That night we shared a bed for the first time since our mother died and we moved into the farmhouse. Toni had offered to take the floor. But this was better, squeezing together on the full mattress the way we’d once curled on the pullout couches of our mother’s friends.
My brain was fogged with anxious thoughts about tomorrow and the day after that and the semester to come. But gradually my body relaxed, lulled by the warmth of Toni’s body and the sweet, familiar smell of her hair.
“Tell me a story,” my sister murmured drowsily.
I smiled, recalling years of whispers in the dark. “I don’t have any stories.”
“You always have stories,” Toni said.
I did. Or I used to.
“Once upon a time, there was a girl named Rose,” I began obediently. I had no idea how my story ended. But it didn’t matter. Toni would be asleep long before then. “Who lived with her aunt and uncle in Kansas.”
That was how it began.
“Does she have a sister?” Toni asked.
I smiled. That was our story, after all. Two children on a trip into the magical unknown.
Maybe that was my problem. I’d been writing Rose’s story, but I’d forgotten to give her a companion on her journey. Someoneshe needed to protect, to force her to be braver, kinder, wiser. It wasn’t enough to defeat the dragon. Fairy tales—the ones I loved—weren’t only about survival. They were about hope and love and joy.
“She has a pet,” I decided. “A chicken.” I knew chickens. And a chicken would be funny.
“I don’t want to be a chicken,” Toni protested sleepily.
“What, then?”
“A dog.”
She had always wanted a puppy. Not a working dog, like Uncle Henry’s, or one of the feral strays along the highway. So, yes, okay, a dog. I could see it in my mind, small and dark and bright-eyed.
“A dog named Toto,” I said, and my sister made a sound like a hen on its nest, low and contented.
I spun my story, Rose and her dog Toto on Christmas Eve, and Santa gliding in on a rainbow to take them up in his sleigh as the sky darkened to twilight and the stars came out. My sister’s breathing deepened and slowed.
“And when they woke up,” I said softly, “they were in a country of marvelous beauty.”
But Toni was asleep by then.
I stayed awake a long time after that, the plot meandering along, winding up and down in my head like a road leading... somewhere.
And wondered what story I was going to tell Aunt Em in the morning.
Fifteen
When Tim was deployed in Afghanistan, he communicated only sporadically with his parents. He couldn’t make calls in a combat zone, not when he was out on a mission, and the Internet at the duty station was frequently unreliable. So he emailed and managed occasionally to Skype, grateful his parents never pressed him for more. “No news is good news,” his grandfather the brigadier said gruffly.
All that changed when a suicide bomber plowed through Tim’s checkpoint in Helmand Province and blew him up. The casualty notification officer had visited the family pile in Gloucestershire to give his parents the news. Tim hadn’t spoken to them until he was aeromedded out to the hospital in Birmingham.
Now, though Tim’s mother would never say so, any silence was cause for concern. Which meant Tim now called dutifully every Sunday and listened without complaint while his mother chatted lightly on neutral topics—the altar guild’s Advent decorations or last night’s roast—the mundane details a substitute for the things they did not say.I love you. I worry about you. I’m fine.
Naturally, he was going home for Christmas.
His parents’ house would be permeated with the smells of woodsmoke, his father’s Scotch, and his mother’s dogs. His eighty-nine-year-old grandfather would come for dinner on Christmas Day. After his mother served the pudding, they would pull crackers—she was big on observing traditions—and the four of them would sit around the eighteenth-century dining table, paper crowns perched incongruously on their heads while they painstakingly read the jokes out loud. Tim had been looking forward to it.
But it seemed his mother, Caroline, had other plans this year.
“A little party on Boxing Day,” she was saying with bright holiday cheer. “Everyone is dying to see you. You haven’t been home in ages.”
