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Over The River and Through the Woods

Merron Douglas

    The first Saturday in December, the bodega owner beneath our apartment waddles out from his store and sets a deformed Santa Claus atop a pile of plowed slush. Later, Phoebe and I watch from the living room as the side mirror of a car clips it, and Santa faceplants into the brown sludge. We book train tickets home.
    She sleeps half the ride and only wakes to choke down chewable Dramamine tablets. I press my forehead against the smudged glass and watch the concrete and city lights fade to dark hills and spindly trees, branches bent away from the tracks as if afraid of being struck.
    My parents meet us at the station, and I barely recognize Mom beneath the mass of knitted wool she wears atop her bald head. She presses chilly lips to my flushed cheeks and comments on my appearance, about how the blonde ends of my hair only reach my ears, how I look too skinny beneath my black sweater. Dad hugs me with one arm and grunts out words of affection. Phoebe glances around, but her parents aren’t there. I don’t know why she expects them to be.
    At home, the house resembles a Hallmark store. Plastic feathery angels and rosy cheeked Santas decorate the living room, the kitchen. I struggle to breathe through the dense scent of cinnamon and spice. An elf glares at me from atop the bathroom shelf as I pee.
    When Mom goes upstairs to take an afternoon nap, Phoebe and I escape to the creek behind the house. My boots slide on wet leaves and rain-soaked rocks, the distant caw of crows our marching tune. The quiet of the woods is cut by the rush of the creek, roaring at being so full, so cold.
    “She looks better,” Phoebe says, sliding a cigarette between her teeth. We’re perched atop the same slippery boulder, curled in on ourselves to stay warm. “I think the treatment is working.”
    I suck in a breath and the frigid air makes my lungs ache. “She doesn’t. She looks worse.”
    Phoebe flicks ash off the end of the cigarette. “It’s fucking weird being back here. I feel like our world is, like, bigger now.”
    It’s not. Our world is our apartment and the seedy bar down the street, my office building and the restaurant where she waits tables. Our world looks big beneath the lights and the noise, but it’s never been smaller.
    “Hey.” She holds out the cigarette, and I think about how her brown hair looks pretty against the gray sky, how effortlessly it blends in with the rough bark of the trees. It’s as if nature is reaching out and asking her to return, to trade traffic for soft soil and light pollution for constellations. “You want?”
    I shake my head. “I’m good.”
    She shrugs and takes another pull, tilting her head back and letting the cloud pour from her lips. “I kind of miss this place. Things were easier when we were kids.”
    “Not easier. Just different.”
    “You’re so depressing,” she says with an eyeroll. I smile a bit. Our eyes lock, and I know I’ve given myself away.
    She leans in to kiss me and I want to tell her to stop, to not touch me unless she means it. But her lips are familiar, and her hands slide up my shirt in a way that feels more like home than the building just a half mile away.
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    Dad tells me the treatments have stopped working after dinner, while Mom is upstairs resting. He says it while wiping down the table, voice steady like this is a practiced thing. But the polished wood is free of crumbs and mess, and yet the damp dishtowel in his hand still swipes across the surface. He refuses to meet my eyes.
    I don’t cry. I wait for Dad to say his piece and I thank him for telling me. He nods and silence falls, too thick and awkward to breathe in.
    I drift into the living room. Phoebe lays in front of the hearth, draped in a plaid blanket and face pressed into a reindeer pillow. Her head is beneath the glittering tree, amongst the colorful presents and fallen pine needles. I want to unwrap it like a gift, to peel away her scalp and skull and see her brain underneath, to read her thoughts and feelings and deepest desires, to see what she really thinks of me.
    I lay next to her, our bodies pressed together from foot to shoulder. She wakes and rolls over, peering at me through her lashes. Color tinges her cheeks, flamed by the warmth of the fire. “What’s wrong?”
    I look at the multicolored lights looped around the tree branches. The room is silent, save for our quiet breaths and slow heartbeats. I try to form my mouth into syllables that speak to the depth of what I feel, but my tongue is still and fat against my hard palate. I let her question linger in the air like the smell of clove and vanilla, and watch the lights until they blur into a smear of blue, yellow, green, and red.

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