More Stories from the Twilight Zone (53 page)

Leonardo was Joanne's oldest grandson. The rest of the family called him Leo, but Ryan loved the boy's full name. Joanne's father had shaken his head when he heard it.

Leo the Lionheart,
his father had taken to calling the boy, and the nickname was proving true.

Who would think that a ten-year-old would be the one to insist on seeing his unconscious great-grandfather?

“You've been taking him to hospice?” Joanne asked.

“Every day we can manage it.” Ryan sounded as baffled as she felt. “He's the one who keeps reminding me when it's time to go.”

She heard the reluctance in his voice. It was the same reluctance she felt whenever she thought of going to the hospice care facility.

“Leonardo wanted to take some cookies over today,” Ryan said. “I'm supposed to pack up the best for him.”

Joanne hadn't thought of that, probably because she knew her father would never eat them. Ah, well. They'd last. Eventually the nursing staff would enjoy them.

Still, she picked out the best “example cookies,” the ugliest ones, dripping with the most frosting and decorations. She had an old tin, an extra one she'd kept for years for reasons she no longer remembered, and she carefully packed the cookies in that.

Her grandson came into the room just as she was finishing. Leo looked like a little lion. He had a round face and a flat catlike nose. His eyes were a light brown that matched his brownish-blond curls.

A streak of green frosting ran from his right ear to his nose, and his eyebrows were dusted with red sprinkles. She had a hunch he did that last on purpose.

“You wanna come and see Grandpop?” he asked Joanne. Grandpop was what all the kids called her father. Her own husband had been their grandfather, but his death was long enough ago that Leo was the only one who remembered him, and then only dimly.

“I'll see him a little later,” Joanne said. “You tell him all about the cookies.”

Leo took the tin. “He's sorry he missed out, but he said you'd understand.”

Her breath caught, but Leo didn't seem to notice. He took the tin out of the kitchen as if he were holding gold.

Ryan watched him go. Joanne's hands were shaking as she packed the last tin.

“He's been doing that,” Ryan said. “It's like he realizes Grandpa can't talk, so he's talking for him. I'm not sure if it's sweet or creepy.”

“Or both,” Joanne said.

Ryan nodded. “We'll stop at hospice. You sure you don't want me to stay and help you clean up?”

She shook her head. “I've done it for years. It's my chance to eat the leftover frosting.”

He chuckled. She grinned, then picked up the remaining tins and carried them into the dining room. The littlest two grandchildren—four-year-old cousins born days apart—had fallen asleep with their faces mashed against the table. The five- and six-year-olds—both boys—were stirring all the different frostings together to see what color they would get.

The eight-year-old had her arms crossed in disapproval. She was the only grandchild who hadn't gotten covered in food.

Their mothers looked exhausted. Joanne helped wake up the little ones. Then she took the frosting from the boys and carried it into the kitchen. She dipped a clean spoon into it—it was now a muddy brown—and took a taste, closing her eyes. She loved butter frosting. It was the best thing of all.

Her youngest daughter, Nikki, leaned her head into the kitchen.

“Mom?” she said. “I was going to ask you. Did you get a letter from Grandpop?”

“A Christmas newsletter?” Joanne asked.

“Yeah.”

“I got a Christmas newsletter purporting to be from your grandfather,” she said carefully.

“So you didn't send it,” Nikki said.

“No,” Joanne said. “If I had, I would have made him photocopy it instead of mimeo it.”

Nikki frowned at her. “Mine was photocopied,” she said. “On that green and red construction paper he loved. Remember?”

Joanne did remember. Throughout the late eighties and early nineties, all of her dad's Christmas letters were on thick red and green paper. The family joke was that they could cut up the letters and make them into daisy chains for the tree.

“It's weird,” Nikki said. “I thought you mailed it for him.”

Joanne shook her head. “Ask Ryan. He's been seeing your Grandpop more than the rest of us.”

Nikki's face colored. She nodded and backed out of the kitchen. Joanne swirled the spoon in the frosting, regretting the tone she had taken with her daughter. It was the holiday, no matter what was going on, and there was no cause to speak to Nikki that way. No matter how hard Nikki tried, she would never be as considerate as her brother. Yet Joanne always expected her to be a lot more sensitive.

Joanne was the one who wasn't being sensitive. That letter was disturbing. She wondered who else had gotten a copy, and how she would ever find out.

 

It never took as long as she expected to clean up. Within an hour, her house was back to normal, as if the kid tornado hadn't hit at all. When everything was done, she grabbed her coat and purse, and headed into the snow.

All she planned to do was say a quick hello to her father, then buy herself a nice dinner. But she drove the car past hospice, and down a road she had traveled most of her life.

The family house looked naked this winter. Usually she came over on the first weekend in December and decorated. The last few years, Ryan and Leo had helped, hanging icicle lights from the eaves and wrapping multicolored lights on the two evergreens up front.

But they hadn't done that this year.

The sidewalk needed shoveling—she would have to remind the neighbor boy (had she paid him lately?)—and ice had formed on the porch steps. She unlocked the front door and let herself inside.

The place was starting to smell musty and unused. She had cleaned up her father's mess shortly after he went into the hospital, expecting him to return at any point.

But he hadn't returned. And the Thanksgiving decorations she had put up—her mother's decorations—came down without being replaced by the Christmas decorations. His Christmas cards had all gone to hospice in case he did regain consciousness, as did his little six-inch television, the one he usually kept near his chair in the kitchen.

She ran a finger across the fireplace mantel, noting the dust. She would have to clean this place, but she didn't see the point. He wasn't coming back, and the family would have to decide what to do with the house itself—something she didn't relish.

She grabbed a flashlight out of the front hall closet, then stopped. The familiarity of it all. She had made these same movements ever since she was a little girl. She knew where everything was and where everything belonged.

Losing the house would be like losing both parents all over again. Even if the house stayed in the family, this configuration—the flashlights and extra blankets in the front hall closet, the ice skates (unused in more than two decades) hanging from their peg behind the door—would be gone. The house would be different, its soul altered because the beings that inhabited it would be different.

She shook off the thought and climbed the stairs, listening to the familiar creaks and groans under her feet. She let herself into her father's bedroom, and opened the closet door.

The closet was a walk-in, and in the very back were the stairs leading up to the attic. She climbed them, ducking more than she had as a child.

She flicked on the dim overhead light. Dust motes rose around
her. The attic was cold. She had forgotten to turn on the small heater that Daddy always used to keep back the gloom.

There were more boxes up here than she remembered, and a stack in the corner of all of her mother's personal things, labeled in Joanne's neat handwriting—from another moment in her life that she would love to forget.

Joanne turned her back on that stack of boxes and headed to an older stack, pushed behind an ancient wardrobe.

She flicked on the flashlight, and ran the oval of light over the boxes, reading the labels—
JOANNE (SCHOOL), PHOTOGRAPHS 1941–1955, GINNY (BEAUTY PAGEANTS)
, and on and on. Finally Joanne saw the box she was looking for. It wasn't in the back after all. Someone (her father? He knew he wasn't supposed to come up here alone.) had slid it nearer to the stairs.

The box was twice the size of the other boxes, and it was labeled
XMAS LETTERS
. She opened it and found her father's original drafts in perfect order, starting with last year's.

 

December 19
I'm getting a late start this year because Mother Nature has decided that winter will start on time for once. Too often she's been late with the snow and cold, and I'm never in the seasonal mood until the air is properly crisp. Of late, however, she's been early, and that's equally frustrating, for when Christmas comes, it feels as if someone had postponed it to the end of January instead of the end of December . . .

 

Joanne sank to the floor, reading each letter, going slowly back in time.

 

December 1
I have dreaded this letter ever since August. So many of you don't know, because we only communicate at this time of year,
that my beloved Lucille left us that month. I stood over her open grave, tossing in a perfect white rose like the one I had given her on our wedding night, and thought of this moment.

No more letters,
I decided.
There is no point.

But there is a point, dear friends, and the point is you. This afternoon, my daughters and I, along with my grandchildren and their children (three now!) stood at that same gravesite, covered in brown grass and frost, and watched as the stonemason put the beautifully carved headstone in place.

Annie thinks it a bit plain. Ginny likes its simplicity. But as usual, it is Joanne who understands.

“Art Deco,” she said, placing her hands together like she has since she was a little girl. “Mama would be so pleased. . . .”

 

Joanne placed the pages upside down so that they stayed in order, some of the words so familiar she could recite them from memory. The oldest letters dated from early in her parents' marriage, long before she was ever born.

Her father had married late, and relished the idea of a family, saying he hadn't been ready before, and hinted at things he had done, things his readers (but not the daughter he hadn't yet had) would clearly understand by implication. She had read these older letters dozens of times, and each time, they had raised questions.

She had forgotten to ask her father about those questions.

Now she never could.

She set the letters down. When he was gone, she would copy them for the whole family—a bit of history for everyone—and make a little booklet out of them. Maybe she would go to one of those self-publishing places and create something lovely, something worthy of him.

But this year's reaction to the surprise letter ruled out one thing: She couldn't send that booklet at Christmastime, not without letting everyone know it was coming.

She gathered up the letters and held them for a moment. That surprise letter had driven her here, to see if what she remembered was what her father had done.

She had remembered a lot, but she had forgotten so much more—the occasional elegiac note, the puckish sense of humor that would appear, the way he could turn a mundane moment into the most important in the world.

She was glad she had come, on this night of doing the cookies. It was a way of keeping him in the celebration, even though he physically couldn't be present.

She neatly stacked the letters together. She was about to put them back in the box, when the flashlight beam caught something at the bottom.

A mahogany box, long and thick and ornately carved. She had seen four others like it. One belonged to her mother. Her father had given it to her as an engagement present so she had a place to keep all of the love letters he had sent to her. Mother had done that, too, and Joanne knew where that box was.

Her father had made Joanne promise she wouldn't read anything in it when he was alive—
I didn't write those letters for you, Button
—and she had kept that promise only because, as a child, she had been unable to break the tiny lock her mother had attached to the beautiful silver clasp.

The other three boxes came to each daughter on the occasion of her high school graduation, a place for her future love letters.
I trust,
Daddy had said to all three of them at the moment he gave them their box,
you never got letters in high school. You're barely old enough now to get them.

Joanne reached into the cardboard box, her hand shaking, and pulled out the mahogany box. This box matched the others. It had the silver clasp—tarnished now—and the same odd carvings along the edge. There was no lock, like there was on her mother's love letters, yet Joanne still felt like she was about to
touch something forbidden, something that didn't belong to her, and never would.

She almost let it wait until her father was really and truly gone. But the flashlight beam flared—something she had never seen one do before—and for a moment, she thought she saw her name carved into the wood.

She squinted. What she had thought was her name was one of those scroll-like carvings that existed on the other boxes. If the carvings said something, they did so in a language she had never seen before.

She set the box on her lap and ran her fingers across it, feeling the warm wood beneath her fingertips, the gentle edges of the etchings, and the roughness of the silver clasp. Then, before she could change her mind, she threw back the clasp and opened the box.

The scent of sandalwood rose from the interior, which surprised her and made her sneeze. Inside were more letters, looking just like the ones Joanne had thumbed through.