it, I hadn’t thought about him for the job, but I do remember that last week, when I heard that he was back in town, it was one of those rare occasions when I took my attention off of my own problems and sat in a moment of quiet to think about what a lovely thing it is that his father died and left him his old house. That sounds awful, but his father was a raging alcoholic and the fact that he held on until sixty-two is a mystery to us all. He once got so drunk down at Dickie’s Tavern, he sold his car for forty bucks to the woman who called bingo so he could buy more booze. I think that was actually the tipping point where he just stopped leaving the house because he had no way around after that and just got sicker and sicker. What a way to go.

I heard through the rumor mill—not that it’s reliable, but still—I heard that Evan is going on two years on disability and hates it and would rather be working. Maybe he’d take the gig for the insultingly low rate that we can afford to pay in exchange for a sense of purpose. Of course that’s not how I’ll spin it to him—that sounds pitying. He could be…very needed here. And who doesn’t want to feel needed?

He moved down to Minneapolis after junior college and became a cop, which was surprising to me because he was quite the dork in high school. I could see him becoming a theater arts major or something, but I guess people grow up. I thought he was kind of dreamy in school, actually, but I don’t think he ever knew it. I don’t know the details of it all, but I know he was shot on duty by a teenager trying to hold up a gas station for the measly eighty bucks in the register. The teen only went to juvie for two years because of his young age and poor Evan had a bullet that took out the vision in his left eye, and he’s no longer able to serve.

I think him moving back here where all the folks that care about him are will probably do wonders for him. Maybe I can get Clay to help fix up his dad’s house. That place has to be a total shitpile after all these years of a man holing up in there. I heard he ordered a pallet of Colt 45 to his house from Flynn’s Liquor once, but that’s probably an exaggeration.

“What do we need a security guy for? I was in the navy,” Herb says.

“So what? You think anyone is gonna give this loose cannon a gun?” Millie asks the room, pointing to Herb.

“Who said anything about a gun? I got a TenPoint Titan crossbow in my storage unit,” he replies.

“Lots of good it does us in your storage unit, genius,” Millie says.

“Returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars,” Mort says from his chair in the corner. He’s currently reading his way through all the classics and is having trouble garnering any enthusiasm about this from the rest of the gang.

“Pardon?” Bernie says.

“Who wrote that? Can anyone name the author of the quote?” Mort asks in a soft voice.

“Shel Silverstein!” Herb guesses because he tries to support his friend when he’s in the mood.

“You think it’s Shel Silverstein?” Mort asks, dismayed.

“Well,” I change the subject. “I think trying Evan is a great idea,” I say, hearing Heather come into the front office to take over second shift. “I’m bringing the girls to Mack’s for dinner. I’ll bring the leftover scones for you in the morning,” I say, pulling my down coat off the back of an armchair and wrapping a knit scarf around my neck.

“I’d prefer a rack of lamb myself—there’s enough sugar around here,” Bernie says. I smile at him and tell him I’ll see what I can do. I say my goodbyes, wave to Heather, and make my usual rounds. Even though I don’t need to, I like to make my way down each hall and check on the folks who like to keep to their rooms. I hear Elvis’s “Blue Christmas” play from Lu cinda’s cracked door, and strings of colored lights flicker from Wally’s miniature tree. There’s a creepy Santa statue that has a motion detector so he waves and shouts Merry Christmas at you when you pass by, but the mechanism stopped working and now it sounds like he’s choking on something instead. I finally unplug him and watch the light inside of him dim and then die, and I bring him outside with me to toss him in the dumpster. His time is up.

When the frigid air hits me, I decide to just leave him in a snowbank for now and rush to my car to get the heat going, but as I approach the car, I see something stuck from under my windshield wiper. For a moment I think it’s a take-out menu, but who would be out here in this weather passing out menus? When I get closer, I see it’s a red envelope. My hands begin to shake involuntarily.

The wind howls and snow whips at my face, so I grab the envelope and jump into my car, locking the doors. I turn on the ignition and just look around a moment, giving the back seat a paranoid glance even though the car was locked and no one could be there. I look up and down the snow-covered two-lane road on either side of the building. Nobody.

I look at the envelope in my hands and can’t imagine what it could be except maybe a Christmas card from, I don’t know, Chris, the janitor who left earlier. Something, anything that would just make perfect sense and have me laughing at my paranoid self in a minute, but my gut is telling me something very different.

I open the envelope with my heart in my throat and read the words scrawled on the small square of thick paper tucked inside.

“I told you what would happen if you went public. I won’t kill you, I’ll make everyone around you pay, remember?”