EXCERPT, WHEN ELLIE WAS LITTLE: OUR LIFE IN HOLIDAYS, PUBLISHED 2011 BY NORA GLASS
Christmas
When Ellie was little, she loved for me to tell her stories. Her favorites, of course, were about her or a little girl very much like her, a girl who was brave and fought great battles on horseback or found hidden castles. Her next favorite were stories about me and her father. She liked to think about what Paul was like before she came along. Before he left. She loved our getting-lost-in-the-desert story, and the one about how we once mistook a baby skunk for a kitten in the dark. But the story she asked for most was the one about how we met.
The story always changed. I never told her the real story, which was too prosaic and boring. It was no good for a little girl’s bedtime, a little girl who wanted something exciting. So I would make up a story, always changing the elements.
“We met when I was a pirate.”
“He was a pirate?”
“No,” I would growl, covering my eye with my hand and stomping in a peg-legged circle. “I was a pirate. My ship was the Sea Siren, and I plundered the oceans, filling the hold with jewels I took from around queens’ necks.”
She would giggle and fall backward on her bed. “Did you have both your hands?”
I pulled my arm up in my shirt. “Of course not! This was just a hook back then.”
“How did they fix it?”
“I was rich. You can buy new arms that work if you’re rich.”
“Where was Papa?”
“On a kayak.”
Ellie gasped. “In the middle of the ocean?”
“Do you think that’s very safe? For a tiny kayak to be all the way out there in the big waves?”
Solemnly, she shook her head.
“Me, neither. So I pulled my sailing ship alongside. ‘Prepare to be boarded,’ I yelled down at him. He looked up, surprised. He’d been napping, you see.”
“You woke him up?”
“I did. He was very grumpy about it. Your dad never liked to be woken from a sound sleep.”
“Like me!”
“Like you, chipmunk. So he said, ‘Don’t even think about it!’ That made me, as a pirate, very upset. You can imagine.”
She nodded solemnly.
“I reached over with my very long arms and put the point of my hook right behind his collar. I hauled him on board and turned him upside down, shaking him to see if any doubloons fell out of his pockets.”
“Did some?” Ellie scrambled excitedly to sitting.
I pushed her gently back into her pillows. Story time was about going to sleep, after all. “No money. But lots of jewels.”
“What kind?”
“Diameralds. And rupizluli. Do you know what colors those are?”
Her green eyes wide, she shook her head.
“Diameralds are rainbow colored and they come out of rain clouds, and rupizlulis look like sequins but they’re actually tiny crystals that fairies dig out of riverbanks after lightning storms.”
“Oh . . . ,” she breathed.
“So I collected all of them, because they were rolling around the deck of my ship, and you know how I hate dirty floors. And usually, when I turn prisoners upside down and shake them, they start crying. It’s to be expected. It’s not a very pleasant feeling, as you can imagine. But your dad, he was different.”
“How? He didn’t cry?”
“Just the opposite. He yelled at me.”
“He did?”
I nodded. “Well, I deserved it. I was a thief, after all. He said I’d better give him back all his jewels. I said, ‘Or what?’ And then he said, ‘Or I’ll sic my pet alligator on you.’”
“Pet alligator?”
“Sure enough, I looked back down in the water, and there was an alligator thrashing his tail so hard he sent water up into the sky for a mile. Maybe a mile and a half.”
“What was his name?”
“That’s a funny name for a crocodile.”
“It’s a funny name for a crocodile, yes. But this was an alligator, and it’s a pretty common name among that species.”
“Then what?”
“I gave up, obviously. I didn’t want to get bitten by Alastair, because he looked like he hadn’t brushed his teeth in twenty years.”
Ellie touched her freshly clean top teeth. “Then what?”
“Then he said he loved me and that he wanted to marry me.”
“Alastair did?”
“Your dad did.”
“That’s silly. Why would a pirate marry a man in a kayak with an alligator?”
Because of his eyes, your eyes. “Because he made me laugh.”
“I make you laugh, too.”
“All the time.” I kissed her and told her to sleep. The next night, the story would be different. I tried to never tell the same one twice.
The actual story was dull. I was twenty-three years old, just a baby. I’d landed my dream job at the Sentinel, and I wasn’t fully aware yet that really what I’d landed was a glorified gofer position. It was Christmas Day, and there were only ten people in the whole office, all of us rookies. The only place open for lunch was Pho King, but that was okay. I ordered my pho with extra jalapeños and green onions, light on the chicken. The man behind me in line laughed. “I’ve never heard anyone order it exactly the way I do.”
I said without looking around, “Well. We should probably get married.”
He laughed again, and I liked the sound of it, round and sweet. “I’m in. How do you feel about roofing materials?”
“Nothing better,” I said. Then my eyes met his. I had a piece of beach glass in my pocket at that very moment that exact shade of green.
We fell in love. He gave me my heart, my Ellie. For that—divorce and failure and alimony and resentment and anger and regret aside—for that, he will always be the best Christmas present I ever got. He gave me my strong, clear Glass girl with his own beautiful matching eyes and my long nose and, of course, a strength that is all her own.