The Mayhews soaked up the sea, the sun, the sand, and the Mexican locals, thrilled that now he couldn’t hear conversations in two languages. Back in the States, Dallas City had had a weekend snowstorm; on Cottonwood Street, Keith and Debbie Cumberland had had their own.
Weekdays were usually sleep-til-noon nap time once the twins were off to pre-K the state provided, enrolled not so much to get an educational jump on the other four-year olds in town, but to provide their parents with a few hours of much needed sleep. They didn’t need little Eddie and Em banging around the place all morning.
Debbie thanked god Sunny Learning was only two straight blocks away and within unescorted walking distance. She could bundle up the kids, watch them from the back window, and not be forced out in the cold herself—a reward for having to get out of bed after just getting there, dressing them, making them breakfast (rather, stirring packets of instant breakfast into two glasses of milk, something they could do themselves in a few years and let her sleep in), Sending them off without going outside was okay today because the sunshine bouncing off the snow was really, really blinding through her dilated pupils.
“Be good, guys,” she said, relieved to be unencumbered. “See ya later.” She watched them trudge through the first half-block, but the reflected photons were giving her a headache, the flannel sheets were calling her name, and catching some zs was her main priority, so she stuffed in earplugs, set the alarm for 11:45, and re-joined Keith back in the sack.
Her return to hibernation was certainly not long enough--the five hours of tossing and turning this Monday morning only seemed to make Debbie more hung-over—and now she would have to stay up with the twins until their bed-time. She grumped and moped, but then felt blessed when she gathered enough residue from the edges of her (canceled) credit card, on the mirror, and off the table to make her own powdered breakfast--a nice little line that, hopefully, would keep her functioning for the next eight hours.
“Velveeta sandwiches and corn chips for lunch—frozen pizza for supper,” she grumbled, as she planned the day’s menu. “Cue up one of their quieter movies and maybe I can sack out on the couch a little this afternoon. Hopefully, I can get them to bed early,” she muttered, her mind engaged now that the meth was kicking in. A quick cup of java, grab my coat and sunglasses, grab the kids, and call it a day, she thought while impatiently watching the drip, drip, drip of the coffee maker, wishing it would go as fast as her fucking nap that was cut short.
The north wind that meat-lockered her at the back door was as effervescent as the meth and the Maxwell House. Debbie felt almost half human again as she slipped and slid towards the former liquor store-turned-daycare center, thinking how warm the house the house will be on return, despite the many cracked storm windows and high cost of natural gas--they had a very profitable weekend and the thermostat was going to be cranked up as high as she was, she promised herself.
She stopped cold in the snow and read the note taped to the front door: Sunny Learning will be closed today, Monday, February 5, 2018 due to snowstorm. We will be open tomorrow morning at our regular hours pending road conditions. Stay Sunny and Keep Learning!
“Oh, fuck! Then where’s the kids?” she blurted at quarter force as to not arouse suspicions from the neighbors who were outside shoveling, their gossip antennae keyed high whenever she or Keith were about town, waiting to hear or see a spark of weirdness from them that could become a forest-fire-raging true story by the end of the week. “Did you hear what them Cumberlands did now?” became a hot Dallas City topic of conversation, replacing talk of Keith as football zero.
She rattled the door. Locked. She checked the grounds around the building for tiny boot prints, but there were none; any trace that Eddie and Emmy might have been there was gone when the janitor cleared and salted the sidewalk much earlier in the morning. Debbie walked home briskly, wondering and worrying.
Goddamn it, the one fucking time I don’t walk em all the way to the goddamn building, she lamented as her pace picked up to almost a jog until she reached the yard--and saw two tiny pairs of bootprints leading into the garage door that opened towards the alley side.
The old hinges on the door sounded arthritic when opened slowly. “Emily? Eddie? You in here?” Debbie asked in a whisper, coming round to the pick-up’s passenger side. “Hello? Guys?” Quiet. “Guys?”
Her effervescence was complete, her nerves electric, when two small stocking-capped heads popped up from under the tarp Keith kept in the cab. “Mommy! Mommy! You’re awake!”
“Oh my god, you’re okay!” She opened the truck door which also needed oil and gathered the twins up in her arms. “Oh my god, Mommy loves you guys so much! I’m so sorry. Mommy didn’t know school was closed today. What were you doing out here?” she asked, wishing she wasn’t speeding so damn much right now.
“When we got to school the door was locked and we got cold,” Emily chattered when they got back inside. “Eddie said we should go back home but then those doors were locked, too. We banged and banged but you and Daddy kept sleeping. Then we got scared and more colder.”
“Yeah,” Eddie butted in. “Emmy started to cry and I did too. Then an old man with skin like yours in the summer, mommy, came and helped us. He said the truck would be warmer and took us there. You would have been mad at him, Mommy, because he wasn’t wearing a coat or mittens. He told us stories until you got here. He let us play with his feathers and beads. He was nice.”
“Oh you kids and your imaginations,” Debbie laughed and tousled Eddie’s hair. “You did some smart thinking, taking care of your sister like that.”
“But it wasn’t me. It was our friend. And he taught us a new word, long and funny. Said to tell our mommy and daddy to watch us more close like mommy and daddy birdies do with their babies in the nest, or...or…or--metheekweeeeee!” Eddie told her sternly for an excited four-and-a-half-year-old.
Debbie chuckled as she slapped together the fake-cheese sandwiches. Metheekeweeeeee was long and funny. Where do they come up with shit like that? Must be a word they remembered from cartoons or Sesame Street, she guessed, newly relieved now that the twins were safe and warm. Now, please let me nap on the couch, guys, she thought to herself. Mommy feels like fuck.
2
Their first Christmas together at Blackstone, and, yes, Ian and Terry decorated--after their success at Halloween scaring the bejeebers out of trick-or-treaters, many who believed the mansion has been haunted for decades, anyway, they decided to go for it and try to put “the deal with Deena” behind them.
They decorated different rooms apropos for different decades with kitsch bought on eBay. A disco ball hanging in the foyer welcomed friends to the 1970s, the 12-foot Douglas frocked in white, and trimmed with those old incandescent C-9 ceramic lights bulbs that were low on luminancy/high on wattage, and bubble lights, and tinsel.
In the formal dining room: an elegant 1920s Christmas with silver, gold, and crystal decor, the table set with china; the seven-foot fir with fake-flame lights mimicking the effects of real candles; mirrored glass and metallic ornaments reflecting a mix of flickers and the dark chocolate of the mahogany wainscot.
The holiday scheme for the drawing room was decided the day Terry moved from Nauvoo bringing with him a 6-foot aluminum tree and its color wheel that slowly bathes everything in red, green, yellow, and blue, along with a box of holiday knick-knacks from the 1960s. Initially, Ian thought the throwback far too retro—much too gauche and ghastly for the full window facing the highway traffic—until he heard the sentimental reasons for Terry’s tradition.
“My grandmother bought the tree in 1964 and brought it out every year until her death in ’08. Gram McDermott was adverse to change, loyal to traditions,” he explained. “She thought it was so cute the way I’d sit cross-legged under it as a boy, fascinated more by the slow-moving colors than by my Game-Boy for once.”
“I dunno, I was just spell-bound by something so very low-tech. The dear sweet lady died without much, but she made sure to will her aluminum Christmas and her collection of ceramic snowmen, Santa mugs and Nativity creche to her dear sweet grandson. I guess I’m just as sentimental, as I display the tree and decorations every year since. I loved her and still miss her very much,” Terry related, misty-eyed.
“Then the drawing room will be for Gram McDermott!” Ian declared, carefully unwrapping each antique ceramic piece from its newspaper cocoon and arranging them over the fireplace mantel interwoven with aluminum garland. “Her Shining Room!” he shouted with glee, amazed how the sunlight was dazzling the aluminum tips and showering the room with the diamond-like effects. “Looks great, Ter!”
Until they came downstairs the next morning. Gram’s tree was laying on its side, pinning the color wheel to perpetual red, painting the room blood-soaked--a stark reminder of the horror at the Keep; every ceramic snowman and Santa mug and the ceramic baby Jesus lying in the manger, were shards of kilned plaster smashed to bits after falling to the brick hearth below.
After fake-tightening the mantelpiece screws he claimed had worked loose after he refurbished and reinstalled it, Ian fake-apologized for his fake-shoddy workmanship. It was a lie--and he knew it.
It was Bertie, the eleven-year old who had entertained the family with a reading of “The Night Before Christmas” on the snowy Yuletide eve back in 1912 who had thrown a tantrum and caused the damage. That was the last Burg Christmas and it was Bertie’s room—her stage—and she wasn’t going to share it with the usurper’s Gram McDermott.
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