by Alice Ozma
For ten minutes, my father and I couldn’t bear to leave the spot where we were standing. We didn’t talk—we had enough work just mopping our faces dry only to find that they were immediately saturated before we’d even finished. I looked at him and wanted him to say something meaningful.
“At least we’re still on the same floor as her” was all he said, his voice breaking.
We got into the elevator, and as the doors closed we cried harder, grateful for the privacy.
“At least we’re still in the same building as her,” I said.
The slow walk to the car and exit from the parking lot prompted my father to say, “At least we’re still on the same street as her.”
With each added distance, we had more and more trouble keeping ourselves together.
We got back to the hotel and sat on our beds for a while, looking at the walls and biting our lips.
“Let’s go to the pool,” my father said finally, searching his suitcase for swim trunks.
“Now? In our condition? I think we’ll get some funny looks. I’m not sure I’m up for it.”
“It’s a big hole filled with water. No one will even see our tears. We’ll blend right in.”
“Or we’ll raise the water level and flood the pool.”
We went and floated on our backs, not talking or even moving. A year without Kath.
When we did our reading that night, it almost didn’t seem right. Kath was leaving and we were just sitting in a hotel bed, reading The Secret Garden like it was any other night, like we were back at home and things were as normal as could be. The moment we’d both been waiting for since we began the book, the moment when Mary finally found the entrance and saw the garden for the first time, finally came. We turned the page and there it was, suddenly, in all its green and overgrown glory. But it was lost on us. It went by without a comment or even a gasp. The world of our books, which had always seemed very real and very close, seemed so tiny and distant. I felt a million miles away from Mary. Nothing she did really mattered. She could discover a garden or stay in her room and play checkers, for all I cared. The fact that she was also coping with loss—a different sort of loss, of course—didn’t occur to me. Even if it had, it wouldn’t have moved me. She was not real, and reality was weighing heavily on my chest, keeping my attention away from the garden where things had the potential to grow and get better.
“At least we’re still in the same state as her,” my father said, as we handed in our hotel key and headed for the parking lot the next morning.
And later, when we reached home, “At least we’re still in the same country.”
Two days later, her plane left for Germany. I wasn’t even sure if we were under the same sky.
My father and I learned to live as just the two of us—an act we would later perfect. There were fewer expenses when it was just two people, anyway. As it turned out, my sister got a poor match for a host family and, after a series of strange incidents, including being asked to eat uncooked roadkill for dinner, she took an emergency flight home just in time for Christmas. But she never really came back. She stayed for a month and left again to join a new host family in Germany. Later she lived in Russia. Now she lives in Serbia.
So on her first day of college, a day when I was thirteen that I’ve been trying to recall, there’s nothing much to remember. There weren’t any tears. It was a huge day for the students and families around us, but we felt disconnected from them. They hadn’t had the practice we’d had. They cried and we shrugged. Now she was only a car ride away. We could see her on weekends and holidays. College, it seemed to me, was a vast improvement. We carried the final boxes to her room with smiles on our faces, waved good-bye knowing it was really see-you-later, and saw her again in a week. My father did her laundry when she came home, and her clothes smelled like mine. Nothing was wrong with it. Then she left again for a semester abroad. She was always leaving, and I can’t say I blame her. She had wonderful opportunities. She was never just running. I remember her leaving for lots of places, but not college.
Later, during our worst financial straits and while Kath was in Russia, my father kept the house at fifty-two degrees and went to bed wearing two wool hats and a pair of gloves. I also had a pair of gloves, called my typing gloves, with the fingers cut out to allow easier work on school projects. A friend left my sleepover because she was too cold. It wasn’t pretty. I wondered what my sister was doing every day, and if it was warm where she was. We talked on the phone and she said no, it was even colder there, she missed us more than words could explain, and she would keep calling regularly. She did. Still, the days got shorter and something was missing. Whenever I heard my father putting toast in I fumbled out of bed as fast as I could, only to remember when I got to the bottom of the stairs that no one was chasing me to claim the coveted spot warming our hands over the toaster.
Sometimes I lay in her bed at night and counted the stars. Not the ones out the window, but the little glow-in-the dark ones all over her ceiling. We’d split a pack of them years ago, and most of mine had already fallen off, landing every now and then with a little plastic sound as they hit my floor or dresser. But Kath had used more tack than I had, and hers were still up, even after the cold winters and hot summers our house had come to expect. I wanted to peel some off and mail them to her, so we could look at them together every night, but they had lasted this long, so I let them stay. The real things, the burning balls of gas in the night sky, weren’t enough. Everybody had those; these plastic stars understood and remembered. They’d seen it all. They were still here.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Day 1,513
For they said, it was a shame to quarrel upon Christmas Day. And so it was! God love it, so it was!
—Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol
I am not putting that thing on my Christmas tree.”
“Your Christmas tree? How do you figure that?”
“I paid for it with all the money in my sock drawer and I spent two hours putting it up. I would say that makes it my Christmas tree as much as it possibly can be.”
My dad was circling the tree, looking for a place to hang his favorite ornament: a big gold box, taller than my hand and wider than most novels, with a holographic photo of Elvis Presley on it. There were tiny, painted buttons on the ornament, but it looked more like a radio that mysteriously had a screen than a television. When you tilted it, it revealed either a photo of an incredibly sweaty, chubby Elvis or a screaming-into-the-microphone, tired-looking Elvis. It could not have been more hideous, and I was fairly certain it was originally marketed as a gag gift.
“Look, it plays music!” my father said, pressing a button on the back of the ornament to produce a tinny, whining sound that was supposedly the song “Hound Dog” but sounded more like the animal itself howling and walking across a pile of bicycle horns.
“It is lovely, yes, no one can deny that. I am not denying that at all. But is there room for it?”
The answer was no—I had filled up every inch of the tree with ornaments. Some were homemade, some were family heirlooms, and absolutely none depicted fat, sweaty men. I planned for things to stay that way.
There was a knock at the door.
“My hands are full!” I yelled, organizing our presents so that the ones my father had wrapped in tinfoil weren’t immediately apparent.
“I just got out of the shower!” my sister called from upstairs.
My father didn’t notice the knock or chose to ignore it as he knelt down and tried to ascertain how far an ornament had to be from the ground to keep the cats from batting at it.
“Um, I guess I’ll get it then,” my sister’s boyfriend, Nathan, said cautiously.
He and Kath were splitting up the college break between New Jersey and his home state, Texas. He had stayed with us few times before, including a couple of Christmases, but he was clearly uncomfortable answering the door in someone else’s house.
“Merry Christmas, everyone!” m
y mother shouted before she was even inside. Her arms were overflowing with blankets and pillows, which she deposited on the couch before announcing that she had to go get her sheets and a few more pillows.
“Are you planning to sleep on a pile of jagged rocks?” my father called, as she headed back out to her van. “Because if you’re not taking the couch, I’m going to use it to keep my presents comfortable.”
Although my mother had stayed at her apartment during her first Christmas away, it didn’t feel right to me. There was no reason for her to sleep alone, or wake up alone, on such a big day. So I suggested that she sleep at the house, just this one night out of the year, and the tradition continues to this day. My mother never complained about crashing on her ex-husband’s couch, and my father never really questioned the idea of having his ex-wife stay in his living room. Although they can fight as bitterly as anyone at times, my parents have always maintained a friendship that goes beyond putting on a good face for our sake. My mother stayed over because she knew it was important to me, even though I was now thirteen years old, and my father let her because he didn’t think she should be alone for the holidays. It wasn’t until I was about to graduate from high school and my dad’s then-girlfriend refused to accept the arrangement that any of us even thought of it as out of the ordinary. To our surprise, he defended the tradition even then.
“Nathan, before you go upstairs,” I said, grabbing him by the sweater, “tell me this: how do you think baby Jesus would feel if he knew there was a hip-shaking, rock-and-roll singing man at the top of our tree?”
I pointed at the ornament in question, which was now hanging where the star had been just a moment ago.
“I can’t imagine what he’d say,” Nathan said, trying to avoid conflict, “since I have never personally met him, that I know of, and also since I am Jewish.”
“But if you had to guess,” I pressed.
“Well, didn’t Elvis sing a lot of gospel music? I think baby Jesus would like that.”
My father broke into “How Great Thou Art” and moved holographic Elvis back and forth for dramatic effect. Sweaty, chubby. Tired, screaming. Out of the thousands taken during the man’s career, you’d think they could have found two slightly more flattering photos.
“What are we singing about?” my mother asked with a huge grin, as she finished piling blankets in a stack that could have put the Princess and the Pea to shame.
“Are we singing about how this butter has been expired for six years?” Kath said, waving the box in my father’s face. “Or is that not important to anyone but me?”
“That has been in the freezer since the week I bought it. It is perfectly good.”
“This is why we never have company over. Dad, I have told you many, many times that the freezer does not stop the hands of time.”
My father got serious.
“What is this, Christmas Eve or Complain About Dad Day? If you don’t like the butter, don’t eat it! What do I care? Was I begging you to eat it? Do you think I was crossing my fingers, just hoping that you would come down and eat some toast and tell me what I am doing wrong with my life?”
“She would have started with your taste in ornaments,” I interjected.
“James, I’m sorry, but is this present for me?” my mother called over all of us, waving a tinfoil-enrobed box above her head. “Because if it’s the slippers I asked you for, I’d like to open them now.”
“It is not for you! Can’t you read tags?”
He took the present and moved it to the back of the pile, apparently annoyed that she’d revealed its shape and texture in front of the true recipient, whoever that was.
“I’m so sorry, Jamie! I really am! I thought I was ‘To Whom It May Concern,’ honestly, I did!”
From where I was standing, helping my sister check the expiration dates on everything else in the refrigerator, I could just barely make out the tag, which read, To: Whom It May Concern. From: None Of My Business.
It was a typical James Brozina tag, but even I didn’t know what it meant. I had a feeling that it was for Nathan, though, because my father had drawn a dancing man on the tinfoil in Sharpie. Actually, that didn’t narrow it down at all.
My mother turned on some Christmas music, and everyone but my father sat around the tree to talk and admire our decorations. My dad headed to the dining room, turned on the television, and watched the news while eating a peanut butter sandwich. He wasn’t being antisocial—he enjoyed watching the news and eating peanut butter sandwiches, and he liked it just as much on Christmas Eve as he did during the rest of the year. And since Christmas cheer meant letting everybody appreciate the holiday in his or her own way, we let him enjoy himself uninterrupted.
My father had read to me earlier in the day so that I could better enjoy the Christmas Eve festivities. We were working on Gary Paulsen’s Hatchet, but we’d put it down for the night. The tale of a young boy surviving on his own in the wilderness was an exciting read, and it had become even more exciting when I realized my lab partner just so happened to be reading it, too. Zack and I would go back and forth, imagining what we would have done in each situation and arguing the plausibility of each other’s schemes. I enjoyed the book very much, but on Christmas Eve it didn’t quite seem festive enough, so we’d traded it out to read a collection of out-of-order paragraphs from A Christmas Carol. I liked to read the passages about Scrooge’s sister Fanny, even though they were sad, because she sounded like such a nice person. And then to cheer us up we read about the party at the Fezziwigs’, a name that instantly makes me smile just from the sound of it.
Because our reading was done, my dad went to bed first. The rest of us stayed to shake our presents and drink more hot cocoa, which I happily gulped even though I hate hot drinks. Christmas can change your opinion on most anything. When we got up to go to bed an hour or two later, I instinctively reached to remove the Elvis ornament and replace it with the star we always used.
“For what it’s worth,” Nathan said, standing behind me, “I would leave it, if I were you.”
“Are you looking at the same holographic gold box that I am?” I asked in astonishment.
“Yes.”
“And you think it is attractive?”
“No, not exactly.”
“Well, what?”
“It’s a silly ornament. It’s even sillier at the top of the tree, where a star or an angel might be, if this were some other family. But one thing I’ve always liked about this family is that it is always fine to be silly. It’s none of my business, but I don’t think this tree stands out in a bad way. It’s just right for the Brozinas, when you think about it.”
“You’re making me feel like Charlie Brown,” I said, “with my pathetic but appropriate Christmas tree.”
“What’s wrong with Charlie Brown?”
“What’s wrong with our Christmas star? The one we’ve used for years.”
“Nothing,” Nathan said. “Nothing at all. Both are nice. The tree will look great either way.”
He wished me a Merry Christmas and went to bed.
Alone in the living room, I stared at the great big tree.
I pulled up a chair to stand on and tried the star on for size. It looked good. I tried the Elvis ornament on. It looked silly. But when I put the star on and hung the Elvis ornament over it, it somehow looked just right. So that was how I left it.
In my bed that night, I listened to all the sounds of the house. There was my father’s quiet snore, rhythmic and peaceful. There was my mother’s open-mouthed breathing, like she was puffing on a car window to fog it up before writing her initials with her finger. I could hear my sister and Nathan giggling, sounding sleepy but happy. From my feet, I could hear one of the cats purring.
Over the years, I had gotten used to living with just one other person. The house had stopped feeling empty, and I no longer minded the quiet. There is nothing wrong with being a family of two. But tonight, as our sounds blended together into a hushed Chri
stmas carol, I savored the song, for once full and rich. We were singing something, and it was not “Silent Night.” Maybe it was “Hound Dog.” But I think it was an original.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Day 1,528
She tried to think of every pleasant and beautiful and wonderful thing she knew. She made a list of all the miracles in her mind. She recited poems to herself and sang softly all the songs she’d learned at school and all the songs Daddy sang. But it wasn’t any good.
—Virginia Sorenson, Miracles on Maple Hill
A C is absolutely, positively, the worst grade you can give a person. It’s worse than a D or even an F, because it means that you are, totally and completely, average. And you’re not even average in the real-world sense, because most students either do well or do poorly. You either identify yourself as someone who gets good grades or someone who doesn’t. If you get a C, that identity gets a little blurry—are you an underachieving smart kid, or an overachieving dumb kid? Also, if you’re used to getting mostly As, a C is basically an F that took more work. Among the words that start with c: crusty, canker sore, cannibal, and congeal. I rest my case.
So it was no small blow when, after seven years of mostly As (with scattered Bs in math and science), I received my first C. Worst of all, it was in my best subject.
Report cards were given out in homeroom, but not during homeroom: the last class of the day was cut short so students could make their way back to their first class. In high school, they gave them out during first period, but middle school students (including myself, as I would soon find out) were still prone to big, emotional scenes, and starting the day off with one could be disastrous. Just a few minutes before the final bell, I pushed my way through the crowds from my Spanish class to my geography class and took a seat near the front in hopes of getting out sooner.
