“Zachary?” Kenzie persisted. “Maybe Christmas isn’t so bad after all?”
“No. Christmas is still worse.”
Kenzie was quiet, considering this. He could see her furled brows in his mind’s eye. Trying to imagine what could be worse than being almost killed and paralyzed, at least temporarily, and spending the special day in the emergency room and ICU.
“You’re going to have to tell me,” she said. “What exactly happened to make Christmas so awful?”
Zachary took long, slow breaths. His heart rate didn’t pick up, and the machines stayed quiet and calm beside him.
“It was a long time ago. When I was ten.”
“Ten? What happened, you didn’t get the toy or the puppy you wanted?”
“No. I was ten… my folks were fighting. It was Christmas Eve, and we all had to go to bed early because of a big fight. They wanted us out of the way while they screamed at each other. Like we couldn’t hear them in our bedrooms.”
“That sucks.”
“I waited until they went to bed, which wasn’t until hours later. They fought… not just arguing, but physical. I remember hiding under my covers, scared to death and trying to keep my little brother calm, pretending it was really nothing. I just huddled there, holding him, while they screamed up and down the house, hitting and slapping and throwing things. Then… they finally went to bed.”
“Zachary… I’m so sorry.” Her voice was much more tender than it had been. He wished he could see her. That she would hold his hand and look at him while he told the story, so he didn’t have to see it all in his mind, to feel that terror and anxiety again. But his heart stayed calm. Whatever meds they had started running into his IV were obviously doing their job, keeping him from feeling the worst of the emotions of that day.
“I got up when they finally went to bed. I waited until I was sure they were down and asleep and weren’t going to get up again.”
“Why? To call for help?”
“No. I cleaned up… picked up everything they had thrown. Straightened all the furniture. I got out the ornaments for the tree. They had gotten a tree, but kept fighting whenever we were supposed to decorate it, so it was just standing there in the corner of the living room, all bare branches. I spent hours decorating it. I needed a chair to get the upper branches, had to keep moving it around the tree to put the garlands on. I untangled and tested the lights, picked out all the best ornaments. The ones with happy memories and special occasions associated with them. Baby’s first Christmas. I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus. All the silly ornaments that we made for school projects. Everything. I spent all night getting it all perfect.”
“What a sweet thing to do. I’m sure they appreciated it, even if it didn’t make things better.”
“I got out the special Christmas candles. Beeswax ones that my grandma had brought back from Germany. Set them out. Lit them. Laid down on the couch to stare at all the beautiful Christmas decorations and imagine how everyone would feel when they came out in the morning, and Christmas had arrived. It would be magical. It would bring them all back together. We’d have Christmas together without any fighting.”
“But that didn’t happen,” Kenzie guessed.
“I woke up to a room full of smoke. I couldn’t see. Couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t get out of the room. We didn’t have any smoke alarms. Not any that were working, anyway. I was screaming, trying to wake everyone up and get them out of the house, but I couldn’t even walk across the living room to find the bedrooms, I was so disoriented.”
Despite whatever they were putting in his IV, Zachary choked up. He couldn’t help reliving it. The acrid smoke burned his lungs. The terror. Knowing that everybody in the house was going to die and it would be his fault.
“A neighbor’s son who had come home for Christmas in the early morning saw the smoke and called 9-1-1. They got my parents and my brothers and sisters out of their bedrooms through the windows. The firemen had to break down the door and search the house for me. Room by room, because no one knew where I was.”
“Thank goodness they saved you.”
Zachary swore. “No. I wish I’d died. I wish they saved everyone else, and let the house burn down around me. That would have been better.”
“You can’t say that. No. It’s not true.”
“You don’t know! You have no idea!”
“You must feel terribly guilty,” Kenzie said. “But you were only a little boy, trying to do something nice for your family. It wasn’t your fault.”
“It was my fault.”
“You can’t say that.”
“They split the family up.”
Kenzie’s voice was hesitant. “What…?”
“My parents separated. They put all the kids into foster care. They said we could never be a family again. We didn’t deserve to be a family.”
“Who said that?” Kenzie was horrified. She stood and leaned over the bed, grasping for Zachary’s hand. “What a horrible thing to say! You can’t believe it.”
“My mother. My parents. They said I was incorrigible. A criminal. They didn’t want Social Services to put me into foster care; they wanted to put me in prison. I spent a lot of my teenage years in institutions. All kinds of ‘secure’ facilities for kids with behavioral problems. Prisons for kids who had never been convicted of anything.”
Kenzie stroked Zachary’s hair, tears in her eyes. “No. How could they do that? You weren’t being bad.”
“I did awful things. Not as bad
