The eight-year-old had her arms crossed in disapproval. She was the only grandchild who hadn’t gotten covered in food.
Their mothers looked exhausted. Joanne helped wake up the little ones. Then she took the frosting from the boys and carried it into the kitchen. She dipped a clean spoon into it—it was now a muddy brown—and took a taste, closing her eyes. She loved butter frosting. It was the best thing of all.
Her youngest daughter, Nikki, leaned her head into the kitchen.
“Mom?” she said. “I was going to ask you. Did you get a letter from Grandpop?”
“A Christmas newsletter?” Joanne asked.
“Yeah.”
“I got a Christmas newsletter purporting to be from your grandfather,” she said carefully.
“So you didn’t send it,” Nikki said.
“No,” Joanne said. “If I had, I would have made him photocopy it instead of mimeo it.”
Nikki frowned at her. “Mine was photocopied,” she said. “On that green and red construction paper he loved. Remember?”
Joanne did remember. Throughout the late eighties and early nineties, all of her dad’s Christmas letters were on thick red and green paper. The family joke was that they could cut up the letters and make them into daisy chains for the tree.
“It’s weird,” Nikki said. “I thought you mailed it for him.”
Joanne shook her head. “Ask Ryan. He’s been seeing your Grandpop more than the rest of us.”
Nikki’s face colored. She nodded and backed out of the kitchen. Joanne swirled the spoon in the frosting, regretting the tone she had taken with her daughter. It was the holiday, no matter what was going on, and there was no cause to speak to Nikki that way. No matter how hard Nikki tried, she would never be as considerate as her brother. Yet Joanne always expected her to be a lot more sensitive.
Joanne was the one who wasn’t being sensitive. That letter was disturbing. She wondered who else had gotten a copy, and how she would ever find out.
It never took as long as she expected to clean up. Within an hour, her house was back to normal, as if the kid tornado hadn’t hit at all. When everything was done, she grabbed her coat and purse, and headed into the snow.
All she planned to do was say a quick hello to her father, then buy herself a nice dinner. But she drove the car past hospice, and down a road she had traveled most of her life.
The family house looked naked this winter. Usually she came over on the first weekend in December and decorated. The last few years, Ryan and Leo had helped, hanging icicle lights from the eaves and wrapping multicolored lights on the two evergreens up front.
But they hadn’t done that this year.
The sidewalk needed shoveling—she would have to remind the neighbor boy (had she paid him lately?)—and ice had formed on the porch steps. She unlocked the front door and let herself inside.
The place was starting to smell musty and unused. She had cleaned up her father’s mess shortly after he went into the hospital, expecting him to return at any point.
But he hadn’t returned. And the Thanksgiving decorations she had put up—her mother’s decorations—came down without being replaced by the Christmas decorations. His Christmas cards had all gone to hospice in case he did regain consciousness, as did his little six-inch television, the one he usually kept near his chair in the kitchen.
She ran a finger across the fireplace mantel, noting the dust. She would have to clean this place, but she didn’t see the point. He wasn’t coming back, and the family would have to decide what to do with the house itself—something she didn’t relish.
She grabbed a flashlight out of the front hall closet, then stopped. The familiarity of it all. She had made these same movements ever since she was a little girl. She knew where everything was and where everything belonged.
Losing the house would be like losing both parents all over again. Even if the house stayed in the family, this configuration—the flashlights and extra blankets in the front hall closet, the ice skates (unused in more than two decades) hanging from their peg behind the door—would be gone. The house would be different, its soul altered because the beings that inhabited it would be different.
She shook off the thought and climbed the stairs, listening to the familiar creaks and groans under her feet. She let herself into her father’s bedroom, and opened the closet door.
The closet was a walk-in, and in the very back were the stairs leading up to the attic. She climbed them, ducking more than she had as a child.
She flicked on the dim overhead light. Dust motes rose around her. The attic was cold. She had forgotten to turn on the small heater that Daddy always used to keep back the gloom.
There were more boxes up here than she remembered, and a stack in the corner of all of her mother’s personal things, labeled in Joanne’s neat handwriting—from another moment in her life that she would love to forget.
Joanne turned her back on that stack of boxes and headed to an older stack, pushed behind an ancient wardrobe.
She flicked on the flashlight, and ran the oval of light over the boxes, reading the labels—JOANNE (SCHOOL), PHOTOGRAPHS 1941–1955, GINNY (BEAUTY PAGEANTS), and on and on. Finally Joanne saw the box she was looking for. It wasn’t in the back after all. Someone (her father? He knew he wasn’t supposed to come up here alone.) had slid it nearer to the stairs.
The box was twice the size of the other boxes, and it was labeled XMAS LETTERS. She opened it and found her father’s original drafts in perfect order, starting with last year’s.
December 19
I’m getting a late start this year because Mother Nature has decided that winter will start on time for once. Too often she’s been late with the snow and cold, and I’m never in the seasonal mood until the air is properly crisp. Of late, however, she’s been early, and that’s equally frustrating, for when Christmas comes, it feels as if someone had postponed it to the end of January instead of the end of December . . .
Joanne sank to the floor, reading each letter, going slowly back in time.
December 1
I have dreaded this letter ever since August. So many of you don’t know, because we only communicate at this time of year, that my beloved Lucille left us that month. I stood over her open grave, tossing in a perfect white rose like the one I had given her on our wedding night, and thought of this moment.
No more letters, I decided. There is no point.
But there is a point, dear friends, and the point is you. This afternoon, my daughters and I, along with my grandchildren and their children (three now!) stood at that same gravesite, covered in brown grass and frost, and watched as the stonemason put the beautifully carved headstone in place.
Annie thinks it a bit plain. Ginny likes its simplicity. But as usual, it is Joanne who understands.
“Art Deco,” she said, placing her hands together like she has since she was a little girl. “Mama would be so pleased. . . .”
Joanne placed the pages upside down so that they stayed in order, some of the words so familiar she could recite them from memory. The oldest letters dated from early in her parents’ marriage, long before she was ever born.
Her father had married late, and relished the idea of a family, saying he hadn’t been ready before, and hinted at things he had done, things his readers (but not the daughter he hadn’t yet had) would clearly understand by implication. She had read these older letters dozens of times, and each time, they had raised questions.
She had forgotten to ask her father about those questions.
Now she never could.
She set the letters down. When he was gone, she would copy them for the whole family—a bit of history for everyone—and make a little booklet out of them. Maybe she would go to one of those self-publishing places and create something lovely, something worthy of him.
But this year’s reaction to the surprise letter ruled out one thing: She couldn’t send that booklet at Christmastime, not without letting everyone know
it was coming.
She gathered up the letters and held them for a moment. That surprise letter had driven her here, to see if what she remembered was what her father had done.
She had remembered a lot, but she had forgotten so much more—the occasional elegiac note, the puckish sense of humor that would appear, the way he could turn a mundane moment into the most important in the world.
She was glad she had come, on this night of doing the cookies. It was a way of keeping him in the celebration, even though he physically couldn’t be present.
She neatly stacked the letters together. She was about to put them back in the box, when the flashlight beam caught something at the bottom.
A mahogany box, long and thick and ornately carved. She had seen four others like it. One belonged to her mother. Her father had given it to her as an engagement present so she had a place to keep all of the love letters he had sent to her. Mother had done that, too, and Joanne knew where that box was.
Her father had made Joanne promise she wouldn’t read anything in it when he was alive—I didn’t write those letters for you, Button—and she had kept that promise only because, as a child, she had been unable to break the tiny lock her mother had attached to the beautiful silver clasp.
The other three boxes came to each daughter on the occasion of her high school graduation, a place for her future love letters. I trust, Daddy had said to all three of them at the moment he gave them their box, you never got letters in high school. You’re barely old enough now to get them.
Joanne reached into the cardboard box, her hand shaking, and pulled out the mahogany box. This box matched the others. It had the silver clasp—tarnished now—and the same odd carvings along the edge. There was no lock, like there was on her mother’s love letters, yet Joanne still felt like she was about to touch something forbidden, something that didn’t belong to her, and never would.
She almost let it wait until her father was really and truly gone. But the flashlight beam flared—something she had never seen one do before—and for a moment, she thought she saw her name carved into the wood.
She squinted. What she had thought was her name was one of those scroll-like carvings that existed on the other boxes. If the carvings said something, they did so in a language she had never seen before.
She set the box on her lap and ran her fingers across it, feeling the warm wood beneath her fingertips, the gentle edges of the etchings, and the roughness of the silver clasp. Then, before she could change her mind, she threw back the clasp and opened the box.
The scent of sandalwood rose from the interior, which surprised her and made her sneeze. Inside were more letters, looking just like the ones Joanne had thumbed through.
December 19
It’s always summer here in December, something I will never get used to. Yes, it’s summer in Australia in December as well, but I’ve never been Down Under, and I come here all the time. Summer is the busy season—more bugs than any other place on Earth (if, indeed, this is Earth), flowers bigger than my head, and animals on the move, trying to find the proper home for their growing families.
I can empathize, even though my family is long since grown . . .
She frowned, thinking that the date was familiar, and so she looked at the pile of letters still resting beside her leg. Each letter that he had mailed had a corollary in the box. Last year’s letter, dated December 19, had a matching made-up December 19 letter, as if she had had two fathers, one who lived in this little house that he had raised a family in and paid off twenty-eight years ago, and the other who disappeared into a sunlit world of December summer.
She read random snippets of the other letters from the box:
The water here is brighter blue than the water at home. It tastes fresh, like snow melt with a tang.
and . . .
He passed me this morning, my great-grandfather, looking trim as ever. His hair was black, not the thick pile of silver I remember from my childhood. He wore an Edwardian suit, complete with pocket watch and long golden chain, and made me think of those illustrations of the rabbit from Alice in Wonderland.
He didn’t say hello and neither did I. We both knew it wasn’t the time. We would speak on some future date, when it was more appropriate, when we actually had something to say . . .
and . . .
Saw my first dragon in June. They’re bigger than I expected and more fearsome. If you jump when you see a lizard, imagine how you would feel at one blown up to the size of a horse, with round reptilian eyes and a slitted tongue. Each tooth is larger and thicker than my finger, and the fangs that curve beside the black lips are the size of horns of plenty.
I was terrified. Deep down mortally terrified, knee-knocking, all-but-peeing-myself terrified. I hid behind some tree with big flat leaves and hoped I was downwind.
Apparently I was because it lumbered in the other direction, and then when I was really and truly sure it was gone, I leaned my head against the tree’s sharp bark and felt both humiliation and embarrassment.
In my imagination, I am the archetypical hero, the man who would rush a dinosaur wearing nothing but a loincloth and carrying a dull knife. But in real life (although I hasten to call this place real life), I am a middle-aged guy in blue jeans and an Abbey Road T-shirt who hides behind giant leaves and tries not to wet his pants . . .
She laughed in spite of herself. Not because the letters were particularly funny, but because they were wry and honest. She remembered that quality from her teen years when she did sneak into Ginny’s room to listen to the later Luminaria tales.
The hero in Daddy’s stories was never particularly heroic. The monsters were hapless—had they been intelligent and strong, the hero would have died. Instead he survived through instinct and sheer luck, somehow always making it back home in time to have supper and tuck his precious daughters into bed.
Joanne riffled the letters, but didn’t read any more. Although she did note that the typeface of these letters always matched the typeface of the Christmas letter from the same year.
She closed the box and cradled it to her chest. Part of her wanted to take the box with her, bring it to the safety of her own home, and hide it in her attic so no one else knew it existed.
But she was Joanne The Responsible One, and she would forever feel like she had a secret—a noxious secret—from the others.
She leaned her cheek on the box’s edge, feeling the soft warm wood against her skin like a caress. Then she replaced the box in the bottom of the cardboard box and put all the other letters on top of it.
She stood carefully, so that she didn’t hit her head on the slanted ceiling, and brushed off her pants. More dust motes rose. She shut off the flashlight and headed back to the stairs, turning off the overhead light before heading down.
For the first time ever, she was cautious—if she fell and hurt herself, no one would find her here. No one had known she was coming.
She reached the bottom, the closet that smelled faintly of the pipe Daddy had given up thirty years before, and the leather from his (rarely worn) dress shoes, and she let herself out of the closet and into the bedroom.
There, in the light, she saw herself in the mirror above the vanity and got another surprise. What a comical figure she made—a middle-aged woman dressed in a Santa sweater and black pants, dust stains on her face, and frosting with sprinkles along her hip.
Certainly not the beautiful princess of the Luminaria letter or the lovely daughter who needed her father’s protection from the once-imaginary suitors.
She wasn’t quite sure how she ended up here, looking for bits of the fantastic in the dark. That she had found it surprised her.
That some of it sounded familiar surprised her even more.
She had to go home before heading to hospice. She took a shower and found a different set of holiday clothes to wear, this one—a black and red glitter sweater over black pants—a little more tasteful.
As she left the house a second time, she
grabbed her cell phone and speed-dialed her youngest sister.
“I was just going to call you,” Ginny said, sounding breathless. She didn’t say hello or anything—she hadn’t since she bought her first cell phone years ago. “I finished up earlier than I expected. I’m flying in tomorrow and I’m staying until the inevitable. Have you already done cookies?”
“This afternoon,” Joanne said as she slid into the car. She felt an odd sense of relief that her baby sister was coming—not to help her with their father. Lord knows, no one could help anymore—but to simply be there, beside her, so that Joanne would no longer be alone.
“Damn,” Ginny said. “I love doing cookies.”
“I could whip up another batch,” Joanne said.
“Naw, I’m sure there are other traditions I’d forgotten that I’ll love just as much.”
“Will you stay with me?” Joanne asked.
“Hotel, babe,” Ginny said. “Pampering and fifty-seven channels.”
“Doesn’t sound like any hotel around here.” Joanne almost mentioned that Ginny could stay in their childhood home, but she didn’t. Her sister, who had started her fashion company for women over forty when she hit that magic age and no one would hire her, had more than enough money to do whatever she wanted.
Ginny laughed. “I’ve booked the ticket and rented a car. I’ll be there for dinner tomorrow. We can talk then.”
She was clearly going to end the call, but Joanne caught her first.
“Ginny,” Joanne said, “did you get a Christmas card this year from Daddy?”
Joanne half-expected her sister to say she hadn’t. Instead, Ginny said, “Oh, yeah. It was cute. That red-light-district thing? So Daddy.”
More Stories from the Twilight Zone Page 38
