“SO THE DAD’S THE FAN, right?” Grant asked.
“I mean, the dad’s obviously the Fan.” Marty turned to mansplain this to Stephanie. “In the book, Fan is Ebenezer Scrooge’s sister. She’s the one good thing in Scrooge’s life—the only person who loves him unconditionally, who believes in him, who’s on his side no matter what.” Stephanie already knew this, as over the course of the past few weeks she’d practically memorized A Christmas Carol, but she nodded politely.
“And then the Fan always dies,” Grant added. “Total bummer.”
It was July. We were all sitting around the table in Conference Room B for a Team Lamp meeting. We’d just listened to Tox lay out her strategy for how she was going to wrangle up the spirit of Ethan Jonathan Winters I from wherever he’d wandered in the afterlife. That was how it worked: I found the Marley in the Scrooge’s memories. Tox found the Marley, like, literally. She was kind of a Ghostbuster—she located the spirit and brought it in to Project Scrooge. It was also her responsibility to convince this unhappy spirit to play his part on Christmas Eve—warn the Scrooge, be repentant, that kind of thing. I didn’t know why, since Tox handled the negotiations and I pretty much stayed out of it, but we never had any trouble convincing the Marleys to cooperate.
So now, with finding the Marley checked off, we were on to the next step: the Fan.
“Ethan’s dad does seem like a good Fan,” Stephanie said. “But that’s almost too easy, isn’t it? Why do we need all this time to figure out the Fan if we already know who it is?”
“Okay, no. Maybe we’ve identified the Fan,” Tox said, “but that doesn’t mean this next couple of months is going to be some kind of cake walk. What we have to do now is decide on the perfect Fan moment to show Ethan, the one that will affect him the most without sending him into a grief spiral or making him shut down completely.” She laughed. “The situation is delicate, clearly. So you see, now is when we actually have to figure out the Fan.”
“So we sift for Fan moments,” Stephanie assumed. “Find the best ones.”
“But it’s not that simple, is it, Holly?” Grant said.
I sighed. “Yes and no. The problem is that Ethan doesn’t want to think about his father. He’s resistant, especially with stuff that has to do directly with his dad’s death. I still haven’t been able to access any of that.”
Tomas, who worked in research and development, flipped through his folder, where I could see a copy of a newspaper clipping. “We know most of the details,” he said. “Ethan’s dad was killed five years ago on the morning of December twenty-ninth, in a freak accident on the sidewalk at Lexington Avenue. He was just at the wrong place at the wrong time, and then bam—he got hit by falling construction debris. At least it was quick.”
I doubted that made a lot of difference to Ethan. That sounded bad.
“I thought you could look at any memory you wanted to,” Stephanie said, frowning.
I shook my head. “What I’m doing during a sift is basically remembering something with the Scrooge. He experiences it as a sort of dream, and I can direct it, in a way, but he has to cooperate. If he doesn’t want to go there, I can’t make him.”
“So what do we do if he won’t go there?”
“We look for ways in. Find memories to connect to that aren’t as painful, and hope to be able to catch a glimpse at the more important stuff. I did get that one initial memory of Central Park in the snow, so it’s possible. But it’d be better if I could see the dad’s death and know exactly how to approach the subject with Ethan.”
“Like I said,” Tox harrumphed, “it’s delicate. Sometimes it’s easier to catch a real ghost than a bunch of emotional baggage. I’m glad my job is the ghost.”
“And you’re sure the dad’s the Fan?” Stephanie asked.
I closed my eyes and sighed. “Ethan was a normal kid until his dad died. He was fine.”
And just like that, I wasn’t thinking about Ethan anymore. I was thinking about me.
“Okay, maybe he wasn’t exactly normal-normal,” I admitted. “But he wasn’t the way he is now. He had a family and a life and hopes and dreams like every other kid, and then . . .”
I remembered the door to my mother’s hospital room. Pushing it open. Seeing my mom lying there hooked up to all her tubes and wires. She’d looked like she was sleeping, but she wasn’t sleeping.
“And then?” Stephanie said gently.
I opened my eyes and blinked away the image. “And then one day all of that stopped. His dad was gone, and everything changed. He changed. Anyway. I’m, like, ninety-eight percent certain that Ethan’s dad is the Fan. As for the rest, we’ll get there. Ethan might not want to mull over a bunch of sad memories, but it’ll happen eventually.”
Because I knew: You can try to keep the worst things down inside you. You can shove them away, not think about them, not deal. But they bubble up to the surface. They always do.
I was right. Of course I was. The Fan stuff did come, eventually. Every week I chipped away at the smaller, unobtrusive memories of Ethan with his dad, tiny moments like walking to his first day of school, or that time they tried to make a cake for his mom’s birthday but ended up almost burning the apartment down, or his dad teaching him how to tie a tie. I still hadn’t experienced anything directly related to his dad’s death, not the funeral or the moment when he’d heard the news or any of that—Ethan still kept that completely suppressed—but by August I’d settled on what I thought was the right moment to show him on Christmas Eve. It was this bit about Ethan losing at the school science fair and his dad helping him cope with the failure. It was good because it showed the unconditional love the Fan always has. It would do.
Frankly, I was on a roll at work, a model employee, some might say, checking off those Scrooge boxes left and right. And finally, after a lot of trial and error, Ethan let me see a memory about his dad that he really felt something about, which I considered progress.
It involved first grade and a boy at school. The kid (whose name Ethan didn’t even remember at this point) kept pushing Ethan—like literally pushing him. He did it every time they passed each other in the hall, in the line at lunch, waiting for their parents at the end of each afternoon. And then one day Ethan was in the cafeteria, and he was kind of sulking at the prospect of there not being any tator tots, which was Kid Ethan’s favorite thing, when the bully pushed him from behind.
It made Ethan spill his chocolate milk, and he, like, snapped. I could feel the blood rush to his face, his little fists clenching, his lip curling up in a snarl, his vision clouding with fury. He turned around and pushed the kid back, and not just a little push. Ethan put his hands on the kid’s chest and shoved him out of the line and right to the end of the connecting tables that half of the school was sitting at, eating. Ethan hurled that troublesome kid against the edge of the table until the kid fell, and then Ethan heaved with the strength of a much bigger person and slid the kid down the entire length of the table, through all the plates and silverware and glasses, like a fight in an old Western movie where the hero slides the villain down the bar.
Ethan ended up in the headmaster’s office. He was suspended for a week. Which he thought was super unfair, and I tended to agree. The kid had it coming.
“That’s not the point,” his dad said that night when they talked about it.
“But the kid pushed me!” Ethan said. “He’s been pushing me every day.”
“So you tell somebody,” his dad said. “You don’t push back.”
Ethan scoffed. “Who would I tell?”
Ethan’s dad pressed his hands to his chest. “Me! You tell me! And then we figure out what to do together, okay?”
“But you’re not at school,” Ethan argued. “You’re not there.”
“So you tell me the second you get home. Or you ask to make a phone call.” Ethan’s dad slung his arm around Kid Ethan’s shoulder and hugged him. It felt good, being squeezed. Being loved. Being safe. It made him feel better.
“I’m always going to be here for you, buddy,” his dad said then. “Always always. I promise.”
Even asleep, Ethan’s body tensed when he remembered those words. Ethan knew now that if someone pushed you, you had to push back. Anything else was weak. His father, he thought, had been weak—soft, just as his grandfather had told him. And his dad had been a liar. I’m always going to be here for you, he’d said. But he wasn’t. Which was the biggest lie of all.
I swallowed down the lump that had jumped up in my throat. My dad once said those words to me. It must be a parent thing. After Mom died, when I was slumped in an empty pew at the church waiting for her funeral to start, he’d sat down next to me, and put his arm around me that same way, and he’d said, “I’m always going to be here for you, Holly.”
Which turned out to be a lie, too.
People lie, the Inner Yvonne said matter-of-factly. It’s what they do.
It’s what they do.
“Are you okay?” Stephanie asked when I came back through the Portal.
“Why wouldn’t I be okay?” I said tightly.
“You seem upset,” she observed.
I took my latte from her. “I’m fine. Just tired.” She looked tired herself. Her hair was piled up in a messy bun on the top of her head, random strands falling out. She was wearing a wrinkled NYU sweatshirt and jeans. It was the best outfit I’d ever seen her wear. Which, sadly, was saying something.
“How’s school going?” I asked her as we walked back to my office.
She glanced over at me, startled. She’d been working at PS for months, and this was the first time I’d ever asked her about her life.
“School? Oh, it’s . . . fine.”
“When do you even go to class?” I asked. “It seems like you’re always here.”
I waited for her to start chattering, to tell me about her classes, her professors, her roommate, something, but she just handed me the folder to file my report into. Then she rubbed the back of her neck and sighed. “It does seem that way, doesn’t it?”
It totally did.
That night I had another one of those annoying dreams about my past. It was a side effect of the memory sifts, I thought. I delved into someone else’s past, which got my subconscious working on my own. Another reason why this job was a form of punishment.
This dream was about my dad. Our last real conversation.
“Come with me to New Zealand” was how it started. “It’ll be fun.”
“No, thanks.” I was sixteen, just weeks from my death, tweezing my eyebrows at my vanity mirror. I stopped to look at him in the mirror. His face was so hopeful. “New Zealand’s cold.”
“December is summer in New Zealand,” he said. “It’s practically tropical.”
“There are sheep in New Zealand,” I said, wrinkling up my nose.
“Sheep are cute,” he argued.
“They’re smelly.”
He changed tactics. “There are hobbits there, too. I have it on good authority.”
This was one of my best memories—going to see The Hobbit with my dad when I was younger. He was so excited. Like he wasn’t some big, famous director. Like he was just a kid, and I was a kid, and the movie was the coolest thing ever. But I was sixteen—almost seventeen—now. I wasn’t a kid anymore.
“Dad,” I sighed. “There’s a runway show for Calvin Klein on the twenty-fourth that I want to go to.”
He didn’t give up. “Afterward I have to go to New York for a bit. You could come. New Year’s in Times Square.”
I hated New York. It was a well-established fact. “I have stuff.”
“Bummer,” he said. “But, hey, I miss you, Hol. I want to spend some time together. I feel like since Yvonne died, we’ve been . . .”
“ . . . since Mom died, actually,” I corrected him. “But whatevs. It’s no big deal. You’re busy. I’m busy. It’s fine. We’re good.”
“It’s not fine. Come hang out with me,” he urged, almost pleading with me now.
“I can’t.”
“You can.”
“I—”
“You totally can. You’re a high school student. You don’t have any real obligations. You can do anything. Especially go to New Zealand with your father.”
Adults always loved to tell you that your life wasn’t actually real. I threw the tweezers down and turned to look at him. “Dad, I’m not going to New Zealand, okay? Or New York. Or anywhere. I don’t want to go.”
“All right. So in March—”
“I’m not interested in your movies,” I burst out. “I don’t even like them.”
He stepped back. “Okay, ouch.”
“It’s just . . . they’re not my thing,” I murmured. I knew I’d gone too far. I’d hurt him. But part of hurting him felt good, because it was a little taste of how I’d felt when he just kind of abandoned me after Mom died. How he wasn’t there for me.
Even though he was trying to be, right now.
He tried to smile. “I could make a movie about robots. Would you like that kind of movie? Killer robots. I had a robot screenplay on my desk yesterday.”
“Dad . . .”
“How about aliens?” His eyes widened like this was the best idea ever. “I’ve been dying to make a movie about aliens. We could shoot it in London. There are no sheep there. We could hang out with the queen.”
“Why can’t you ever be serious?” I glared at him. “I said no. Leave me alone. I have my life, and you have your life, and we should just keep it that way.”
He nodded stiffly. “Okay. Okay. I hear you.”
“Okay. Can you . . . ?” I gestured toward the door.
“Sure.” And he was gone.
It was the last time I ever saw him.
“Dad, wait,” I said, realizing all of a sudden that this had been it—more than the night with the Ghosts and the travels through time—this moment right here had been my last chance. If I’d gone with him I would never have been standing on Wilshire Boulevard that morning after yoga. Maybe I wouldn’t even have been picked as the Scrooge. If I’d just said yes to that simple little request, I’d be alive right now. But I hadn’t known that. I couldn’t have known. “Dad, wait!” I called again. But it was too late. I was waking up.
I opened my eyes. My heart was beating fast. I was back in the crappy walk-up, it was still crappy, and the air conditioner was apparently not working, either, because it was sweltering in there, even at ten o’clock in the morning. I threw off the covers. I’d never gotten used to summer in New York. The heat. The humidity. In California I’d never been hot like this. I was sweating, like literally damp with sweat. I smelled lavender and realized I was wearing my Hoodie. I must have gone to sleep in it.
I fiddled with the air-conditioning unit in the window, which was blowing air, but not cold air. I called the super. Voice mail. I stripped down to a tank top and shorts. I drank ice water. Stuck a damp washcloth on the back of my neck. Nothing helped. Then I did the only other thing I could think to do: I stole neighbor lady’s newspaper. I fanned myself for a minute and then scanned the movie section, not finding anything good, not really expecting to see anything, but theaters typically have AC, I was thinking, and that’s when one of the titles totally jumped out at me.
There it was. Like it was waiting for me. Like it was destiny.
Evangeline’s Well.
A new film, it read. From acclaimed director Gideon Chase.