Page 18 of Silent Echo
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
A fter three trying months, Sebastion has finally turned a corner and accepted me as his mother.
We rent a cute house in Campbell, Florida, only twenty-seven miles from Disney.
It’s fully furnished and in a quiet neighborhood.
To help Sebastion adapt to his new life, we went to the pet store and picked out a guinea pig.
Sebastion named him Buzz after Buzz Lightyear, of course.
He’s black and white and just the cutest little thing.
Growing up, I was never allowed to have a pet, so this is a treat for me too.
Maybe when we have our own house, we’ll get a dog.
I feel like I’m living in a Norman Rockwell painting.
Every few days, he still asks about Charlotte, but it’s getting easier and easier to distract him from his memories.
The most important thing is that he calls me Mommy when we’re out in public.
I made it clear to him that if he gave anyone any reason to suspect that I wasn’t his mommy, they would take him away and put him in an orphanage, where he would be until he grew up.
I hate to use a scare tactic, but it’s for his own good.
Tomorrow is Christmas and Sebastion is as excited as, well, a kid on Christmas Day.
“Shall we decorate the tree?” I ask while he’s working on his spelling words in the kitchen.
He looks up, holding his pencil midair, and nods.
Sliding off the chair, he pushes his work away and follows me into the living room, where boxes of newly purchased ornaments sit open.
Next to them is a box filled with the handmade ornaments we’ve been working on all month.
Sebastion goes to that box first and grabs the reindeer made from Popsicle sticks and googly eyes.
“Where should I put Rudolph?” he asks.
“Wherever you like,” I say, smiling at him.
He puts it on a low branch. Christmas music is streaming on a speaker from my phone, and a sense of happiness fills me.
This is the first Christmas since Nora got married and moved away that I have a sense of belonging, of having my own family.
“Jingle Bells” starts playing, and Sebastion drops the ornament in his hand and stares blankly.
“What’s wrong?” I ask him.
“My mommy and daddy sang this to me when we went sledding.” His lip starts to tremble. “I wanna go home.”
I put my arms around him. “You are home, remember?”
He struggles from my embrace and runs from the room.
I hear his bedroom door slam, and I sigh.
It’s his first Christmas in his new family, so he’s still adjusting.
I need to make this one extra special and create new memories with him that he’ll cherish.
He’s so young; those old memories will be gone in a few years and all that will remain are the ones we make together.
I think back to the earliest Christmas I can remember.
I think I was seven. I still believed in Santa Claus and asked my parents to leave him cookies and milk.
My mother said she would and hurried me off to bed, warning me that if I didn’t go to sleep, Santa wouldn’t come.
I was too young to know whether or not my parents were drunk back then.
I only have scattered visions of that night.
I remember sneaking downstairs after everyone was asleep to see if she’d left the cookies and milk by the fireplace.
She had forgotten. Worried that Santa might not leave us anything, I went into the kitchen to do it myself.
I had to climb on the counter to reach the cookies, and I slipped.
The cookie jar came crashing down, and there was broken glass everywhere.
I froze at first, and then went to the garage to find a broom.
When I opened the garage door, it set off the burglar alarm.
The next thing I knew, my father ran into the kitchen with a gun in his hands, and when he saw me, he began to yell.
“What the hell are you doing?” The phone rang, and he answered and told the alarm company it was a false alarm. My mother came down to see what the ruckus was.
“You forgot to leave cookies and milk for Santa. I was just trying to reach the cookies,” I explained.
My father turned to me, his face full of fury. “There is no damn Santa Claus. It’s time you stopped believing these childhood fantasies.”
“Marvin!” My mother looked at him in horror.
“There is too a Santa,” I said.
He grabbed my hand and pulled me from the kitchen into the living room. “Look,” he said, pointing to the tree. “See all those presents? Your mother and I did that. Not Santa. Now go to bed!”
That Christmas I lost my faith in more than Santa.