The Sunday night before the trial, Jay takes his kids to get a tree.
Thanksgiving had been a spindly roasted chicken Lonnie brought over and a can of green beans, which was Rolly’s contribution, along with a six-pack of cream soda and Crown Royal for the grown-ups. The kids watched TV while Jay and the others worked until Evelyn, fed up with waiting, finally came to get Ben and his sister so they could have a proper meal, or what was left of it, with their grandparents, Ellie begging at the last minute for her aunt to drop her at Lori King’s house instead. Lori was almost twelve weeks along by then, and there was an actual picture of the thing, a little bean-shaped hope that will turn that girl’s life inside out. It had been the Porters’ first holiday apart, and Jay wants to make it up to them. The nearest tree lot is a small, dirt-packed field at the edge of the parking lot for Meyerland Plaza, which is already decked out with holly wreaths on its light fixtures, each with a red bow resting on the bottom, the ribbon turned up at the ends like a painted smile. Jay parks under one of these oversize holiday displays. He takes forty dollars, his absolute limit, out of his wallet and tosses the leather billfold into the glove compartment.
This was Bernie’s deal, the tree and all that.
She did it with the kids every year.
They’re excited at first, Ellie and Ben, even briefly reaching for each other’s hands in a way that Jay hasn’t seen in years as they take off toward the line of white tea lights ringing the field, the free apple cider, and the jingling carols playing on a boom box and the rows and rows of fragrant fir trees, skipping off like storybook children into an unknown forest. He loses sight of them within moments, dizzying himself in a maze of trees, six feet, seven feet, eight feet tall, his head light with pine and cinnamon. He leans over, hands on his knees. Over the treetops, he hears his son’s voice.
“This one!”
“Let’s let Dad decide.”
Jay stands upright, turning the nearest corner to see both of his children the next aisle over, hands on different tree trunks, needles up to their jacketed elbows as they try to hold them upright. Ellie’s is a noble fir, thin, prayerful branches pointing up, a Charlie Brown tree, as Bernie used to say. Ben has chosen a short, squat, sumo-looking tree that looks on the verge of toppling over. Unable, or unwilling, to choose between his children’s two separate dreams for their first real Christmas without their mother, Jay makes the pick for the family, going with a thick Douglas fir. It’s eight and a half feet tall and costs sixty-five dollars, and he has to run out to the car to get another twenty and a five.
They’re quieter on the ride back, all three of them.
It’s a heavy silence, breathless and strained, as if they were actually carrying the tree on their backs, so weighty is the expectation of holiday cheer, the dream of an easy, uncomplicated return to normalcy that they’ve strapped to the roof of the car. They seem, not a one of them, to have thought this through past the actual acquisition of the tree, failing to consider what more might be asked of them once the thing was in hand, that they would have to eventually bring it into the house, amid the ghosts of Christmases past, and decorate it, eight and a half feet of green to color with memories. Jay doesn’t even know where in the house the box of ornaments and lights is hiding, or the dusky angel that his wife found in a clearance sale at Walgreen’s. Bernie was the last one to put them away.
Ben sits next to Jay in the front seat. He’s staring out the window, a tiny O fogged on the glass where his breath lands, the edges expanding and contracting every few seconds. He’s looking at the decorated houses along the drive, lights in red and green, white and blue. From the backseat, Ellie breaks the silence. “Ms. Hilliard said I could come watch the trial, if I want to.”
“Your principal?” he says, remembering suddenly the woman’s wide-set eyes, her quietly solicitous manner. “I don’t think so, El.”
“No, really,” she says, leaning forward to grip the back of the driver’s seat, speaking over her father’s shoulder, her face lit up in the rearview mirror by the passing streetlights. “She thinks it’s an important thing to witness.”
“I don’t think they want a bunch of high school kids in the courtroom.”
“She thinks it’s an important thing for me to see,” Ellie says, nudging her father’s shoulder with the pads of her fingers. He can smell her lemony lotion, the sweet, plastic scent of her strawberry lip gloss. “She thinks it’s important for me to see you . . . ‘standing up,’ or something,” she says, trying to get the woman’s words just right, but leaving the impression that Jay on his feet is in itself a major accomplishment. “I thought I could come by and watch some of it.”
“There’s a lot of stuff in this trial I don’t want you hearing.”
“I already know everything. I even know how they found her.”
“El,” he says. He nods toward her younger brother, reminding her of his presence.
“I’m just saying, I know enough,” Ellie says, sinking back into the leather seat, throwing her head against the headrest. “I feel sorry for her,” she says, so softly her father can barely make out the words. He tries to catch sight of her in the rearview mirror, but she’s behind him, her face obscured by his own.
Ben finally turns from the window. “Are you going to win?”
“I don’t know.”
“Oh,” Ben says, pinching his eyebrows together.
It appears he hadn’t considered this as a real possibility. He sighs, as if preparing himself, or Jay, for defeat, as if the entire prospect has aged him in just the last few minutes. Then, with great care, he repeats to his father the very words he’s been made to hear in the wake of every C grade he’s ever received, every third strike at bat. “Well, you tried your hardest.”
True, up to a point.