The 13th Day of Christmas Page 2

  Then, one night, he was just too tired to stay for a story. He apologized, kissed her on the forehead, and looked at her much longer than usual. Charlee took her small hands and ran her fingers along the edge of his face and pinched his chin with both her thumbs. She thought he might smile, but he didn’t. It only made him look away again, and she noticed that the lines on his neck were starting to look like frowns.

  She thought nobody should have that many frowns.

  Charlee soon noticed that when the stories went away, boxes began to appear in their place. Boxes of a hundred shapes and sizes started filling up and were stacked in big box towers in every corner of the house. Charlee’s mother wrote in fat, black marker on the side:

  Charlee’s Clothes

  Zach’s Books

  Dad’s Files

  Mom’s Journals

  One night after the box towers started, Charlee’s dad entered her room when he thought she was already asleep. He took a stuffed monkey that still had the stiff paper price tag clipped to it and snuggled it next to her. He lifted her arm and squeezed the monkey underneath her left elbow.

  She wanted to open her eyes and surprise him, to say thank you and give him a kiss before he could shut the door and let the room fall back into darkness. But even a child can tell when a mother or father is feeling sad.

  He quietly offered that he’d bought the monkey weeks earlier and was going to give it to her for Christmas. But he’d decided Charlee might like it early to help get ready for their trip and fresh start.

  When her father shut the door, Charlee flipped on the lamp next to her bed and sat up to meet her new friend. He had long arms and longer legs that were well out of proportion with the rest of his body. He also had Oreo-sized eyes and a huge white smile that made her smile back because she knew his teeth were bigger than the teeth of any real monkey in the wild.

  She hugged him tight, turned off the lamp, and for a long time wondered what to name her new monkey friend. But since she knew everyone assumed she’d name him Mason, she named him Melvin, instead.

  “You deserve a fresh start, too,” she whispered.

  Less than one month later, Charlee was turned around in the clunky family minivan and hanging on to her seat’s headrest, watching her old home in her old life become smaller and smaller. She watched until it was hidden under a smudge on the rear window. It felt like her entire life had been reduced to a speck so small it was hidden by dirt.

  Before they crossed the county line, Charlee and Melvin were already tired of their brother Zach’s grumbling from the third-row backseat. Zach rotated through a dozen complaints: “Why do we have to move so far away? Why did you sell my bike? I paid for part of that, you know. How much further do we have to go? I hated that stupid school anyway.”

  Zach and Charlee’s mother, Emily, muted her son with threats of stopping the car, selling his two remaining possessions of value—an Xbox and an iPod—and making him start his new school immediately without the week off she’d promised the kids could have in order to settle in to their new life.

  Charlee stared at the U-Haul her father drove ahead of them in traffic. She wished she could have sat beside him instead of by her pouty brother. When they finally passed a sign that read Welcome to Woodbrook—America’s Friendliest Small Town, Zach announced from the back of the van, “More like Welcome to Dumbbrook—America’s Dumbest and Dinkiest Small Town.”

  Charlee told Melvin not to listen to her grouchy brother, and she covered the monkey’s ears with his own long arms and hands. Then she looked out the window at the different trees, different road signs, and different neighborhoods and wondered if her little own life would be better, or just different like the scenery.

  The longer she looked and the faster her mother drove, the more the strange sights outside her window began to merge and blur. The people on the street looked wet, stuck inside clouds so thick she couldn’t tell if they were people anymore. It reminded her of diving underwater for coins at the old community pool and looking up at her dad’s fuzzy figure standing on the edge.

  “Mom, I have a headache,” she said. “Can we stop?”

  “Sorry, Charlee, we’re not that far now. Dad’s just stopping to pick up the keys. We’ll be there soon. I promise.”

  Charlee took Melvin’s furry hands and rubbed her own head with them. After another few minutes of navigating Woodbrook’s unfamiliar streets, Charlee’s stomach began to churn, and she again asked to take a break.

  “Please, Mom? I feel sick. Car sick.”

  “Quit being a baby,” Zach shot from the backseat, and Charlee wondered how her brother had heard her through his earbuds and the screaming he called music.

  “We’re almost there. I know it’s been a long drive, Charlee, but we’re almost there. Maybe take your glasses off.”

  Charlee did and then closed her eyes, using Melvin as a pillow against the van window. Her mind slid from worry to worry like a smooth metal piece on a board game. Would the kids on their street be nice? Next space. Would she make new friends? Another space. She’d never changed schools before. Back two. Would she really make new friends? Skip three. Would her teachers treat her strangely? Would they speak too loudly or too slowly as if she came from some other country and spoke some other language? Would people find out her brother was kicked out of school? Would her dad’s new job work out? Would their new house be big enough for everyone?

  She opened her eyes and studied her reflection in the window. Her hair was black and straight and threatened to once again tickle her shoulders. Charlee had had much longer hair a few months earlier, but her mother cut it short at the beginning of the summer, and Charlee thought the cut made her look like a boy. She couldn’t be sure whether that was her own opinion, or her mind parroting what other children had said too loudly when they didn’t care if she overheard them.

  Plus, Charlee didn’t like boys yet, so why would she want to look like one? She was thankful that even though her hair had not yet completely recovered after the long summer, she was starting to look like a young lady again in the mirror.

  Charlee’s tired eyes were dark, too, but more warm chocolate brown than black. Her father called the color Hershey’s Kiss and even wrote it that way on whatever school forms or paperwork required eye color identification. She’d worn cherry-red framed glasses for almost a year, but lately they gave her headaches. Her mother promised that once they were on their feet in their new place, they’d update the prescription.

  It was only mid-afternoon, but her eyelids soon collapsed under the heavy weight of child-worry. In her dreams, she saw Zach knocking over moving-box towers in their old home and their mother following behind setting them back up.

  Charlee didn’t wake until Zach leaned forward and bopped her head with an empty Gatorade bottle. “We’re there.”

  She sat up and rubbed her eyes, clearing the fog just in time to see her dad in the U-Haul take a wide left turn from the main road onto what looked like a neighborhood street. They followed him, and she noticed a wooden sign surrounded by overgrown bushes:

  “Welcome to 27 Homes.”

  3

  Welcome Home

  “Dad, you said it was a manufactured home, not some trashy trailer.”

  “Zachary—” his mother snapped.

  “It’s okay.” Thomas took a step toward his son in the front yard of their new mobile home. “I should have prepared you better.” He put a hand on Zach’s shoulder.

  “You think?” Zach said before dropping his shoulder from underneath his father’s touch.

  “We’ll make the best of it—that’s what we do, right, gang?” Thomas wasn’t sure he believed it himself, but it was what he’d been repeating in his mind for hours while he was alone in the bouncy cab of the rented truck.

  “That’s right,” Emily tried. “We’ll make an adventure from this. It’s a brand-new
start for everyone.”

  “In that?” Zach said, gesturing with both hands, palms up, toward the double-wide trailer, as if wanting to lift it from its concrete slab foundation and make it taller.

  “It will become what we make of it,” Thomas said, but he knew instantly it was a cliché Zach would dismiss. “It’s a clean slate, son. I know it’s not a house with a big yard and a game room. But it’s all we can afford right now. Honestly, Zach, we’re lucky to even have it. My new boss pulled strings to get us this home—”

  “Trailer,” Zach interrupted.

  “It’s a trailer now,” Emily said, “but when we get inside, we’ll make it ours. We’ll make it a home.”

  “And soon, if everything goes well, we’ll find a bigger place,” Thomas said. “We’ll even let you help pick it out. How about that?”

  “Right.” Zach didn’t say the word; he breathed it. Then he put his earbuds back in and walked toward the trailer.

  “He’ll be fine,” Thomas said, and repeated it, more for himself than his wife. He manufactured a smile and asked Charlee to gather her things from the van. She disappeared into the van to repack her backpack.

  Thomas nodded toward the U-Haul and silently invited his wife to follow.

  “What do you think?” he asked as they leaned against the passenger’s door of the truck’s cab.

  “It’s about what I expected.”

  Thomas rested his arm on the large rearview mirror that was covered in bugs and dirt. “And that is?”

  “Just what I expected. Just that. No better, no worse. It’s what it looked like in the pictures you texted me.”

  “Huh. I hoped it would outperform those cruddy pictures, actually.”

  “It doesn’t, if I’m being honest. But I can’t say I had high hopes, either. I knew what we were getting into.”

  Thomas sighed and tried to fill his lungs with fresh, Saturday, anything-is-possible air. “I know it’s not exactly like the website promised either.”

  “No, not exactly.”

  “But it’s something.”

  “Yep, it’s something all right.” Thomas knew Emily meant it to be funny, but as actors in a scene neither wanted to be in, the line had an uncomfortable edge.

  Emily took a beat, crossed her arms, and took her own deep breath. “It has potential, I suppose.”

  “Potential.”

  “Sure. Potential to be better than it is right now.”

  Thomas wondered if she was still referring to the new home or to something bigger. “I can live with that.”

  “It’s going to be hard, you know,” Emily said with her eyes fixed on Zach rummaging around an overturned trash barrel.

  “I know.”

  They watched Zach throw gravel, one rock at a time, at a tire-lined flowerbed. The pebbles bounced off and scattered in every direction without order or pattern.

  “Do you think he’ll make it?” Thomas asked without looking away from him.

  “I hope so.”

  Zach stopped long enough to fiddle with his iPod and then resumed pelting the tire, seemingly amused by the dull sounds and unpredictability of the ricochet.

  “Sometimes I think he’s just a typical teenage boy, like all his friends. But some days I think it’s worse. Like he really needs help, you know?” Emily looked at her husband and waited for agreement.

  “He’s just a normal kid, Em.”

  Emily gathered and tucked a disobedient rope of hair behind her ear. “Not all kids get suspended, let alone kicked out of school.”

  “Maybe not, but maybe this is exactly what he needs. Even if he doesn’t know it. A chance to start over.”

  They were both still looking in Zach’s direction, but neither really saw him anymore.

  Thomas was remembering the first signs of trouble. They received a phone call reporting that Zach had teased a Hispanic student to tears during English class. The next call came a few weeks later, which led to a three-day suspension. Zach had made fun of a student for crying during P.E. and pushed another boy for trying to defend him. The pushing counted as a second offense, and combined with his original transgression meant the county’s “Three Strikes, Three Days” bullying policy went into effect.

  Zach survived the second semester, at least without any formal punishment, and had a long summer to think about how much more difficult high school would be. But before the new school year’s waxy smell had faded from the gymnasium, before anyone had forgotten their locker combination or gotten a report card, Thomas and Emily received another phone call. Zach was suspended for soaking another student’s biology textbook in a lab sink overnight.

  Zach came home from school angry and stayed that way for days. When he wasn’t grouching at his parents, he was so locked into his video games the house could have collapsed around him and he wouldn’t have noticed until the power went out.

  A week later, Thomas’s one-man construction company had finally caved to a year of pressure and gone bankrupt. Calls for kitchen renovations and backyard decks were so rare he got more wrong number calls than new clients. Soon letters and voicemails from the bank came more frequently, as did calls from collections agents, the IRS, and the insurance provider. Thomas had angry suppliers, at least three customers with unfinished jobs, and one subcontractor threatening more than a lawsuit.

  The misfortune collected over their heads like a violent weather system and wiped the Alexanders from the map. They’d been lifted from the community they’d loved and dropped in the town of Woodbrook—America’s Friendliest Small Town.

  Thomas looked at his watch and groaned. “We’re late. We gotta get the truck back, or we pay another day.”

  Emily called to Zach and Charlee, who were now exploring the side yard and remnants of what looked like a garden. “Time to work, kids.”

  Thomas pulled the trailer keys from his pocket and held them out for Emily. “Welcome home?”

  “Yes.” She took the keys and steeled herself. “Welcome home.”

  4

  Someone Always Sees You

  Charlee sat on a rotting railroad tie and picked at weeds that fought for life through narrow black holes. They’d been in 27 Homes a week and she’d only met a few other children.

  On Monday, a girl offered her a cigarette that she claimed to have stolen from the outside pocket of her uncle’s fishing waders.

  On Wednesday, a younger girl so shy she couldn’t utter a word besides her first name approached Charlee. Filled with joy at having a conversation with someone besides her cranky brother, Charlee overreacted with a hundred questions; the girl turned around and slugged away.

  “Nice meeting you,” Charlee called out from behind, but she wasn’t really sure if it qualified as a meeting or not.

  On Thursday, a boy Zach’s age noticed Charlee’s white-and-pink Reebok’s and asked if she was rich. When she didn’t answer right away, he said, “That’s what I thought, new girl,” and sauntered off.

  Charlee’s mother kept her promise to give the kids a full week off before starting school. Her dad began work the Monday after they arrived, and Charlee hadn’t seen him much since. He was gone when she woke up, and he didn’t walk back in the door until almost bedtime. She didn’t know exactly where he was working, just that a man picked him up every day and they drove to a warehouse where they picked up big sheets of rock and hung them in houses other people were building.

  She’d asked for a story the night before when he poked his dusty head in her room at bedtime. He promised that when they were settled—“really, finally settled”—Mason’s adventures would return.

  After a week, Charlee thought she knew the neighborhood layout like she’d lived there forever. The trailers closest to the main road were the nicest, she’d noticed, and the people who lived in them drove the nicer cars that made less noise and spat less smoke when they drov
e by. Their trailers also seem much wider, she thought, and she imagined they must have looked like mini-palaces inside. The trailers by hers were just okay, not bad, and definitely nicer on the outside than the six that sat on the short dead-end road with the ugly dirt and gravel mountain at the end with grass growing from it. She’d seen kids playing King of the Hill there, and she watched from the road’s entrance, standing bravely in the middle of the street, hoping they’d see her and invite her to watch or be a judge or a referee, but they hadn’t.

  The older people lived in the trailers along the big bend in the main road and they were friendlier. Three ladies at one of the trailers sat on a wooden deck a foot off the ground with no railings and rocked all day in the kind of rockers Charlee had seen at Cracker Barrel. They waved when she walked by, no matter how many times she’d passed by and no matter how much time had ticked by since her last appearance in their eye line.

  Charlee spun around on the railroad tie and began plucking long dandelions from the ground. When she’d picked every one within reach, she stood and picked another nearby patch clean. Soon the bouquet was too big for her hand. She sorted through it, tossing the limp, fading ones to the ground and placing the longest and brightest dandelions in a line atop the railroad tie. The moment reminded her of her Grannie Alexander’s funeral two summers earlier and, for just a second, she felt like an awkward mourner all over again.

  She sat back down and remade her bouquet. Her mother had gone “to fill out applications,” she’d said before she left. Zach was inside playing video games and hogging the only television they still owned. It was really a computer monitor, but her dad had found a way to watch television on it. He said that the previous family had paid for too many months on accident so the Alexanders would be getting free cable, whatever that meant.