What’s it mean when somebody says somebody’s a hothouse flower?” Doc asked us that evening as we awaited Daisy’s hypnotic monotone. He took off a mitten and skimmed his fingertip over the top of the wine in his glass to gather up a speck of something.
Doc had moved the CB radio from the car and installed it in the house. The wind had picked up both outside and inside, winter wanting to settle in good and fierce, and we sipped the leftover mulled wine that Ivy had brought over and reheated in a saucepan. Doc’s house was a Cape Cod cast adrift far from sea, and we’d all always adored it even as we cursed its chill and Doc’s indifference to the icicles that often formed on the edges of windowpanes. It wasn’t that he was hot-blooded; he just didn’t mind being cold.
“Buxom?” Ivy said. “Is that what it means? Or maybe I’m thinking of a hothouse tomato.”
I nibbled off the limbs of a gingerbread man, pushing my woolen scarf down off my lips and chin to take each bite. “Delicate,” I said.
“You remember Hailey Oliver?” Doc asked.
“No,” Ivy said without hesitation.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” he said. “You both were in plays in high school. And junior high. I think you even played sisters once. In One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest or something.”
“You don’t be ridiculous,” she said, sighing, rubbing her neck as if wearied by the conversation. “There are no sisters in Cuckoo’s Nest.”
“You were hookers,” I said. Why do these young ones remember so little of their own lives? “The girl with the terrible lisp somehow got the part of Nurse Ratched, and nobody could understand a word she said. It was a long night. Hailey Oliver played a hooker, and you played another hooker.”
“No,” Ivy said, “I played the hooker, and she played the other hooker.”
“So you do remember,” Doc said. “You said you didn’t remember.”
“You didn’t believe me anyway, so what does it matter?”
“But why wouldn’t you just say you remembered her when I asked you if you remembered her?”
“If you were so sure I remembered her,” Ivy said, “then why’d you ask to begin with?”
“Hey, shhhh, shut up,” Tiff said, but she said it gently, looking up from her book.
“Your Uncle Doc and I aren’t fighting, honey,” Ivy said.
“No, I mean, shut up and listen,” Tiff said. We all tried to hear past the quiet of the room until we realized it was the quiet we were listening for. “She’s like a half hour late,” Tiff said.
Doc jiggled the wires and knobs of the CB as Tiff texted friends. No one’s CB anywhere was picking up Daisy, it seemed. Another hour passed: more mulled wine, more wind rattling the panes.
“There you have it,” Tiff finally said. “A fraud. She’s got nothing left.” She walked to the Christmas tree in the corner and clucked her tongue and shook her head, disappointed in Doc’s arrangement. Doc had never bought an ornament in his adult life—ever since his parents had died, he’d decorated only with the ornaments of his childhood. Tiff moved a long-legged elf from a lower branch to an upper one. She relocated a crocheted snowman of unraveling yarn. She pinched the silk gown of an angel hanging crookedly from a hook in her left wing, lifting the skirts to reveal porcelain joints hinged with old twine.
“The French don’t put up trees,” Ivy said.
“Yeah, you’ve said that,” Tiff said. All week Ivy had been educating us in French tradition, but when Tiff had gone online to investigate Ivy’s gratingly European approach to decorating—slippers full of chestnuts instead of stockings on the hearth, birds of spun sugar on the windowsill—she’d found pictures of a holiday gaudy like our own, trees included.
Tiff wandered off into what we called the sunroom, though the overgrown maple trees thick in the backyard kept all the sun out, even in the winter, when the branches were bare. She shut the door behind her, closing herself off from the rest of us. Coats hung from hooks near the door that led outside, but the coats were for inside, for the sunroom, which was bitterly cold until March. Tiff put on a parka and dropped into the creaking easy chair in the corner, where she usually sat to read, and plucked at the pills of lint in the chair’s fabric. She’d heard of people sacrificing heat in their homes for reasons both spiritual and environmental. Maybe, she considered, she’d move out of Ivy’s house and into this frigid sunroom, where she’d fashion a makeshift yurt from bookcases and sleep nearly crushed beneath heavy quilts. She would locate a cosmic peace.
Tiff wasn’t sure why she was so antsy to hear Daisy read more of her rendition of Coffins, especially because she was convinced of its inauthenticity. Tiff had read online far more convincing rip-offs and had even once tried her own hand at fan fiction—she’d posted, to an unauthorized Miranda-and-Desiree website, a short story about an orphaned wolf-girl who devoured the rabbits that decimated the vegetable gardens of Rothgutt’s Asylum. Tiff knew of some pieces of Miranda-and-Desiree fan fiction that had become legendary in their own right, stories widely and covertly exchanged. There was even fan fiction derived from fan fiction, unofficial plotlines and characters and threads growing like weedy infestations.
Tiff pulled her arms up out of the sleeves of the parka and brought her hands in close to her chest, folding them prayer-like over her heart, feeling for her heart’s thump; she took delight in the rapid chattering of her teeth, as if the cold room were some kind of amusement-park ride. She thought about all the different lives she’d already led, and the different lives she could yet lead, lives that perhaps would better reflect her personality. Maybe she could become famous as the yurt girl of Nebraska, then famous again later when everyone wondered whatever happened to her.
Tiff went to the bookcase along the wall, poked her arms back through the sleeves of the parka, and reached up to tug at the corner of the spine of a book on the top shelf. It was a hollowed-out copy of the third Miranda-and-Desiree book, The Key to the Hollowed-Out Book, that Doc had bought for Tiff at a craft fair; a guy with a jigsaw had sliced out the book’s insides and fitted it with hinges. The heart-shaped lock had long since ceased to clasp, and Tiff had lost the key long before that. Kept inside were notes Tiff had once thought significant, little slips of paper passed between the girls in school, notes full of confessions of love for this boy or that one, notes demanding apologies, notes full of lies meant to incite gossip. It made Tiff cringe to read them now. Though the oldest were from only a few years before, it embarrassed her that she’d felt so strongly about things so dumb. So what if Aubrey had sat next to Lucas at lunch? And who cared that Cecily had picked Sara last for kickball in gym class? But Tiff couldn’t resist returning to the notes again and again, revisiting old anxieties that had grown weak and silly.
Tiff put the hollowed-out book back on the shelf, took down the tenth book, and returned to her chair to thumb through it. She couldn’t imagine reading The Coffins of Little Hope anywhere else than in this cold room of Doc’s, wearing a pair of gloves from which she’d cut off half of each finger and drinking hot cocoa from a soup mug. Tiff suspected her doubts about Daisy’s Coffins rose from the fact that it wasn’t a book at all, no matter who had written it. Tiff needed the words on the page to become the voice in her head, her own voice, or an approximation of it, and she needed the paper and the sound of the scratch of her chapped fingertips against it as she fiddled with each page, ever ready to turn it.