Inland (10 page)

IT’S THE BUZZING OF MY PHONE
that wakes me. Once at first, then in a flurry of vibrations that threatens to shake it off the nightstand. The memory of my dream falls away gently and fades in an instant, losing its vividness, replaced by sunshine and sound, the immediate buzz of messages. There are short ones from Jana, Shanika, Corey—all mass-sent to everyone. Cheerful texts, with promises of a meet up during the holiday break. I scroll through them and grin. I save Ben’s for last, and laugh when I open it.

Cal! You alive? I heard that a career criminal named ‘Santa Claus’ was doing all kinds of B&E last night.

Merry Christmas to you, too,
I text back. His reply comes back so quickly, I’m pretty sure he prepared it in advance.

Nooooo thank you. Christmas = creepy. If that red-suited home invader shows up here, I will beat him. With a menorah. TO DEATH.

I laugh again, and marvel at how easy this is. How effortless. How perfectly he’s settled in beside me, how his noisy exuberance fills in all the blanks. There are so many pieces of me missing, not just the past I’m not supposed to remember, but the little social fluencies that atrophied and died after too many years of quiet aloneness and hospital rooms. Even at my best, I am still a girl with scars on her body and pills in her bag. But he can take up the empty space, make up for all the things I’m missing. Even though he’d be the first to tell me I’m wrong, that there’s nothing missing. He doesn’t see what isn’t there.

My phone buzzes again—
When can I see you
?—and I begin to answer, typing the words,
Maybe tonight,
but then I stop. I don’t hit the send button. Even as I feel the flutter in my stomach that always accompanies thoughts of him, I suddenly feel as though today is something not to be disturbed. It’s not just the holiday—it’s been so long since Christmas meant anything, it no longer registers on my internal calendar as anything but another day—but the air in the room. The house is warm, suffused with the gentle light of almost-sunshine glowing through the thin curtain of overcast sky. I look out at the bright, gray morning. I breathe deeply, and the smell of coffee, fresh and rich, fills my nose. The spiced kick of cinnamon. The dark sweetness of cloves.

Today is different.

There are sounds coming from beyond the closed door, from the kitchen. The clink of china, the
ching
of silverware, the smooth
whoosh
of well-oiled drawers opening, then shutting again with a
clatter
. And something else: voices. Hushed, so as not to wake me, but light, happy. Chatty. I hear my father speak; his voice is low, measured, but strangely musical. I hear Nessa’s answering laugh. I hear the sound of the radio, the low harmony of a traditional chorus singing softly under it all.

Today is different.

I can feel bewilderment pulling at my face, widening my eyes, as I step around the corner. The two of them are there, bent together over a pan, peering at the concoction inside. The kitchen is warm, full of the scent of something just-baked, the sterile cold of its unused countertops vanished beneath a collection of bowls, a slowly melting nub of butter, a haphazard sprinkle of cinnamon sugar and flour that begins at one end of the breakfast bar, crosses over the stovetop, and ends somewhere in Nessa’s hair. She’s grinning; my father is grimacing; his rolled-up shirtsleeves are white with floury fingerprints.

Nessa sees me first, and freezes.

“Uh,” she says, and my father startles, too. They stare at me, guilty expressions on their faces, and for a long moment, the only sound is a rich Irish tenor launching into the opening verse of “I Saw Three Ships.”

I take a step forward, taking in the scene, then peer over the counter and into the pan. Inside, low and flat, is something covered with a crumbled topping. I look at my family—realizing, with a sense of awe and wonder, that a family is what I’m looking at—and clear my throat. I point at the pan.

“What . . . is that?”

Nessa looks stricken. My father draws himself up to his full height, pushes his glasses up his nose, and reaches for a glass full of something white, thick, foamy. He takes a long drink, sets it down, and grins at me with lips covered in a foam moustache.

“That,” he says, “is a Christmas coffee cake made by two people who can’t cook and have been drinking eggnog since eight o’clock in the morning.”

And then he laughs, and so does Nessa, and so do I, and the music soars around us. In the corner of the living room, the little white tree twinkles as though it’s just as amused as we are.

—

In the hour that passes, while my aunt hands me my own small glass of eggnog (“Sip slowly,” my father warns, before beginning to giggle again) and the coffee cake is scooped out and remade and baked once more,
with
baking soda, I watch the two of them circling each other and marvel at the ease of it. Is this what mornings are like in the homes of ordinary people, the ones who grew up untouched by tragedy and have no horrors to forget? This effortless waltz, the casual sharing of space, someone pausing a moment to hum along to the music that fills the room. Even as I sense that this began as a grudging effort, the two of them coming together to create this day for me, something has changed. My father smiles more easily, laughs more deeply, responds to Nessa’s teasing with indifferent ease. And Nessa, for her part, grows less adversarial, less in search of a fight, cheerfully following his instructions and chiding herself for splattering bacon grease on the stovetop.

And with something like wonder, I think,
This is what we could be
. If we only let ourselves. If we only move forward, and don’t look back. If we pretend that the past—the loss, the loneliness, the way the air seeped out of the world as we fled inland, mile by mile—never happened.

Maybe it’s best if we don’t remember.

—

It’s nearly noon when we clear our plates and migrate, by unspoken agreement, toward the couches. Outside, the overcast sky has turned dark, slate gray. Small drops of rain streak against the windows, and in front of them, the tree sparkles and shines all the brighter. I find myself wishing it would pour, wishing that the rain would come down in sheets, obliterating the outside world, erasing everything beyond the borders of this room and its warmth and the lazy, languid spinning of the golden orbs on the Christmas tree.

Nessa swoops in, seizes a package, and thrusts it eagerly into my hands.

“Open mine first,” she says.

From the package, I lift a shimmering cascade of deep blue-green fabric, shaking it loose as the paper falls away. I gasp in spite of myself. It’s a dress, long and heavy, with tiny iridescent beads stitched into the bodice and cascading in ornate patterns down its layered skirt. I stand up, press it to my body, as the hem brushes the carpet with a whisper.

“Oh my God,” I say. I know nothing about fashion, but even I recognize the name on the tag stitched along one edge of the plunging back. The dress in my hands must have cost more than the entire contents of my closet, combined.

“Nessa, this is—I mean, I can’t—”

“Not another word,” she says, grinning from ear to ear. “I knew the moment I saw it that you had to have it. Every girl needs at least one insanely beautiful, utterly impractical dress in her closet.”

I swallow, and look down. “I’m not sure it’ll fit,” I murmur, but even as I say it, I know it’s not true. Even now, I can see how its lines follow my body.

“It will fit you like a glove,” Nessa says confidently. “Which you’ll see for yourself when you model it later.”

“I don’t think—”

My father breaks in, his voice exasperated but affectionate. “Callie,” he says, “why don’t you say ‘Thank you,’ and you can table your doubts until later.”

I gulp again, and blush. “Thank you. It’s beautiful.”

Nessa smiles and puts her hands together, clearly pleased, and my father nods approvingly—though he casts a sideways glance at her, and mutters, “Where do you think she’s going to wear a thing like that?” to which Nessa replies, “Alan, you are completely missing the point.”

—

The scarf I give to Nessa is, I’m mortified to realize, nearly identical to the one she’s already wearing, but she winds it around her neck immediately and proclaims it perfect. The gifts from my father all come in envelopes: movie passes, gift cards, a crisp hundred-dollar bill.

“It was suggested to me that I should give you presents with more, er, flexibility,” he says, knitting his brows together, then casting a sardonic glance at Nessa. “Apparently, my taste leaves something to be desired.”

“No, this is great,” I say. “Thank you. Um . . .” I lean forward to pluck a small package from under the tree. “Here, this is for you.”

I watch him unwrap it, pulling the ribbon away cautiously, slicing the tape with a fingernail so as not to rip the wrappings. The sight of him, so careful and deliberate, brings a rush of memory: my mother, giddy and impatient, whacking him over the head with a tube of wrapping paper, laughing, shouting, “Can we get some urgency, here? The roast is about to come out of the oven!”

When he lifts the object from its box, his expression is so inscrutable, so still, that I get nervous and start babbling, “It’s an ammonite fossil. I mean, you probably know that. I thought you could use it as a paperweight, maybe, but I wasn’t sure if you had one already, and if you do it’s no big deal, I can just—”

“It’s terrific, Callie,” he says, holding up one hand to silence me as he lifts the gleaming spiral to the light. “A beautiful specimen. Thank you.”

I don’t tell him that it was Ben’s suggestion, one so good I was almost embarrassed to take it. He’d pulled me into Mr. Strong’s classroom before the homeroom bell, dragging me back to the decorative glass case full of preserved skeletons, framed scientific illustrations, unnameable things floating in formaldehyde jars.

“Are you still looking for a gift to give your dad?” he’d asked, and then pointed to a curved object on one of the lower shelves. A doughnut-shaped mollusk, polished to a shine, with scribbly jigsaw-puzzle patterns running evenly over its surface. When he explained what it was—an ancient creature, turned to stone, once alive in the sea but now immortalized by the earth—the perfection of it made me grit my teeth in frustration that I hadn’t thought of it first.

“That’s pretty,” Nessa says, and he hands it to her. I watch her examine it, curious, feeling its weight in her hands. The opalescent patches wink with reflected light as she turns it over.

My father clears his throat.

“I have one more gift for you,” he says, and hands me a package, square-shaped and carefully wrapped. He watches me steadily as I begin to open it, and I find myself mirroring him as I peel the paper away, feeling the sturdy outline of a cover—a book?—until I loosen the last folded edge and hold it in my hands.

When I flip the cover open, my eyes go wide and my breath catches in my throat.

“I thought . . .”

I can’t finish the sentence.

I thought he had thrown them away.

I thought they were lost forever.

I thought it was better, better, better if I didn’t remember.

Nessa leans forward to peer at what I hold in my hands, and the color drains from her face. A look passes between them, but I don’t see it, only feel it; I cannot tear my eyes away.

“That’s really lovely,” she says quietly. “Excuse me a moment, please.”

I nod, still looking down.

I gaze into my mother’s face as she laughs in her wave-drenched wedding gown and the spray glistens like jewels all around her.

I flip through the album without speaking, reaching the end, returning to the front, tracing my finger over all the memories I thought had long since turned to dust. My father watches me, quietly, until I look up and find my voice.

“I thought you didn’t have these anymore.”

He looks shocked.

“Of course I had them. Do you mean to say that you thought . . . that you didn’t think I’d—” He breaks off, shakes his head.

“Well,” he says quietly, “that’s my fault.”

I look down again at the first photo, the one from their wedding, the one that used to hang on the wall in the house high up on the seaside cliffs. It hasn’t changed; the two of them are still there, in crisp black-and-white, holding each other and laughing at their incredible luck to be young and so in love.

My father clears his throat.

“I owe you an apology, Callie. I convinced myself that letting you dwell on the past was wrong, that letting you remember your mother too much could be dangerous. Especially when you started getting sick, I just thought it would make your life even more difficult, that you’d have these painful memories to cope with on top of everything else.”

He looks at me; all I can do is nod, but it’s enough.

He keeps going: “And when we came here, and you started getting better . . . well, I was afraid it couldn’t last. Things had been so bad before, I couldn’t believe how well you were doing, that you really are finally growing up just like you should. I was just so fixated on what happened to your mother . . .”

He trails off, looks down at the glass in his hands. I watch him consider his words, watch him steel himself to say them. And then, he does.

“I was wrong. I should have remembered that you’re not just your mother’s child, but you’re my daughter, too. There’s as much of me in you as there is of her.” He pauses, looks down at the photograph in my lap, and smiles a little. He looks at her face, her hair, her smile, and then at me.

“Despite all appearances,” he adds.

I can see him waiting for me to acknowledge him again, to say something. I manage to whisper, “Okay.”

“Okay,” he replies. And then, in a single, sweeping motion, he jumps up, speed-walks to the breakfast bar, returns with a plate of cookies.

“Not homemade,” he says, “but I think we can trust the good people at Entenmann’s not to steer us wrong.”