With You and Without You

by Ann M. Martin

  “Well,” Brent continued, just when I thought we were through talking about money, “maybe we could cut back some more. I could sell my car. And why do we need two color TVs? We could sell one easily.”

  “Brent,” said Mom warningly.

  “And what are you going to do next year when I’m gone?”

  Carrie snorted. “We’ll have fun,” she replied. “Waste stuff right and left. Go all out for Skippy peanut butter. Buy toilet paper without checking to see how many sheets come on the roll. Maybe we’ll splurge and”—she paused dramatically and went on in a stage whisper—“go to a movie.”

  Hope and I smiled. Mom hid her own smile and said mildly, “Okay, that’s enough, Carrie.”

  Brent glared at Carrie. I could almost see a four-letter word forming on his lips, but he bit it back.

  An awkward silence followed. Hope, that familiar gleam in her eyes once again, glanced around the table and filled the silence by saying, “Let’s talk about Christmas some more, okay? Let’s—”

  “Let’s not,” I snapped. It was the first thing I’d said since I sat down. Everyone looked at me. “I don’t think we should even have Christmas this year. I don’t see how we can. It’s not fair.” I tried to calm down and sound more reasonable.

  “But Christmas always comes, doesn’t it?” asked Hope nervously.

  “That’s right. It always does,” Mom assured her.

  “Well, I think the O’Haras should just … skip it this year.”

  “Why?” asked Hope.

  “Yeah, why?” said Carrie.

  Brent was looking at me as if I were crazy. Even he, the miser, wanted Christmas, a low-cost Christmas, but Christmas nevertheless.

  “Why?” I repeated. How was I going to explain this one? “Because … because Dad liked it so much and now he’s gone. It just doesn’t seem fair to have it without him, to make him miss it.”

  “Don’t you think Dad would want us to celebrate Christmas?” asked Mom. “Of all people, he would know best what fun it is. I don’t think he’d want his family to miss out on something so special. Particularly after the year we’ve had.”

  “Oh, Mom,” I said. “Who knows what Dad would have wanted? Ever since June, people have been saying, ‘Your father would have wanted it this way. Your father would have done this, your father would have done that.’”

  “Well, then,” Mom broke in, “how do you know Dad would want us not to celebrate Christmas?”

  “Yeah!” said Carrie triumphantly.

  “Carrie, shut up.”

  “Liza, go to your room this instant.”

  I stared at Mom. It was the first time she’d ever sent me to my room.

  “And that’s another thing,” I said, my voice shaking. “It’s not even my room. I have to share it with her.” I pointed at Carrie. “I don’t have any privacy anymore.”

  “You’re not the only one,” Mom replied tightly. “Now leave the table. I’ll talk to you later. Carrie, you can do your homework in the kitchen tonight, so Liza can have a little space.”

  I climbed the stairs slowly, the sound of Carrie’s noisy protests dying behind me.

  When a knock came on the door about a half an hour later, I didn’t bother to answer it. I knew it was Mom, and I knew she would let herself in anyway.

  It was and she did.

  I was already in bed. The thought of curling up in a flannel nightgown had seemed very appealing. Fifi was at my feet, sprawled across the patchwork quilt, snoring gently.

  “Liza,” Mom said, “I’ve been thinking. Certainly you have the right to voice your opinion on this subject, and you have the right to your thoughts. But you do not have the right to inflict your ideas on everyone else. Do you understand me? You may do whatever you want about Christmas this year, but the rest of us are going to celebrate it, and I want us to be able to do that without any interference. Okay?”

  I was lying on my stomach, facing the wall. I nodded.

  “I want to point out,” said Mom, “that Christmas is the first thing that has begun to pull Hope out of her depression.”

  I rolled over and looked at Mom.

  “Yes, depression,” she repeated, sensing my unasked question. “Children can suffer from depression just as adults can. And whether you know it or not, Hope has been terrified by the things that have happened this year. She may be smart, but she doesn’t really understand why anything happened. She knows Dad isn’t coming back, she knows this is her new home, she knows Miss Donnelly is her new teacher, but she doesn’t understand why. I think what she sees now is that life isn’t stable or predictable. As far as she’s concerned, the rest of us could be taken from her just as easily as her father was. And that scares her. She needs to know that there is some predictability to her life. That’s one reason she’s so excited about Christmas. She wants it to come just like it did last year. She wants us to celebrate it like we did last year. … Can you understand that?”

  “But it won’t be like last year,” I whispered. “Dad won’t be with us.”

  Mom smoothed back my hair, brushing it from my forehead. “I know, sweetheart. And we all miss him. We’ll especially miss him at Christmas. But our lives have to go on.”

  “It still doesn’t seem right.”

  “Not to you, maybe, and that’s fine. That’s your feeling.”

  “You’re still going to celebrate Christmas this year?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “Well, I’m really not going to celebrate with you.”

  “All right. I understand. I don’t agree with what you’re doing, but I understand it. If you change your mind, the rest of us will be pleased to have you join in.”

  I sighed. “Okay.”

  “I’ll go talk to the other kids now.”

  Mom left the room and closed the door behind her. A little while later, Carrie came in. “I haven’t finished my homework,” she told me. “You can have our room until I’m done.”

  “Really?” I asked. I was glad she hadn’t mentioned Christmas.

  “Sure. I’ll leave the door closed, too, if you want.”

  “Thanks, Carrie,” I said. Some privacy was just what I needed.

  Chapter Three

  THE ROOM I SHARED with Carrie was very different from the room I’d had at 25 Bayberry. For one thing, of course, it was crowded. It was smaller than my old bedroom and had the furniture and belongings of two people stuffed into it: two beds (we had vetoed the idea of a double-decker), two dressers, two bookcases, an armchair, my desk (there was no room for Carrie’s desk, but she didn’t seem to mind), Carrie’s board games and stuffed animals, and my tape deck and collections of sea shells and china cats.

  In my old room, a bulletin board had hung over my desk. In the new house, the desk was under a window and there was no available wall space anyway, what with the closet, the other window, the wall lamps, and Carrie’s kitten posters.

  I sat down at my desk, absent-mindedly opened a drawer, saw a photo of Dad, and quickly shut the drawer. It wasn’t easy to look at pictures of Dad. Mom said she thought it was good to look at old photos of him. It would help us to remember him as he was when he was healthy—to remember him smiling or fooling around or working in the yard. But I had a hard time remembering him any way except the way he was the day he died.

  “That’s gross,” Carrie had said when I confided it to her one night. “It’s—what do you call it? It’s morbid.”

  “I can’t help it,” I replied.

  And I couldn’t. I mean, how many people are sitting right next to their father when he dies? When his last breath leaves his body?

  Dad was buried in a little cemetery behind the oldest church in Neuport. We didn’t go to that church, but so many past generations of O’Haras were buried there that Dad had thought he should be, too. All in the family. Ha, ha.

  I hadn’t been to see the grave. Everyone else had been—regularly. Even Hope. Sometimes they took flowers. (More than once I’d seen Hope go off with a
bouquet of wilted dandelions.) Sometimes they watered the grass around the headstone. Sometimes one would go alone, without anything. And stay a long time. Why, I wasn’t sure.

  “You should come,” said Carrie.

  “No way,” I said. “It’s not even him buried there. It’s not his body; it’s just a little pot full of ashes.”

  Ashes had become something of a problem for me. I saw ashes and I thought of death. It started, not the first time I saw the pot in the funeral home, but later, that time when I burned my father’s obituary. I looked at the ashes as the tapwater washed them down the drain, and I kept thinking, “They’re like flakes of Dad, flakes of Dad, flakes of Dad.”

  I knew it was weird, but I couldn’t help it. Now I got nervous if a smoker came to the house. I couldn’t rinse out the dirty ashtrays. I wouldn’t sit in the living room if there was a fire in the fireplace. Flakes of Dad, flakes of Dad. No one knew about the ashes thing. I was too embarrassed to talk about it.

  “What do you do at the cemetery?” I asked Carrie one day when she returned from a rather long visit.

  “I talk to him.”

  “To Dad?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “No, Liza,” she said after an uncomfortable pause, “I’m not kidding.”

  “Sorry. It’s just that it’s …”

  “That it’s what? Strange? You haven’t been there once. I think that’s strange.”

  Well, maybe it was. But what I thought was really strange was the way the rest of the family were just going on about their lives. It was almost as if Dad hadn’t died—or hadn’t existed. Mom was working harder than ever and was taking a course in educational administration at the community college. Brent was frantically applying to colleges and was doing a million other things—working on the yearbook, seeing Ellen, fiddling around with the insides of his car, playing football, and planning for Homecoming. Carrie was just as bad. She had joined an art club at school, was doing a lot of baby-sitting, and was thinking about going out for the middle school’s intramural basketball team. How could they just pick up and go on like this? It wasn’t right. They didn’t have any respect for Dad.

  As for me, Dad was nearly the only thing I could think about. At least once a day I thought I saw him somewhere. One morning in school, for instance, I had turned the bend in the staircase between the third floor and the second floor, and in the crowd of people coming up the stairs toward me was a tall man with graying brown hair who was wearing tortoise-shell glasses. “Dad!” I had nearly cried out, but almost immediately I saw that it was Mr. Yolen, one of the seventh-grade history teachers.

  Sometimes I fantasized that Dad hadn’t really died. It had all been an elaborate government plan for him to escape from our family and his own past and to assume a new identity. Everyone had been in on it—the doctors, the private nurse, the men who took him away. It all made sense, really. I mean, none of us sitting around Dad’s bed that last day had been aware of his actual dying. We only knew that the nurse came in, took his pulse, and announced that he was gone. Which, all along, I’d thought was weird. Weren’t you supposed to know? Wasn’t there supposed to be a death rattle or a tremor or a gasp? Pretty weird. Sometimes I could convince myself that this was true. The government had brainwashed Dad so he would go along with the scheme. Now Dad was walking around somewhere, healthy as a horse, under the assumed name of Bond—James Bond—or something.

  Another thing. Dad’s birthday was August 15, and it had come and gone last summer almost like any other day. We were still living at 25 Bayberry then. I had woken up late and come downstairs in my nightgown. Mom and Brent were on the porch in back of the house, drinking coffee. I sat down with them and propped my bare feet up on the railing.

  “Morning, sweetie,” Mom had said. “There’s a slice of cantaloupe in the refrigerator for you.”

  “Oh, thanks.”

  “Want to go swimming with me today?” Brent had asked. “Jeff’s asking a bunch of people over to break in the new pool.”

  “Sure. … Well, maybe.”

  Not a word about Dad’s birthday. On that day the year before, we’d gotten up early, packed a picnic (complete with a birthday cake), and spent the day at the beach.

  If I’d had the nerve, I would at least have gone to Dad’s grave with some flowers. As it was, only Mom did that. Brent went to Jeff’s party, and Carrie baby-sat for Susie and Mandy White all afternoon. Hope didn’t know when Dad’s birthday was, so she didn’t matter.

  Late in the afternoon, when Mom came back from the cemetery, I saw her standing out in one of the flower gardens (Dad’s favorite) crying, so I knew she was thinking about the day. But I’d thought we should observe it somehow, I mean, aside from going to his grave. So I wrote a poem about him and held a private moment of silence.

  I looked out the window and sighed. I didn’t like the view from the new house nearly as much as the one from 25 Bayberry. There were street lamps and phone poles everywhere. This time last year, looking out my bedroom window, I’d seen trees and a faded lawn and a little early snow. This time last year, Charlie had been alive. This time last year, Dad had been alive. And this time last year, we’d been about to start getting ready for our last Christmas together.

  Chapter Four

  THE DAY AFTER I decided to try to cancel Christmas, I happened to be gazing around the room instead of at the blackboard in math class. Ms. Pressman was at the board with her pointer, spearing a large X between two chalk lines and saying something about “the numerical value of a negative integer without regard to its sign,” and I was feeling as blank as the rest of the kids in the class looked. My eyes wandered slowly to the left, and when I became aware of what was in front of them, I realized I was staring right into the eyes of Marc Radlay.

  It was as if our eyes were locked. I suddenly went numb and sort of tingly all over, and my breath began to come in shallow little gasps, but I could not take my gaze away from Marc’s.

  Apparently, he couldn’t shift his gaze, either. The next thing I knew, he was flashing a quick, tentative smile at me. He managed, somehow, in those two or three seconds, to look shy, sweet, amused, and nervous about Ms. Pressman—all at the same time.

  I didn’t have a chance to smile back, though, because just then Ms. Pressman’s voice rose to a crescendo. “… the magnitude of a quantity!” she cried, and everyone jerked to attention.

  After that, I tried to stick with what she was saying, but my eyes kept drifting four seats over to Marc’s profile. I studied the way his hair, which was a soft brown, curled over the top of his ear. I studied the freckles sprinkled across his nose and right cheekbone. I watched with great interest as he scribbled a note on a piece of paper from his assignment pad, put his hands inside his desk to fold it up, and passed the note to Justin Sommerville. And I watched with a fascination that bordered on horror as Marc, evidently in response to the note he’d gotten back from Justin, scribbled a second note, and passed it to Margie, who passed it to Cathryn Lynn—who passed it to me.

  I couldn’t believe it. No boy had ever passed me a note. I looked again at the wad of paper in my hand. Sure enough, it said LIZA across it in clear letters. I hid it inside my desk. Then I glanced to the left. Margie and Cathryn Lynn were grinning at me, but Marc was looking stiffly ahead, and I noticed that his ears were burning a bright red.

  Margie began signaling frantically and mouthing at me to “Open it! Open it!”

  As soon as Ms. Pressman turned her back to write on the board, I opened the note. I had to do it slowly to keep it from crinkling. When at last it was unfolded, I read the words, feeling as if every eye in the room was on me instead of on Ms. Pressman. “Meet me on the playground after lunch,” the note said. “I’ll be waiting by the water fountain. Marc.”

  Heart pounding, I folded the note back up, and sneaked a look at Marc. He happened to be sneaking a look at me, so I nodded my head slightly to let him know I’d gotten the note and ever
ything was okay.

  He, Justin, Cathryn Lynn, and Margie all seemed to breathe sighs of relief, but no one was more relieved than I when a few minutes later, the bell rang.

  I made a beeline for Denise’s locker and found her standing in front of it, stuffing her gym clothes between some piano books and a pair of boots.

  “Denise!” I whispered desperately, looking over my shoulder as if Marc might have followed me or something. “Look at this!”

  My hands trembled as I fumbled for the note and shoved it at her.

  She slammed her locker door, then unfolded the note. “Meet me on the playground after lunch,” she read aloud.

  “Shhh!”

  “Liza, calm down.” Denise went back to the note. “I’ll be waiting by the water fountain. Marc.” She paused. “Marc? Marc? Marc Radlay? Oh, Liza! I told you, I told you! Didn’t I tell you?”

  “Yes!” We were both squealing and jumping up and down. “How am I going to wait until fifth period? I’ll never make it.”

  “I know,” Denise said sympathetically.

  I thought of something. “Oh, no! What am I going to say to him? Do you think he has something to tell me, or do you think he just wants to talk? If he just wants to talk, what do you think he wants to talk about?”

  “I don’t know,” replied Denise. “Maybe—”

  “Oh, no!” I cried again. “Look at how I’m dressed. How do I look?”

  “You look fine. Makeup always improves your—”

  The bell rang, signaling the start of fourth period.

  “Oh, no, now we’re late!”

  Denise and I ran down the hall in opposite directions.

  At the beginning of fifth period I met Denise at our usual table in the cafeteria. Margie and Cathryn Lynn joined us. We had brought our lunches because Thursday was usually ravioli and Jello-O day, and we all agreed that it was too disgusting to look at, let alone eat.