Today she would watch what everybody ate, and right after dinner she’d run upstairs and put it down in her diary, and next year she’d compare it with what they ate then. But she got confused. While she was paying attention to Dominic’s plate, Cory and Molly finished and left the table to go play with their new toys some more. And Dad didn’t eat much of anything. Mom kept looking at him worriedly, and once, while he was in the bathroom, she sneaked a spoonful of peas onto his plate, but he didn’t eat them.
Dom was taking a long time over his second piece of pie. He’d had one of each kind. Mom and Priscilla were talking about whether the pink and purple socks Grandma had sent her from Texas would go with the flowered pants Santa had brought her, when Dominic put his fork down, looked around at everybody and nobody in particular, and announced at the top of his lungs, “I miss my sister!”
Why not Ethan? Why not your brother, too?
Lucy was awash in a furious sense of injustice and danger, even though Dom had been really little the last time Ethan had been home for Christmas. She herself could hardly remember what that had been like, and her own forgetfulness was unfair and dangerous, too. You better remember everything. You better miss them all.
“I know, sweetheart,” Mom was saying to. Dominic. “We all miss her.”
Pris declared, “I don’t.”
“Oh, Priscilla, you don’t mean that.”
“She was mean and grouchy and she never let me borrow her Garfield shirt and it’s Christmas and I’m not gonna miss anybody!”
“It’s bad not to miss people,” Dominic said solemnly.
“Missing people hurts,” Pris argued. “It spoils things.”
“If you don’t miss them, they go away again.” Lucy hadn’t known he thought such things. She stared at him, then looked away. His baby face looked the same as ever, but now she couldn’t trust that. Stuff went on inside his head that she didn’t know about.
Pris was out of her chair and halfway around the table toward Dominic before Dad caught her. “You stupid baby! You had to spoil everything!”
“Shhh.” Dad held her and patted her hair. Pris struggled to get loose, feet and fists and braids flying, and Lucy was relieved to see that Dad was still stronger. “Dom didn’t do anything wrong. It’s okay to miss the people we love who aren’t here.”
Pris gave up and collapsed against her father’s chest. “I hate them! They ruined my life! They ruined Christmas!”
Dad should have said something back to her, but he didn’t. He was staring off over her head as if somebody else had caught his attention. For a minute Lucy was afraid to look. Then when she did follow his gaze, there was nobody in the window. There was no snow, either, and the sun was shining.
Finally Mom said, “Christmas is different. Our lives are different. It’s up to us whether they’re ruined or not. We can learn to love the life we have now, instead of hating it because it’s not the one we had or the one we wanted.”
Lucy couldn’t stand it anymore. “Mom,” she interrupted, “can I take a plate of turkey and stuff over to Stacey?”
Mom kept looking at Dad and Priscilla and Dominic, and Lucy didn’t think she’d heard her. She was just about to say it again when Mom got to her feet—slowly, holding on to the edge of the table as if she was very tired—and started clearing the table. “To Stacey? Why? Didn’t she have Christmas dinner?”
The truth was, Stacey was having two Christmas dinners, one at her mother’s and one at her father’s. Twice as many presents, too, and her dad was taking her on a ski trip tomorrow. “Her mom said there’s no point in making a big dinner when there’s just the two of them,” Lucy lied.
“That’s too bad. That’s a big mistake, I think.”
“Well, you know, she’s real upset about the divorce. She says it ruined her life.” That part was true. Stacey’s mother said that a lot, and Stacey told Lucy, and neither of them ever knew what to say next.
“Of course you may take her a plate,” Mom said. “There’s plenty.” And once again, with a crash, the conversation had come round to Ethan and Rae: because they weren’t here, Mom had cooked too much, and for the rest of the week, whenever they had leftovers, they’d have to be reminded of what they’d lost.
Lucy carried her dishes into the kitchen and put them on the counter. The clock on the microwave said 3:17. Was Jerry getting ready to meet her now? Getting his house ready? What would he have to do to get ready for her?
Realization struck her of what she was about to do. Sneak out of the house on Christmas Day. Lie to her parents. Go somewhere she’d never been where nobody would know where she was. She didn’t understand why, but she couldn’t tell Mom and Dad the truth. All of a sudden she was scared. What would happen if she didn’t go? Would he stop liking her? Would he track her down?
She calmed down a little by reminding herself that this was Jerry Johnston. She knew Jerry. Ethan and Rae had known Jerry. All she was doing was taking him food and wishing him Merry Christmas. She wasn’t running away with him or anything.
Patches was rubbing around her ankles, holding his tail straight up in the air and talking. Ever since Rae had told her that cats only meowed to communicate with humans, not with each other or other animals, it had bothered Lucy that she couldn’t always understand what Patches was saying in the language he’d made up just for her. She could guess what he wanted now, but he couldn’t have turkey bones because his teeth might break them and then the sharp pieces might stick in his throat and kill him.
She started picking meat off the bones for him, and got so fascinated by how the meat and bones and skin all fit together and came apart that she jumped when Mom came in and said her name. “Lucy, I want you to know how proud I am that you’re thinking about somebody else.”
Lucy ducked her head guiltily.
“Shall I help you fix a plate?”
“That’s okay.”
Lucy could hear in her voice that she was frowning a little. “Does that mean yes or no?”
“You broke it!” Molly yelled behind the closed door of the family room, and Dominic yelled back, “I did not!” and there was the noise of pushing and hitting. Mom hurried to investigate, and Lucy was left to fix the plate by herself. That was what she’d wanted, but now she felt abandoned. Somebody was always coming between her and her mother.
Turkey, dressing, ham, potatoes, gravy. She arranged the plate as everybody brought the serving dishes in from the table. Dom and Molly were still mad at each other; Mom told them two or three times to cut it out, settle down, and swatted Molly’s bottom when she stuck her foot out in front of Dominic while he was carrying the gravy in Grandma’s gravy boat. “It’s Christmas!” Molly wailed. “You’re s’posed to be nice to me on Christmas!” and Mom said, “Even on Christmas you’re expected to treat each other decently.”
On a second plate, corn and peas and cranberry sauce and both kinds of rolls and butter. She needed another plate for two pieces of pie and three pieces of fudge. Jerry had said he was hungry, and she’d seen how much he could eat. She covered each plate with foil and stacked them with the pie on top.
“Do you need help carrying those?” Mom was rinsing the dishes for the dishwasher. Dad always helped, but he wasn’t here now. “I was just going to call Pris to help me here, but I could spare her for a few minutes if you want her to walk over to Stacey’s with you.”
“That’s okay,” Lucy said, and then quickly added, “No. I’ll go myself.”
All of a sudden Mom was crying. She kept on rinsing and stacking and putting leftovers into smaller containers and finding places for them in the refrigerator, but she was crying. Lucy knew it was because of Rae and Ethan, and because she herself was about to do something bad. She didn’t know what to do. She didn’t want to get any closer to her mother’s pain than she had to.
It was 3:46. “I’m going now,” she said. “To Stacey’s,” and left the room balancing the stack of plates under her chin.
“What time will yo
u be home?” Mom’s voice was shaky, but she’d been asking that question ever since Lucy got too old to be told what time to come home.
“I don’t know.”
“Well, you aren’t going anywhere unless I know when you’ll be home.”
“Eight o’clock.”
“Eight o’clock!” Mom glanced at the clock. “Lucy, that’s over four hours. And it’s after dark.”
Lucy stayed stubbornly quiet, head bent over the plates. The bottom plate warmed her hands.
“Be home in an hour,” Mom told her.
“Oh, Mom!”
“One hour. Five o’clock. It’s Christmas. You’re supposed to spend Christmas with your family.”
“I don’t have a family anymore.” She hurried out of the kitchen and Mom didn’t come after her, proving that Lucy was right.
She was on her way out the door with the food when she thought of something. She set the plates down on the bottom step, yelled at Patches to stay away, and ran up to her room.
At first she couldn’t find her diary, and she was sure Priscilla had stolen it. Pris would just love to read all her secret thoughts and then tell everybody.
But there it was, bunched up in her bedspread at the foot of her bed. Had it been moved? She thought so, but she couldn’t tell for sure. Gingerly she picked it up, imagining her own fingerprints on top of somebody else’s. It was weird to think that there was stuff on your fingers that you couldn’t see or feel or taste, but that left a part of you on everything you touched. She stuck her fingers in her mouth. She wondered if Rae would still leave fingerprints. Or Ethan.
She turned the diary upside down and flipped through it backward. There were still a lot of blank pages. She went through them till she got to the last thing she’d written, right after Rae’s last message. There were no more messages.
Lucy went back downstairs, slid the diary under the plates, and carried the whole stack outside. Nobody noticed.
It was cold out. The sky was bright blue, like metal, the color of Mr. Li’s new car. The ground was khaki-colored and spongy under her feet. It was starting to snow.
Walking down her street toward the park, counting pale Christmas trees in sunny windows, knowing that nobody in any of these houses was going to meet Jerry Johnston or had lost a brother and a sister and maybe a father so far or was sad on Christmas, Lucy wished hard that it would snow. Wished for a blizzard, when the shapes of things changed and you couldn’t see where you were going and angels you made in the snow filled in almost before you could stand up. Maybe then this awful feeling that something was going to happen. would go away. Of course, it really didn’t matter what she wished, but it was snowing harder.
If the park had a name, she didn’t know it. It took up one block, and there was a hill in the middle of it so you couldn’t see from one side to the other. It had swings and a spiral slide and two picnic tables. A row of little trees climbed the hill, tied to sticks with thin white rope; the trees had always been here, and Lucy didn’t think they’d ever been any smaller than they were right now. The white rope was hard to see against the snow.
But one of them had fallen over against the sharp sky. Stick figures in a row, one after another like always, and then one broken, the bottom half still sticking straight up and maybe even still growing, the top half dragging the stupid rope that hadn’t kept it safe after all.
She followed the sidewalk to the top of the hill. The cold air hurt in her lungs. It was hard to believe that air really went into your lungs and then came out again, and that while it was in there you took something out of it. It was hard to believe you really had lungs, with all those little hairs and pockets. But the air was cold in there and hurt, and her hands were so cold she could feel their bones, and it was gross but the little hairs inside her nose were cold. From the top of the hill she could see the whole park, and she was the only person in it.
She stood up there a long time. The wind had secret snow in it, snow you couldn’t see but you could feel along with all the snow you could both see and feel. She was shivering and her eyes were watering. She wished she could just go home and everything would be the way it used to be. She wished Jerry would show up. Maybe he wasn’t going to come. She wished Ethan would show up, or Rae, and tell her what to do.
A sidewalk went catty-corner across the park. The pine trees and bushes along it looked like a Mohawk. The sidewalk took you to the corner of Pruitt Middle School, where she’d go next year.
She didn’t believe that. She didn’t believe she’d ever be anywhere but on this cold hill in this stupid park, waiting. Waiting for Jerry, for Ethan, for Rae. She herself next in line and then her little sister Priscilla.
In the corner of the park toward the school was a swing set and slide. She’d played there lots of times, and so had her little brothers and sisters. She couldn’t remember if Ethan and Rae ever had, and Pris was already starting to say she was too old for stuff like that. From up here the swing set and slide looked like a giant bug, the way a mite would look if you could see a mite, or a germ.
Right at this very second, thousands and thousands of her cells were coming off. If anybody noticed anything, those cells would just look like snow. Nobody would guess they’d once been part of Lucy Ann Brill.
The snow in the park and on the streets was starting to look blue because the sun was going down. Lucy was cold and lonely. There were blue-gray streaks in the snow. Footprints, she thought, and then worried about who might have been here, who might still be here that she didn’t see.
Suddenly she realized that the streaks made letters. An E, with the middle arm crooked and longer than the other two. An R with a too-long tail. Way off to the left, toward the school and the swing set that looked like a bug, a D was sliding off into the street.
The letters made a word. The word was a message for her.
She was shivering so hard that her legs wouldn’t hold her, and she had to sit down in the snow. But when she did that, she was wet and colder, and the message just looked like streaks again because she couldn’t see how it all fit together.
She pushed herself up onto her knees. There were sharp, invisible pieces of ice in the wind now, and every time one of them hit her she lost more cells. Slowly, she turned her head from left to right in order to read the message. It was already getting fuzzy and hard to read, filling in with more ice and snow till pretty soon it wouldn’t be there at all.
DANGER
Rae was here, or had been not long ago. Rae was trying to warn her about something, but Lucy didn’t know what. What was the use of somebody getting you all upset about some dumb message if you didn’t have any idea what they were talking about? Rae was just being mean.
She squatted, and the top plate almost slid off. When she caught it, she was sure she squished the pie. She peered at the broken tree. It was the same dead gray color inside as out.
It was windy on top of the hill. She put her plates in a row on one of the picnic tables, one, two, three, lined them up with the edge of the plank. She laid her hand on the foil that covered the one with the pie on it, trying to tell if the pie was squished, but she didn’t look inside. She couldn’t take the food home. If Jerry didn’t show up, she’d just leave it here for the birds or the poor people. She hoped Stacey didn’t call while she was gone. She wondered what time it was, how much of an hour had passed.
She went and sat on a swing and pushed off. The chains were so cold that she had to keep moving her hands up and down. One winter when she was little she’d put her tongue on the iron fence and a piece of skin had torn off. Until then she’d never thought of tongues having skin. She’d checked a lot of times to see if her skin and blood were still on the fence somewhere, but she’d never found anything and her tongue had healed, so sometimes she wondered if that really had happened.
She pumped and pumped. The chains were stiff and made loud creaking noises. When she was as high as she could get, she jumped. It seemed to take a long time before she hit the grou
nd. The air hurt as she passed through it. The ground hurt, even though it wasn’t hard.
Lucy lay down flat on the ground, even though it had hurt her. She spread her arms and legs and tried to feel the curve of the earth, tried to feel it spinning, tried to feel the hot lava that they said was deep down under her wherever she walked or sat or lay. Snow didn’t cover the whole ground yet. Yellow-brown blades of grass that weren’t growing anymore crisscrossed under her nose. She didn’t understand growing, what happened inside. Or not growing.
She was grabbed.
“Rae!” she cried, not knowing why.
Somebody had grabbed her by the waist and was pulling her up, so that now she was on her knees. There was an awful smell, like really bad halitosis, and panting close to her ear like somebody who couldn’t catch their breath to say what they wanted to say. Lucy threw her fists back and twisted around to look. Nobody was there.
She sank back on her heels, then stood up shakily and looked around. In front of her was the lake, but you couldn’t tell it was there if you didn’t already know; all you saw was trees. On her left were houses with Christmas lights on their porches that faded out against the sky.
Jerry was coming from her right. He was hurrying, bobbing up and down like a big balloon. He was wearing a red jacket. He was stumbling.
Lucy turned. Behind her, running down the hill toward home was Rae. Wearing Lucy’s pink sweater that she hadn’t even missed, and no coat. Rae was panting and her hands were in fists, as if she were running hard. But Lucy saw that really she was barely moving at all.
Lucy tried to run after her. But she took only a couple of steps before she slipped on the snowy grass and fell. She slid partway down the other side of the hill, away from Rae and toward Jerry, and she couldn’t think how to get up again.
Jerry was beside her. When he knelt, he lost his balance and almost fell on top of her. He braced himself on his hands and around her. “Lucy. It’s okay. I’m here.”
“Rae.” Lucy couldn’t catch her breath.
Jerry stiffened a little, brought his arms and legs closer around her like the four corners of a cage. “What about Rae?”
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