The Impossible Knife of Memory(84)

It was tempting to let my guard down, but I couldn’t, not until he started seeing that doctor.

The swimming lesson changed things with Finn and me, took us to a new level that was hidden from the rest of the world, one that made us laugh more and required a lot more kissing. Besotted: that was the word of the month. I went to class, did enough homework to keep me off the naughty list, counted the minutes until I saw him again (praying that he was doing the same thing). I learned to love the smell of chlorine because every day after school, I’d change into a T-shirt and shorts, sit in the visitor’s gallery that overlooked the pool, and read while Finnegan Braveheart Ramos valiantly guarded the lives of the Belmont Boys Swim Team.

When I was with Finn, the world spun properly on its axis, and gravity worked. At home, the planet tilted so far on its side it was hard to tell which way was up. Dad felt it, too. He shuffled like an old man, as if the carpet under his feet was really a slick sheet of black ice.

A tree turned up in our living room the morning of Christmas Eve, the base of its trunk jammed into a bucket of rocks. The bucket sat in the middle of an old tire. The tree leaned toward the window, shedding needles whenever Spock’s tail thwacked against it.

Finn and his mom were heading back to Boston that night, so we exchanged gifts in the afternoon. He gave me a coupon book. All the coupons were for swimming lessons.

“Okay, now I really feel like an idiot,” I said, handing over his gift. “In my defense, I haven’t had an art class in years.”

“Ah,” he said, ever the diplomat, when he’d removed the paper. “It’s an original. I love original things.”

I cringed. “You need me to tell you what it is, don’t you?”

“Sort of.”

“It’s a candleholder, see? No, turn it the other way. That thing at the bottom is supposed to be an owl, but it’s not supposed to have a giant tumor growing on its back.”

Finn tried to keep a straight face and failed. “My first thought was that it was Dromedary Man, the camel superhero. But you’re almost right, it’s definitely an owl. But that is not a tumor, that’s a backpack, loaded down with overdue library books. I love it.” He grinned. “It’s very you.”

I tried to decorate the tree after he left. I found a small box of old Christmas lights in the basement, but the thought of a flaming tree-sized torch in the living room made me put them back. I baked round sugar cookies and put a small hole in each one so that after they cooled, I could thread yarn through the holes and hang them on the tree. The trick was to hang them close to the trunk and high enough so the dog wouldn’t eat them. Too much weight on the end of a branch would snap it off, then Spock would eat the cookie, the yarn, and start in on the branch.

An arctic cold front rolled down from the North Pole Christmas morning. Our furnace ran constantly, but frigid air seeped in through the cracks around the windowsills and overwhelmed the crumbling insulation. I spent the day in suspended animation wrapped in a sleeping bag on the couch, sipping hot chocolate, watching Christmas movies, and waiting for Dad to wake up.

Long after sunset, he came down the hall coughing hard, his nose running. “No hugging,” he said. “You don’t want this cold.”

After a bowl of chicken noodle soup and a lot of Kleenex, I gave him my present.

“You didn’t have to get me anything,” he protested.

“It’s Christmas, duh.”

He blew his nose again, carefully removed the wrapping paper and folded it, then flipped the gift over so he could see the front.

“A map of the United States,” he said.

“Our map, see?” I pointed at the red lines that squiggled all over the country. “I traced as many of our trips as I could remember. There’s a hook on the back so you can hang it on the wall.”

“Thank you, princess. I suppose you want a present, too,” he teased.

“That would be nice.”

He went out to the kitchen, opened a cupboard, and returned with a long thin box, covered in reindeer paper.

He hesitated, then handed it to me and walked away. “Hope you like it.”

“Where are you going?” I asked. “Don’t you want to watch me open it?”

“No, it’s okay,” he said, already halfway down the hall.

“Really? You’re really going to do that? What is it, a pair of chopsticks from an old take-out order? Did you wash a pair of my socks for me?”

I regretted the words as soon as they were spoken. He turned around, coughing, and shuffled back to the living room. Sat on the couch without a word.

“I didn’t mean that to sound nasty,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

“Just open it.”

Under the paper was the kind of box that fancy pens come in. “A pen? That would be way cooler than clean socks.”

He pressed his lips together and raised an eyebrow. I lifted the lid, unfolded the white tissue paper, and picked up a pearl necklace.

“Daddy?” I whispered. “Where—”

“That’s from your grandmother. Found it in the basement. I doubt the pearls are real, so don’t think you’re going to get much if you sell it. She wore it all the time.”

I rubbed the pearls on my cheek, smelling lemon and face powder and ginger cookies and hearing bees humming in her garden. “I remember.”