The Sister Season by Scott Jennifer

Author:Scott, Jennifer [Scott, Jennifer]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2013-11-05T00:00:00+00:00

December

25

Christmas Day

“The same ugly tension, wrapped up in bright paper and tied with a bow.”

Eleven

Elise had always been good at making the house feel Christmassy. Even when Robert was horrible. Even when they’d been up all night fighting the night before, Robert drunkenly slurring names at her back, Elise scurrying to put the girls’ gifts under the tree and hoping Robert didn’t notice that she’d bought them more than he’d agreed to.

Elise believed in Christmas. She believed in the magic of the season, even if she never really saw it for herself. She believed in George Bailey and that little girl Virginia and all that sappy black-and-white hopeful movie stuff. She believed that if she gave her girls a special enough Christmas, maybe they could come away feeling sappy and hopeful, too. Maybe they could forget how they were raised the other three hundred sixty-four days of the year.

But if every year Elise was hoping for a good Christmas, this year she was practically bursting with glad tidings. Even if the house had been overdone just a tad, what with the yards of tinsel and forest of poinsettias. Even if the girls had arrived surly and distracted and still—still!—at one another’s throat after all these years.

Even if her husband was dead.

Even if her guilty memory of the night he died ate away at her gut like drain declogger.

In the soft gray morning hours, while the snow and wind turned over to sleet ticking against the sides of the house, the Yancey Farm was calm.

• • •

Claire had come in hours before, shimmying out of her boots and carefully stowing them on the old towel her mom had placed by the back door earlier in the day to keep the kitchen floor from becoming a soppy mess. She’d brushed her hands through her hair, flinging bits of ice around the kitchen, where they would quickly evaporate. And then she’d slipped off to the bathroom to study her red, swollen face in the mirror once again, pondering how everyone in the house thought she was the cavalier one. How none of them could know how her heart was breaking over what had happened back in California just before she left and how confused and lonely she was and how guilty she felt because she knew her sister Maya would want—no, need—to know what had been going on all week. But Maya had shut her out so completely, how could she ever broach any subject with her?

In the end she had simply blown her nose and snuck down the hall into her bedroom, then fallen face-first onto her bed, still wearing the yoga pants she’d bought earlier in the day. She hadn’t worn pants in years, and they felt oddly constricting against her legs, like casts. She couldn’t help but think how appropriate that constriction felt in this, the house that had constricted her for the first eighteen years of her life.

• • •

The still night air pressed in on Bradley as he trundled through the back door, making few attempts at being quiet.

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