Tangled Lights and Silent Nights

by Kelly Stone Gamble

  Jeremy’s mistake? Well, he had several, too many to list. His obsessive love forced him to make a stupid choice—forgive me repeating that—and his clingy obsequiousness became annoying. He and his brother didn’t want to work, but took odd jobs around town, cleaning gutters, working the ski resort nights, grooming ski runs in northern Michigan, where we moved to be closer to my parents. Jeremy always said, “Family comes first.” We could barely afford to keep the lights and heat on in a too-small trailer up near Cross Lake.

  He wanted to wear down the wall my parents built between us. Over the years, two daughters joined Jeremy and I, along with increasingly petty arguments about how expensive babies, Jeremy said, “girls,” were. I cleaned houses, and then took a job as a janitor for the Petoskey Middle School, the afternoon-to-ten shift. I think this embarrassed my mother the most, one of her gilded kids choosing to live in squalor (her descriptive). There were benefits, health care, vacation and sick days. The paycheck was meager for a family of four. Macy wasn’t even one. Jeremy took care of the girls while I worked and then I’d relieve him. I’d sleep while he worked the night shift. But that was only during the ski season. Jeremy seldom found enough work in the summer.

  Jeremy didn’t do drugs. I told the judge that, and no one asked me if I did drugs. (Would I’ve lied under oath on that one?) Thank God. I wanted to be a character witness, tearful: “I know he did wrong, and he can never take it back. He’s not a good person, but he’s a good father to his girls. His brother probably made all these plans.” I actually said that. “Objection, calls for speculation,” was the response from the prosecuting attorney. I couldn’t lie my sins away, rub out my mistakes from the ledger. I filed for divorce the day the judge sent Jeremy and his brother away for decades, may as well’ve been life sentences. By the time they’re up for parole Jeremy’s two daughters, Jeremy’s brother’s nieces, will be pushing fifty.

  Christmas Eve happened, the day Jeremy made his most terrible choice, the worst mistake of his life, and he’s paying for it. You can’t kill someone, and paralyze a police officer, and think there won’t be hell to pay.

  On one of those prison phones with blurry thick plastic between us, Jeremy said, “I did it for us, for Bonnie and Macy, for you.”

  “I didn’t want this. I need you to sign the divorce papers. Please, Jerry, the girls need this. I need this.”

  “I love you. You’re breaking my heart.”

  “You broke mine a long time ago.”

  He actually cried. I’d seen this before. Big fake tears.

  “What if I don’t?” His smile sharpened.

  “That’s up to you, Jerry—”

  “It’s Jeremy to you now—”

  I cut him off before he could say the nastiest things: “If you don’t sign, you’ll never see your daughters again. I’m thinking of moving south anyway.”

  “You bitch!”

  He’d called me worse. I didn’t visit Jerry again—that toxic man thing. He wasn’t worth my time anymore. The girls ask about their daddy and I tell him he’s on a long adventure, and that he misses and loves them, but where he’s at he can’t even write, can’t even text. I changed all my numbers and I don’t do social media. No cell service at all. He signed the divorce papers.

  Jeremy and his brother, they both were bad seeds, but Jeremy’s brother was the one who dealt drugs, made deliveries for a sketchy organization known to the police in northern Michigan, you name it he did it, had the Stooges-like idea to rob from the rich out on Harbor Point one Christmas Eve while everyone attended church services. They cased the place. Their bright idea? To give Macy and Bonnie gifts they’d jump for joy over.

  The Point had a security guard, and things went wrong. Jeremy didn’t shoot the guard dead. His brother did though, so Jeremy became an accessory to first-degree murder. Jeremy shot and paralyzed a police officer, and that’s not worse than death, but comes mighty close, and all to steal a bunch of wrapped presents from an empty mansion on The Point to give to our girls. Macy didn’t know what Christmas was yet. Bonnie expected Christmas and birthday presents, and her disappointment that year echoed from a cavern impenetrable by justifiable grief—loss of lives, loss of self worth, the splintering of families—because children shouldn’t suffer the sins of their parents. They only wanted Christmas. My girls were on the nice list, and, still, bad things happened.

  I met Ethan in a recovery group. I kicked an addiction to painkillers, something that wasn’t a problem before that Christmas. I clung to the word spiral, as in, “She’s spiraling out of control.” My parents and sibling continued to fade into the past. My kids needed me. I didn’t lose my job right away because the school didn’t connect me to my husband—I kept a low profile, and I didn’t clean with anyone else. I took the night janitor position when it opened up.

  My only friend, who still spoke to me after the murder, lived next door. She was single without kids, young, and I could pay her ten dollars a night to babysit Bonnie and baby Macy. I came home and made her breakfast, don’t know what I would’ve done without Sherry.

  I took too many painkillers after spraining my right ankle sliding on ice outside our trailer. I went to a walk-in clinic. I stumbled in. My ankle wasn’t broken, but it was severely damaged. They wrapped it after the x-ray, and the doctor who didn’t offer a name or a look in the eye the whole encounter prescribed something that would relieve the pain, take the edge off.

  Months later, I weaned myself off of these loathsome drugs with the help of a recovery group. Ethan was renovating the center’s kitchen. I noticed how he watched others in the group, wore headphones. I wondered if that was part of his instructions from the group coordinators so he wouldn’t overhear someone’s sob story. He watched me, glanced my way. I looked down. I wasn’t wearing my wedding ring. The divorce was ahead in my future at that time.

  I bumped into Ethan at a hardware store, appropriate. I needed to make my own repairs on a door that wouldn’t latch right now that Jeremy couldn’t do these chores.

  “Sorry to startle you,” Ethan said, his face a blast of kindness. It’s so natural for some people. A gift.

  “Oh,” I remember saying.

  “Am I allowed to speak to you? Outside of—”

  “I think so.”

  “I hope you’re getting over whatever is ailing you. I’ve known so many people the center has helped. That’s how I got the remodel job.”

  “It’s who you know. Everything is.” I sounded so down in that moment.

  “Hey, do you have time for a cup of coffee? Don’t want to trouble you, but I sure could use more caffeine.”

  I said yes, and Ethan became my confidant, the person who helped me place the past in perspective. I didn’t introduce him to Bonnie and Macy for three months. I divorced Jeremy, and said yes when Ethan spoke one of his thoughts about the future out loud.

  “What would you say if I asked you to make a new start? I hate the long northern Michigan winters, and my buddy says Florida needs construction crews especially now after the last tropical storm blew through. I’ve saved every penny and have enough to open my own company, wouldn’t need more than one or two employees.”

  I didn’t answer right away. I contemplated the move, a change of scenery.

  Ethan told me he loved me. That he’d fallen for me, that he couldn’t see spending the rest of his life without me. I heard my mother say, “You’re a pretty girl. Don’t let men take advantage of you.” She always sounded jealous, bitter about it, made me doubt my own looks as she booked hair and spa appointments, did her best to fit in with those who did their best to conceal the fact that she would never fit into their structured lives—my mother wanted too much, fooled herself into thinking money bought acceptance.

  I still didn’t answer. I’d heard this all before.

  “I don’t want to just save you, Paige. I want
you to acknowledge something, kick self-hatred and guilt to the curb, become the good person I’ve come to love.”

  “You think you’re a hero.”

  “Well, I don’t wear a cape for nothing.”

  “Up and moving. It’s a big decision.”

  “Do you want an even bigger decision to make first?”

  Ethan got down on one knee, took out a small ring box. As I opened it up, I broke down. I cried for the longest time.

  I didn’t think I was worthy of such kindness.

  “Bonnie? Where’s Macy?”

  “Playing with Boo in the backyard.”

  “Will you ask her to come inside? Daddy Ethan and I have to speak to you.”

  “Another family meeting? Sheesh.” Bonnie pushes buttons, playfully, testing invisible boundaries.

  “Go get your sister, and Boo too.” The neighbors in this starter-home planned community warn me about their deepest fears in the days after we moved to Tampa. Don’t let your children or pets play outside unsupervised. Too many child predators on the street. Look them all up online. There are dozens and dozens, if not hundreds just being neighborly around here. Makes me ill to think about. And in the backyard? You always hear about some poor toddler taken away by the gators or squeezed by snakes, the real kind, the horrors of suburban Florida life. Why did we move here? Oh yeah, the sunshine and the fears of monsters from the swamp, animal and human. My parents retired to Winter Park, nearer to Disney, two years ago. My father emailed me this news. The lack of an income tax drew them south, not their grandchildren—but there has been kind of a sense of a thaw there. Chad stays in his chalet in busy Michigan.

  Boo, our bull terrier, white with a black spot off-center on his triangular head, wags his tail and follows Macy into the dining room. He curls up on a dog bed in the corner as we sit at the table.

  “Daddy Ethan and I have discussed something and want your help deciding.”

  “Sounds big, Mom.” And then Bonnie motions with her hands, curving around an enlarged imagined belly.

  “No!” I laugh, and in my ears my short burst of laughter sounds tinny from lack of use. “I’m not pregnant. Where do you get these ideas?”

  “It’s all over the television, Mom, the family shows. Whenever parents sit their children down for a serious talk it’s either a new baby or a granny is about to move in, and since our grandparents don’t like us—”

  “They don’t know you, and I’m working on that. They live pretty close now, and how do I know that? My dad, your grandfather, emailed me. Yep, he finally did.”

  “That is big news,” Bonnie says with dripping sarcasm.

  “Listen, girls, you aren’t the reason your grandparents aren’t speaking to me. It’s their choice. They aren’t bad people. We aren’t bad people.” I listen to myself as if I believe what I’m saying. “Hold up before I get too off course. Ethan? Help?”

  “Your mom and I want to make a change, one that I’m fully on board with. Christmas is a time when your mom feels blue, like the old Elvis song you like.” They know this. They know I’m silently crying behind my bedroom door on Christmas Eve. I fool myself by saying I’m not a prisoner to my past. I’m still giving in, being weak.

  Macy and Bonnie stare at me.

  “That’s part of it. What if we changed Christmas?”

  Macy and Bonnie’s expressions of disbelief and fear appear.

  “What?” Bonnie asks this.

  “What if,” Ethan continues, “we chose to celebrate Christmas in July, on the twenty-fifth?”

  “Like the television says?” Macy’s old enough to put two and two together, brainy, curious, and old enough to know Santa’s a myth. We had that dashed-childhood-dreams talk two years ago after a snarky boy, a classmate, kept teasing Macy because she still believed in Santa.

  “Yes. The Queen of England celebrates her birthday on a different date since it’s so close to Christmas. I’m asking you to think about doing the opposite.”

  I take over. Macy and Bonnie are stone-face frowning. “Bonnie, your birthday is between Christmas and New Year’s Day. What if we celebrated your birthday instead, for the whole week?”

  “What about my birthday?” Macy says this, sibling rivalry a real thing.

  “We’d celebrate your September birthday for a whole week too. We already have the best tree made by man. All we need to do is decorate the house.”

  “Even the outside?”

  “Yes,” I say, not really thinking this part through, but owning every change.

  “Our neighbors will say we’ve gone nuts,” Bonnie says, but she has the hint of a smile now.

  “Can I dress Boo like an elf?”

  “Yes,” I say.

  “Can we watch all the Christmas specials now?”

  “Certainly,” Ethan says. “The rest we can make up as we go along.”

  “Now, get your things. We’re driving to that Christmas In July Extravaganza.”

  There’s more to it than just this conversation. Of course I wrap simple presents for the girls come December 25th, decorate cookies, participate in their school pageants. But we don’t concentrate on the holiday as much, and the pain lessens. The girls enjoy a big Christmas in July and a smaller one in December. Their schoolmates come over more in the summer, do holiday things, watch Grinch on repeat. We read “The Night Before Christmas” on July 24th.

  Whispering later at night with Ethan, I feel hopeful. I admit that, and I ask Ethan about his parents, his siblings—maybe another mistake I worry over like beads is my hope to fix broken things. One sister still speaks to him, visits with her three kids for a Florida vacation away from that long Chicago winter they embrace. The brother-in-law is a peach of a guy. We have a lot of space for sleeping bags and a nice couch in our two-bedroom home on our stamp-sized lot with a view towards the highway and swamp beyond that. There’s an ocean close by even if you can’t see it.

  “You’ve said it before. I once believed my parents would never bend.”

  “You read their email. Sounded like they may be willing to let down their guard.”

  “What about your parents?”

  “They don’t care enough.”

  “Because I’m who I am, the ex-wife of a murderer.”

  “Probably. They’re too waspy to ever admit their own faults.”

  “Probably?”

  “Well—”

  “They don’t like me, us, because I’m black, because you married a black person.”

  “I told you this long ago. It’s nothing you need to keep talking about. It doesn’t matter what my parents think. They don’t know you.”

  “You know I think everything is my fault, that I need to apologize to everyone, even people I meet for the first time.”

  Ethan held me tighter. He’s surprised me more than anyone I’ve ever met.

  I remember not being able to breathe. That terrible night.

  All the oxygen in the chilly trailer vanishing as if I’d been shot into space from home base, untethered—that’s how I felt.

  “Mom?” Tiny Bonnie teetered out of her bunk like Cindy Lou Who, not in appearance, but in how wide-eyed and innocent she sounded, simply kind and mystified.

  “Sit down. Please, babe, I need you to focus,” Jeremy said, scooping up Bonnie and placing her next to me on the cushion.

  I took deep breaths, deeper down into that well that haunts me, the darkness, the depth welcome because it shielded me. My toddler-girl felt scared the next second as she witnessed her father fragmenting into manic desperation. Jeremy’s eyes held a panic so severe it triggered my own.

  After a moment, Bonnie and I clutched each other on the sofabed this late Christmas Eve. No, it was Christmas Day, the clock heralded a curse after its midnight chime. What was Bonnie doing up? Th
at’s where my thoughts spun to as my husband came home, stolen wrapped presents under his arms.

  “Here. Take these and hide them.” He said this and threw work clothes into a garbage bag along with his razor.

  “What did you do?” I said, even as Bonnie grasped my leg tighter.

  “Did Santa come?”

  I ignored her question, pressed my hand against her bird-sized back.

  “It’s better you don’t know. They’ll think you were involved.”

  “Then take whatever’s in those gifts back. I don’t want to know, and you’re not thinking whatever this is clearly enough. Take your troubles and leave us out of it. Is that your brother in the van outside? What did you two do?”

  I heard sirens in the distance.

  Afterwards, who could think about Christmas in the same way again? In the first month there were lots of cameras and reporters trying to get a shot of me, interview me, link me to what my husband and his brother did. They were murderers. I married badly. My mother was so right. She and the rest of the family shunned me completely after this Christmas, no more reaching out on my part either.

  I stayed indoors as much as possible. I didn’t park near work and somehow the newspaperman didn’t stake out the school. I did tell my story to the principal. My side, and she had the best poker face, offered little reassurance that I’d be able to keep my job. If I became too big a distraction…

  I’d sue if they fired me without cause. That’s a thought I remember now. I didn’t have the money to sue anyone, and no lawyer would defend me against the system.

  I grew without solace, faced each day’s questions with a stony demeanor. The girls became shadows joined with my own.

  I visited the paralyzed police officer in the hospital, somehow avoiding the nurses and other staff members. Luck had nothing to do with it. I wasn’t invisible, and I received side-eye from most of the all-white members of these northern towns regardless of how presentable I appeared.

  I needed to move forward, and apologizing even if I didn’t do anything wrong myself needed to happen. I felt this as the days passed. I read a story in the local paper about the officer’s rehabilitation, the regurgitation of my husband’s misdeeds. I needed to apologize for him. Maybe I am selfish. My parents think so.