TEN

CHRISTMAS 2002

Hank and I have been practicing for tragedy for a few years. We put Jaxson down in early 2001. Well, I did. As I pulled out of the garage with the sick old dog in the backseat, Hank and Emmy stood in the doorway, Emmy wailing and Hank barely able to breathe. Then, at the end of 2001, my friend and Emmy’s godmother, Kitty, died of breast cancer. She was only thirty-three years old.

With elderly parents we are always expecting the “news.” While we wait for the inevitable, like farmers watching the skies for ice storms, disaster comes from a completely unexpected direction. In the summer of 2002, Hank’s sister Beth, a golf pro at an exclusive resort, is diagnosed with ovarian cancer. She is six months younger than I am.

 

We’ve been going to California for Thanksgiving or Christmas for the past ten years. We often take off for the mountains there to give Emmy a chance to play in the snow. We stop in rustic little restaurants for hot chocolate. Occasionally, Hank and I even leave Emmy with the grandparents and go out on our own, something we almost never do at home. We are always more in love with each other in California. We go to different beaches. We take Emmy and the dog to the park where Hank played as a boy.

This Christmas is different. This Christmas we linger nearby. The shopping is less frenzied, the dinners more subdued. This Christmas as we sit in the family room, Beth comes through the doorway, gaunt, hollowed, stoop-shouldered. Tears fall at their leisure from lashless eyelids as she recounts these long six months since July: the trips to the emergency room, the good nurses who bathed her as if she were a baby, the scar from sternum to pubis, the row of chairs in the chemo room. She takes off her wig and swigs from a beer, this soldier who looks at us from the middle of the trench, and the words pour like coins from a torn pocket. We are the dream of home she’s falling toward, the place where she plans to be born again.

Usually Southern California is dry in the winter, but this Christmas it won’t stop raining. My mother-in-law Jean tries to gather the strength to be the mother she has always been, cooking and cleaning, even though she’s in her seventies now. But she’s shell-shocked from these past six months. Still she manages to make dinner every night, and she and I indulge in our annual conversation marathon at the dining table. Hank Senior has put up a tree; as usual it’s given birth to several litters of presents.

We have the dog with us. We always do. The dogs have blurred in my mother-in-law’s mind. Satan, Jaxson, and now Merlyn. Each one black, each one male, each one a lab. Merlyn is the sneakiest of the three. Something glinting on the coffee table is an invitation for a quick snatch and dash—and there goes one of your favorite pair of earrings. Merlyn was born trouble—maybe that’s why he has become my dog instead of Hank’s.

 

I remember the first time I met Jean and Hank Senior, the day I stumbled out of the backseat of the rental car, barefoot and clutching a two-year-old Emmy. Emmy had been crying after the five-hour flight, so I sat in the backseat and held her and sang songs with her while Hank drove and Jaxson rode in the front. I’ll never forget the look of surprise on Emmy’s face as two elderly people swooped out of the house and fell upon her in adoration. For the first time in Emmy’s life, I simply let her go as Jean took her from me and fussed over her and Hank Senior stood by, chuckling in admiration.

And that’s how it was every time. For those one or two weeks of the year I was able to relinquish my role. I could let go of my maternal vigilance and relax. It was wonderful.

“My God,” Jean confided to me. “If I’d known he had you in his life all those years, I wouldn’t have been so worried about him.” But for the six years that Hank and I had been together before Emmy was born, they hadn’t met me. Hank Senior didn’t say much about the past. He just sat in his recliner with the sports channel on, let Emmy muss his hair, and pretended that she had “stinky feet,” which always sent her into paroxysms of laughter.

 

Now, ten years later, Emmy, with her pants rolled up, steps outside into the inches-deep water and lets it graze her bony white ankles.

“It’s a flood,” she says, looking at the grassy lake in her grandfather’s tidy lawn. The drops continue to spike the water and ripple. The cat prowls to the window, watching this cold California rain. It is almost Christmas, Emmy is almost grown, and the child within struggles to manage the lanky bones, the beauty that has captured her wild-hearted spirit. Gingerly she comes back inside searching for fuzzy slippers for her chilled little feet, laughing and pushing back her long hair, a mermaid walking into the living room on new legs.

Beth teaches Emmy and me how to play Texas Hold ‘Em. Emmy’s a natural at the game. I guess her acting talent helps her bluff. I’m always the first one out of chips. We play for hours. The year before I’d almost gotten back on a plane and gone home when Beth started quoting Ann Coulter, but this year Beth and I put our politics aside. Cancer will do that.

At night we sit together in the family room: Hank’s parents, brother, sister, nephew, and Emmy and me. Merlyn scours the floor for dropped crumbs. We watch movies or play Clue. We eat chocolate-covered cherries and Christmas cookies. A fire burns in the fireplace. While Emmy and her cousin are occupied in another room, Beth tells Hank that she thinks she’ll be lucky if she lives another five years. Turns out she’s off by one. She’ll be around for six more years.