The Twelve Days of Dash and Lily. Rachel Cohn

minute he saw me, he extended his hand and asked, “How’s the life, Dash?” And when he shook, he shook hard.

      Lily didn’t ask me what I was doing there, but the question was certainly in her tired eyes.

      “How was the doctor?” Langston asked.

      “Much better company than the undertaker!” Grandpa replied. Not the first time I’d heard him use this joke, which meant it was probably the two hundredth time Lily had endured it.

      “Does the undertaker have bad breath?” Boomer barged into the hallway and asked.

      “Boomer!” Lily said. Now she was definitely confused. “What are you doing here?”

      It was Langston who cut in. “Much to my surprise, your Romeo here has brought us a rather early Christmas gift.”

      “Here,” I said, taking Lily’s hand. “Close your eyes. Let me show you.”

      Lily’s grip was not like her grandfather’s. Before, our hands used to pulse electric together. Now it was more like static. Pleasant, but light.

      She closed her eyes, though. And when we got into the living room and I told her to open them, she did.

      “Meet Oscar,” I said. “He’s your present for the first day of Christmas.”

      “It’s a pair in a partridge tree!” Boomer yelled out.

      Lily took it in. She looked surprised. Or maybe the stillness of her reaction was further tiredness. Then something kicked in, and she smiled.

      “You really didn’t have to . . .” she began.

      “I wanted to!” I said quickly. “I really, really wanted to!”

      “But where’s the pair?” Grandpa asked. Then he saw the photograph. His eyes welled up. “Oh. I see. There we are.”

      Lily saw it, too, and if her eyes welled up, they welled inward. I honestly had no idea what was going on in her head. I shot a look at Langston, who was studying her just as hard, without getting any ready answers.

      “Happy first day of Christmas,” I said.

      She shook her head. “The first day of Christmas is Christmas,” she whispered.

      “Not this year,” I said. “Not for us.”

      Langston said it was time to retrieve the ornaments. Boomer volunteered at the same time Grandpa made a move to get some of the boxes. This snapped Lily back to attention – she shuffled him over to the couch in the living room, and said he could oversee them this year. I could tell Grandpa didn’t like this, but that he also knew it would hurt Lily’s feelings if he put up too much of a fight. So he sat down. For her.

      As soon as the boxes were brought in, I knew it was time for me to leave. This was a family tradition, and if I stayed and pretended I was family, I would feel every ounce of the pretending, in the same way that I could feel the weight of Lily pretending to be happy, pretending to want to do what we were encouraging her to do. She would do this for Langston and her Grandpa and her parents whenever they got back. If I stayed, she would even do it for me. But I wanted her to want to do it for herself. I wanted her to feel all that Christmas wonder she felt last year at this time. But that was going to take more than a perfect tree. It might just take a miracle.

      Twelve days.

      We had twelve days.

      I’d spent my whole life avoiding Christmas. But not this year. No, this year what I wanted most this season was for Lily to be happy again.

       Saturday, December 13th

      I’m mad at global warming for all the obvious reasons, but mostly I’m mad at it for ruining Christmas. This time of year is supposed to be about teeth-chattering, cold weather that necessitates coats, scarves, and mittens. Outside, there should be see-your-breath air that offers the promise of sidewalks covered in snow, while inside, families drink hot chocolate by a roaring fire, huddled close together with their pets to keep warm. There is no better precursor to Christmas than a quality goose bump chill. It’s what I count on to usher in the good cheer, happy songs, excessive cookie baking, favorite-people togetherness, and the all-important presents of the season. The days before Christmas are not supposed to be like this one was, a balmy seventy degrees, with holiday shoppers wearing shorts and drinking iced peppermint lattes (yuck), and tank-top-wearing Frisbee players nearly giving concussions to dogwalkers in Tompkins Square Park with their carefree spring-day bad aim. This year the cold couldn’t be bothered to bring in Christmas, so until it could, I wouldn’t bother getting too excited about the best time of the year.

      There wasn’t enough cold outside, so instead I brought it inside and turned it on Dash, who didn’t deserve it.

      “If you have to go, then go,” I said brusquely. Brusque. It was such a Dash word – obscure, unknowable, distant – that it felt strange I even knew it. Along with the other million obligations overwhelming me at the moment, there was SAT study time, which left an amaroidal taste in my mouth. (How could an SAT taker possibly be more prepared for university by knowing such a word? Right – not at all. Complete waste of word, complete waste of time, complete certainty I will still not achieve my parents’ hopes for my college admissions prospects by the addition of the word amaroidal to my vocabulary.)

      “You don’t want me to stay, do you?” asked Dash, as if he was pleading for me not to demand his spending any additional time with my beleaguered Grandpa and my brother, who at best tolerates my boyfriend and at worst is downright rude to him. I’d feel bad about Langston and Dash’s animosity except it seems to be an enjoyable sport between them. If Lily was the subject on Jeopardy!, the answer would be, “She does not understand it at all,” and the question would be, “What is the human male species?”

      “I want you to do what you want to do,” I responded, but what I meant was: Stay, Dash. Please. This Christmas tree gift is so lovely and exactly what I didn’t know I needed – for the season, and from you. And even though I have a ton of other things I need to do right now, there’s nothing I want more than for you to decorate the tree with me. Or for you to sit on the sofa and watch me bedazzle it while you make snarky comments about pagan traditions misappropriated by Christianity. Just to have you near.

      “Do you like the tree?” Dash asked, but he was already buttoning his pea coat, which was too heavy for such a warm day, and looking at his phone like there were text messages on it beckoning him to better places than at home with me.

      “Why wouldn’t I?” I said, not willing to further profess my profuse thanks. I had only just started sorting through the decorations when Dash announced his intention to leave, and he did it at the exact moment that I opened the gift box from the Strand that Dash had given me last January 19, to celebrate author Patricia Highsmith’s birthday. Inside the box was a red and gold ornament with a sketch in black picturing Matt Damon as the Talented Mr Ripley. Who else but Dash would delight in a Christmas decoration displaying the face of a celebrated literary serial killer and give it to his girlfriend as a present? The present only made me adore Dash more. (The literary hero part, not the serial killer part.)

      In February, I had placed the gift box in the Christmas decorations storage box with a sigh of great hope – that Dash and I would still be together when it was time to put the ornament on the tree. And we were. But our relationship was ephemeral (finally an SAT word that applied to my life). It didn’t feel real anymore. It felt more like an obligation that somehow had survived till now so we should at least see it through the holidays, because that’s where it started. Then we could stop pretending that what had initially felt so right and true now felt . . . still true, but definitely not right.

      “Be good to Oscar,” said Boomer.