The Twelve Days of Dash & Lily(55)

“Neither do I!” I confessed. “I have been trying for months to figure out a way to make it better, Lily. And the only answer I can come up with is to tell you there are some things you can’t control, and time is, like, number one on that list. Number two is the actions of other people. I watched my father destroy my mother—absolutely destroy her. And then I watched them both destroy their marriage and the entity that was the only thing I’d ever known as family. I know I was only eight, but even if I’d been eighteen, there wouldn’t have been anything I could do but protect myself. I wanted to do anything I could, but the answer was to realize that it was not something that I got to decide. Even now. I cannot change my father. And I want to, so badly. I will even admit to you now that one of the reasons I want to change my father is because I feel that if I can change everything that’s wrong with him, then maybe I can change all those parts in me, too. Isn’t that scary? But isn’t it also natural, to want that?”

“You never told me that.”

“I know! But I’m telling you now—I’m telling you all of this now—because I know there are all of these things happening to you where what you feel is, as I said before in the wrong way, beside the point. You can’t stop time. You can’t make everyone healthy or always in love. You can’t. But you and me—what we have—that’s one thing we do have control over. That’s the one thing that’s up to us. There are times when it feels to me like it’s all up to you. And I’m sure there are times for you when it feels like it’s all up to me. But we have to move forward like it’s up to us, together. I know it’s not as intense or immediate as it used to be—but that just means that instead of having only a present together, we’re having a past, present, and future all at once.”

Lily softened then. I could see it. She wasn’t giving up. She wasn’t giving in, per se. But she was understanding. I was feeling the same way. How had we never had this conversation before?

Probably because we hadn’t been ready for this conversation before.

“It’s not fair,” Lily said, walking over to me and leaning in. “What’s the one thing we want when it comes to the people we love? Time. And what’s the scariest thing about how love goes? Time. The thing we want the most is the thing we fear the most, I guess. Time is going to run out. But in the meantime we have…everything.”

She hugged me then, and I hugged her back, and we probably would have stayed like that for a very long time if Inga the caterer hadn’t come in at that moment.

“I promise I wasn’t listening,” she said, which pretty much guaranteed she’d been listening. “I just need to get the cheese puffs out of the oven before they become cheese puffeds.”

As we walked back down the hall to the party, I explained Boomer’s Theory of the Blink to Lily. She liked it.

“We had our blink,” she said.

“Yup.”

“And now our eyes are open.”

“Or eye.”

“Or eye.”

“And inevitably—”

“We’ll blink again.”

“But that’s okay.”

“Because things will be clearer after we do.”

“Precisely.”

We got to the door of the party. Friends, family, and strangers spread before us. There was a music to their conversation—this strange orchestration of good company.

I reached for her hand. She took mine.

“Let’s do this,” I said. “All of it.”





Thursday, December 25th

It was an odd feeling—still so much sadness to process, and yet this felt like the best Christmas of my life.

All my favorite people gathered in my favorite house on my favorite day of the year. Laughing. Talking. Gifting. Eating. Nogging.

And Edgar Thibaud in a corner, the head of a group sitting in a circle around him, dealing a deck of cards to rapt elementary school–age party attendees, teaching them how to play poker.

“You invited Edgar Thibaud here?” Dash asked me.

“Grandpa did.”

Actually, what Grandpa had said was, “You didn’t invite Edgar Thibaud, did you? That woefully neglected hooligan high-fived me at the senior center and said he’d see me at my sister’s Christmas party, and we could gather round the hearth and share a flask of hooch with some hoochie mamas.”

I shuddered, recalling my grandpa repeating Edgar’s vulgar words. But I couldn’t sustain the lie for more than a second. I amended my statement to Dash. “I mean, I did. Grandpa feels sorry for Edgar. He has no one at Christmas.”

“For a reason.”

“We must open our hearts to the downtrodden, and to scoundrels,” I told Dash, and gave his hand a gentle squeeze. “?’Tis the season.”

“Edgar doesn’t get a copy of the List, does he?”

I started to sputter “Nnnooo,” but Dash brushed my response away. He leaned in to me and whispered, “Should I be worried about your fascination with Edgar Thibaud? You don’t look at that preposterous buffoon and wonder what it would be like to kiss him, do you?” Dash’s one visible eyebrow was raised, about to the height of the eye patch on his other side, and his lips had a vague half turn to them. He was teasing me.