Page 36

36

Christmas Killjoy

Jake

I park Grant’s car three blocks from Andrew’s prying eyes and nosy questions and walk the rest of the way, until I stand in front of the two-story white polyp of suburban architecture I first washed up at twenty years ago almost to the day with nothing but a bag of clothes and my dog. A sunburst window over the front door, sheer white curtains in the windows, hedges trimmed and fiddled within an inch of their life, manicured lawn on display even now thanks to this green Christmas. Conventional. Unchanging. Eternal.

I haven’t been back in three years, but last night Laura’s name came up on my phone, and for some reason I answered it.

“It would be so nice to see you,” she said. “You and…anyone else you want to bring.”

She meant Dodi, and since all my Dodi thoughts are linked chaotically like a barrel of plastic monkeys, I immediately heard Dodi saying, You need to tell your aunt you’re sick . I’d pictured them all assembled around that long, shining dining room table, the extended family that has always looked at me like something embarrassing that has crept out into the open, as I dropped my bombshell. They would finish chewing and dab their lips with their napkins. Sounds neat, Jake. Can you pass the potatoes?

I accepted the invitation alone and here we are. I wonder if the bichon frisé is still kicking. And as if he reads my mind, he comes snuffle-trotting down the walkway, his tongue hanging out one side of his underbite, his eyes in business for themselves. Princess. He’s delighted to see me. A former cellmate back in the clink.

I stand there for a good minute on the welcome mat, reminding myself the nausea is just Pavlovian conditioning. Princess is a dog, so he’s knows all about it. He shivers and stinks and leans against my leg. His nails need a trim. The hair in front of his eyes, too. I press the doorbell. Footsteps, and the door swings open, and I paste a big smile on my face, quick as lightning.

“Jake!”

Laura wears a Rudolph apron dusted with flour, and just like the house and yard, she’s unchanging and eternal, except in her case I’m grateful for it. I don’t really know what comes over me. Without thinking, I reach in and hug her. She freezes, then puts her arms around me in a fierce squeeze.

“Where’s your bag?” she asks, blinking rapidly with misty eyes and not looking at me. She peers out the door, like she hopes to see another person coming up the walkway.

“I didn’t bring one.” It’s still at Dodi’s. Laura’s face falls, and I change the subject before she can ask if I’m spending the night. Depending on Andrew, I might prefer to sleep in my car. “How many people will there be at Christmas dinner tomorrow?”

“Fifteen,” she says, closing the door. “Andrew’s parents will be shuttled over from the home. Ninety-five and ninety- two this year, and still gallivanting around for the holidays. Can you believe it? Of course, they want to spend Christmas with their great-grandkids.” At the mention of Andrew’s sister’s grandkids, her smile flicks back on in full force: “ Three little ones this year. June and Molly are five now, and there’s the baby of course—Oliver.” Laura beams at me. It’s all about the kids, for Laura.

Andrew’s voice emanates from somewhere in the house. It’s a one-sided conversation, or argument. Laura twists her head to listen in on this half of the phone call, her smile slipping again, and I reflexively leap into distraction mode, like I always did when I lived here.

“Is the tree all decorated?”

In answer, she swans ahead of me into the vaulted living room where a ten-foot Christmas tree flaunts itself in sparkling, twinkling glory. Garland is threaded through the banister, silver stars dangle from light fixtures, holly and cedar swags hang on the doors, Christmas ornaments clutter every surface—Santa throw pillows, snow globes, snowman nesting dolls.

Christmas belongs to Laura. She practically invented it. It’s always been that way—at least, after that first awful Christmas when a car crash landed me in this strange house with a pair of strangers. There hadn’t been a single holiday decoration of any sort in the entire place that year, and I’d wandered the house silently at night while they slept, wondering what sort of aliens I found myself living with. But now it’s all perfect, the entire house. The pile of gifts under the tree is obscene, the biggest one left unwrapped: a deluxe Barbie house festooned with ribbons. Laura has a tendency to go garbanzo beans over the girls.

Andrew’s voice gets louder, and it’s clear now that it’s his sister he’s arguing with. Laura drifts to the foot of the stairs and listens, still, her hand like a claw gripped around the banister.

Distraction mode. “What needs to be done in the kitchen?”

Laura swivels and fires a bright, strained smile at me and leads me to the kitchen. The oven is on, all stovetop burners firing, and every inch of counter and tabletop has been assigned to a job. Crystallized cranberries dry on a baking sheet, candy cane brittle cools on a rack, peeled potatoes lurk in a big pot in the sink…it’s endless. More has always been more for Aunt Laura. She’s spent days working on this. I take an apron off the pantry door, tie it tight around me, and when I turn around, she’s smiling for real.

There’s a bang upstairs, and I redirect quickly with our favorite game.

“The mixer,” I say.

Laura glances at the mixer. “How?”

“He’d have to be wearing a tie.”

“Oh, grisly!” she says appreciatively. “Asphyxiation or broken neck? Either one, I suppose. Now, tell me what you think of this.” She fishes a kitchen gadget out of a drawer. “I saw it and bought it just to show you. Right through the orbital socket and into the prefrontal cortex.”

She engages the plunger and little claws come out of the hollow shaft and click together. Clack clack clack. Princess twitches on the mat at her feet.

“You win,” I say, and she glows, the yelling and the banging forgotten. That’s the magic of I Spy a Murder Weapon.

Laura tugs a dish towel off the counter to make room for a cutting board—and a chef’s knife lurking underneath goes spinning through the air. She yelps. It twirls in slow motion, glinting with Christmas colors as it pirouettes through space above Princess where he lies on the kitchen mat, and my hand reaches out all on its own to catch it.

I make contact.

“Jake!” my aunt shrieks.

I hear her plop down onto the floor next to me—because I’m already hunched on the floor myself—and she squeezes my shoulder.

“Jake,” she says softly. “It’s okay, honey. Open your eyes. You can look.”

It’s not okay. I’ve got it clenched into a fist now, but I got a glimpse of my hand—of the inside of my hand—the split second before I closed it.

Slow footsteps come down the hall, and the kitchen door swings open.

“What’s the shrieking about?” Andrew says coldly. He eyes me dispassionately.

“Jake’s cut his hand.”

Andrew’s eyes are skeptical slits. “There’s no blood.”

“He’s stanching it.”

“Why are you sitting on the floor? What’s wrong with you?”

That’s when Princess sticks his face in it. Snuffling, dirty white, with rust stains coming from his eyes, he presses his stubby, arthritic paws into my lap and wafts his foul breath into my face—

“Get up,” Andrew says.

Princess tries to stick his wet nose to my hand, and I jerk it away.

“Shoo, Princess!” my aunt says, but Princess becomes more committed.

“There’s nothing wrong with you,” Andrew says. “You’re always like this. You always think you have something wrong with you.”

“He cut his hand—”

“I don’t see a cut.”

“His palm—”

“Open your hand, Jake,” Andrew says.

Everyone’s talking at once, and Princess keeps at it, sticking his fucking damp face—

“Open your damned hand, Jake!”

I open my hand, releasing the pressure on the cut, and pain suddenly blooms through my hand, up my arm—

The blood . Oh, the blood.

Laura squawks and bundles my hand in a dishcloth with vegetable trimmings still clinging to it. “Stitches!” she cries.

“He doesn’t need stitches,” Andrew says. He yanks me to my feet by my wrist and sticks my hand under the sink, then runs the cold water. The bottom of the basin swirls pink and red. I close my eyes and gag. I’m not good with blood.

“Unbelievable,” Andrew says, dropping my wrist. I clench my hand back into a fist and the bleeding stops, and I lean heavily against the counter. Andrew plucks up a clean holly-patterned napkin from a stack folded neatly for dinner tomorrow and wipes his hands. I’ve been sorted. He’s ready to move on to more important things.

“They’re not coming,” he announces.

“What?” Laura says blankly. She’s still wearing her apron, but she’s slipped on a coat and has her car keys clutched in one hand.

“Judith is doing her own Christmas,” he says with the air of injured royalty, as if he didn’t intentionally pick a fight with his sister and then hold Christmas hostage. I’ve seen him use this move a dozen times over the years. Good old Judith finally called his bluff.

Laura’s face falls. The food. The decorations. The Barbie mansion—

“But I spoke to her this morning—”

Andrew says the most Andrew thing possible. “You know what she’s like.” Then he turns and walks out.

Laura stares after him, stunned, as the kitchen door rocks on its hinges behind him, the scuffling noise of Princess licking his balls the only sound in the room.

When I see Laura’s face, I know I Spy can’t touch this. I sometimes wonder if there’s an evolutionary advantage to being an asshole. Maybe it’s calorically more efficient.

“I don’t need stitches. I’ll bandage this up.” I wrap my hand in a clean dish towel and flick the radio on to Christmas tunes on my way out.

In the bathroom I find a roll of gauze, which I wind tightly around my hand across the sliced webbing between my thumb and index finger. Princess follows and watches the proceedings. When I finish, he and I stare at each other.

Princess’s villain origin story is that he is the replacement dog my uncle brought home after he put down the senior golden retriever I arrived with. I named him Princess to piss off my uncle and never forgave him. Uncle, that is. Maybe this is my villain origin story.

“Who’s a good boy,” I grunt in the flattest, deadest voice I can summon, and he wags his tail, delighted. I trim his bangs with the bandage scissors while he licks my knuckles in ecstatic supplication. Maybe he’ll spend the night with me in the car.

—

While Laura gets lunch on the table, I inspect the picture-perfect Christmas tree, resplendent in winking fairy lights and old-fashioned, kitschy ornaments. With my good hand, I try to adjust a Santa perched too close to the end of a branch, but his body detaches from his head and falls to the floor. The severed head bounces on the springy branch, and it makes me think of Cat. She would like that ornament. Laura is still busy in the dining room, so I snap the body off a snowman hanging nearby. An angel next. A reindeer. And finally a drummer boy, before Laura calls me to lunch.

Andrew sits at the head of the table, as usual, with Laura to his right and a space for me at his left. He allows Laura to serve him, and then he rubs his hands slowly, like he’s wiping something nasty off his skin. He finally looks at me.

“I wasn’t sure if we’d ever hear from you again, Jacob,” he says lightly.

Laura keeps her head down and slices through her quiche slowly and deliberately. If he’s been hounding me for three weeks about that dinner, I wonder what it’s been like for Laura.

“Any new developments in the world of ‘temping’?”

Needle, needle, needle. It’s what he does best.

“No,” I say pleasantly.

“Any new developments at all?”

“No.” I put on my happy idiot smile, the one he hates.

“It didn’t last long with that woman,” Andrew says, forking quiche into his mouth. Maybe if I shocked him, he’d choke.

“It’s lasting just fine. We got married,” I announce.

“What?” Laura says incredulously, her fork pinging off the edge of her plate as it falls from her hand.

“We eloped.”

Laura’s face goes still. “What…?” Her mouth forms several other words, but no sound comes out. Andrew continues shoveling quiche like nothing in his universe has changed.

“Dodi and I got married.”

“Her name’s Dodi?” Laura says. I never even told her her name. She’d asked me to call her after that dinner, and I never did. Laura stares at me, and I realize with a sinking feeling that I’ve hurt her. I’ve hurt her very badly.

I want to tell Laura everything—well, almost everything—but not with Andrew there twisting and distorting all the facts in his narrow, disagreeable mind.

“Where is she now? Why isn’t she here for Christmas?” Laura asks.

Andrew scoffs. “He’s not serious. He spouted this nonsense about getting married by Elvis at the restaurant.” But as he reaches for the salt near my setting, his eyes fall on the band on my left hand.

“ Is that a wedding ring?”

I say nothing.

Andrew stares me down with gunmetal eyes. “Are you going to answer me?”

It’s funny how certain phrases punch dusty old buttons in our psyche. I was a twenty-nine-year-old adult male until that sentence was uttered, and now I’m a nine-year-old child just arrived on the doorstep of these two strangers, frozen, sick to my stomach. The moment passes.

“I can see how much respect you have for your family,” Andrew says.

Under the table I cross my fingers for another ice spell. All I want for Christmas is a few days of stonewalling. Andrew stands up and tosses his napkin onto the table next to his unfinished plate, and Laura and I go still.

He’s like an ice-capped, dormant volcano. We feel the tremors beneath our feet, and every time we wonder if today’s the day—

“Disappointing, but not surprising,” he says quietly, ice cap glacially cold and intact. Christmas comes early: he leaves. From the dining room we hear him put on his coat and shoes and let himself out of the house. Somehow in twenty years he hasn’t realized that flouncing out isn’t quite the punishment he thinks it is.

It takes several minutes for the temperature of the room to go back to normal. When I look at Laura, she’s pale and faded, like a bit of paper bleached by the sun.

“I don’t blame you for eloping,” she says.

“I’m sorry.”

“I would have liked to get to know her. I mean, I would like to get to know her. You’re married. ” She flaps her hands weakly. “You met someone, and fell in love, and got married . And I had no idea.”

“I’m sorry.”

She waves her hands at me exasperatedly. “This is good news. Where is she?”

“She’s at her place. She…” I cast about for a way to not lie too much. “Eloping was an impulse. We haven’t been together very long. We decided to stick to our original Christmas plans.”

“Her place? You don’t live together?”

“No. She—” And then I get my stroke of genius, the thing that will distract her completely from the snags in my story and absolve me of my sins. I’m manipulative and terrible.

“We’re not going to rush that because she has a daughter.”

The result is instantaneous: Laura melts. “A daughter?”

I am forgiven.

“She’s six.”

Laura clasps her hands over her heart. “Oh, Jake.”

It’s a tropical paradise in this room now with Laura’s sunny smile, and even Andrew wouldn’t be able to touch it. If he came back, he’d melt and vanish into the cracks between the floorboards, and that would be the last we ever saw of him.

“Her name is Catriona, but we call her Cat, and…she…likes Barbies.”

Straight to hell. Do not pass go. Do not collect two hundred dollars. This is my birthday dinner with a fake girlfriend for Laura to get emotionally invested in and break her heart over all over again. I feel queasy, but Laura is levitating. There’s no way either of us is finishing our quiche now.

“Can I see photos?”

“I…don’t have any on my phone.”

It’s been a very long time since I’ve seen a smile like this on Laura’s face. Normally she has to borrow her sister-in-law’s grandbabies, but this shiny new Catriona? Her very own proprietary grandniece.

I throw in one last tidbit. “She doesn’t have any living grandparents.”

Laura is deceased. Toes up, flat on her back, ready for the embalming fluids. She flutters off in the direction of the kitchen, and I follow, bringing dishes with me in my good hand. Some deep programming has her plugging in the mixer, pulling out the flour, the butter, the sugar…

“You can’t meet her just yet,” I remind her.

“I know,” Laura says frantically. She wrestles the mixer attachment in place and starts churning the butter and sugar together. There’s no stopping her. An offering of cookies to this absent child is a done deal. I will be leaving with a pound of them tomorrow.

I try to load the dishwasher, but my hand throbs. A speck of blood has been slowly spreading across the gauze bandage all lunch, and soon my whole palm will be soaked.

“I’m going out,” I say, and Laura whirls around on me. “Just to get a new knife,” I clarify. The one I dropped snapped across the middle of the blade. “There are good deals right now.”

I leave her there with her cookie dough and Christmas radio.

—

I get five stitches at the emergency room from a doctor wearing a Santa hat and whistling “All I Want For Christmas Is You.” I can’t watch. I keep my eyes glued on an empty wheelchair across the room. If Dodi were here, I’d tell her about Tari. I left her in a wheelchair just like that.

“Never much of a wait on Christmas Eve,” the doctor says when she finishes. “Most people having accidents today are too busy to come in.” She bundles me up with gauze, then flips my hand over to look at my white fingers. “Do you need me to look at that too?”

“No.” I yank my hand away.

When I step outside it’s already getting dark. I go to the mall and buy a new knife from an upscale kitchenware store, where the sales team eyes my blood-freckled shirt with wide-eyed concern. If Dodi were here, we would have some fun with them. I pay up, but I’m not ready to go back, although I don’t want to stay at the mall, either. There isn’t a single square inch of space on this planet where I’d like to be right now. Although maybe that’s not true. It’s hard not to think of Dodi’s apartment, specifically the left seat cushion on her lumpy old sofa, while she watches true crime next to me. I wouldn’t mind being there right now.

I pass clothing stores and toy stores, a hair salon, a makeup outlet, a pet store. There are three yellow puppies tussling in one of those vile pet store window display boxes. I slow down and linger. If Dodi were here, I’d tell her I like dogs, but dogs live a long time.

And then I feel something unfamiliar, something I’ve never felt in my life: a tiny, warm hand slipping into mine.