The hallway was damp, poorly lit, and smelled heavily of smoke and urine. We started up the stairs. My sister and I looked around at the graffiti on the walls, our father walking us quickly passed some obscenities sprawled over the stairwell as Vanessa tried to sound them out. I ran my hand up the banister with the chipped paint as we scaled each floor, our feet sticking in places to the soiled carpet as we turned around the final corner at the third floor landing. I began searching the faded signs beside each door.

We passed 3A, and my father wrinkled his nose as a man and woman screamed at each other from behind the door. He put his smooth hands on both of our shoulders, making impressions in our puffy coats, and herded us along faster as we went. We finally reached her door and paused for a moment, as if we had collectively forgotten why we had come.

My father knocked hard and fast, rapping three times on the dark wooden door frame. The echos of apartment 3A filled the space, sounding like so many late nights had for our own family. We heard the locked bolts being undone from behind the hollow door. It swung open a crack, held by two chains from the inside. Her face appeared in the gap and brightened, and she closed the door again quickly before opening it.

“Merry Christmas!” Vicki said, wrapping her arms around us. Vanessa and I each put one arm around her middle, never letting go of each other with our intertwined hands. I breathed in her blossomed perfume, heavily applied at her neck, and felt the warmth of her embrace, as welcomed as it was foreign. The man down the hall yelled again as I breathed deeply into her hair, frozen in a moment of excitement and discomfort.

My father behind us stood and stared uncomfortably at the walls. He looked over his shoulder toward her neighbor’s door, then back to us. Our mother looked up and met his eyes.

“How long can I have them for?” she said.

He seemed to consider for a moment, running his fingers through his salt and pepper.

“We’ll be back around four to pick them up.”

Vanessa and I looked at each other, then back to Vicki as she bristled. She stood up as large as her stature could muster next to our father, in his business casual clothes and leather shoes, his blinking beeper clipped to his belt. We were frozen in the entry to her apartment, decades of odor coloring the paneled walls.

“But it’s already ten,” she said.

“We got delayed leaving the house. It’s not easy getting the girls ready, you know?”

“How could I?” Vicki said. “I never see them.”

“Well you’re seeing them now,” he said, finality in his tone. He turned to us, softening. “If you need anything, we’ll be in town all day. Just call, all right?”

“They won’t need anything,” she said, and pulled us inside her apartment, breaking our interlocked hands, our fingers falling away from one another as we crossed the threshold. “See you at four. Not a minute earlier.”

Vicki waved over her shoulder as she turned inward to the cramped space and began closing the door as my father stood just outside the partially opened entryway. He looked as if he wanted to say something. She closed the door fully, and the instant the handle clicked into place, she quickly relocked the chains to the frame and shifted the three dead bolts into place.

She turned to us when she was through. Her smile was warm, her over-dyed hair with the split ends falling past her breasts, and she gestured around her tiny space. The man down the hall was mostly muffled through the closed door, and the rankness was replaced by the smell of cooking food and half a dozen lit candles.

“So, what do you want to do first, dinner or presents?” she asked.

We looked around, our eyes wandering to the bathroom with no door, the couch that doubled as a bed, the kitchenette one person could turn around in very carefully, and through the cracked window to the street three floors below. We could see the tattered awnings that flapped in places. The walls were littered with pictures of the two of us before her most recent stint in jail and a handful of her other children we hardly knew as babies, of boy band posters that had once folded out of CD cases and butterfly decorations from the local dollar store.

An aluminum christmas tree sat on the arm of her couch, the decorative bulbs and ribbons shining with reflections from the small colored lights. A small pile of immaculately wrapped gifts were haphazardly placed below it. I smiled, and thought of how long she must have saved to have been able to afford anything for us. Finally, I spoke.

“Food. Do you have chips?”

“And dip,” Vicki said, delightedly picking the bag from on top of her refrigerator, which she could reach without moving the trunk of her body. “I know my girls, don’t I?”

Vanessa giggled, and she reached into the bag and took a handful, scooping into the ranch up to her small fingertips. I smiled too, sitting down on her couch, feeling a spring through the aged stuffing.

“I’ve missed you guys so much,” she said, taking a step and opening her miniature fridge, an off-white laminate that showed every fingerprint from every hand that had ever touched the exterior. She pulled out a whole big bowl of mashed potatoes with a big pat of butter on top and grinned as she set it in the microwave and turned it on. I noticed the other contents of her refrigerator were piled on the floor in the corner in a small styrofoam cooler, the outside of the container sweating. She noticed me looking and opened the top lid to check its contents. She reopened her fridge, taking an ice pack from the small freezer, and adding it to the box.

The smell of hot chicken was warm and familiar as Vicki opened the lid of her crockpot with the small bit of rust around the heat-setting knob.

“I made your favorite too,” she said, touching Vanessa on the top of her head as the last of her white fingertips were licked clean. Vanessa smiled, leaning into Vicki’s hand.

“Can we watch TV?” Vaness asked, adjusting the strap on her overalls.

“Well, I have a TV, but no cable or anything like that,” she said, looking at me and Vaness apologetically. She looked at the bowl of steaming mashed potatoes in the microwave that took up her whole kitchen counter space, adding “And it’s black and white. But I have some VHS’s. I still have your favorite though. How about we watch Blues Clues?”

I wrinkled my nose at the suggestion. “We don’t watch that anymore. That’s for little kids.”

Vicki stirred the pools of melted butter into the potatoes thoughtfully. “Yeah, I guess it is.”

“What else do you have?” Vanessa said, hopping down and sifting through the small stack of VHS tapes on the floor. She pulled one dusty tape out toward the bottom of the pile, holding it up like a trophy as she shoved some more chips in her mouth with her other hand. “What about this one? I love the Grinch.”

Vicki looked at me, and I nodded my head.

“I love the Grinch too.” I said.

“Well how about it?” She said, serving the potatoes out on two plates next to the steaming chicken. She started using a can opener to pop open a can of green beans, draining the water into the kitchen sink. “It’ll be a real Christmas dinner. Our little ghetto Christmas.”

I cringed inwardly, thinking of the sequin do-rag she wore the last time I saw her, but smiled. I helped Vanessa set up the TV, turning on the small screen, waiting for it to slowly show the static snow, coming clearer and clearer into focus. The microwave beeped to the hiss of the screen as I loaded the movie. I hit rewind and watched the whole movie run backwards, gift giving, gift stealing, then loneliness at the top of the mountain, the happiness of all the singing Whos around the tree in the beginning. I wondered if days like this were like the hard part in the middle, the time in between being apart and our happy ending. I pressed play, the music coming out of the little speakers, the black and white cartoon coming to life.

“Christmas was three weeks ago,” I said, to no one in particular.

“Yes, it was,” Vicki said, stiffening as she found some mismatched silverware, stabbing a spoon deep inside the mound of mashed potatoes. She opened the refrigerator, pulling out a plate of deviled eggs, placing two on each plate. I remembered the last time she made them for us, when we saw her for Easter.

“I love devilled eggs!” Vanessa said, bouncing in her seat as her plate arrived.

“Me too,” I said, grabbing one and stacking it on top of the other, trying to make it whole again. “Mom almost never makes them for us at home. Just for parties.”

“She’s not your mom,” Vicki said coldly. “This is your home. This is where you belong. With me.”

I looked at my egg, sliced straight through, its insides scrambled and oozing, small bits of paprika staining the whites like grape juice someone took to bed––an irreparable stain, and ate it.

The food was good. The clothes she bought us were a few sizes too small. At 3:56, Mom and Dad came back to get us. Vanessa and I both raced to lace up our shoes when we saw the gold minivan park on the streetside below, and soon heard our father coming up over the stairs to the door. Vicki unlocked the door, taking longer than necessary to undo each bolt. She gave us each a hug, and whispered she loved me close to my cheek with a kiss that left a small glittered smear, and the smell of her cigarettes and dollar store perfume. As I started down the stairs, one hand in my father’s, I waved over my shoulder.

Somehow, I knew that she meant it.

I had looked up at the Levine’s building as I buckled into my seat. I remember my grandpa had told me once that it had been beautiful, a long time ago. A thriving place. I watched the smoke that was already billowing from the window cracked a few inches, our mother flicking her hot ashes to the street below as Vanessa buckled up, as we drove away. Vicki waved from behind the frosting glass of the third floor window, and the awning, torn and beaten, seemed to wave too.

As we pulled away, I was glad to be heading home.

 

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  • R. M. Davenport graduated from the University of Maine at Machias in 2020 from the Arts and Letters undergraduate program with a focus on creative writing and book arts. As an openly queer creative writer and painter, R. M. Davenport is committed to shedding light on difficult conversations around trauma, poverty and mental illness so often shrouded in shame with openness through the arts.