The Christmas Story

The studio was dark and cold when I arrived. Snow covered all the skylights. It had taken me twice as long as usual to walk there, slipping and sliding along the way. I turned the heat up high, higher than I was supposed to. And I turned on the space heater near my desk. There was a slew of email messages I didn’t want to answer: a reminder from the 5 Colleges Literature and Politics Consortium (5CLAP) that as writer-in-residence I was expected to do another community event during the year, a request from the Valley Advocate for an interview about the Truth and Reconciliation Commission book, an invitation to the 5CLAP year end holiday party.

And then I started to write what you asked me to write: a story for your daughters, for Rosa and Emma. Because they cannot read anything of mine that’s published, I said, okay, I’ll write them a Christmas story.

*Snow never stayed on the ground in New York. Almost as soon as it fell from the sky, it was battered by traffic, stomped by booted feet. There were grimy dark snow banks by the curb, and pools of slush everywhere else. The only place where you could find a real stretch of white snow was in the park, behind the playground. We’d go there with our metal-bladed Flexible Flyers, slide down the hill on our bellies, scream to warn the other kids as we careened out of control.

Leah Loggins lived by the entrance to the park, on Fort Washington Avenue. She had wavy blonde hair that her mother braided before she went to bed each night and wore denim bib overalls and cotton peasant blouses. I wore the polyester polo shirts and pull-on bell bottoms that everyone else in the neighborhood wore. Teachers told me to brush my mud-colored hair even when I’d just brushed it. Leah lived on the west side of Broadway. We lived east.

“People in your neighborhood practice voodoo,” she said.

“No one practices voodoo,” I told her.

“There are dead pigeons where you live. It’s for voodoo. Santería.”

“No, it’s not!”

Leah’s apartment was unlike any place else I’d seen in the neighborhood. Everything was in a neutral color. It was uncluttered, without carpeting or linoleum, even. Sun speckled the wood floor in the living room.

Leah’s mother, who we both called Vera, came in. She had shoulder-length grey-blonde hair, and she always wore the same Indian cotton caftan. “Why don’t you girls string some popcorn for the tree?” she asked.

The Christmas tree was wide and bushy and so tall that it almost touched the ceiling.

“Do you always have a tree?” I asked. “My mom won’t get one because we’re Jewish.”

“We are too,” Leah said.

“You are?”

Leah nodded. She was expertly stringing popcorn. My popcorn kept breaking into crumbs around the thread.

“Try the cranberries,” she advised.

They slid on the needle more easily, but stained my fingers red.

“You should ask Jerry to get you a Christmas tree,” said Leah. “He’s not Jewish.”

Jerry was my mother’s boyfriend. He moved in with her after she and my father divorced.

Lissy, Leah’s little sister, entered the room. She was only two years old, and persistently booby-trapped the apartment with puddles of baby pee when she went diaperless. She was carrying a plastic dinner plate with her as she wandered around. I made a mental note not to use it.

“One time, my daddy got really mad and threw our Christmas tree out the window,” Leah announced.

“Leah!” Vera pleaded. “Don’t tell people that.”

“I thought it was funny,” Leah said, pulling thread through a few more pieces of popcorn.

That night, I explained to my mother that I had helped decorate Leah’s Christmas tree and I wanted one too.

“Hannah, we’ve been through this a million times. We’re not getting a Christmas tree. We’re Jewish.”

“Leah’s Jewish,” I reminded her.

“Leah’s father isn’t Jewish.”

“Jerry’s not Jewish.”

“I am,” my mother said. “And you are. And we’re not getting a Christmas tree.”

*

You’ve asked me to explain this to you, asked: “If you weren’t religious, why couldn’t you have a Christmas tree?”

Being Jewish culturally isn’t the same as being religious, I explained.

Why, you wanted to know, didn’t we have Chanukah, then?

And, already that month, I’d had to explain over and over to well-meaning people wanting to wish me the right thing, no, Chanukah isn’t Jewish Christmas. Even if you are religious, it isn’t a very important holiday. It’s just hyped up because of Christmas.

We were sitting in the snack room at the Chestnut Mountain Christmas Tree Farm. The scent of pine needles so powerful, it was as if we’d climbed inside a box of air fresheners. Pine mixed with the scent of sugar cookies and cloves. We were at a picnic table drinking our complimentary mugs of mulled cider. There were carollers from the Unitarian Church raising money for a women’s education project in Guatemala, sometimes getting attention, sometimes being ignored, shutting their eyes as they sang. So earnest.

Sometimes tearful children ran in, seeking refuge from bullies in the crafts room, holding their damaged homemade Christmas decorations.

Rosa appeared and announced she was bored, standing there in her big black sweater and black leggings. Emma followed, holding up a cardboard star covered with glitter.

The two trees we’d bought were already tied to the roof of your Volvo. One was for your house and the other was going to be dropped off with Emma and Rosa at their mother’s.

I told you—didn’t I—how odd I found it to be driving those roads with you, with those two Christmas trees and Sinead O’Connor singing “Silent Night” on the radio? I told you—didn’t I—that I didn’t mind when Rosa and Emma did their sugared up Sinead O’Connor imitations, didn’t mind their wacky questions, didn’t mind their direct pronouncements? Did I tell you that even though the weekends with them make me happy, take me away from the more brutal events I am writing about, I am always a little bit relieved when their weekends with us are over? I always exhale a little bit after we bring them to their mother’s house, drop them off, drive away again.

*

I saw the little white dresses and veils in the shop window on upper Broadway. “Mommy!” I called out. I wanted to know they made little wedding dresses.

“Those are communion dresses,” my mother answered. She pulled me past them and explained: “They’re for Catholics.”

I once overheard a teacher describing my mother as “harried.” Her hair was always a mess, her lipstick never on straight. Her clothes—from years before—were too small and she rarely bought new ones. But now that she’d gotten my father to move out and was living with Jerry, she seemed more alive than ever before. Some sort of fear had left her.

My mother and Jerry were at their best when they were angry together, focusing on the same transgression. For example, often they were not acknowledged as a couple. Jerry was younger than my mother, and black, and when they went to restaurants, the host would try to seat my mother with just me. My mother’s eyes would glow incandescent with outrage, and Jerry would take my mother’s hand, and then we would all be seated at the same table, with my mother and Jerry expressing annoyance at the staff throughout the meal.

At home, they argued with abandon. They conspired by egging one another on. I remember, Jerry, who was always wearing his military surplus jacket, leaning back in the kitchen chair, arguing with my mother when he wanted to take on a political cause, and she would try to tell him to choose his battles. Deep acne scars pitted his face. I was not yet old enough to think of them as ugly; I thought they made his face interesting.

Now that she’d gotten my father to move out and was living with Jerry, she seemed more alive than ever before. Some sort of fear had left her.

“We need a tenants’ association,” Jerry announced.

The heat kept going off. We’d have it for a day or two and then, when we least expected it, wake up to face-slappingly freezing air. And when my mother turned the water on, I would hear her gasp become a gulp of despair, and I knew what it meant: There was no hot water.

We all had our jackets on all the time.

My mother stared at him for a second, then proceeded to put servings of Hamburger Helper onto our plates.

“Tenants’ association, schmenants’ association,” she said.

Jerry half-laughed.

I hated having to wear my coat all the time. The thick, mustard colored wool made me feel as if I could never move the way a person should. And I dreaded the cold water I had to splash my face with in the morning. We heated bath water on the stove, but never got a tubful—just a few inches of water that got dirty and cooled off fast. In the afternoons, when I got home from school and Jerry and my mother weren’t home yet, I wasn’t allowed to even light the oven. My mother was terrified that the pilot would go out and the apartment would fill with gas. Sometimes when she’d light the oven at night, the flame would catch with a burst that left her scurrying back—the danger of our kitchen.

We could huddle in the kitchen with the gas stove on, but even then the kitchen was not really warm enough to be in jacketless.

“Okay,” she said. “Let’s go down to Florida and we’ll talk to the landlord.”

Jerry started to smile.

“For real,” he said, “someone’s got to organize people.”

“You organize people.” She sat down. “I’m through with it.”

The next day Jerry took me to the WBAI office to help print fliers. I turned the crank on the mimeograph, watching the wheel turn as the paper came out with what Jerry had written. I knew I had to turn the crank carefully, or the ink on the fliers would be uneven. Those fliers we perfect.

NEIGHBORS!!!

THERE IS SOMETHING WE CAN DO ABOUT:

NO HEAT OR HOT WATER

ROBBERIES IN OUR BUILDING

DIRTY ELEVATORS AND STAIRS

UNLOCKED LOBBY DOORS

There was also a Spanish translation of the fliers that Luisa Nieves wrote. She lived down the hall from us, and I used to get scared when I saw her coming down. She took crap from no one. Until I was fourteen, when I reached her height—five feet, four inches—I believed she was the biggest woman in the world. She was constantly in motion, grabbing her kids, especially skinny Roberto.

Roberto and I slid fliers under each apartment door, and we finished so fast, Luisa gave us some Chupa Chups. We sucked on them while we walked up and down the stairs. In a corner, near the staircase on the second floor, I found some comic books. They were just three panels long and a panel high. The characters in them looked like something from Mad Magazine, but they all had problems—they had debt, or they’d committed a crime, or they were sick and were going to die. But they would meet someone who told them about Jesus, and no matter how hard things were, no matter how much money they owed, or how many robberies they’d committed, or how sick they felt, they could accept Jesus into their hearts and enter His Eternal Kingdom.

I didn’t know what an Eternal Kingdom was, but in the comic book it looked a lot like heaven, with angels and a bearded robed man reading from a book that shone light on his face. At the end of these comic books, the main character would always die, and either he would have accepted Jesus into his heart and gone to the Eternal Kingdom, or he would not have accepted Jesus and he’d face eternal damnation, which I knew was the worst thing that could happen. There was even a cartoon about a Jewish man, a Holocaust survivor, and he went to the Eternal Kingdom because he had the foresight to accept Jesus into his heart.

I didn’t know how to accept Jesus into my heart. What did that mean? I said, “Jesus, I accept you into my heart,” very softly at night, so that no one would hear me. I whispered “Jesus, I love you” into my pillow before I went to sleep. I hoped that would be enough to save me from eternal damnation.

*

When I get back to your house in the evening, you’re cooking dinner in your big gleaming kitchen with the island in the middle. The radio is on, so loud you don’t hear me at first, and then you see me and come over to me wordlessly. The announcer’s pompous pausing doesn’t bother you; it bothers me. The announcer’s contrived outrage about “violence in our urban areas” doesn’t bother you; it bothers me. The announcer’s clumsy celebration of a new R&B group doesn’t bother you; it bothers me. He’s asking us to listen to the lyrics. He wants us to understand that the song isn’t about sex; it’s a young man singing that when he falls in love, it will be with a friend! He sounds as if he is amazed this is possible.

Everybody here means well. And that radio station—the one you listen to when you’re cooking dinner—is like a distillation of meaning well. Everyone here simultaneously feels they deserve and don’t deserve their upper middle-class lives. Everyone here is trying to figure out how to talk to and understand people and places that are not like the ones they know. Everyone here is white.

You tell me there are other people here from cities, international students, faculty from all over the world, exiles, refugees. And that’s true, except that none of these people are considered the norm. You’re the norm. I look like the norm. And the thing I find most painful isn’t sticking out (because in their eyes, I don’t), it’s their assumptions that I’m one of them. It’s that, when I tell them where I’m from, they conclude, oh, it’s really nice there, isn’t it? It’s that, where I came from, who I was before I came here, has been erased.

Your big, comfortable house smells like sautéed mushrooms and butter and the big bristly Christmas tree. And you wake me up when I have nightmares about the TRC stories, the victims’ testimony, the assassins’ confessions. Someone looking in will see us sitting on the sofa with our glasses of wine and think how happy we look at home.

*

“What’s a brothel?” I asked my mother.

I was setting the table in the kitchen. The windows were completely steamed up from the boiling spaghetti water.

“It’s where prostitutes work,” my mother said. “Why?”

“Is there a brothel on the fifth floor?”

“Yes,” she said. “There is. Hannah, put the strainer in the sink for me.”

“Why is having a brothel here bad?” I asked my mother.

She looked surprised at first, rested the pot on the edge of the ceramic sink as the steam flew up in her face and made her sweat. Then, after a beat, she explained, “It brings in a lot of strangers who don’t belong here. It brings bad people in.”

“This guy told Jerry that the johns pee in the elevator.”

There was silence for a beat. Then my mother explained, “The johns are the customers. They don’t care about people who live here. If you see someone like that, stay away from them. Okay?”

I shrugged and drew Charlie Brown in the condensation, his round, bland face and his squiggle of forehead pasted hair.

There was a second meeting in the lobby that Sunday. It went on all afternoon long. The grownups talked about building codes and tenants’ patrols and rent strikes. Everyone who walked in was greeted by Jerry and Luisa. If we knew them because they lived there, they were spoken to warmly and invited to join in. There were also men on their own who came up to the building from the street, saw the meeting through the glass door, and walked away again. Roberto and I got bored, so we decided to race by running up one staircase, then across the lobby and up another staircase again, until Luisa pulled us aside and told us to play more quietly.

Instead, I decided to go upstairs, where my mother was sitting in the kitchen, with the stove on, reading History Will Absolve Me by Fidel Castro.

“How come you’re not downstairs?” I asked.

“Because I’m not going to these meetings,” my mother said.

“Why not?”

“Because I’m tired.”

She had rings around her eyes and her hair was mussed and dry.

“Are we gonna have to have a picket line?” I asked her.

“Who said that?”

“They were talking about a rent strike downstairs.”

“A rent strike is where you don’t pay your rent for a while. Until the landlord fixes things. It’s not a picket line.”

“If we have a rent strike, we’ll have more money, won’t we?”

“You don't get to keep your money when you have a rent strike. You have to put it into escrow.” She saw my bewilderment and added, “It’s a special bank account. You keep your money there until the landlord fixes things. And a rent strike is the last resort. You have to try everything else first.”

She stared out the window then.

“Maybe we could go to Cuba one day,” she said. “They have free medical care and it’s hot there.”

I fell asleep before Jerry came home, and when I woke up, the air was frigid. Light seeped under the door. Jerry and my mother were in the kitchen. I could hear water running, and Jerry pleading: “No!”

“I’m trying to help,” my mother said.

“It hurts,” Jerry explained with a gasp.

The walls were damp with condensation, weeping, clammy. I stood up, felt my way out of the room, found the light switch. When I reached the kitchen, I saw my mother trying to put a dishtowel against Jerry’s face.

“Call the cops,” she said.

“No,” he answered. His face was swollen, a bruise darkening under his eye.

“Did the pimp do that?” I asked.

“Go back to bed,” my mother ordered.

The next morning light, Jerry huddled in a corner of the kitchen while my mother made coffee. His bruise was even darker.

“Couldn’t you call someone at The Voice?” my mother asked. “Don’t you have that friend at The News?”

“A slum in north Manhattan isn’t a story,” Jerry said.

“Maybe you should make it one,” my mother advised.

So he and Luisa came up with a plan: banners painted inexpertly onto old bedsheets. The first read:

MERRY CHRISTMAS! OUR CHILDREN DO NOT HAVE ANY HEAT!

The second declared:

LANDLORD = SLUMLORD

The third one announced:

RENT STRIKE!

The banners flapped against the hard, dirty brick. They were supposed to shame our landlord, but they also shamed us. We were the people unfortunate enough to live there. “You make us look bad!” an old man screamed at Jerry on the street. He actually flailed his hands in frustration. The super told Luisa the banners had to come down, but she gave him one of her looks and walked away. And then the New York Daily News ran a story. They had pictures of the banners, a picture of Luisa and her children. And, finally, there was a picture of a beach with an empty deckchair facing the water. This, said the caption, was Miami Beach, where the building’s landlord lived and he could not be reached for comment.

After a beat, she explained, “It brings in a lot of strangers who don’t belong here. It brings bad people in.”

The next day, Jerry got a phone call. It was the landlord’s management company. The landlord would like to inspect the building, they said. The landlord would also like to meet the tenants’ committee. Could Jerry organize this?

Jerry was so happy, he went out and got me a bicycle. It had a banana seat, streamers, training wheels. “Happy Chanukah!” he said.

“Happy Chanukah!” I said back.

I was pretty sure Chanukah was already over.

I rode the bike down to St. Nicholas Avenue and back, and down to St. Nicholas Avenue and back. Roberto ran after me and asked for a chance to ride. Then I rode the bike over to the park and Leah came down with Vera and Lissy. She brought her bike, which didn’t have any training wheels at all.

We raced around, laughing. Then Vera watched our bikes so we could go play on the rocks. She didn’t realize we were planning to go to the Danger Caves. We walked along the top of the stone wall on Haven Avenue. We had to edge sideways and face New Jersey and the Hudson River, and then we would get to the rock caves, which had once seemed huge, but now, as Leah and I were getting older, seemed much smaller. We couldn’t stand in them anymore, but we could crouch down inside, and in the Danger Caves, amidst the condoms and broken glass, I found it: a crucifix.

The crucifix was made of pewter and was on a broken chain. I picked it up and wiped it against my pants.

“That has germs on it,” Leah said. “You better clean it.”

When I got home, I washed the crucifix in soap and water and I put it underneath my pillow. “I love you, Jesus,” I said to it, silently, at night, as I prayed for heat.

I kept the crucifix in my pocket and rubbed the contours of its surface whenever I needed reassurance. I told the crucifix, “I accept you into my heart.”

*

“You’re going back to work?” you asked, when I got ready to go back to the studio after dinner.

I reminded you I was working on The Christmas Story.

Walking through the town at night, if I looked into all the lovely homes with their Christmas trees, I could believe I’d spirited myself into the world I wanted to live as a child.

There are no fewer than five bookstores in this two-street town. The copy shop is run by a collective. You once saw James Baldwin sitting at the window table at Judy’s. The town’s population swells when the colleges are in session, to more than 35,000 people. I get to do an event at each institution involved in the Five Colleges Consortium—with the buttoned up students of Amherst College, the privileged hippies of Hampshire, the serious young women of Smith, the isolated feminists of Mount Holyoke, and, most happily, with the chaotic crowds at the state university. A free bus system takes all the students from place to place, keeps their cars off the roads when they’re drinking. Almost every musician touring the northeast stops here and plays the Mullins Center, or the Iron Horse, or Academy of Music.

It was the kind of place everyone wanted to live, wasn’t it?

People called this—half-jokingly—the Happy Valley.

A blast of warm air hit me when I opened the door to the studio. I’d forgotten to turn the heat off. The snow on the skylight had melted and the room was bathed in moonlight. There was an enormous desk on trestles, a Herman Miller desk chair, a tan sofa, a glass coffee table, and, off to the side, a small bedroom. My place for the year I am writer-in-residence.

If you had not come into my life during my first week in town, this is where I would sleep at night.

*

Two days before Christmas, the landlord came, and as he arrived, a photographer from The Daily News arrived also.

Jerry hadn’t contacted The News about this. So who had? The landlord?

The landlord looked different than I thought he would. He was short and fat. And he was old, older than my father, even. He wore a wool coat and was darkly tanned, like someone who spent every day on the beach. New York was freezing, gray. Luisa had sent Roberto to ring everyone’s bells and tell them, “The landlord’s here. The landlord’s here.” And then we all came out. We surrounded him. People began to shout things all at once. The super stood by the landlord and folded his arms across his chest.

Someone shouted at the super, “What are you, his mamaguevo bodyguard, you fucking gusano?”

“Alright, simmer down. Simmer down,” the landlord said. “I’ve come to tell you the boiler will be fixed.”

“When?” someone asked.

The landlord said, “Today.”

A flashbulb went off. A reporter scribbled on his pads.

“I was unaware that there had been any problem—”

Luisa spat something under her breath that I couldn’t understand.

“I was unaware,” he continued, like an exasperated father, “there were problems here. Now, of course, I have an investment in this property, and I’ll do my best to rectify the situation. I’d like to meet with some of you to see how we can work together. Let’s set up a time to talk some more. For now, I want to all of you a merry Christmas.”

And then, then he reached for a plastic garbage sack, and he started to pull out toys. A very little girl took a doll and a boy behind her took a truck. The landlord held up another doll and smiled. Everyone was silent for a moment. Then another little girl came and accepted it. The girls got dolls, and the boys got model cars. Luisa clung to Roberto, and my mother kept her hands on my shoulders. The landlord searched the crowd with his eyes, smiling creepily at the kids. And then his gaze alighted on me.

I told the crucifix, “I accept you into my heart.”

I turned away and looked at the plastic car the boy held. The landlord noticed and asked, “This?” He had dropped the doll back in the bag and was holding one of the model cars. My whole body tightened. I wanted that car. But my mother kept her hands firmly on my shoulders.

“No,” my mother said to the landlord.

And after that, nobody took anymore toys.

The landlord shrugged. He followed the super into the pee-smelling elevator. He rode upstairs and back down again. He walked from one end of the dirt-caked lobby to the other.

“Obviously, the management firm I have hired hasn’t been doing their job,” he announced. “I’ll figure it out after the holidays. For now, merry Christmas! Happy Chanukah!”

And then, just before he went out the door, he muttered, “You people live like pigs.” He glanced at my mother when he said this.

And then he was gone, swept off in the chocolate brown Cadillac that had been double-parked on the street.

That night, the heat came back on. We threw off our coats. We took hot baths and I stayed in the tub until my fingers wrinkled.

I washed the crucifix with soap and hot water.

We had a full day with heat, and then another day with heat, and then one more day until, on Christmas night, the radiators went cold again. There was no heat or hot water.

“Put your coat on,” my mother said.

She lit the oven in the kitchen.

“I hope there’s a special hell for landlords.” She was trying to sound angry, but her voice almost caught in a sob.

A few hours later, the blue lights of police cars and ambulances bounced off the walls of the apartment and the brick of the building across the street. Jerry ran downstairs to find out what was happening.

“They found the family upstairs unconscious,” Jerry explained when he came back. “All of them. The cops think they turned on the oven to heat the place and they must have fallen asleep. The flame must have gone out.”

My mother’s eyes became enormous. Her brow tightened. This was one of the things she had warned me about—the gas seeping out when there was no flame anymore, the apartment filling with gas while we slept. She knew people did this to heat their apartments when the boiler broke down, and she did too, but she always did so fearfully.

“I’m going down to the hospital,” Jerry said.

“For God’s sake,” my mother cried out. “What can you do there?”

“I can tell people about it,” he said, getting his tape deck. Then he said to my mother, “Call Danny and see if he can get someone there from The Voice.”

“Can I come with you?” I asked Jerry.

He was about to say yes, but my mother looked at him.

“The hospital will be warm.” Jerry said to her.

My mother hesitated, then said, “Alright.”

I scrambled down the steps with Jerry. There were two cop cars outside and an ambulance. A small crowd was gathering, some of them people we knew. Jerry nodded hello to them all. The back of the ambulance was open; the driver stood waiting. Jerry walked over and introduced himself. “C’I talk to you?”

“You family?”

“I live here,” Jerry said. “I’m on the tenants’ committee.”

The driver looked away from him, looked straight ahead.

“You going down to Columbia Presbyterian?” Jerry asked.

Columbia Presbyterian was the nearest hospital.

The driver shook his head. He said, “We’re going to Sydenham.”

Sydenham was all the way down in Harlem.

“Columbia Pres is a zoo,” the driver said under his breath.

Two cops came out carrying a woman on a stretcher. Then another couple of cops came out carrying a stretcher with a woman on it too. The stretchers were loaded the back of the ambulance. The ambulance attendant climbed in and the doors slammed shut and the cops held their palms out to the driver to send them off.

Jerry backed away and the ambulance joined the traffic on Broadway.

“I’m sorry to tell ya,” one cop said to the other one. “I’ve seen this before. It’s too late for them.”

Jerry’s eyes clouded over. He grabbed my arm and guided me towards Broadway, but there were no taxis. There were never yellow taxis uptown. We were going to have to find a gypsy cab, and you had to look hard for them, because they weren’t real taxis—they were unlicensed, unmarked.

There was a man behind us hailing every single car that went by.

“Hey,” Jerry asked the man. “You looking for a taxi?”

The man nodded. He had wild eyes, an edgy walk. He looked like he’d been punched in the stomach.

“You going to the hospital?” Jerry asked.

The man nodded.

“We’re going there too.”

“There’s a taxi!” I screamed, and hailed a big, old grey Impala. We all got in.

“I’m Jerry Hill,” said Jerry, turning to the man. “And this here is Hannah.”

The man stared straight ahead, his face ashen.

“Landlord,” he mumbled.

“What?” Jerry asked.

“Landlord,” said the man, “gave me a present.”

Jerry watched him and asked warily, “What do you mean?”

“The landlord gave me a present.”

Jerry didn’t say anything.

“I got a dead mother and sister. Landlord gave me a present,” the man said again. I looked at Jerry, who covered his face with his hands. I looked out the window. Broadway was a blur, the blur a blessing, because it wiped everything out.

“Landlord gave me a present. Landlord gave me a Christmas present.”

“I heard you,” Jerry said now. “We’re gonna be at the hospital soon.”

“I got a dead mother and sister,” said the man. “Landlord gave me a present.”

Jerry told me to stay in the waiting room when we got to the hospital. He went into the ward with the man from the taxi. I sat in one of the plastic chairs. Stretchers glided past me. A man in a wheelchair screaming disappeared behind double doors. A doctor complained to a nurse that he couldn’t stand seeing one more gunshot wound that night. Then I got up and wandered unnoticed in that way children can. I felt for the crucifix in my pocket. I stroked my fingers over its pewter curves for the last time before I put it into the garbage can.

*

Anyway, that’s what happens when I try to write a Christmas story.

I know—you wanted something magical, and hopeful, and heartening. You wanted something for the kids. And I don’t have anything against that. I don’t even have anything against the gifts and the music and the tree. Sometimes, I even go into the living room when I wake up in the middle of the night and, while you’re still sleeping, I plug in the Christmas lights and look at them blinking in the dark. And my heart goes, boom boom. I imagined a life like this when I was a kid.

But now—it’s just not a good fit now. It’s just not what I want.

I know that this place demands mandatory cheerfulness, and that this time of year there are so many people pretending excitement when they feel none. And I know how many people there who are barely surviving, broke and hating everything about their lives, or trying to survive in a violent family. And I know the pressure to say everything’s okay and everyone’s at peace and everything’s holy this time of year is bullshit—everything is not.

You will not be able to leave here, or at least you won’t be able to leave here for a long time—not if you want to be a father to Emma and Rosa (and you do).

I will not be able to stay here. It’s not that I want to go back to where I grew up. I don’t want to go back to that time and place ever again. I just don’t want to be somewhere that erases that time and place. I don’t want to be somewhere that erases stories like this one.

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