by Fran Kimmel
Then, if that wasn’t enough, Bill and Audrey’s yelping chihuahua, home alone, set off their useless new security alarm. The constables were called out so often they had memorized the security code. They’d learned to stay upright in the house at all times, their noses a safe distance from that leaping excuse for a dog.
Albert Finning, ninety-six and still on his own, called in a self-diagnosed bout of appendicitis a little after ten. King and Cruikshank showed up before the ambulance and loosened Albert’s belt buckle. Problem solved. On the way back to the station, they confiscated George Lundy’s potato launcher, which he was loading and reloading as fast as he could in Peavey Mart’s empty parking lot.
Beyond that, Betty said over the phone, little else had come through. Not one frozen limb. Not a car wreck or a single reported blow between spouses. The good people of Neesley had had a surprisingly quiet time, the violence of winter knocking the wind right out of them.
Eric laughed at Betty’s stories, feeling relieved he wasn’t the one making the rounds. All those Christmases he’d missed out on while he sorted others’ problems. When Betty asked for an update about the goings-on at the Nyland house, he didn’t tell her about their harrowing night. It seemed too intimate, a family matter that he didn’t want to share.
The utility truck arrived just after one as Eric was shovelling the last few feet of driveway. Larry Turner stepped down from his cab, wobbling slightly—red-eyed, stubble-chinned. He looked like an accident waiting to happen.
“Quite the storm,” Eric said. He’d known Larry since his school days, a sullen sort who hadn’t amounted to much. Two failed marriages. A son who wouldn’t speak to him. “How are things?”
“’Bout what you’d expect,” Larry grumbled. “Damned lines down along Lincoln Road all the way to the tree farm.”
“At least the town grid stayed up.”
The sun’s rays bounced off Larry’s bald scalp and scraped cheek, highlighting the start of another shiner. The whole town knew that Larry had been pulled out of several bar fights the past year.
Eric said, “Appreciate you getting here so fast. Christmas Day and all.”
Larry shrugged his shoulders, turning away, one day as bad as any other.
While Larry worked on the line, Eric headed to the barn. A bird circled above. Eric looked up unwillingly. It was a red-tailed hawk—the real thing. He cranked his head back, studying the oatmeal belly, magnificent wings, and wide, fanned tail. He felt boyhood wonder—nothing more, nothing less. The hawk soared effortlessly on an air current, until it caught an updraft and climbed into the sky and out of view.
Eric had to take a moment to catch his breath. Then he grabbed the pick axe from the barn and waded through crusted snow to the far side of the yard. The apple tree stood lifeless and bloated in its coat of white, Walter’s old water drum half buried beside it.
Eric had been at it for four days, chiselling away the earth to make a resting place for Hannah’s cat. He’d managed to keep the fire burning day and night, the drum protecting the heat from the worst of the wind. He’d gone back again and again, each time shovelling the smoldering charcoals aside as the ground became soft, and then chipping away with the pick axe. By yesterday, he’d cleared off over two feet of black earth, more than enough, but he’d kept on swinging anyway, picturing Wilson beneath him as the ground cracked open. God only knew what he’d find now. The damn storm might have decided to seal the empty grave back up during the night.
Eric shovelled around the water drum and then tipped it on its side, peering down to find the hole still a hole, the ground still warm to the touch, a spray of ash and powder.
He’d done all he could do to get ready for this. The dead cat was in a small Borden Cheese crate he’d found in the barn, wood streaked black, the box ancient enough to be worth cash to the collectors who flocked to Neesley’s antique sale every year. He’d shaken out the dead flies and crammed in the brittle carcass. After he slid the wooden lid shut, he banged in a few finishing nails to keep it that way. Hannah didn’t need to see inside.
The system would take care of her. That’s what he’d repeated to Ellie over the last few days: the lie he told to protect his wife. He’d seen kids get bounced so many places they couldn’t remember the names of their street or their keepers. In truth, the girl would be better off right here, on this plot of land, where she would be safe. An impossibility, of course. He had to hide this line of thinking, bury it along with the cat.
Eric stabbed the shovel hard into a deep wedge of snow and headed toward the house. The sky was gay and bright, not a whisper of wind, the right kind of conditions for a cat’s quiet send-off. But it didn’t feel right, not today, not on Christmas.
He heard Larry’s engine start up and turned to see him back behind the wheel. Somehow he’d managed to repair the line without frying himself in the process. It was remarkable how life carried on. Despite stupidity and wickedness, worry and remorse.
The cat could wait. Tomorrow, he would stand beside the girl under the apple tree and try to find a few right words.
—
The whole family went to bed early. Hannah wished she would fall asleep, but her stomach hurt. She couldn’t stop her thoughts from frothing around and battering her insides.
It had been a happy Christmas Day, her happiest in a long, long time. They fed Thorn treats all day long, brushing his coat while he farted up a storm. Grandpa Walter was back to his old self, not remembering one thing about being lost in that storm. She wished she could forget too. She wished she could snap her fingers and make the past go away.
There were so many presents. Ellie cried when she unwrapped her songbook, just like her mother had when it arrived in the mail.
Once Ellie was able to talk again, she asked, “Do you play the piano, Hannah?”
No. At Sunnybrook she’d been allowed to turn the pages for Mrs. Humble at hymn sing, but she’d hardly seen a piano since.
“What a shame!” Ellie’s eyes were still teary. “A voice like yours. You should have lessons.”
Eric slapped his knee and said, “Just what I need! How did you know?” Then he found the hammer and a nail and pounded the key holder to the wall by the front closet.
Sammy jammed his eye to the kaleidoscope’s rim, tilted his head toward the ceiling, and marched around in circles, crashing into the coffee table and almost knocking over the tree.
“Hey, buster, watch where you’re going,” Ellie said, but Sammy announced, “The world’s in here,” and everyone laughed.
Hannah and Daniel opened their presents at exactly the same time. “It’s an angel,” she said, wanting to grab it back before he had time to react.
“Cool,” he said, smiling big. Then his face turned red, even the tips of his ears. “Yours is a bird. A robin.”
“It’s so tiny!” A tiny bird on top of its own little house.
“You’re supposed to have a bracelet to put it on,” Daniel said, redder still. “It’s a charm. Girls collect them.”
“Or I could put it on a chain, like a necklace.” Her present to him wasn’t nearly enough. “You don’t have to wear yours!” she burst out. “You can put it in your drawer.” But when she looked up, her angel was around his neck.
The Nylands gave her more presents than she’d ever had at one time. A fuzzy sweater and a new jacket with soft fur. A nail polish. Lotions that she’d rubbed over her arms and neck until she smelled like a garden.
So why did such a growing ache run right through her middle?
It was this family. It was finding everything she’d missed out on, seeing their lives framed in happy poses along the mantel and then playing out in front of her. The warmth of the fire; the concern on their faces; Ellie’s careful, kind tone—none of it fooled Hannah. Being with the Nylands had brought a new kind of loneliness. She didn’t belong here. Tomorrow morning, she would be sen
t away. She might as well have stayed lost in the storm.
Part Seven
Thursday’s Child Has Far to Go
Thursday, December 26
Fifteen
Ellie woke early. She dressed in the dark, so as not to wake Eric, and closed the door soundlessly as she left their room. Turkey and stuffing spice lingered in the hallway; she could smell it in the walls and blowing up through the heat ducts.
She turned on the lamp in the corner of the living room and sat in Myrtle’s overstuffed chair, wrapping Myrtle’s afghan around her cold ankles. Christmas detritus lay scattered about, wayward bows and bits of ribbon clinging to the skirt under the tree. A bag with wads of torn wrapping paper was still under the coffee table.
The lamp cast jagged shadows along the wall, poinsettia leaves in their red crepe basket. She reached out her arm, extending her fingers into the light, but she couldn’t get their shape right as they skulked around the poinsettia’s silhouette. Her fingers looked obscenely long, like black daggers piercing the leaves, so she curled them into a fist and brought them back to her lap.
That old English poem floated into her head: Monday’s child is fair of face, Tuesday’s child is full of grace, Wednesday’s child is full of woe. She got stuck on Thursday’s child. What did it mean to have far to go? How does one find where they’re meant to be?
And what could she offer Hannah? She’d been up half the night thinking about it. Legally, it could work. Betty had said as much, when they’d talked on the phone yesterday, reciting a long list of conditions—paperwork, criminal checks, interviews, home visits—before blurting out, Are you seriously considering this, Ellie? Ellie assured her she wasn’t, just curious about the machinations of a system that Hannah was now a part of.
She was foolish to have asked the question, wrenching the thought out of her and into the open. Sammy’s and Walter’s complications were piled as high as a chimney stack, her own craziness on top. Look what it had done to her, wanting something so bad only to lose it again. No, as much as she might fantasize about keeping Hannah—singing lessons, movie nights, book clubs for two—the child would be better off in professional care.
Betty would come for her today. She’d be at their door in a few hours, bright eyed and ready for business. It would be a good day to travel far, to get to wherever she was taking Hannah without a storm hurling through the fields.
Walter had left his Ag Society pen and paper set on the table beside the chair, the top page littered with his spillage—loopy doodling and scribbled words that had nothing to do with each other, moldings, shotgun, dominoos, bateries. Ellie ripped off a clean page and started writing a list of her own. Milk, eggs, cottage cheese. A ham might be nice to break up the days left of turkey. She could pick up some of the green mint jelly that Walter liked so much. They kept stacks of jars in the back cooler at Dave’s Pharmacy, almost like the kind that Myrtle used to make. Animal crackers for Sammy. Protein bars for Danny.
But it was no good. Even as the pen formed the words, she knew her list was as ridiculous as Walter’s. It included none of what they needed. She folded the paper over and over and over again, until it was as small as a love note in a teenager’s pocket.
—
Eric woke when Ellie slipped out of bed, but instead of getting to his feet, he wrestled with the covers and dug himself in deeper. The house was hauntingly quiet in that black hour before dawn, not a hint of wind beyond the window.
They had no plans for Boxing Day other than to bury the cat, find Hannah a suitcase, and then give her away.
He should get up right now. Betty would do the handover before noon and he needed to be sharp for the ensuing fallout. But he couldn’t move his legs, couldn’t let go of all that had happened. If he lay still in the dark, he could play back their Christmas, a moment-by-moment recap. It was the only way he knew how to make it stay real—make it mean something.
Somehow, they had tunnelled their way through the storm, the easiness of it almost absurd. Walter on the couch, in and out of sleep, as cantankerous as ever; Thorn on the floor beside him; Ellie staying close, bringing him everything he asked for—extra pillows, the cordless phone, chips crispy not mushed.
They’d opened their presents slowly, one at a time. Afterward, they huddled around the tree, at turns silent and then talking all at once. There were naps on the floor, a heap of pillows and blankets and bodies sprawled messily like at a child’s sleepover. They started the turkey using the backup generator, browned it after Larry finished repairing the wire, but instead of fussing with fancy Christmas place settings, they piled around the table with their everyday plates.
Years from now, they would still be telling stories about this Christmas, the one when Grandpa got it in his head to walk to town in the middle of the night during a record-breaking wind chill, the worst storm of the decade. Daniel would exaggerate the specifics, Sammy going along with the story: how long it took to find him; how deep the snow; how the power was down for days; how Grandpa bounced back, like a child who’d been playing in the snow.
And while they would keep it to themselves, they would think of Hannah too. They might be staring out a window on a bitterly cold night; listening to a clear, sweet voice on the radio; or walking down a sidewalk, a girl in a too-small, shabby coat coming toward them, and they would see her.
—
The three of them walked single file along the narrow path Eric had cleared from the house to the far side of the yard. Hannah was between Daniel and Eric, the wooden box in her arms. Daniel had hoped to see inside—he’d never examined a dead cat before—but the lid was nailed shut and his dad had said absolutely not. He’d asked him three times how Hannah’s cat ended up dead. His dad never answered, so he figured it had to be bad.
Before they reached the apple tree, they passed by the remains of Robert the Snowman, now just jagged peaks in the mountain of new snow. A strange fog had rolled in, greying out the white world, and as they solemnly marched forward, the thick air ran across their cheeks like wet tongues.
Before today, Daniel had only been to one funeral, his grandma’s. At the chapel, they had her in an open box. She looked nothing like she had in life, her face too caved in and shiny. It was shocking to see her so still, hands folded, lying there in her blue dress and dark stockings. In real life, she never stopped moving. She used to tilt her head and lean toward him when he spoke, as though he was worth listening to, but when he stood beside her casket and stared at her waxy eyelids and powdered cheeks, he couldn’t think of one thing to say.
Daniel had wanted his mom to come into the yard with them, but she didn’t want to leave Grandpa after his big escape, and Sammy had a sore throat and wasn’t allowed out.
When they lined up around the hole in the ground, the three of them looked down. The air smelled like a campfire drowning in sand. It was an impressive-sized crater, the shovel wedged in the snowdrift beside it. Daniel wished he could have done the digging, but his dad had never asked for his help.
“Will this be okay, Hannah?” his dad asked her.
She didn’t say a word, just banged the toe of one of Daniel’s old boots into a chunk of ice, hugging her box while she stared into the hole.
“That tree was just a twig when we first planted it,” his dad said. “I was your age when I dug the hole for it. You can’t tell now, but in the summer those branches will be loaded with green apples.”
“It’s a good place to sit and think,” Daniel said. “Well, not now. In the summer. When it’s shady.” He sucked air through his teeth, determined not to say anything else stupid. Why did she have to leave? It’s not like she was going to live with a nice aunt or with anyone else she wanted to be with.
Hannah quit kicking the ice, her whole body stiffening. “Nigel says that cats don’t have souls.”
“He’s wrong,” Daniel jumped in, not knowing about souls but knowing she’d want he
r cat to have one. He hated everything about that man.
His dad took off his glove and pressed his fingers to his forehead like he was trying to push away a headache.
“We can’t prove that animals have souls,” he said. “But we can’t prove they don’t either. I’ve seen a cat run back into a burning home not once, not twice, but five times to save every one of her kittens. That cat got badly singed—her paws, the tips of her ears—but she didn’t give up. Who’s to say she didn’t have a soul?”
His dad put his hand on Hannah’s shoulder. Daniel didn’t know what to say next. After his grandma’s service at the funeral chapel, they got into cars and drove to the seniors’ recreation centre for sandwiches and cake. His dad had asked if anyone in the crowd wanted to share a few words. One after another sprang out of their chairs and stepped up to the microphone. One lady recited his grandma’s secret recipe for double-fudge brownies. Another pointed to the stage’s ceiling and yelled, “You can thank Myrtle Nyland for this paint job! She was the only one of us willing to get up on that scaffolding.”
Daniel wished he could tell a story about Hannah’s cat. “What was she like?” he asked, turning to her. Hannah stared into the hole, so he asked again. “Your cat? What was she like?” He didn’t know the cat’s name, and it was too late to ask now.
Hannah didn’t answer, so his dad stepped in. “Six years ago, your mom brought Mandy home—she was just a kitten—and you found her wrapped in a towel inside a shoebox. She had just her pink nose sticking out.”
