She pulled the Christmas tree from the web-strewn place in the corner. Karen hated artificial trees but this was the one that used to go up in their basement in Edgemont, her tree. The proper one, the white spruce, was always upstairs. Her father decorated it with a ladder. When he disappeared and they had to give up the house to pay some tiny percentage of his debts, the plastic tree, her tree, was the only tree. Her mother died and the six-foot miracle of moulded plastic carried the childhood she most longed for, her true childhood, before she knew. And for Benedict, an artificial tree from 1989 made the most sense: nothing had to be cut down and the plastic was already in the ecosystem. Last year she had sprayed organic silver fir essential oil on the fake branches to manufacture a hug of nostalgia.
It was not a heavy box but it was awkward to drag up the stairs. A third of the way up, she heard the ping of her phone over Nat King Cole.
Chestnuts roasting on an open fire. She crawled over the busted Sears box and ran up the stairs, hoping it was Jak. It was Poppy, advising her they would stop at Starbucks on the way home. Did she want anything? An eggnog latte? Karen did not want a latte and she did not want her daughter, who was struggling with her weight, to spend six dollars on five hundred gooey calories either. Midway through each of the responses she crafted, she erased the words. In the end, she simply wrote, “Nice thought but no thank you.”
She gulped what remained of the Pinot Gris in her glass, slid her phone into her back pocket, and walked back down the stairs. The tree box was not where she left it, and it had not slid down. The box wasn’t there at all. Karen stood at the bottom of the stairs. “Dad?”
The only answer she could hear was Nat King Cole singing in the kitchen. Karen walked back across the basement floor and looked into the rec room. She used the flashlight on her phone to illuminate the space. There it was in its place in the corner. A large dollhouse, two boxes of stuffed animals, Lego scenes, and other toys and games Charlotte had always found irrelevant and Poppy had outgrown were shoved against the back wall next to the Christmas tree along with boxes of children’s books Karen could not bring herself to donate or trade.
No intruder squatted there in the spiderwebs.
Karen sat on the floor. She was sure she had pulled out the Christmas tree, had lugged it halfway up the stairs, but the Pinot Gris had fogged her up. She had imagined it, like she had imagined her dead father upstairs in Charlotte ’s room. She concentrated on the dollhouse, on the beautiful books she had read to the girls. When they were forced to move to some boiled meat apartment building in the welfare part of New Westminster, there would be a reckoning. She did everything she could to slow it down,
to live in the present tense, but her girls were nearly grown and this secret shrine to their childhood was essential. Maybe a storage facility? The Nat King Cole album ended and the house was silent apart from the mechanical groan of the furnace.
Copyright © 2021 by Todd Babiak. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
