I just want to hug our old family dog, Melon. She’s been gone for many years now, but I can still picture her so clearly, too clearly, on this cul-de-sac where I always walked her. She never liked the leash and I loved that about her. I’d let her run free, take the heat from crabby Mrs. Benson next door, who took her lack of orgasms out on everyone else, or at least that was the story I crafted back then, the story I repeat to myself now.
Taking out my phone, I scroll for a moment to numb the numbness. Chris answers the phone before I realize I’ve called him.
“Emily Jane,” he says, voice warm like an old sweater, tucked in a bottom drawer because it’s not fashionable enough to be seen in but you can’t bear to donate it. “Merry Christmas Eve.”
“Merry Christmas Eve,” I hear myself echo.
There’s laughing and hollering in the background. It sounds like people are playing a game or something. The sounds revive me somehow. I have an absurd desire to be there with Chris’s family, around a fire, drinking hot cider. It doesn’t even have to be spiked.
I just have this vision of cracking up over the stupidest things or maybe nothing at all. The vision dissipates as quickly as it came, but something about it lingers in my legs and helps me stand back up and continue walking.
“I was just missing Arnie.” I hate how weak I sound admitting to missing anything.
“He misses you too,” Chris says. “You’ll have to come by and see us in the New Year.”
“Yeah, sounds good,” I say. “If my jam-packed calendar allows for it.”
Chris seems to pick up on the sarcasm, which shows how far we’ve come, or at least how far he’s come, this past year. He’s reallystarted to appreciate the full range of my humor and break out of his accountant box.
I ask him if Olivia is there and he says no, that she’s with her family down in Florida. This cheers me up a bit—not that I actually care. It’s just kind of a game at this point, trying to stir up trouble because I like the constant churn of swirling motion.
“Give her my best,” I say and he says he’ll do that. I have a feeling he means it too, which makes me feel good picturing him telling her about how we had this intimate phone call on Christmas Eve, which is pretty much the most romantic of all days because there’s none of the letdown of Christmas itself. But then it makes me feel a bit sad actually, that Olivia might freak out at Chris for no reason, just because I called him and he picked up. So I tell him that he actually doesn’t have to mention anything. But he still says that he will.
I guess I respect his integrity, but I’m also annoyed that this means he still doesn’t think he has to hide me.
Chris says he should probably get back to his family; they’re in the middle of a game of Balderdash. “They’re very competitive about it,” he whispers, like he’s confiding in me.
“Right.” I hang up first, shuffling down the street back to my parents’ house, back to the TV room that everyone has migrated to, back to my dad yelling at the screen, waving his hands this way and that.
I don’t say much, just watch my sister and her husband sit on opposite sides of the couch, not even touching. They act like friends, not lovers. It makes me feel sorry for them but also oddly sorry for myself. Then I start watching my mom and dad, which makes me feel sorry for everyone.
I rifle through the presents under the tree and count how many are for me. It’s one of my only traditions that’s worth keeping. I always like presents best before I unwrap them, when I can still imagine them as whatever I want to. Before the disappointmentof their underwhelming reality pops the iridescent membranes of hope, swelling then stinging like bubbles of soap.
My phone buzzes and I expect it to be more about Jenni’s betrayal, but it’s Chris. He’s texted a photo of Arnie wearing a pair of reindeer antlers and grinning at the camera like a total goon. I stare down at the photo for a long time, and my sister asks who I’m texting and why I’m smiling.
“What’s with the interrogation?” I scowl at her. “Smiling isn’t a crime in this house, or is it?”
“Knock off that attitude, Emily Jane,” my dad says without peeling his eyes away from the TV.
“And this is why I come home so often.” I send myself to my bedroom just to get away from them. My room still has these heinous pink walls that explain so much about who other people wanted me to be.
There’s this little toy piano I used to practice at. I sit down on the too-small bench, my spine slouched and my legs wedged, and try to play a song from muscle memory. It’s just senseless notes, nothing fits together, nothing comes out cohesively, not even “Hot Cross Buns.” It’s like I’ve forgotten every single song. My brain tries to tell my body that this is success, that this is what we wanted, to leave the past behind. But my body isn’t buying it. It’s all tense and wobbly again.
Standing up shakily from the piano, I get this childish urge to look out the window for the Christmas star, the one the wise men followed all those years ago, or so I once believed, back before I knew better. I’m too tired to fight the desire, so I push aside the checkered curtains and look up at the sky. It’s too cloudy. I can’t see anything, not that I’d see anything even if it were clear. We’re alone in this world. We only have our family and friends, but you can’t trust them either. We really just have ourselves.
I crawl into bed and pull the tattered comforter up over my head and stay like that all night. It feels suffocating but also safe, and Ilike to believe that I’m a caterpillar, transforming into a new creature. It’s not that I don’t like who I am now; it’s just that I wouldn’t be opposed to growing some wings. Not butterfly wings, those are too flimsy, but maybe some dragon wings. Flying while breathing fire sounds pretty ideal to me, but when I wake up the next day on Christmas morning, I’m still fully human. Still just me.
Chapter 11
After we’re done unwrapping the presents on Christmas, I make a little comment to my sister about how she got twice as many gifts as I did. My sister stiffens at that, goes into full attack mode, though she talks in a coddling whisper because she’s holding the baby, or maybe she just likes to talk like that because of how passive-aggressive it sounds.
“You can’t complain. Mom and Dad gave you so much more attention than me growing up,” she says. “It wasn’t even close.”
“If by attention you mean judgment and pressure, sure,” I tell her. “Lucky me.”
“You loved it,” my sister says. “You always tried to keep me from ever one-upping you.”
She looks bedraggled by the lack of sleep so I should just give her some grace, but she’s the one who started it. “What the fuck are you even talking about?” I slash back.
