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But when I went down to the room under the stairs and let him pull me close, I didn’t want to laugh anymore. I felt it, too: the rightness of it, the sense that every moment in my life had led me to this place. I was finally exactly where I was supposed to be.
Some kind of magic seemed to settle over the house in the hours that followed. I wrapped the tree in lights that miraculously came on and stayed lit, not a single dead string among them even though they must have been at least a decade old. I found boxes and boxes of ornaments, delicate glass balls and bead garlands in every color, and hung them on the branches until there wasn’t a single space left that didn’t sparkle. My mother came back with a giant charcuterie and cheese platter at the same time as Diana announced that she’d made pasta and salad, so that suddenly there was food everywhere, and all of us eating, drinking, talking about nothing except how good everything tasted and how beautiful everything looked.
Richard built a roaring fire as the sun went down, and one by one we gravitated toward it, settling into chairs and onto sofas, listening to the crackle and snap of the kindling and the voice of the rising wind under the eaves. My grandmother had been quiet and alert all afternoon, talking very little and looking up every time someone walked into the room, as if she was expecting visitors. But now she sat back in a chair close to the fire, letting her head rest to one side, lifting a hand to touch the crepey skin at the base of her throat. My mother came to kneel in front of her, taking her hands one at a time and massaging them with lavender cream, and Mimi sighed and said, “Thank you, dear,” and that awful moment from the night before seemed like something that had never happened at all, nothing more than a bad dream. When Adam brought Mimi her evening pills, she swallowed them obediently. Her eyes stayed open, fixed on the door. In her pupils, wide and dark, the reflected firelight danced.
The house sighed. The wind rose. Adam stepped out to get more firewood and came back in with his cheeks flushed and his hair wild,blowing furiously on his hands to warm them. “It’s gotten damn cold out there,” he said, and the wind howled and rattled the windows as if in agreement. The lights flickered once, but stayed on, and the room filled with a series of relieved sighs and ripples of nervous laughter.
“Imagine,” someone said, and the rest of us nodded, so in tune with the moment and with one another that one word was enough to understand: Imagine if the lights had gone out. Imagine no power on Christmas Eve, Christmas Day. Imagine that darkness, how complete. How terrible, how exciting. Imagine the flicker of candlelight on freshly fallen snow.
We drank and dozed as the night deepened, steeped in the comfortable silence and cozy intimacy that comes from being in a room where everyone is either a little bit drunk, a little bit asleep, or both. Diana turned onLove Actuallywhile Richard pretended to vomit in protest. My mother, Adam, and I played half a game of Scrabble, then abandoned it when Mom playedexoticson a triple word score and gained an insurmountable lead. William fell asleep reading and then woke himself up with a sudden fart that everyone pretended not to hear until he’d excused himself off to bed, at which point the entire room collapsed into hysterics. Adam settled in beside me on the couch where I was stretched out with a blanket in my lap, taking care not to look at me but arranging himself on the cushions so that one of my feet was pressed against his thigh, the sweet sneakiness of it sending chills down my spine as much as the warmth of him against me. Richard stopped pretending to vomit atLove Actuallyand then sniffled loudly as the end credits rolled, so that Diana turned and gave him an incredulous look.
“Aww, Dicky,” she said.
“Oh, shut up,” he said, blowing his nose and then throwing the balled-up tissue at her.
And all the while, the house whispered while the wind rushed, rattled, roared.
Sometime later, Mimi suddenly stood up, wild-eyed and lookingaround the room. “Is he here?” She looked at me, at my mother. She stared at the tree.
“Who?” my mother said, and Richard yawned and said, “Santa Claus,” and then stood up, too, and took my grandmother by the arm with surprising tenderness. “Come on, Mother,” he said. “It’s bedtime.”
Mimi blinked at him indignantly. “I can’t go to bed withyou,” she said, and Richard raised his eyebrows in mock offense. “What’s so wrong with me?”
“You’re my...” Mimi trailed off, gazing into his face, searching his features. “I’m not sure,” she said in a small voice. “You look like someone. You look like my papa. But you’re not.”
“No, I’m not.”
“Do you know him? My papa?”
From the corner of my eye, I saw my mother and Diana tense up. Anticipating something bad, something cutting, one of Richard’s trademark barbs. The night would be ruined, all the magic gone. But he only slid his arm across Mimi’s shoulders and smiled.
“Well, I knew him a bit,” he said. “I haven’t seen him in many years.”
“It’s been so long. But I need... I need to speak to him.” Her voice grew tremulous. “I need to tell him before it’s too late. I promised, but—” She broke off, looking around the room, and her face fell. “Oh no, but I’ve been confused. It’s already happened. Hasn’t it? I can’t take it back.”
“What’s happened, Mother?” Richard said carefully.
Mimi shook her head. “They said it was an accident,” she said, and her voice broke. “They said he must have slipped and fallen overboard.”
A hush fell, and we all stared. The details of my grandfather’s death were the one thing Mimi never talked about, and hearing her say the words aloud was unsettling, as if a taboo had been broken.
Diana piped up. “That’s right, Mother. It was an accident, a terrible accident,” she said, and my grandmother shook her head. Her voice was flat now, the tremble gone.
“They never found him,” she said, and a funny little smile playedover her lips. “I remember now. An empty box, that’s what I buried.” She paused. “They never found him, so they never knew. But I knew. It was my blood, after all. My blood, on my hands.”
“What is she talking about?” Diana said nervously. “Does anyone know what she’s talking about? Mother—”
But Mimi wasn’t listening. She was staring into space now, lost in a reverie, talking only to herself.
“But it doesn’t matter,” she said. “He came back for me. He always comes back. I feel him beside me at night, I hear him whispering in my ear.” She lowered her voice and looked around furtively. “He’s here now, you know. In this very room. Only he thinks I can’t see him, because he’s wearing someone else’s skin.”
Nobody spoke. The temperature in the room seemed to have dropped ten degrees. Mimi turned her head, looking toward the dark and empty doorway, and so did everyone else. All of us holding our breath, as if the ghost of my dead, drowned grandfather might walk through at any moment, pale and cold, reaching out with a hand that the sea had long since stripped to the bone. The silence stretched out, no sound but the crackling of the fire—until a log popped loudly enough to make everyone jump, and my mother stepped up and took Mimi’s other arm. “Bed. Right now,” she said firmly.
Richard sighed and stepped aside. “Shame. It was just getting interesting,” he said, and then threw his hands up when my mother gave him a dirty look. “Hey, this isn’t my fault. She brought it up.”
“Say good night, Mother,” my mom said.
“Of course,” Mimi said cheerfully, as if the preceding conversation hadn’t happened at all. “Good night.”
