The Truth About Keeping Secrets(32)

I was afraid of myself when left to my own devices. I didn’t like that person much in the fleeting moments I encountered her, and I certainly wasn’t interested in being handcuffed to her.

Christmas. The grief book in Dad’s office had warned that today would be bad. I woke up feeling mostly empty. Tired, but that wasn’t anything new; I still wasn’t sleeping much, because I couldn’t sit in the dark for any considerable amount of time without a variety of awful thoughts intruding, spinning around on my brainstem, pole dancing, mocking me. Instead, I opted for playing video games or watching movies until I passed out, then I’d wake up in the middle of the night with the title music humming faintly. But this morning I couldn’t even bring myself to open my eyes. Christmas. Dad loved it. The minute after midnight on Thanksgiving he’d feed me a steady diet of those Claymation Christmas specials, which were all sort of creepy but in an endearing way. I liked the uncanny-valley-ness of them, all the jerking unnatural motions sort of reminiscent of how I felt I navigated through the world. Especially today. Especially today, because today I was due to have an anniversary reaction, a reaction I’d have for at least ten years and probably for the rest of my life – every Christmas and every birthday forever there’d be a Dad-shaped hole, where I’ll remember in vivid technicolour that he should be here, he should see me graduate and get married and grow old and for fuck’s sake, he should at least be here on Christmas so we can –

Breathe.

June.

June. I wondered what she was doing. If she was still in bed. What her family did on Christmas – her not-close dad, her not-understanding mom. Had she even thought of me since the beginning of break? I would have done just about anything to see an itemized list of everything she thought about on any given day. Oh God. I would have given anything.

Mom knocked on my door at ten that morning. I pretended it had woken me up; I wasn’t sure why. ‘Santa came,’ she said.

I propped myself up on one elbow. ‘No, he didn’t.’ I think I was trying to make a joke, but it just came out like some defiant proclamation from an eight-year-old.

She smiled, the rest of her face straining in protest, then leaned against the doorframe with her arms crossed. ‘We’re just gonna have a little day in. OK? There’s no pressure. No pressure to feel … feel anything at all. Deal?’

I wiped the non-sleep from my eyes, and smacked my cheeks. ‘Deal,’ I said, not convinced.

Mom had gotten me an excessive number of presents. I worried that I’d been placed on some ‘give-a-sad-kid-the-best-Christmas-ever’ list, but the meticulousness and uniformity with which everything was wrapped suggested it had all come from Mom. New sweatshirts, and gift cards to restaurants, and a drone. With each new thing I unwrapped she’d watch, then take a sip of her coffee before saying that we could take it back if I didn’t want it – it was so damn quiet in the house, just crinkling and tearing and plastic scraping plastic and Mom slurping and saying we can take that movie back or that gift card back and it was honestly driving me insane. God, of course I appreciated it, of course I did, but it was also driving me insane. And I thought of Mom at the kitchen table with her stacks of folded papers, kneading her forehead and sighing – how could she have done this? How could we afford this?

And when the pile had been exhausted she looked at me for a long time, then finally said, ‘You’re not happy,’ in the weirdest way I’d ever heard. She didn’t say it as though she expected the presents to make me happy, like she was disappointed that they didn’t, but as though it was a statement of fact, almost robotic, like she’d assessed me just now and come to a conclusion. ‘You’re not happy.’ No. No, I’m not.

But it wasn’t because I was unsatisfied; it was because I was sad for her, and I was sad for us, and I was sad that the world had ended and there was nothing we’d ever be able to do to get it back, but I couldn’t say any of that so I just went: ‘You said I didn’t have to feel anything.’

Mom thought for a moment, then got up and left. I worried I’d driven her away or something, but she came back from the front room with another present: small, rectangular and wrapped in glossy red paper. ‘This was in the mailbox,’ she said, and handed it to me. It wasn’t particularly heavy, and it had my name printed across the back in what looked like impossibly neat handwriting. ‘I figured it was from one of your friends.’

Weird. Olivia? Definitely not. She wasn’t one to shove a present in the mailbox; she’d want to give it to me in person. Seeing as the list of people I could consider ‘friends’ was practically microscopic, there was only one name left.

Breathe.

I tore at the paper with a new hunger, suddenly feeling very validated, like this had all been worth it – June had been thinking of me, enough to come all the way over, to give me something. I should have gotten something for her, I thought.

It was a book. A pale green cover with a drawing of a distinctly sad-looking guy on the front, and above it, the title. It took me a second to read, even after the paper had been cleared away. I must have been reading it incorrectly. No, no. There it was.

Healing Homosexuality.

I instinctively grabbed for paper to conceal the cover, as if I could rewrap it somehow, and if I did then maybe the moment wouldn’t have happened, I never would have opened it at all, but it did. It had happened. Someone had put a fucking copy of Healing Homosexuality in my mailbox.