“It’s like … can we even put this out anymore?” Carina shook her head briskly. “That sounded shitty, and it’s not what I meant. Just … who’s in our family now? When somebody asks if I have any brothers and sisters, what am I supposed to say?” She huffed. “That’s not right either!”
“I get it, Carrie. I know what you mean.”
“You do?”
“Yeah. Everything’s changed. Elisa’s still our sister, but everything’s changed. It’s all wrong now. Like our family has a flat tire, or something.”
With every bin they filled and sealed shut, Lia had had the same thought, growing bigger throughout the day: what they were doing was ending Christmas. Not just this year, but forever. How could they ever have another? Elisa never would. And none of them would ever have another Christmas that wasn’t the day she’d died.
“Yeah,” Carina sighed. They put the snow family into its box, and Lia sealed it shut.
As she carried the box to the cellar, Aunt Carmen came up from her latest trip to the storeroom. “Hey. We should probably take care of the outside decorations, too. Your parents use a service for that, don’t they?”
“Yeah, but I don’t know who.”
“I don’t want to bug your mom. Can you call your dad and ask?”
Lia called her father. He answered at once. When she told him what they were doing and what they needed, he said he’d call and have them come to take it all down right away.
Then he thanked her for taking care of her mom.
But Lia didn’t feel like she’d been taking care of anybody.
Ever in her life.
~oOo~
They ordered pizza for a late lunch. Ren and Snuggles came down to join them, but Mamma did not. Since she hadn’t been down since breakfast, Lia decided to take lunch to her. She put together a tray with two plates, two slices of sausage and extra cheese on each, and two Coke Zeroes in glasses with lemon wedges, and carried it upstairs.
There was no answer to her knock, but Lia pushed the door open anyway—that was a big no-no in their family, but desperate times, desperate measures.
The room was dark, with all the drapes drawn. Mamma lay in bed, on her side. Lia thought she was sleeping, but when she went to set the tray on the dresser, she saw her eyes open, staring at her in the mirror.
“I brought you some lunch, Mamma. Pizza from Santini’s. And Cokes.
“I’m not hungry, honey.”
Leaving the tray on the dresser, Lia went to the bed and sat on the floor near her mother’s head. “Mamma, what can I do?”
“Nothing, Lia. There’s nothing.”
“We took all the Christmas decorations down. You don’t have to look at any of that if you come downstairs.”
Mamma’s blue eyes filled with tears, and she closed them.
“I’m sorry. We were trying to help.”
“I know. You did. It’s … oh, honey.” She began to weep softly.
Her grief wafted out and pulled Lia in, and she set her head on the mattress near her mother’s. “Mamma …” she whispered, but there were no words that would follow.
Mamma pulled her closer, held her in soft arms tight with grief and need, and they cried together until their tears were spent, for now.
Then Mamma sighed heavily. “We have to bury her. I don’t know how to survive that.”
Lia didn’t know, either. Except for one thing: “We’ll hold each other up.”
~oOo~
That night, while Alex slept soundly beside her, Lia lay wakeful, her mind whirring. She had so many thoughts, so many feelings, all of them powerful and complicated and contradictory. She blamed her father, even though she didn’t want to, and was sad that he blamed himself. She wanted her mother to be stronger, to stand up and guide her and Carina and Ren through this, and wanted to hold her and protect her while she cocooned herself in grief. She was in love and had never felt so happy and complete, and she was in grief, with a key part of her missing. She wanted her family back, whole and in one place, and she wanted to run away and never come back.
Her thoughts would not stop spinning, her emotions pummeled her heart relentlessly. She couldn’t sleep; she could barely breathe.
It all needed to get out of her before she was torn open from the inside.
Finally, she slipped carefully from the bed, eased open a drawer in her desk, pulled out one of the pretty bound journals she couldn’t stop buying