The Nearest Heart

On the morning of Wednesday, December the twenty-second, Emmy Hartwell-Calloway puts on Christmas music.

Not loudly. Not aggressively. She puts it on at a volume that is technically background but is doing the work of something more than background, with the specific energy of someone who has decided it is now seasonally appropriate and is not taking questions. She is in the kitchen. The music is from the living room. It is reaching the kitchen with intent.

Juliet, at the Chemex, listens to it for a moment.

"It's the twenty-second," she says.

"Christmas is in three days," Emmy says.

"I'm aware."

"You don't sound festive, my little jingle bell."

"I'm making the coffee," Juliet says. "This is my festive. Ring Aling."

Emmy appears in the kitchen doorway. She is wearing the look of someone who has decided that Juliet's threshold for Christmas music is a negotiable position and that the negotiation started this morning. "I found a thing," she says.

"A thing."

"In the Box." Meaning the Box That Moved In In June… last year, which has been slowly yielding its contents over the past eighteen months in the manner of a geological deposit. "It's relevant to the season."

She holds up a small knitted figure. It is a snowman. It is approximately four inches tall. It has a scarf that is slightly too long for its body. It has, if Juliet's assessment of fabric work is correct, been knitted by someone who loved the person they were giving it to more than they understood knitting.

"From your mother?" Juliet asks.

"From my grandmother," Emmy says. "She made one every year. I have a box of them at home — at my parents' home. I must have put this one in my bag at some point." She looks at the snowman with the specific warmth of someone receiving an unexpected visit from someone they love. "I think he needs to go near the leprechaun."

The leprechaun. Still on the wall. Nine months, three weeks.

"He's been alone since March," Juliet says.

"He has been," Emmy agrees. "I think he'd appreciate the company."

They install the snowman on the kitchen wall. He is placed with the gravity his office deserves: to the left of the leprechaun, at a slight angle, such that the two of them appear to be having a conversation that has been going on for some time. Given the tenure of the leprechaun, the conversation might well continue for many months. Emmy stands back and looks at them with the expression of someone who has made an executive decision and is at peace with it.

"Festive," she says.

"Extremely," Juliet agrees, and hands her the coffee.

#

The box is in the back of her wardrobe.

She has known it was there. It arrived long ago and has moved a few times. She placed it in there just after Emmy moved in, as she was cleaning space for her bride-to-be. She did not label it differently from any other box, and she has been leaving it for when she was ready in the specific way she leaves things that are not yet ready to be addressed: with acknowledgment and without urgency.

She finds it on the afternoon of December twenty-second, when she is looking for something else buried amidst Juliet's wardrobe and Julian's pieces she hasn't wanted to part with. Her hand goes to the wrong box.

She knows it immediately by the quality of it — the weight, the way it has been packed by someone who was being careful. She sets it on the floor. She looks at it for a moment.

Downstairs, through the window: the December garden. The light coming in the way it has always come into this room, the particular south-facing quality that makes the back room the best-lit room in the house. On the windowsill of the back room: the pamphlet, set there by Emmy in September, which Juliet has known about since approximately forty-five minutes after Emmy placed it there, and has been leaving with the same quality of acknowledgment-without-urgency.

She takes the box downstairs to that room, with the space it affords to work, and opens it.

#

The files: documents from the lawyer's office, dated from the year Julian was thirteen. She knows the categories before she opens them — estate, probate, the formal language of what remains after people are gone. The formal language of the world continuing in the specific way it continues: by documenting.

There are also letters.

This is the part she had not anticipated, or had anticipated and then filed under not yet. Two letters from David, written to Gerald, from the period before. Not about anything urgent — they are the letters of someone who wrote to his brother the way David did everything: warmly, at length, with attention to detail that would be specific without being precise. One of them is about a trip he and Marie had been planning. The tone is anticipatory. He is looking forward to something. He has arranged for Julian to stay with Gerald while they're away. Julian won't mind, he writes, he's become very self-sufficient, he can manage a few weeks, and Gerald is there. They are so excited for their trip, won in a contest. He regrets that it's only for two, he would take Julian along, but he realizes that the resort probably isn't of much interest to a thirteen-year-old. Julian might enjoy having some time to himself with his uncle without his parents around.

Juliet reads this letter twice.

The third time she doesn't read it. She holds it and looks at the December garden through the window and she thinks about the man in the dream — Julian in the kitchen, making bad coffee, self-sufficient, managing. Julian who had become careful because someone needed to be. Julian who had become, in David's words, self-sufficient, without David fully registering what that meant. Julian, who might be better off without them around. David meant it in the temporary sense, Juliet knows that, but it still takes a moment to process.

He didn't think to check who was coming in.

Gerald had said it about the world. Juliet is holding the letter from David about Julian, and she understands that it was also true of this — of Julian, of what Julian was carrying, of the careful one who had been careful for years before his parents noticed. Not because they didn't love him. Because they loved everything and the world came through their door and they were busy welcoming it. They were excited at an adventure. They would take full advantage of everything that adventure offered, without worrying much about any potential danger.

She sets the letter down.

She is not going to name what she felt at thirteen. She has known for a long time that she is not going to name it in her own mind — the naming can wait for Emmy, and it has been waiting, and it is nearly finished waiting. What she is naming now is something different: the shape of the people who produced the feeling. Real. Specific. Flawed in the specific way of people who are too full of welcome to leave room for guardedness. Her father, who loved everything. Her mother, who cooked things that smelled like only that house and organized the linen cupboard twice a year because that was how she expressed her love for what was in it.

They had loved Julian. She knows this completely. She has known it. But she has been carrying the knowing alongside the other thing, and the two have been in the same box, and Gerald's reframe had moved them apart slightly, and the letter has moved them further, and what she can see now is:

The other thing did not mean they did not love him, and it doesn't mean he did not love them. The other thing was a fact about a careful, worldly-beyond-his-years thirteen-year-old and a situation that no amount of love, abundant and real as David and Marie's love was, had prepared anyone for. It had simply happened. And Julian had felt what Julian had felt, and the feeling was real, and the feeling does not indict anyone. Children internalize responsibility in ways parents don't fully understand.

She can tell Emmy this now.

She is ready.

#

She puts the letters back with care. She closes the box. She puts it in the corner of the wardrobe where it was, because it is not going anywhere, and it will be there, and that is fine.

She walks back downstairs and stands in the doorway of the back room for a moment — the second of stillness that the room always requires — and she looks at the windowsill. The notes. The pamphlet. The December light.

For her emerald, she thinks. This room. When it's ready.

#

On the evening of December the twenty-second, Emmy attempts to wrap Juliet's Christmas gift. The Christmas music, as has been the situation all day, still plays softly in the background.

Juliet is in the living room with the doctoral notes. From the bedroom, where Emmy has retreated with approximately twelve feet of wrapping paper and the specific energy of someone who has committed to a task, there are sounds.

The sounds are: tearing, re-tearing, the specific frustrated exhale of someone who has misjudged a dimension, and then something that is approximately the sound of wrapping paper winning.

"Emmy," Juliet calls.

"I'm fine," Emmy calls back.

A pause. More sounds.

"Are you using the good scissors?"

"I am using whatever scissors I can reach without standing up."

"Those are my fabric scissors."

A longer pause.

"I feel that this information is not helpful at this stage of the process," Emmy says.

Juliet puts down her pen. She looks at the ceiling for a moment with the expression of someone performing a rapid calculation. She picks her pen back up.

"There's tape on the right side of the wardrobe," she says.

"I found tape," Emmy says. "I found a lot of tape. I'm in a very good place with tape."

"Is the gift visible through the wrapping?"

Silence.

"...some of it, not the important parts," Emmy says.

Juliet closes her notebook. She goes to the bedroom doorway.

The gift — the amber cashmere robe, which Juliet has not seen but can identify by its dimensions and the specific shape of Emmy's guilt — is wrapped in the manner of something that has been wrapped by someone with tremendous goodwill and no spatial reasoning. The paper is festive. There is tape in quantities that suggest either structural necessity or anxiety. There is a corner that is doing something geometrically unprecedented.

Emmy is sitting back on her heels looking at it with the expression of someone who is not going to ask for help and is also very aware that help is standing in the doorway.

"I'm going to need you to not look at this," Emmy says.

"I'm looking at it."

"Stop looking at it with that face."

"What face?"

"The face," Emmy says. "You know the face." She gestures at the wrapped gift. "It's the wrapping of love and intention."

"Yes dear, it's the wrapping of your love, intention, and a considerable amount of structural tape."

"The tape is load-bearing," Emmy says.

Juliet considers the gift for another moment. She does not offer to re-wrap it. She looks at Emmy instead — at the specific quality of Emmy on the floor with her grandmother's snowman on the kitchen wall and twelve feet of festive paper, and her good scissors, and absolute confidence in the final result — and something that has been loosening since September loosens a little more.

"It's good," she says. Which means: it's good. All of it.

Emmy looks up. She reads this correctly.

"December twenty-third tomorrow," she says.

"I know," Juliet says.

"Three more sleeps."

"We're not five," Juliet says.

"We're also a little five," Emmy says. "Sometimes."

She is right. Sometimes.

Juliet holds out a hand. Emmy takes it. She gets up from the floor and they stand for a moment in the bedroom doorway, both of them looking at the wrapped gift that is doing its best, the December evening doing its December things outside the window. A slow seasonal song starts to play, and Juliet slowly starts moving with it, pulling Emmy close. Neither are strong dancers, but neither need to be for each other.

Tomorrow, Juliet thinks. I'll tell her tomorrow.

* * *