Jim Shepard - Flights

“They got him downstairs in the living room. He says you have a nervous breakdown.”

He shook his head again. “I don’t have a nervous breakdown.”

In the near darkness he could see her picking self-consciously or abstractedly at the covers. “Mickey said you wouldn’t get off the road.” He shifted under the covers. “Are you okay?”

“Uh-huh.”

“If I did that they’d kill me.”

He let it go.

“The Sisters say I should be nicer to you.” She waited, the air audible now in the heating vents. “Do they say that to you?”

He wiped his nose on the covers. “They say that to everybody.”

She rose to leave. “I hope you’re not sick. If you’re still sick tomorrow, I’ll ask if we can eat up here.”

“Thanks. That’d be good,” he said, and she closed the door behind her, her hair under the light as beautiful as he had ever seen it before the black door shut it out.

“Get out of bed, pal. You may not have any Christmas spirit but you got some singing to do.” His father stripped the bed of blankets and sheet with one pull, leaving him a fish on a beach, foolish and exposed. The cool air chilled his feet.

“Let’s go. Your Aunt Rosie’s coming over and you’re not receiving visitors in bed.”

He had been in bed all day this Christmas Eve. Cindy had called again, his sister had had jelly sandwiches with him on a TV tray for lunch, and his father had gone over to the school to pick up his choir robe. His mother had come up to talk with him while she was baking. His father decided enough was enough forty-five minutes before company was due to arrive.

“You see your Aunt Rosie twice a year,” he said. “You can make a little effort. You can only take this Camille bit so far.”

His Aunt Rosie was actually his mother’s aunt, who lived in upstate New York and came down to visit that part of the family in Connecticut — her nieces’ families — twice a year, at Thanksgiving and Christmas. This year she had missed Thanksgiving. She would see everyone at Christmas, she’d said. And besides, who wanted to drive all the way up there, pick her up, and take her back? She was in her nineties and had come over from Naples fifty-three years earlier and was still convinced her stay in America was only temporary.

She never had pretended to understand any of the children, but Judy’s Eustace was another story altogether. From start to finish: What kind of name was Biddy? Or Eustace, for that matter? And he was always standing around like a chidrule. He never ate. You could count his ribs. He was a nice boy and he gave them nothing but worries.

Biddy stood in the shower, soaping up. His father was shaving and singing “The First Noël.” In the living room his mother was vacuuming and the stereo was playing “Buona Natale,” from a Jimmy Roselli Christmas album. Kristi was watching Miracle on 34th Street in the den, with the volume turned up. Rather than mixing, the sounds were fighting with each other for his attention, snatches of one, then the other, dominating.

His father grinned at him when he came into the kitchen dripping and barefoot, hoping to coax him into the same hearty good humor by example. His mother was levering red-and-beige cookies off a metal sheet with a spatula. He rubbed his arm dry, his wet hair stiff and cold on his neck.

“Look at him. He’s got the weight of the world on his shoulders,” his father teased.

“Your clothes are laid out upstairs,” his mother said. “What time did Sister say to be over there?” He could sense their anxiety in the tone of her voice: what if he refused to respond and continued to refuse to respond? He had an unpleasant feeling of power. “Eleven-thirty,” he said, and headed obediently for the stairs.

Rose arrived a few minutes later in a welter of greetings and warnings about icy steps. She leaned on Michael’s arm, and one by one they kissed her. Biddy still didn’t look good, Kristi was getting bigger and bigger, and what had Judy done to her hair?

“I cut it, Rosie,” his mother said. “I want it off the face. I don’t want to have to worry about it for a while.”

Rose suggested she looked like a feminist.

Michael and Sandy brought the presents into the living room and piled them under the tree. They’d driven Rosie down the day before, and were now taking her from relative to relative on her Christmas tour. They looked tired already.

She was led into the living room and settled into a chair near the tree while his father put on his Mario Lanza record, a Christmas tradition when she visited. It was not a Christmas album, but Rose didn’t have a stereo and Mario Lanza held a place in her personal pantheon, his father said, just a notch or two below the Holy Ghost. Her hearing was still sharp. She’d just have a little of the homemade white wine she’d brought, they shouldn’t bother over her, sit down, relax. Mario Lanza sang “My Buddy.” To Biddy it always sounded like “My Body.”

“What about this one?” Rosie asked, gesturing toward Kristi, who was edging her present back and forth on the rug with her toe as if movement might reveal its nature. “How’s she been?”

His mother sipped her drink, which was a rich honey color in the warm lights of the lamp and tree. “She’s been okay. You know. Stubborn as ever.”

“She’s the scourge of the nuns,” his father said. “She has them living in fear.” Michael and Sandy chuckled, and Kristi rocked back and forth, pleased with the attention.

“What about Biddy?” Rose said. “Has he been behaving?”

Both his parents hesitated and his father set down his drink. “We had a little excitement yesterday.” He gestured toward her with his head. “Tell Rosie what you did yesterday.”

Biddy looked into her eyes.

“He sat down over on Ryegate Terrace over here last night and—”

“Where?”

“Over here on Ryegate Terrace, where the Lirianos live, and he decided he wouldn’t get up.”

“He couldn’t get up?”

“He wouldn’t get up.”

It took some additional discussion to make it clear to her what they meant. Once she had it clear in her mind, she looked at him, baffled. “Why wouldn’t he get up?”

“He won’t tell us. Maybe the world grew too heavy on his shoulders. I had to pick him up in my car.”

“What’re you, cuckoo?” Rose said, concerned.

Biddy managed a smile.

“You’re cuckoo sometimes,” she decided.

“I think he saw another hurt dog,” his father said. “Is that what it was?”

“I didn’t see any dog.”

“Are you going to be able to go to midnight Mass with us?” his mother asked. “Biddy’s in the choir this year.”

“I heard,” Rose said. “Sandy and Michael told me.”

“Sister said his voice is just like an angel’s.”

“It’s pretty icy out, Rose,” Michael said.

“I’m going to go,” she said. “If Sandy and Michael can wait around.”

Sandy and Michael, sagging noticeably, said that would be fine.

She requested that Biddy sit next to her at dinner, whether to show he was favored or to keep a closer eye on him he wasn’t sure. She tried a bit of everything that was put on the table: fennel and black olives, prosciutto and melon, turkey and turnips, mashed potatoes, stuffing, yams in syrup, broccoli. She spooned out his portions besides, claiming if he’d mangia a little more he wouldn’t look like such a ghost. She waved her hand slightly and shook her head, chewing. “Yesterday on Mervin Griffin they got two women in love,” she said. “Two women in love. You believe that?”

“No, Rose, they were kidding you,” Michael said. “They were just friends.”

“Two women in love.” She gave up, appalled either way.