After a long moment, he continues, “But that morning, her body started shaking. It was a seizure, but I didn’t know that then. To me it felt like an earthquake—like the earthquakes we’d learned about in school. I imagined some fault line inside of her had split open. I panicked. I was too terrified to move. I screamed for help, but my grandparents were out. Justin was just a baby. He’d been sleeping in his crib, but eventually he started crying. Finally I managed to get out from under her, but her body was so heavy. I ran into the next room and called 911. I can’t remember much after that. She died in the hospital that night—a brain aneurysm.”
Marilyn holds on to him, her arms wrapped around his body, her face pressed into his back. “James, I’m so sorry.”
When he finally turns to look at her, she sees the tears running down his face. She runs her hand along his cheekbones, his brow. “She must have been amazing,” Marilyn says quietly, “to have kids like you and Justin.”
“I don’t know that I believe in heaven, at least the way most people do, but there have been times—I’ve never said this to anyone, but there have been times where I swear I can tell she’s here. I can feel it…”
He rolls onto his back, stares up at her ceiling. “She loved hummingbirds, for some funny reason. They were her favorite animal. She put out a feeder every spring and filled it with sugar water, like religiously. When we moved in with Nana and Poppa after the divorce, she was all excited about hanging it up—but she had the thing out there for months, and they never showed. She’d change the water and put it back, and I’d be like, ‘What are you doing? The birds aren’t coming.’ And she’d be like, ‘Have faith.’ And then one morning, I’m in front of the TV with my Cap’n Crunch, and she’s squealing, ‘Jamie, Jamie! Look!’ And she sounds so excited that I run over, and there’s this tiny little bird, its wings going maybe a trillion miles an hour. It sees our faces, right up next to it, right against the glass, and it darts away for a minute, and then it turns back. We keep real still and it goes up to this feeder and just starts eating. Right there. Like, inches in front of us. And pretty soon, that one bird must tell its friends where the food’s at, and there’s this whole posse of them that starts showing up. We watch them every morning—it never gets old. It makes my mom so happy.
“So after she dies, you know, the sugar dries up, and nobody puts out the food anymore. I mean, I’m like eight, so I don’t even think of it, and the birds stop coming. But one morning, maybe half a year later, I’m in the kitchen getting a soda, and I turn and out the window I see this little hummingbird staring back at me, its wings beating fast as ever, only it’s not going anywhere. It’s not darting around. It’s just there, looking at me, and I know it’s her. My mom. I mean, not literally like she’s the bird, but—somehow, I knew she was telling me something. Reminding me. It was just a feeling. I don’t know.” He pauses. “I hadn’t said a word in months, but I whispered to the bird. Just a simple hello, but it broke the silence.
“After that, I started filling up the feeder.” James smiles. “The first time I tried to boil the sugar water I didn’t ask my grandma or anything first—I just pretty much dumped the whole bag in, thinking I’m gonna make it extra good. And Nana comes in and catches me and she freaks, but in the end she showed me how to make the nectar, and the birds started showing back up.”
Marilyn hugs him, and he rests his head against her. She sees the rain has stopped, the deep gray clouds breaking up, letting in the soft blue of the evening sky. She traces the arcs of his body with her fingers, his muscles softening as he shuts his eyes.
“If I ever have a daughter,” he says, his gaze drifting toward the window, “I’ll name her after my mom.”
Marilyn’s always imagined a part of her would die and be reborn into someone new as soon as she left for college, but now the transformation’s already taking place. Only it’s less like death and more like waking up. Whatever’s been there, buried, has begun to surface in James’s presence.
The childhood memories that had been fuzzy and distant, like an out-of-focus movie of someone else’s life, have started arriving unexpectedly, bright and true in her body. Lying on James’s shag carpet, languid after their still-startling intimacy, Marilyn remembers the simplicity of the smell of summer grass from the yard in Amarillo, the desert heat that seemed weightless even as it scorched, the sky she’d imagine swimming through, the smell of her dad’s cologne (yes, now she can recall) when she’d jump into his arms—these pieces of herself from another time and place tie her to James now, leaving her with the feeling that all her life has been leading to him.
His lips on her temples, on her eyebrows, behind her ears, little kisses everywhere.
Then Justin, banging on the door. “Are you guys almost ready?!”
“We’ll be right there, Jus! Get your shoes on.”
This Saturday, two days after Thanksgiving (the holiday weekend she will look back on and remember as the time in which she fell in love with James), is a rare day when Rose and Alan are both out—a date to the movies—leaving the brothers alone. Marilyn came downstairs in time to see Rose dolled up with pink lipstick and a pink sweater, big gold earrings studded with gems, rose-scented perfume, and she loved the still-girlish way Rose flirted with Alan (who was himself dressed up in a sport coat), holding out her hand for him to take it.
Marilyn came over, ostensibly, to study—she and James both want to make progress on their college essays—with a promise to Justin they’d get ice cream afterward. James set Justin up with a movie and they went into his bedroom, but before they even managed to pull out their papers, they could not keep their hands off each other. That’s how it’s been these days—a constant hum of electricity (they hope audible only to them), perpetual restless hunger, deep in their bodies. He locked the bedroom door. She had to bite down on his sweatshirt, balled up and stuffed into her mouth, to keep silent.
“We should probably still get some work done, no?” he says, his voice breaking into her reverie.
“But I don’t think your brother’s gonna wait any longer for Baskin-Robbins,” she replies in a whisper. After they go out for cones of mint chocolate chip (Marilyn), rocky road (James), and Neapolitan with sprinkles (Justin), Rose and Alan have returned and James suggests going to the library.
As they set up in their usual spot, James asks, “You wanna look at a draft of this essay?”
“Of course.” Marilyn takes the pages that he pushes across the table.
As she starts to read he gets up, mutters something about the bathroom. When he returns, he opens his calculus book and pretends to be absorbed in it, but she can feel his eyes, continually fluttering upward to her. He’s written his college essay about his mother. He tells the story of her love for hummingbirds in stunning detail, going back to what he knows of her own childhood in North Carolina, through her family’s move to Los Angeles as a teenager, up to the birth of her children, and the bird that arrived at James’s window six months after her death. The funny thing about beauty, James writes, is that in no way does its presence negate the truth of suffering, of injustice, of pain, but it does stand stalwart in its own right, as its own truth.
Marilyn wipes her eyes as she reaches the end. “James,” she says. “This is so good. I mean, Jesus, you could be the next Joan Didion.”
James laughs, but she can see the pride shining behind his eyes.
“I’m really glad we’re reading the book. It helped. It inspired me. I didn’t want to write the same old boring stuff.”
“It’s anything but boring—it’s—it’s beautiful.” And she means it. He’s made something so personal bigger than himself, bigger than his own loss, bigger than his own family. He’s made it into a story.
“What about you? Have you started?” he asks.
“I have, but this makes me wanna start over. I could do better. I could be more honest. It’s easy to forget sometimes how much power there is in saying what you mean instead of what you think someone
wants to hear.”
“For sure.”
“It’s like it’s become so ingrained in me, trying to please other people, or just—finding the path of least resistance. But that’s not who I want to be.”
“It’s not who you are—look how much work you’ve put into this whole process already. That’s not easy.”
“Thanks.”
“If you want any help, I’m here,” he says.
I’m here. Those words have never sounded as good as they do coming from James.
Marilyn spends the next hour making edits to his essay, suggesting cuts and additions and searching for grammar mistakes, and when she hands the papers back to him, he looks up from his textbook and says, “I don’t want to let you go.”
“What do you mean?”
“Next year. I don’t want this to be over.”
“Neither do I,” she says, her throat tightening.
“What if it didn’t have to be like that? What if we went together?”
“That would be amazing…” She checks his face, sees her own uncertainty, her own hopefulness reflected. “I could apply to UCLA. You’re right, it’s a good school,” she says.
“I know how much you want to get out of here. I’ll apply where you’re applying. We’ll see what happens…”
It takes Marilyn a moment to process his words, and then she begins to swell, filling with helium. She could float to the top of the glass roof above their heads—beyond it, into the outer reaches of the atmosphere.
“Okay,” she says, “I love that, but I mean, you have to make sure you think they’d be good places for you. That it’s what you’d want—”
“I don’t know what I want. But I know I want you.”
* * *
This is what it feels like to be in love with James Alan Bell, in Los Angeles on the first day of December of 1998, she thinks, as they drive away from the library and merge onto the 101, a huge moon hung in the sky ahead, his hand on her thigh, Aaliyah singing “At Your Best” on the radio.
“This could be our song,” she says quietly.
James does not take his eyes from the road, but she feels him weave his fingers through hers. “Yeah.”
That night, Marilyn stays up late, adjusting her college list to fit what she believes will be best for James too, searching for their intersections. She drops Smith (all women) in favor of Boston College. She adds UCLA. She also adds Harvard (though she knows she won’t get in) just so he’ll apply, thinking she could be nearby at another school in Cambridge, maybe Emerson. Columbia, though—Columbia would be the dream. She falls asleep, imagining them arriving in New York together, hand in hand, the diamond at the end of her tunnel now turning into the spectacular lights of the city she could see with him.
At the first ring, Sylvie pushes the worn fake Christmas tree into Marilyn’s arms and runs for the phone.
“Hello?” Her face falls. “Mm-hmm. No thanks. Please put me on your do-not-call list.” Sylvie hangs up and turns to Marilyn. “Welp, no news is good news for now!”
Marilyn had a callback for the Levi’s commercial last week, but she’s already reminded her mom they aren’t likely to hear anything until after the holiday.
“We’re about to turn a corner. I can feel it in my bones,” Sylvie says as Marilyn props up the tree—the same one they’ve had since the year they moved into the OC apartment. The branches are beginning to seem bare, having slowly shed a portion of their silver “needles” over the years.
Marilyn wishes she could retreat to her room to work on her college essay, but as she looks over at Sylvie in the kitchen starting hot chocolate—their tree-decorating tradition—she softens and opens a ziplock bag full of ornaments. Sifting through the haphazard collection of Play-Doh hearts, candy canes, and silver stars, she finds the My Little Pony ornament that Sylvie had made for her by attaching a hook to the back of a smaller toy. As Sylvie brings her a steaming mug, Marilyn hangs the pink-haired horse on the tree, although she thinks Fluttershy is looking a little worse for wear.
* * *
By Christmas morning, they’ve managed to stock the tree with a few presents. As Sylvie checks the ham in the oven, Woody opens his gift—a personalized mug reading WOODY WINS! They’d bought a plain white coffee cup at the dollar store, and with permanent marker Marilyn carefully stenciled the letters, along with several colored stars. They put it in the oven to bake, and—as Sylvie said—voilà! The marker had become permanent.
Woody’s lips turn in a sort of downward smile as he examines it, and Marilyn can see he’s restraining emotion. “Well then,” he says, “this is very nice, isn’t it. Very nice, ladies. How ’bout that. First Christmas gift I’ve gotten in years, isn’t it. Thank you.”
“I think I’ll put it to good use right now,” he adds, getting up to pour coffee, which he finishes off with a shot of Baileys. Though Sylvie says nothing, he turns to her defensively.
“It’s a holiday.”
Sylvie only nods, and says to Marilyn, “Help me with the salad, will you?”
The “salad” is a Jell-O salad, the same one Sylvie makes for Christmas every year. They stir pineapple, cranberries, and walnuts into the hot liquid and put it in the fridge to set, while Woody works on his Baileys and coffee and pours another, this time with a shot (or two) of whiskey. Marilyn eyes him as she hears the familiar ding of the dial-up, which means he’s likely beginning an online poker game.
“Woody…” Sylvie says, her voice soft. “It’s Christmas. Take the day off…”
“It says right here, on my mug. ‘Woody Wins.’ I’ve got good luck.” Woody smiles, but Marilyn can hear the booze starting to creep into the edges of his vowels.
Sylvie shuts her eyes and then flips on the TV. A Charlie Brown Christmas plays in the background while she and Marilyn finish making the lunch. By the time the table is set, the ham, green bean casserole, and Jell-O salad served, Woody’s still staring intently at his computer screen.
“Shall we open our presents before we eat?” Sylvie asks.
So Marilyn retrieves the rest of the small packages from under the tree. One for Sylvie, two for her. She opens hers first to find a collection of perfume samples inside a CK One tote. She gets this same gift every year for Christmas, or a version of it. (The brand of tote bag changes.) She dislikes wearing perfume, but still, there’s something comforting in the familiar package, and she goes through opening each scent, commenting on which are her favorite. From the bottom of the bag she pulls out lipstick samples. She knows Sylvie gets them from the women at the makeup counter, then carefully slices off the tops with a sharp knife to make a clean surface. Marilyn’s mostly only ever used the lipsticks when her mom puts them on her before an audition or meeting, but in the past months, since James, she’s started experimenting with her own makeup. She discovers a deep purple and paints it on, grins at her mom.
“You like?”
Sylvie smiles at her smiling. “You know I prefer more traditional colors, but I’ve noticed you branching out, so who am I to say. I’m just an old lady.”
“You are not.” Marilyn gives her mom a purple kiss on the cheek.
Marilyn knows what the second gift will be also. She opens the package, carefully wrapped in thin shiny paper, to uncover three jars of Sylvie’s famous holiday lemon scrub. Though the recipe is fairly simple, her mom makes it only once a year, perhaps to preserve it as special, and prints out labels—SYLVIE’S LEMON LIFT—that she pastes onto the mason jars. As Marilyn inhales the scent—summer in the middle of December—she wishes her mother would have her house in the hills, or at least a home of her own, the money to buy nice dresses, to eat in restaurants with linen napkins, to fill the hole that takes the shape of longing for such things.
“Smells amazing,” Marilyn says. “Now open yours.”
Sylvie unwraps the tiny gift to reveal a set of careful ornaments made from ribbon and Scrabble letters glued together. The set spells I LOVE YOU, MOM. Marilyn knows it’s not much, it??
?s nothing really, but she tries to come up with a new little gift to make her each year.
Sylvie comes over to hug her, and Marilyn can almost feel the lump in her mother’s throat as she whispers, “Thank you, baby.”
“What’s that?” Woody asks, turning from his computer, his voice taut like a bow waiting to release its arrow.
“A present. Marilyn made it for me.”
Woody crosses to the kitchen table where they sit. “And where did you get those Scrabble letters?” he asks Marilyn.
“Um. I—found an old game, in the back of the closet.”
“You mean my old game.”
“Sorry, I—I didn’t think anyone was using it. It was all the way in the back, covered with dust and stuff.”
“You are a guest in this house, and you have no right to take what belongs to me!” Woody explodes.
Marilyn shuts her eyes, escaping to her brick pathway, her fall leaves, her stone library, to her future dorm room where she imagines James, asleep in her bed, no one to bother them.
“Put it back,” Woody says.
Marilyn glances toward Sylvie, sees the tears gathering in the edges of her eyes.
“Uncle Woody, please,” Marilyn says softly. “We all—we all got presents. That one’s for my mom.”
“You have no right—you don’t know where that game came from! You don’t know what that game is.”
Wordlessly, Sylvie starts snapping apart the letters, freeing the small wooden tiles, the tears now having escaped her eyes, running down her face.
She gets up and goes to the closet. Marilyn can hear the tiles dropping back into the box.
Sylvie returns to the living room. “Let’s eat,” she says. She moves into the kitchen and begins to cut the ham.
The clink of their forks is the only break in the silence. Marilyn takes a second slice of Jell-O salad for Sylvie’s sake, forces the jiggly substance down the back of her throat.