Chapter Text
Everyone tells her she’s lucky to have such a quiet baby. It’s true he rarely cries, even when she knows he’s hungry, as if he’s somehow resigned himself at a young age to unfulfilled desire. He’s not even talking yet, not a single word. But she’d gladly trade in her quiet baby for one that’s still. Hands everywhere, curious fingers reaching up to grasp anything within reach, bring it up before his unblinking blue stare. He pulls things apart to examine their insides, consternation twisting up his little brow. By the time he’s fourteen months and incongruous evergreen wreaths dusted with plastic snow are starting to appear in Galveston shop windows, she’s not willing to even entertain the idea of bringing a Christmas tree into their tiny apartment. She imagines him electrocuting himself with a string of lights, strangling himself with tinsel, slitting himself in the throat with broken glass from a decorative ball.
She doesn’t know where such thoughts come from.
“You can’t not have a tree,” Trisha says, popping her gum as she counts down her register at the McCrory’s where they both work. “Kid’s gonna end up fucked up enough as it is, growing up in that shitty apartment of yours with no dad. Least you can do is give him a real Christmas.”
Eileen wants to grab her by her long dark ponytail and smash her face against the cash register, but she doesn’t and she’s glad two days later when she gets off work and finds Trish standing by her car, smoking a Pall Mall and guarding a large cardboard box.
“Musta miscounted inventory,” she says with a wry smile, and helps Eileen load the box into the trunk.
It’s a dull green thing, made of the same stuff as the grass that goes in Easter baskets. It’s attached to stainless steel branches that fold out like some kind of mechanical spider questing for prey. It’s barely any taller than Rusty. She spends her day off stringing cranberries and popcorn onto a thread and then pockets a single strand of lights from a window display at work. Finally, one muggy evening a week before Christmas, she sets the tree up, says a prayer than the damn thing doesn’t go up in a heap of smoldering cranberry-scented melted green plastic, and plugs in the lights.
She thinks they’re broken for a second and then realizes they’re the kind that blink on and off. Well, shit, that’s no good--he’s sure as hell not gonna be able to keep his hands off those. She turns toward her son, already unconsciously moving into position to grab the back of his overalls and drag him away from disaster as she has so many times before.
But Rusty's not moving.
His mouth is slightly agape, a little pink bow like an angel’s in a church painting. The lights cast a warm glow over his face and hair, honey-colored like that of the man whose face she barely remembers. The only movement is the twinkling of the lights in his eyes, which seem impossibly wide, impossibly blue. She’s never seen him look so at ease.
“Do you like the lights, Rusty?” she says, and she's surprised at the calm in her own voice, too. “Aren’t they pretty?”
He doesn’t take his eyes off the tree, but his lips meet for a moment as he wraps them around his first words.
“Wights,” he says. “Pwetty.”