‘What is it you want, Mary? What do you want? You want the moon? Just say the word and I’ll throw a lasso around it and pull it down.’
She stared at the TV screen from her spot on the living-room couch at three in the morning, watching, of all things, It’s a Wonderful Life on TBS. It had been her mother’s all-time favorite movie. She used to let Julia stay up to watch it with her on Christmas Eve after midnight Mass, when the rest of the house had gone off to sleep. They’d make popcorn and snuggle on the couch under the cotton and fleece pink blanket stolen off Julia’s bed. Momma knew every line. Every single word, in fact. Sometimes she would say them along with the actors, with the same inflection, too. She’d had Jimmy Stewart down pat.
‘Hey! That’s a pretty good idea. I’ll give you the moon, Mary.’
They’d never had the chance to watch it that last Christmas. Christmas Eve that year was spent in her new room at Aunt Nora’s in Great Kills, far away from her living room in West Hempstead, far away from Carly and her friends and her school. Sitting on her new bed, with her new pink comforter and her new ruffled curtains, she’d watched out the window as carloads of well-dressed, smiling people pulled up in front of her new neighbors’ house, platters of food and bottles of wine in their hands, arms loaded with Christmas presents. She’d sat there for hours in the dark, her numb body trapped in place, watching the comings and goings of what was now to be her new life, reciting sad, cheesy lines from her mother’s all-time favorite movie, which now played like a bad memory in her head. Only, unlike a TV movie that you didn’t want to watch anymore, she couldn’t turn it off. Instead, it just kept running, running, running, as she sat at that window, until the entire film had played out in her mind. She’d spent the last fifteen years hating herself for taking those two hours and twelve minutes for granted every year. If she could go back and have one more moment with her mother, just one more, that would be it.
‘Strange, isn’t it? Each man’s life touches so many other lives,’ Clarence the Angel said to a sad and shocked George Bailey. ‘When he isn’t around he leaves an awful hole, doesn’t he?’
She mouthed the words along with Clarence and closed her eyes to stop the tears. She could still smell the damn fleece blanket – the one Aunt Nora had replaced – and the lilac-scented fabric softener her mom used to use. Since she’d moved into her own apartment, she’d tried every brand known to man in the stores, but she’d still never found it.