After picking them up at the Cincinnati airport, Dan parked the minivan in the driveway and carried their luggage through the garage while Debbie gave them a tour of “The Stash”: shelves and shelves of spaghetti sauce, pineapple juice cocktail, potato flakes, soda bottles, whitening toothpaste, high-fiber cereal, cheese spray, antimicrobial sponges, mild salsa, Italian dressing, dryer sheets, and lemon juice.
“It’s like a store,” breathed Lucy, running her hand across a row of Gatorade bottles.
“And I only paid one hundred and twenty-seven dollars for the whole thing,” said Debbie. “Want to see where the magic happens?”
“Magic!” cried Elliot.
Debbie led them out of the garage and through the great room to her couponing office. They crowded around a table covered with newspapers, a paper cutter, several types of scissors, a computer, and a color printer. Against one wall, a bookshelf was filled with binders marked “no expire,” “no limit,” “BOGO,” and “Moneymakers.” Debbie showed them how she searched for coupons, categorized them, and compiled them in a binder for her monthly trip to the supermarket.
“You’ve really taken this to a new level,” Sophie said.
“All thanks to you!” Debbie said, squeezing Sophie’s hand. Sophie didn’t really see how she could take credit for all of it, but she squeezed Debbie’s hand back. Yes, she’d been the one to set up Debbie’s first computer, T1 line, and email address—nine years ago, when she and Brian had come to visit the newborn twins. Sophie remembered how they’d found Debbie, formerly a high-ranking product manager at Procter and Gamble, wandering the house with unwashed hair, her nursing bra permanently unfastened, a glazed look in her eyes. Sophie had hooked up the computer and introduced her to the nascent world of mommy blogs and Listservs, but it was Debbie who discovered the existence of coupon sites. Before long she was feeding her family, plus the beneficiaries of countless soup kitchens and food drives, for pennies on the dollar, and was helping others do the same with her exhaustively researched blog “Debbie Does Discounts.” All signs of depression had disappeared; on the contrary, Debbie now functioned on a higher level than most people.
Having finished the tour, their suitcases put away in the bonus room, Sophie and Brian flopped on the sectional in the great room, where Dan was flipping through sports channels. Lucy and Elliot, shy at first, had quickly discovered the pleasures of the vast carpeted space, the corpulent furniture, the large-screen TV, and the bottomless bowl of Goldfish crackers sitting on the low coffee table. They ran laps through the kitchen and great room, stopping periodically to examine the cathedral-ceiling-grazing tree (“seventy-five percent off at Costco last January”) and the extravagantly wrapped gifts already heaped beneath it.
Debbie added crab dip and Pepperoni Stix to the coffee table, and brought out cold beer in frosted mugs. “I got the kind you like,” she said to Brian, perching on the arm of the sectional next to him, “even though it wasn’t on sale, ha-ha.” She smiled broadly, shrugging her eyebrows. Like Brian, Debbie was fair, with pale blue eyes and easily burned skin. Unlike him, she splashed every emotion across her face.
“Thanks, Deb.”
“So how’s the famous curator? Tell me about all your adventures. I’m dying to hear.”
Brian told Debbie about his latest trips to Italy and France, his publications, his search for the Saint-Porchaire. She listened with her mouth half-open, interjecting “oh!”s and “wow!”s and “you’re amazing!”s, periodically waving at Dan to make sure he was listening. Sophie yearned for Brian to duck Debbie’s praise, murmur something modest, but he accepted her admiration as his due. Sophie figured Debbie was just traveling the orbit already scribed by their parents when they were alive, with their displays of high school cycling trophies and their bulging scrapbooks of museum newsletters and exhibition announcements. Brian was used to it.
The nine-year-old twins, Kendall and Kylynn, surprised Sophie by taking an immediate interest in the younger children, styling Lucy’s hair and heaving Elliot around in their skinny arms. They even offered to change Elliot’s diapers, to which Sophie had no objection, even though the twins took this job too seriously and began changing him every twenty minutes. Elliot seemed happy with the attention, and Sophie was sure Debbie would be able get her some cheap diapers.
Sophie offered to help out in the kitchen, but Debbie’s meals generally involved adding a cup of water to something in a casserole dish, so she found herself spending most of her time on the sectional feeling superfluous. This actually wasn’t so bad. It had been a long time since she’d watched daytime TV; she was amazed there were so many shows about women having babies. Didn’t the people sitting at home—women with babies—want to watch something else? But she found that she couldn’t take her eyes off the young, excited couples as they decorated the nursery and talked about names, then rushed to the hospital and eventually descended into sweaty, face-distorting agony. Like clockwork, Sophie burst into embarrassed tears every time a slimy blue infant was placed, flailing, on its exhausted mother’s chest.
Dan went to his job at Ashland Chemical every day, and Debbie and Brian stayed busy showing the kids around their hometown. They took them to see the tree at Fountain Square, the Festival of Lights at the zoo, and Cincinnati’s best-decorated front yards. Sophie never felt like going along; she was finding it harder and harder to look into Brian’s eyes, and Debbie’s gushing niceness made her uncomfortable. She retreated further into the folds of the couch, napping and channel surfing, making occasional forays into the garage for bags of chips. Despite her calorie intake she felt pleasantly hollow. Now and then she would think about her house—its cramped living room, its excess of stairs. Then she would change the channel without looking, having memorized all the buttons on the remote control.
On Christmas Eve, Debbie wanted to go to the mall to catch the last door-buster deals at Circuit City. “Come on, it’ll be fun,” she said to Sophie. “There’s nothing like the mall on Christmas Eve! The kids can see Santa!”
“I don’t know,” Sophie said. “They’re showing a Baby Story marathon.”
“Mommy!” cried Elliot with a gurgling laugh. Sophie sat up and looked over the back of the couch to see him running ecstatically into Kylynn’s arms.
“All right,” Sophie said, peeling off the afghan that was twined around her legs. “I’ll come.”
The eight of them boarded the van, the stroller comfortably stowed in the back, and the doors oozed shut with the push of a button. Christmas music played on surround sound as they pulled out of the cul-de-sac. Sophie marveled at the van’s spacious, soothingly beige interior. She’d never sat in such firm-but-yielding, buttery leather seats. The armrests were generous and adjustable. Warm air flowed over her feet. Let’s keep driving, she thought; let’s skip the mall. Why leave this paradise and endure the indignity of walking?
Too soon, they arrived at the Tri-County Mall, which was ringed with news vans and reporters filing their Christmas Eve reports. “Is he really here?” asked Lucy as they hummed around the parking lot searching for a spot.
“Oh, he’s here,” said Debbie. “Getting everyone’s last-minute requests before he starts flying around the world.”
“Wow…” breathed Lucy, craning her neck to see out the window. “I can’t believe he’s here.” Sophie allowed herself to rise out of her funk just enough to enjoy her child’s happy acceptance of the impossible. Here among plastic trees and prerecorded church bells and manufactured magic, Lucy’s four-year-old heart, barely the size of a clementine, was large enough to welcome it all inside.
Once inside the teeming mall, Debbie and Kylynn peeled off toward Circuit City, while Dan and Kendall took the escalator to the Sharper Image; they’d all agreed to meet for dinner at Ruby Tuesday. In their stroller Lucy and Elliot swiveled their heads in amazement, taking in the flood of shoppers’ knees streaming past, the fistfuls of shopping bags, the blinking jewelry and sparkling sweaters. A fleshy old man in a Santa hat buzzed by on his mobility scooter and winked at the kids. “Santa?” inquired Elliot, twisting around to watch the man disappear into the crowd.
“No, honey,” said Sophie, struggling to keep up with the stroller, which Brian was pushing with grim determination. “Santa doesn’t ride on a scooter. He’s up here, I think. In Section E, by Abercrombie and Fitch.”
They found the line: a long, winding queue of red-faced, overdressed babies, wailing toddlers, and blank-faced parents. At the front Sophie could just make out a hugely fat Santa sitting on a couch with a small boy seated beside him.
“Really?” said Brian, eyeing the line.
“Where’s Santa?” asked Lucy, trying to unbuckle the stroller straps.
“Stay there, honey,” said Sophie. “We just have to wait in line for a while. Are you sure you want to do this?”
“Of COURSE I want to do this!”
“Well,” said Sophie to Brian. “When in Cincinnati, do as the Cincinnat…ianites? do.”
“Cincinnatians. Do you mind if I run over to Banana Republic while you wait?”
“Go ahead. Just don’t spend too much money.”
Lucy pulled on Sophie’s sweater. “Mommy, is he the real Santa?”
Sophie considered the many answers to this question: he’s one of Santa’s helpers…nobody really knows…he’s whatever you want him to be…
“Of course he’s the real Santa.”
“Okay, good,” said Lucy. “Because this is a very, very long line, and Santa is the only person I would wait in this line for.” She paused. “Is Santa a person?”
“Um, he’s a magical person. A person with magical powers.”
“Wow.”
By the time Brian got back, Sophie was only halfway to the front of the line, and the kids were beginning to fray. Every time she pulled a new toy out of the stroller basket and handed it to Elliot, he flung it to the ground. Lucy, allowed to get out of the stroller on the condition that she stay within three feet of Sophie, was flaunting her freedom in front of her brother, who desperately wanted to get up and run. She was also trying to engage the two children behind them in conversation.
“Santa is a magical person,” she said to the pair of little boys. “He has magical powers.”
The boys gave her a blank stare and Sophie, as usual, found herself acting as a conversational stand-in, making eye contact with the parents and chuckling, “Thank you, Lucy, that’s very interesting.” The mother, who seemed to be half Sophie’s age, returned the chuckle halfheartedly while her husband (boyfriend?) remained absorbed in his phone. Elliot let out a bloodcurdling shriek.
“Please,” Sophie pleaded with Brian, “take Elliot. He wants to get up, but I can’t chase him around.”
“It’s almost time to meet them for dinner,” said Brian, lifting Elliot from his seat.
Sophie sighed. “Lucy, honey,” she said, “we might not have time to get to Santa. It’s almost time for dinner.”
Lucy blinked at her. “But—Santa! You promised!” Her bottom lip began to grow.
“I know.” Sophie looked at Brian. “We did promise.”
“Look,” he said, trapping Elliot’s kicking legs against his chest with one arm. “Why don’t I run to Ruby Tuesday and tell them we’re going to be late. It’ll give Elliot a change of scenery.”
“Okay, great,” breathed Sophie. “Thank you. I love you.”
Ten minutes later, when Sophie and Lucy had almost made it to the front of the line, Brian and Elliot reappeared with Debbie, Dan, and the twins in tow. “They wanted to watch,” he explained.
“This is so exciting!” said Debbie, rattling her shopping bags. “You’re almost there! Dan, get the camera out.”
And so Elliot had a full audience when Sophie plunked him on the sofa next to Santa, with Dan and Brian pointing their cameras at him, the twins aiming their phones, Debbie waving excitedly. Elliot took one look at the large, perspiring stranger sitting beside him, slid off the couch, and ran back to the stroller, slipping his arms into the straps and trying to buckle them himself. Dan, Debbie, and the twins rocked with laughter.
“My turn!” shouted Lucy, clambering onto the couch in Elliot’s place. “Santa, I want some Polly Pockets and a Playmobil palace. And a book about fairies.”
“Ho ho ho,” chortled the Santa mechanically, his eyes glazed with fatigue.
“That’s not funny,” objected Lucy. “Why are you laughing?”
“Ho ho—ah, what’s your name, little girl?” He winced a little, adjusting his position on the seat, which, Sophie noticed, seemed to offer no lower back support.
“Lucy. Don’t you know that?”
“Oh, right, Lucy. Now I remember.”
“Did you get my letter?”
“Of course I did.”
“You know where I’m staying, right?”
“Of course I do. Now what else do you want for Christmas?”
“Tell me.”
“Tell you what?”
“The address. It was in my letter.”
“Lucy!” said Sophie. “Leave Santa alone. Tell him what else you want.”
Santa put a finger against his nose and tried his best to twinkle.
“I just want to make sure he knows where to bring my stuff.” Lucy was squinting up at Santa. “Is that beard real?”
“Okay, time to give another little girl or boy a chance to talk to me,” said Santa, probably sensing what was coming next. Lucy looked out at the kids waiting wearily in line, then turned back to Santa, grabbed his beard, and pulled. Sophie was chagrined to note that it wasn’t even a good stage beard; it was held on by an elastic band. When Lucy let go it snapped against Santa’s face.
“You little—”
“Fake! Fake Santa! Santa’s fake!” bellowed Lucy as Sophie grappled with her, trying to pull her off the couch. Lucy flailed, reached out, and grabbed Santa’s hat. His flowing white hair came off with it.
“Sorry, Santa, I’m so sorry,” muttered Sophie as she dragged Lucy off the couch, prying Santa’s hair out of her grip and trying, awkwardly, to hand it back to him. At the head of the line the two little boys, mouths slack, watched Santa replace his hair. They turned to their mother for an explanation, but she only glared at Sophie.
“He’s FAKE!” Lucy screamed at the children.
“Thank you, Lucy, I think they got it,” said Sophie, depositing her into the stroller. Debbie and Dan looked stricken; the twins were laughing, showing each other the video they’d just taken on their phones.
“That was excellent,” said Kylynn.
Sophie caught Brian’s eye; he couldn’t have looked happier if someone had just handed him a gift-wrapped piece of Saint-Porchaire. “Truth to power,” he said, patting Lucy’s head. She looked up at him, her fingers in her mouth.
“He was fake,” she said, and resumed sucking on her fingers. Sophie studied her for signs of emotional distress, but Lucy seemed content. Her disappointment, after the long journey to the front of the line, had apparently been quelled by the satisfaction of arriving at the truth. Sophie shook her head, amazed, as always, by her children’s ability to navigate the ever-shifting landscape of true and false, yes and no, possible and impossible, here and gone. It was something to be learned from them, she decided: the ability—not to mention the willingness—to face the beardless, hairless truth, accept its implications, and move on.
She leaned on the stroller handle, pushing it forward, and they all headed downstairs for Christmas Eve dinner at Ruby Tuesday.
***
The day after Christmas, Sophie lay on the sectional watching the gray sky through the high, arched window that loomed over the great room. The kids were busy with their new toys, whose molded plastic packaging was scattered around the room like cast-off cicada husks. Dan and Brian were watching football while Debbie filled lawn and leaf bags with crumpled wads of wrapping paper. Sophie cradled her Christmas stocking against her belly. The floor next to her was confettied with foil wrappers of mini chocolate bars, each one neatly creased into a small, shiny square. She opened another bar and slowly chewed the waxy chocolate, molding it against the roof of her mouth. Her fingers worked the foil, lining up the edges.
The top of the window arch, she had discovered, framed a small portion of a commercial flight path. She’d spent the morning watching planes climb through the arch, trying to imagine the people inside. It really was extraordinary that hundreds of fleshy, unruly bodies could be so neatly contained in a sleek package whose red, white, and blue logo could actually be identified from a sectional in a cul-de-sac. She imagined each package scattered across the ground, torn open like a gift handed to an impatient two-year-old.
Debbie set a small wastepaper basket next to Sophie. “Can I get you anything, sweetie?” she asked.
Sophie turned her head, struggling to focus on Debbie’s pale, worried face. “No, I’m perfect.”
“Do you want to go for a walk?”
Sophie blinked. People walked here?
“I don’t know about you,” Debbie continued, “but I could use a little fresh air.”
So against her better judgment, Sophie squeezed into a pair of jeans and put on her coat and set out with Debbie. The neighborhood had sidewalks, but they walked down the middle of the street, Debbie walking fast, pumping her arms, her breath coming out in little puffs. Sophie stuffed her hands in her pockets and kept up by inserting occasional jogs into her stride.
Debbie talked for a while, telling stories about the twins’ school, where she volunteered three days a week. She was in charge of obtaining donated school supplies. She described how, at the beginning of the school year, they had assembled the crayons and glue and chalk into six-foot-tall tiered wedding cakes decorated with ribbons and paper flowers.
“But why?” Sophie asked, confounded.
“Why what?”
“Why cakes?”
“Why not? It was pretty—you should’ve seen the teachers’ faces.”
“Oh.”
Debbie linked her arm through Sophie’s. “It feels good, you know. Making people happy. Doing something good for the world. It helps.”
Sophie groaned inwardly. Debbie’s very personality was a cul-de-sac. How did she avoid getting fat, living on Pepperoni Stix and platitudes? Sophie found herself suddenly longing for her cracked marble stoop and crazed porcelain doorknobs, and streets that actually went somewhere.
But now, with Debbie’s arm through hers, cold air slapping her cheeks, her smugness felt empty and unsatisfying. Was her life in Philadelphia really so special? The pine floors and the lead abatement and the high utility bills—weren’t they just an expensive form of vanity? And her neighborhood—in truth, it was exactly like this: a numbingly predictable housing development, with its mass-produced moldings and identical marble mantels. Hers was just older and less convenient. Why was she risking everything for that?
“Did I ever tell you about the time I let thieves into my house?” Sophie asked, knowing that she hadn’t.
“What? No. When?”
“When I was a kid.” Sophie pulled her arm away from Debbie’s on the pretext of zipping her coat up to her chin. “I was eight. We’d just moved into a new house, and we had the usual people coming in and out—the telephone company, the water company. I was always the one who let them in ’cause my parents were gone all the time.”
“They left you alone when you were eight?”
Sophie’s laugh came out in a white puff. “Of course. They always said I was responsible enough to be treated like an adult, which—yeah. Anyway, I was at home one afternoon when these two guys came to the door saying they were from the electric company.” In jeans and T-shirts. Knowing, somehow, how stupid she was. “They said they had to do something with the meter, but they didn’t want me around. Said it was dangerous. Told me to take a walk or something, so I went out back.” There was a tire swing in the backyard; it always had a murky puddle of water in it. Sophie remembered pouring the water out, then sitting in the middle of the tire and using her feet to push herself around and around until the rope began to kink. Then she let go and pulled up her knees and spun crazily, hugging her cheek against the cool black rubber, struggling to keep herself from being flung backward into the air.
“After a while I started to wonder if they were ever going to come tell me they were finished, so I went to the back door and peeked in.” She remembered seeing all the way to the front door, and through it to the front yard, because it was standing wide open. “They were gone. So was half our stuff.”
“Oh, no!” Debbie’s mittens flew to her mouth.
“Mostly my dad’s stuff. All the electronics he was supposed to write about, plus his Commodore, his Selectric, everything. Most of it still in moving boxes.”
“Oh, how awful.”
“Yeah.” Sophie felt the crush of realization and guilt now, just as heavy as it had been that day in 1978. “I felt like the world’s biggest idiot.”
“But you were a child!” Debbie took Sophie’s arm again. “How could you be responsible for something like that?”
“I was in charge.”
“You were eight!”
“Well, anyway.” Sophie took a deep, bracing breath. “I couldn’t handle telling my parents what I’d done. So I took a rock and broke the window in the back door, then I locked the front door, got on my bike, and went for a long ride.” Whipping through the suburban streets as fast as she could, losing herself in the unfamiliar neighborhoods, daring the universe to try to scare her now. “When I got back that night, everything was cleaned up and they’d already filed a police report.”
Debbie didn’t seem to know what to say to this.
“You’re the only person I’ve ever told about that.”
“Well! You were awfully…resourceful. I guess you had to be.”
Sophie suddenly felt embarrassed.
Debbie asked, “Have you heard from your mother lately?”
“Not in a couple of years.” There had been two postcards after Randall’s funeral, from New Mexico, then nothing. Sophie had tried sending letters through family friends, then through Maeve’s cousins in Texas, but nobody knew where she’d gone. Sophie remembered the way Maeve had looked at the funeral, stony and tall in her tailored black pants and gray jacket. She had squeezed Sophie’s hand in a way that said, “You can do this,” but not in a way that said good-bye.
“I’m sorry.”
“I’ve tried to be different,” Sophie said. “From her. But you know the saying—one day you put your arm into your sleeve and your mother’s hand comes out.”
“Oh, I don’t think that’s always true,” Debbie said. “You’re not about to run off and disappear. You’re just not like that.”
Oh, but I am, Sophie thought, horrified. I’m about to pull my own kind of disappearing act: as devastating as a plane crash, as careless as running away. Her throat began to ache. “I’m trying….” She tucked her chin and mouth down inside her parka.
“What?” Debbie asked, with a nervous laugh.
Sophie breathed deeply through her nose, forcing cold air through her clenched throat. “I think I just came up with my New Year’s resolution.”
“Oh! What is it?”
“To grow up.”
“Oh, come on. You don’t need to—”
“I just mean I’m going to stop doing some stuff that was bad for me.”
“Smoking?” Debbie whispered.
“Something like that.”
When they got back to the house, Sophie pulled off her coat and tried to remember where she’d left her laptop. She wanted to start redesigning her website; she also needed to send belated holiday greetings to her old clients.
Brian came into the foyer. “I have to go back.”
She smiled at him. She knew he couldn’t stay away from the museum this long. “Fine with me.”
“Something’s missing.”
“I know the feeling.”
“From a period room. A Dutch tazza.”
Sophie stared at him.
“A footed bowl. It’s silver. Michael’s freaking out. He always wanted to put it in a case.”
Sophie’s hands crept to her stomach. “Why do you have to go back?”
“For questioning.” Brian rolled his eyes. “Michael brought in the FBI, for Christ’s sake.”
“Oh. Wow.” She’d worn gloves, right? But what about fibers from her coat…skin cells…a hair. She’d seen the TV shows. She knew what maniacs those people were.
“Hey,” Brian said, reaching out to touch her face. “Don’t worry. We’ll all go back together. I’ll change our tickets.”
“Oh, good,” she said, hugging herself. “I mean, I love it here. But I have so much to do back home.”