You Better Not Cry: Stories for Christmas (18 page)

“Look,” I said, “I just want a little tree. With some pretty lights. And a few sparkly balls. We don’t even have to have a star on top if that’s too Jesus of Nazareth for you.”

He knew I could talk him into almost anything. “I don’t want to celebrate the big Christian holiday,” he mumbled, frowning.

“I’m not suggesting we set up a nativity scene on the mantel and then go bomb an abortion clinic. I just want a little tree. That’s all.”

And when he smiled just a little, I added, “Come on, it will be fun.”

The smile was still there but his eyes flashed with caution.

I had used that exact phrase—
it will be fun
—about going boating on the Connecticut River with my brother early in the summer. Dennis had never learned to swim and hated the water, but he figured it would be okay “for an hour or so,” and reluctantly agreed.

The grim, fatiguing seven-hour boat ride was not merely a
memory
for him, but a ropy psychic scar.

Finally, I just told him, “I have always loved Christmas. Even when I was in my twenties and trying to be very cool and anti-Christmas, secretly, I still loved it. And I know that’s kind of idiotic, but there you go. I mean, I buy all of it: the cheesy music, the gaudy lights, and the spray snow, especially the spray snow. So the thing is, I have loved Christmas my entire life, and yet? Every single one has really been kind of hideous. Or maybe
hideous
isn’t the word. Maybe it’s more like, cataclysmic. It’s like I have a genuine Christmas
curse
or something. All I want is just one good, normal, happy holiday. A little one.”

His eyes had softened and he walked over to the counter and grabbed the car keys. “Ready to go get our first Christmas tree?”

The smell of fresh balsam was overwhelming as we stepped out of the car. Atkins Market, a former roadside apple stand that got ambitious and now peddled lobster tails and clever mustard, had a parking lot full of fresh-cut trees.

Ropes of soft white bulbs lit the area and the ground was thick with needles and sawed-off lower branches. It was this makeshift cocoon of bare-bulb lighting along with the tree carnage and balsam-stained air that made me realize, this was like the animal-friendly equivalent of a whaling vessel.

Standing beneath that halo of light, I suddenly felt
observed.
I imagined Greenpeace activists hiding in the darkness of the surrounding orchard, waiting to pummel us with sticks and frozen Granny Smith apples.

But Dennis knew certain veal recipes by heart; he experienced no ethical confusion over the tree bodies and immediately located the one perfect tree.

Everybody else had overlooked it or they would surely have taken it. There was only a week until Christmas and I had thought we’d be lucky to find one that didn’t look like a wood chipper got to it first. Instead, we got a tree so beautiful, you’d swear it came from a box. The apron was exactly symmetrical, as though it had been formed by a meticulously calibrated robotic extrusion nozzle and not the random, seemingly drunken hand of Mother Nature herself. That crazy old bitch gave us the California redwoods; true. But right along with it she whipped up some naked mole rat.

We hoisted the tree onto the roof of the car and secured it on the ski rack with bungee cords. “Let’s head over to Target and pick up some decorations,” Dennis said.

But when I saw this tableau—the Audi wagon, the fake-looking real tree, the snow blanketing the landscape, smoke from Atkins bakery ovens curling into the air in soft, sweet plumes—I thought,
This is ridiculously perfect
.

Simultaneously I felt actual g-forces inside my chest as I was ejected from my life, suddenly on the outside looking in; an observer. Though many things could be said about my life over the years,
ridiculously perfect
would never have been among them.

I simply could not trust any kind of perfection, not even the ridiculous variety.

After cleaning up the 498,000 individual needles that had scattered everywhere when we dragged the tree inside, I made a display of fetching a pitcher and giving the tree some water. To prove that I could.

Crouched on the floor, trying to angle the pitcher under its wide lower branches and getting my hand smothered with sticky sap and my eyes stabbed with needles, I realized,
This fucker really
is
like a pet, only a super-dumb one
. All it could do was
need attention
and remain upright while looking pretty. Though, hadn’t I dated many guys who had even less to offer?

After this, I went upstairs to the bedroom and my laptop. I was in terrible withdrawal, having been offline for
hours
. Surely, there’d been an earthquake or a major molestation; perhaps even the announcement of an unsuccessful conjoined twin surgery. Essentially, I just needed a good bedtime story.

Dennis came up to bed sometime later.

I woke up on my right side, facing away from the wall of windows. I thought:
It’s bright. I’ve overslept.
And I had, it was nearly eight thirty. The dogs were nestled deep into the down comforter. Bentley, who was normally awake at first light, excited about his morning walk, merely glanced at me as I climbed from the bed and walked to the next room.

Dennis was sitting at his desk. He was working and appeared to have been awake for hours. “Oh, hi there,” he said. “I didn’t hear you wake up.”

“Just now. Did you not sleep? Why are you already up?”

He nodded at the stack of papers, envelopes, and bills on his desk. “The Amex bill. Some accounting things for Ira that I was supposed to send him last week, just a lot of paperwork.”

Because the word
accounting
makes me want to shoot heroin, I nodded blankly and smiled, turned right, and began down the stairs to my own office.

Halfway down, I became aware of the difference in temperature; it had been comfortable upstairs but already it was
chilly
down there.

Winter in New England
, I thought.
Heat rises.

And then I saw the dazzling display of lights. Dennis had been the last one to bed; I hadn’t known he’d kept the tree lit.

The blinking lights were reflected across the glossy finish of our dark wood floors. Red, green, blue, yellow, purple—the colors seemed to be spreading from the shadows beneath the sofa, magically swirling, glistening and glittering throughout the main downstairs living area.

Kitchen, dining room, living room—all one space—shimmered with this wondrous Christmas ether. Even the wet-gloss baseboards and walls were splattered with twinkling lights.

I was momentarily stunned, locked in place at the bottom of the stairs, my right hand still on the banister, my body turned in witness. There was so much blinking, sliding, sparkling color; jewels flowing into jewels, the room awash in luminosity, hazy rings of glow floating everywhere.

It was beautiful in a way that made me hold my breath; the body’s response was to choose
seeing
over breathing. My eyes understood that what I was seeing was rare, significant.

Yet somehow, also, incorrect.

Like looking up at the night sky and seeing, there beside the moon, a nebula of silvery, blue lights; a nursery of baby stars where there had always been only shadow.

It was magnificent.

Then I understood, and it was appalling.

The lights
were
bleeding out from beneath the sofa and the table and all the legs of every chair. They were liquefied. The shadows had melted, their dark tails dissolved into a rippling, expanding lake of saturated color.

The floor, impossibly, was beneath
inches
of shimmering water.

Our new house, the home we had built together over two years and just finished, was flooded.

I watched waves glide beneath the dining table and soak into the carpet, ocean into sand. I remained motionless at the bottom of the stairs in a kind of paralysis of disbelief.

Two of the things Dennis hated most in the world—water and Christmas—had joined forces to ruin his new home.

I had always had the oddest feeling—consider it knowledge—that if I were ever to find myself inside the cockpit of a 767 with two dead pilots and a few hundred passengers in the cabin behind me, I would absolutely be able to land the ninety-thousand-pound jet.

And I would do it without deploying those ridiculous yellow rubber chutes.

I could see the landing in my mind: the sickening seesaw of the wings as I made my approach in a heavy crosswind, the thought-pulverizing speed of the geography’s approach and then at the last possible moment, the bending of probability itself, the crack of logic’s irrefutable spine, and the instantaneous elimination of all potential outcomes except for one: mine. The moment crowned and I delivered it—the perfect, elegant lift of the magnificent nose
just so
.

Almost
arrogant.

The settling of the wings, instantaneous and in unison; like twin sisters suddenly deciding to behave perfectly and in flawless cooperation.

The coiled spring every passenger felt at their very center, held in place by the weight of breath, before the rear tires hit the tarmac, bouncing once.

The wheels slamming down once more, this time with permanence;
they will not bounce again
. The nose gently settling and the plane screaming defiantly down the runway, a gleaming triumph of flashing sun streaks.

Failure, destruction, ruination—the statistically probable outcome—was a mere vapor trail, mist consumed by the roiling air left in the plane’s wake.

I would land that 767.

But frozen at the bottom of the stairs in my own home, transfixed by the ruin, I couldn’t do a thing.