The Christmas Orphans Club(79)

“How’d you find me?” I ask.

“Are you kidding? You’re wearing a bright red ball gown and a feathered headpiece. Everyone in this hospital has heard about us and thinks we’re total freaks. I overheard two of the nurses speculating that we’re in some kind of cult. One of them told me you were up here. I think she was worried you were recruiting the children.”

I laugh in spite of myself, but I’m secretly disappointed that he wasn’t frantically searching for me. Ideally, because he needed to tell me how wrong Priya was. How unfair her words were.

But instead he says, “Our costumes are better.” He nods at the music group in the rec room. “I’m also a better singer than him.” The lone man in the group is butchering “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home),” an ambitious song choice for his limited vocal range. His attempted falsetto comes out crackly and sharp, but no one else notices. The kids are too hyped up on sugar and their parents are nearly catatonic, grateful for any distraction.

“We could challenge them to a duel?” I offer.

“I’m gonna guess dueling is frowned upon here. Also, what are you even doing up here? Isn’t it kind of messed up to gawk at all these sick kids like it’s some kind of sadness zoo?” He scrunches his nose in distaste.

“Shit, is that what I’m doing? I just wanted somewhere to think.”

“What are you thinking about?”

“Do you remember that Christmas we went to my sister’s? Our senior year of college?”

“I remember,” he says. “But why were you thinking about that?”

I shrug. The honest answer is that I’ve been trying to shove thoughts of what Priya said out of my brain. If I don’t think about it, I don’t have to deal with it. At least for a little while longer.

“Do you remember how awful that night was?” I ask.

“Oh god, yeah, your sister is a terrible cook. Not that you’re much better. Glass houses and all that.” He raises his eyebrows at me. “That ham she made was, like, black on the outside, but somehow still raw in the middle. And those rolls! We could have played hockey with them. You know, if one of us knew how to play hockey.”

“Sure. But do you remember how insufferable she was?”

“What do you mean?” He gives me a blank look.

“How she completely erased every single trace of our parents and moved on like: Poof! Brand new life!”

He’s silent for a minute while he mulls this over. “That’s not what I remember. I mostly remember how bad the ham was and how the whole apartment smelled like burnt meat. Although, in hindsight, who were we to complain? I’m pretty sure we showed up empty-handed.”

“No, you must remember. She was sucking up to Spencer’s mother and we had that stupid white elephant with all that taffy because that’s what Spencer’s family does every year? We didn’t even watch The Grinch. We used to watch it every year when I was a kid, it was our favorite part of Christmas.”

“Hannah, she probably didn’t want to watch The Grinch because you were twenty-one, not twelve.”

I puff out a breath. How could he have forgotten how bad that Christmas was? Time must have dulled his memory. In mine, that Christmas was painful. I wouldn’t have survived it without him.

“I remember one other thing,” he says with a finger poised in the air. “I remember her telling the story about her trip and how she went to all the places in your mom’s journal. I thought that was really nice.”

“What?” I would have known if that’s what Brooke was doing on her gap year. “No. Trust me, she was just gallivanting from one hostel to another following Spencer around like a little duckling.”

“I swear I remember her telling a sweet story about how much that trip meant to her and how she used your mom’s list as a guide. Maybe you were in the bathroom or something? Or you were talking to someone else?”

A seed of doubt plants itself in my gut. If she did say that, I definitely wasn’t there to hear it.

“Well, even if that’s true about her trip, it doesn’t counterbalance her abandoning our family.”

“I don’t know if I’d put it that way. Maybe she . . .” He hesitates. “. . . Moved on?”

“Exactly! She moved on! From me, from her only family. Who does that?”

“She invites you to every Christmas and Thanksgiving. Weren’t you complaining that she invited you to a Fourth of July barbecue last year?”

“Yeah, but they’re pity invites. She’s glad when I don’t come. You don’t abandon your family like that. You’d never do that to me.”

“Wait.” He turns to look at me. “Is that why you didn’t go to David’s parents’ house for Christmas?”

“What are you talking about? Brooke has nothing to do with that.” I can’t believe how out of sync Finn and I are right now. I wonder if he’s still a little buzzed from the champagne at lunch.

“Sure, I mean, not directly. But you know it’s alright for you to spend Christmas with David, right? It’s okay for us to move on from this tradition, to grow as people. Healthy, even.”

“What if I don’t want to move on? What if I like things the way they are?”