Christmas in July

by Alan Michael Parker

  Privately, substitute the word “life” for “town” and you’ll see how incompetent I have been, never better than an assistant life planner. Christmas knew: she saw who I was.

  Everyone wants something. The dangerous people let you think they want something, but they want something else. The innocent people tell you what they want, because they only want what they want. Too often, the most innocent people don’t know what they want, they can’t see it, there’s only a blur. My ignorance of the difference between what I want and what I need has the power to incapacitate me.

  As Christmas showed me, I am bad at love, possibly even incapable. Maybe I can be better at understanding her death.

  Many of the facts are known. On a Sunday afternoon, on the last day of July, Christmas went wandering. She apparently wanted to pet the puppies at Pet Land, the ones the Saxon Hills Humane Society brings to place in the arms of sympathetic shoppers to encourage adoption, but she got the day wrong, the puppies are only there on Saturdays, not Sundays. The clerk at Pet Land remembered Christmas: a tall, sick teenager in combat boots, plaid shirt and skirt, and a purple hat. She was trailing glitter, too—like a little dying star. She left. She stopped at a hardware store and bought a cold Coke from a cooler. It was hot, the end of July was ridiculously hot this year, and she was getting sicker every day. That Sunday, the heat had risen dramatically—ten degrees hotter than the previous day. Christmas walked more than two miles in over ninety degree heat toward the downtown business district of Saxon Hills.

  Downtown, she met someone she knew—perhaps they arranged to meet, that part’s unclear—a young woman named Sarah Wasser-man, who was acting bizarrely, according to multiple witnesses. Wasserman had run into a Greek diner off the square and then run out again; she appeared to be fleeing someone, “her head on a swivel,” one report noted, but whoever scared her wasn’t in view. Wasser-man had lain down in the grass at one point, and might have been crying. A dog walker saw the two girls together on a bench in Memorial Park. A mother with two toddlers splashing in the Memorial Park fountain saw them, too. A trio of Sunday joggers saw too—three sweaty men, jiggling in their silly Spandex, as I imagine them now. No police officers. No crazy aunt named Nikki to protect her.

  What Sarah Wasserman and Christmas animatedly discussed for more than an hour on that park bench, we don’t know. At 4:45 p.m. on the last day in July, Sarah Wasserman and Christmas rose from their park bench, walked together to the corner of West Starkweather and Third, and began to cross in the crosswalk, the WALK sign in their favor. A white, late-model Kia—that’s what the police report says, “a white, late-model Kia,” because the investigating officers obviously watch too much TV, every Kia’s a late model—ran the light and swerved toward them, perhaps even at them. Numerous witnesses agree the driver seemed enraged, his face livid.

  In an upstairs window of a nearby building, a young man was standing on the balcony, out for a smoke. He claimed the driver sped up before impact, “like he meant it,” the young man, Thomas Perry, repeated on the news. There were four passengers in the vehicle, three wedged in the backseat.

  Christmas and Sarah Wasserman struggled. Were they pulling one another this way or that? Was something else happening?

  Contact. The bumper, the hood, the roof of the car, and then her body rolled off sideways, her head hit the curb…

  The driver of the car never stopped.

  A number of witnesses recalled especially the faces of the people in the backseat as the car accelerated out of the intersection. Thomas Perry reported that the three passengers twisted around to look through the back window. The three passengers and the driver were easily identified later by witnesses, although one of the backseat passengers was made to identify the front seat passenger. The politics of murder.

  Thomas Perry didn’t say more on the news, but I can see them in my mind’s eye, the three passengers and their open, empty faces. When human sympathy leaves us, we have such an empty look—I think we can see those people, they’re on TV all of the time.

  The day of Christmas’ death was a bright, hot day. I was home, working on the Comprehensive Plan, as enjoined by the State of Maryland under Article 66B. The Saxon Hills town planner, my boss Greg Rossi, had assigned me the water and sewer assessment—in truth, he was pretty much willing to have me write the whole damn plan while he read bestsellers and took two-hour lunches at Santiago’s—and I had colonized my dining room table with blueprints and spreadsheets. I liked to work this way, even though the air conditioning in my rented house was set on High and only capable of Low. I was wearing shorts and a tank top but still sweating. I remember thinking, when the police rang the bell, came inside, stood everywhere, stood next to me, were too close to me, I couldn’t move, they were everywhere, that the dripped sweat on the spreadsheets looked like bird shit. Memory’s a bitch, Aunt Nikki.

  Of course, Christmas became in my dreams the deer of my childhood, getting hit by a truck. I had been that deer for so long, and now it was Christmas.

  “Christmas was a smart girl who wanted to be a fashion designer.” “Christmas was tall for her age.”

  “Christmas had seen a lot of hurt.”

  “Christmas’ best grades were in math.”

  “Everyone who met her thought she was at least sixteen.”

  “Christmas was going to start a babysitting business.”

  “Christmas wouldn’t eat fish.”

  “Christmas hated her mother.”

  “When she was killed, Christmas was still covered in glitter from the music festival the day before, which she must have sneaked into (because she didn’t have fifty dollars, the cost of the ticket, that’s for sure).”

  “Christmas’ taste in music was…”

  “Christmas liked to…”

  “Christmas’ favorite movie was…”

  “Christmas’ favorite memory of her father was…”

  “Christmas used to…”

  So many of those pronouncements fail to find an object. Who was she? The paint was still wet, at thirteen. I have heard the news reports, I make myself talk with the occasional person who met her, the authorities have shared some information with me, and I simply don’t understand. I feel like I’m trying to look at a picture of a girl in a locked museum, the lights are off and I’m standing in the bushes, at the window, and all I can see of the figure is a thin sheen of the moon in the reflected glass. The moon can be so bright, so far away and bright.

  Because I was not her mother, and didn’t claim to be, and she and I only lived together for five weeks, I barely glimpsed who she was. She never trusted me enough to share.

  Not that I blame her: I don’t trust myself either.

  I suspect that one of her skills, what Christmas was capable of, perhaps as a result of the object lesson provided by her lying, meth-head mother, might have been an ability to figure out whom to trust, who among the grown-ups would let her down. Is this a skill a child learns when the child has to fend for herself too early? It’s a kind of street smarts—although that’s a joke about town planners, that we have street smarts. Could she smell bad people, get up her dander like a wild animal who knows?

  Don’t get me started on Nature versus Nurture.

  I let her die too soon. What I suspect about myself: when I got Christmas, I had already made her death into a done deal, and that led me to ignore who she was as a living girl. She was Otto’s daughter, Otto was dead, there was Otto in Christmas, and I couldn’t stand that Otto was dead. Or I was protecting myself, because she was a temporary person, only alive for a little while longer.

  There is another version of the story, one in which I don’t blame myself so much. There may not be ways to forgive oneself, but I can see how Christmas was only Christmas, in pain, returning to the wild, doing what she needed to do, and I (accidentally, blindly) let her. I was here for her, and once or twice, she came to me. Maybe that was all the wild girl could handle, in terms of intimacy.

  Every night,
I sleep in the closet of the spare bedroom upstairs. It’s a tight space, not a walk-in, with a small shelf above the clothing bar. I have removed the hangers—I would hate getting up to pee in the middle of the night and banging my head on the hangers, or hearing their ringing in my dreams. I wheeled an old desk chair into the closet, removed the ant traps from the floor, and I laid out my cotton blanket as though readying a bed. Each night, I yank the string to the bare bulb overhead, settle into the chair, the darkness mine, and there I am. The closet smells faintly of potpourri, or maybe some old woman’s perfumed rayon blouses hung there too long. Old lady smells. But I try not to let anyone else’s body into my closet—no hands, no feet, no shirts or shoes, no one reaching in—when I go to sleep. Sometimes I think that the closet smells like popcorn.

  Well into my teens, I tried to sleep in regular beds. In my twenties, I didn’t, and some of my sexual behavior (in retrospect) seems to have been a mild kink related to other people’s bedrooms. Then other people’s bodies became a problem.

  Now, in my thirties, I’ve tried again. For too long, the worst part of the first month in Saxon Hills, I tried to sleep in the queen bed in the master bedroom downstairs. That was obviously the right bed, I would tell myself; be gone, fears. I was working on the whole being, brain first. Cognitive behavioral restructuring.

  I walled off one side of the real bed with pillows wrapped in a blanket, to make the space tighter and safe. Even still, too frequently in the night I would forget, and think that the lump was a lover—there were hands, feet, breathing—and I would hyperventilate until I remembered no one could be there.

  Walled off and wedged, the pillows my protection, I nonetheless felt the bed a sacrificial platform on which I was laid exposed. It’s been a new thought, and not good. But I kept up the pretense. As though I could simply live normally, I would set a glass of water on my night table, a boring biography of a politician to fall asleep to, a pair of cheaters, a flashlight, and my alarm clock, the dial covered with a sock. No need for a girly gun under the pillow; violence has never been my forte.

  Now, again, I sleep in the smallest space I can make mine. I am not a survivor: that’s what I tell myself when I go to sleep in my chair in the closet. Who needs to be a survivor? I just need some goddamn sleep.

  Christmas asked me right away about my closet. “That closet thing. What’s with that?”

  “I…I sleep there,” I answered. “None of your business. I have to.”

  We were at the grocery store together, having driven all day the day before, an awful day, hauling her stuff to Saxon Hills in a garbage bag in the trunk of my car, our new relationship at a ceasefire only when she jammed her stupid earbuds in her ears and we both could be silent. Now, day two, she was already refusing to say what she wanted for dinner, so I was pissed.

  “That’s screwed up,” she said. She put two big bottles of pop in the cart, no eye contact.

  “Okay, it’s screwed up.”

  “That’s fucked up. You need help.”

  I tried to laugh. “But you’re okay? You’re just so sane, aren’t you, Beatrice?”

  She slammed a bag of Oreos too hard into the cart, breaking the cookies for sure, the bag popping. “I’m Christmas.”

  “So we’re doing my problems, not yours?” I asked. I reached into the cart and took out the Oreos, I wasn’t buying those.

  Christmas was quiet for a short time as I wheeled our cart through the canned vegetables aisle, through soups. I was so bad at this. I couldn’t help calling her Beatrice, to make a useless point.

  We arrived at checkout. There was a line of shoppers, a pimply cashier.

  “I hate you,” Christmas finally said softly, her meanest words almost always delivered in a whisper. “Fucking bitch.”

  She elbowed past me, around a young mother and child, and out the store’s automatic door into the searing weather, waves of heat visibly undulating from the asphalt and the cars in the parking lot.

  Christmas on fire, I thought.

  Only weeks later did it occur to me that her nausea had probably been severe, that shopping for groceries couldn’t have been fun. She had thrown up that morning, even, and I had dragged her to the grocery store.

  I was always pissed at her, those first few weeks. Yes, she treated me like shit—as though I were her reprobate mother and not her well-intentioned godmother. But I think I was mostly furious at her for dying, for being the daughter of my beloved dead brother, who died, he died, he was dead, and for bringing her own imminent death, along with the pressure of love, into my quiet house. Christmas and I were both under pressure to love each other, and neither of us was thrilled. We were both Danzigs, full of Danzig emotions. We might love each other some day, but neither of us asked for this.

  If Christmas had any nightmares, I never knew. I was too clenched in my blanket, deep in my safety chair, desperately trying to sleep, wanting to be safe, and I had given her my bedroom on the first floor, so we were a world apart. For me to sleep, no one else could be there.

  She did say “Thank you” when I showed her to her room.

  In our five weeks together, she said many nastier things to me, usually reserved for the moment she went out the front door. I suspect she often waited for me to come home from work, and then she would leave while saying something awful to make a point; some times, though, she would simply be gone when I returned, to make the same point differently. Either way, she was never there. She would never text me back.

  How to tell a thirteen-year-old who has lost her hair to chemo that I stopped dyeing my hair Clairol Red Hot Red in sympathy?

  We went shopping for clothes. Under ordinary circumstances, I find the West House Mall terrifying, my agoraphobia fully activated, set off by the indoor shopping experience. The atria were hung with lights and banners and cartoon characters, colors and neon everywhere, right on top of me, the wheelchair ramps and pop-up kiosks and mall walkers, the incessant voice-overs, the music a horror show. The pumped-in smells, the swirly patterns in the heinous carpeting—it all was designed for the person I am least like. I knew, too, that I would again never find my car out there in the parking lot. We would never get home. But I had offered to buy her clothes, and Christmas insisted on the mall. At least that once, she had agreed to accept some credit card love.

  She was trying on a bathing suit in one of those generic stores. They all have the same names—Forever, Unlimited, Eternal, Future, Endless, Boundless. They all sell costume jewelry bound to break, the plastic beads spilling on the checkered linoleum, rolling into oblivion. I’d be the one on my hands and knees trying to pick up those beads; that’s what the store sells me.

  Christmas was never going to be someone else, I realized, as she rang back the little blue curtain to model for me the hideous one-piece. There was no promise.

  Wow, I was in a foul mood, I realized.

  “Great,” I said. “Let’s buy it.” My phone buzzed, a text from Rossi. “Hold on, hold on,” I said.

  “Great how?” She turned around to flaunt her nonexistent ass, elbows in, palms out.

  I texted Rossi back. “Great color,” I said. “It’s flattering.”

  “You’re not even looking,” she said. “You’re on your phone.”

  “I was looking…hold on.” Rossi needed to reply: it was important.

  “No!” Christmas said. “Aunt Nikki…” She scowled at herself in the triple mirrors. “It’s the worst. I’m gray.”

  “Well…” I thought I might put my hand on her shoulder.

  Christmas looked ready to cry. “Aunt Nikki…”

  “It’s bad,” I admitted. I looked at her more carefully, checking how she took it. “Color matching is going to be a challenge,” I said, half a joke. We made eye contact as I stealthily turned off my phone.

  Then I spun around again to face the store, more demons to come, including my own. My back was to her: I closed my eyes to gird myself. “Let’s try somewhere else. Come on, girl. Nothing here goes wit
h cancer.”

  Finally, Christmas laughed.

  Before Christmas was gone twelve hours, the news broke, and with shame and blame and horror, Saxon Hills joined the twenty-first century. An anonymous caller had led the police to the hit-and-run vehicle, a stolen car hidden in a garage at a house in the woods north of Saxon Hills, just past the abandoned quarry. For an unidentified reason related to the information in the original phone call, Homeland Security had been alerted. By the middle of the night, the house had been raided by multiple federal and local agencies, resulting in the arrests of sixteen people on the premises, and later, four more people living in Saxon Hills, a long list of felony charges, including various acts of domestic terrorism, and a serious and self-satisfied press conference. More warrants were issued for people in other homes in other areas. The conspiracy was national.

  Automatic weapons, homemade explosive devices, and plans to attack the local middle school as well as the First Church of the Holy Spirit, a local black church with seven hundred parishioners, had been discovered upstairs in the house, which the anchorwoman on the news described as the outpost of a cult that had become a terrorist cell. The terrorists had a “war room,” the newswoman said. The cult’s leader, a man known as Jebediah Farley, among other aliases, was subsequently arrested attempting to board a Greyhound bus at the Eleventh Street depot in Pittsburgh.

  Among the detainees was nineteen-year-old Sarah Wasserman, of no fixed address, the woman who had struggled with Christmas in the crosswalk.

  Had anyone pushed anyone into the path of the Kia? Was the driver of the Kia hunting, running down Sarah or Christmas? Had Sarah killed Christmas?

  Or, maybe, had Christmas saved Sarah?

  I go through periods of managed anxiety, and at times, when I feel better, I come off my meds, usually just after their effects on my life become intolerable. Ritual and repetition are my recourse. I keep my sunglasses, my sunscreen, my keys, my wallet, my lip balm, an extra scarf, my antibacterial gel, my pepper spray, my dental floss, my travel toothbrush and mini paste, and my mascara all in the exact same place in the hallway every day, below a row of ready purses hung on hooks. The purses might be color-coded on their hooks, but that would be admitting too much.