DR. TUTTLE had to go to the lab that afternoon—one of the experiments he was supervising was in its final stages—but instead of heading off to check on the Women’s Shelter, as she wanted to do, Mrs. Tuttle spent as much of the rest of the day as possible with Tim. He seemed fine, but he never asked about the funeral, never spoke a word about Great-aunt Winifred. After the boys went to bed that night, Dr. and Mrs. Tuttle discussed Tim’s situation. They agreed he must be going through a period of denial and decided not to bring up Great-aunt Winifred until he did himself.
The next day it poured, and Dr. Tuttle stayed home and organized a game of Monopoly with the boys. He did everything in his power to help Tim win, going so far as to trade him Park Place for Connecticut Avenue straight up, which outraged John Henry. But in the end John Henry bankrupted both of them anyway. Tim wasn’t a sore loser, though. And he ate all his dinner, even the succotash.
On Sunday evenings the family usually watched TV together. That night there was a comic movie on about identical twins who were separated at birth and found each other as adults. Mrs. Tuttle privately thought it was juvenile, but Dr. Tuttle, who’d done several genetic studies of identical twins, was enjoying it as much as the boys—at least until a commercial for homeowners’ insurance came on and John Henry said:
“What’s happening with Aunt Winnie’s house, anyhow?”
Dr. Tuttle took a sip of his decaf and cleared his throat. “Well, I guess she left it to me. Come spring, maybe we can have it fixed up.”
“To sell?”
“That’s a bridge we don’t have to cross till the will’s out of probate.”
“Where are you going, love?” Mrs. Tuttle said, watching Tim head out of the living room.
“I’m kind of tired,” he said.
“But the movie’s not over!”
Tim just shrugged and inched toward the door.
“You know, son,” Dr. Tuttle said, “you can still use Winnie’s house. You can go up anytime you want and paint the view.”
The next morning Dr. Tuttle gave Tim a key to Great-aunt Winifred’s house, but Tim stuck it away in his desk drawer. He had no more intention of going to her house than he’d had of going to her funeral. For if he hiked up there and found the house empty, it would be that much harder to keep on believing his great-aunt wasn’t really dead. When the school bus lumbered by the cemetery on Colchester Avenue, a cold hand seemed to reach inside him and give his heart a warning squeeze, but otherwise all he had to do was close his eyes to see her perfectly, sitting at her easel or rolling out a pie crust. To him she was still vibrantly alive.
Nevertheless, he missed her dreadfully. Her old saying—“out of sight, out of mind”—was a bunch of baloney. Finally, in desperation, he came up with an idea: painting a picture of her to hang over his desk. That way he would see her first thing when he came home from school, and if he woke up in the middle of the night feeling lonely for her, all he would have to do was turn on his lamp, and there she’d be.
Unfortunately, his easel and paint box were up at her house. But he saved up his allowances, and one Saturday he had his mother drop him off at Pandora’s Paints on her way to the Women’s Shelter. He bought four tubes of acrylics and a couple of brushes and a small canvas. In memory of his great-aunt, Pandora Potts threw in three more tubes of paint and three more canvases free of charge.
Later that day Tim rigged himself an easel out of scrap lumber from the shed and set it up in the sewing room, at the end of the upstairs hall—a room his mother hadn’t set foot in in years. From then on he devoted all his spare time to his great-aunt’s portrait, and though his parents didn’t ask what he was painting, they were both pleased that he was doing it. He worked from memory and from a slightly yellowed snapshot of Great-aunt Winifred opening a Christmas present on their sofa. But after every session he ended up scraping his paint off the canvas, and as the days turned to weeks, he realized there was something in the joke his mother used to make about Great-aunt Winifred: that she stuck to landscapes because people were too hard to paint. People were hard. At least, Tim couldn’t even come close to capturing his great-aunt.
One Saturday he heard a thwunking sound and, glancing out the sewing-room window, saw that John Henry was punting the football around one of the Cooleys’ pastures. On the spur of the moment he decided to try painting a picture of his brother. The pasture, which sparkled with frost, came out very nicely—and so, to his surprise, did John Henry. Encouraged, Tim tackled Great-aunt Winifred again, starting from scratch. He worked painstakingly, every afternoon, right into December. But this attempt was even worse than his earlier ones. It was as if his brush refused to tell the truth. The portrait didn’t even remind him of his great-aunt, and he missed her more than ever.
One of their family traditions was to hike partway up Great-aunt Winifred’s hill to cut their own Christmas tree, but since Tim hadn’t mentioned her once since the funeral, Dr. and Mrs. Tuttle put their heads together and decided it would be safer simply to buy a tree this year. While the family was decorating it, John Henry announced that he was making a change of his own this year. He was going to use his own money to buy his presents.
“I don’t care what you say,” he declared as he carefully hung his favorite ornament, a grapefruit-sized one coated with silver and gold sparkles.
“That’s a very generous impulse, dear,” said Mrs. Tuttle, wondering why that hideously gaudy thing was never one of the ornaments that broke. “But I’m not sure it’s a good idea. What do you think, Trev?”
Dr. Tuttle looked up from his struggles to get their oldest strand of Christmas lights, which was “in series,” to work.
“Sorry,” he said. “This thing’s more frustrating than isolating the DNA of a drosophila.”
“John Henry wants to use his own money to buy his presents,” Mrs. Tuttle said.
“But you worked so hard over the summer, J. H.,” said Dr. Tuttle. “Wouldn’t you rather spend your hard-earned cash on that new snowboard you’ve been carrying on about?”
“That’s okay,” said John Henry, who secretly hoped to get a new snowboard from them. “I’m too old to take present money from you.”
“Well, if that’s how you want it,” said Dr. Tuttle. “But don’t feel you have to march in step, Timmy.”
This was small comfort to Tim. If his younger brother was too old to take present money, how could he possibly accept it?
After school that next Thursday the two boys got off the school bus at the mall on Route 2. John Henry’s wallet was bulging with over a hundred dollars in cash. He bought their father a fishing reel for twenty-nine dollars and their mother a thirty-two-dollar scarf of green-and-yellow silk. Tim, however, couldn’t find anything decent for five dollars and thirty-one cents—his current net worth—and he plodded home feeling guilty and disheartened.
Things went downhill from there. The next day first-term report cards were handed out, and Tim’s was no better than last year’s. Halfway through dinner that night John Henry casually produced his. While his marks were getting their usual raves, Tim stared at his cauliflower, praying for a miracle to make his parents forget that he must have gotten his report card, too.
It worked. After praising John Henry’s grades, neither of his parents said a word about seeing his.
This surprised John Henry as much as it did Tim. It annoyed him, too, since Tim’s lousy grades always made his seem that much better. He waited patiently, but the subject of report cards seemed to have been dropped. Finally, after finishing off the last smelly bite of cauliflower, he blurted out:
“Eighth graders got report cards today, too.”
“Mm,” said Mrs. Tuttle. “How’d you do this term, Tim, dear?”
“Not so good,” Tim mumbled.
“Well, it was a tough fall for you,” Dr. Tuttle said.
Mrs. Tuttle agreed. Tim waited for them to say more. But his father just finished off his biscuit, while all his mother said was “I’m afraid I oversalted the cauliflower a bit, dear, but do try and eat some of it.”
Tim lit into his cauliflower as if he actually liked it. And when he looked up gratefully at his parents, he had a brainstorm.
During dessert—ice cream and store-bought sugar cookies—he studied their faces. At one point he stared at his father so hard, Dr. Tuttle asked if he had a crumb on his chin.
Tim had one canvas left, and after breakfast the next morning he went straight up to the sewing room and began a double portrait of his parents. Christmas vacation had begun, and for the next few days he concentrated on the painting. His parents, busy as ever, were usually out when he felt like checking something—the size of his father’s ears, for example, or the exact color of his mother’s eyes. But, luckily, the upstairs hallway was a gallery of family photos. And when his parents were home, he surreptitiously studied their faces. And little by little the faces in the painting became recognizable.
A funny thing happened. Ever since his father had pried his hand out of Great-aunt Winifred’s, Tim had been trying to dodge a feeling of loneliness and despair. But now, sitting between the painting of his parents and the painting of his brother, which was propped against the old pedal-driven Singer sewing machine, he began to feel less lonely and less desperate. Of course, he was alone in the sewing room. No one ever set foot in there except him. But he didn’t feel so alone.
He put the finishing touches on the double portrait on the morning of the twenty-fourth, as a few Christmasy snowflakes knocked gently on the sewing-room window. As he wrapped the painting in foil and tied a ribbon around it, he felt a whirring in his stomach, an expectant feeling he hadn’t experienced since he was hurrying up the hill to work on his fall painting and tell Great-aunt Winifred about the partridges.
The snowfall grew thicker and thicker. By evening it was a fierce blizzard, and in the middle of Christmas Eve dinner their electricity went out. Dr. Tuttle tried to call the power company, but the phone was out, too. No one was terribly concerned, though. There were plenty of candles, and it was kind of fun, eating by candlelight with the howling wind piling snow against the windows.
After dinner Dr. Tuttle built a blazing fire in the fireplace—the furnace was dead as well—and Mrs. Tuttle went upstairs with a flashlight and dug out extra quilts for the beds in case the heat stayed off all night. Then they gathered around the hearth to sing Christmas carols and hang stockings underneath Tim’s Summer View. After that they all deposited their presents under the tree, which looked a little forlorn unlit, and then Dr. Tuttle sent the boys up to bed with the spare flashlight.
“Leave it on the post at the top of banister, Tim,” he said. “I’m going to try to keep the fire going, but if—”
“What about Santa?” said Tim. “He’ll burn his feet.”
“I’m pretty sure old St. Nick wears fireproof boots,” Dr. Tuttle said.
“If you boys get too cold tonight,” Mrs. Tuttle said, “you can always crawl in with each other.”
“Yuck!” cried John Henry.
Tim echoed this sentiment. But up in the bathroom he held the flashlight while John Henry brushed his teeth, and John Henry returned the favor.
“You know, if Santa Claus actually existed, he’d have a sleigh wreck tonight, huh?” John Henry said as he set the flashlight on the post.
Eighth grader that he was, Tim still actually liked to believe Santa Claus did exist, so he just said, “Sleep tight, John Henry,” and felt his way into his room. His computer could run awhile on battery, so he flicked it on and started playing Minesweeper, but soon his fingers got too cold and he flicked it off and crawled into bed. The weight of the second quilt made him feel nice and snug, but instead of falling right to sleep, he slipped into a fuzzy place halfway between sleep and waking. It was sort of like the unheated mudroom at the back of Great-aunt Winifred’s house: not quite inside, not quite outside. And in fact he felt himself floating up to that very room. Peering into the kitchen, he saw that Great-aunt Winifred was safe and sound, her face lit from the warm glow of a wood stove that was giving off the heavenly smell of non-store-bought cookies. …
He woke up in the middle of the night, blinking at the ceiling light. The electricity had come back on. But the room was bitterly cold, and before he could work himself up to desert the warmth of the bed to dash over to flick off the switch, the light flickered back out.
He soon dozed off again, but his brother, who’d been awakened by his bedside lamp coming on, didn’t fall back to sleep when the darkness returned. John Henry had been having a bad dream. In it Tim was balancing on the banister post like the flashlight while their parents stood below on the staircase madly applauding, as if Tim had done something stupendous. It started John Henry wondering what his brother could have possibly gotten them for Christmas for a lousy five dollars and thirty-one cents.
After a while his curiosity got the better of him and, cold as it was, he slipped out of bed. He groped around for his heavy winter bathrobe and fur-lined slippers and then felt his way out into the spookily dark upstairs hall. Once he located the flashlight, he flicked it on and crept down to the living room. Dr. Tuttle must have come down at some point to stoke the fire, for it was blazing away behind the fire screen, but the stockings still hung limp and empty from the mantel. It was disappointing to see that none of the packages under the tree was big enough to be a snowboard—but that wasn’t what John Henry had come down for. Kneeling, he shifted the flashlight beam from package to package till it hit one with a bell-shaped tag that said For Mom & Dad, Merry Christmas, Timmy. It was on a flat foil package. John Henry wedged the flashlight between his thighs and undid the red ribbon and carefully peeled back the pieces of Scotch tape. The feel of the package made him uneasy, and when he pulled the foil away and saw the beautiful double portrait, he felt queasier than he had last summer while cleaning out the Cooleys’ chicken coop. He could just hear his parents carrying on about the painting, forgetting the fishing reel and the silk scarf entirely.
