Chapter 11
Chapter Eleven
WILLA
Ihave spent a week becoming a dead woman, and tonight is the dress rehearsal.
That is the morbid way to say it and I would not say it out loud to a soul, but it is the true shape of what I have done.
I found Della’s Christmas boxes in the third shed where Jonah’s photo said they would be, six of them, packed by a woman who labeled everything in her quick slanting hand, PORCH GARLAND: START AT THE LEFT POST, TREE: LIGHTS FIRST OBVIOUSLY, STOCKINGS: see note inside, and inside that one a note, to no one, to next year, to whoever, that said the nail for Cooper’s is the low one so he can reach it himself.
And I have followed her, box by box, instruction by instruction, hanging her garland on her posts and stringing her lights and setting out her chipped ceramic village with the one church that has lost its steeple, and I have rebuilt, as faithfully as a stranger can, the exact Christmas a woman I never met made for the people I am not allowed to love, and now the farmhouse glows from the road the way it must have glowed every December she was alive, and I stand in the yard on Christmas Eve in the cold and look at it and do not know whether I have done a beautiful thing or a haunted one.
Both. The answer is both. It is going to be both all night. I square my shoulders and I get the pies off the passenger seat and I go in.
Here is where I am supposed to be tonight, for the record.
I am supposed to be at Roz’s. I have spent every Christmas Eve of the last six years at Roz’s, since my mama moved down to Valdosta to be near my sister, and Roz and I do our thing, the wine and the bad movie and the one ornament we fight over, and this year I told her I had to do the Mercer Christmas for Cooper and she went quiet on the phone in the way she does now, the waiting way, and she said, “For Cooper,” with no inflection at all, and I said, “For Cooper,” and she said, “Okay, sugar. Bring me back a report,” and let me go, and I have been not thinking about the exact flatness of her voice all week.
Inside, it is warm and loud and it smells like a kitchen that has decided to try.
The first thing that happens is the thing I was not braced for, which is that they are happy.
When I came out earlier in the week to do the decorating I did it while they were at the market, on purpose, because I did not want an audience for the part where I impersonate their dead, and so tonight is the first they have seen it finished, lit, the whole house glowing the way her house used to glow, and Cooper has clearly given them the full tour already and is giving me the encore, towing me room to room.
“She put the church with no top right here,” he reports, of the ceramic village, “because Aunt Della said the broke ones need the good spot,” and Sam, behind us, makes a small sound and turns it into a cough.
Beau stands in the middle of the front room looking up at the garland on the posts with an expression he cannot get the charm in front of fast enough, and says, rough, “You found the note about the low nail,” and I say I did, and he nods, several times, at the garland, not at me.
And Asa, in the doorway, says nothing, but he looks at his grandmother’s lit-up porch through the window and then he looks at me, once, and there is a thing in it I cannot read and do not get to keep, because he takes it back behind the wall before I can, but it was there.
For one second, the most closed man in the county looked at a glowing porch and could not get the door shut in time.
It smells, specifically, like something I do not have a name for, something rich and dark with bay leaf in it, and when I come into the kitchen Jonah is at the stove with his back to me and his shoulders set in a particular way, and on the counter beside him, open, propped against the canister, is a recipe card.
A real one. In her hand. And I know, because Jonah told me once without telling me, that he has not opened that box since June, that he cooks from memory so he will not have to read her writing, and he has opened it tonight, he has stood here and read her writing on purpose, for the boy, and made her Christmas Eve dish out of her own instructions, and his eyes when he turns around are red at the rims and perfectly dry and he says, “It’s her gumbo.
She did it every Christmas Eve. It’s probably wrong.
” And I say, “It smells exactly right,” and he holds my gaze a second the way he does, two people who do the same job, and he goes back to the pot so he does not have to be looked at, and I let him, because letting a person not be looked at is half of love and nobody ever credits it.
They have hung the stockings on the low nails and the high ones.
Five of them. And then, at the end of the row, a sixth, smaller seam to it, older, with a D embroidered on the cuff in thread gone soft, and nobody has explained the sixth stocking and I do not ask, because the sixth stocking is the entire evening in one object, the choice they made, to hang it, to not pretend she was never here, to let the empty thing dangle there in the firelight and be looked at.
I think it is the bravest piece of interior decorating I have ever seen.
I hung the other five. I would not have dared touch hers.
They did it themselves, before I got here, and I understand it was discussed, and I understand it was hard, and I love them so much in that moment, all four of them, that I have to go admire the tree for a minute with my back to the room.
Dinner is the collision.
It goes beautifully and it goes terribly and it goes both in the same breath, which I am coming to understand is simply what this family does now, what grief is, not a room you sit in but a weather that moves through the good rooms whether you invited it or not.
Cooper is lit up, wired on cocoa and the magic of it, telling me which cookies are for Santa and which are decoys in case Santa has friends, and the table is loud, and Beau is at full wattage, doing voices, doing the goat, keeping the whole thing afloat on pure performance the way he does, and Jonah sets the gumbo down in the center of the table, her gumbo, in her pot, and the steam comes up, and the smell of it hits the table, and the table goes quiet.
Just for a second. The smell does it. Smell is the cruelest sense, it has no manners, it walks straight past every wall you built and sits down in the chair from nineteen-eighty-something, and I watch her gumbo walk into that kitchen and sit down in the empty chair, and every grown man at that table goes still and somewhere else for the length of one breath, and Cooper, who is eight, who does not have the walls yet, says, plainly, happily, with no idea he is detonating anything, “It smells like Aunt Della.”
And Beau laughs. He laughs, because that is what Beau does, that is the reflex, the charm coming up to catch the falling thing before it hits the floor, he opens his mouth to make it light, to make a joke, to save us all from the steam, and the joke does not come.
I watch it not come. I watch Beau Mercer reach for the thing that has never once failed him, the bright deflecting thing, his whole life’s tool, and find it gone, find the cupboard bare, and his face does something I have been waiting a month to see it do and dreading in equal measure, it falls, all at once, the seam giving way down the middle, and Beau puts his hand over his mouth and the tears come up out of him fast and silent and total, the kind that have been waiting six months behind a dam built out of jokes, and he shoves back from the table and says, muffled, “Sorry, I’m sorry, don’t, it’s fine, I’m fine,” and gets up to flee, because a man who has been the bright one for six months does not know how to be witnessed cracking.
I get to him before he reaches the door.
I do not do it on purpose, my body just does it, the way it did with Sam on the phone, the way it does.
I do not tell him it’s okay. I have learned better in this house.
I put my hand flat on his back, between his shoulder blades, where the seam is, and I say, low, just to him, “You don’t have to be funny right now.
We’ve got it. Sit down and miss her. We’ll hold the room.
” And Beau Mercer, the charmer, the one who carries the casseroles and tells the one good story so nobody has to cry, turns and puts his face down on my shoulder right there by the back door and cries like the dam finally gave, and I hold all his weight, and over the top of his bent head I see the table watching, Sam with his hand pressed to his own mouth, Jonah with his eyes closed, Cooper gone solemn and wide, and Asa.
Asa is looking at me hold his brother. And his face is not a wall.
For once, for this one second, the door is wide open and I can see everything behind it, and what is behind it is not anger and it is not even grief, it is terror, plain animal terror, the look of a man watching the exact thing he has been bracing against arrive in his own kitchen on Christmas Eve, watching his family fold itself around a woman in the firelight like she has always been the missing piece, like the constellation finally has its center back, and knowing, the way I can see him know it, that there is no putting this back in the shed with the other boxes.
And then he gets up, quiet, and he goes out the back door into the cold, toward the hives, the way he goes, and the cold air comes in where he left, and I hold his crying brother and I let him go, because I have decided I am not wanted here, and a woman who has decided she is not wanted does not follow a man into a field.
The evening rights itself, the way evenings do.
Beau cries himself out and comes back to the table wrung and sheepish and somehow younger, lighter, a man who set something down he has been carrying since June, and he eats two bowls of his sister-in-law’s gumbo and tells me, quiet, “Thank you,” with nothing performed in it at all, the first completely unperformed thing he has ever said to me, and I file it in the good drawer.
And then it is time for the one Christmas Eve present, which is apparently a Della rule, one present on the Eve and the rest in the morning, and Cooper has been vibrating about this for an hour, and he runs to the tree and comes back with something flat wrapped in approximately one entire roll of tape, and he does not put it under anyone’s name, he brings it straight to me, and he climbs half into my lap the way he has never once done, a careful child abandoning all his care, and he says, “I made you yours early. Open it now. I can’t wait till morning. ”
It is a drawing.
It is the family. Four big stick uncles, one small stick boy, one goat with one ear up and one down.
And in the middle of them, holding the boy’s stick hand, in a red triangle coat, is a stick woman with my hair, my actual brown scribble of hair, and over all of them, up in the corner where he always puts her, a little higher, watching, is the woman in the other triangle dress with the crown of bees, AUNT DELLA, and underneath the whole thing, in his best careful printing, the title, the thing he has named his own family, it says: MY PACK AND MISS TATE AND AUNT DELLA WATCHING.
My pack and Miss Tate.
He has put me in it. He has drawn the picture of everyone he has left and everyone he has lost, and he has put me in the middle of the everyone-he-has-left, holding his hand, and his dead aunt is up in the corner watching us with her bees, blessing it, the way the dead bless things in the cosmology of an eight-year-old, which is to say completely and without complication, and I am holding this piece of paper in a warm kitchen that I decorated out of a dead woman’s labeled boxes, with a sobbed-out charmer on my left and a careful boy in my lap and a grieving man out in the dark field because the sight of me was more than he could hold, and I understand, with total clarity, that I have become the heart of this family.
And I cannot let myself believe it is mine.
That is the thing. That is the whole broken thing in me, lit up by the tree, exposed.
A child has handed me documentary evidence that I belong here, has drawn me into the center of his whole world in marker, and the oldest voice I own, the one from before I have words for, says: he’s a baby, he doesn’t know, you’re the help, you’re the nice lady who fixed Christmas, you are borrowing this, every bit of it, the warmth and the boy and the gumbo and the drawing, you are borrowing it for one season and in June you give it all back, and the man in the field already knows that, that’s why he’s in the field.
Do not get confused. Do not, whatever you do, start to believe the marker.
So I do what I do. I hug Cooper hard and I tell him it is the finest drawing anyone has ever made me, which is true, it is the finest thing I own from the second I touch it, and I tell him I am going to frame it and hang it where I see it every single day, which I will, and I do not let one drop fall in front of him, and I drive home at midnight on Christmas Eve with a child’s drawing on the passenger seat where the pies were, and Della’s glow in my rearview, and the smell of her gumbo in my coat, and I get home to my own dark house and I turn on my porch light, for nobody, and I prop the drawing on my kitchen table against the salt, MY PACK AND MISS TATE AND AUNT DELLA WATCHING, and I sit down across from it in my coat, alone, at one in the morning on Christmas, and I look at the place where a careful boy drew me into the middle of a family, and I let myself cry, finally, the whole closet-full of it, because there is no class to teach now and nobody to be fine for, just me and the marker and the unbearable, unbelievable, unborrowable evidence that somewhere out past the county line, I am loved, and I am the only person in three counties too scared to cash it.