She was reaching for the next thing in the cardboard folder when she realized that she could not remember the professor’s name, or what he taught, or why the relationship had hurt her as it did, left her almost suicidal for the following year.
The next thing was a photograph of her old dog, Lassie, on her back beside the oak tree in the backyard. Lassie was dead these seven years, but the tree was still there, leafless now in the November chill. She tossed the photograph into the brazier. She had loved that dog.
She glanced over to the tree, remembering . . .
There was no tree in the backyard.
There wasn’t even a tree stump; only a faded November lawn, strewn with fallen leaves from the trees next door.
Eloise saw it, and she did not worry that she had gone mad. She got up stiffly and walked into the house. Her reflection in the mirror shocked her, as it always did these days. Her hair so thin, so sparse, her face so gaunt.
She picked up the papers from the table beside her makeshift bed: a letter from her oncologist was on the top, beneath it a dozen pages of numbers and words. There were more papers beneath it, all with the hospital logo on the top of the first page. She picked them up and, for good measure, she picked up the hospital bills as well. Insurance covered so much of it, but not all.
She walked back outside, pausing in the kitchen to catch her breath.
The brazier waited, and she threw her medical information into the flames. She watched them brown and blacken and turn to ash on the November wind.
Eloise got up, when the last of the medical records had burned away, and she walked inside. The mirror in the hall showed her an Eloise both familiar and new: she had thick brown hair, and she smiled at herself from the looking glass as if she loved life and trailed comfort in her wake.
Eloise went to the hall closet. There was a red hat on the shelf she could barely remember, but she put it on, worried that the red might make her face look washed out and sallow. She looked in the mirror. She appeared just fine. She tipped the hat at a jauntier angle.
Outside the last of the smoke from the black snake-wound brazier drifted on the chilly November air.
December Tale
SUMMER ON THE STREETS is hard, but you can sleep in a park in the summer without dying from the cold. Winter is different. Winter can be lethal. And even if it isn’t, the cold still takes you as its special homeless friend, and it insinuates itself into every part of your life.
Donna had learned from the old hands. The trick, they told her, is to sleep wherever you can during the day—the Circle line is good, buy a ticket and ride all day, snoozing in the carriage, and so are the kinds of cheap cafés where they don’t mind an eighteen-year-old girl spending fifty pence on a cup of tea and then dozing off in a corner for an hour or three, as long as she looks more or less respectable—but to keep moving at night, when the temperatures plummet, and the warm places close their doors, and lock them, and turn off the lights.
It was nine at night and Donna was walking. She kept to well-lit areas, and she wasn’t ashamed to ask for money. Not anymore. People could always say no, and mostly they did.
There was nothing familiar about the woman on the street corner. If there had been, Donna wouldn’t have approached her. It was her nightmare, someone from Biddenden seeing her like this: the shame, and the fear that they’d tell her mum (who never said much, who only said “good riddance” when she heard Gran had died) and then her mum would tell her dad, and he might just come down here and look for her, and try to bring her home. And that would break her. She didn’t ever want to see him again.
The woman on the corner had stopped, puzzled, and was looking around as if she was lost. Lost people were sometimes good for change, if you could tell them the way to where they wanted to go.
Donna stepped closer, and said, “Spare any change?”
The woman looked down at her. And then the expression on her face changed and she looked like . . . Donna understood the cliché then, understood why people would say She looked like she had seen a ghost. She did. The woman said, “You?”
“Me?” said Donna. If she had recognized the woman she might have backed away, she might even have run off, but she didn’t know her. The woman looked a little like Donna’s mum, but kinder, softer, plump where Donna’s mum was pinched. It was hard to see what she really looked like because she was wearing thick black winter clothes, and a thick woolen bobble cap, but her hair beneath the cap was as orange as Donna’s own.
The woman said, “Donna.” Donna would have run then, but she didn’t, she stayed where she was because it was just too crazy, too unlikely, too ridiculous for words.
The woman said, “Oh god. Donna. You are you, aren’t you? I remember.” Then she stopped. She seemed to be blinking back tears.
Donna looked at the woman, as an unlikely, ridiculous idea filled her head, and she said, “Are you who I think you are?”
The woman nodded. “I’m you,” she said. “Or I will be. One day. I was walking this way remembering what it was like back when I . . . when you . . .” Again she stopped. “Listen. It won’t be like this for you forever. Or even for very long. Just don’t do anything stupid. And don’t do anything permanent. I promise it will be all right. Like the YouTube videos, you know? It Gets Better.”
“What’s a
