I slipped up to my room after presents and wrapped myself up in the quilt. After staring at my closed laptop for a few minutes, I finally opened it, clicking through to find the pictures I’d buried so deeply in subfolders I wouldn’t ever be able to stumble across them by accident. It was hard to see her face and not be immediately overwhelmed by all the feelings I’d spent so long trying to not feel. That was the only way to do it, really. That was the only way to get through every day and not just break down crying. I couldn’t let myself remember her, I couldn’t think about her, or miss her.
But it was Christmas. It had been almost three months since she’d died, and I felt guilty—not for moving on, but for forgetting. It was easier to forget, and selfish, and cowardly, and it was time now, finally, to acknowledge that she was gone.
I started way back, back to the baby pictures, back to when my dad was still around. My mom was thin then, my dad looked healthy, I was all round blubber and wispy hair. The sad thing was, there weren’t all that many pictures to look at. My dad had always been the photographer in the family, and when he died, my mom just stopped taking them. All the ones I had of the two of us were from my grandma’s really awful point-and-shoot. But there were a few scattered moments from early childhood: Mom and me at Thanksgiving baking pies, Mom helping me into my coat last year before prom, just three days before she would go to the hospital and never come home; Mom and I eating Jell-O out of little plastic cups in her hospital room the day before she went into the surgery that would give her the infection that would kill her. And that was it—that was the last one. She’d said she was too ugly from the chemo, she didn’t want any more pictures taken of her until she was feeling better. But she never felt better, and she was never going to—and she knew that. We all knew that. And I didn’t realize she would fade so quickly from my memory, and these photos would be all I had of her, and they wouldn’t be enough. How was I supposed to hold on to an entire life with so few pictures? She was just an idea now—a lovely thought, faded at the edges, like my dad.
A long time later I shut the computer down, buried my face in my knees, and cried. I’d meant to go back downstairs to be with everyone else, but I couldn’t, and I think they understood because they didn’t come knock on my door. Eventually I fell asleep as the light faded and the snow stopped.
As usual, I woke up from a nightmare.
In it, I walked through Adrian’s silent mansion, but all the angles were slightly off; the floor was sloped, the door frames were crooked, and the walls were just the tiniest bit caved. I walked from one room to another, but the rooms never ended. Always, I would eventually end up in the main foyer.
I walked for hours until I felt tired and sore and the floors felt sticky. I looked down and saw that I was standing in a spatter of blood. The blood was dripping from twin puncture marks all over my arms. I looked up and realized that my footprints were scuffed through a trail of blood that led both behind and in front of me—I must have been walking in it the entire time.
As all these realizations descended, the spatter of blood became a trickle, although it didn’t seem to be coming from me anymore. Suddenly, the trickle became a flood, and the flood started rising to my ankles, my knees, my hips, my waist, my chin, and then I was floating in it, being carried up to the ceiling, and it was warm and thick and smelled like copper. I reached the ceiling and still the ocean of blood kept rising until there was no more air, just blood.
For once, Adrian wasn’t awake—when I sat up sharply, he did, too, though his eyes were mostly closed and he looked extremely confused.
“What’s what?” he asked, blinking as he scanned the room. “S’ome happening?”
I planted my face against his chest angrily. “Nightmare,” I said. “Go back to sleep.”
Adrian sunk back into the pillows and rested his hand on my back. Still not really awake, he mumbled something I couldn’t understand before going still and quiet once more. I lay awake for an hour looking at him—not because I was afraid of another nightmare, but because I didn’t understand how I could be so happy and so sad and so angry all at the same time. Several times Adrian’s arm tightened around me, and I wondered what he was dreaming of.
*
“Two words, Mystic: slumber party.”
It was the day after Christmas and I was trying to brush my teeth and talk to Trish on the phone at the same time.
“Who, wha’, whe’, where?” I asked around my toothbrush.
“Are you brushing your teeth?”
I spit into the sink. “Yep.”
“Gross. Anyway, it’s at my house, junior gals, tonight. Be there or suffer my wrath.”
I headed downstairs and found Rachel sitting at the table. “Can I go to a slumber party at Trish’s tonight? If I don’t, I will suffer her wrath.”
She thought about it a moment. “Sure.”
I pulled the phone back up to my mouth and said, “Yes. What time?”
“Dinner’s at six, and we’re making Sloppy Joes. You need a ride?”
I chewed my lip, thinking. I hated asking Trish to come all the way out to get me, I didn’t want to bug Joe or Rachel, and I felt stupid asking Adrian to take me to someone else’s house. I had my license, but there was no way I was driving any sort of vehicle through snowy mountain roads on my own.
“Errr…,” I said, stalling.
“Do you need a ride to Trish’s?” Rachel asked.