No Good Asking

by Fran Kimmel

  “There’s so many,” she said. “The tree will be coated in snowflakes.”

  She was on her knees, dragging the box along the floor. She had to maneuver around Ellie, who was not moving at all, who just stood there beside the tree, a coil of tinsel hanging from her wrist, staring at Sammy. Hannah’s eyes darted from Ellie to Sammy, back and forth until Sammy spun around and faced the wall so she couldn’t look at him anymore.

  Hannah stood, a slow-motion unwinding. “I want to go to my room.”

  Eric came up beside her, holding a clay cupcake. “You’re not giving up, are you? There’s a whole lot of tree left to go.”

  Hannah’s bottom lip quivered. “Can I go now?”

  Ellie was in front of the girl, her arm on her shoulder. “No, don’t go.”

  “A goddamn piece is missing,” Walter yelled, his head rising then dipping, close to the puzzle table.

  “He doesn’t want me here,” Hannah said.

  “Sammy doesn’t want to be like this,” Ellie tried to explain. “It’s hard for him at the beginning. If someone gets too close. If he doesn’t know them very well. When his routine is broken—when something new comes along—it takes him a while to get used to it.”

  Hannah said nothing, eyes scrunched, lips pressed tight. She stood picture-still for the longest time, and then backed up slowly, away from the tree. “I’ll help with the puzzle,” she announced. “Sammy can have a turn now.”

  Ellie looked at Eric—how to choose one child’s best interests over another’s.

  Hannah could back all the way to the barn, and his boy would not budge. Eric wanted to call her back, but her resolute look stopped him as she settled on the arm of Walter’s chair. He could drag her to the tree and stuff her hands with snowflakes; it wouldn’t matter now, her heart had gone out of it.

  Daniel popped out from the backside of the tree. “You can’t give up,” he yelled at Hannah. “We’re not done yet.”

  “Sammy is going to take over for a while,” Eric explained, Ellie heading to the far side of the room.

  Daniel blew air out his cheeks, shoulders dropping. He flopped back on the couch and pulled his phone from his pocket.

  Eric picked up the tinsel Ellie had let fall to the floor and tossed it into the old suitcase. Ellie guided Sammy back to the tree, stooping to pick up the trail of fallen soldiers on the way. Sammy wouldn’t look in Hannah’s direction, pretending she was not there.

  “So where should we put these, Sammy?” Ellie asked.

  Sammy sat cross-legged on the floor, his back to Hannah. He stuck to the branch lowest to the ground. One soldier went up, then another, then another, until all the soldiers hung in a tight cluster, a thicket of tiny helmets and guns.

  “Good job, slugger!” Eric said. “I think you’ve got this area secured.”

  “Want to do snowflakes next?” Ellie passed him a snowflake by its loop of wire. She guided him to another branch, close to the soldiers.

  “We need you over here, Dan,” Eric said, knowing Ellie would want it.

  “I’m busy right now.” Daniel didn’t look up from his phone.

  All this tactical maneuvering: Hannah’s retreat, Daniel’s surrender, Sammy and his soldiers marching in, taking over. Eric could hear Walter repeatedly asking her name; Hannah telling him, over and over.

  “So what exactly is keeping you so busy, Dan?”

  “A tweetstorm about whales crammed in tanks. Abusement parks. There’s a documentary about it. And a trailer.”

  “It’s okay,” Ellie said. “Let him have a break. We can get this.”

  Eric followed her lead, throwing decorations on the tree, working quickly, their youngest between them on the floor. Sammy had the feathered owl in his fist, tracing a circle around its black button eye.

  “Oh no!” Ellie said, hands on her head. “How could I forget?”

  Eric looked around. “It’s all here, Ellie.” The room was covered with the wearisome business of Christmas. What else could there be?

  “Music! We’re supposed to have Christmas music.”

  Eric wished she would stop trying so hard, but he went to the CD player and flipped through the stack. “Which one do you want?”

  “One of the choirs. Carols. Something we can sing to.”

  Music filled the room. “Silent Night.” The adult choir. Walter yelled at the nurse to cut out that racket. Eric cranked it up a notch. Daniel was listening to a 9-1-1 call—“a whale has eaten one of the trainers!”—with the phone volume as high as it would go.

  All is calm. All is bright. Now you could hear the killer whale, slung in the air by a hoist, crying his one-ton heart out. Eric told Daniel to give it a rest, put his phone away.

  Sammy poked out the owl’s eye, and the tiny black button skittered along the floor to land in front of Thorn, who rolled out his tongue and snapped it up like a dead fly. Sammy wanted the button back. He flapped his arms.

  Ellie announced they were all to sing. “Come on, we know the words. Sammy, you know this one.”

  Sammy was flat on his stomach, trying to pry Thorn’s mouth open with all of his fingers. Ellie sang softly, cheeks red, not willing to quit. Sleep in heavenly peace, damn it. “Danny, help me out here.”

  “We’re not the Jackson family.”

  Eric swung around and told him to can it, to turn off the damn phone.

  “Let’s hear you sing then, Dad.”

  Eric bit his lip and concentrated on the tree. The choir looped back to yet another bloody holy night, Ellie limping along with them.

  But then there was a new voice, sweet and clear above the rest. They all turned at once, even the dog.

  Hannah stood tall and straight beside Walter’s chair, head tilted upward, eyes closed, her voice light as a flute. Second verse. Third verse. The music poured out of her.

  The others didn’t make a sound, none of the Nylands. Thorn sat grinning sincerely, the rest frozen in place as they listened to the girl sing her song.

  When the music faded, Hannah opened her eyes and blinked into the light. “We were supposed to sing?” She sounded unsure, so many pairs of eyes on her.

  Ellie stood motionless, not breathing, one arm suspended in midair.

  Eric slipped over to the CD player, hit pause, needing a minute to compose himself. He wished the detachment would call and tell him that Nigel Wilson had hung himself.

  “Holy shit, Hannah.” Daniel snapped her picture with his phone. “You should go on one of those singing shows.” He snapped a second time. “I’m serious. You’re way better than most of those kids. You could totally win.”

  “He’s right,” Eric said. “You have a really pretty voice.”

  Walter tugged on the sleeve of Hannah’s sweater, then handed her a rock pulled from his pocket. “Don’t lose it,” he warned. Then he saw the rock he’d given her in her hand. He took it from her and slipped it in his pocket with the others.

  —

  Sammy sat on the floor, button eye forgotten. He recognized her words, shiny and round. They jumped out of her mouth, colours splashing through the air—blue, blue, less blue, red, red, more red, yellow, blue, red—the sounds just right, like a tower of blocks. The room shrank as he listened, a Goldilocks room, not too big, not too small. He was just right too, taking up the best space. She kept her eyes closed. He looked right at her face, and it didn’t hurt behind his eyes.

  The music stopped. His mom stood too still. Danny took a picture with his phone. His grandpa gave the girl a rock and took it back again. Sammy wanted her to start over; he wanted to sing the words too.

  —

  Except for the TV noise, the house was quiet, the kids and Walter long since asleep in their rooms, even Daniel. Eric and Ellie had been watching the late-night news, or trying to. Eric couldn’t stand the weather lady with her I’m-so-pleased-with-myself
tone. Snow and more snow on the prairies. An impending storm. Impossibly cold.

  “Come on now, let’s call it a night,” he said, pulling Ellie from the couch to her feet.

  Eric planned to sleep in his own bed tonight, consequences be damned, although he was pretty sure his father would stay put. Walter had been so exhausted by the excitement of the day—the girl, the tree, the angelic voice in his ear—that Ellie had had to help him down the hall and into his pajamas. He hadn’t made a peep for hours.

  Eric turned off the TV and unplugged the Christmas lights. Ellie blearily followed him into the bedroom, dropped her housecoat on the floor in front of the closet, and flopped down on the queen-sized bed. Her head hit the pillow like a stone. Eric crawled in beside her, spread the extra blanket over both of them, and turned off his bedside lamp. He listened for the sound of Ellie’s breathing, a white noise that soothed him, but she was a small ball turned away. He could hear nothing but the creaking of the old roof, the expanding and contracting of the copper pipes.

  He thought of the ways he’d belittled his wife. Times when she had called him at work, Sammy still in diapers, a heart-stopping panic in her voice, I think he might be deaf, Eric or I can’t calm him down. He hadn’t wanted to hear it. He’d tell her Danny had been strong willed too, and she was overstretching her case. He’d remind her he had a station to run, as if her concerns were petty and had nothing to do with him. Eric felt weak with exhaustion. He couldn’t think about them anymore. His father and his sons. The girl. Ellie. He especially couldn’t think about Ellie, how she had tried and tried before Sammy came along; the part he played. None were immaculate conceptions: he was complicit in each, exuberantly thrusting and grunting. And after days or weeks, when her normally pale cheeks flushed pink or when she teared up during a Hallmark commercial, neither one of them let on that they’d noticed these changes. Nor in reverse, when she’d gone back to pale, back to rolling her eyes when the TV grandma read the Mother’s Day card. Over and over. He’d go to work, come home, and find all the evidence destroyed. She might have trembled a little as she reached for her hairbrush, but she made it easy to turn away, to pretend he had only imagined these things.

  He supposed she kept the pregnancies secret after the second to protect him, believing he’d fall apart if he knew. That he’d not be strong enough or weak enough or sensitive enough to do or say or feel the right things. And she was right. He knew every time—the changes in her glaringly undeniable—yet he pretended he didn’t. He could have stopped her, become a less willing participant, but he let Ellie carry on, carry the weight of their hope and their grief for the two of them.

  Now he just wanted to be alone in his head and feel the sweet pull of nothingness. He couldn’t make out what it was at first, coming from such a distance, a pinprick of bright light. One of the constables, or the sun, hurtling toward him, knocking him off course.

  It was Ellie, jerking his arm. He shook her off.

  “You’re doing that thing with your legs.” She was sitting up, pillow propped against the headboard, a magazine open-faced across her raised knees. She had turned on the damn light.

  He covered his eyes with the crook of his elbow. “Turn off the damn light.”

  “You’re doing that jerking thing again. For the past half hour. Every thirteen seconds. I’ve been counting. You seem perfectly relaxed one second. Then you do it again.”

  “El, go to sleep. Turn off the light.”

  She turned the page. “You need to take the calcium.”

  He felt a burning urge to kick out his legs, but he gritted his teeth and kept as still as he could.

  “I bought you the big bottle. The chewable kind. You could at least give them a try.”

  “Tomorrow,” he said, but then tomorrow flashed before him, so much yet unresolved. Hannah still with them, Wilson bruised and sober in his cell, his house still standing right across the road. He reached across Ellie clumsily and switched off her lamp, knocking her magazine to the floor, the room gone black. He rolled back to his proper place on the big bed, a different country, his indent so worn on the mattress he could trace his body’s outline with chalk. But then the strangest thing. Ellie crossed the border. She was beside him now, tucked in close under his arm, her breath on his shoulder.

  “It was a good day, wasn’t it,” she said.

  He tried to get his bearings.

  “I mean, it’s horrible really, if you let yourself think about it. That horrible man. But if you put him out of your mind, it turned out all right, didn’t it?”

  Eric was still adjusting to the feel of her body, without any warning, pressed tight to him like that.

  “Danny was quite sweet really. With the tree. The way he gave her his iPad.”

  He had forgotten what to do with his hands. This is your wife, for God sakes. Get it together.

  “And Thorn. He’s on the bed with her, you know. Totally smitten. You got him out, didn’t you? After supper?”

  Uh-huh, he said, or a sound like that, rolling over to face her. He couldn’t kiss her now, not on the lips, not with this fragile connection that could so easily break.

  “I’m so tired.” She let out a drawn-out sigh that ended with a yawn. “I should have listened to you about moving here. About this town. This house.”

  He didn’t think he’d said anything she should listen to about this town, this house. He didn’t remember saying anything at all.

  “You were so against it in the beginning.”

  “I said that?” He hadn’t shared his feelings about Walter, he knew that for sure, but Ellie had a way of forming her own conclusions.

  She stayed quiet for a long time. Eric thought she might already be asleep. Then out of the blue, “You know what I mean.”

  He wrapped his arm around her, brought her closer still. She yawned again and so he did too.

  “I’m just so tired, Eric. So tired all the time.”

  “Go to sleep, El.”

  “Take the calcium.” She sounded sleepy and far away, lying still on his chest.

  His arms slackened around her shoulders, the wind going out of him. But he didn’t let go. He thought about falling asleep like this, waking up hours later, Ellie still attached. The possibility seemed startling, like coming to after a bender and finding your body entangled in a stranger’s pair of sheets.

  “They’re gone now,” he said about the jerks, his legs bowls of mushed peas.

  “A few more days,” she answered dreamily, half-asleep.

  Only a tiny part of his brain still worked. She’d forced the jerks right out of him. “They’re gone now,” he might have said again.

  “Gone,” she repeated. “She’ll be gone soon.” She was breathing slower now, her mouth slightly open, a trickle of wet on the hairs of his chest.

  Part Three

  Play It Again

  Sunday, December 22

  Nine

  Hannah couldn’t stay in bed a minute longer. She pulled back her covers, causing the dog to jump to the floor. She stepped over him and tiptoed to her bedroom door, opening it by inches, before feeling her way down the black hallway and into the living room. Thorn tangled between her legs as she wove a path around the furniture and over to the decorated tree. She had planned to stand in the dark and wait for her eyes to catch up, but in a brief spurt of courage, she reached over and turned on the lamp so she could find the tree plug.

  It was even better than she remembered. Yesterday, with Sammy so near, she’d been afraid to examine the finished tree too closely, but here, all alone in the early morning, she could take her time studying each branch.

  There was every colour of bulb you could ask for. Red, blue, green, yellow, purple, white. The tree in her head had just blue lights, tiny as pencil erasers. She and her mother pulled out its box from the trailer’s closet each year. The tree’s branches folded straight u
p, its trunk a metal tube, as light as a hollow doll. Hannah got to pull each branch down and poof out the pretend twigs. She got to carry it around too, move it from here to there. Mostly she kept it on the floor beside her at night so that before she went to sleep she could reach out and touch the lights, one at a time, and feel each tiny stab of heat.

  This tree was huge. She loved everything about it. The way it smelled like the forest, needles falling to the floor like miniature pick-up sticks. The way the branches curved up at the tips like fingers.

  She loved the decorations Daniel and Sammy had made the best. They were ugly really—tattered toilet-paper rolls painted badly, clay sculptures, their shapes unrecognizable, like plops of poop. But they’d been stored in their boxes between Christmases and hung alongside the pretty store-bought ones.

  She thought back to her own little tree, not knowing what had happened to it. Was it still in the trailer’s closet or had the next family thrown it away?

  Thorn had fallen asleep at her feet, his ear flapped backward, a triangle of pink skin. The snowflakes in front of her were too crowded, bunched together on a lower branch. Hannah wanted them to be more spread out, like real snow falling, so she reached down for a handful and rearranged them at different heights.

  Her eye caught a movement reflected in one of the stained-glass angels. She whipped around. Sammy glared at her from his hiding spot in the hallway. She froze, her hand mid-air, her teeth clamped tight. It took everything she had to keep still, but she was terrified she’d spook him and he’d wake the whole house.

  They stood there, staring at each other like deer on opposite sides of an open field. Whatever she did next, she had to get it right.

  —

  He’d been caught. She was in her pajamas, staring back at him. Sammy could spin around, so she wouldn’t see his face, but then he couldn’t see his soldiers. She was too close to them.

  He tried to keep his arms still, but they jumped from his sides and flung all around. Hers did too. When he grabbed his from the air and pushed them into his stomach, so did she. Her face was shiny under the lamp. One cheek was fatter than the other, a rainbow you could make with three crayons—blue, purple, green—from the top row of the crayon box. She didn’t smile or laugh or sing or move her feet.