by Rachel Cohn
“I’m sorry,” she said, moving an exercise ball off the general area of my pillow. “If you want, I can get you some cleaner sheets. I changed them after you were here the last time—but I know that was months ago.”
Mercifully, there wasn’t any rebuke in her recitation of this fact. At least not until my father walked by and seized it.
“Yes, it hasn’t escaped my attention that your presence has been scarce here, Dashiell,” he said from the doorway. “It’s been that way for the whole year, no? About the same time you met Lily, if I’m not mistaken. I know what teenage hormones are like, but family is family, and it’s about time you realized that.”
“Now, now, dear,” Leeza said, armfulling some yoga mats into the closet. “We love Lily.”
“We love what we’ve seen of Lily,” my father replied. “But I have to say—first, a year ago, she lands you in jail. And now she’s landed you in the hospital. It makes we wonder whether Lily’s the right kind of girl for you to be spending so much time with.”
“Are you kidding me?” I said.
“I’m not kidding at all.”
I stared him down with my one good eye. “You don’t know Lily at all and you don’t know me at all, so your observations, while delivered with conviction, are just so much horseshit to me, Dad.”
My father grew bright red. “Now you look here, Dashiell—”
“No,” I said, shaking my head. “Stop. You don’t get to do this. You don’t get to pass any judgment here.”
“I am your father!”
“I am all too aware of that! And it’s bad enough for you to treat me like an idiot. But don’t you dare slander Lily in the process. It takes both her and Mom to balance out the seesaw with you on the other end.”
My father laughed. “Ah—I knew your mother would factor into this. All of these things that she’s told you—”
“No, Dad. These are the things I’ve told myself. Over and over and over again. Because, surprise! I am actually capable of coming to my own conclusions.”
“Boys,” Leeza interrupted, “I know it’s been a really long day for all of us. And Dash needs rest after everything he’s gone through. So why don’t we call it a night?”
“I’m sorry,” I said, “but I need to know if he even wants me here. Otherwise I can just go home.”
“No, Dash,” Leeza said sternly. “You are not staying alone tonight. Eventually, whatever drugs they gave you at the hospital are going to wear off and you’re going to find it’s not particularly comfortable to go to sleep with a bandaged eye. You need someone to take care of you.”
I didn’t tell her, but at that moment, she sounded exactly like my mom, in a way my mom would actually approve of.
“Listen to Leeza,” my father said.
“There’s no school tomorrow, right?” she went on. “Invite Lily over for breakfast. I’ll make gingerbread pancakes.”
“You’ll order gingerbread pancakes,” my father snarked.
“No,” Leeza corrected, “I will make them. It’ll be nice to have some people around who deserve them.”
“Good lord, I know when I’m not wanted,” my father huffed. “I’ll see you in the morning, Dashiell.”
“He loves you,” Leeza said once he was gone.
“You shouldn’t be the one telling me that,” I replied.
“I know.”
While she went out to the closet to get some new sheets, I texted Lily with the invitation to breakfast. It was late, so I wasn’t expecting her to be up. But she responded right away, excited.
“Lily’s on board for gingerbread pancakes,” I told Leeza when she returned. Then I took the sheets out of her arms; I could make my own bed.
“Lovely!” she said with compensatory cheer. “Is there anything else I can do for you before I head to bed?”
Tell me why you’re married to my father, I didn’t say. Tell me that when I make mistakes they’re going to be my mistakes, not his mistakes.
“I’m good,” I told her.
She brought me a glass of water for my bedside anyway, and a few Tylenol. After she kissed me on the cheek good night, she pulled back and considered me one more time.
“It’s actually not a bad look for you. More bounty hunter than pirate, I’d say. Work it while you can.”
I dug out my pajamas from a drawer.
“And Dash?” Leeza said from the doorway. I looked back up at her. “You’re right about Lily. She’s a keeper.”
But why, I wondered as I began the long, long, somewhat tortured road to sleep, would she ever want to keep me, if paternity was destiny?
Tuesday, December 23rd
I hadn’t told Lily about the gingerbread pancakes; she arrived with freshly baked gingerbread muffins. I was going to explain this coincidence to her, but I was interrupted by her crying out, “YOUR FACE!”
“What about my face?” I asked. “You can’t honestly see it under all these bandages, can you? My goal is to haunt an opera house by the time I’m twenty-three.”
“It’s not funny!”
“Actually, it is. And I think in this case, we can agree that I get to be the one to determine the humor of the situation, no?”
I leaned in to kiss her. Because of the whole half-blind thing, my aim was a little off. But she was nice enough to correct my miscalculation in a rather satisfying manner.
“I may start pulling an Adam Driver,” I warned her. “Wear a mask just for the fun of it. I mean, to prove that I’m badass and evil. That’s a Star Wars reference, by the way, not a Girls reference.”
“I got that one,” Lily said. And I thought, Voila! Now you’re not thinking about my injury anymore!
Before she could start drowning me in Apology Soup, I led her into the kitchen, where Leeza was over the griddle and my father was over the Wall Street Journal.
“Great minds think alike!” Leeza exclaimed when she saw the muffins.
“More like every goddamned thing nowadays is gingerbread for Christmas,” my father added. “Don’t get me wrong—I’m glad it’s not pumpkin, for Christ’s sake. But still. Gingerbread’s hardly an original thought. If you ask me, I blame Starbucks.”
“Nobody’s asking you, dear,” Leeza said lightly, taking out the muffins and putting them on a serving tray.
Within a few minutes, the pancakes were ready. Leeza had even made them in the shapes of ginger people. (It seemed strange to me to gender cookies.) What then followed was something that Lily was deeply unfamiliar with—familial silence. Every now and then one of us—even my father—would compliment the pancakes. But otherwise…nothing. Lily kept staring at my bandages, horrified. My father wouldn’t stop reading his paper. Leeza smiled vaguely, as if there were invisible elves telling her gossip.
I imagined this was what every meal with Leeza and my dad was like. When it had been my dad and my mom, silence had meant a truce. Here, it was a default void.
Please may we not become like this, I wanted to say to Lily.
And maybe she got that, because when I looked back at her, she rolled her eyes.
I tried to roll my eyes back, forgetting for a second what a bad idea that was. The result was a not-so-gentle ice-pick-to-my-retina feeling.
I must have yelped, because both Lily and Leeza immediately asked if I was okay. Dad just looked annoyed.
“A-okay,” I assured them. “But I just remembered—I need to change my bandage.”
“I’ll help you,” Lily and Leeza said at the same time.
I can do it, I thought.
Then I thought, But actually, I’d rather do it with Lily.
“Thanks, Leeza,” I said. “But I don’t think I need that many hands to help out. I’m going to let Lily take this one.”
We went to my room, where I got the gauze and tape from my backpack. Then we went into the bathroom, because even though I didn’t particularly want to see it, I knew we should probably have a mirror handy. I took off my eye patch and then started to unravel what the
doctor had done. But Lily stopped me, said, “Here, sit down. Let me.”
I closed my eyes. I felt her peel the tape from my skin, as carefully as she could. I felt the gauze over my eye loosening, and loosening, and then finally falling away. Lily gasped a little at what she saw—the stitches, the bruising—but instead of saying anything, she kept working. We were silent now, yes, but it was a silence of concentration, of focus. Not just on her part, as she slowly put me back together. I was also feeling her fingers as they touched the side of my head. I was hearing her breathe. I was attuned to the most basic pulse of the moment. The gauze was put in place, kept in place. The eye patch went back on top, protecting the protection. A pat on my back—All done, all good.
I opened my eye.
“I hope I did that right,” Lily said.
“If it were me, I probably would’ve wrapped up the wrong eye.”
“There was some…glitter. Kind of embedded in the side of your face. I didn’t know whether to take it out or leave it. I figure the doctor will do that next time?”
“Just adds to my street cred,” I assured her. “Already balladeers are crafting legends about the boy known as Glitter Pirate and his way with the blades.”
“I’m so—”
“Don’t say it! It was no more your fault than it was Andrew Carnegie’s fault for funding so many libraries, which led a century later to so many librarians on ice skates who were unprepared for glitter explosions. Anyway, I had a great time until the, you know, hospitalization. The Rawkettes knocked my socks off—which was no small feat, considering how laced up I was.”
At this moment, Leeza called out, “Everything okay in there?”
Considering my father’s comments about Lily’s bad influence, I wanted to yell out something about champagne and a sponge bath—but I wasn’t sure there’d be a way to explain the joke to Lily without hurting her feelings. So instead I yelled out, “All’s well!” and then murmured to Lily, “We must get out of this apartment as quickly as humanly possible. In fact, forget human constraints—let’s make like cheetahs. Or gazelles.”
“Are you sure?” Lily asked, looking me in the eye.
“Why wouldn’t I be sure?”
“I don’t know. They made you pancakes.”
“She made me pancakes. Mostly because she feels bad that he’s such a jerk.”
In certain circumstances, this would have been the point to say Oh, he’s not that bad. But my father didn’t merit those circumstances.
“The city awaits us!” I told Lily.
“Well, then,” she said, putting all the supplies back in my backpack, “we shouldn’t keep it waiting.”
We thanked Leeza about a dozen times each for the pancakes, and she asked us about a dozen times if we were sure we didn’t want more.
“Leaving already?” my father said the minute he was done with his paper.
“Only two shopping days left!” I chirped, which sounded inane even to me.
“Well, what’s the answer about Christmas? Will you be joining us or not?”
Only Leeza and Lily’s presence prevented me from saying “Not,” and then walking away.
“I’m afraid I already have other plans,” I said instead.
“What plans?” my father said skeptically.
I didn’t want to tell him about Mrs. Basil E.’s party. Because she’d invited me in a way that I knew my father would never invite Lily. It didn’t seem fair to put them on the same plane.
“I have plans with Lily,” I answered, and let that be that.
“Wonderful!” Leeza said.
My father gave me a look to say, Lily’s not family.
I tried to give him a look back that said, She’s better family to me than you are.
I kissed Leeza on the cheek. She seemed surprised—this was not our goodbye ritual.
“I’ll drop by after Christmas,” I told her. “I promise.”
“We’ll be here!” she replied.
My father didn’t get up from his seat.
“Bye, Dad,” I said.
“Bye!” Lily echoed.
I was so relieved when we were out of there.
—
“So,” Lily said when we got to the street, “what should we do? I have dog walking at three. But before that, I’m all yours.”
“Well,” I said, checking my watch, “it’s a little too early for a Salty Pimp.”
“Agreed. Maybe later. Do you need more caffeination?”
I shook my head. “I think it’ll play with my head.”
“So…”
“So…”
This is the funny thing about New York—there are so many things to do at all times of the day, but there are still moments when you have no idea which of them to do, and feel extra silly because you know there has to be something out there for you to do; your mind just hasn’t found it yet.
“I didn’t make any plans,” Lily said apologetically. “After last night, I thought maybe I shouldn’t.”
“And I haven’t made any plans. But we shouldn’t let that tip us into planless despair.”
“We could go help Langston and Benny pack.”
“That may require too many visual cues.”
“Oh. Sorry.”
“Maybe we should just have an early Salty Pimp.”
“I’m not even sure they’re open at ten.”
The whole city. We had the whole city! And yet…
“Do you hear that?” Lily asked. At first I didn’t know what she meant. Then I focused not on my thoughts but on what was happening outside my thoughts—and I heard it.
“Is that bagpipes?” I asked.
“I think it’s bagpipes,” Lily said.
Then, as if to confirm our theory, a bagpiper rounded the corner. Then another. And another. Eleven times over. A platoon of bagpipers, playing Joni Mitchell’s “River.” Behind them was a trail of sidewalkers—not marching in formation but instead summoned to follow along, to see where this was going.
Sometimes you make plans. Sometimes plans make themselves.
Especially in New York City.
“Shall we?” I said, offering my hand. I was doing this to be romantic, and also because I was worried that my visual impairment was going to make it hard for me to march in a growing crowd.
“Let’s,” she replied, taking my hand to be romantic, and also because she was worried that my visual impairment was going to make it hard for me to march in a growing crowd.
Hand in hand, we headed down Second Avenue. It soon became very clear from the conversations of the people around us that nobody knew who the bagpipers were or where they were going. There were plenty of theories, though.
“I think it’s the fire department’s bagpipe corps,” one older gentleman said.
“I’m not sure the NYFD plays Joni Mitchell,” his companion replied. “She’s Canadian, you know.”
Meanwhile, the hipsters directly in front of us were in a bit of a lather.
“Do you think it’s Where’s Fluffy?” a skinny guy in a cardigan asked.
“It’s not like Where’s Fluffy to play in the daylight,” a disheveled guy in a peacoat replied.
“Which is why it would be so Where’s Fluffy! To fool us by playing in the daylight!” the skinny guy rebutted.
I wasn’t sure what any of this meant. What I was sure of was that the bagpipes had begun to play “Fairytale of New York”—which is basically the best Christmas song ever written.
“Where do you think we’re going?” Lily asked.
I knew it wasn’t meant as an existential question. But that’s how my mind chose to hear it. Maybe because I was still trying to loosen myself from my father and the mood of foreboding that he put me in. Maybe because I was still wondering if Lily and I had found safe ground again. Or maybe just because we were blindly following eleven bagpipers, and while not a single one of them appeared to be pied, I was sure caution needed to be exercised whenever random pipers were concerned.
More and more people joined us as we crossed through midtown. For one scary moment, I thought we were going to head to Times Square, which would have been a literal tourist trap at this point in the season. But instead we skirted around it, an accumulation of curiosities following a single tune.
By the time we got to Tompkins Square Park, there had to be at least two hundred of us. There was a pause in the music as the bagpipers assembled in the park’s central circle. The hipsters peered around, looking for another band to show up. But the bagpipers were the only show around—and now they were ready for another song.
Even though it wasn’t even noon, they started to play the opening strains of “Silent Night.” Even though it wasn’t night, we all fell silent, something in the sounds reaching far within us. Such a peaceful song, and so sad. Even though there weren’t any words, we were all filling in the words in our heads.
All is calm, all is bright.
I didn’t really believe in Christmas carols, but I could believe in them a little more if, like this, they pushed us a little closer to wonder, a little closer to gratitude. Even the hard years have some reason for celebration, and I was feeling it now, and hoping that Lily was feeling it too.
The next song wasn’t a Christmas song—it was Van Morrison’s “Into the Mystic.” Some people in the audience started to sing along. I could tell Lily had no idea what song it was, so I started to serenade her with my own off-key rendition, telling her we were born before the wind, also younger than the sun. Telling her that when that foghorn blows, I’d be coming home. Telling her I wanted to rock her gypsy soul.
She smiled at that, showing me some of that gypsy soul shining through.
By the last verse, she was singing along. Then even more so when they transitioned into a rousing rendition of Sam Cooke’s “A Change Is Gonna Come.” We were all singing along now, joined by more and more people who were coming to the park and finding this strange, piper-drawn chorus. This spoke more to me than any 70-percent-off sale, more than any Hollywood construction, more than any check my father could write or any commercial that could be put on TV.
I put my arm around Lily’s shoulder and she put her arm around my waist, and we stayed like that—two bodies, one entity—for the rest of the song. Then we moved our arms so we could applaud with the rest of the crowd. The eleven bagpipers bowed once to us, then once to each other, then disappeared into the day.
