Never Alone

With the girls gone skiing with their cousins, Tracy finally found herself with a couple of days to focus on the novel she was writing.

She felt it was nice having roommates, to be able to have a whole house; roomy, private, but it also seemed like she never had any time alone.

She has completely forgotten the parcel at the front of the house which her friend, Carol had pointed out when they were leaving. She will have plenty of reminders this evening.

After getting her coffee, Tracy turned off all the lights but what she needed around her desk, with the hope that anyone going by would think she was sleeping or away. Not that anybody ever really came by without announcing themselves by phone or text anyway. Still the isolation in the darkened house, with snow lightly falling outside the windows seemed conducive to writing.

"Quite cozy, in fact." Tracy said out loud, and sighed with contentment as she sat down at her desk.

Then a knock came at the door.

Tracy stood up, crossed the room and knelt on the sofa to look out the window.

"I don't recognize that person," she thought,

"Well I would but that's just not Daddy Pete. He' s dead."

Realizing this must be a delivery person, Tracy turned back toward her desk thinking how nice it would be if only she could see her stepfather again. He was the stabilizing factor in her world, growing up with her mother sick. Really, in her mind, Daddy Pete was her favorite person. Cancer had taken him two years earlier.

With warm thoughts of her stepfather in mind, Tracy settled back at her desk.

The phone rang.

Having not even opened the right file yet, Tracy found her mood rising to a bit of frustration. She'd been interrupted twice already!

"Thank goodness for call display," she said to herself. She read the lighted panel on the phone and chose not to answer it. It displayed her grandmother's phone number. It could only be her wretched uncle Charlie, since her grandmother had been dead for three years now.

Tracy had not spoken to Uncle Charlie since the funeral. She had contact with him before that only because she had to.

He had moved in to - supposedly - help her grandmother after her grandfather died. He didn't want his sister living alone in that big house, so far away from the rest of the family. That's what he said anyway. Tracy knew he also needed a place to stay.

What she was thinking now was, "...and family spent less time with her only AFTER he moved in, the control freak."

She had no desire to speak to him now or ever. Three years was not long enough in Tracy's mind,

"Not after..." but Tracy didn't want to remember him touching her as a child, or his bristly chin - already older than anyone else she knew when she was twelve - when he kissed her.

"Well, back to work." she said, pulling up the file and almost beginning to relax.

Tracy only managed to add two pages to the document before she heard a knock at the door and a woman giggling. From where she sat, she glanced out the window. She saw a car in the driveway, almost up to the back door. Careful not to be seen she went closer to the window. She saw the car was full of young women.

"What now?" she thought, "A bunch of girls coming to get me for a Christmas party?", really feeling her frustration again.

"Don't they know to call in advance? A girl has to have time to get ready!"

She finished with that thought train because the girl coming back from her door reminded her of something.

"It's the dress", she thought "It's exactly like Sarah's."

Sarah was her sister who died in a crash almost a decade ago. Sarah had been out to a dinner party with her friends. "...that fancy french restaurant"'she thought. It was fairly formal for the girls, at the time just teenagers, and they went all out to look beautiful and mature. On the way home their car was hit by a drunk driver. It was pushed and rolled into a building. They were all crushed, Sarah and four others.

The phone rang.

Tracy looked at the call display. She saw the same number as before and left it.

Tracy went back to her writing.

Another man walked past the window to the back door. Controlling her frustration, she decided to stay in her seat this time. She did notice that the man, perhaps another delivery driver, looked an awful lot like Mr. Severs. Mr. Severs lived down the street from her when she was in grade school. He was the man who helped her with her bike, tended to her scraped knees, generally listened to her when she was fatherless and her mom had not yet met Daddy Pete. Tracy had some nice memories of Mr. Sever then kept writing.

An hour and a half later Tracy printed off the seventeen pages she'd finally been allowed to write.

"Now's the fun part," she said with a sarcastic laugh, "editing."

She was grateful to have had some time to herself though and looking forward to a fresh coffee to drink during the process.

Tracy checked the back door for parcels on her way to make coffee. There was nothing there, at the back door.

"I didn't order anything anyway. I just thought maybe someone sent something for Christmas." she was thinking, and began to wonder why then had all these people come to the house tonight.

"I've never had so many people try to contact me in one day." she said to the coffee pot, "It's so strange how they've all looked like people that I've known but who've already died."

"I guess if you don't get out and see many people, they all start to look like people you've known." she thought, then out loud, "Hey, maybe I can use that in the lyrics of the song Lily sings in the club in the story. 'They all look like people you've known'. Well I can work it in somehow."

Before she poured her coffee another knock came. No one could see her in the kitchen so she didn't need to answer the door.

She started the walk back to her desk and saw out the window a girl in a delivery uniform, with a ponytail out the back of her hat.

"Another one." Tracy gasped, "She looks just like Denise!"

Denise, her best friend from school, married the same year she did. Denise's first child was being born the same week as Tracy's second born. Denise didn't live through the birth. Tracy had gone home confused about feeling the greatest joy of having another baby, a miracle, while also feeling guilty about it because her friend had not survived to receive the same miracle. She loved Denise still, though two decades had passed.

"The ponytail did it. It was just the way Denise wore her hair." Tracy thought, "That's all it was."

She sat down for a read through of her work.

The phone rang.

She picked it up while looking at its screen, annoyed at herself for doing it, as she did. The screen had shown her grandmother's number. There seemed to be noone at the other end of the line so she hung up.

"Good. I didn't want to talk to you anyway, Charlie." she said at the phone.

After the blue pencil was all done on the seventeen pages from tonight, Tracy retrieved the stack of previous pages. She made it a habit to read each chapter as it was done, then read from the beginning to check for flow, and of course, continuity of detail.

The phone rang again.

Tracy jumped, jarring her coffee just a little.

"Guess the nerves are back" she thought as she answered her grandmother's number.

"Charlie," she said, "I never really expected to hear from you again and I was ok...." she trailed off as a woman's gentle but inquisitive voice said,

"Hello? Hello Tracy, is that you? It's been so long."

Tracy carefully replaced the receiver. Her thoughts were jumbled. She was silent and unclear.

"That couldn't have been Gram. I'm losing my mind." she thought but out loud she said, "I was just crazy. Also rude."

She was thinking, since that wasn't her grandmother, it WAS someone and she had just hung up on them. She explained to herself that probably Charlie had a new live-in to stave off those lonely nights and that woman was nice enough to contact his family at Christmas time.

Feeling embarrassed and a little angry at herself, Tracy forced herself to get back to her work.

When Tracy finished reading her novel to its current stop point, and was satisfied with her new edits, she realized something.

With all her distractions, everything that had happened tonight, she had not gone to the front door. Even with all the delivery people she had seen going by, she had not remembered the package at the front door. It had been the last thing Carol said to her when they left last night but Tracy promptly forgot.

Tracy became excited that there may be a Christmas present for her outside. She also worried that it had been there for twenty-four hours in the cold and snow. Instead of searching for her own outerwear, she grabbed a coat Nancy had left behind, stuck on her runners and grabbed some mittens from the basket at the door. Outside she went, by the front door this time.

Immediately she saw the package. It was partially covered with snow and practically in the middle of the lawn.

"Why do they just leave them way out there?" she thought, "That's not very professional." The now familiar frustration was coming back to her.

Glancing toward the driveway, Tracy thought she realized how hard it must have been snowing while she worked. There were no tire tracks or footprints to be seen at all. She brought her attention closer to the steps so she could go down them and retrieve the box from the lawn. She stared there a moment in shock.

"Well maybe I had to finish writing Lily's story before I could know." she thought and marvelled that fate would concern itself with such tiny details.

At the bottom of the steps, in her own overcoat and boots was her body.

She could see that she in fact had tossed the box onto the lawn accidentally, when she fell.

As she began to faint, into her own dead body she realized the feeling of welcome from all those who had tried to call on her that night - those who loved her and who had gone before.

The following morning, on a walk together, Tracey's neighbor, Kelly and her dog Skipper found Tracy. Kelly called 911 and explained the situation.

She said, "She must have fallen and knocked herself out. It looks like she froze there in the snow, but, I could swear, she's smiling."