It’s December 22, only two more sleeps until Christmas Eve, and this is our baking day. We always make Rice Krispies Treats and peanut butter cookies. Tonight at seven, I will Skype with Grandpa Bill and Grandma Violet. Dad and I, we have our Christmas traditions, and I always know what to expect. I like a life with no surprises.
One day, I hope Trullia will explain. I want her to explain everything, like how and why she left us, and I’m going to ask her to explain what we ever did to force her to run away like that.
When elephants fly, maybe my mother will apologize. When elephants fly, maybe I’ll forgive. Maybe. Maybe not.
The cabin is warm with the smell of butter and sugar. Cookies are cooling on paper towels. I love this Christmas baking day smell, plus the scent of the evergreen tree we cut from the mountain. The whole room feels cozy with cookies and Christmas. The tree is all lit up in the corner, decorated with every special ornament I’ve made since I was a baby. Dad is so proud of my art.
“Time to top off the tree,” Dad says. He hands the shimmery star to me. My grandparents gave us this star when I was little.
“To light our way,” I say, like always, carefully placing the star on the tip-top pointed branch of the tree. I arrange it nice and straight. It’s always important to us that our star be just right.
Dad plugs the star into the strand of twinkle lights, and it gleams to life, shining.
“There,” he says. “Now we can see through the dark. Find our way through another winter and back to summertime.”
I love summer best, when everything is a riot of blossoms and blooms. My mother was named for a wildflower, and so am I. Lily Rose Pruitt, named for the common daylily that grows here on the mountain. I guess it’s an appropriate name, because common daylilies are untamed and orange, and so is my hair. Not that anybody could have known that when I was born, a bald-headed baby that cried way too much and kept people awake at night.
I was born in summertime, when the mountain is full of flowers. They make me wheeze with my asthma, but I forgive them for that. After all, they’re so beautiful and it’s not their fault some people have allergies.
We have tall buttercup and jewelweed, touch-me-nots, Venus’s looking glass and devil’s paintbrush, purple goat’s beard and fireweed. We’re so exploding-full of flowers in the summertime that it almost makes your eyes go blind with beauty.
Sometimes I wonder how my mother could have left all these flowers, this mountain, our campground, my dad. But mostly I wonder how and why she could have left me. Her own flesh and blood and bones and breath.
And tonight, just like always, she won’t even join in on the Skype call.
My grandparents’ faces fill the computer screen, and their smiles beam sunshine. The wonder of Skype always makes them laugh. They look even older than the last time we Skyped, after a turkey dinner on Thanksgiving Day, but they are still really cute, in that old-people kind of way. Both with hair white as cotton (but Grandma’s long and streaked with purple), and their eyes shine soft and blue.
“There you are, Lily-Bird!” says Grandma Violet. “Big as life! West Virginia to Florida, and we’re together again. Magic! Ta-da!”
“Hi!” says Grandpa Bill in his raspy voice. “How are you, Lily dear?”
“I’m fine.”
“So good to see your face!” says Grandma Violet.
“So what do you want for Christmas?” asks Grandpa.
I shrug.
“Maybe new paints. A great year for me and Dad. To get good grades in school. That probably sounds like New Year’s resolutions, but that’s what I want.”
“What a good girl!” says Grandma.
“A heart as big as West Virginia!” says Grandpa. They are full of compliments for me, that’s for sure.
We never bring up my mother on these Skype visits. We act as if she doesn’t even exist.
“So, uh, how’s Florida?” I ask.
“Bright and sunny as ever!” says Grandpa. “Seventy degrees tonight.”
“Wow,” I say. “It’s like below freezing here.”
“One day, we’re hoping you get down here to visit, sweetie,” says Grandma. “Before you’re all grown up.”
“I know, right?” I reply. Dad’s tapping my back. “Here, Dad wants to say hi.”
Dad leans over my shoulder and puts his face in front of the screen.
“Hi!” he says, then steps away.
My grandparents laugh, and they both say “hi” at the same time.
“Let’s see your tree, Lily,” they say, like always. I carry the computer to the living room and show them the tree so they can ooh and aah.
“So sweet!” says Grandma. “Still using the star we gave you when you were a baby.”
Then we chat about random things like school and how cool it is that Dad and I always make so many cookies and treats.
“Well, I’m beat,” Grandpa says. He yawns. His face is pale. “Love you to the moon.”
I look outside, through the living room window, at the frosty Friday night full moon hanging over our home in West Virginia. The same miraculous moon that shines over Florida, and my grandparents, and even over my mother.
“I love you, too,” I say. “To the moon.”
And I seriously do.