Christmas, Present

by Jacquelyn Mitchard

  “But Laura looks the same to them as she always did. She hasn’t lost her hair, or been in a wheelchair . . . how can you expect them to grasp how sick she is?” Miranda asked, and then added, “You are okay, aren’t you?”

  “My wife is dying,” Elliott told her, shocked. “How can I be okay? I’m not sobbing and screaming, but . . .” How am I, Elliott thought? I’m an idiot buying cards that say “Way to Go, Graduate!” I’m a flatliner, trotting around on the tile.

  “I mean, are you okay financially?”

  “What . . . ? How can you bring that up? Or, more to the point, only you would bring that up, Miranda. Now, of all times.”

  “Because I care. I can help, that way. Do you really have enough to take care of them? Without Laura’s income?”

  “Actually, we have very good insurance. Laura insisted.”

  “That’s very odd. Her income was not significant.”

  “It was a big help. It paid for the girls’ lessons. As for the insurance. Laura wanted to get it while we were younger because the premiums were cheaper. And it was like an investment. For the girls. We did it years ago.”

  “Mmmm,” Miranda mused. “It’s almost as if she had a presentiment.”

  “No, Miranda, it’s almost as if she thought we could get low rates, and it would be an investment A savings account we couldn’t touch every time one of the kids wanted a GameBoy.”

  “Well, what has it . . . how has it done?”

  “We should realize . . . a couple of hundred thousand. Or more.”

  “That won’t go far.”

  “A hundred thousand dollars?” Rory cried. Elliott and Miranda started. They exchanged perhaps the first synchronic gaze in their entire acquaintance: Nothing Rory said would make either of them rebuke her. “We’ll be rich! We’ll be as rich as the Priors or the Wisens! We could put in a pool!”

  The price being one mother, Elliott thought, giving Miranda a poisonous smile, which she did not deserve. “We won’t be as rich as the Priors or the Wisens and we aren’t putting in a pool because Amelia can’t even swim and could fall in, and . . .” He could not stop himself. “Rory, I can’t believe you just said that.”

  “What?” Rory asked.

  Elliott sighed. Rory had no sense of the social vice comprised by mentioning money in the same breath with death, the awkward cross-tied position of the heir. Though shocked by his child’s naked materialism, he knew mortal irrevocability was still unreal for Rory. Someone at work had once told him that children grieved in reverse, that while adults were stricken sharply at once and slowly recovered, children were initially blasé, but the longer the loved person was absent, they experienced greater recognition of loss.

  He and Miranda watched Rory wander back to her mother’s room. Simultaneously, Miranda and Elliott released deep breaths.

  “We actually would be quite flush by our standards, Miranda,” Elliott said abruptly. “I thought you were asking if I was doing okay.” A hatred so foul and sizzling it felt like internal combustion gripped Elliott’s gut; he was surprised Miranda did not feel it lick out and scorch her composed face.

  “Well, good,” Miranda complimented him. “What Rory said is normal, Elliott. Children want to know what’s going to happen to them. They can’t grieve if they’re afraid that their beds will be taken away. I know that much.”

  “How are you, Miranda? Are you okay?”

  “I’m not stupid,” Miranda said, opening the clasp on her bag, extracting a perfectly clean handkerchief. “I know you’re asking how I feel about Laurie. She’s my child. I expected her to outlive me by many, many years. I suppose I’m in shock.”

  “But you didn’t act that way while she was alive,” Elliott interrupted. “God!” He slapped his forehead. “I mean, during our marriage.” He could not believe his audacity. No one living ever spoke this way to Miranda. “You weren’t motherly. Or grandmotherly. You agreed to come on holidays. That’s not all there is to it. You didn’t . . . call for no reason. Do you know you never once had the girls stay overnight?”

  “But I worked at night . . .”

  “You didn’t have to . . .”

  “I did, and also . . .”

  “You just found it easier to deal with perfect strangers and make their dreams come true than to deal with your own children,” Elliott said thickly, aware this would have none but an ill effect and disgusted with himself for saying it. “Don’t you see what a mess Stephen is? That he lives like a college boy?”

  “We had card parties,” Miranda said.

  “Card parties?”

  “And charades. And the children would play, oh, whatever they did, hide-and-seek, outside in summer, that game with the flashlights . . . hordes of them, cousins and kids from the block.”

  “Ghosts in the Graveyard,” Elliott told her, suddenly cold.

  “We would have these get-togethers, when Stephen Senior was alive. We’d make a bowl of punch, rum, and apple cider. All of us were so poor. My sister, Juliet, and Stephen’s friend Jimmy from work, and his wife, she was Greek.” Miranda went on, “I can remember us literally rolling up the rug in the old house, to dance. We have old eight-millimeter movies of us dancing . . .”

  “And after?”

  “I honestly tried. I remember a Fourth of July barbecue I tried to put together. I burned my eyelashes off starting the grill.”

  “I don’t know what this has to do with how you were to your own children . . .”

  “I didn’t know how to do things! How to do the things to keep their lives the same. You’ll have to do that, Elliott . . . ,” Miranda said, her face flushed.

  “I will,” he said stoutly.

  “Take care you do, because otherwise . . . nobody invited us, Elliott,” Miranda said. “A widow with four children is not an asset to a gathering. And I suppose they were naughty. Stevie was. Angela was.”

  “Why didn’t you just read to them? Listen to the same music as you had before, with Stephen Senior? Watch the home movies, together?”

  Miranda folded her hands. “Well, Elliott, I suppose I was afraid it would hurt me too much,” said Miranda. “To be honest, I did not feel the same. I didn’t feel like doing the same things. I could always say I was busy. With work.”

  A widow with four children is not an asset, Elliott thought.

  * * *

  With Rory nestled beside her, fiddling with the dials on the bedside radio, Laura told her daughter that she knew how it felt to want to be the most popular one. “I was that way, too. I would try to tie my scarves around my neck—we all wore these little silk scarves the size of a bandana, but wrapped around with little clips on them, and I could never get them right. I would try to tie them on for forty minutes in the morning, until the scarf was filthy and damp from my hands, and then I go to school, and there was Petty DiCastro, with hers tied just like on the video in JC Penney’s. They had this little TV you could watch to learn how to tie the scarves once you bought one.” Rory had been the child to whom Laura could prattle forever. She always seemed interested and made appropriate comments no matter how far off the path Laura strayed. “What I mean is, I tried too hard to fit in, until I found my sport. What I want you to do, even if you don’t stay in the gym, is try very hard not to be that kind of person even for a little while.” Rory nodded vigorously. “Do you know what I mean? The kind of person someone popular can talk into anything? Once, the popular girls—there were four of them, and they wore a knot in their shoes tied exactly the same way—talked me into standing on the edge of Rat Prairie . . . you don’t know where Rat Prairie is, do you? I suppose Rat Prairie isn’t even there anymore; it’s condos. But it was named for what was in it. Anyhow, while they went in there and made out with their boyfriends in the tall grass, someone set a fire, and the rats came running out. The fire department came. I was the one there. They took me to the station. I was hysterical. It was the most horrible thing I ever saw, the rats, Rory, like in the Pied Piper . . .” Why am I rambling, Lau
ra wondered. Is it because of what is going on in my head? No, she thought ruefully, I always rambled. I could never get to the point. Elliott called it backing around the corner to the beginning.

  Was that, she thought, because of what was wrong in my head, even then?

  “Rory, listen.” Laura willfully gathered her thoughts and tucked Rory’s small shoulder under her own arm as they reclined on the bed. “Are you listening to me? Nothing, no matter how much it matters at the time, is worth doing something you think is wrong. And you always know.”

  “How?” Rory asked.

  “You ask the still, small voice, like Father Delabue said,” Laura told Rory. “And if you feel a doubt, that’s your real self telling you what to do, always.”

  “Even if it’s telling you to be afraid,” Rory ventured.

  Laura sighed. It was foolish, and Laura knew it to be foolish, to try to impart an encyclopedia of mothering into a spare few minutes. But a spare few minutes were her lot. She could not protect Rory from her eager, anxious personality, from being the child who knew the birthdays of everyone else in her class so she could mourn in advance to which parties she wouldn’t be invited. That was a mother’s job—They’re only jealous of you, sweetheart. When you’re older, they’ll all want to be your friend—all the ready, hopeful falsehoods of parenthood. Perhaps they were jealous? Perhaps Rory really simply was a late bloomer, as Laura had been? She could not confer goodness and confidence on Rory like a healing, like the prophylactic antibiotics she’d given her for troublesome earaches when Rory was a baby. She could only give Rory a memory, and it had better be a sufficient one.

  “Well, like now, of course, it’s natural you should be afraid,” Laura told her. “That’s simply recognizing your own real feelings.” But Laura also reminded her daughter to think of all the times fear could be a trickster, the times Rory’d cried before meets, terrified she would fall on the beam and hurt herself or—worse, for Rory—foul her routine, and how many times she had gone ahead and done it despite her fears, and done it perfectly, landed it perfectly.

  “Should I write this down?” Rory asked.

  “I wrote it down for you.”

  “Will you be our guardian angel?”

  “If I can.” Laura caught her breath at the sharp veer of the questioning. “Of course I will. But Rory, here’s a secret. Even if I die, you can see the best part of me again. When you get to be forty”—Rory’s eyes widened—“you do this. You look down at your hands, and you’ll see my hands. You’re the one who looks just like me, except your pretty curly red hair. You’ll see my hands because your hands will have grown to look just like mine.”

  “I won’t make regionals,” Rory mourned, “because I’ll be emotionally disturbed.” Laura thought, and grimly, of her mother’s misplaced candor, on the drive from Natick. Her mother would go ahead with her champagne brunch. Laura’s funeral would have to wait.

  “Yes, you will make regionals,” Laura told her daughter firmly. “People go on after horrible things happen and it actually makes them better at whatever they do. You know how Father Delabue always says, when you’re sad, offer it up? That’s how you do it. You offer it up.”

  “To Jesus?”

  Hell, thought Laura. “No, to Mama,” she said, holding tiny Rory against her with all her strength. “I will always be your mama, Rory. I will always be inside you.”

  “I don’t believe in Santa,” said Rory. “Anymore. Will Santa come?”

  “Absolutely. Why would Santa punish you because your mom got sick?”

  “Well, I’ll have to miss a lot of school,” Rory concluded, her face finally dry, but swollen as a plum.

  “That’s right,” Laura said. ‘Tis an ill wind, she thought.

  Elliott and Miranda sat knee to knee, Elliott’s jeans nearly touching the sharp camel crease of Miranda’s slacks. Miranda accepted a copy of the Globe from a passing volunteer in pink. Now, Elliott thought, she’s going to read the paper? She said, “You’ll have to make sure they keep in touch with Suzie’s children and Angela’s . . .”

  “Why don’t you, too?” Elliott cried. “You’re the matriarch. You have the house on the Cape. Why didn’t you build a little compound with guest cottages at the shore? Why don’t you now, in light of this? Why don’t you preserve the extended family?”

  Guest cottages, he thought. That’s a little Kennedy. Asking a bit much. “Why didn’t you at least reassure them, all the time, back then? Why don’t you make a resolution to do it now?”

  “Well, Suzie was almost a teenager when Stephen died, and she wasn’t much interested in things like that . . .”

  “She was nine, Miranda! No bigger than Rory. Laura and Angie were little. Angie was practically a baby. I’m sorry for this, but my own father has done a basically crap job with the girls . . . and so has my sister. It’s not only you.”

  Good God, he realized then, I haven’t called my father. Or my sister.

  He glanced at his watch. The time was flooding past; it was already morning, breakfast time on school days. Nurses were hailing one another, wishing one another good holidays. Elliott realized his time with Laura was collapsing slowly, like a spent parachute—that his life a.d. was about to commence. And there had been no time, to tell her how he had never, at a party, lusted for another woman, how he had never felt anything but lucky to glance across the room at his innocent little imp in her one fancy black dress, Laura’s mittened hand so trustingly on the crook of his elbow, Laura grimly instructing him that he couldn’t chisel cost when it came to perennials, that one box of sedum was not enough to fill in the cracks in a wall, Laura learning the tango from a videotape and becoming furious when she couldn’t teach him, Laura. Laura!

  But he would not know, not for days, during the bustle of the funeral, the parade of the casseroles, that eventually time would grind down to a slow-motion dressage of seconds and minutes to be hurdled. That time would change character, from the headlong gallop of family life to a grim march. Seconds would become weeks, weeks centuries, for months to come. He would glance at calendars and be stunned to see that it was still February, that his tragedy, like a weight he needed virtually to strap onto his back and carry with him wherever he went, had grown no less heavy, so he could not even begin the process of speeding up, of trying to outdistance it. The weight would confer its own terms, its own tenancy.

  He would have the sense to avoid paging through photo albums; but he would not be able to stop the flip-book in his head—of the moments wasted because they were presumed infinite, the nights two tired young parents had contented themselves with a pat instead of a tumble, turned their backs to each other—turned their backs!—and gone to sleep gratefully, in the utter certainty that each of them would have another chance, tomorrow, or Saturday morning. All those chances had been wadded into a sloppy ball and tossed away for him by an indifferent fate.

  Miranda’s lips were moving. Elliott had to wrest himself down into the room to concentrate on her words. “I was off there, distracted,” he apologized. “Tell me again what you just said.”

  “I loved them,” Miranda offered uncertainly. “You should know. I loved them. My sister and I didn’t come from a family where you got hugged and kissed just for coming through the door. Stephen Senior did. And his parents were always petting and patting him, too. Like your mother.” Elliott thought briefly of his own mother, her careless tousles, her habit of massaging his neck, once annoying, now longed for. “How was I to change . . . ?”

  Elliott drew a deep breath. “You have time, Miranda. I’d take it. You know, Laura doesn’t think that you love her. She doesn’t think you’re proud of her. She thinks you’re proud of Angela and that you love only Suzanne.”

  “That’s absurd.” Miranda silenced him, her fingers absently braiding Amelia’s hair.

  “I know it’s horrible to tell you. But while she can still understand you, you might say something, for your own sake . . . she doesn’t really know how her sisters and br
others grew up so close . . .”

  What Miranda said next, Elliott would remember one day, years later, when he’d chased Annie down the hall so furiously that he’d run into the wallboard over the laundry chute, nearly breaking his nose, leaving a mark that would remain for years. Annie had told him to shut his fat mouth when he grounded her after she was caught sneaking Rory out of the house at midnight to meet boys at the gazebo.

  All those years later, he would confide in Miranda that during their confrontation at the hospital, he truly had not realized how very hard it would be, how friendships would grow slim, then dim, then brittle and sparse. Abashed, he would apologize—over coffee he had learned to brew with delicate expertise—for his hysterical and presumptuous suggestion that she start a family compound. And with reticence and tolerance, she would assure him that the addition she’d built onto the cottage, after Laura died, was no accident. She would assure Elliott that, for all his mistakes, he had done what she had not—bound the girls to him as well as to one another, not only with unqualified love but with the tireless expression of it. And Elliott would recall exactly what Miranda had said to him, her defense against his barrage. She’d said, “I think I was afraid they’d turn away. That they’d always liked Stephen Senior better. And they had each other, and that is really how it is supposed to be, Elliott. It’s supposed to be them against us.”

  It would turn out to be the best advice anyone would ever give him, and it would see him through those times when both Annie and Rory assured him that they fervently wished he had died instead of their mother.

  But that night, when neither of them could back off, they were both relieved to be drawn off the subject by the sound of pounding feet. Angela, her scarf and coat thickly frosted with wet snow, flew past the quiet-room door on her way to pop into every room on the hall until she found Laura. Cobb, her fiancé, stopped to shrug at Elliott and Miranda. “We barely got into Logan. It’s closed now,” he said. “We got a flight at six a.m.” In his hands he held a large, lifelike stuffed Scottie, a plaid bow about its neck. Amelia got up from the floor and took it from him, tucking it under her arm with a businesslike air, as if she understood that this was her duty, the beginning of her acceptance of homages.