Accidental Notes: A Novel

Chapter 20

Creatures are Stirring

Not sure what this story is? The synopsis is available here.

Catch up on chapter 19 here.

I don’t know how I’m going to make it through a church service and candle lighting in the same place I keep failing. The piano on the stage mocks me, reminding me of every melody I failed at, every harmony I’ve turned into discord in this family. I am the accidental note here. I’m the one out of key.

Pastor Clark comes on stage after we sing, talking what Jesus’ birth means for our redemption. He drones on about how it’s both a miracle and the opening chapter of a tragedy, because this birth always meant death. I catch Dad’s eyes, which are watery like baptism. We light candles and we sing. Little ones yawn. Babies cry. Dad’s hand reaches into the empty space between us and squeezes like someone is there.

Our drive home is silent. We don’t even wish each other the merry Christmases that most of the people at church offer us on the way out the door. We don’t say anything when we get back to Grandma’s house, or as we move toward our separate bedrooms. I send one last look across the hall, where he’s sleeping in the master, but he’s shut the door without looking back.

I put on my pajamas and a sweatshirt and crawl into bed, but I can’t sleep. Now that I know what to look for, all I see in my dad right now is this painful absence. All he must see, anywhere, is how badly he misses his son. My parents were happy with just Brennan. He was enough; they didn’t want another child until he was gone.

They didn’t want me until they didn’t have him.

I wonder if they wish I were a boy. Maybe that would fill the hole in Dad’s heart, help me mend the deep wounds in my family. I want both of my parents to smile when they see me, even if it’s only because they’re seeing someone else.

At two o’clock in the morning on Christmas, I leave my bedroom. I close the door behind me and plan to go back into the spare room with my phone as my flashlight so I can find Brennan. But there’s creaking on the stairs.

I’m too old for Dad to dress like Santa Claus — at least he realizes that — but I can see the way his arms are gathered around a bundle. I’d forgotten about filling stockings, forgotten it must have always been a parent tiptoeing down the stairs at in the middle of the night. Dad’s steps are so heavy, the presents seem like a burden in his arms. But I wonder if once, when I was a child or when Brennan was, doing this was a joy. Something he looked forward to, back when we believed in miracles.

He turns around like he can sense me. “I didn’t think you’d be awake.”

I shrug. “Couldn’t sleep.” Then I lie. “I thought about playing piano, a lullaby maybe.”

Dad’s nod proves nothing except how he doesn’t believe me. “Close your eyes?” he asks. “Until I’m downstairs. I still… I want it to be a surprise.”

So, there still is a hint of magic inside of him, or some magic he wants to keep inside of me. I close my eyes. I let my imagination run away, until the creaking of the stairs is reindeer hoofs on the roof, impatiently prancing while they wait, shaking jingle bells on their reins. Dad’s groan as he drops the pile is Santa as he comes down the chimney. A “ho ho ho,” not an “ugh,” on his lips. And in this place in my imagination I’m smiling.

“You ready for some Christmas magic?” Dad says when he’s back up the stairs. He takes my hands, like all the ways I ruined Christmas Eve are over. Is he erasing that part of our past, too? If he can forget an entire child, can he forget the way his only daughter hurt him? Is he sweeping a broom over the footprints we left in his memory?

“I don’t want to open our stockings yet, Dad,” I say. Instead I lead us toward the family room, bypassing the stockings hanging on the mantle. I sit at the treble end of the piano bench and make room for Dad beside me. With a smile, I place his left hand on two F keys, an octave apart. My hand fits over his perfectly now, and I start a steady 4/4 rhythm.

It doesn’t even take four beats for him to realize what I’m doing. Before I’ve even pressed down on the C to start the melody, he meets my eyes and smiles. I’m eight again, sitting beside him just like this, in Christmas pajamas as my hand taps out “Little Drummer Boy.” Dad sings this time, quietly. We don’t need a lead sheet, not for this. It was our tradition, and even though it stopped just after I turned ten, my fingers remember.

For the first time since I got here, the music surrounding us brings us closer together instead of pressing space between us. “Shall I play for you?” he sings. And I’m not Mary, but I nod.

When our duet is over, he does play for me, an arrangement of “Oh Holy Night” that’s complicated and lovely. Then I play, too, from lead sheets. Not something churchy, but “Winter Wonderland” and “Let It Snow,” because I’m finally enjoying the weather. I don’t know how much time we sit there at the piano playing songs together. I’m not sure it matters. It’s the first time in ages I know I’m with my dad.

Dawn approaches, tinting the snow like fire. I yawn. “Merry Christmas, Dad,” I say.

“Merry Christmas. You ready for those stockings now?” he asks. There’s a glimmer in his eye, a twinkle just like Santa’s, and for a minute I’m willing to believe in him the way grown-ups still believe in the magic of Kris Kringle sometimes.

We sit on the floor, our backs against armchairs, each of us holding a stocking. Dad’s is full, too. He must have filled his own. I wonder how long he’s been doing it, if he even bothered when we weren’t here, or if until this Christmas his mother would fill him a stocking. I look at him cradling that ratty piece of felt, ERIC scrawled on it in a child’s handwriting probably half a century old, and I see a person who lost his mother a few weeks ago, a person who lost his son and hasn’t forgotten either of them.

Once I’ve pulled out a box of Cookie Dough Bites and a book I’d asked for, and watch Dad pull out a gag toy and candy of his own, I set my stocking aside and turn to him. It’s a dangerous topic switch, but maybe with the way he feels present with me now, I can ask and things will still turn out okay. “What did Brennan’s look like, Dad?”

Felt pulls in Dad’s hands as his fingers slip to the edge of his stocking. “His what?”

“His stocking. I have this polar bear one. I remember a ballerina one from before I was big enough to write my name. What did Brennan have? Did he pick out his own?”

“Buzz Lightyear,” Dad says. His eyes flick toward the stairway. I bet if I looked long enough, I could find it in the spare room, dusty in one of the boxes. When Dad talks, he doesn’t glance at me once. “He fell in love with Buzz the moment the first Toy Story movie came out and wouldn’t trade out his stocking even years later. It was his, he’d say. His own special thing, to infinity and beyond. As a kindergartner, he loved how Brennan and Buzz both started with B. I even had to convince him to write his own name, instead of Buzz, when we first bought the stocking for him. But he did, backward r, mix of upper- and lowercase letters and all.”

He pulls his own stocking up against his chest and bends his knees until he’s made a cradle.

“I’m sorry I didn’t get anything for your stocking. I didn’t think — ”

“You didn’t have to, Adaya. It’s not your job to take care of me.”

Except I’m starting to think that’s not true. “It still would have been nice for you to have something to open that you didn’t put inside.”

Dad sighs and pulls out a book of his own, the same one he got me. “There’s a lot of things that would have been nice that I’m not going to get.”

I’m pretty sure I know that better than he does. But I’m not going to ruin this one good moment. The next thing in my stocking is a movie, one I saw in theaters and enjoyed.

“Your mom said you’d like that one,” Dad confesses while I hold it. “Do you mind if we watch it after we open presents?”

“I’d like that. And thanks, Dad. For all this.”

He smiles like it was nothing. I pretend it’s true.

Neither of us got many presents, me because I have to fit them on a plane to take back to California, Dad because I didn’t know what to buy him besides more golf balls. It doesn’t matter. Even without being near my mom, it’s one of the best Christmas mornings I remember.

We end up falling asleep, him on the couch, me curled into the love seat, well before the credits roll on the movie. It’s the first real, peaceful rest I can remember since I got there. At least until an incessant vibrating in the pocket of my sweats wakes me up. It’s Mom calling. For the first time since I got here, my mom is the one who’s calling to talk to me.

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