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Christmas Spirit

Dodi

I wake slowly to a heartbeat ticking under my ear. When I peel my face from Jake’s shirt front, he blinks blearily and rubs his eyes, leaving his glasses askew on his nose, and I have the stupidest, half-asleep instinct to reach up and straighten them, to touch his stubbly cheek, to scritch my fingernails against his scalp as I smooth his hair. Snow still falls outside, although it’s early morning now. The last embers smolder in the grate, and the tree twinkles.

I start when I realize we’re not alone. Jake’s aunt stands in the doorway to a grand old dining room, decked out in outrageous Christmas pajamas, an old-fashioned silver coffee service in her hands and a huge, sunny smile on her face. In the doorway opposite stoops an old man I don’t recognize, with tufty white hair and a ratty robe. He gazes dumbfounded at the scene before him, like he was a recipient of Jake’s Christmas surprise too. Jake and I shuffle upright on the old velvet sofa, bones cracking, sensation shooting painfully back into our numb limbs, and then there’s a creak on the stairs. We all turn to look.

Cat drifts down in her odd Victorian nightgown, dragging her fingers along the carved wood banister, singing a weird, dirgelike tune, and I’m not certain, but I think I can make out the words to “Frosty the Snowman.” She’s always been my weird little Wednesday Addams, and I love her that way, I do , but in this moment, I just want her to be the sort of happy Christmas child that claps her hands in wonder at the tree. I tried my absolute hardest for her, failed catastrophically, swallowed my pride, accepted help, tried again—and I just want to know I did it right. I never know if I’m doing it right.

She glides into the room and mutely takes in the tree, the holiday homeware aisle exploded all over the room, the smattering of Halloween interspersed throughout, the grown-ups she knows and the two she doesn’t, and gazes at all of us with that solemn wise-child expression that always sets off all my alarm bells when we’re out trying to pass for a normal mother and daughter, and says, “This house is haunted.”

I shrivel for one second, but then Jake’s aunt sighs like that’s the sweetest thing she ever heard, and the old man, who has apparently already adapted to the upside-down world he woke up in, says with a twinkle, “Anyone can see that.” She does look like a little ghost or spirit in that gown. He directs a crinkly old smile at Cat, and Jake’s aunt beams at her too, like they both already had little Cat-shaped holes in their hearts and she’s popped right into place.

We settle down to unwrap the presents under the tree. Most of the gifts are addressed to people who aren’t here. Cat unwraps each one and passes it to whichever adult claims it. Bill makes a bid for a luxurious bathrobe. Laura helps herself to a wool blanket she’d apparently bought for her sister-in-law. I take a black Chanel handbag— this season’s—and bundle it back up in its tissue paper and cradle it in my lap like a little baby while Jake gives me a look. I’m a materialistic monster. And there’s more, so much more. Cat takes a Barbie mansion and a dozen more gifts besides—two of everything, for some reason—but she seems happy enough about it. Throughout it all, we drink coffee and chitchat and joke, like this isn’t strange at all. No one asks for an explanation for the sudden appearance of Christmas, or for waking up in a strange house, or for the relationships linking us together. We all just narrowly escaped a dreadful Christmas by the skin of our teeth.

“It’s a lovely old place,” Jake’s aunt— Laura —says to Jake’s grandfather— Bill . “It would make a lovely funeral home.”

I get the feeling this is Laura’s highest praise.

Bill scratches his hairy ear with a skeptical look and points at the grunting mass of straggly white fur on the rug in front of him. “I pulled something like that from my shower drain once. You’re not supposed to name it and feed it.”

“She’s mine now,” Cat says rapturously, tugging the dog into her lap. The old bichon frisé whines in ecstasy as she pulls a freshly unwrapped baby onesie over his head.

I jump in quickly. “It’s not our dog.”

“Oh, a family dog is everyone’s dog!” Laura says. “We can share him.”

This is quickly getting out of hand. I glance at Jake, but he just watches me, inscrutable. Amused?

“But you said we would get a dog,” Cat reminds me. “We have a dog roof.”

Cat unwraps another present and another. Now she passes them all to Jake, but he just gives her a small smile and passes them on. He won’t keep any of the presents for himself. It’s impossible not to think of that bare bedroom at Grant’s, the Swedish death cleaning he’s already done. He drinks coffee like he’s breathing air and observes us all like a scientist watching an experiment unfold. He’s placed himself on the outside again. He did this all for us, and not for himself.

—

At some point Jake disappears, and then suddenly there are pancakes on the dining room table, and more coffee, and hot chocolate for Cat. Bill eats and eats, and Jake surreptitiously taps some pills from a box out onto the table next to his plate. I follow him with my eyes as Jake stokes the fire and cleans the mess of wrapping paper. More pancakes appear, and dirty dishes disappear, and then Christmas music is playing. Bill nods off in an armchair with his chin on his chest, and after Cat finishes cutting about a hundred sugar cookies with Laura, I melt onto the floor in front of the warm fire and play haunted Barbie manor with her. It’s something I never get to do. Or maybe it’s something my hamster brain never lets me do. There’s always so much —always, always go go go—studying, cleaning, cooking, driving, worrying, fretting, rushing. I don’t know when she got so big. She has a whole inner world I don’t know anything about. We both do. Fantasy worlds in our heads that we retreat to.

And then, suddenly, Christmas dinner. Norman fucking Rockwell. We sit around the table for hours, and I think of the life I told Jake I had planned. The old house, the fluffy, stupid dog, and the grandparents there to help. Laura smiles and compliments me on Cat, my strange, uncanny girl who never gets compliments, and her sweetness gives me a toothache; Bill shows Cat the pictures in a dusty old copy of Peter Rabbit with gnarled, trembling hands, and Cat tells him that she loves rabbit; Princess farts blissfully on the Persian rug in his third outfit change. My eyes finally connect with Jake’s.

He’s been watching me this whole time—all day—to see what I think of his latest gift. Every time I look his way his eyes are on me. And for some reason it’s impossible to hold his gaze for more than a few seconds. I feel like he’ll read my mind if I do, and I don’t know why I don’t want that—I don’t even know what thoughts I’m trying to keep hidden from him. But I look at him now. He’s tired and pale, and he never got around to shaving, but he smiles a shy, twisty smile at me—a real one—and my heart stutters, and who am I kidding? It’s obvious what thoughts I don’t want him to see.

He’s an agent of chaos. An opportunist and a manipulator of Machiavellian proportions. A magician who pulls coins from my ears and rabbits from hats, makes my problems vanish behind a false wall, cuts me in half and puts me back together again. My jack of spades with his shovel slung over his shoulder, who knows where all the bodies are buried, and can take care of a few more for me if I need.