That Year
- Dec 8, 2021
- 3 min read
by Shelby Van Pelt
We were too cool for holidays that year.
In a borrowed pickup, we drove west. We cursed the cost of gas and picked at convenience-store sandwiches. We fishtailed on an icy interstate somewhere in Oklahoma. By some miracle, we skimmed the snowbank and swerved back onto the highway, unscathed.
You believed in miracles.
We had met, two weeks earlier, in the laundry room of our co-op. Sparks flew over a loaned quarter. A discussion of the foreign coin rejected by the dryer. We both loved travel, we said, but neither of us had seen the Grand Canyon. Over dinner at that little Armenian place in the East Village, we hatched a plan, a deal sealed later that night in sweat on sheets and salt on lips and the laugh-track drone of a roommate watching sitcoms on the other side of the wall.
The desert surprised us. It was cold, empty, haunted by bitter winds that charged across its floor. We were unprepared. Should have packed heavier coats, brought another blanket. The tent trembled as howling gusts lashed its polyester skin. We shared your sleeping bag because it was way warmer than mine. Nose to nose like a two-headed caterpillar in an undersized cocoon, we were oblivious to morning breath and eye goobers and other indignities.
We awoke, that first morning, to a swirl of weightless snow, sweeping like gossamer around the gnarled cottonwood trunks. Christmas Eve. We drove to the North Rim, where we clutched instant coffee in travel mugs with fleece-swaddled hands. We stood at the edge.
“Unreal,” I said, and I meant it. How could wind and water scar the earth like that? But you offered one of your acquiescent shrugs. Nothing was ever impossible to you.
We should’ve been with our families for the holidays. Me, with my mother upstate. You, with your parents in Baltimore. But we were together, staring at this outrageous gash in our planet. How had it started? A collection of unwitting rocks, runoff from a thawing ice age…wind, rain, drought, flood. How many of these causes must’ve had to align to create such a thing?
But a one-in-a-million chance is still a chance.
On our second night in the desert, we awoke to rustling. We poked our heads through the tent flap and peered across the campsite, which was painted by frost, glowing under a clarion moon. There was a buck, its antlers silhouetted against the star-silver sky.
“It’s Rudolph,” I whispered, teasing.
“Nonsense. Where’s his red nose?” Your breath left puffy ghosts in the dry air. The buck leapt off into the brush. “That must’ve been one of the others. Dasher, Donner. Maybe Vixen.”
You believed in miracles. You believed, generally.
Now, it’s Christmas Eve again. The boys and I are at my mother’s house upstate, sitting in that cushioned bench in her bay window, the one you liked to curl up in while reading. Adolescence has sunk its teeth into the boys like you wouldn’t believe, and I know they’re too old for this, but when a shape emerges from the threadbare forest and hovers at the edge of the yard…
“Rudolph,” I whisper.
They roll their eyes. “It’s a deer.”
Like those desert winds that battered our campsite, the sickness had torn through your body, unrespectful of anything in its path. The doctors offered slim odds. You believed in miracles, but this time, miracles couldn’t return the favor.
I shoo the boys off to bed with promises of cinnamon rolls in the morning. Soon, they’ll be too cool for Christmas. Maybe they already are.
Maybe next year I’ll take them to the Grand Canyon. They’ve never seen it.
When Shelby Van Pelt isn’t feeding her flash-fiction addiction, she’s juggling cats while wrangling children. Her debut novel, REMARKABLY BRIGHT CREATURES, will be published by HarperCollins in May 2022. Born and raised in the Pacific Northwest, she’s currently missing the mountains in the suburbs of Chicago. Find her at www.shelbyvanpelt.com, on Twitter @shelbyvanpelt, and Instagram @shelbyvanpeltwrites.
