TROUVAILLE ... l.danes (REWRITE)

chapter twenty-six; the present

THE PEACEFULNESS OF THE FIRST SNOW 

two-thousand-and-two

THE FIRST snow falls when Shelley is hanging a green-and-red striped bauble on her Mom's Christmas tree.

She presses her nose to the cold glass and watches as it flutters to the ground, dancing through the darkening town outside. Soon enough, when the moon is high in the sky and the stars are hidden by pressing clouds, the streets will be covered in a pretty white blanket and they'll all fall soundly asleep knowing that the world is beautiful for just a moment. Shelley will not be able to fall asleep tonight. She will sit on the front porch, hot chocolate in hand, layer upon layer covering her body, and she will enjoy the peacefulness of the first snow.

That peacefulness never existed in D.C.

In the kitchen, Sookie is grumbling over the eggnog she has burnt for the third time in a row while Shelley's Mom watches on, commenting on the fact it smells like an exploded Christmas factory in her house now. Her Dad is hanging the mistletoe in all the worst spots so that at least someone will be accidentally caught beneath it, and Jackson has been relegated to sifting through the movies until he finds one that they will all like.

The Danes-St James tradition has changed since Shelley had her last. She can still remember it clear as day. She remembers it every Christmas. Back when she and Shane would decorate with oddly white decorations that always matched, and he never wanted to make dinner so they'd always book six months in advance for his favourite steak restaurant, and she'd always come home too late to watch a movie that she liked. What she would have given to spend just one more Christmas falling asleep on William Danes' sofa while her family reminisced on the days of old.

She wishes Liz was here to press her nose up against the glass and beg their dad's to let them outside into the snow.

"Not until after the movie, Seashell."

Her heart lurches. She heard the same thing every year. How could she miss it so much? The softness to her Dad's voice as he leans around the doorframe to smile at her, like a shared joke nobody else will understand. She could lean into it. Allow it to swallow her up and send her back seventeen years. She will always be that seventeen year old girl at her last Christmas get-together drooling on her crush's shoulder.

She sends a fabricated smile over her shoulder.

"I remember, Daddy!"

His chuckles echo, breathier than before, throughout the house as the stairs creak beneath his feet. This house is ageing and he is ageing alongside it. The creak of his bones an effect of the cold settling on the ground outside. Before, old age was a distant horizon they couldn't quite see through the fog, but now they have gone crashing onto the shore. And Shelley would have been none the wiser if her plane hadn't crashed beside them.

She hangs another bauble on the tree.

Jackson leans over to switch the vinyl playing on the record player and Frank Sinatra's sultry voice oozes from the speakers attached to it, crinkly yet still working despite the years of use. Her Mom squeals from the kitchen and comes rushing through, clapping her hands at her favourite Christmas album. She yells on her husband to hurry up so they can dance and his feet come padding back downstairs just as quick as he went up them. Soon enough, they are slow dancing, hands linked, her head resting on the sharp edge of his shoulder. Shelley watches them, bauble string dangling from her index finger. She can't tear her eyes away.