As the arrival of Christmas began to be measurable in hours instead of days, I felt as though I was being pulled forward against my will by some insistent gravitational force. With every day that passed, my panic built. Though I didn’t quite understand why, the thought of being alone with my parents for even a moment during that holiday seemed excruciating, so I began a campaign to get Luke and Kat to come on Christmas Eve instead of arriving sometime in the late morning on Christmas Day.
“Please just spend the night, Kat. Please.”
“I don’t get why all of a sudden you want to have a slumber party. Why can’t I sleep at my own house? I’ll be there for presents and all that.”
The fact that Kat was coming for Christmas at all was a major, epic step. A sign that while she and my mother had a long way to go, they had established a newfound understanding on which to build.
“I just really think we all need to be together,” I said. The truth was that I hoped that if we could reassemble our family, we might be able to harness some small amount of joy to help soften the blow of the announcement that I was sure was imminent.
“Is Luke coming?”
“I haven’t asked him yet, but I’m sure he will.”
“If Luke comes, then maybe.”
. . .
In the end, I couldn’t convince Kat or Luke to come out a day early. Christmas Eve was much as I had imagined, with my parents and me on autopilot, going through the motions as we tried to replicate holidays past. My father read from the Bible and we held hands during grace and thanked the Lord for our blessings. My mother put out stockings, and the tree I had bought was decorated, though my mother hadn’t bothered to twine lights through the branches. “They’re such a hassle to get off.” My mother began to open the Christmas cards that had accumulated in a basket on the counter. One at a time, she ripped them open without pleasure, as if they were bills, snorting quietly at each card that had a generic “Seasons Greetings” message rather than a specific reference to Christmas. “People love to pretend that Christmas is about something other than Jesus.” Every so often she would pass one to my father, who would briefly acknowledge it before passing it back. Christmas music played loudly through the house until my father turned it down. “I’m sorry, girls. I have a terrible headache,” he explained.
Come seven o’clock, we were all in front of the television, watching a Christmas special we’d seen dozens of times, the lines of which we could recite from memory. My father quietly nursed a drink, and my mother stared off into space until she announced at eight that she was tired and going to bed.
Kat and Luke both showed up early on Christmas Day. They came together, Luke having taken the train and Kat having picked him up at the station.
“Merry Christmas,” said Luke as he opened the front door and peeked his head inside.
“Merry Christmas!” called my mother, rushing to greet him. She was doing her very best to be enthusiastic.
Kat followed him in, then shut the door behind her. “Hey, you guys,” she said, setting down a shopping bag full of wrapped gifts. “Merry Christmas.”
I heard my father click off the TV in the family room and walk into the foyer. “How was the train ride, Luke?” he asked. He and Kat had yet to reconcile on any level and they both stiffened slightly in each other’s presence.
“Oh, fine,” answered Luke. “Very festive. The conductor was wearing a Santa hat.”
“It definitely doesn’t feel like Christmas out there,” said Kat, taking off her light jacket. It was unseasonably warm, forecast to be in the low sixties.
“Isn’t it awful?” asked my mother with a worried expression. I knew that she was considering the possibility that the warm day was some sort of sign, a portent of doom. “And on Christmas of all days.”
“I don’t mind it.” Luke shrugged. My mother eyed him skeptically, as if his tolerance of this springlike Christmas was yet another indication of his compromised morality.
“Well, your mother made a delicious-looking quiche,” said Dad, the cue for us to begin to make our way into the kitchen for breakfast.
As we passed through the family room, I saw Kat eye the tree and the modest display of gifts underneath. She knew the very least about my parents’ situation. “Is there coffee ready?” she asked.
Gathering around the table, Luke began to instinctively fill the palpable void with chatter, talking incessantly and nonlinearly. Every so often, one of us would throw him a conversational bone.
“I hear the whole East Coast is like this today,” he said, gesturing outside to the sunny, balmy weather.
Kat nodded. “A friend of mine went up to Vermont for a ski trip and she said only a few trails are open.”
“Oh, where did she go?” asked Luke, eager to latch onto a thread.
“Stowe.”
“Oh, we just got back from Stowe. We loved it!”
Luke was aware of his slip immediately, and Kat and I instinctively tensed.
My mother zeroed in on that pertinent little pronoun. “Who’d you go with?” she asked, her fork frozen in midair and balancing a bite of quiche.
“Just a friend,” answered Luke dismissively. Seeking to segue gracefully out of this line of conversation, he began to exhibit an unusual amount of interest in Kat’s friend. “So is this a friend from work? How long has she been at the salon? Is she a stylist or an aesthetician?” That sort of thing.
. . .
Throughout the day, I expected my father to clear his throat and tell us in his chairman-of-the-board voice that we needed to have a “family discussion.” That was always what he called them. “Kids,” he would say, “your mother and I have something to tell you.” Then they would hold hands and use words like bankruptcy and assets and collateral. This was how it happened in my head. But he never said those words. In fact, he barely spoke at all.
When it was time for Luke and Kat to go, after the presents, after several dead, painful hours, then dinner, he walked them to the front door. Maybe now, I thought, both dreading the sound of my father having to admit his failure and desperate to get it over with. But instead he hugged them both, pulling Kat in first, then reaching out to Luke. Gripping the backs of their heads with his hands, he lowered his chin to his chest so it looked as though they were huddling against something fierce and cruel. My father never hugged us like this. It was a pat on the back or a tousling of the hair, but never this. And after the awkward, distant day, it was entirely unexpected. Kat and Luke were frozen, and when he let go, it was clear that they knew something was wrong. But instead of asking if everything was okay, instead of our familial pack instinct kicking in, we all scattered. Luke and Kat hurried out the door; I went upstairs. Only my mother stood next to Dad, with her arms crossed, her thin body radiating worry. “Roger,” I heard her say as I reached the top of the stairs, “what’s going on?”
Later, I would find out that my mother already knew that they were losing the house. She knew it was definite when she had told me that it was only a possibility. The plan was for my father to tell us all officially on Christmas. Terrible timing, but it couldn’t be helped. In retrospect, it would have been freeing. It would have begun to loosen the suffocating hold of the many secrets that hung in the air unspoken. But my father couldn’t do it, he told her now. Wouldn’t do it. He wasn’t going to let it happen.
I imagine my mother’s heart splitting at that moment, cracking from the pressure. “Honey,” she said tenderly, “it’s happened. We just need to put ourselves in God’s hands.” But my father, we would come to learn, had a different interpretation of what that meant.
. . .
I sat on the edge of my bed—I don’t know for how long—with my cell in my hands. I could call him to say Merry Christmas, just to hear his voice. And when my phone rang I felt my heart soar, only to plummet when I realized that it wasn’t Mark’s ring but, once again, Gary’s.
“Merry Christmas,” he said softly. It was late, but Gary’s family always ate a late supper on Christmas.
“Merry Christmas.”
“How was your day?”
“It was good,” I said automatically, though unconvincingly. “How was yours? Did you go to your mom’s?”
“Actually, I had Christmas here at the house this year.” He sounded almost ashamed. I didn’t speak. “I really just wanted to call and thank you for your gifts. I know that Daniel and my mom are going to reach out to you as well.”
I wasn’t in the mood for formalities. “Oh, you’re welcome,” I said quickly. “I hope you like them.”
“Yeah… that bookmark is something else.” Something else was the way Gary always described things that he didn’t really like but felt that he should. Oh, that concert was something else. Did you see that painting? It was something else.
I let out a tired, sad laugh.
“Listen, I’m really sorry that I didn’t send anything… I didn’t know that we were exchanging gifts… But I have something for you… that I’ll send…”
I interrupted him. “Gary, you don’t need to get me anything.”
“No, no. I mean I have something, but I didn’t know if we were going to do that, so I didn’t send it.”
He was always so phobic about faux pas. I just wanted to get off the phone. “Okay, well, I am beat, so tell everyone Merry Christmas for me.”
“Ellen,” he said, “there is just one other thing that I wanted to tell you.”
“Okay,” I said expectantly, wanting him to get on with it. There is a problem with the divorce; he needs me to come back up. There is something else I need to sign, a tax document.
“I’m engaged.” He said it frankly, without any pauses or signs of ambivalence. Just like when he had told me that he wanted a divorce.
“You’re engaged.” I had to say the words out loud to understand their meaning.
“Yes, just today. I wanted you to know. I thought I should tell you.”
I held my head in my hands. “Congratulations.”
Her name was Natalie. She was an occupational therapist who worked with some of the men and women in Daniel’s home. I had met her before. She was pretty, blond, with a good nose and white teeth, and came from somewhere in Florida. She also had a three-year-old daughter from a previous marriage. Well done, Gary, I thought. Not only would she be an even better advocate for Daniel, but she had a proven breeding record. He didn’t just replace me; he upgraded.