9. Chapter 9 Liam
Iwoke up to the text still on my screen.
Alex
I'm coming to Christmas Eve.
I'd read it eleven times before I fell asleep. I read it again now, in the gray Saturday light, lying in my twin bed with Noah's whale dock still going on the nightstand. It still did the same thing to my stomach. Warm and tight.
He was coming.
He was coming here.
I put the phone down and looked at the ceiling. Popcorn texture, yellowed near the light fixture. The ceiling Alex Harrington was going to see in a few days.
I got up, walked through the house in my socks, and saw every room as a stranger would.
The living room. Couch with the blanket that wasn't decoration. Carpet worn into a path between the kitchen and the TV. The kitchen through the doorway, the fridge humming, the faucet dripping, my mom's shift schedule taped to the cabinet.
I'd looked at all of it the night I got off the bus and felt the shame. He was coming, and the house was what it was, and I could either spend the next few days staring at the carpet or I could do something about it.
I got out the cleaning bucket from under the sink, Windex, lemon bleach, a scrub brush, and a few ripped-up old tee shirts.
I cleaned like it was a job Jerry was paying me for.
The bathroom first because the bathroom was the emergency. Scrubbed the tub. Scrubbed the sink. Replaced the hand towel with the one good one from the closet, the one we saved for company, which was only Christmas.
Then the kitchen. Counters, stove, the grease spot behind the burners.
I cleaned the outside of the fridge, which I've never done.
Then I opened the fridge and cleaned the inside, which nobody in this family had ever done.
Threw out a yogurt that had expired during the Obama administration and cleaned the shelves.
Then the living room. Vacuum. Dust the bookshelf. Straighten the blanket on the couch. Still not decoration, but at least it could be neatly not decoration.
I caught myself rearranging my mom's bookshelf and stopped.
I was doing it again. The same thing I'd done at the marina with the coveralls. Moving evidence. Except now I was doing it to my entire house, rearranging my mother's living room like a stage set.
But I couldn't stop. The house was small, and it was old, and it was ours, and I could hold two of those without a problem, but all three made my hands reach for more cleaning chemicals.
The decoration bin was in the closet under the stairs, behind two coats and a box of my mom's nursing textbooks from her certification years ago.
I dragged it out. The lid was cracked. The plastic was the yellow-white color that clear things turn when they've around for too long.
Inside, a life in ornaments. Strings of lights I'd have to test. A star wrapped in newspaper we'd always used. Tinsel in a ball. Glass balls, half of them cracked, the other half survivors. A wooden reindeer with a broken antler I'd made in third grade. A candy cane made of pipe cleaners.
I went back to the closet for the tree.
Five feet, artificial, the same one we'd had since I was in middle school.
It came in three sections that slid into a pole, and the middle section always stuck, and the branches had to be bent out by hand one at a time because the box crushed them flat every January.
I set it up in the corner by the window.
Same corner, every year. It leaned a little to the left no matter what I did with the stand.
Then, I pulled the first string of lights out of the bin and plugged them in on the carpet.
Dead. The second string lit up about two-thirds of the way and then quit at a knot.
I sat cross-legged on the floor and worked through it bulb by bulb, pulling the dead ones, pressing in replacements from the little spare bag taped to the end of the string until the whole line caught.
Then, the second half. Then a third string for the top.
Forty minutes on the floor with tiny glass bulbs and my fingers going numb, and the tree lit up section by section. Warm white. A few dead spots where I'd run out of spares, but lit.
I started hanging ornaments. Glass balls first. Survivors in the front, cracked ones in the back where nobody would see them. The reindeer. The candy cane. The tinsel, draped loosely because my mom hated it placed strand by strand, and I'd learned that the hard way at nine.
And there it was, near the bottom of the bin, under the tinsel, wrapped in tissue separate from everything else. I almost missed it.
I picked up the paper-wrapped ornament and pulled off the paper.
The glass heron.
Maybe four inches tall. Hand-painted, blue-gray with white at the throat, standing on one leg on a little wooden base. The paint was wearing at the edges, but the neck was still right. That long S-curve herons do when they're watching the water.
My father had given it to my mother.
I held it in my palm and thought about Alex.
He'd told me about Frederick. The heron at the inlet on the Point.
And here was a heron in my hands. Painted glass, bought at a craft fair by a man who thought it would make a woman smile. Different bird. Different family. Same lake.
I didn't know what to do with the coincidence, so I hung it on the tree. Near the top, where my mom always put it.
The tree was done. Five feet, leaning left, lights mostly working, cracked ornaments in the back, and a glass heron near the star. The whole thing looked like what it was. A family's best effort with what they had.
My phone rang, and I went into the kitchen to get it. It was Noah.
"Captain Moore." Noah's voice, zero preamble. "Tell me everything."
"Tell you everything about what?"
I crossed the room and plopped down on the couch.
"About the fact that you're across the lake from your boyfriend on Christmas break. How is that going? What's happening?"
Boyfriend. The word hit differently coming out of someone else's mouth. At school, it was a fact. Here, on this lake, with Noah saying it through a phone while I sat on a couch I'd just vacuumed for the first time in my life, it landed heavier. Realer.
"It's a lot," I said.
"A lot good or a lot bad?"
"Both." I leaned back into the couch. "His dad's fucking evil. Wants him to basically sign his life away to the Harrington life plan. That means no rowing with Riverside and no me."
"That's crazy. I can't believe he has to deal with that. Glad I'm not rich. "
"Yeah." I rubbed my face.
"Sorry man."
"And my mom's set a place for him Christmas Eve."
"Does he know?"
"I invited him the other night. He said he couldn't promise. Then last night, after the dinner with his dad, he texted me and said he's coming."
"That's great."
"Yeah."
He must have heard it in my voice. "Liam. That's great."
"I know."
"Then why do you sound like someone told the boat sank?"
I looked at the tree. The glass heron caught the light.
"Because now he's actually going to be here," I said. "In this house. The house is bad man. I spent the entire morning in a cleaning frenzy."
"How bad?"
"I cleaned behind the toilet. I threw out a yogurt from 2016."
"Okay."
"I rearranged my mom's bookshelf."
"Okay."
"I'm not okay."
"I know." Noah's voice shifted into the gear it went into when he stopped being funny. "You're afraid he's going to walk in and see… what?"
"How poor I actually am and choose his dad's plan over me."
"That's not going to happen because he's already seen your side of the dorm room."
I smirked. "My side?"
"It's a wreck compared to mine," Noah laughed. "But seriously, Alex comes from money, but I don't think he's shallow."
"I know."
"He's gone through a lot to be with you."
That's true.
Noah was quiet for a second. I could hear Priya in the background. A door, a voice.
"The yogurt thing is unhinged, though," he said. "I want that on the record."
I laughed.
"Listen," he said. "You cleaned the house. The guy you love is coming to dinner."
"I never said I loved him," I said as I stood up in defense of myself.
Noah laughed. "Okay, Liam… okay."
He knows me too well.
I sat back down.
"It's going to be okay."
"You're probably right. It's just a lot."
"And you can handle a lot."
I sighed.
"So… the reason I called is about New Years."
"New Years?"
"Priya and I were talking about driving up. We could get one of those lake rentals. They're like eighty bucks a night."
"You want to come up here? To the lake?"
"Why not? I've been hearing about this lake for two years. I want to see the dock, the marina, the whole thing."
"Are you sure?"
"Yeah, let's ring in the new year on Captain Moore's home water."
I thought for a second. That'd be nice.
"Yeah, come up," I said.
"Sweet, we'll book it today." Noah paused. "And Liam… stop cleaning. The house is fine. You're fine. He's coming because of you, not your countertops."
And with that, he hung up, without saying goodbye. Noah was weird like that sometimes.
***
A few hours later the side door opened, and I was still on the couch.
"Liam?"
"In here."
My mom came in with her bag on one shoulder and her keys still in her hand and stopped in the entryway from the kitchen to the living room. She looked at the tree, the floor. Then looked at the kitchen behind her.
"Did something happen?"
"No."
"Did you break something?"
"No, Mom."
"Because the last time this house was this clean, you were twelve, and you'd put a baseball through the bathroom window."
"I didn't break anything. I just cleaned."
She set her bag down slowly. Walked into the kitchen. Opened a cabinet. Closed it. Ran her finger along the counter.
"You cleaned behind the stove."
"Yeah."
"Liam. Nobody cleans behind the stove."
She turned around and leaned against the counter, crossed her arms, raised her eyebrows, and waited.
"Alex is coming," I said. "He texted me last night."
"Ah… I see. Well, you've done a great job cleaning."
"Thanks."
"Good," she said. "That's good. I'll get an extra ham."
"Mom, you don't have to—"
"I'm getting an extra ham, Liam. Your uncle eats like he's being timed." She opened the fridge, scanned it, closed it. "I'll need rolls too. And pie stuff."
She was doing her thing, just turning empty shelves into a grocery list.
"Did you get him a gift?" she said, pulling a notepad from the junk drawer.
"No."
"Liam."
"I know."
"Christmas is in a few days."
"I know, Mom."
She looked at me over the notepad.
"Alright," she said. "Well, we'll go shopping. Tomorrow. We'll drive into town and figure it out."
"Shopping where?"
"Shopping everywhere." She said it like the plan was already finished. "I've been buying Christmas presents on a budget for thirty years."
"It's not about the budget. It's about—"
"I know what it's about." She wrote something on the notepad. Ham, rolls, pie. Tore the page off and stuck it on the fridge. "Was there anything meaningful? Something that meant something specific to the two of you?"
Meaningful. The word sat there again. I didn't have an answer.
"Not yet," I said.
"It'll come to you." She picked up her bag. "I've got to go back for the evening. And don't clean anything else, you're scaring me."