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The Grinch

Jake

Andrew’s car is still gone when I get back. Maudlin Christ-baby music plays inside, and I find Laura wrapping up a batch of sugar cookie dough in the kitchen. It doesn’t make sense that she’s only just finishing up now, all these hours later, but when she goes to place it in the fridge, there are several other batches of dough already bagged and waiting inside. She’s been busy.

She pours hot chocolate into matching snowman mugs and we settle on the living room sofa. My aunt stares balefully at the Christmas tree. All this work, for what?

But I know for what, don’t I?

“Are you still putting on a Christmas show for me?” I ask.

“Yes.”

“I’m almost thirty.”

She shrugs. “I’ve never really forgiven myself for that first Christmas.”

“I thought I was putting on a Christmas show for you.”

“Does that explain the decapitated ornaments?” she says, and I go still, a misbehaving child found out. But she’s not angry at me and my anxious little boy antics. “I think they really capture the festive spirit. I added a few myself.”

She smiles a big, brave, fake smile at me. I flick on a matching fake smile. I learned from the best. I will see her Christmas spirit and raise her. I lean forward, elbows on knees, and catch her eye.

“The Christmas tree star.”

She glances up. Sharp edges, metal and glass. “Sure,” she concedes. “If it went straight into an artery.”

She doesn’t seem too excited.

“Strangulation by string lights.”

“Oh, I like that,” she says, cocking her head to one side while she pictures it. “That would be…dazzling.”

We both picture it for a moment.

She eventually sighs. “Nope. I don’t think either would work. I think both are too good for him.”

It’s been twenty years, and we still haven’t figured out the perfect way to off Andrew.

“Do you want me to check your phone?” I ask. Now and then he installs something nefarious. A tracking app. A spy app.

“It doesn’t matter. I never go anywhere exciting.”

I brace myself. I had this conversation once with her, years ago, when I left for university, but she shut me down. I don’t know if I’ll get another chance, so I try it out again. “I wish you’d leave him.”

The statement lands like a Christmas ornament exploding on the floor. Her face goes slack for a moment, and the glimmer of unease that follows is scarier than any expression I’ve ever seen Andrew make. That look right there is the reason I would never ask her to help me at the end, to do something that would be in defiance of Andrew.

She clears it away rapidly and squeezes my hand.

“You know I don’t stay for him,” she says, frankly this time. “I have no living family—Andrew’s family has always been my family. I don’t want to lose that. Family is so important to me.” She smiles at me, willing me to understand. This little dysfunctional family is everything to her, for some reason. I don’t tell her that we could have been a family, just the two of us. When I was younger, I fantasized about us packing up and riding off into the sunset. I’d lost my mother, and she’d lost her estranged sister, but Laura and I—we hit it off immediately, despite the grief. Maybe because of it. Together we could have been happy.

“And…how would I, anyway?” Laura continues. “He’s outmaneuvered me. He’s a majority partner in my business. He’s got our money all squirreled away. I’d say we’re going to wait and see who dies first, but he’s never going to die. His parents are in their nineties and they still do the couples dance classes at the home. He’s going to gradually… desiccate , like one of those monks.” She lets out a shivery breath and bravely perks up. “Did I tell you about the mummy that came in last year—?”

“Yes.”

She smiles ruefully and stops her retelling.

“I have money, Laura.”

She waves me to shut up. “No.”

“I do. I have a lot of money.”

She looks at me like I’m a child offering all the buttons and bottle caps in my piggy bank to her. “Hush. I’m not asking you to solve my problems. I was going to leave him when I was younger, but at the last minute, I couldn’t.”

This is brand-new intelligence.

“When?”

“Twenty years ago. But I would never have done that to you, Jake. After everything you’d been through, I decided you needed an extra parent figure on hand to help. I couldn’t take you away from Andrew, could I? I stayed for your sake.”

I stare at her in horror. She stayed because of me . Because of some misguided, traditional notion that I needed a father figure. How many times did Andrew make pointed comments within my earshot about unwed mothers and boys being raised without fathers , and how at least now Jake could be raised in an environment with proper family values. The whole time I lived here, she tried so hard to facilitate that relationship. He does care about you in his own way, Jake.

She looks my way, a smile in place, but it drops from her face when she sees my expression. I hoist my own smile into place, too late.

She watches my face for a moment with a regretful air, then sets her empty mug down and stands.

“I’m going to bed, Jake.”

She drifts up the stairs, leaving dissatisfaction and disappointment suspended in the atmosphere like a scented holiday candle. I remain downstairs, alone with the Christ-child music and the blinking Christmas lights. It’s the perfect Christmas tableau: tree, stockings, nativity scene perched on the coffee table—all perfectly coordinated like a homeware catalog—and it’s all an elaborate facade to a deeply rotten family. I always wanted a different sort of family.

I pull the creased Santa photo from my pocket. Santa’s in the center, of course, wholesome and jolly, with red cheeks and a white, whiskery smile, but Dodi and I aren’t smiling so much as baring our teeth in big, fake, psycho smiles that don’t reach our eyes. I’m spattered in my own blood, clutching that kitchen knife in such a way that my hand is positioned over the handle, the clear plastic housing vanishing against my coat and leaving just the blade visible, and Dodi is holding that aluminum baseball bat. Santa looks like he’s about to get his head caved in and his joints disarticulated. And Cat—Cat sits primly on his lap, ankles crossed, hands folded, her hair ribbon in a perfect bow above one ear, as she gazes solemnly at the camera with eyes deader than blown-out candles.

I think of Cat with her duct-taped tree and tin of beans. She deserves something like what Laura’s put together. Not me, a cynical old person army-crawling my way through another holiday season. The song on the radio changes to “Silent Night,” sung by Elvis of course, and I don’t think of Dodi. I definitely don’t think of the way her face twisted strangely when she saw Cat garroting me in a piggyback ride, before it abruptly settled out again, like a rumpled blanket yanked straight. I’ve been leaving her alone so she can be happy, but she didn’t seem very happy.

I pick up the mugs to take into the kitchen, and now I think of Laura, and how alone she is. She’ll be even more alone soon, with me gone, although I don’t kid myself I’ve ever been much of a consolation to her. On the way I stoop to pick up a wrapped gift and prop it up higher onto the pile, out of the way of foot traffic, when my thumb rips right through the paper and into the squishy contents. I flip the present over to read the card: For Jake, Love, Andrew , written in Laura’s loopy handwriting. I rip open the package and inside I find an expensive robe of bamboo silk, soft and warm-looking.

Bill needs something like this.

Fuck Andrew. Fuck Andrew, and fuck Christmas, and fuck—

Elvis trills his last, and a stupidly familiar song comes on. Horns flare, strings skip jauntily up the scale, a percussive burst, and—

You’re a mean, one, Mr. Grinch

You really are a heeeel…

I’m instantly calm.

In the kitchen I pull a yellow glove over my bandaged hand and wash and dry the mugs, whistling along to the tune, and then, instead of putting them in the cupboard, I wrap them up in paper and set them in their original box, the one they’re stored in every year between Christmases. I locate the other six in the set and pack those too. I pack up the Christmas dishes and cutlery in their boxes, the tablecloth and table settings, and then I remove the prepped ingredients and the cookie dough from the fridge, everything already neatly stored in Tupperware and Ziploc bags.

In the living room I take down the severed head ornaments and all the others one by one, pack up the garland, the presents, the throw pillows, and Christmas blankets. Everything goes into the front hallway in a big pile, and from there it goes to the car. Andrew keeps an old spool of nylon rope in the garage. It takes a blundering half hour, but I manage to hoist the tree on top of Grant’s car—the branches making some interesting grating noises against the paint job—and tie it in place with rope fed through the cracked windows.

My final move is to creep up the stairs and shake Laura awake.

“Come.”