But that year, the tree sat in its shadowy corner, pungent and undecorated. No presents ever appeared. The girls played in Beth’s room while Beth’s parents had some kind of awful fight downstairs, carried out in angry, snarled tones. Sometime in the middle of the night two days before Christmas, her father left the house, the door slamming behind him. Lying in her bed, squeezed next to Lily, Beth listened to his car start up and drive away.
In the silent dark, Lily spoke. “We don’t need him,” she said. “Go to sleep.”
The next morning, Beth’s mother found them in the kitchen. Her hair was done, and she had makeup on, though her eyes were red. She was wearing a red sweater and a plaid skirt that fell below the knee, as if she thought she might go to a Christmas party. “I’m going shopping,” she said, her voice dull. She put on her coat, picked up her purse, and left the house.
She was gone for three days.
No one had told the housekeeping staff to cook a Christmas meal, so there wasn’t one. The girls were left alone in the house as the wet snow fell outside and melted on the cold grass. The first day, they raided the kitchen, eating cookies and drinking chocolate milk. They watched TV until late and went to bed after midnight. Beth jumped at every sound, expecting one or both of her parents back any minute to shout at them for being bad, but they never came.
On Christmas morning, the girls ate more chocolate and played dolls and dress-up. They raced each other around the yard, churning up the wet snow as the ocean roared at the bottom of the cliff. Beth thought of the other kids from school, and she knew that she wasn’t having the right kind of Christmas, a normal kind of Christmas. She didn’t unwrap gifts or leave cookies for Santa. She didn’t have turkey. It felt sad, but then she and Lily popped popcorn six times, smothering it with butter and eating it all day until they went to bed.
I should miss them, she thought as she and Lily jumped from the coffee table with their arms outstretched, seeing which one of them could touch the ceiling first. And she did miss her parents, a little. But she didn’t miss the watchfulness, the waiting for the moment when her parents started politely snapping at each other, forgetting that she was in the room. She didn’t miss having to tiptoe everywhere, remembering never to touch anything or ask for anything or make any noise, because she was supposed to be seen and not heard. She didn’t miss lying alone in bed in this strange house, wondering why she was so afraid of it, of beams and roofs and windows, as if she and the house hated each other.
“You’re not really my cousin, are you?” Beth asked that night as they wound the bedcovers around themselves and ate the last of the candy they’d found in the pantry.
“No, I’m not.” Lily’s profile was perfect as she snapped off a small bite of chocolate. “You don’t have a cousin.”
“Then who are your parents?”
“I live with foster parents,” Lily said. “This is the second family I’ve lived with. I’ll probably live with a different one next year.”
Beth had never imagined meeting a real-life orphan instead of reading about them in books. “Where are your real parents?” she asked.
Lily thought this over. “My mother is alive,” she said. “My father, I don’t know. Maybe he’s dead. If he isn’t, I plan to find him someday.”
“What about your mother? Do you plan to find her?”
Lily thought about this again. “My mother doesn’t want me,” she said. “But maybe she has no choice.”
The next day, they ran out of cookies, so they tried baking cookies themselves from a recipe book that was stacked under the sink, the pages stuck together with disuse. Beth singed a finger when she opened the hot oven, so the girls turned the oven off and ate the uncooked batter instead. There was a brief fight that day, when Lily took a doll Beth wanted to play with. Lily won.
Beth’s mother came home, still wearing the red sweater and the plaid skirt. Her hair had been taken down and put up again, and her mascara had dribbled into raccoon bruises beneath her eyes. She looked around the mess of the house, at the two girls sitting on the living room sofa, surrounded by blankets they’d pulled off the bed.