‘What do you believe in?’ I asked.
Nana smiled. ‘I believe in kindness and hard work.’
‘What about God?’
She smiled again. ‘I believe that God believes in hard work too.’
‘What should I believe in?’ I asked.
‘You should only believe in what you want to believe, and you should always believe in yourself.’ It was a good piece of advice that I’ve never forgotten.
Conor carefully unwrapped a yo-yo unlike any I’d seen before.
‘I found this in Shanghai when I was performing there,’ Dad said, and my mother rolled her eyes. ‘I’m told they’re the best yo-yos in the world, but you’re the expert!’
‘It’s perfect. Amazing. Thank you,’ said Conor, with actual tears in his eyes, as though our father had given him a yo-yo made of gold.
‘And . . . I’m told you’ve been writing for the school newspaper. I thought this might come in handy if you don’t have a photographer,’ Dad said, giving him another, slightly bigger parcel.
It was a Polaroid camera, and Conor’s face lit up like the Christmas tree he was sitting next to. I remember him taking pictures of us all for his Darker family tree that afternoon. He took more of Rose than of anyone else. Nana used those pictures to paint our faces on the wall at Seaglass a few weeks later, so that who we were that day was captured in time forever.
Dad’s gift for Nana was a cuckoo clock from Germany. It’s one of the most eccentric clocks in the hall. Every hour, on the hour, a little wooden man and a little wooden woman come out of two tiny doors, and meet in the middle before she chops off his head with an axe. They do this all day, every day. My father’s gift for his ex-wife was less disturbing. He gave my mother a small red velvet box, and Nancy smiled her real smile when she opened it. We all admired the beautiful silver heart-shaped locket. There was room for two tiny pictures, and when my mother smiled at my sisters, I was sure it was their faces she wanted to keep inside.
Memories are shapeshifters, especially the childhood variety, but that was a good Christmas. I don’t think any of us appreciated our parents spending it together for us, despite being recently divorced. Looking back, I think they might have done more to make life better for us than we sometimes remember. My collection of happy childhood memories is a little threadbare.
We make moments with our families. Sometimes we stitch them together over time, to make more of them than they were. We share them and hold onto them together as if they were treasure, even when they start to rust. Sometimes those moments change shape in our memories, sometimes we stop being able to see them how they really were. Sometimes we have different recollections of the same moments, as though they were never really shared at all.
I remember the food we ate, the games we played, and the music we listened to. I remember John Lennon singing about Christmas on the radio, and my mother saying how sad she still was that he was dead. I asked if he was a friend of hers; I was too young to understand people grieving for someone they’d never met. I remember me and my sisters singing along to ‘I Wish It Could Be Christmas Everyday’， and the whole family singing carols with Dad playing the piano.
I overheard my parents briefly squabble in the kitchen, but not for long.
‘You can’t buy their love,’ Nancy hissed, and Dad mumbled some inaudible reply. Now that I’m older, I realize that the problem was that he could. He’d show up once or twice a year with gifts wrapped in shiny paper tied with pretty bows, and we treated him like a king. Meanwhile we took her, and Nana, a bit for granted. There are things we all should know better, but being human means you can never know it all.
Alcohol always seemed to help my parents to tolerate being in each other’s company, so they drank more and more of it over the years, and the squabbles were replaced with quiet stares, and the variety of silent conversations all parents have when their children are in earshot.
That night, when my parents put me to bed – together but apart – and turned out the light, I saw a galaxy of luminous stars on my bedroom ceiling. Rose had used her precious glow-in-the-dark stickers to decorate my room instead of her own.
‘Night, night, pipsqueak,’ she whispered, standing in my doorway.
‘Why?’ I whispered.
‘Because you deserve to see the stars just as much as the rest of us.’
Nineteen
31 October 2 a.m.
four hours until low tide
‘Why were you with us that Christmas?’ Lily asks Conor when the film comes to an end.