The 13th Day of Christmas Read online

  Once, when Charlee’s dad was traveling for work and staying in a hotel a day’s drive away, he still came all the way home for dinner, cake, and presents. They didn’t start until 11:00 p.m. and didn’t get to bed until after 1:00 a.m. But it had been one of Charlee’s favorite birthdays.

  Charlee lay in her hospital bed and wondered how many balloons it would take to float out of Woodbrook Mercy Hospital and all the way home. It had been two weeks since Thanksgiving, two weeks since the surgery, two weeks since the last time her mother’s eyes were clear. Now they were red and swollen and looked like they weighed so much it hurt to keep them open.

  Charlee had already started chemotherapy and radiation. She’d heard the doctors say they didn’t want to do them at the same time, but because of the kind of tumor they found, they didn’t want to take any chances. She’d also heard them say it wouldn’t be long before she started losing her hair, and that made her very unhappy. She tried to stay positive, the way her mother told her to. But she’d waited a long time for her long hair to come back, and, in Charlee’s mind, losing it again was the most unfair thing of all.

  Charlee thought about Miss Marva and wondered when she’d come back to visit. She hadn’t been in for a few days, and Charlee worried about her. Miss Marva didn’t have anyone to send her balloons when she didn’t feel well or to sit by her bed when she was tired and wanted to hear a book.

  Charlee looked at Melvin on her bedside table. He was the only one still smiling. She imagined the room full of balloons, a dozen white ones by the top of the bed, a dozen purple by her feet, a couple dozen more on the machine hooked to her arm, and a few on the tubes, too. She squinted her eyes and saw five bundles, maybe six or seven or eight, all tied to the couch where her mom slept. She figured if her dad were on it, too, it would need a bunch more to get it off the ground, so she pictured those, too.

  She began to feel sleepy again and pulled Melvin close. The real balloons began to blend into the imaginary ones, and she felt herself being lifted from the bed. She clutched Melvin tight and smiled.

  13

  Missing Marva

  6:17 a.m.

  Marva awoke and looked at the clock the same way she always did. But she did not swing her legs toward the floor, turn off the alarm, and pick up the phone on the nightstand to check for a dial tone. Instead, she simply reached over and turned off the alarm.

  When she tucked her arms back under the warm blanket, she felt just how much her sides ached. Then, as she readjusted the sheets, her legs sent the clear message they were not ready to support her and probably could not be counted on if she had elaborate plans for the day.

  6:20.

  It took just a few minutes for her to receive the same message from the rest of her body, too. There would be no working at the clothesline. She would not walk to the Alexanders to check on Zach and watch him play his video games or ask him about his day at school. She’d enjoyed those visits the last two weeks, and they’d taken her mind off her own aches and pains. But that morning, the years screamed louder than they ever had, certainly louder than the old alarm clock.

  7:04.

  Marva felt guilty. She’d never been a sleeper, even when she and John used to work late; they’d always arise on time and make up for their fatigue by going to bed early. She remembered teasing John about the times they had to shut all the blinds in the house and wear sleeping masks during the spring and summer in order to race the sun to sleep. She also remembered the early years of their marriage, when they went to bed early quite often, even when they weren’t tired at all. The thought made her smile.

  8:53.

  Marva turned away from the clock and wished John was next to her. She thought of the mornings she first started checking for the dial tone. Those were the days after they stopped hearing from J.R. as he fought in Vietnam. It wasn’t that he’d called every day, but rarely a week passed when they didn’t hear his voice at least once on a scratchy line run between their home and a tent in Asia. He never wrote much, like other soldiers they knew in the war, but he called home more often than many. He said he liked the sound of their voices, the instant assurance that they were alive. Letters, he said, were outdated before they left the jungle.

  10:33.

  Marva was awake again and still thinking about J.R. She finally reached over and listened for the dial tone. Like every single day since the first time she’d checked, it was there.

  Her stomach ached, and she didn’t know whether she was hungry, sick, lonely, or some combination of everything, some sensation required by old age. She’d felt its cousin before, the kind of loneliness so deep it paralyzes. But the feelings of that particular morning were unfamiliar, a new neighbor she was inclined to distrust.

  10:59.

  There were no trailers in the neighborhood on the morning the Army chaplain turned down their driveway. There was only 1 Home, not 21 or 24 or 27. There weren’t kids throwing rocks or cursing at their parents. There was just the Ferguson family with a nice yard filled with trees and a thin mother of one who liked to work at her clothesline because it felt closer to heaven.

  Marva had been at the line when the chaplain arrived, and she didn’t need to hear his message to know she’d never get another phone call from her son. She collapsed in the yard and pulled her apron up to her face, muffling the unique screams that only a mother of a dead soldier is entitled to make. The screams started from the gut, from the place the soldier came from, and grew, just like he did, getting louder and longer and stronger until they burst out on their own and took flight.

  John heard the screams from the shower and came running in a robe, his wet hair stuck to his forehead. He knelt in front of her beneath the clothesline and pulled her to his chest. He made promises that even he didn’t yet believe. He spoke in a single long breath, a whispered rambling run-on monologue, promising that J.R. was better now, closer to God, cloaked with eternal honor, unafraid, without pain or worry.

  Marva hoped it was true. Later, she knew it was true. But the knowledge didn’t erase how much she missed her son or the man who’d insisted all would be well.

  12:05 p.m.

  Marva’s eyes shot open on the first ring.

  “Hello?”

  “Marva?”

  “Yes.”

  “This is Emily.”

  “Hello.” Marva pushed herself up with one arm and grimaced. “Is everything all right?”

  “Yes, but I’m calling about you. Are you okay?”

  “Of course. My. Of course. Just tired today.”

  Marva switched the phone from one ear to the other. “How’s our Charlee?”

  “The same. She’s the same. She asked about you. She misses you.”

  “My. I’m sorry. I’ve been tired a day or two, I suppose. I’ll make it by for a visit. I miss her, too.”

  “Do you need anything?” Emily asked. “Can we come by? I’m here with Charlee, but I could send Zach. He’s home. Should I do that?”

  “No, no. I’m fine. Just slow today, that’s all. I’ll come by later today, please tell Charlee. And I’ll bring more balloons.”

  “She’d like that. Would you mind bringing Zach with you? If you come? No pressure, of course. But Thomas is working today out of town, and Zach is stuck home alone on a Saturday.”

  “Of course. I’ll stop there on my way.”

  The women said good-bye, and Marva finally inched toward the edge of the bed. She looked at the clock a final time. She wished it read 6:17.

  14

  Visitors

  Zach walked home from Miss Marva’s in a tightening spiral, gradually losing pace, uneasy about a direct approach, like a plane with a broken wing. He considered that if his engine ran any slower, he might stall and crash.

  He stopped at the tree stump Charlee loved, the one he saw her on from the trailer’s back window. Part of him wanted to s
tand on it, too. To see if it really made him into someone different the way it did for his sister. He wondered: would it make him taller? But instead of standing on it, he circled it like he had the patches of noxious weeds that were once dandelions.

  The afternoon at Miss Marva’s felt like beating the high score on his favorite video game. He’d been treated like a VIP; he’d been listened to. Miss Marva sat through a detailed description of how to play Call of Duty and promised one day to come by for a demonstration of Guitar Hero.

  Miss Marva looked him in the eye, and Zach had noticed. He enjoyed the pictures and the stories about her son in the war, and he wished, just for her, that he would have come home alive. She seemed to enjoy Zach’s stories, too, many of them about Charlee and their life before Woodbrook.

  She’d asked Zach to fix some lights that had burned out around her Christmas tree, and while he tested and retested the strands, she sat on the couch and described some of the many ornaments from a distance. Later, when she’d described the significance of the Advent calendar on the mantel, he’d only pretended to be interested. But by the time she was done, he was tuned in with eyes open and curiosity piqued.

  He even looked through Miss Marva’s aprons when she’d asked if he’d help her find the specific one she wanted to wear. He would never personally wear one. “Totally not ever,” he’d told her, but he had to admit that a few of them made him LOL. This, of course, led to a text and instant messaging lesson. She was fascinated, he thought, like a real friend. He promised to come back one day with a cheat sheet for her.

  Before he’d left, while sitting at the opposite end of the couch drinking the hot chocolate he’d made at Miss Marva’s request, she had asked the simple question: “Would you tell me about your old school?”

  “Um . . .” The answer stalled like the rusty VW Beetle in his yard. “I don’t know. . . . It was . . . It was like whatever . . .”

  “Whatever what?”

  “I didn’t fit in. Nobody really liked me there.”

  “Zach Alexander, that can’t be true. I bet everyone liked you.”

  Zach snorted. “Not hardly. Nobody did. Plus my grades stunk. I’ll never be as smart as Charlee.” He fished with a spoon for a mini-marshmallow in his hot chocolate.

  “My. I bet you my favorite apron that’s not true.”

  “It is,” he said, but without sadness or jealously. “She’s really smart, even for a little kid. I bet she gets straight A’s for pretty much forever.”

  Zach didn’t say it, but he hoped forever meant at least the rest of elementary school.

  When they both had finished their hot chocolate, they said good-bye, and Zach took his time trekking home. When he arrived at the back door of the trailer, he heard his parents inside arguing. He sat on the step and listened to them fight about Christmas, money, his mother’s job, his father’s struggles to find steady work and be at the hospital at the same time, Charlee, Charlee’s odds, Charlee’s doctors, the hospital bills, other bills, and life insurance.

  Zach thought they’d run dry of anger, but before any kind words came, they had zigzagged back into arguing about Christmas again, splurging on a real tree at home, getting a small tree for Charlee’s room or skipping it altogether and just praying Charlee would come home.

  The one thing he didn’t hear, for once, was his own name.

  Zach finally opened the door and walked in. Both parents looked at him, but neither really saw him, and he passed through to the room he shared with someone who hadn’t slept there in more than two weeks.

  For the first time since they’d moved to 27 Homes, he didn’t just use her bed to climb up to his own. He stayed on hers, resting his head on her pillow and looking up at the bottom of his bunk.

  The arguing from the next room grew louder, and he wished one of them would just walk out, slam the door if they had to, instead of making lists of every single worry out loud. They’d moved on from the day’s problems to disagreeing and re-disagreeing about things from their old and easier life in a place he hardly remembered anymore.

  He closed his eyes and wondered if Charlee was sleeping. He wondered, too, if Marva had gone to bed or if she’d remained on the couch where he’d left her, locking the door behind him.

  Finally, with nothing else to do and no other excuses, he knelt on Charlee’s bed and prayed to a God he wasn’t sure had time to listen.

  15

  The Woodbrook Weekly

  Woodbrook’s Odd Couple

  by Rusty Cleveland

  It is the most unusual friendship.

  One is pint-sized, just nine years old and full of life. But she’s not full of life lived; she’s full of dreams and a life yet to live.

  The other has already lived a beautiful life. At the age of eighty-one, she wonders just where the finish line is and at what speed she’ll cross it.

  One spent most of her autumn school days watching the classroom clock and waiting for the sound of that final bell so she could get home and skip her way across the weedy patch of ground between her home and that of her best friend’s.

  The other has done much the same thing. She has eyed the kitchen clock and willed it along, minute by minute, eager to hear the roar of the yellow bus making its way through the neighborhood.

  They are Charlee and Marva. The former is an old soul in the innocent body of a child. The latter is a young soul in the tired body of a widow. Their differences complement their extraordinary bond.

  Marva collects aprons and has hundreds of them folded nicely in drawers and arranged on hooks and pegs around her home. One of my personal favorites reads “If you want breakfast in bed, sleep in the kitchen.” She wears several throughout the day as part of her regular outfit. To see her without one is almost like seeing a turtle without its shell.

  Charlee? Well, Charlee collects days and prays her collection will eventually grow into the years of a long life.

  On Thanksgiving Day, Marva had a crowded house for dinner in a home that looked so much like Christmas, she could be sued for copyright infringement. Joining her around the festive dinner table were Charlee Alexander and her family. In the midst of this picture-perfect gathering, something went terribly wrong. A brain tumor spoiled the party. A brain tumor disrupted lives. It was an evening these two friends will never forget.

  What began with a prayer at the dinner table ended with prayers at Woodbrook Mercy Hospital that Charlee would survive the tumor that lurked near the back of her brain. It’s impossible to know how long it has been waiting for attention, silently hinting at danger with headaches and stomachaches that are often part of an active child’s life.

  Charlee’s doctors are some of the finest to ever don scrubs and white coats. Correction: Charlee suggests that her doctors don’t wear coats. They wear capes.

  Because Charlee has avoided the most common post-surgery complications, her family will bring her home today, just eighteen days since their lives changed.

  Charlee will be weak, but she will be home. She will continue her radiation and chemotherapy, but she will be home.

  It’s easy to imagine our little heroine, once settled and rested, making that walk, maybe even with a hint of a skip in her step, across the field from her house to visit her best friend. She’ll sit and smile with approval at the newest addition to Marva’s apron collection and swim in the sweet smells of cranberry-scented candles and Christmas fudge. The two friends will laugh. And then laugh some more.

  Charlee will not yet grasp how fortunate she is that the doctors are confident they removed the entire tumor. But Marva will, and the thought will bring tears to her eyes that Charlee will try to will away. It’s not the finish line that is on Marva’s mind so much these days, but the race of life itself and the longing to spend even one more day with her pint-sized, precious friend.

  There is not a person reading this today who hasn’t been to
uched by cancer. It is a disease with a wide and deep family tree that does not discriminate. It takes the elderly, those who’ve already lived through the aches and pains. It attacks the young, like Charlee, who only pray they will experience the aches and pains of growing old.

  Cancer can make a loud, grand entrance, the way it did for Charlee, and give us a fighting chance to beat it.

  Or it can come on stage silently, doing its damage in the unswept edges of the theater, not stepping into the spotlight until the only option is to get comfortable until the show is over.

  Today, eleven families across America will learn their child has a spinal cord or brain tumor. Three more families will say good-bye to their child; such funerals can break the strongest men and often wedge families apart into pieces that cannot be reassembled.

  Think of it: between now and Christmas morning, 150 families will discover that their child, the one who, days ago, dreamed of playing professional football, or dancing on Broadway, or sailing around the world, or curing cancer, now only dreams of being alive on Christmas morning.

  Some of these cancer patients will have strong family teams behind them: coaches, doctors, teammates, siblings, cheerleaders, and friends. The lucky ones will have a Marva.

  Others will have nothing and no one, only the fear that comes from leaving the world before anyone notices they’re even gone.

  No matter the size of the team or the depth of the bench, these are frightening days for a cancer patient. Memories of happy, healthy holidays are crowded out by fears that this one could be the last. Those fears lead us to live with cameras in our eyes, capturing every colorful detail while we pray to replace them with happier memories next year, but knowing what we see today may become the anchor memories of our shared lives.

  What about you? Is there a Charlee in your life? Do you know someone struggling with cancer or some other illness this Christmas? Do you know someone who is perfectly healthy but who feels imperfect and lonely? Is there a team that needs you? Someone you can serve?