Adam Haslett - Imagine Me Gone

Mom wheeled on us in the kitchen, crying, “No! No!”

We were getting cereal. The trussed turkey sat pale and bulbous on the counter behind her.

“What’s the matter?” I asked.

“An onion! I forgot to get an onion! ”

Michael’s chest and shoulders crumpled forward in relief at the insignificance of the cause for this year’s Christmas-morning panic.

“We’ll get one,” I said.

“Where, for heaven’s sake!”

“The convenience store,” I said. “I’ll go after breakfast.”

“But the stuffing! ” she said. “The stuffing! ”

“It’s just an onion, ” Michael pleaded, “it doesn’t matter .”

“Of course it matters!” she shouted, slapping her thigh.

“I thought we had some,” Alec said through the white surgical mask that he wore over his mouth and nose to protect himself from the atmosphere of the house. He pointed under the table, where a red mesh bag of sweet onions lay at the bottom of a terra-cotta planter beside the birdseed.

“Ah!” Mom called out. “Ah! Thank goodness! When did I get these? How silly.” She bent down, grabbed the bag, and reached for a pair of scissors to slash it open.

“Jesus,” Michael said, “that took a week off my life.”

“Please, Michael, stop exaggerating, ” Mom said.

I carried my cereal bowl into the dining room. Alec, still in his bathrobe, had dashed ahead of me and already had the A section spread on the table in front of him. He lifted the beveled cone of his mask off his face in order to feed, leaving it resting on his forehead like a stunted horn. Paul’s footsteps padded above the ceiling. He’d gotten in the previous night and was up in my room getting dressed. The jet lag and mis-timed meals would throw off his blood sugar. He needed to eat soon.

“Is something the matter?” Aunt Penny said, appearing in the doorway. She had on her black wool pants and black turtleneck and black cardigan and gray shawl.

“No,” Alec said without looking up from the paper. “Everything’s fine.”

She put on her reading glasses and leaned in to examine the thermostat. “It’s arctic in here,” she said. “I don’t know how your mother survives — I have to turn it up.” She was acclimated to her New York apartment where the radiators ran so hot she had to keep windows open in January. She arrived each year with a suitcase full of woolens, girded for battle over the heat.

“Aren’t the two of you cold?” she asked.

“Not really,” I said.

“Christ on a bike!” Michael exclaimed, entering the dining room with a mug of coffee and a palm full of pills. “Where did that come from?”

A tabby cat was rubbing its flank against the front radiator.

“Mom,” Alec said, lowering his mask over his mouth and nose, “there’s a cat in here.”

“It’s Nelly!” Mom said from the kitchen. “I let her in this morning. She’s Dorothy’s cat from next door, she’s perfectly sweet.”

Aunt Penny leaned down and began petting the creature. “She just wants to get warm like the rest of us, don’t you, kitty?”

“You’re eating? ” Mom exclaimed, looking in on us in alarm. “What about the stockings?”

“Mom,” Michael said, “I’m trying to be an adult.”

“Oh, come on,” Mom said, in a sweet voice now. “I was up till midnight with them.”

There had been no interruption in the doing of stockings. We had done them every year of our lives. When the old felt tore, Mom sewed it back up again.

“Yes, we should do the stockings,” Aunt Penny agreed.

And so the three of us sat in a row on the couch in the living room and were handed our stuffed red stockings. In each of them were pencils, miniature bars of soap, Kit Kats, lip balm, mints, etc. Deodorant for Michael, a pair of earrings for me, dark chocolate for Alec, and always a clementine in the toe. Mom went into the closet in the other room and got us shoe boxes to put our little presents in. We thanked her for each item as we opened it. She looked on, smiling, saying they were nothing much, just things we might use, or that she knew we liked.

“Oh, there you are,” Aunt Penny said when Paul entered the living room, sleepy-eyed in his button-down, V-neck sweater, and corduroys, grinning at the sight of the three of us lined up like toddlers.

We had been set to fly together. But the night before, he had changed his mind. He wanted the two days to write, he said. An unimpeachable excuse, given that I was asking him to sacrifice far more time than that so I could leave my job. Impossible to argue with. But also a dare. Because was I really supposed to believe that his suddenly holding back on coming to be with my family had nothing at all to do with my telling him ten days ago that I was pregnant? Nothing to do with the fact that he’d barely said a word about it since? But it was late, and I was packing — I didn’t want to take the dare and open everything up hours before I left.

At least now he was here more willingly. I could tell that much from his relaxed expression, the kind he had after a productive day at the desk, his baseline tension alleviated for an evening. He’d had his two days to himself. He had made his point, if that’s what it was. Now he was happy enough to go along with the festivities, to accept my aunt’s approval of him as a handsome, marriageable prospect, to laugh with Michael and Alec, and laugh at them, settling himself at a mildly ironic distance from the goings-on. I’d wanted him to step between the others and give me a kiss good morning, but he took a seat by the window, watching us from there.

“Oh, it’s The Messiah, ” Mom said, and bolted out of her chair to turn up the radio. “King’s College,” she added, “they’re broadcasting it live.” She told us this every year with the same note of excitement. Behind her, in the window, hung the Venetian Advent calendar that used to belong to one of us when we were little, and which she still opened a window of each morning until we arrived, when she said that one of us should do it, for the fun of it.

After stockings, we ate the ritual coffee cake and bacon. Then it was back to the living room for the presents from under the tree. Mom dashed to and fro as we opened gifts, basting the bird, pulling out the good plates, getting the silver from the cupboard. Aunt Penny supplied us with our annual sweaters, hats, gloves, and scarves. Alec complained that he was wheezing despite his mask. It wasn’t the cat, he said, it was the mold in the basement. Its spores were everywhere.

Michael’s presents to each of us were compilation CDs he’d burned, Mahler for Aunt Penny, Ella Fitzgerald for my mother, what we ought to be listening to for Alec and me, and a concessionary alt-rock mix for Paul. He did his best to pay attention as we each opened them, but kept circling back into the front hall, to the telephone, willing it to ring, willing Bethany to call. She had eventually offered some excuse for her failure to appear after that night he’d been on the verge of leaving his apartment to seek her out, and they had been seeing each other since, though with enough ambiguity on her part as to their status to leave Michael perpetually on edge. Now she’d gone back to Cleveland and hadn’t contacted him in four days, having forbidden him to call her there, given the wrath it might incur from her parents. And once again, he was tortured by her silence.

Soon everyone but Paul and Michael had joined the struggle in the kitchen. Each time my mother opened the oven, Aunt Penny hovered at her side, asking if the juices were running clear, because if they weren’t it could be quite dangerous. When the time came, Alec mashed the potatoes, and I sautéed the beans with almonds, and prepped my annual pecan pie. In the final stages, Mom cursed what a furnace the house had become, and threw the back door wide open as Aunt Penny looked on, aghast.