I also thought about Rick’s mother and father and how nice it would have been if they’d still been with us. I liked them. I liked being part of their family.
If someone had asked me what the sermon was about that Christmas Eve, I would have had to say that I had absolutely no idea.
We got home from church at midnight and all three of us went straight to sleep. I thought I heard something around 2:00, but figured it was just the unfamiliar noises of a new house. At 3:30, I awoke and couldn’t sleep. I was hot, I was hungry. I tossed and turned until 4:00, then finally got out of bed and went downstairs for a glass of milk. When I moved toward the refrigerator I accidentally stepped into a brown paper shopping bag and spilled garbage all over the pristine bamboo floors. I turned on a dim light, reached down to gather up the Subway wrappers and soda cans from our moving day lunch, and noticed Rick’s handwriting on the lined paper from one of Jackie’s school notebooks. I uncrumpled it and read what he had written:
Dear Mrs. Torrey,
My name is Rick Newton. I’m a custom home builder here in the South Bay. My wife is a writer. We have a daughter who’s a junior at South High. We’re currently building a home on Vista del Mar.
There were wads of paper everywhere. I sat on the floor to read them one by one:
Dear Mrs. Torrey,
I’ve lived in Redondo Beach my entire life. There’s nowhere else I’d rather live.
Dear Mrs. Torrey,
I’ve built houses all my life and I’ve always believed in good craftsmanship.
Dear Mrs. Torrey,
I’ve worked with my hands all my life, so putting words on paper isn’t easy for me.
Dear Mrs. Torrey,
I met my wife when I was 29 years old, but I feel like I’ve known her forever, and I need your house to make sure I do.
Dear Mrs. Torrey,
Houses are tricky things.
Dear Mrs. Torrey,
If anyone asked me why I love my wife so much I’d never be able to explain it. The same is true about your house.
Dear Mrs. Torrey,
Fuck you.
I smoothed out the notes, then went to Jackie’s backpack and ripped out two pieces of paper from her binder. She had one of those tiny staplers in her pencil case. I used that to turn one of the pieces of paper into a makeshift envelope. I used an erasable pen and wrote my own letter:
Dear Mrs. Torrey,
My husband doesn’t know I’m sending these letters. I found them crumpled up on the floor just now, very early on Christmas Day. We used to make a big deal out of setting things up so that our little girl would believe Santa had come. We would eat the cookies she left out, drink the milk, fill her stocking with chocolate. We wanted her to believe in Santa because it seemed so close to believing in God, and believing in God seemed really important to us. You have to believe in something, right?
That little girl is 15 now and I don’t think she believes much in either Santa Claus or God. I didn’t think I did, either, until just now. Seeing these letters from Rick scattered on this floor was the closest I’ve come to believing in a long time, because it’s the closest I’ve come to being known for who I am. It felt exactly like a moment of grace. And it made me realize that this might be what you’re looking for, as well.
You’re just looking for a moment of grace, a moment when your house and all the years you’ve lived in it are seen for exactly what they are. I wish I could give you that moment of grace wrapped up in a bow this Christmas morning because even though you don’t know me from any one of the thousands of people who’ve traipsed through your life these past few weeks, you’ve given it to me.
Merry Christmas,
April Newton
I slipped back into bed somewhere close to 5:00. It was still dark. Then, around 6:00, I heard Rick start to stir. He turned over, shifted his weight so that he was lying on his back. I was on my side, turned away from him, as had become my habit. Normally, I would have slipped out of bed. Normally, I would have pretended that I didn’t hear the way his breath had changed from a sleeping breath to a waking breath.
I rolled over and pressed a leg against Rick’s body.
He reached his arm over and rested it against the thick part of my hips.
I was astonished at how warm his skin felt.
I moved closer so that my stomach pressed against his hip and my breasts pressed against his chest.
He began to rub his thumb over my hip bone, very slowly.
“I love you,” I whispered.
He shifted his weight so that he was facing me and gently kissed my lips. I pressed my body more firmly into his and opened my mouth to kiss him back. I moved so that I could welcome him.
Then the phone rang.
We heard Jackie answering down the hallway, then her footsteps coming toward our room. I turned away, pulled the sheets up to my chin.
She knocked.
“It’s Grandma,” she said, handing me the phone. My mom. Calling from Chicago where she would be ruling a kitchen that wasn’t hers and whipping up animosity from my brother’s wife as surely as she was whipping up the mashed potatoes.
“Merry Christmas,” she said with cool efficiency. I was an item that needed to be checked off her list. It was a long list that included braising and broiling, separating and grilling.
“Merry Christmas, Mom,” I said.
“How’s the house?”
“I don’t really know yet,” I said.
“I bet you’ll be happy to finally cook in a real kitchen.”
“Yes,” I said. “How’s Cal?”
“Fine,” she said. “We’re all fine.”
The call went on for fifteen minutes, even though we had nothing to say. When I finally hung up, Rick had slipped on his sweatpants and gone downstairs with Jackie to start making pancakes.
C
HRISTMAS DAY
We sat on the floor around the sad Target Christmas tree. I gave Rick the laser tape measure, which I knew he liked because he immediately got out the instructions and started to read about how the thing worked. We made Jackie close her eyes as we walked her to the den, where we had laid out all the new things for her room—the beanbag chair and the desk, the fluffy rug and an alarm clock in the shape of a beagle. She flung herself onto the beanbag and asked if she could open her present from Max.
It was in the pocket of her robe—a tiny box with something written right onto the cardboard with ballpoint pen. She read the words, pulled off the top and gasped. It was a yin/yang necklace on a leather string. She slipped it over her head, gushing, “Isn’t it so amazing?”
It was so amazing, in fact, that I felt choked up. “That’s very sweet,” I managed to say.
There was a large box under the Christmas tree from my mother. Jackie handed me the card that said, “For your new bedroom.” Rick and I had imagined our new bedroom as a clean, neutral space, earthy and plain like the beach. It would be our retreat from the loud and noisy world, our perch overlooking the ocean. The ceiling beams were sandblasted and whitewashed. The rug was the color of sand. The comforter I had selected was the palest shade of turquoise blue, my ultimate response to the Swiss Coffee on the walls.
Inside my mother’s box was a complete set of linens for our new bedroom—a heavy Ralph Lauren pattern in red and blue paisley, with a white eyelet dust ruffle, blue pillow shams, a red throw pillow, and a matching set of towel sheets, bath mat, hand towels and washcloths. It looked like the bedroom set of a hunting lodge.
“Oh, dear,” I said.
“Mom, it’s Christmas,” Jackie warned me. “Be nice.”
I bit my lip, and then Rick pulled a box out from under the tree. It was a large, flat rectangle wrapped in plain brown paper.
“The gals at the planning commission dug it up for me,” Rick said.
I tore open the paper, expecting a photo of the newly finished house, or the blueprints framed for posterity. It was an aerial photo of Redondo Beach taken a very long time ago. You could see the pier and the curve of the Esplanade, but there were few trees, few roads and few houses. It looked like something familiar, yet foreign at the same time. I couldn’t figure it out.
I looked up at Rick. “What is it?”
“It was taken the year the house was built,” he said. “I thought she might like it.”
The gears in my mind were grinding, but I still didn’t understand. “Who?” I asked.
“Peg Torrey,” he said.
“Who’s she?” Jackie asked.
“You sound like you practically know her,” I said to Rick.
“I’ve been inside the house.”
“You have? When?”
“While you were having your massage.”
"But I . . .”
“Vanessa took me through. She is, after all, a Realtor.”
“What is it, Mom?” Jackie asked, positioning herself behind me so she could see the photo. “And who is Peg Torrey?”
“She’s a woman who owns a bungalow down by the beach.”
“Why did Dad give you a picture of someone else’s house?”
“Because it’s exactly what I wanted.”
“An old photo?”
I shook my head. “The chance to follow a whim.”
Jackie stood up. She wasn’t fooled for a minute. “What kind of a whim?” she asked.
The problem with setting a precedent for telling the truth to your children is that you have to keep it up. You can’t suddenly decide that you’re going to start lying, or that you’re going to pick and choose. They understand what truth is, and once you give it to them, they expect it. All the time. There was never a moment when I was going to lie to Jackie about having cancer. She was only ten, and I may have used softer words, or softer concepts, but I told her the truth. I met a woman a few years ago who was a fifteen-year cancer survivor. Her children were grown, with children of their own, and houses far away. “I’m still wondering,” she told me, “how I’m going to tell my children I had cancer.” I was speechless. I had no advice for her whatsoever. She was too late for the truth.
“Peg Torrey is giving her house away in a contest,” I explained, “and I thought I’d try to enter.”
Jackie squinted at me. She stood up even straighter so that she looked like some kind of angry queen. She looked at her dad, then back at me, and at the photo in my hands.
“You’re kidding,” she said, flatly.
“It’s hard to explain,” I said.
“Dad built this house for you,” she said. “That’s like . . . it’s like. I swear, it’s like having an affair.”
“Jackie!”
She spun on her heels, grabbed her purse and walked past the Christmas tree and all the presents and out the door.
I got up to follow her.
“Don’t,” Rick said. He’d stepped in front of me, pressed his hand against my arm.
“Don’t what?”
“Don’t go after her.”
“It’s Christmas! We don’t even know where she’s going!”
“Probably just down the hill. I’ll go after her. Why don’t you take that photo over to Peg Torrey’s house.”
“Rick, that’s crazy. Let me go.” He was still holding on to my arm.
“Didn’t you listen to the sermon last night?”
“The sermon? Please. Let me go.”
“It was about how we tell the same story year after year and say the same prayers and sing the same songs, but we never know where the magic is going to come on any given year. We never know when we’re going to feel moved. All the anticipation—the gifts and the decorating—it’s all just about waiting, and watching for when we’re going to feel moved.”
“What does that have to do with anything?”
“You might find what you’re looking for if you take that photo over today.”
“I just want to find Jackie.”
“I said I would go.”
I don’t know what shifted—the planets in their courses, the molecules in the air, the way the blood flowed through my head—but I let him win. I let Jackie go. I allowed myself to honor the gift he’d given me.
"OK,” I said.
I took the photo and gathered up the letters we’d written to Peg Torrey and drove down the hill to Pepper Tree Lane. The daughter I had met at the open house was sitting on the front steps drinking a cup of coffee. She looked tired. There was a large basket tied up with cellophane sitting next to her, and a bottle of merlot with a plaid bow.
“It’s like gifts from the Magi,” I said.
She laughed. “That’s good,” she said.
“Shall I just add my offerings to the pile, then?”
“Go right ahead.”
I set down the gift-wrapped photo and the homemade envelope of letters, but felt like I should say something before turning to leave. “It’s a lovely house,” I said.
I wrote an article for
Family Circle
last year on the ten rules for good conversation. It was supposed to be a primer for mothers who were having trouble talking to their daughters, or wives having trouble talking to their spouses. My expert source was a young professor from Cornell who had done a study that involved timing people’s responses in conversation. Step number one for good communication, she said, was to allow the empty spaces in the conversation time to expand. You were supposed to breathe in and breathe out two whole cycles before talking again after you asked a question, which was the equivalent of twenty seconds. I breathed, and breathed again, and just like that, Sarah started talking.
“I know,” she said. “Most of the houses on the street were like this when I was little. There was a Foster’s Freeze a few blocks that way on Pacific Coast Highway and all the kids would go over there for chocolate-dipped ice cream cones. And there was a restaurant the other way called Millie Riera’s. It was right on the water. I mean, you could sit there, have swordfish steaks and look out at the dolphins playing in the waves. That was the place my dad always took us for big birthdays.”
“No wonder your mom wants to preserve it.”
“She wants to handle the sale of the house the same way my dad would have handled the death of a patient—by being present for it, by being attentive to it, by not running away from it, by trying to find meaning in it.” She stood up abruptly, then. I was standing on the sidewalk at the bottom of the front steps and she was standing on the porch. She towered above me. “It’s hard to be the child of saints,” she said.