The Clairvoyants(51)

I didn’t tell Del about our mother’s invitation. Our Christmas would be at Windy Hill, with all of the Milton girls. I agreed to stop by and visit and have some of Del’s eggnog, but I told William I didn’t want to stay very long, and he agreed. We’d purchased each other gifts that we’d already exchanged on Christmas Eve. I’d gotten him a cashmere sweater—a forest green that went with his copper-colored hair. He gave me a vintage camera—a Pentax that I had been searching for. We showed up at Anne’s with Geoff at noon, and opened Anne’s gifts, and smiled at everyone, as if nothing had changed. Del was exuberant and silly, and I wondered if she’d been drinking too much. I was doing a poor job of monitoring her, if that was still my role. I wasn’t entirely sure anymore.

“I’m glad I’m spending my last Christmas with all of you,” Anne said, holding her eggnog up with a trembling hand. “I’m looking forward to ushering in the New Year.”

She wore a red wool dress, a beautiful scarf. We’d all agreed to return on New Year’s Eve for a party, and it felt, in many ways, as if that might be a final event. Anne again patted the sofa next to her and had me sit beside her, and she picked up my hand with the ring, and gave it a gentle squeeze, as if this were all she needed to do to show her approval of the marriage. I suffered the Milton girls’ glares, and Alice refused to speak to me at all. Del said Alice would forgive me.

“She’s one of those girls who forget things pretty quickly,” she said.

We hadn’t had much time to talk since that evening with the journals, and Del hadn’t been especially forthcoming about what the journals revealed. “It’s all who she’s mad at, and who she talks to at lunch in the cafeteria,” Del had told me one afternoon in my apartment. “Who she sneaks a cigarette with in the bathroom. Like an after-school special.”

Christmas day I found Del in the kitchen decorating sugar cookies. She had colored icing in small bowls and was painting a blue scarf on a snowman.

“Remember when we used to do this with Grandmother?” she said.

We were alone in the kitchen, and I leaned over the counter toward her.

“Did you give the journals to Anne?”

“Sure,” she said, wiping the brush off on a dish towel.

“You kept the newest one,” I said.

“You are so untrusting,” she said. She set the cookie on a glass plate. “No one is trying to hide anything from you.”

When we were little Del or I would tell this sort of lie all the time. “This is my favorite dinner!” I’d exclaim when our mother made her Bisquick and vegetable soup casserole. “You look so pretty,” Del would say when I woke with mascara streaks under my eyes.

“What are you talking about?” I said.

Del chose a large Christmas tree–shaped cookie and began brushing green icing over its surface.

“Are you taking your medication?” I said.

Del lifted her head; her brush paused. “Is that any of your business?” Then she bent back over her work. “What do you think our mother and sisters are doing today?”

I felt a stab of guilt that I hadn’t shared our mother’s invitation. “Sitting around the tree talking about us because we’re not there,” I said.

Geoff came into the kitchen singing “We Three Kings,” and then a few of the Milton girls trailed him in, singing, too. Del’s expression brightened.

“Remember when we put on that Christmas recital in the old house’s living room?” she said. “Mr. Parmenter showed up at the front door, and we did our performance for him? He never took off his coat, did he?”

The unease of that Christmas Eve returned to me—our mother with the J&B out on the counter, the jangle of ice cubes in hers and Mr. Parmenter’s glasses. It was snowing. Our grandmother had gone to bed. Eventually, Mr. Parmenter left, driving his Jaguar back to his miserable life, one he ended a short month later.

“Why was Mr. Parmenter there?” I said.

“His daughter, Candace, was in my class,” Del said.

The memory filled me with an awful emptiness. But Del seemed unmoved. She joined Geoff in singing, and they all filed out of the room as if they were a group of carolers. It occurred to me that her memory seemed so sharp about so many aspects of our childhood, but it selected and excluded, and when it came to the summer David Pinney died it provided a blank, as if that one part had been conveniently erased.

When William and I left, Del was hanging pinecones covered in suet and birdseed from the trees in Anne’s backyard. I called across the snowdrifts to her. Alice was with her, and Del turned and stared at me for a moment, and then turned away. I began to see the Milton girls forming a barricade between Del and me, and I wasn’t happy about it.

*

ONCE WE RETURNED from Anne’s, William and I sat together under blankets, listening to the elm scrape the side of the house, both of us wishing we could light a fire, and berating ourselves for not having stayed at Anne’s beside hers. It was late afternoon, and the snow began to fall, the flakes like pencil shavings or ash, and William suggested we go for a walk.

“At least we’ll be moving,” he said. “We can stay warm that way.”

Neither of us had initiated sex, and I thought I might make a joke about how marriage had so swiftly tamped down the urge, but I did not. I knew it wasn’t getting married that changed things, really. It was my vision of Mary Rae with him in the Silver Streak, and Alice telling me he’d asked Mary Rae to marry him—two things I didn’t know to be true.