You Better Not Cry: Stories for Christmas (20 page)

I couldn’t wait even fifteen minutes for my brother. I was going to have to do something I never, not even in my most terrifying nightmares, imagined: I was going to have to ask one of our neighbors for help. Carleen.

She was a professor. At the very least, she would be able to think of a better tool than a dustpan to get rid of the water.

I stumbled out of the garage wearing clumsy winter boots and no socks. My feet were sliding around inside them and I kept tripping. It felt like weeks had passed since I’d been outside, which is how I must have looked: pale, unshaven, wild-eyed, out of breath.

I was lumbering down my driveway when I saw Carleen sitting on the steps of her front porch, despite the cold. She was wearing a thick bathrobe and held a mug of coffee in her hand.

She resembled everything I had tried to create that was now destroyed.

As I walked, then jogged, across our yard to hers, I thought,
I made Dennis leave New York City and build a house with me in Massachusetts. And then I destroyed it all because that is what I do—attract disaster.

As I neared Carleen, I could no longer see her. I could see only Dennis, doubled over on the floor and sobbing, “No, no, no.” Some part of him would be warped now, like the floors. The part that believed in me and thought we could build a life. The part that made it unscathed through forty-four years.

Then I was standing in front of Carleen, ragged and panting. My past had hunted me down and it had found me.

It turned out, in my new
There’s meatloaf in the freezer!
life, the meatloaf was actually just a dead cat wrapped in aluminum foil.

The furniture that had outlasted three centuries was right now splitting apart in my living room as it soaked up my water. Soon, it all would crash through the floor into the basement, with Dennis on top, impaled by my colonial fireplace poker.

What did I say to Carleen? I don’t remember. All that remains is this: she rose from the steps and moved to her front door, all at once. She was a blur, in motion. She held the coffee out, away from her. And her robe was airborne around the edges.

With her hand on the doorknob, she turned and looked over her left shoulder and said, “We’ll be right there.”

The way she said it, or maybe the way she moved—almost choreographed, as though all her life she had known that this moment was coming—made me certain she would know what to do with all of our terrible water.

As I headed back inside, I wondered how the day would ever end. I hadn’t had that feeling for years. Not since I’d stopped drinking.

I remembered, no matter how impossible it seemed that any given day would end, it always did. This one would, too.

Even worse, now I knew things could happen in the night. Harm could reach you no matter how insulated you thought you were. It could change you. It could
take.

When Carleen arrived a few moments later, she brought her transplanted California surfer-dude blond husband, Henry, and her Shop-Vac. Henry was holding what appeared to be every bath towel they owned, each perfectly folded.

I saw the slightest widening of her eyes as she surveyed the damage, but she said nothing. I had learned this about Carleen: if it was a rainy day, she would never say,
“It sure is a rainy day.”

She simply began to assemble the vacuum and then she plugged it in. Carleen was like a trauma surgeon:
“Yeah, it’s really never a good idea to French kiss any dog you don’t know, but especially not a Presa Canario. Well, let’s see if we can’t get a temporary face sewn in place for you.”

She raked the vacuum across the floor in wide, even strokes, sweeping the room in a logical grid. And when I saw this I thought, thank God we live next door to somebody with a Ph.D. I had lived in Manhattan for nearly ten years before I even
realized
it was laid out in a grid. Then Dennis had to explain its advantage.

In ten minutes, all the standing water was gone. It had been simple. She didn’t need a sponge mop or a dustpan or twenty rolls of paper towels.

I’d managed to close the French doors and turn the heat all the way up.

But that is fairly all I did.

Perhaps I oversold myself a little as a pilot. Maybe I was the airsick passenger in the back of the plane, the one who has lifted all the barf bags from the surrounding seats and is filling them up one by one.

It wasn’t only that Carleen owned a Shop-Vac. I could have owned a Shop-Vac. The difference was, she cleaned up all the water with it.

While I most certainly would have electrocuted us all.

My brother descended a few moments after the last of the water had been sucked away. He was driving a British military Land Rover that was hauling a trailer behind it. Instead of parking on the driveway, he plowed straight across it and onto the side yard, then down and around into the back. The wide, toothy tires devoured chunks of half-frozen yard, mixing them in with snow.

He entered the house like a weather system, a super-cell thunderstorm complete with rotating cloud bands and downbursts. At six-three and well over two-hundred pounds, his long legs and huge feet enabled him to travel to the center of the space in two or three great, lumbering strides.

He stood perfectly straight, looming over everything, his eyes not even blinking behind the thick lenses of his glasses. He was expression-neutral and made no sound as he surveyed the room, instantly collecting vast amounts of data, like a barcode scanner at a supermarket checkout.

Some sort of globally convergent infeasible-interior-point predictor-corrector algorithm must have switched in his mind, because all at once, he zeroed in on our Christmas tree.

With great purpose, he moved to the French doors. They seemed to explode open at his touch.

Just then, he noticed Henry and Carleen standing in the kitchen. “Oh, huh,” he said. “Well, hi, I guess.”

Carleen smiled at him, and though he was unable to tell, it was a fully genuine, cannot-be-helped kind of smile. “Hi, John.”

She had always liked my brother. “He’s direct, that’s what I love about him. You always know exactly where you stand with John.”

“Yeah, it’s quite the mess in here. What happened? Did a pipe burst?” he asked.

“We don’t know yet. It came from under the sink but the plumbing in the rest of the house still works, so who the fuck knows.”

“You think maybe your fancy queer faucet turned against you?” He nodded his head at our kitchen sink, the gleaming nickel Franke faucet.

“It wasn’t that,” I said, annoyed. It was too lovely to cause trouble; it wasn’t some garbage-faucet from Wal-Mart. But now that I glanced over at it again, there seemed to be something smug in its gleam.

He shrugged. “Huh. Well, in any case, we have to get everything out of here.”

And as suddenly as the words had left his mouth, his gargantuan paw gripped the neck of the Christmas tree. He hoisted it straight up, high into the air. The tree stand slid off and crashed to the floor as my brother maneuvered the tree over his shoulder, somewhat like a javelin and hurled it onto the deck and into the snow that was packed into a drift against the railing.

Christmas balls popped free of their hangers and flew in all directions. Some rolled back into the house, others sunk into the snow on the deck. Most, though, slipped through the railing and shattered against the stone patio below.

A snarl of lights trailed from the branches, the tiny bulbs crushed into colorful dust beneath his boots.

Strands of silver tinsel blew from the tree and lifted into the air above the backyard. As they were carried higher and still higher, these strands looked not like tinsel anymore, but rather like scratches; tears in the very fabric of everything.

It was an effort for Dennis to even speak, he was so dumbfounded. “What did you do
that
for?”

My brother turned and looked out at the tree. We all did. There was something quite shocking, even disturbing about it.

It was almost as if my grandmother had come to spend Christmas with us, dressed in her very best outfit and wearing her favorite jewelry—her charm bracelet, her gold and jade rings—and we’d gone and beaten the hell out of her then tossed her broken body into a snowbank. There was just something plain old
awful
about it.

I hadn’t felt this way as a child when my mother hurled the Christmas tree off the deck; then it had seemed thrilling.
Maybe she’ll burn down the house!

My brother grunted and said, “Well, you really oughtta have a fake tree like we do. They’re much less trouble, they don’t mess up the house, and they’re better for the environment.”

I stared at him, picturing a Chinese Christmas tree factory located on a former lake bed or wildlife preserve, spewing toxic green smoke into the unregulated air; the freshly stamped trees being hoisted by forklift onto tractor trailers so they could be driven four hundred miles to the port where they would be loaded onto an oil-leaking ship and taken to America.

Yeah, I was
sure
they were better for the environment.

He strode around the dining room table, reached over, and hoisted the huge, overstuffed slip-covered lounge chair right off the floor and into the air, holding it steady beside his large hairy head. He barked, “C’mon, what the fuck are you all just standing there for? Don’t you understand? We have to get every single item up off the floor and out of this room. Mush, mush,” he shouted. “Each one of you, grab something and take it into the garage or throw it onto the deck with the tree.”

We did.

And we fell into a silent rhythm, from living room to garage; chair, table, chest. As we worked, a television commercial was irritatingly playing on a loop in my head.

This used to happen to me as a child. Without trying or even wanting to, I automatically memorized every word of every commercial. The difference was, back then I was compelled to act them out.

“Water can be more damaging than fire. When you have a flood or serious water damage, Call ServePro. When fire and water take control of your life, we help you take it back. ServePro. Like it never even happened.”