The Last Christmas Letter
Kristine Kathryn Rusch
Copyright © 2011 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch
Published by WMG Publishing
Cover illustration by Konstanttin/Dreamstime
Cover design copyright © 2011 WMG Publishing
Smashwords Edition
This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. All rights reserved.
This is a work of fiction. All characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.
This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.
The Last Christmas Letter
Kristine Kathryn Rusch
“I can’t believe you did this, Joanne,” her sister said on the phone. “Just because I can’t come to Wisconsin for Christmas doesn’t give you the right. It’s mean.”
Joanne Carlton leaned against the oven. It was warm with the afternoon’s baking. The entire kitchen smelled of vanilla, cinnamon and cookies.
“I didn’t do anything, Annie,” Joanne said tiredly.
“Nice try,” her sister snapped and hung up.
Joanne rested the phone against her forehead and closed her eyes. For nearly fifty years, she had put up with her sister’s histrionics, usually laughing them off. Annie was volatile. Annie was temperamental. Annie was the emotional one, while Ginny was the pretty one and Joanne was the smart one.
Joanne was also the oldest and had been, from the beginning, the one everyone expected to be responsible.
But she wasn’t responsible for this.
She set the phone back in its cradle, then wiped her hands on the towel she had looped through her belt.
The grandchildren were coming for the annual cookie decorating party, something everyone in her extended family—the family she raised, not the one she was raised in—looked forward to. Cookie decorating and then, in four days, Christmas.
Her entire house was spotless. She had decorated every room, and had trees on every floor. In the basement she had set up the white flocked tree she had bought one year when the children were young, upstairs she had the artificial tree that her late husband had once sprayed with pine scent because he couldn’t stand the smell of plastic, and on this floor she had a real tree that her son Ryan had begrudgingly helped her put up in early December.
Her house looked like Christmas, felt like Christmas, and smelled like Christmas, and that was what she wanted—a sense of the holiday so strong that years from now, when her grandchildren thought of Christmas, her house would rise in their memories as the perfect place for the perfect holiday.
The children would have their perfect holiday, but for her, some years were harder than others. This was one of the hard years.
She walked into the entry. Christmas cards hung from the garland that looped the mahogany banister leading upstairs. She picked up the pile of cards that had arrived this week, the ones she hadn’t had time to hang.
Strike that. The ones she’d been avoiding hanging.
She plucked out a card that had ostensibly come from her father. It looked like a card Daddy would pick out: Garish red and green, with Santa and Rudolph on the front. Santa was shaking his finger at Rudolph whose nose was glowing red.
We can’t call your room the Red Light District, Santa was saying, and no, I won’t explain why.
Inside, the card read Happy Holidays, with the “I” dotted by the image of Rudolph’s red nose. Underneath was tight precise writing that said simply, I love you, Button. Merry Christmas. Daddy.
The disturbing part of the card wasn’t the slightly risqué slogan or her father’s unblemished handwriting (despite his shaking fingers). It was the Christmas letter tucked inside.
She had opened it the day the card arrived and started to read, then stopped with tears in her eyes. Obviously, Annie had gotten one of these letters too and it had upset her as much as it had upset Joanne. Soon, Joanne would probably be getting a call from Ginny, and while she wouldn’t be angry—not like Annie was—she would profess a mild shock and dismay over the way that Joanne “of all people” had handled the holiday.
Even though Joanne had had nothing to do with the letter.
She unfolded the piece of paper and leaned against the banister, the garland tickling her neck. The letter looked like every other Christmas letter Daddy had written in his long life.
Joanne would have sworn that it had been typed on the Royal that his mother had given him (at great expense) when he went off to college in 1932. He had used that Royal throughout his life, having the keys repaired when they needed it, and stockpiling ribbons in the 1980s when the demise of the typewrite became apparent.
The arch of the lower case “a” was broken, and the enclosed part of the lower case “e” was filled in because no matter how often he cleaned the keys, he could never get that “e” to work right again.
He—or whoever had done this—hadn’t photocopied the letter, like Daddy did in his last two decades. Instead, the letter had obviously been mimeographed.
The ink was slightly blue and blurry. But even if that hadn’t tipped her off, the faint smell still embedded in the paper would have. That sharp powerful odor, only approximated these days in Magic Marker pens, always brought her back to her father’s office where she ran the mimeograph machine for him.
He would set up the machine, carefully aligning the typed original with its gluey purple back on the drum. Then she would operate the crank handle, watching as each page appeared, glistening and wet from its contact with the mimeo ink.
She was there every week, copying his pop quizzes and helping with the year-end exams. But she loved mimeographing the Christmas letter because she got to read it first.
Joanne could still remember some of his openings, having studied them as they came through the mimeograph machine, one blurry page after the other:
Yes, it is the bleak midwinter and you will probably get this letter after the festivities have ended. Still, the information contained herein doesn’t lose its freshness with the passing of the holiday.
Or…
Every year, I look at the snow glistening on our yard, the pine trees providing a nest for the winter birds that gather despite the weather, and I feel the urge to share the triumphs and tribulations of my family with the people whom we love but see only too rarely.
When she went away to college, she missed that voice, and greedily snapped up a copy of the Christmas letter as soon as she got home for the holidays.
Annie had inherited her job. Annie had lasted only one year (“Jeez,” she said to Joanne, “you didn’t tell me that turning that dang crank hurts your arm.”) before giving the job to Ginny. Ginny secretly told Joanne that she hated the smell (“It makes me dizzy”).
Joanne loved it. She missed it when her father became practical and retired the mimeo machine for a half hour at a copy shop. Some pimply kid ran the copier behind the desk while Daddy read his newspaper, and Joanne always felt the process had gone slightly wrong. No pimply outsider should take over the family copying task, no matter how slight it was.
Joanne once told her father she had learned to write by reading his letters, and he was surprised by it. But she felt it was true. Even though he had written essays—what now would be called “creative nonfiction”—those influenced her less than his newsletters.
Although she never did tell interviewers that. When they asked where she got her inspiration for her novels, she cited her favorite authors—Fitzgerald, King, Le Guin—and never once mentioned her father.
Lately, she had been regretting that oversight. She might not have a chance to rectify it. The doctors said he would probably never regain consciousness.
At the thought, Joanne’s hand started shaking. The newsletter crinkled in her fingers. So she carried it to the kitchen and set it flat on the table she had covered with a vinyl cloth in anticipation of the grandchildren.
December 15
Right there, the date was unbelievable. Daddy had slipped into the coma on December 2nd. The nursing home had moved him to hospice on the 10th. Hospice was offering only palliative care.
The fact that he was still alive only a few days from Christmas showed the inherent strength of that 95-year-old body. It was efficient from the marathons he had run until his knees gave out at 72, and the lap swimming he had substituted until he got pneumonia in October.
He had been so angry then, knowing he was going to miss the Regional Masters Competition that was going to be held in Minneapolis at the end of November.
I would’ve won my category, Button, he said to Joanne—actually more like wheezed at her, his breath whistling as if he had swallowed a bit of tubing.
You’re the only one in it, she said.
No, Button, that’s where you’re wrong. There were 15 people at State, and I beat all of them, including some whippersnapper who hadn’t even turned seventy-five yet.
She remembered when he turned seventy-five and was trying to find something to substitute for the running. That was the year he had discovered the Masters age group swim program and he was determined to race.
This’ll keep me going, Button. You’ll see.
She blinked hard and made herself focus on the warm house, the table before her, the vinyl cloth ready for the grandchildren’s mess. She held the newsletter flat and tried to read it again. This time, she got past that date and into the body itself.
December 15
The magic of the season arrived with suddenness and gusto the day after Thanksgiving. For the first time since retailers moved the Christmas season from Advent to November, the Christmas music on the radio seemed appropriate and I began thinking about my holiday newsletter.
Of course, I think about my newsletter all year. How does a man describe his adventures in a world he doesn’t really understand in a short pithy way that makes him seem less like a fool and more like the hero?
I hark back to my own great-grandfather on that summer day in 1934 when he first took me across that mysterious divide between our world and Luminaria. My mother had called me home from college, convinced he was about to die. And apparently he thought so too, or he wouldn’t have taken me with him…
Joanne stopped reading. She knew the story, since her father had repeated it most of her life. Only there was no mention of Luminaria. Instead, her father told the tale to illustrate how hardy his side of the family was.
His great-grandfather had fallen off a ladder at the age of 95. Daddy had been called home from college and spent the day at his great-grandfather’s bedside. In the morning, Daddy had awakened to the whir of blades against grass. He peeked out the window to see his great-grandfather mowing the lawn—not with any power mower (they didn’t exist in 1934), but with one of those push mowers that Joanne had tried once and given up on at half the length of the lawn.