Needless to say, I’ve never liked Christmas.
Every year I spend Christmas Eve with Bernadette’s family and reject all invitations for Christmas Day.
For years I was fought over, pressured, guilted by Dad and Mom, to choose between them. One would think they’d come to some kind of half-day-each agreement, but not my parents—why agree when you have the opportunity to wage war? Once I was old enough to choose, I stopped celebrating altogether.
Usually I just paint.
This year though, I go to my closet, take out the Lucas shoebox and bring it to the living room.
Wishing like crazy for a drink, I open the box.
On top is a Polaroid of us at graduation. Our arms are flung around each other and we’re grinning like five-year-olds. So young.
Lucas was fond of taking photos, so there are lots. One by one, I go through them. Interspersed with the pictures are Valentine cards, birthday cards, the occasional love note left on my pillow. My throat aches, but I force myself to read every word, take in every detail. I come across a Christmas poem he wrote me one year. It says:
Mara, Mara, why so sad
in the happy season?
Trees and Santa make you mad
I don’t know the reason.
I say it out loud and laugh.
Once the box has yielded up its painful treasures, the question is what to do with it all? Surely going through it isn’t enough—not even close.
The phone rings.
Usually I don’t answer the phone on Christmas Day, but today I do. It’s Mom. Maybe it’s just the state I’m in, but something in her voice touches me, forces me to remember I love her. The next thing I know I’m suggesting we have lunch tomorrow and we’re making plans to meet at a pub up the street from me.
I take Dad and Shauna’s call too; it seems that capitulation is the theme of the day. Or one might call it change.
I decide to organize the Lucas stuff. I start chronologically, making a pile for each semester and then create subcategories—photos, letters, notes, cards, etcetera. I plan to buy a better box, one with little files where all of it can go. Or maybe I’ll purge most of it. Some of it. But not yet.
There are tiny sketches too, working drafts, and, finally, three sculptures from Lucas’s pre-tennis-ball-and-shellac phase that I’ve been keeping in a dark corner of the basement. Anything I like, I put on display in the house. Seeing it every day will be hard to get used to, but I think it would make him happy.
I wander from room to room searching my soul for a way to integrate, to rehabilitate, to find someplace less painful for his memory to exist.
And finally I go to my studio and paint until I cannot keep my eyes open or my fingers moving any longer.
***
It’s been over a year since I’ve seen Mom, so I hardly notice the food at lunch.
As always, I feel scruffy and freakish in my jeans and cotton sweater next to her in her beige wool suit, silk scarf and precarious-looking leather boots.
Even the day after Christmas, she has her laptop, cell, and PDA.
“How are you?” she says.
I fiddle with my napkin. “Good. Really good.”
She regales me with work stories and at the end of lunch hands me a gift bag.
“Mom, you didn’t have to.”
She pats my arm. “Open it.”
I reach into the tissue and pull out a small box. Inside is a miniature artist’s palette made of crystal.
I am speechless.
Mom starts to shift in her chair. “If you don’t like it, I can exchange it.”
“No, it’s beautiful.”
“Well, I know I don’t get the whole art thing, but I thought you might like it.”
“I do.”
“Merry Christmas, honey.”
I try not to cry on the walk home.
***
After the moderate success of lunch, I decide to be really wild and drop in on Dad and Shauna in the evening.
They invite me to dinner and I accept.
Shauna gives me a pair of turquoise earrings from Mexico and Dad sits calmly on the couch watching “Six Feet Under” on DVD and asking the occasional question.
“So,” he says. “What happened to your boyfriend...Hugo, wasn’t it?”
“We broke up.”
“How come?”
I sigh. “It’s complicated.”
Dad nods. “Relationships aren’t easy for you, huh?”
“No, Dad,” I say. “They’re not.”
He reaches out and pats my knee.
“It’ll get easier someday,” he says, and smiles fondly at Shauna. “I promise.”
***
New Year’s Eve, I find myself on Erik’s doorstep.
He is alone. There a dark circles under his eyes and his skin is pale—he looks like hell.
“Well, well...” he says.
“You were right,” I say. “We’re not quite done.”
He crosses his arms over his chest. “I’m not fucking you tonight, Mara.”
“I didn’t ask you to.”
He raises an eyebrow. “You’re here.”
I flush and he smirks.
“Shouldn’t you be at some swanky party with your boyfriend?”
“You know, that really doesn’t suit you. Erik.”
“You’re right.” He sighs. “You’d better come in.”
I slip past him and make my way to the couch, where I curl up in the corner. Erik gives me a quizzical look and sits down at the other end.
“Hugo and I broke up,” I say. “And I went out and stood in traffic.”
Erik frowns. “Seems a little over the top. How long have you known the guy?”
“It wasn’t about him,” I say. “I stood on the streetcar tracks. I stood there and waited and I almost let one hit me. I considered it.”
His eyes widen.
“We have to talk about Lucas,” I say.
He shakes his head.
“Erik.”
“No.” He gets up and paces to the bedroom door and back.
“You know you never answered my question that night,” I say.
“What question? It was five fucking years ago.”
***
Lucas is a sound sleeper, and there are things you need to know; things only Erik can tell you. You creep from the bed, grab some clothes, and tiptoe to the living room to put them on.
The streetcar carries you across town to Erik’s place where you see red light glowing from the window behind the fire escape. You haven’t been here for weeks and planned never to come again. This is the last time and you’re here for answers, not sex.
Since the excruciating family dinner, you’ve been trying to reconcile the Erik you’ve been fucking with the half-brother Lucas despises. Your heart and loyalty must be with Lucas, but the story of Erik’s childhood speaks to you. You know now why you were drawn to him. It wasn’t only his beauty, wasn’t just physical. Like you, he knows the extremity, of loss, of being lost. He knows what a scary place the world can be. This knowledge is something Lucas does not have, an awareness he is missing. Lucas believes the world is a good place and that people live happily ever after. You were hoping his belief would infect you, inspire you, and perhaps heal your pathetic, jaded soul.
But instead, something in Erik called and you responded, proving your worst fears about yourself. You are doomed to selfishness, doomed to fail the ones you love, just like your parents. You are a faithless piece of shit who will never deserve to be loved. You have a sick feeling that when you go inside and ask the questions you need to ask, Erik might prove he is just as bad, possibly worse.
You go up the stairs and knock on the door. He opens it a crack and peeks out. Seeing it’s you, he opens it wider, lets you in and shuts it quickly.
“Did you know?” you ask, and look for an answer on his face.
He lights a cigarette and gazes at you through narrowed eyes.
“You shouldn’t have come.”
***
“What question?” Erik says again.
“You remember.”
“Not really,” he says. “ Besides, you were the one cheating on Lucas, not me.”
“I know that.”
“There’s no absolution here, Mara. We have to just live with it.”
“I know that too, but someday I’d like to think I might be happy. I’d like to believe that everything I touch isn’t going to turn to shit.”
“Good luck,” he says and shrugs.
“There must be something we can do.”
“Besides fucking?” he says.
“Yeah, besides that.”
He sneers. “Oh, I get it. You want to talk about feelings and cry and all that shit.”
“Well, I want to talk at least.”
“Bad news: I don’t.” But he lowers himself onto a stool and hunches there.
“Tough,” I say, and push on. “Let’s start with this: why did you have sex with me? In the beginning.”
His eyes lift and meet mine. “I thought that was pretty obvious.” I can read his thoughts as if they’re my own, but I am not to be distracted or deterred.
“Listen.” I lean forward. “Let’s just get this out of the way, because I’ve wondered all this time and I need to know.”
“Fine. Get to it,” he snaps.
“You and Lucas hated each other.”
“Check.”
“You came back years later and tried to make amends, he rejected you.”
“Check.”
“He was a spoiled brat who’d had a perfect life compared to yours and he had no empathy, no room in his heart for forgiveness...”
“Where’re you going with this, Mara?”
“And there he is, all golden and smug with his art and his trust fund and his precious girlfriend...”
Erik stands. “I think you’d better shut up.”
I stand too. “It wouldn’t be that hard, once you get that job at the school, to find out who she was, what class she was in, and then wave your big dick around and fasten your dark-soul eyes on her and somehow know, because you know him, that a part of her must be starving for someone just like you...”
“You fucking bitch.” He seizes me by the arms.
“I wouldn’t judge you, Erik,” I say.
“Fuck you.”
He pushes me back and my shoulders and head slam against the wall.
I grit my teeth. “I just need to know.”
He has me by the shoulders and he’s gripping so hard it hurts.
I shove him away, he lands on the floor and I stand over him, shouting. “I need to know, Erik. You’re not the one who walked out of here and saw him standing there. You didn’t hear him calling me a whore and screaming that he was going to kill himself, that we’d be sorry...”
My voice cracks as it all comes back; the shock of seeing Lucas in front of Erik’s building when I’d left him fast asleep in our bed, his voice when he said he knew what I’d been doing, who lived in the apartment behind me, the tendons on his neck pulsing as he raged, the sick, dizzy feeling in my belly. I was paralyzed, too terrified to speak. I stood shaking my head, gasping for breath, taking the cruel names because, after all, I deserved them. And then the words, those final words: “I’m going to fucking kill you, I’ll kill you both. Better yet, I’ll kill myself and then you’ll be sorry! Then you’ll understand what you’ve destroyed, you fucking slut!”
Such a manic look in his eyes and underneath, such pain, such bitterness, so much hate coming at you as he starts to back away. You take a step towards him, your eyes begging him to stay, to listen, but he hisses and takes another step.
“You’ll be sorry,” he says again.
A scream in your head as you see it, and then his name from your lips, ripped from deep inside, a warning that comes a second too late, a second before the sound of flesh and bone colliding with metal, the screeching brakes, his body like a rag doll, twisted and flying...
And finally everything goes still and there are only his eyes accusing, his body mangled and dead.
I come back to the present. Erik is staring at me and I must have been speaking, must have been, because he is stricken, frozen in the moment with me.
My face is covered in tears and I am hyperventilating.
“Jesus,” Erik finally breathes.
“You can do whatever you want to me,” I say in a voice so raw it doesn’t even sound like me. “But none of it will ever hurt as much as that hurts. And I deserve it. I deserve worse.”
I see tears in Erik’s eyes and horror behind them. Erik missed the accusations but he heard the sound, heard my scream, ran outside and saw the same broken body, the same dead, eyes that I did. We are reliving it now, but of course neither of us ever really left the scene.
“Like you said,” I whisper, “we can never run fast enough.”
“No we can’t.”
I kneel on the floor beside him.
“I’m not trying to shift the blame, Erik. There’s no point. I would just like to know if there was even one honest thing in the whole mess...or if, on top of it all, I was such a fool as to let you play me.”
His cheeks are wet with tears and he closes his eyes. “Fuck you for thinking I would.”
Something in me loosens, dissolves and floats away, leaving a little more space for breath.
“You didn’t know who I was,” I say, just to be sure.
He opens his eyes and shakes his head.
“Well, that’s something,” I say, and outside, out in the world, the new year arrives.