Watching My Fake Sister Dig Her Own Grave novel · Chapter 30 of 32

Chapter 30: Christmas

"Yes," I said.

His shoulders lowered.

"Okay. Good. She's going to cry."

"Your mother?"

"Nessa. She's going to say she told you so."

She did, the next day, over a cup of shelter cocoa.

"It was a stupid answer," she said. "I told you."

"You told me."

"So now you know." She went back to her horse. "Took you long enough."

Christmas Eve at the Coughlins' was thirty people in a two-flat built for eight.

Somebody had fixed the plastic Santa's nose with a red bottle cap.

There were stockings all along the banister, one for every person in the family, names in glitter glue.

The last one said ANNABELLE.

The A had been done twice because the first one ran.

"The little ones did it," Dez's mother said. "Don't look at the second N. We don't talk about the second N."

There was ham, a mountain of mashed potatoes and four kinds of cookies.

Dez's oldest sister made me sit down and put a plate on my knees.

The smallest niece sat on the stairs next to me and asked if she could hold my leg again.

At eleven-thirty we all walked to midnight mass in the snow.

It was a big old church on Halsted, gold inside, full of candles.

I stopped at the bottom of the steps.

Dez stopped with me.

I'd sat on steps like these every Sunday of my life.

I'd never once been inside.

"We can stand out here," he said. "Nobody'll care."

"No," I said.

I went up the steps on his arm, past the place where I would have been sitting, and through the doors.

It was warm in there.

I didn't hear much of the mass.

My good ear was on the wrong side of the pew.

I didn't need it.

On Christmas Day the caseworker let Nessa come to Lake Forest for six hours.

Brendan picked her up at the shelter at nine.

Nessa walked into the marble foyer, looked up at the curved staircase, and said, "Huh."

Then she looked at me.

"You fell down that?"

"I let go."

She nodded slowly.

Mom had a stocking for her on the mantel.

It was red, with NESSA in white felt letters.

Nessa looked at it for so long that Mom had to go into the kitchen.

There were four chairs at the dining table now, and two more brought in from the kitchen for Nessa and Dez.

Nobody had asked where the fifth one went.

Nobody needed to.

After dinner Mom took me upstairs.

Not to Verity's room.

To the linen closet at the end of the hall.

She reached up to the top shelf and took down a box tied with a ribbon that had gone yellow.

Inside was a stocking.

Small, old, a little faded.

ANNABELLE, in red letters, with a felt teddy bear underneath.

"I hung it every year," Mom said. "Twenty-one Christmases. Your father wanted me to stop. I couldn't."

She put it in my hands.

"I took it down at midnight every year, so Verity wouldn't see it in the morning. I didn't want her to feel like the spare."

She laughed, a terrible little laugh.

"I spent twenty-one years trying not to hurt her feelings."

I held the stocking.

It was the size of my forearm.

Every Christmas I'd been on a corner, it had been hanging on that mantel.

"Mom," I said.

She looked at me.

"I love you."

It was the first time I'd said it to anyone.

I'd never had anyone to say it to.

Mom sat down on the floor of the hallway in her good dress, right there by the linen closet.

She pulled me down with her.

We sat on the carpet with the old stocking between us, and she cried, and I let her, and after a while I did too.

Brendan found us there twenty minutes later.

He didn't say anything.

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