12 Days 'til Christmas ✓

chapter twenty-two

t w e n t y - t w o

*

I wake up with a start in the middle of the night, greeted by darkness and the sense that something isn’t right. Not like there’s someone in my house or the place is on fire, but the itchy feeling at the back of my mind that I’m forgetting something, something that I should be upset about. It’s only when I roll over with a grunt and squint at my too-bright phone screen that I see it’s only half past midnight. It feels like it should be four in the morning, but it’s been less than three hours since I came to bed.

And then it hits me like cold water creeping up my back, a slow wave of realisation that comes with the memory of yesterday, sweeping up the glass and tipping it into a shoebox and crying. That scratchy feeling that woke me up intensifies and all I can think, in my delirious, sleep-ridden state when my head feels thick and soupy and my limbs are leaden, is that the girls have been split up. The girls should never be split up.

They grew together and they died together, and they were memorialised together in those ornaments that I check every day from the moment my tree goes up each year, and now I can’t shake this paranoia, this strange superstition. I can’t have one without the other. The universe already made that decision for me – I can’t have my girls, but they can have each other.

My feet know what they’re doing more than I do. I push off my covers and blindly stumble out of bed without my glasses. They must have fallen off my bedside table, but I don’t need them to find my way downstairs. It’s a strange relief, actually, for everything to be a blur as I slip out of my room and pad down the stairs, the softly glowing lights on the Christmas tree greeting me like an old friend.

Noelle’s bauble stands out even though I can hardly differentiate between most of the decorations. Perfect clear glass, a glittery snowflake shimmering in the light, her name written in beautiful cursive. Pip is so talented. All of the Campbell siblings are. Their artistic prowess knows no bounds, featured in some way in every room of my house, and I feel a tug of guilt and shame when I cup one hand around the bauble and take it off the tree.

But that tug isn’t as strong as the powerful instinct that tells me to break it like Robin’s was broken. The compulsion has taken over my body beyond reason, this ridiculous but unshakeable conviction that they can’t be at rest if they’re apart, and when I’ve put so much symbolism and ritual into these baubles, I can’t rest easy knowing that one is proudly displayed on my tree and the other is a pile of glass in a box.

I can’t do it, but I have no. I can’t just drop it on the floor and hope it shatters, but I need to. I’m tearing myself between conflicting messages in my head, one voice telling me that I’m being ridiculous, that there’s no real significance and I can just get a new bauble for Robin, but the other voice is just as loud. The one that tells me I’ll feel better if they’re both broken, when I can convince myself once more that they’re together even if they’re not here.

I’m still torn when the decision is wrenched from my hands, quite literally. In my tired and glasses-free state, I don’t notice the curl of the rug when I turn. It catches my foot and when I throw out my hands to break the fall, I drop Noelle’s bauble. It doesn’t bounce on the thick pile rug or fly onto the sofa, nestled between cushions. It smashes on a patch of uncovered wooden floor, cracking the snowflake right down the middle.

I can’t help a whimper, even if that was what I was going to do anyway. It’s the shock of the fall and the noise and the realisation slowly sinking in that there’s no turning back now. I have to collect the pieces and add them to the shoebox but it’s dark and damn it, I should have found my glasses. It’s impossible to see the shards and as I plant my hands on the ground to push myself up, one embeds itself in my palm.