More Stories from the Twilight Zone (54 page)

 

December 19
It's always summer here in December, something I will never get used to. Yes, it's summer in Australia in December as well, but I've never been Down Under, and I come here all the time. Summer is the busy season—more bugs than any other place on Earth (if, indeed, this is Earth), flowers bigger than my head, and animals on the move, trying to find the proper home for their growing families.

I can empathize, even though my family is long since grown . . .

 

She frowned, thinking that the date was familiar, and so she looked at the pile of letters still resting beside her leg. Each letter that he had mailed had a corollary in the box. Last year's letter,
dated December 19, had a matching made-up December 19 letter, as if she had had two fathers, one who lived in this little house that he had raised a family in and paid off twenty-eight years ago, and the other who disappeared into a sunlit world of December summer.

She read random snippets of the other letters from the box:

 

The water here is brighter blue than the water at home. It tastes fresh, like snow melt with a tang.

 

and . . .

 

He passed me this morning, my great-grandfather, looking trim as ever. His hair was black, not the thick pile of silver I remember from my childhood. He wore an Edwardian suit, complete with pocket watch and long golden chain, and made me think of those illustrations of the rabbit from
Alice in Wonderland.

He didn't say hello and neither did I. We both knew it wasn't the time. We would speak on some future date, when it was more appropriate, when we actually had something to say . . .

 

and . . .

 

Saw my first dragon in June. They're bigger than I expected and more fearsome. If you jump when you see a lizard, imagine how you would feel at one blown up to the size of a horse, with round reptilian eyes and a slitted tongue. Each tooth is larger and thicker than my finger, and the fangs that curve beside the black lips are the size of horns of plenty.

I was terrified. Deep down mortally terrified, knee-knocking, all-but-peeing-myself terrified. I hid behind some tree with big flat leaves and hoped I was downwind.

Apparently I was because it lumbered in the other direction, and then when I was really and truly sure it was gone, I leaned my head against the tree's sharp bark and felt both humiliation and embarrassment.

In my imagination, I am the archetypical hero, the man who would rush a dinosaur wearing nothing but a loincloth and carrying a dull knife. But in real life (although I hasten to call this place real life), I am a middle-aged guy in blue jeans and an Abbey Road T-shirt who hides behind giant leaves and tries not to wet his pants . . .

 

She laughed in spite of herself. Not because the letters were particularly funny, but because they were wry and honest. She remembered that quality from her teen years when she did sneak into Ginny's room to listen to the later Luminaria tales.

The hero in Daddy's stories was never particularly heroic. The monsters were hapless—had they been intelligent and strong, the hero would have died. Instead he survived through instinct and sheer luck, somehow always making it back home in time to have supper and tuck his precious daughters into bed.

Joanne riffled the letters, but didn't read any more. Although she did note that the typeface of these letters always matched the typeface of the Christmas letter from the same year.

She closed the box and cradled it to her chest. Part of her wanted to take the box with her, bring it to the safety of her own home, and hide it in her attic so no one else knew it existed.

But she was Joanne The Responsible One, and she would forever feel like she had a secret—a noxious secret—from the others.

She leaned her cheek on the box's edge, feeling the soft warm wood against her skin like a caress. Then she replaced the box in the bottom of the cardboard box and put all the other letters on top of it.

She stood carefully, so that she didn't hit her head on the
slanted ceiling, and brushed off her pants. More dust motes rose. She shut off the flashlight and headed back to the stairs, turning off the overhead light before heading down.

For the first time ever, she was cautious—if she fell and hurt herself, no one would find her here. No one had known she was coming.

She reached the bottom, the closet that smelled faintly of the pipe Daddy had given up thirty years before, and the leather from his (rarely worn) dress shoes, and she let herself out of the closet and into the bedroom.

There, in the light, she saw herself in the mirror above the vanity and got another surprise. What a comical figure she made—a middle-aged woman dressed in a Santa sweater and black pants, dust stains on her face, and frosting with sprinkles along her hip.

Certainly not the beautiful princess of the Luminaria letter or the lovely daughter who needed her father's protection from the once-imaginary suitors.

She wasn't quite sure how she ended up here, looking for bits of the fantastic in the dark. That she had found it surprised her.

That some of it sounded familiar surprised her even more.

 

She had to go home before heading to hospice. She took a shower and found a different set of holiday clothes to wear, this one—a black and red glitter sweater over black pants—a little more tasteful.

As she left the house a second time, she grabbed her cell phone and speed-dialed her youngest sister.

“I was just going to call you,” Ginny said, sounding breathless. She didn't say hello or anything—she hadn't since she bought her first cell phone years ago. “I finished up earlier than I expected. I'm flying in tomorrow and I'm staying until the inevitable. Have you already done cookies?”

“This afternoon,” Joanne said as she slid into the car. She felt an
odd sense of relief that her baby sister was coming—not to help her with their father. Lord knows, no one could help anymore—but to simply be there, beside her, so that Joanne would no longer be alone.

“Damn,” Ginny said. “I love doing cookies.”

“I could whip up another batch,” Joanne said.

“Naw, I'm sure there are other traditions I'd forgotten that I'll love just as much.”

“Will you stay with me?” Joanne asked.

“Hotel, babe,” Ginny said. “Pampering and fifty-seven channels.”

“Doesn't sound like any hotel around here.” Joanne almost mentioned that Ginny could stay in their childhood home, but she didn't. Her sister, who had started her fashion company for women over forty when she hit that magic age and no one would hire her, had more than enough money to do whatever she wanted.

Ginny laughed. “I've booked the ticket and rented a car. I'll be there for dinner tomorrow. We can talk then.”

She was clearly going to end the call, but Joanne caught her first.

“Ginny,” Joanne said, “did you get a Christmas card this year from Daddy?”

Joanne half-expected her sister to say she hadn't. Instead, Ginny said, “Oh, yeah. It was cute. That red-light-district thing? So Daddy.”

“It didn't bother you?”

“What? The card?” Ginny let out a gusty sigh. “Don't tell me. It got Annie's knickers in a twist. She should be old enough by now to understand that Daddy has a bawdy sense of humor.”

Joanne smiled in spite of herself. In years past, the red-light-district aspect to the card would have bothered Annie. She probably hadn't even noticed this year.

“The newsletter,” Joanne said.

“I
loved
it,” Ginny said. “It read like a great story from Luminaria. Made me feel like a little girl again.”

Her response made Joanne lean back against the seat in surprise. The car was getting cold. She turned the ignition, and started the heat, making certain she pressed the garage door opener.

“You there?” Ginny asked.

“Yeah,” Joanne said. “It's not the newsletter's content—”

Although it was. The newsletter's content bothered Joanne so much she couldn't read it—

“It's the
fact
of the newsletter.”

“The fact of it?” Ginny repeated, obviously not understanding.

“That it exists at all,” Joanne said. “Daddy went into a coma weeks before it got mailed.”

“Oh.” Ginny said it as if she hadn't put that together.

“Annie blames me. She thinks I wrote it and sent it.”

“Daddy clearly wrote it,” Ginny said. “The dates didn't bother me either. I figured he'd written it a long time ago, like a good-bye newsletter, and made sure someone would mail it for him if he couldn't mail it for himself. It's just the kind of thing he would do.”

It
was
the kind of thing he would do. “I didn't mail it for him,” Joanne said.

“I didn't say you did.” Ginny sounded a little annoyed now. “Daddy has friends, you know.”

He did. A large group of them with whom he spent countless evenings, going out to dinner, bowling, or drinking and playing darts at a local bar. They had been visiting him faithfully.

“Maybe that's what happened,” Joanne said. “The letter just seems so . . . this year, you know?”

“No, I don't,” Ginny said. “Did you
read
it? He didn't mention a single thing that happened this past year. That's why I figured he'd had the thing in storage, waiting for this moment.”

Joanne didn't confess that she couldn't read it. Maybe she had just taken that opening and grafted the events of the year onto it.

“Was yours mimeographed?” Joanne asked.

“Yeah,” Ginny said. “That's why I figured he planned this years ago. Do you know how hard it is to find a mimeograph machine? Especially one that works? Not to mention the paper.”

Joanne hadn't thought of that. She hadn't thought of any of it.

“I guess that's it,” she said softly.

Ginny sighed into the phone. “Annie really got to you, didn't she? What did you think Daddy did? Crawl out of bed, type and mimeo a letter, and then sink back into his coma?”

Joanne winced. Annie had always been blunt. Ginny had learned how to be even more blunt.

“No,” Joanne said.

“The letter's sweet,” Ginny said. “Read it. And get Annie out of your head. She's always veered to the negative, and it's gotten worse as she gets older.”

Which was true, no matter how much Joanne didn't want to admit it.

“So buck up, enjoy your holiday, and I'll be there to help with Daddy and festivities and everything. I'll even buy you dinner at the nicest place in town.”

“There's no need,” Joanne said, but realized she was talking to a broken connection.

Ginny, as usual, had hung up without saying good-bye.

Joanne stared at her phone for a moment, then smiled ruefully. Her baby sister always made her feel better.

Joanne folded her phone and tucked it into her purse. Then she backed the car out of the driveway, and headed to hospice.

 

She probably should have gone to dinner first. She was hungry, despite all the cookies. But it was getting late, so she went to see her dad.

Already the hospice house had dimmed the lights in the entry. She used the admissions code they had given her and let herself
inside. Someone had left fudge on the reception desk with a sign that said,
PLEASE! TAKE SOME!

Joanne smiled as she signed in, but didn't take anything. Lights illuminated the single nurses' station in the back. The remaining rooms were private, designed to look like bedrooms so that the dying would feel comfortable—if they were aware at all.

She walked down the hall to her father's room. The night nurse peeked out of one of the other rooms, saw Joanne, and gave a little nod.

Joanne nodded back. She slipped into her father's room. A holiday nightlight in the shape of a tree made the room a festive green and red. A small light glowed from the nightstand behind the bed.

Next to it stood the pile of cookies that Leo had taken with him with a note—
Merry Christmas! Love, Leo
—in her grandson's careful handwriting.

She smiled as she sat down next to her father. He looked even less substantial today than he had the day before. This light, however, gave his now grayish skin some color. His head was propped up by pillows, tubes taped into him everywhere. His blue eyes were closed and were slowly sinking into his skull.

She took his hand and was startled at how cold his skin was. Instinctively she looked at the monitor, saw the green line that tracked his heartbeat, and then covered his hand with her other one.

“We did cookies today,” she said, “although I suspect Leo has already told you about that.”

She talked to her father, telling him about the day, the baking, the fact that Ginny was coming—everything except the letters.

He didn't look at Joanne. He didn't even move while she was there. Eventually, she ran out of things to say.

She leaned over him, bussed his cheek, and headed out into the night.

It seemed colder than it had before, the air clearer. She drove to a diner not far from her house and ate meatloaf with homemade gravy—comfort food.

Then she went home to a decorated house that still smelled of cinnamon, vanilla, and Christmas love.

 

The rest of the days before the holiday blurred. She had dinner with Ginny, listened as Ginny told Annie to lighten up and get her butt home to see Daddy one last time, bought turkey and all the fixings for Christmas dinner, wrapped the remaining presents, and somehow got to midnight service on time despite all her errands.

She had no time to look at Daddy's letter. She barely had time to think about it. She visited him, of course, but each day it seemed like he became more and more insubstantial.