Christmas, Present

by Jacquelyn Mitchard

  “Laurie! Don’t! Laurie, you loved Stephen best!” She listened as Angela covered the phone and yelled to Cobb, “Get the airline on the cell phone! Get a flight for us! Now, right now!” And then she came back on. “Is Stephen there?”

  “No, not yet. But I want you to remember. Stephen was our big older brother. He was the chief torturer, the big cheese, the big tease. I loved him”—Laurie thought, I am using the past tense—“best next to you. He was a guy. We all had to take care of him. And he had to take care of us. He was the daddy. And Suzie just wanted to grow up and get out of the house. That left us.”

  “Is Elliott there?” her sister asked.

  “He’s at the drugstore,” Laura explained. “I wanted him to get me some things.”

  “At the drugstore?” Angela brayed.

  “Yes, I don’t have time to explain. Before I hang up, I want to tell you, Suzanne had Mother. You had me. There are things you will always remember about me. Remember when I painted you as a Picasso for Halloween? All blue on one side and all yellow on the other? Remember when I read you Little House in the Big Woods, and you wanted to move to Wisconsin and live in a log cabin, and we got the plans from the library . . .”

  “And stole the lumber. Stephen could have been a full-time thief . . . ,” Angela, now fully awake, said roughly.

  “He built the tree house! He could have been a builder or an architect!”

  “If he wasn’t a full-time screw-off . . .”

  “Don’t say that, Angie,” Laura reproved. “Stephen’s just . . . it’s a phase . . .”

  “He’s forty-two, Laurie!” Angela snorted, and there was no arguing it: Stephen, the man for whom the term “peripatetic” had been invented. He was a sometime laborer, a sometime roadie for bands, a sometime collector of seasonal unemployment.

  “Think of how he built you that house, so you could pull up the rope and no one could get you? But then you really did it? And we threatened to call the fire department? You didn’t care, and we actually had to call them? You were so gutsy, Angie. What were you, five?”

  “How can you do this?”

  “I know it hurts. It hurts me to remember, too. But I have to do it all right now.”

  “I mean, leave me, and then talk to me as if it were any other day.”

  “I don’t have any choice. I told you that! Ell and I went to Cirque du Soleil for our anniversary, and it was so wonderful, and then I got this massive, this incredible pain in my head . . .”

  “Don’t you dare leave me before I get there.”

  “I’ll try hard,” Laura said, relenting, wondering how a brain could will itself not to wink out.

  “Laurie, I love you! I love you! I’ll, when I graduate, I’ll find a way to stop this . . .”

  “No, you take care of babies, the way you want to.”

  “Laurie!”

  “I have to call Suzie and Stephen. Well, Stephen will probably come over. So I have to hang up.” The voice that replied was Cobb’s.

  “I think she’s . . . throwing up, Laurie. I’ll watch over her. I have a plane flight. We’ll be there by . . . I think by noon. They’re still landing. I want to tell you, I wish you could be at our wedding,” he said. “I’m sorry I said that.”

  “Some would say I will be, huh?” Laura answered.

  “We’ll have a picture . . .”

  “Oh, Cobb, no, ick!” Laura answered, as Elliott, wet and disheveled, entered the room with a double handful of plastic bags. “That would be so morbid. It will be summer then. A long time from now.”

  She thought of her mother-in-law’s garden, as it was when Amy was alive, the riots of bleeding heart, gerbera daisies, hosta like great umbrellas spoked by the stargazer lilies. Laura was a disaster with her own garden. She was limited by inclination and sheer languor—weeds and worms? Or books and oatmeal cookies?—to hydrangea and Rosa rugosa. Elliott called Laura the Black Thumb, after she was able to pull off the impossible and murder a cactus dish garden. “Kiss Angela,” she told Cobb, and put the phone down, turning her attention to her husband, getting up off the bed. Why should she be in bed? Had anyone told her to stay in bed, or did people simply compliantly slip onto these hard beds with their stiff, many-times-darned sheets the moment they were designated “patient”?

  “Did you find the things?” she asked her husband, reaching out with the towel from the end of her bed to dry the sleet from his drooping black curls.

  “Yes, all of them,” Elliott said, and just then Laura dropped the towel and groped back, her arms rowing, as if for an imaginary chair. Her eyes revolved away until only a slim sliver of the blue iris showed, and her hands clawed as if she were attempting to grasp her own wrists. Elliott dropped the bags and shouted for the nurses, who came in a group of three. They all watched as Laura’s feet slowly attained a perfect level en pointe.

  “Don’t worry, Mister Banner,” the young one said. “She won’t bite her tongue. She doesn’t feel this.”

  Laura’s jaws were scissoring, her teeth grinding louder than a cement mixer in the silence of the predawn. “It will end in a moment. I’ll get Doctor Campanile.”

  He stroked Laura’s sweaty forehead and smoothed back her clean hair. “You smell good,” Dr. Campanile told Laura. “Do you feel odd?”

  “Only tired, as if I’d gone running.”

  “Sleepy?”

  “No.”

  “That’s good, too.”

  “You didn’t see it,” Elliott pleaded. “It must have hurt her terribly.”

  “I know patients who have grand mal seizures chronically, and they say there is no pain,” the doctor told him. “They feel as if they are far away from their own bodies. They can hear, however.” He spoke softly, then, “Well, I think it is time to call your daughters now. She is fine, for a good while perhaps.”

  “They’re on their way. Will they see this? When it happens again? There was no warning.”

  “No. I hope not. I can’t say for certain. We will let them wait outside. I’ll be right outside. Every moment. The office I am in is only three doors from the nurses’ station. I’m still searching, Mister Banner. I’m speaking online with a neurosurgeon in Australia. He’s had some success with preserving a life, but not with much brain function . . .”

  “That would be all right,” Elliott told the doctor. “I would care for her.”

  “It would not be all right, Ell,” Laura said. “I don’t want that.”

  “Laura, let him check it out, at least. For me.”

  She sighed. Elliott left to find a glass of water.

  “Doctor,” Laura said, as he fiddled with the lines in her IV, summoned a nurse to inject something, “only for relaxation,” he promised. “Am I forgetting something?”

  He paused thoughtfully. “I have seen so many deaths, so many rooms in this place ringing with anguish for unfinished lives. I have watched children die. In my experience, the worst deaths are the deaths of those who have failed to love their lives.”

  “I do love my life,” Laura said. “It is a small life, though.”

  “But a complete life. I don’t mean completed, but lived. So, for you, I suspect it is less difficult. There is less to hope to have accomplished. I hope to be as strong,” the doctor said.

  “But you don’t really have an alternative, do you?” Laura asked him. “When there is nothing left but this, you don’t think of yourself. It isn’t bravery. It’s something else.”

  “This is the same thing I observe,” said Dr. Campanile. “It is something else. Perhaps emotional, perhaps biology being our comfort and friend. Now rest, Laura, save your strength.”

  Laura brushed her hair again and made the call to her sister Suzanne. Suzanne gave a short, sharp scream. She then insisted there must be a second opinion; she would call her best friend’s husband, a professor at UCLA, who would know what to do, perhaps the Mayo Clinic. A Medevac. Laura demurred. Suzanne was adamant. She would call back and ask to speak directly to the neurologist. Suzan
ne was an administrator for a large credit union. She coped by taking charge. Laura said nothing. Suzanne then resolutely, over Laura’s objections, roused Laura’s ten-year-old nephew, Aaron, who told Laura he had done his project on Paris and pasted in the photos she had sent him of the churches. At Suzie’s prompting, he sang one line of the French carol he had learned.

  This, more than anything, nearly did Laura in.

  At last, Suzanne took the phone back from Aaron.

  “Well,” she said gruffly, with a pause that let Laura know she’d lit a cigarette (Suzanne believed that none of them knew she smoked), “you are the best of us, the most beautiful, the most patient, the kindest . . .”

  “Suzie, you are far more attractive than I ever was. Men fought to date you. I only ever had Elliott, and Greg in high school,” Laura said. At forty-six, divorced for nine years, Suzie was still stunning, slender as a champagne flute, ankles like a thoroughbred. “And what have I done with my life? A couple of pamphlets for county fairs and motorcycle rallies? Made Halloween costumes?”

  “You’ve . . . lived an honest life. I’m Mother, of course. I know you all think that. Cold and remote. But Laura, don’t think . . . don’t think . . .” She detected no wobble in her sister’s voice, but Laura knew Suzanne was crying. “Stephen will be absolutely lost,” Suzie said, her own analysis of their chronically single, helplessly charming brother, who often said he wished he were gay so he could find someone as neurotic as himself. “And Angela . . .”

  “She has Cobb. So you’ll come, then?”

  “Of course, I was already coming today. Our flight is in three hours. Do you think . . . ? That we . . . ?”

  “I don’t know. It could be. But Suzie, listen. I have to ask you . . . there is one thing that I want you to do. You know my desk? My little desk in the bedroom, not the computer room?”

  “Grandma MacDermott’s.”

  “Well, I want you to have that, because I know you love it, but Grandma thought I was going to be a writer, a real writer, I mean, that was why she left it to me . . .”

  “You wrote all those poems . . . when we were little.”

  “Yes, about dead dogs and virgins jumping into the volcano. I wish I could get hold of them, too. Mother probably has them. But what I really want is, there’s a locked compartment in it. To the left of the opening for your knees. I have the key taped under the big lid. Where I keep my stationery? That you gave me?”

  “What did Grandma have in there?”

  “A Valentine. That’s all. Not signed. I was so excited when I found it. It’s so old, it has real lace.”

  “What do you have in there.”

  “That Valentine. And also a little charcoal sketch. Of me. A nude sketch. Rolled up. From . . . a long time ago. Will you take that out for me, and . . . decide what to do with it? One of the girls, when she’s as old as I am now, maybe she’ll want it, if one of them shows signs of wanting to draw or something. They don’t show signs of that now.”

  “I’ll do that. And if I can’t, I’ll destroy it.”

  “Okay,” Laura said, a burden lifted. “Suzie? I didn’t have an affair.”

  “It wouldn’t matter, but I believe you, Laurie. Of anyone on earth, you are the last person I would suspect of having an affair.” Laura didn’t know whether to feel grateful or slighted. “I’m going to get Aaron and me to the airport now. We’ll get the earliest flight. They let you bump in for things that are urgent.”

  There was a long pause. Then Suzanne said, “Laurie? Baby?”

  “What, Suzie?” Laura asked.

  Suzanne said softly, “Sleep tight.” And she put down the phone without saying good-bye.

  * * *

  Elliott watched Laura, in her tiny, flawless, Catholic-school script, taught her by nuns who were allowed to write home only twice a year, as she filled all the space on all the cards, licked and labeled them: Anna, Aurora, Amelia. She saved Angela’s graduation card for last and left it open. “Put a check in it, Ell,” she told him. “A big check. She has pots of loans to pay off. Will you do that?”

  “We have three girls to educate, Laura,” he reminded her, hating himself.

  “But Ell, I’m so young! And you didn’t want to take out insurance on me, remember? You said I was basically an at-home mom? But I said that was all the more reason, that I wasn’t a real contributor so it would be like a sort of savings account for the girls? Well? You’ll have piles of life insurance! You’ll be rich, by our standards. You can take them to Paris, when Amelia is big enough. Will you do that, Ell? Will you?”

  He promised.

  He could not imagine doing anything like that.

  “And I don’t care,” Laura added, “if you take a new wife with you. I really want you to get married again, Elliott. I mean it. You’re the marrying kind.” Both of them smiled. This has been a private joke all their lives together. It had been Elliott, not Laura—Laura yearned to travel and “be free and poor”—who begged to marry early, and he was relieved when the accidental pregnancy happened. Elliott didn’t want to leave home even to visit the Grand Canyon, much less the Grand Caymans, and had spent three weeks assembling a folder of tips, maps, and coupons for a five-day excursion to Disney World with a one-day stop to see his father.

  Oh, Elliott, she thought. If only I could donate something from my body to you . . . something, some gene on which was encoded the will to take chances.

  Laura felt the urgent need to begin to dictate her list, spraying out information like scattershot, in no order of importance: There were stickers in the heartworm box Elliott should put on the calendar to remind him to give Athena her pills. All the doctors’ and dentists’ names, including the orthodontist Rory would surely need, were in the left-hand drawer of her office desk, in a file marked Girls/Personal. Baptismal records and birth certificates, with copies, were in the same folder. Their life insurance policy and their wills were in the fireproof safe. The combination was 6345789. He must ask for Miss Cook for Amelia for first grade. Rory is only paid up at the gym until February, and the Y coach said she’d gone beyond him; she needs private instruction.

  “Oh!” she cried suddenly. “I forgot all my friends!” The scope of her ability to attend had diminished to a single point of concentration, like the pinprick cameras they made with Sister Julian in fourth grade, with shoeboxes and black construction paper. She could see only her family in that small lighted circle. “I need more cards, Elliott! I need one for Rebecca and Whitney! And one for the women in the book club, Marley and Elizabeth . . .”

  “I’m not getting any more cards,” Elliott said, his features visibly blurred with exhaustion. “You’ve gone far enough with this. It’s like you’re organizing a fund-raiser.”

  Laura bit her lips. “You’re right,” she said. “But you will tell them, especially Rebecca and Whitney, how much I . . . ?”

  “Laura, could you possibly think they don’t know?”

  “I would want a good-bye,” Laura said, biting her lip thoughtfully. “And I can’t bear calling them.” At last, Laura asked a nurse for a sheet of plain paper and wrote what she actually felt, rather than what she thought she should: Miss me, you guys. Miss me and talk about me. Try to include the girls with your kids, and help Elliott find a wife.

  “That’s insulting,” Elliott said. “You make it sound like, make sure the poor old doofus buttons up his sweater. I would never, ever get married again. Who could love the girls the way I do? Who could I love . . . the way I love you? It’s ridiculous. Laura, don’t. It’s crude.”

  “Elliott,” Laura said suddenly, “people always say they never will. And they mean it. But I’ve read articles that say if you like being married, chances are you’ll marry again within two years. It’s people who don’t like being married who stay widowers.”

  “And furthermore, with all this, there’s no time for me, for us. I want to hold you, forever. I want to tell you all the things I’ve thought about, when I see you making dinner, how sex
y it is to me that you know where everything is, how you sing when you fold the laundry, always the same song, did you know that?”

  “I didn’t,” Laura replied suddenly. “What is it?”

  “It’s ‘Hey, Big Spender,’” Elliott said, nearly laughing. “That’s what it is.”

  “Huh,” Laura said, her eyes welling, as she took Elliott’s arm. “It probably looks like I care about you less than I do about all these others. I know I’m wheeling from one thing to another . . . but Elliott, it’s not that I love you less, I love you more. I guess I expect you to be another me, part of me. To understand more. I . . . I was going to ask you if you wanted to make love—it wouldn’t hurt me, and it would be our last chance.” Elliott winced, caught his breath. “I knew you’d react that way, sweetie. I understand. It probably would be too . . . appalling. Like making love to a—”

  “No, not that! Not at all. But I . . . couldn’t, Laura,” Elliott told her. “I would be afraid to hurt you. What I wanted was to be alone. Hold you . . . to sleep. No more rushing around.”

  “And, Ell . . . we have time. But now we’ll have to wait before we talk anymore,” Laura said, with a significant and patently phony brightening of her eyes as she glimpsed her daughters, huddled at the doorway, Amelia still in her Clifford pajamas. Miranda, exquisitely turned out in camel and taupe Saturday elegance, stepped into the opening behind the girls.

  “She wouldn’t change,” Miranda apologized to Elliott, gesturing at Amelia, then leaning down to kiss his cheek. He hoped his mother-in-law did not notice how he flinched. She kissed Laura’s cheek and said, “I wrestled with her for thirty minutes.” How inappropriate Miranda must have felt dragging a rumpled child in pajamas into a hospital, Laura mused.

  Amelia would not cross the room to her mother’s bed. Annie hung back, as well. It was Rory who cried, “Mommy!” and flung herself on top of Laura.

  “Don’t!” Elliott cried, as Rory froze.

  “It’s okay, Ell,” Laura told him. “She can’t hurt me. It’s okay, Rory, Rory, morning glory, sun queen of the balance beam. This is so terrible, if I had a million bucks, I would give it away if you didn’t have to see me like this.”