Sophie's Journal — Era 1: The Aftermath (1946–1948) — Entry 3

Christmas Eve. Vermont. I am a thousand miles from Casa Blanca and this is the first Christmas of my life I have not spent at home.

I told my father I had been invited by a sorority sister. This is true. Margaret Aldrich, from Alpha Delta Pi, asked me to come to her family's house in Stowe because nobody should be alone at Christmas, which is the kind of thing Margaret says with such plain sincerity that refusing her feels like kicking a puppy. I said yes before I had finished thinking about it, and by the time I had finished thinking about it I had already packed.

The real reason is Thanksgiving. I went home for Thanksgiving and it nearly broke me. The orchard and the piano and my mother's particular way of being pleasant and my father's voice doing that thing it does, and I came back to Albuquerque and lay in Tessa's guest room and stared at the ceiling and knew I could not do it again so soon. Not yet. Not Christmas, which is worse because Christmas has carols and candles and the expectation of joy, and I am not equal to the expectation of joy right now. I am barely equal to the expectation of getting dressed in the morning.

So I am in Vermont. In a white clapboard house with green shutters and a wreath on the door and smoke coming out of two chimneys and snow on everything, snow on the roof and the fence and the road and the trees and the hills and the mountains and the sky, or what passes for sky here, which is low and grey and soft, nothing like the sky at home, which goes on forever and does not apologize for itself. This sky apologizes. This sky says, I know I am not much, but I am keeping the snow in, so you're welcome.

Margaret's family is kind. Her mother fed me pot roast and mashed potatoes and something called a Parker House roll, which is a kind of bread that has never been near a tortilla and does not aspire to be. Her father asked me about New Mexico as though it were a foreign country, which from here it might as well be. Her little brother showed me his sled. They have a fire in every room, which is the one thing this house has in common with Casa Blanca, though these fires burn maple and birch and not mesquite, and the smell is different, sweeter and lighter, and the crackle is different, and I miss the smell of mesquite the way I miss everything now, which is constantly and from a great distance.

I went skiing today. Margaret taught me, or tried to. I fell seventeen times, which is not an exaggeration, because Margaret counted. She said I was a natural. I told her that falling seventeen times did not meet any definition of natural I was familiar with. She said the natural part was getting up every time. I do not think she was talking about skiing.

My mother sent a package. It arrived at Tessa's before I left, forwarded from the house. A scarf. Cashmere, from a shop in Virginia. Blue. A very specific blue that she chose because it matches my eyes, and I know she chose it carefully, and I know it is her way of saying she sees me. I am wearing it now, sitting on the bed in Margaret's guest room, which has a patchwork quilt and a braided rug and curtains with little blue flowers on them and smells like lavender and wood smoke, and outside the snow is falling and the world is white and quiet and nothing like home.

Danny would have loved this. Danny, who grew up in Tennessee and talked about snow the way other people talked about the ocean, as a thing he'd seen but did not quite believe. He would have made a snowball and thrown it at somebody, probably me, and then grinned that grin and said something about how the cold was only tricky if you stayed in it, and everyone would have laughed. Danny is the absence I can talk about. He is the one I can miss out loud. The other absence sits beside Danny's and says nothing, and I wrap my mother's scarf tighter around my neck and I do not say its name.

My father called tonight. I could hear his voice through the telephone wire, all that distance, and he said, "Merry Christmas, Punkin," and I said, "Merry Christmas, Daddy," and neither of us said what we were really saying, which is that I am not there and he wishes I were and I wish I could be but I cannot, not yet, and the distance between us is not the miles but the summer, and the summer is a country I cannot go back to and cannot leave.

I will get through this. I am getting good at getting through things.

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