B000FCJYE6 EBOK (8 page)

I went to my mom. We looked at the window together.

“We can’t leave it like that,” I said. “Can we?”

She shook her head.

“Should I get a blanket?”

She pushed herself off the back of the couch, and we got blankets from the linen closet. I held them while my mother threw them over the curtain rod. My hands got cold.

My mother dropped her arms when she was done, and said, “Go to bed now, Kate.” She turned and went to her room.

I stood there, looking around. The dark living room was like a winter field, shadows of furniture gradually disappearing under blown snow. There’s glass under there, I thought to myself. Carefully, I walked through the snow, skidding my toes first. I decided to wait until my father came home. I would keep him company while he played cards. I sat down on the snow-covered couch and looked at the blankets, blowing softly, letting in snow.

My face was frozen. Esau was sleeping in the other room. Tomorrow he would be gone. He was going away for a long time. They were taking him and it was their fault and now there wasn’t even a window.

I stood up, yanked down all the blankets, and sat back down on the couch.

I watched the wind whisk a pile of snow from a branch of the oak and blow it toward me. I flinched and closed my eyes as the spray of ice hit my face.

On Christmas morning, I woke up and lay in bed, not wanting to leave the tunnel of my own warmth. Out in the living room, my mother put on a Christmas record. I smelled bacon and coffee. My father’s voice came down the hall, booming along with the carols.

Everything was fake. They were only doing it because I said I was quitting Christmas. Last night I had refused to trim the tree. It was Esau’s and my job. Both my parents were drunk and nearly set the house on fire, getting tangled in the lights and laughing until they sat down in the middle of the boxes of tissue-wrapped ornaments and cried.

We were going to visit him at State.

I got up and dressed in all red. I knew my mother wouldn’t tell me not to wear red, what with my orange hair, because it was Christmas and I could do anything I liked. I got my sleeves confused and went out the door and my father set me straight.

“Santa came, Katie,” my mother called. “Why don’t you see what he brought you?”

“Your mother’s making pancakes,” my father added, sitting down on the couch and rubbing his hands together. He nodded toward the tree, lit up like Las Vegas. “Go on and look in your stocking.”

I shook my head, but my parents looked so crestfallen I couldn’t keep it up. I sat down among the piles of presents and started fishing treasures out of the stocking my grandmother had knit for me when I was born.

There were dozens of presents from Oma and Opa, the cousins and uncles we never saw, my parents, who always were broke after Christmas. My father spiked his eggnog with brandy and my mother put used bows in her hair. They sang. They laughed when I liked things. The pancakes were from scratch. They gave me candy and oranges and new red boots. They gave me everything on my list.

They gave me the orange boy’s bike. The one Davey had. My heart’s desire.

I said thank you and began to cry, for reasons of which I was not aware.

“Oh, now. Say now,” said my father. He came over and sat next to me on the floor, rubbing my back with his hand. “See here.”

“It’s not the bike,” I said, wiping my face with the heels of my hands. “I love the bike.”

“No, of course not. It’s everything,” he said.

“It’s just
everything.
”

“I know. Of course it is.”

“The bike is the best present ever.”

“It’s not bad, is it? No. It’s all yours. We’ll teach you to ride in the spring.”

“With Esau. I want Esau to teach me to ride.”

The record had stopped. My mother got up and moved the needle to the edge. The Mormon Tabernacle Choir exploded into the room like a drunk uncle, screaming, “Joy to the World.”

“Well now,” said my father. “We’ll just see what’s what when the time comes.”

I was done crying. “I want to go see Esau,” I said.

“Well, we’re going to,” said my father, surprised.

“Now.”

He looked up at my mother. She raised her eyebrows and shrugged.

“Hup, then,” my father said, getting to his feet. “I guess that settles it. I think I’ll get my shoes on first, if that’s all right?”

I nodded.

We slid through the winter landscape as if the car was on skates. Whiteness. White ground, white sky, neat piles of snow on the thin wooden fences at property lines. Bare black branches of windbreaks here and there. My father babbled excitedly for a while, then lapsed into a silence that lasted until we arrived.

The building wasn’t ugly, exactly. It looked like a mansion, brick and five floors high. I trailed behind my parents, who straightened themselves and walked toward the double front doors. My father pushed me slightly before him as we stood waiting at the reception desk, as if he’d brought me there as a gift. My mother carried a shopping bag of presents for Esau and looked hopeful.

I began to regret having asked to come.

“Visiting?” asked the square woman at the desk. Glasses dangled on a cord off the shelf of her bosoms.

“No, we’re checking in,” my father said, and laughed loudly at himself. She looked up at him with her chin tucked in. He cleared his throat.

“Name?” she said.

“Schiller.”

She fussed and shuffled. “Hmm,” she said, as if she had discovered something on the piece of paper she held. “Fifth floor,” she said with finality, and put her glasses on her nose and started typing.

We got in the elevator. As the door closed, my father muttered, “Merry Christmas to you too.” I giggled.

The elevator opened and we stood outside a Plexiglas door, through which I could see a desk and then another door. A buzzer sounded, and my father pulled open the first door.

A pretty nurse looked up at us and smiled. She wasn’t wearing the silly hat. “Merry Christmas,” she said. “Nice to see you again, Mr. Schiller, Mrs. Schiller.” She looked at me and said, “And you must be Kate.”

I nodded, feeling put on the spot.

“Your brother talks about you a lot,” she said, coming around the desk with a huge key ring. She paused in front of the door and turned to face us. “Now, I should tell you, Esau’s not doing so well today.” She studied the reactions on our faces. “He had a long night last night, and we had to put him down with a pretty powerful medication. You know how it comes and goes. He’s done just great this week, really. But today he’s not very clear.”

My father nodded, as if taking this lightly. “So, he’s a little foggy?”

“He might not know who you are.” She looked at him steadily.

“Does he know it’s Christmas?” my father asked. He sounded so sad I winced.

“Hard to say,” she replied as she turned and unlocked the door. She held it open for us and we filed in.

The wide, carpeted hallway smelled of medicine, Lysol, and pee. We went into a large room where people were clustered at tables and on couches, or sat alone in chairs. The room was decorated like a classroom, with glittered cutouts of paper stars, Christmas trees, and angels pasted to the windows. A little plastic tree sat crooked on a side table and an old woman in a hat knitted a long thing.

“Esau,” the nurse called, going over to a shrouded figure in a chair by the window, its back to the room. We followed her and stood stiffly a few feet away as she bent over what I realized was my brother, shrunken. “Your family’s here to celebrate Christmas with you.”

Esau turned around and looked at us, his eyes moving slowly from one to the next, taking each of us in. “Hello,” he said formally, as if it took him that long to think up the right word. “Why don’t you sit down,” the nurse suggested, dragging chairs up in a semicircle around him, as if he was going to give a speech. To my father she said, “Let me know if you need anything.” She left.

“Merry Christmas, son,” my father burst out, leaning down over Esau and giving him a hug. My mother kissed him on the cheek. “See, we brought your presents,” she said. I sat down in a chair and tugged my skirt over my knees.

“Hello,” Esau said again. “Thank you.” He paused. “Hello.”

“Do you know who we are?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said, looking right at me, and I believed him.

“It’s Christmas,” I said.

“Okay. Thank you for the presents,” he said slowly, as if his mouth was sticky.

I helped him open them because his hands shook from the medicine. He thanked us for the magazines. He thanked us for the new games. He thanked us for a book on bugs, thick, elaborately illustrated, that I wanted myself. He unwrapped the last package, looking bewildered by the sudden largesse of his world, and held the ink-blue corduroy shirt in his hands.

“A blanket,” he said softly, pleased with it. He ran his hands over its nap.

“That’d be your good old-fashioned shirt, son,” said my father. “For wearing.”

My brother nodded. “To sleep with.” He bunched it carefully and held it up to his face.

We sat silently, trying to decide what to do with this.

“Well, I don’t see why the hell not,” my father said finally, and reached out to pat Esau’s knee. It startled Esau, and he pulled himself into the corner of his chair. I saw the hurt cross my father’s face as he took his hand back and showed it to Esau, palm out, the way you’d show your hand to a skittish dog.

The smells of cafeteria food seeped into the room, and the garbled murmurs of the other residents grew louder.

“I have to go now,” Esau said, his voice heavy with regret. He stood, holding his new shirt, abandoning his blankets in the chair. “Thank you.” He walked stiffly to the doorway. Our heads craned to watch him explaining something excitedly to the nurse. He showed her the shirt and gestured. She helped him get his arms into the sleeves, pulling the corduroy over the shirt he already wore. She led him back, and he sat down again. He looked pleased.

“She says—” He looked up at her and suddenly went blank. “Oh! She says do you want lunch.”

“Would you like to stay for lunch?” the nurse echoed. “Esau would like it if you stayed.”

“It’s a special thing,” he added.

“It’s a special Christmas dinner,” she translated. “The residents planned their favorites. What did you pick, Esau?”

“Peaches!” he crowed, rocking in his chair.

“I think he picked pizza, but that’s all right,” she said. “I’m sure there will be peaches too. There always are.”

We ate pizza, French toast, corn, and peaches for Christmas dinner. Esau ate with unexpected daintiness, a napkin tucked in his collar. After lunch there was medicine in paper cups and Christmas carols.

Esau didn’t go over to the group that gathered around the ancient record player. He hung back, with us, standing next to my father, every now and then reaching out to touch my father’s face. My father sat very still as Esau’s pale, translucent hands fluttered near his eyelids, tapped his brow, his earlobes, his chin. My father began silently to cry.

Esau edged closer to him, a look of concern on his face. He pressed his thumb into each slow tear as it appeared, then walked his strange stiff walk across the room and returned with a tissue. He handed it to my father, and my father blew his nose.

“Thank you,” he said.

“You’re welcome,” Esau replied. He waited until he saw that my father had finished crying. He sat down in my father’s lap, his thin side against my father’s chest, his arm over my father’s shoulders. Carefully, my father wrapped his arms around my brother. They rocked.

“I have to go now,” Esau said peacefully. He pulled up the hem of his new shirt and laid it against his face. His head fell heavily against my father’s neck.

I sat in the backseat of the car, watching night fall on the white prairie, unaware that in the front seat my parents’ marriage had cracked down the center the way a frozen lake will crack: deeply, invisibly, without explanation, the eerie noise a muffled clap of thunder that rolls from the south side to the north.

My mother drove. Both of them smoked. Nothing was said.

We drove through the night in a narrow tunnel of headlights. I felt safe and hot, zipped into my jacket, buckled into my seat.

I kicked the back of my father’s seat steadily and he didn’t tell me to stop, but I grew bored with it and I stopped.

As soon as we pulled up to the house, I ran in to survey my new riches. My mother made toast from Christmas bread for supper and called us. We’d been sitting there only a minute when my father pushed himself away from the table. But instead of getting a drink and sitting down again, he just picked up a bottle. Then he went out to the porch and sat down in a chair full of snow.

My mother turned to me. “I can’t do it,” she said, as if she and I had been discussing something. “I just can’t.” After a minute I nodded, because she seemed to be waiting for a response. She nodded once in return, stood up, and went into the kitchen to make coffee.

I sat there awhile. Since no one was looking, I ate all the toast. Eventually my father came back inside and sat down in his chair. I got up from the table and passed by him, feeling invisible. I wondered if this was what it was like to be a ghost. I sat down on the floor of my bedroom with my blanket and watched him in the living room and wondered if Esau could do this. If he was a sort of ghost, and could float through space, watching. The idea comforted me, and I thought I felt him settle down next to me on the floor. I laid part of my blanket over his invisible knees.

My mother came out of the kitchen with two cups of coffee and handed one to my father. She sat down on the couch. She looked out the window, the way I had noticed her doing more and more—as if she was looking toward a particular place, a place she wanted to go. I thought of what lay in the direction she was looking: first, the Andersons’ yard, then Main Street. If she was looking at Main Street, she might be thinking about turning left. To get to the city, you turn left on Main Street. If you turn right, you wind up in Canada and then the North Pole.