Two Cranky Siblings
Winter came all at once to Hiberhaven, usually just after Halloween, and it stuck around until May, but Piper never minded. The cold kept the tourists away once the brilliance of autumn and the allure of the holidays were over, a wet spring meant the waterfalls up in the mountains would be doubly impressive, and falling snow always felt like magic. But first, Christmas.
The truck rattled down the highway, shocks, breaks, suspension,somethingneeded a fix, but the problem could be worried about in the new year. Instead, Piper squeezed a smooth stone in her hand, tipped her head back, and closed her eyes in the passenger seat, intending to appreciate the quiet beneath the pickup’s rumble. There wouldn’t be much quiet going forward, but for now—
“I think I tore something.”
One of Piper’s eyes popped open, setting itself on her brother. “I doubt that very much.”
“You haveno ideahow hard it is chopping down a tree, Pippy,you’venever had to do it. It sucks.” Presley’s whining filled up the cab as he rubbed at his shoulder, other hand on the wheel.
“Well, it’s not your rotator cuff if you can move it like that.”
He immediately went still and pursed his lips in thought. She was just making things up, but when she put on the voice she learned from her mother,the doctor voice, they’d been calling it since childhood, she was convincing enough. Presley shook his head but released his arm. “And there was all that hiking! You’re used to it, but it’s a lot flatter in Brookhampton. I’m not doing anything else the rest of vacation, I hope you know that.”
She chuckled—as if experience had ever led her to expect otherwise. “Well, thank you for maiming yourself in the name of the MacLean Christmas Tree. Dad will appreciate it, and so do I.”And mom too.
“Anything to make you guys happy.” He grinned, flashing her the crooked smile he inherited from their father, one she hadn’t seen in a long time.
“Actually, it would really make me happy if you cooked dinner tonight.”
“Well, anything but that. Unless you want Sonny’s?”
Piper groaned at the thought of more greasy burgers and fries—their father’s answer to everything. “I already prepped for lasagna,” she said, closing her eyes again. Despite that she should have probably been annoyed, the darkness behind her lids lit up with the forest once more, and she smiled instead, turning over the smooth stone in her fingers.
Presley complained the entire time, but trudging through the snow and picking out the perfect tree was still one of Piper’s favorite parts of Christmas. It used to be a full-day affair for all four of them, starting with breakfast at the Hiberhaven Diner, pancakes for everyone because they needed the carbs their mother joked, and then they would head to the national forest. Their father would try to distract Piper and Presley from arguing over who would find it that year with promises of cookies that devolved into threatening a call to Santa, and their mother would blaze the trail that inevitably led them to The Tree.
For the last five years, it had only been Presley’s moaning and groaning that filled up the frigid forest on their two-man trek for The Tree. Yes, there were perfectly fine, pre-chopped and de-squirreled ones conveniently located in the parking lot of Mr. Hoffman’s hardware store right in the heart of Hiberhaven, but Piper didn’t want one of those. So she used up all her goodwill with her little brother as soon as he arrived in town by insisting she needed that last moment of peace and quiet in the woods before the rest of their family showed up. It wasn’t a lie—she did mentally bottle up the serenity of the forest to slowly decant as her sanity would unravel over the next two weeks—but it was also only half the truth.
She just couldn’t tell Presley the real reason she needed to go out into the forest to find The Tree was because of magic.
Of course, itwasn’tmagic, not really, since Piper knew magic wasn’ta thing. Knowing is funny like that, as one can be absolutely convinced and yet be entirely incorrect, but even though Piperknewwhat she felt in the forest wasn’t really magic, capital M or otherwise, being shown The Tree still felt nothing short of magical.
The first year the two of them hiked out into the national forest on their own, it had been a sound. She never could identify the bird, but Piper followed the twittering—a song her brother professed to not hear—and when it stopped, she was standing before the perfect pine. Another year, a flicker of a sourceless light between branches beckoned her off the path, and again that Christmas’s tree presented itself to her as if just waiting to be chopped down. Regardless of what it was, signs or luck or just the consequence of time, there was always a warmth that came with spotting The Tree, and that warmth felt too much like her mother placing a hand on her shoulder and whispering, “What do you think of that one, honey?” to not seek it out every year.
This year, however, was particularly not-magical-but-sure-felt-like-it.
Presley had wandered with her for a bit but eventually dropped himself into the snow, declaring she was impossible to please when she said no to the fifth fir he pointed out. Despite that he picked up and put down heavy things for fun, he griped about the weight of the axe and told her to call him when she finally found whatever the hell she was looking for. Piper continued on until there was a tingling along the back of her neck, and there in the silence of the looming conifers and crispy snow, she waited until a shock of crimson cut through the white.
The cardinal flitted from branch to branch, impossible to miss as Piper followed after. Cold feet and fatigue forgotten, she hopped over logs and sank into snowy mounds, but the bird gave her just enough time to catch up before darting off again until it finally came to stillness on The Tree.
It’s perfect, the distant memory of her mother’s voice said, and even though one of the needles pricked her finger painfully when she reached out to touch it, Piper called for Presley and declared it had been found.
With The Tree tied up in the bed of the old pickup, Presley drove them back, his duty to the MacLean family complete, and Piper’s about to begin in earnest. But the pending exhaustion, complaints, and thanklessness would be fine because Piper had convinced herself that little spark of not-really-magic was all she needed.
Magic, however, had other ideas.
Down a dirt road on the outskirts of Hiberhaven, the family vacation cabin that had become her permanent home years ago was a hulking yet inviting place. Its log facade blended into the dense wood that surrounded it, and the snow had melted off its high-pitched roof, a deep, mossy green. The multicolored lights she’d strung up all over the porch were blinking over her father’s figure as he stood under the eaves, Doc tucked up under an arm and celebrating their return with a soulful little howl.
Warmth spread out in Piper’s chest as she spied the wreath hanging on the front door. For the last five years, she’d laid the wreath out then pretended to forget about it, and when her father inevitably declined to accompany them on the tree hunt, she asked if he could hang it for her. The years when he actually went through with it were always better.
But then a fist tightened in Piper’s stomach. They’d pulled in beside a truck so big it made her hatchback look like a toy, and Uncle Russ was already shouting as he climbed out of it.
“At least he’s only bringing one of them this year, right?” Presley mumbled.
The truck’s other door flew open, and not one but three young boys piled out.
“Actually, it looks like Russ is on Christmas duty for almost all his exes this year.” Piper watched the three shove one another from the safety of her seat then lifted her eyes back to her father. The smile he was giving Uncle Russ shifted from perfunctory to genuine, and that warmth in her chest grew just enough to convince her to drop the smooth stone she carried into her bag and go out into the snow.
