“MOM? MOM!”
Leo hurries up the stairs, looking for her mom. “Mom? Where are you?”
Her mom comes out of her bedroom. Her eyes are a little puffy but she’s not crying, which is good. It had been a rough day. Not that Leo had been expecting Christmas Eve to be a party. She felt like she did the time she first went to that big roller coaster amusement park, tagging along with Nina and her friends. She had thought she could handle it, but the way her stomach had swooped once she saw the wild tracks made her think twice, and she spent most of the trip waiting for everyone at the ride’s carefully marked exits.
This time, though, there’s no getting off the ride. Christmas Eve has officially begun.
There are a few gifts under their tree, hastily wrapped and tied with lopsided bows. Two of them are for Denver (a new collar and a new leash), both of them purchased by Leo. Nina had always been responsible for Denver’s gifts, had even put a few squeaky balls in his stocking every year, and for all of the heartbreak and pain that this year has brought to Leo, she doesn’t think her heart can handle it if Denver doesn’t get any presents this Christmas. She hopes he likes his new leash. It’s red and has paw prints all over it. She’s pretty sure Nina would approve.
She doesn’t get him anything for his stocking, though, mostly because she has no idea where it even is. They didn’t exactly do a lot of decorating this year. The tree is up, but not decorated, and the only reason it even has lights in the first place is that it’s artificial and pre-lit. It even has a special button that changes the lights from bright colors to soft, then flashing, then fading. Denver, for reasons only he knows, likes to sleep on that button, so the tree sometimes looks like it’s in the middle of a raging party, lights changing and flashing every few seconds.
Leo and her mom don’t have the heart to shoo him away from the tree this year, so the tree is currently lighting up a storm.
“Whoa,” her mom says now, clearing her throat a little, a sure sign that she’s been crying in her bathroom. Leo decides to ignore that part. “You’re in a hurry. Where’s the fire?”
“East just texted me,” Leo says. “He has a gift for me, I guess. Can he come over? Just for a few minutes. He has to go to his grandfather’s house tonight, they go to Christmas Eve Mass and everything.”
Leo can feel the weight of her words as her mom pauses. “Mom,” she says again. “It’s just a gift.”
“Fine,” her mom finally says. “It’s fine, sure. Tell him to come over.”
“But I didn’t get him anything,” Leo worries, picking at her cuticles again. Her mom pulls her hands apart without even mentioning it, going down the stairs and heading toward the tree. Denver’s moved away so she hits the button and tiny white lights settle in the branches.
“I’m sure East will understand,” her mom says.
“Will I seem like a jerk, though?”
“Lee.” Her mom looks up from the tree. “You have never been a jerk in your entire life.”
“That’s not true,” she says. “Remember when I shoved that kid in preschool and she landed facedown in the sandbox?”
“Agatha Perkins deserved it,” her mom replies, which makes Leo smile.
“Probably,” she agrees. Agatha had been pretty notorious in their neighborhood circles. Nobody had cried when she and her family moved away the week before third grade started.
“You are not a jerk, East will understand. Have you seen the TV remote?”
“Under the couch cushion,” Leo says, then adds, “Denver was trying to chew on it so I hid it,” when her mom raises a questioning eyebrow.
Denver doesn’t even look up from his water bowl, where he’s currently slurping like a camel. He never worries if he’s a jerk or not, Leo thinks.
Their plan had been to heat up a frozen pizza and watch a non-Christmas movie. Neither of them were up for any feel-good holiday cheer about love and family and togetherness. More specifically, they were going to watch Independence Day. Leo had picked it out and it said a lot about her mom’s current state of mind that she had agreed immediately to watch a movie about aliens on Christmas Eve. She had expected her to disagree immediately but all she said was, “Is that the one where Bill Pullman is president?” and Leo said yes even though she wasn’t sure and had to look it up later on IMDb. (It was.)
Leo had FaceTimed with her dad and Stephanie earlier that night, the two of them holding up champagne glasses filled with sparkling cider. They looked happy, but their smiles were tight, and there were a few moments where the three of them pretended that the gaping silences in between their sentences were because of Wi-Fi delays and not their own inability to fill the space. “Love you guys,” Leo said at the end. “All of you.”
Stephanie’s smile got a bit bigger, a bit more real.
Leo still hasn’t told her mom about the whole baby thing. She keeps thinking that tomorrow will be best, and then tomorrow becomes yesterday and now tomorrow is Christmas and well, Leo’s not an expert but she’s pretty sure that today’s not the best day to drop the news. Leo decides that maybe that weird week between Christmas and New Year’s is best, when everyone’s a little deflated and tired from the holidays but still has some jolly spirit left.
Leo tries not to think about what Nina would say if Leo ever used the phrase “jolly spirit” in front of her.
“When’s East coming over?” her mom asks, her voice muffled by one of the couch cushions as she digs around for the TV remote.
Leo checks her phone. “Um, maybe in the next fifteen minutes or so?”
They both look around at the house. A fine layer of corgi hair seems to coat every available surface. There’s a bunch of old drinking glasses on the coffee table and five shoes—not five pairs of shoes, just five shoes—lying near the front door. The tree is still leaning to the left, even though one of them has said, “We should straighten the tree” at least once a day since it’s been up. Two coats are slung over the stair railing, crusty plates are stacked up in the kitchen sink, and the throw rug is cultivating its own family of dust bunnies.
“I’ll get the vacuum,” Leo says.
“I got the kitchen,” her mom replies.
East shows up eighteen minutes later, just when Leo is literally kicking their Roomba back into the hall closet, and her mom is slamming the dishwasher shut. “We’re sort of violent cleaners, aren’t we,” Leo says, feeling a little out of breath after their mad dash to make the house look hospitable again.
“The tree is still crooked,” her mom says.
“That’s part of its charm.” Leo shuts the closet door and quickly puts her hair back behind her ears. “Plus it’s just East,” she adds. “He doesn’t care what the house looks like.”
“I care,” her mom says, which is news to Leo, then starts the dishwasher. It immediately roars to life, its familiar surge and hum making the house almost feel like it did before, working in tandem with all of the people who lived in it, doing its part to create a home for them. Leo can’t remember the last time they ran it. She’s eaten cereal out of the same bowl for at least the last month, washing and rinsing it and leaving it to dry in the rack so she can just grab it again the following morning.
Fuck, Leo thinks to herself as her phone buzzes. She’s sentimental about the dishwasher. If this is what Christmas Eve is going to feel like, Christmas is sure to be a disaster. She’ll probably end up sobbing over her dad and Stephanie’s Nest thermostat at the rate this is going.
She checks her phone. Hello hello, East has texted, and she can almost hear him saying the words, low and quiet and slightly bemused.
Leo looks up at her mom, who’s tucking her own stray hairs behind her ears. Her mom’s gone a lot grayer in the past few months and Leo has a sudden sense of time moving too fast, of her mom changing and aging and slipping through her hands. But all she says is, “East’s here.”
“Did he knock?” Her mom frowns, and Leo holds up her phone and wiggles it a bit.
“He can’t just ring the bell?”
“Mom, nobody rings the bell. This isn’t a sitcom.” Leo’s not even sure if she knows what their doorbell sounds like. “I’m opening the door, okay? The house looks fine. East knows that we live here with a shedding corgi. He doesn’t think it’s a film set.”
Out of the corner of her eye, she sees her mom open a kitchen drawer and shove a pile of unopened mail inside.
True to his text, East is indeed standing at the door. He looks nice, his hair actually combed back rather than in his face. Leo thinks it looks like the kind of hairstyle a grandparent would approve of on their way to Christmas Eve Mass. He’s also wearing a buttoned-up blue shirt and a zip-up gray sweater, and Leo doesn’t even have to look at his shoes to know that they’re black and sturdy. Sensible. It’s a far cry from his checkered Vans and Nina’s hoodie, and she knows her sister would tease him endlessly about his temporary new look.
But Leo is not her sister.
“You look nice,” she says, standing back a little so he can come inside. “Nice shirt.”
“Thanks,” he says. “I like your tree.”
“It leans,” Leo and her mom say at the same time. Leo’s almost forgotten that her mom is even there, and when she turns to look at her, Leo’s surprised to see that her mom actually looks nervous?
And then she remembers that night in the emergency room, the squeak of gurney wheels in the emergency room corridor, how bright the fluorescent lights had been, her mom bursting through the door, East’s wails ringing down the hall.
“Hi, Ms. Stott,” East says, sounding as nervous as her mom looks. “I’m sorry to stop by in the middle of Christmas Eve and all, I just had this thing”—he gestures toward the gift in his hand—“for Leo.”
“No, that’s fine, that’s fine,” her mom says. “It’s—It’s good to see you, Easton.”
“You too.”
Her mom is the one who moves first, stepping forward and putting her arms around East, who gingerly hugs her back. In the background, the dishwasher stops and then starts with renewed vigor, and Leo finds herself wishing she could step in between them, but also knowing that there’s no place for her inside their embrace.
Her mom says something so quiet that Leo can’t make it out, then East is nodding as he pulls away. Both of their eyes are wet, her mom laughing a little as she quickly wipes hers on her sleeve, and East’s cheeks are flushed pink. “I’ll let you two talk,” her mom starts to say, but East interrupts her.
“Actually, my dad was wondering if you could come out to the car? He wanted to say hello, just like for a second.” East runs his hand through his hair, but he’s forgotten that it’s styled and so he only just messes it up. Leo has the urge to comb it back into place with her fingers. “He also said it’s okay if you’d rather not.”
“No, no, I’ll talk to your dad.” Leo’s mom pulls her cardigan tighter around her and Leo can see how her waist is thinner than it was last Christmas. No one else would have noticed, but now that it’s just the two of them in the house together, Leo sees things that she otherwise would have missed.
As soon as her mom steps outside toward the driveway, East turns back to Leo. “Hi,” he says. “Sorry, I look like I’m in some catalogue.”
“You look nice,” Leo says again. “Seriously.”
“You’ve used the word ‘nice’ three times in the past minute,” East points out.
“You know, we cleaned the house for you,” she teases. “We even ran the dishwasher. So you could be a little nicer.”
“That’s four.”
“East!” she screeches, and from underneath the tree, she can see Denver’s head pop up as the tree’s white lights begin to flash.
“That’s a party right there,” East says, gesturing toward the tree, and it occurs to Leo that maybe he’s stalling? Because he’s nervous? She’s seen East be many things over the past four months, but nervous has never been one of them, and she wonders what exactly is in the gift-wrapped package in his hand.
“So did you just come over to admire our disco tree or . . . ?” Leo says.
“Oh yeah. Yeah. Sorry. I, um.” East clears his throat and Leo finds herself suddenly feeling like a big sister toward him, even though she’s two years younger. She wonders if this is how Nina used to feel toward her, exasperated and protective at the same time.
“So!” East says, handing her the package. “Merry Christmas. Sorry about the wrapping.”
“You used duct tape,” Leo says, turning it over in her hands. The paper is pretty but the silver tape makes it looks more like a threat than a present.
“Yeah, apparently we’re out of Scotch tape.” East shrugs and runs another hand through his hair. At this rate, he’s going to show up to Mass looking like he arrived in a convertible during a hurricane. “This is all we had.”
“No biggie,” she says. “Can I open it now?”
“Yes, yes,” East says. “Sorry, yeah. Of course. I just, I really hope you like it and if you don’t, I’ll get it out of here and throw it in the trash and we can forget this whole thing ever happened.”
Leo smiles. It’s sort of fun to see him tripping over himself. She’s used to Cool East. She almost likes this version better.
“I’m sure I’ll love it,” she says, then tears the wrapping paper right down the middle since there’s no way she can get through the duct tape.
At first, all she sees is the back of the frame, but when she turns it over in her hands, her breath catches and her hand goes to her chest like she could force the air back into her lungs.
It’s a black-and-white photo of her and Nina at the party. They’re together on the diving board, Leo’s head tucked toward Nina’s as if she was trying to hear what her sister was saying. They’re both in profile, Nina’s face alive in a smile as the pool lights illuminate them. There are people in the background, but they’re blurred, making Nina and Leo look even sharper, almost as if someone’s drawn them with a fine-tipped pen.
When Leo doesn’t say anything at first, East jumps in.
“It’s a silver gelatin print,” he says. “I did it as a test and it looked really good. I didn’t even know I had this shot until a few days ago.” He clears his throat. “I know you want more memories of that night. This is how I remember it. Before everything, before . . .” He trails off as Leo grips the frame, stares into the photo like she could somehow disappear inside of it, slip back into the past before it all went wrong.
“This is my memory, Leo,” East murmurs. “I want you to have this one.”
Her heart thumps hard, almost like someone has reached into her chest and given it a tight squeeze. “East,” she says as soon as her brain calms down long enough for her to form words. “It’s beautiful. It’s . . .”
“I remembered what you said about her face,” East adds. “Maybe now you won’t forget it.”
Leo nods as her eyes fill. She’s cried so much this year and still has trouble figuring out if they’re happy or sad tears. These feel like both.
“I love it,” she says, then reaches up and wraps her free arm around his neck, hugging him so tight that he almost loses his balance. He catches himself, though, then puts his arms around her and holds her back. Outside, Leo can hear her mom’s voice, quiet but calm, and she closes her eyes and tries to imagine that everything is okay, that Nina is just upstairs, that East is here to surprise Nina with a beautiful photo of her and Leo, that Nina will absolutely love it.
“She would love it, too,” Leo whispers, and feels East nod against her shoulder.
Leo’s mom kindly clears her throat before she steps back through the doorway and East and Leo pull away from each other. “Hi,” Leo says, then wonders why she said it. “We’re fine.”
“Good.” Her mom smiles. “East, your dad is so excited for you and your college applications. That’s almost all he could talk about. You should be hearing back in a few weeks, he said?”
East looks a little uncomfortable as he shifts his weight, and Leo wonders if he feels guilty that he’s doing it alone, that Nina won’t be there by his side at graduation, or for that matter, anywhere else ever again.
“Yeah,” he says, then clears his throat. “He’s, uh, really proud.”
Leo’s mom glances down at the gift. “So what’d you get?”
Leo just holds it out to her because she’s not sure how to describe it, and her mom frowns as she takes the frame, holding it out a little so she can see it. Her glasses are on top of her head but Leo doesn’t point that out.
“Oh,” her mom says, and then “Oh” again, but this time it’s slightly garbled. She glances at East, then Leo. “Is this from . . . ?”
“Yes,” Leo replies, already knowing what her mom is asking. Next to them, East shifts his weight from one foot to the other and looks wary, like a kid who’s not sure if he broke a major rule. “It’s from that night. At the party.” Please don’t freak out, she adds silently.
But her mom doesn’t freak out. She just glances up at East with watery eyes, then gives him a small smile. “It’s beautiful, East,” she says. “Did you take this?”
East is now clutching his hands in front of him. “Yes,” he says. “And printed it, too.”
Leo’s mom nods as she hands the photo back to Leo, and then she reaches up and gives him a hug. It’s such a simple movement that none of them seem to register it at first, least of all East, but then he’s putting his arms around Leo’s mom and Leo sees his face wobble and shift as she holds him tight.
Apparently forgiveness can appear in many different ways, at the most surprising times. Leo tries very hard not to think about how death can sometimes do the same thing.
They only pull apart when East chuckles under his breath, then gestures to the stack of books about grief and healing on their stairs. They’ve been sitting there since at least September, Leo realizes, their permanence borne out of her and her mom’s steadfast refusal to acknowledge them.
“We had those, too,” he says wryly. “After my mom died.”
“Oh yeah.” Leo’s mom laughs a little, too. “My sister, Leo’s aunt, sent them. So did a few other people.” She shrugs. “They mean well, I guess.”
“There was a dumb workbook,” Leo adds.
East squints a little as he looks at the pile. “I think my dad still has the one on the bottom. That one’s not too bad. No quizzes or worksheets.”
Both Leo and her mom laugh at the same time, in the same way, that sharp bark of dark humor, a noise that can only truly be heard by someone who’s also uttered it. East’s eyes sparkle a little when he recognizes the sound. “Yeah,” he says. “Lots of people mean well.”
He leaves soon after and Leo waves toward his dad’s car, wrapping her arms around herself as she watches the red taillights fade into the dark street. Nina would love this weather, cold but not freezing, that tiny hint of crispness that signifies a Southern California winter. “Capital W Weather,” she would call it in the confident tone of someone whose closest experience with snow had been ordering Hawaiian shaved ice from a food truck every summer.
Leo leaves the front door open, waiting for her mom to tell her to shut it, that she’s letting out all the warm air, that the electric bill isn’t going to pay itself, all of the things she would have said to Nina if she had been there, too.
But when there’s nothing, Leo turns around to see her mom standing near the stairs, staring at the books. There’s five or so of them, some thin and some as thick as Nina’s old AP Bio textbook, the one she had forgotten to return to the school library at the end of last summer. It was still sitting on her desk upstairs, a picture of a green, slimy-looking frog staring up with bulging, unsympathetic eyes.
“Mom?” Leo says, but she doesn’t hear her at first, and Leo shuts the door with a little more force than normal, which jolts her mom out of her trance. “Sorry, it slipped,” she lies.
“Kelly does mean well,” her mom says, gesturing toward the stack. “These probably weren’t cheap, either.”
“Probably not,” Leo agrees, even though she has no idea. She’s still holding East’s gift in her hand, almost afraid to set it down and have it disappear just like Nina did. “Did you want to watch the movie?”
“What?” her mom says. “Oh, yes. Yes, of course. The one with the aliens, absolutely. Let’s do it.”
They light the fireplace with one of those fake logs, heat the frozen pizza (which always seems lukewarm at best in the middle, no matter how much Leo fiddles with the oven temperature), and pour sparkling cider and bring all of it over to the coffee table. Leo grabs the remote before her mom can, which means they’ll save at least ten minutes of her mom accidentally pressing the wrong button or changing the channel when she meant to turn up the volume.
It’s fine at first, but Leo can feel a small timbre of tension stretching through their living room. She manages to eat a slice of pizza, then another, but her mom only takes a few bites of hers and doesn’t touch the cider, either. There’s a lot of exciting things happening on the screen, aliens blowing up downtown Los Angeles and Will Smith saying booming, heroic things, but Leo can feel her mind being pulled toward her mom like a child who doesn’t want to leave a toy store.
Why did East have to point out the books? she thinks. They were so close—so fucking close!—to making it through this terrible rite of passage. A movie, a pizza, and then Leo could go upstairs and shut her door and scroll through her phone and pretend like it was just another night, that Nina was bent over her textbook down the hall, griping about homework under her breath. Leo knows it’s not exactly healthy to pretend (and those books on the stairs probably each have a chapter or two on denial), but when she’s alone at night, Leo can pretend, and pretending at night is what gets her through the days.
One of the aliens has just finished destroying everything and everyone in the lab when Leo’s mom reaches for the remote. “Can I . . . ?” she says, and Leo sees her hand shaking a little as she hands it over. True to form, she accidentally turns the volume up a few notches before she manages to pause the movie, so the alien destruction sounds particularly piercing before they’re jerked into silence.
“Mom?” Leo says. The two slices of pizza sit like rocks in her stomach. This whole thing was stupid, so stupid. She should have just gone to her dad’s.
But her mom is up and off the sofa, marching with a sturdiness that Leo hasn’t seen since The Before, and Leo scrambles after her, wondering if this is the moment when her mom loses it, if she’s going to have to watch her mom have a complete nervous breakdown while an alien is frozen mid-snacking on a bunch of people on TV.
Leo wonders if it’s too late to call an Uber and meet up with East and his family at Mass.
But her mom walks straight to the stairs, then reaches down, scoops all of the grief books up into her arms, then hands a couple to Leo. The cover on the top of her mom’s stack has a resigned-looking woman staring pensively out a window, a scarf wrapped around her shoulders. Saying Goodbye, the title says in looped script.
“Is this what I’m supposed to look like?” Leo’s mom says, holding it up and shaking it at Leo. “Like this woman?”
“It sort of looks like those romance novels that they sell by the cash registers at grocery stores,” Leo points out, and her mom’s face breaks out into a grin.
“It’s just so stupid,” she says, walking past Leo into the living room. Denver’s head pops up as she passes him, his ears following like two tiny satellites looking for either treats or trouble. “I don’t know what the hell Kelly was thinking. Like there’s a book that could help with this!” She gestures to the overall house, but Leo understands what she means. There’s nothing that could ever fill the space left behind by Nina.
And then before Leo can stop her, her mom’s tossing the book into the fireplace.
“Mom!” Leo cries.
“Which ones do you have?” Her mom asks her, ignoring her outburst as the flames catch the corner of Saying Goodbye. The woman still looks sad and serene as her face begins to crumple into ash.
Leo holds up one of hers. It’s a paperback but heavy. “From Mourning ’til Night,” she says, holding it up.
Her mom stands back and gestures toward the fireplace. “Let ’er rip, kiddo.”
Leo’s read Fahrenheit 451, or at least enough of it back in freshman English to get the point, so this feels . . . wrong? Is it technically illegal to burn books? Nina would know, Leo thinks before she can stop herself, but Nina’s not there anymore to tell her yes or no, true or false, right or wrong, and that’s sort of how they got here in the first place.
Leo tosses the book on top of the last one as her mom whoops and puts her fists into the air. It’s so weird to see her mom celebrating, to see her hopping up and down in her socked feet and smiling, and Leo finds herself half elated that her mom actually looks happy for once, and half terrified that her mom isn’t really acting like a mom anymore.
Whatever’s happening at her dad and Stephanie’s tonight, Leo’s pretty sure they’re not doing this.
“What about that workbook you mentioned?” her mom asks now, reaching for her sparkling cider and taking a big sip. “Do you still have it?”
“No, I put it in the recycling bin,” Leo admits.
Her mom—her mother!—rolls her eyes and polishes off the cider like it’s actual champagne. (And to be honest, now Leo’s a little curious if her mom secretly swapped out the fake stuff for the real thing when Leo wasn’t looking.) “A quiz,” she mutters, shaking her head. “Unbelievable.”
The Sixth Stage is next on the heap, followed by Struggling Through Sorrow. Her mom munches on a slice of pizza as the covers catch fire and her eyes have a glow to them that isn’t just a reflection of their now very roaring fireplace. “As if anyone could ever fucking understand this,” she says to herself.
This is now the second time that Leo’s ever heard her mom say the word “fuck.”
They stand next to each other for a few minutes, watching the flames get bigger and the room slowly begin to get smokier. “Mom?” Leo asks after a few minutes.
“Hmm?”
“Did you open that thing in the chimney, what’s it called?”
“The flue?”
“Yeah.” Leo coughs a little, waving a hand in front of her face. “That thing.”
Her mom pauses, then shakes her head. “Huh. I’m not sure.”
Leo’s about to respond, but the sudden, high-pitched screech of the smoke alarm beats her to it.