A Long Thaw (14 page)

Nana shuffles in, wearing a pink flannel nightdress that falls to her ankles. She takes Juliet’s stocking down from the mantel and sits in the armchair.

‘I have some things for your stocking,’ she says, pulling a shopping bag out from behind her chair. ‘Don’t look over here so you can be surprised.’

Juliet sits up. ‘You didn’t have to do that.’

‘Well, someone did and I hope I’m not ruining your belief in St Nicholas.’

Juliet laughs. ‘I was just going to fill it with the leftover candy I have.’

‘That wouldn’t do. Don’t you think Hannah and Lilly would notice that your stocking wasn’t as good as theirs?’

‘Actually, I’m not sure either of them really believes any more either.’

‘Pish posh.’

Juliet smiles at her grandmother’s familiar funny way of talking.

‘Children want to believe in magic,’ Nana says. ‘They just need us to give them permission.’

Juliet shifts the pillows around behind her and leans against them. She notices the little elf doll tucked between two books on the shelf in the corner. It comes back to her then, the way Nana hid the elves every year. There are three: their green beanbag bodies and hard plastic faces have always reminded her of Snap, Crackle and Pop. She and Abby hunted for them every year: it was part of their Christmas tradition. Juliet wonders if Nana has hidden them all these years or whether she has brought them out of storage for Hannah and Lilly.

‘I’ve been thinking,’ Nana says, ‘about setting up piano lessons for Hannah and Lilly when they go back to California.’

‘Wow. That would be so great,’ Juliet says. ‘Lilly will probably love the idea, but I don’t know about Hannah. She’s at that age where it seems so important to control your free time.’

‘All the more reason. Too much free time can get a girl her age into trouble.’

‘Oh, I don’t think Hannah’s the type to get into trouble.’ Juliet’s slightly startled by the thought.

‘It takes all types, these days. The Larson girl down the street just had a baby. She’s sixteen. And there’s another girl I heard about in church. They’re talking about opening a daycare centre at the high school.’

‘Hannah’s only fourteen.’

‘And those are girls from good, strong families. Hannah and Lilly seem to be so much on their own.’

How did they get here from piano lessons? ‘Well, they have each other. And they have me.’

‘From a distance.’ Nana looks up and seems suddenly to realize Juliet’s defensiveness. ‘And you’ve done such a good job. You can tell how much they love you and want to make you proud. That can be the hardest thing for an adult to instil in a child. But the most important.’

‘I think they both have a really good sense of themselves. They haven’t had a lot of supervision so they’ve learned to look out for themselves. And each other.’

Nana nods. ‘They’re great girls – both of them.’ She sighs heavily. ‘They say the years go by faster the older you get. I’m starting to believe that. When I saw Lilly again it finally made me realize how much time has passed. Made it real to me for the first time. She’s become this beautiful walking, talking full
person.
She doesn’t even remember me. Hannah, too. All the memories I have of them – they don’t have those memories.’

‘Well, Hannah has some memories of you. And Lilly has sort of adopted those memories. You know, if you tell a story often enough, you think you can remember it.’

Nana smiles sadly. ‘What stories do they think they remember?’

Juliet spots a second elf hiding in a potted poinsettia at the edge of the room. His cheerful face hangs over the rim, obscured by the leaves. By tomorrow morning, this will be a memory she and her sisters can share.

Hannah and Lilly spend the morning in their nightgowns wearing the matching hats, mittens and scarves they’ve got for Christmas. The snow is coming down hard now and it’s making the girls especially giddy. Nana wouldn’t let them out of the house in their stockinged feet, but she pushed open a window and let them catch snowflakes on their tongues. They had popped their heads back inside with snowflakes sparkling on their eyelashes, laughing through chattering teeth. Juliet loves her new digital camera – there seems no limit to the number of pictures she can take.

‘I hope you’re planning to get dressed before everyone gets here,’ Juliet says sleepily. She’s working on her third cup of coffee. She’d expected the girls would still be on California time, but she seems to have miscalculated.

‘Who all is coming?’ Hannah asks, shaking off her right mitten and reaching for a slice of bacon.

‘I told you.’ Juliet suspects that this need to be retold the guest list has something to do with their father. The sisters don‘t ever talk about him directly. His presence in their lives has always been marked by his absence. ‘Abby and Aunt Rachel and Uncle Henry. And Great-aunt Bernadette. That’s all.’

‘Awwwnt Rachel,’ Lilly giggles.

‘That is the proper pronunciation,’ Nana says, dipping the edge of her toast into her egg yolk.

Lilly smiles at her tentatively, unable to catch her grandmother’s tone.

Hannah wanders around the room, looking at the photographs on the piano. She stands on her tiptoes and reaches for one in the back. ‘Who’s this?’

Nana reaches for the pair of glasses hanging from her neck. ‘Give it here.’

Hannah walks to her grandmother and holds out the frame.

‘Well, that’s Abby and that’s Juliet,’ she says, pointing to each with her crooked middle finger.

Juliet leans forward to look at the photograph. They’re sitting together on the piano bench, both of them with left side ponytails. Juliet can’t remember that her hair had ever had so much red in it. Abby’s hair was so light. They must have been four or five at the time, back when they were both their parents’ only daughters.

‘You were little,’ Lilly says and then laughs at herself.

‘We were all little once. Even me!’ Nana tests the buoyancy of Lilly’s curls, gently tugging one and letting it spring back into place. Lilly giggles hesitantly, but doesn’t pull away.

‘Do you have any pictures of our dad?’ Hannah asks flatly.

Juliet’s so surprised she feels like the wind has been knocked out of her. She looks from Hannah to Lilly – neither will return her gaze. Lilly examines her cuticles with mock intensity. Hannah looks up at her grandmother, her face composed and unreadable.

Nana seems unflustered. ‘Certainly.’ She stands and walks to the hall closet, pulling several frames and an album from a shelf. Juliet wonders if her grandmother had put them away in preparation for their visit, or perhaps for her own reasons.

Nana sits on the couch and motions Hannah to sit next to her. Lilly follows, standing a little bit away.

‘This album is full of pictures of your father growing up,’ Nana says, setting the album on the coffee table. ‘These are more recent.’ She hands Hannah a stack of three frames. The first was taken at a barbecue. He and Uncle Henry are standing by the grill and Nana has to point out which is which.

Juliet gathers the plates from the table and carries them to the kitchen. They clatter against each other noisily on the way to the sink.

Whenever it snows enough to stick, Juliet thinks of her father teaching her to make snow angels. He carried her out to the back yard when she was four or five, plopped her down into a deep snowdrift and lay down beside her. They had admired the difference between the two shapes.

‘Mine is just a baby,’ Juliet said, disappointed.

‘The smaller the angel, the faster they fly,’ he told her.

Juliet tries to push the memory away.

Nana always kept a dish of Andy’s chocolates on the counter between the kitchen and dining room. At Christmas, Juliet and Abby were allowed one before dinner. They peeled open the pale green foil and placed the tiny rectangle of chocolate and mint on their tongues. One year when they were quite small – so small that Juliet remembers reaching into the bowl on the counter on her tiptoes – the two girls filled their pockets with candies and snuck upstairs to devour them in Aunt Rachel’s room, discarding the wrappers in a pink trash can under her old desk. The chocolate was so sweet, the first bite always made their jaws ache.

Later, Aunt Rachel bounced Juliet on her knee singing: ‘Trot-trot to Boston, trot-trot to Lynn, better watch out, or you might fall in!’ Juliet turned pale as she dangled from her aunt’s hands at the end of the song. Hanging upside down, she could see Abby’s little face creased with worry for her.

Abby arrives at Nana’s house with her parents. Aunt Rachel throws her arms around Juliet immediately. Uncle Henry kisses Nana’s cheek and carries the presents into the living room. Hannah and Lilly stand at the edge of the room and have to be coaxed towards their teary aunt who hugs them tightly and kisses their faces.

‘You’ll rub off their freckles,’ Nana says, putting her arm around Rachel and walking her into the living room.

The girls follow, the younger ones taking cues from the older ones, laughing. Hannah and Lilly sit on the floor by the tree and start shaking presents.

‘It’s so nice to have a big Christmas again,’ Rachel says.

‘There!’ Abby points to the elf in the poinsettia.

‘We’re still looking for the third,’ Juliet tells her.

‘I know where he is,’ Hannah says, in a singsong.

Abby scowls. She and Juliet scan the room without getting up.

‘Where’s Auntie Bernadette?’ Rachel asks.

‘Oh, that woman.’ Nana shakes her head. ‘She’ll be here for dinner. She’s spending the morning with her new gentleman friend.’

‘What about the one from Thanksgiving? I forget his name.’

‘Richard. Well, he’s out. Turns out she only liked him for his cocker spaniel – once the dog died, the man lost his appeal.’

‘Oh.’ Abby covers her smiling mouth.

‘That poor man – loses his dog and his girlfriend in one fell swoop,’ Rachel says.

‘I pity the new man more,’ Nana says.

‘Mumma!’ Rachel squeals. ‘That’s mean,’ she says, but she’s laughing with the others.

‘Aunt Bernadette is a little high maintenance,’ Abby explains to her younger cousins.

‘High maintenance? Ha! That sister of mine is as crazy as a filly-loo bird!’

As the girls dissolve into giggles, Nana winks at Juliet.

In the kitchen, Nana makes red and green icing for the Christmas cookies. She lets Lilly measure out the food colouring. Rachel stirs the batter and swats Abby away when she tries to steal a taste. Everyone laughs. Abby leaves, slouching next to her father on the living-room couch. Henry puts his arm around her and they talk in voices too low for Juliet to hear. After a few minutes, he squeezes her more tightly against him and kisses the top of her head. Juliet sits at the breakfast bar, where she can keep an eye on everyone. She busies her hands by taking a wrapper off one of the chocolates Nana has left in a dish on the counter. As it dissolves on her tongue, she feels the familiar ache and wonders where Hannah has gone.

Juliet climbs the stairs and finds her sister lying on the bed in Rachel’s room, staring at the ceiling. She leans against the doorway. ‘Too hectic down there?’

Hannah sits up. ‘I guess.’

‘It’ll be calmer tomorrow. We’ll go sledding, just the three of us.’

‘When are we going to meet Jesse?’ Hannah asks.

‘Actually, he’s not around this week,’ Juliet lies. ‘He went home for Christmas.’

‘Do you have a picture of him?’

‘Um, yeah.’ Juliet pulls her wallet out of her back pocket and slips out a photo strip from a booth in Maine. They had gone last summer. Sleeping overnight in a parking lot and then spending the day eating salt-water taffy and playing in the arcade. There were three photos, but she had ripped off the bottom one and given it to him. She wonders if he still has it. She hands the strip to Hannah.

Hannah squints at it. ‘He’s cute,’ she says, nodding her approval.

Juliet takes it back and tries to look at it through her sister’s eyes. In the top photo, they’re both laughing and in the second, they’re crossing their eyes and puffing out their cheeks. Juliet remembers that they were kissing in the third.

‘I have a boyfriend, too,’ Hannah says, getting up and wandering around the room.

‘Oh, really?’ Juliet puts the photo strip back in her wallet and sits on the bed.

‘Yeah.’ Hannah rearranges the knick-knacks on Rachel’s old desktop. A blotter with green vinyl corners and a calendar off by several decades, displaying the month of May. An aluminium can of pens and pencils.

‘What’s his name?’

‘Matt.’

‘How serious are you?’

‘Well, we’re not having sex yet.’ She fidgets with the hem of her shirt, pulling it lower and putting one hand on her hip. ‘If that’s what you mean.’

Juliet hears the
yet
and feels like the house is on fire. She has the urge to grab her sister by the hand and run. Instead she sits on her own hands and tries to control her breathing. She finds herself repeating words she’d spoken the night before to her grandmother. This time, her voice sounds smaller somehow. ‘You’re only fourteen.’

Hannah sits on the edge of the bed next to Juliet, folding her hands in her lap. ‘How old were you the first time?’