This Time of Year

Please note, this story centers around grief with a brief mention of alcohol use as a coping mechanism. Violence is implied without any explicit description.

Christmas is the time of year for bright colors, pine needles, and unexpected, unwarranted acts of goodwill. It’s the time of year for warm mugs of hot cocoa with marshmallows floating on the surface, pillowy, soft, and white, ugly Christmas sweaters with too many loose threads, overpriced family dinners out and reheated leftovers paired with an already opened bottle of wine. You can’t walk down a street block without seeing happy children making deformed snowmen, festive lit-up trees and wreaths and homes like gingerbread houses. All they’re missing is gumdrops and a final dusting of sugar. This time of year, you can hear their little toy dogs yapping and the sound of Frank Sinatra oozing out of open windows wherever you go. 

This time of year, last year, I was just like the rest of them. 

We had picked out this house for its Dutch windows. They even had shutters on them, working shutters. Our realtor tried to talk us out of it, and I can’t blame her. We knew it would be a fix-it kind of house. It was meant to be a romantic move to a quaint neighborhood where every house is a different color, bright and bold, and we chose the problem child, the one with chipping white paint revealing dusty pale brown bones. Rooster-printed wallpaper covered the kitchen from the space above the stove to the dingy backsplash, rotting wood paneling was up to our hips in the dining room, and the carpet turned the bedrooms a toxic beige, the color of quicksand under white light. There was no basement to speak of, and a rickety yard, too small and too dead to hold any property value. 

Piece by piece, we brought it back to life. I redid the floors, prying up the dirty carpet and the baseboards, and on the long days when I came home late, ink clinging to my fingers and words spinning through my mind like ballroom dancers, I’d see her out there, on the ladder, a paintbrush in her hand and a bandana holding her hair back, the house in front of her slowly turning a beautiful, robin’s egg blue. She would be in jeans or overalls or the “paint smock” she made in junior high, a white tee shirt with a smiley face plastered on the front. She’d turn back and smile at me, Nina Simone or Ella Fitzgerald crooning up to her from the stereo sitting on the ground, then resume painting without a word. 

We’d save the small talk for dinner, or for our tiny kitchen, shared over skillets and salt, as I cooked, as we shared one glass of wine between us. Grace had loved this house, from the twiggy trees out front when we bought it, to the poppies she’d planted in the spring. She’d wanted them to bloom in time for August, so she could take a picture to show her new students a beautiful home garden on their first day of class. 

I don’t think I’ll plant anything out there, at least not anytime soon. I almost didn’t bother with a tree at all this year, but I’d seen an advertisement off the side of the interstate, and I thought of how we used to skip through small towns, searching for antiques and books so old the pages were falling out. Grace would pull me with her on impulse, without a care in the world for the time or the practicalities of a dirt road on old tires. We did it once with Hannah and Richard, in those years when we were roommates, new to the city, hungry and electrified, obsessed with the lights that come on at night and the stars blinking out there beyond them. It must have been nine years ago, exactly, on Christmas Eve; I’m almost a decade away from that night when we tied a tree last minute to the top of my car with leftover canyoneering rope and decorated it with handmade, cut out snowflakes. Grace made dozens, big and small, inelegant white things. 

Yesterday, I bought the tree alone and dragged it in at dusk. It didn’t (and doesn’t) feel right to celebrate all on my own, but that clean, untouched wood I spent hours and hours on has become all I can see. It seemed a crime to leave it empty, but even with the tree, branches bare, it seemed a crime to decorate it. What would I put on it? Grace had always made something, bought something new, thought up something that only she could create. I could buy ornaments from Walmart, but I don’t think I could bear to look at it if I did. I wrapped an old strand of lights around it and left it at that.

There are no gifts. 

These past weeks have passed by like pages in a book never read, parched and dry, each one crowded with dull lines. I stay in my home office, most of the time. I watch children pass by on their bikes, hollering and laughing, as I write and research, taking breaks now and again to flip my vinyl records to the B-side. The research is the only thing that keeps me tied to the world, even if it keeps me inside more often than not. Now, it’s the only thing that means anything. We painted the walls in my office a deep blue, broken up by my prints and movie posters. I kept M and Vertigo, but I had to take The Godfather down. I left it, one morning, outside next to my trash and recycling bin, face down on the pavement, still in its frame. 

Richard didn’t believe me when I told him about it. And why would he? I don’t think I’d have believed me either, if I hadn't seen that man with his crooked smile, skulking in an alleyway, leaning against the brick. He was smoking, wearing a thick coat on a warm Tuesday night in September, looking into the newsroom on the third floor as if he knew where it was. As if he knew where I was. I watched him saunter down the street and put his cigarette out on the hood of my car. 

Now, looking back, I know he wasn’t the first. The first had been the cashier at the deli, a veritable Michael Corleone, with dark hair and simmering blue eyes like a butcher's knife. Or maybe the first had been the couple who introduced Grace to their friend at parent-teacher conferences: there was something off about him. Those were the words she’d use. I feel safe, though, don’t you worry. 

I will never forgive myself for accepting that answer.

How can I? The empty space under my sparse Christmas tree is so pitifully sad. I can already hear the dust accumulating on my bookshelves. I could almost convince myself I’d imagined that they were ever clean. After all, I spent most of my time in the city proper, working myself to the bone, chasing stories in the dead of night, interviewing, transcribing, always searching for a new angle, a better pitch. In those early days, back in the heat of June, all I had done was interview a shell-shocked witness about a murder in a tiny delicatessen off 29th street. But I still remember when I caught the flu from my brother; I was helplessly feverish, sick and sweating in bed as Grace swept, dusted, cooked, sang and laughed as she took care of me as if I held her heart in my hand. 

She had rarely been sick. An apple a day; we teachers know, she’d laughed, with a lazy smile. I never properly returned the favor, though I bought her a new set of acrylics, fresh canvases, and a cherry blossom tree last Christmas. The bonsai was the first thing to go, after September. The new tree sits in its place, space filled, just yesterday. 

Not that anyone is here but me to see it, or that I would want to invite anyone. Richard has been distant. Hannah is not the same when she talks with me. I haven’t talked to her alone since October first (but who’s counting?) and I haven’t spoken with my editor since the second: which is why it surprises me when he calls. Christmas Eve, no less. I let it go to voicemail, resting my phone face down on the couch. I close my eyes and try to listen, really listen to Glenn Gould’s interpretation of Bach as I never have before. I can get lost in his variations for hours on end but not tonight. Tonight I feel like a boy listening to a broken music box, turning it back again and again and praying for a different ending to the song that plays on loop. 

I pick up my phone and play the voicemail. 

“Hi, Daniel. I hope you’re doing well. I’ve always found the holidays tough, and I want you to know, we’re all thinking of you, at the office. Even Colin.” There’s a pause, a sound of something rustling, as he takes a deep breath. “It’s not your fault. It’s no one’s fault. And she would’ve wanted you to be happy. I think-“ he pauses, cuts himself off. “We miss you, and our readers miss you too.”

Of course, that’s why he’d call. It must be bad, for him to call tonight. Maybe they cut his bonus. 

“Well, don’t you know it.” He forces a chuckle. “Call me if you ever want to come back. Or just call, anyway. Merry Christmas.” 

I delete it. I’ve missed three other calls, all from my brother Charlie, all without a voicemail. 

Scott has always been a fool, but now he’s proved himself to be a coward. Choosing not to see it won’t change the past. And it won’t bring her back. I find my way to the liquor cabinet, finally. A tumbler. Ice. A hard slug of Johnnie Walkers. The truth will out, Grace would say. Shakespeare got that one right. Let others lie to themselves, lie to others if you must, but never lie to yourself. 

Scott can pretend he didn’t know I was profiling a string of disappearances and deaths connected to the mafia, as if he didn’t edit every piece I wrote. He can pretend he knew what to say when he saw me slack-jawed and white-faced when the police called me at work. Even if I wanted to, I cannot pretend I don’t know the reason a semi ran into Grace’s bug yellow compact car at eighty miles an hour half a mile from her school on a sunny afternoon. 

I will never be able to pretend it didn’t have to do with me.

I sip at my whisky but I don’t down it. She wouldn't have wanted me to be happy; she would’ve understood that happiness was beyond the question, but she would’ve wanted me to be alive, and she wouldn’t have wanted me to give up. Happy is gifts under the tree, lighthearted smiles and Christmas carols. Happy is the Christmas party at the old newsroom or the one Hannah and Richard are hosting today, like the one they held last year, in their matching Christmas hats. How she could do it again this year, I don’t know. She waited weeks to tell me. I didn’t think you should know, I didn’t know what it would do to you. Her voice had shaken over the line, and I’d sat back on the stone porch steps of our pretty blue house, and took a breath in anticipation. She was pregnant when she died. She was waiting for the right moment to tell you. 

I choked. The rest of our conversation went by in stilted silence of held breaths and uncertain pauses. The bullet didn’t hit until I’d clicked to end the call.

It still kills me, to remember what there was before and what there would have been. A cradle or a tiny blue blanket or a stuffed panda with squeezable beads in its stomach, soft and pale pink. I’d seen one in the grocery store, heard Angela talk about it for her column. It would have fit so well together. Our little family of snowflakes and stuffed animals. The vision is so sweet I could die. 

I slide down the ground, expensive hickory underneath my fingers, Grace’s grandmother’s couch behind my back. It smells like dust and perfume, like cold nights and forsaken love. Good Lord, I’m a lost cause. But it won’t matter. I have a conversation with an old roommate at a publishing house after the holidays, and then it will all be worth it.  

The alcohol is not strong enough, but I’m too scared of myself to drink anything stronger. 

By the time I hear the knock at the door, I’ve finished my drink, and it takes more determination that I thought I had to stand. Even as I use the couch to help me, the Christmas tree shakes as I stumble along on wobbly legs. A pounding on the door. 

I wonder if it’s Hannah and Richard, come to sweep me into their party, with wide open drunken arms. There were many nights when we were in school Richard hauled me away from my desk to go to a bar. Or maybe it’s Charlie. He was here a few nights ago, I forget when, to take me away from my thoughts. I thought he would be with our mother, or his wife, tonight of all nights. But I’d be lying if I said I don’t welcome the distraction. The rescue. There’s nothing for me here, anymore. I grab my coat, and turn to the door, just as it bangs again. 

“Coming!” I call. 

This old place doesn’t have an electric doorbell yet. It’s one of the many changes we never quite got to and I don’t think I ever will. I should sell it and I think I shouldn’t have left my mother alone on Christmas Eve. I pat my pocket; the keys are still there. 

I unlock the door, heavy iron doorknob in my hand, and come face to face with scrutinizing blue eyes. Slowly, too slowly, I realize, this is not Charlie. This is the devil from the deli, and two men behind him. The cold wind hits me hard enough to bring tears to my eyes. I tighten my hold on the doorknob as Blue Eyes digs his hand into his coat pocket. I don’t think to move, and I don’t think to run. The world has turned to tar, and I cannot think of a single thing to do. I take in their grim faces and their greasy hair and a cold clarity seizes my heart. For all of the world’s beauty, the end is empty, barely an utterance in a lonely room. I don’t flinch when I see the gun. I am convinced I won’t feel the pain.