CHRISTMAS WAS ALWAYS my mother’s holiday. She started buying gifts in March, wrapping them at night when she couldn’t sleep, mentioning them briefly in passing: Oh, I found the best thing. I can’t wait until it’s yours. There was an entire room at the end of the upstairs hallway in which Mom stowed the boxes of earrings, the blouses and tights, the ties she always bought for Dad, and for as long as I could remember, Jilly and I could be trusted with that. There would have been no pleasure in ruining the surprise.
On Christmas morning we’d come downstairs, and there would not be a place to stand. It would be as if the floor had cracked wide apart and a world of color pushed up, and through—a jagged landscape of red and white foiled boxes, snowflake cutouts, silver angel wings. On the mantel my mother would have placed birch twigs, frosted with sugar. On the windowsills she’d have arranged her Santas. And she’d be sitting there in her favorite green plush chair—her blond hair magnificently smooth, her eyes wide beneath a sky of sparkle, my dad squeezing in beside her. Christmas was my mother’s holiday. It was the day of the year in which her talent for beauty was an active verb—a cascade across the room.
Dad took the red-eye home that Christmas Eve morning. A cab dropped him off. I heard it brake at the curb because I was waiting for it, because I’d been awake since so much earlier, watching the window for signs of a diminishing dark. I had a million things to tell my dad. I had as many things I knew I’d never say. But all I wanted, when I heard the cab, was to feel his arms around me, to hear him say My Littlest Girl, which is what he always called me, even after I got big.
I slid out of bed and opened the door to my room. I went halfway down the stairs and stopped. There was a pot of coffee on. There was a murmur. I understood at once that I would have to wait my turn. That some things do take precedence over a daughter’s love.
They talked for the longest time, my mom and dad, but I could not make out a single word. I heard only the rise and fall of sadness and silence, the long pause and the resumption, the rush and the rebuttal. I was back in my bed with the door closed tight, watching the window, the low sun in the window, the day that was coming on strong. I heard a scuffle outside my door, the rattle of the loose doorknob turning.
“Hey.” It was not my dad. It was not my mother. It was Jilly, who hadn’t bothered to knock, and maybe for some sisters that would have seemed the most natural thing, but not for the two of us—blond and auburn, pretty and not, on the opposite ends of most spectrums. She was wearing a lacy peach nightgown with cream-colored sleeves, the sort of thing I’d have thought would be worn to a party. I was wearing a T-shirt and cotton sweatpants. My hair was electrical.
“They’re talking,” I said, for she was studying me, saying nothing.
“I know,” Jilly answered. She sighed.
“He’ll probably come to see us soon.”
“Maybe,” she said. Then: “Do you mind?”
I didn’t answer. She turned and sat on the edge of my bed. Sat there in silence, facing the window.
“Doesn’t look like snow,” I said.
“No,” she said. “It doesn’t.”
And that was all between the two of us, because anything that might have been said should not have been said. Not then. It was too scary.
I woke to the sound of a slight tapping at the door. “Honey?” Dad said. “Can I come in?” I must have fallen back asleep, and Jilly, too, curled up in one corner of my bed like a cat, her long hair over her fine shoulders. “Daddy!” Jilly said, which is what she called him still, and I said, “Hey. Dad. Welcome home,” putting my hands to my hair to power it down, swallowing the stale taste from my mouth. He looked faded and creased around the eyes, with a line of worry down his forehead. His hair seemed flat and lifeless. He wore an untied tie around his neck like a scarf. His pockets jingled with spare coins.
“You don’t know how I’ve missed you,” he said, coming toward us, sitting between us on my bed—his light, lithe daughter on one side, me on the other, all of us wrecked by some variant of sleep: too much, too little, our eyes a little tilted in our heads.
“Did you get my letters?” I said, though I knew he had.
“Of course.”
“Did you go to Gump’s?” Jilly asked.
“Without a doubt.”
“How long are you home for?” I wanted to know.
“Not long enough,” he said. “Never long enough.”
He told us stories, then, about Stuart Small. He took us on a tour of San Francisco. He told us about the Christmas tree down on the wharf, which was taller, he said, than most anything. Then he wanted to know all about us, and Jilly told him about driver’s ed and the total barf head who was its teacher, and I said only that I’d been writing poems, and maybe I could show him later, except that they were works in progress, and he said he’d like that very much, and that works in progress always had more flavor than anything perfect enough to be called finished.
“I bet you’re tired, Dad,” I said, and he said he was, and I took my arm from around his neck and Jilly took her arm back, too, so that he could stand and lean in and kiss us both on the forehead, then go off down the hall, to the master bedroom. Jilly was gone just as soon as he was. I lay down on my pillow and listened long as the house slowly went silent.