December Speaks by Martina Preston

It wasn’t until I left my town that I began to learn its secrets.

Winter break after my first semester in university, I drove home the back way and fell in love for the first time with the turns in the roads, the bareness of the deciduous trees on either side, river birch peeling and turning to slush in the canoes of the highway shoulder. I left my home behind and arrived at my house. I hadn’t started calling it “my parent’s house” yet. I wasn’t sure what to call it.

It was December. Over the melting of our Hanukkah candles, I learned about the child predator who used to live down the street, and whose presence kept my parents from letting me walk to my best friend’s house alone. I watched the wax make trails on the valleys and mountains of the crinkled aluminum foil that we used as a fire-safe tablecloth. I thought about the trails my feet had made across the boundaries of the town. Did the predator walk those same paths? My father told me these secrets. The three flames shook with the wind of his movement when he stood up to leave.

Later that evening, we gathered in a circle in the living room for gifts. My grandma knew how much my siblings and I used to love searching for the afikomen at Passover every spring, so she and Papa would hide our presents around the house so we could have the thrill of discovery. Now, we were older, and our secrets had changed. Gifts were no longer hidden, and I loved the consistency of their contents. Small squares were always three-pack of sticky notes, hopefully yellow or pale blue, those were my favorite. Small rectangles held a new book, or a pair of Kirkland Signature socks. Large rectangles were Tupperware filled with cashews, or dried fruit, or oatmeal packets. My grandmother had other secrets to keep in mind than the location or content of a Hanukkah gift. She kept her phone ringer on the loudest setting, not because she couldn’t hear, but because depression kept her in bed most days and only the deafening noise of a grandchild calling to say hello would make her get up. She would tell me later.

After our nightly gift exchange, I tried out my new socks on a walk around town. Down the road from my parents’ house, the light from the inside of the red-and-white diner reminded me of an old country painting, Thomas Kinkade and the beauty in things, or something like that. On the multicolored brick wall of the Trackside Pizza, someone had spray-painted the words “Welcome to Scumner.” That nickname was new to me. I liked plain old “Sumner.” Sumner was where my brother and I used to pick up railroad ties off the side of the tracks and replace them with our stories and legends of where they might have come from. Sumner reminded everyone of summer, especially autocorrect. One spring, my mother stopped us from going to play with the railroad ties. I learned later that someone had died on the tracks; my father told us that they closed the road for maintenance.

But I grew older, and each time I returned the town told me more of its secrets. There was a new apartment complex behind the supermarket. Locals—the true locals, that is, the ones who were here for the river and the fields and not the Sounder commuter rail—didn’t like the way it disrupted the view of the mountain. The owners of the breakfast place on Main Street—the hole- in-the-wall with hand-painted windows that won best pie in the Rhubarb Days Festival every July—went fishing and never came back. A third-wave coffee shop had opened up and displaced one of the perennial kitschy antique stores. The tri-fold sign outside shouted to me that they were serving croissants and coffee in the mornings, and tacos and tequila in the evenings. The leaves of the dogwood tree behind the sign whispered that the business would never last. Not here.

“Welcome to Scumner.” I dropped my eyes from the graffiti, and noticed that sitting on the curb under the phrase, back against the brick, was the blonde, curly-haired woman who would walk around the town at all hours of the year. I talked to her once, in a dream. She carried an opaque plastic bag. What was in it? In my dream, I asked her. She stared at me, her eyes watery and wide like an air bubble inside a syringe.

In my dream, she didn’t answer. I don’t know her name.

I followed the road straight ahead until I ran into City Hall, alone as a beige two-story building among the rows of broken-in, half-painted homes. When I was in sixth grade, a building burned down a few blocks away and I made cookies for the firemen. The fresh batch of chocolate chip oatmeal cookies cooled in a paper clamshell box as I stood outside City Hall, waiting for someone to come to the door. The bell rang, and I bounced up and down on the balls of my feet, trying desperately to tell other people that I cared for them. I’ll never know for sure if the firemen received my cookies, or if anyone enjoyed them. The town doesn’t need to tell me.

After passing City Hall, I turned back to retrace my steps, on the path I’d walked more times than there are leaves on the Martina tree in our front yard. I always thought it was odd that my parents had named trees after my little sister and I. Down the road, barely a half-mile away, the public high school was growing its memorial orchard. We, of course, were still alive.          

I returned home from my walk, ducking under the entrails of the dead clematis on the trellis that guarded my parents’ front door. The house was quiet. My grandparents left while I was gone–I thought this was strange; they’re the kind of people who want their last words to be “I love you,” so they say it every chance they get. I would talk to my mother later that night, and she would tell me that they forgot to bring Papa’s nightly heart medication, and had to rush home to time his dosage right. I would think to myself that these are the times where I need to hear “I love you” most. Not because I’d forgotten, but because our chances to say it were running out. My grandpa’s heart stopped three separate times that year. My grandpa never told me these secrets.

I found my mother sitting alone at our kitchen table, and I could tell from the way she braced herself against the table legs that the house was shaking from the patterns of the train a quarter mile away. I was the fish in the ocean who didn't know water–I had never heard the train from this distance, or felt the house tremble. I slept well through the nights.

My mother had always slept horribly, and this turned out to be a blessing when she woke up one night, the summer before, to a wall of fire a few feet from her singed eyelashes. The curtains had ignited–I worry that I would have slept through it. My mother, though, would wake up at a car door closing across the street, so we were safe, and the house was fine. The firemen came. They said nothing about the anonymous cookies from seven years before.

I made us spiced rooibos tea, our favorite, and sat down at the table beside her. My mother is just a girl. She held the warmth of her drink with both hands and told me about Hanukkahs past. I watched the tea steep in my mug, darkening its surroundings with its secrets, and I wondered how my mother was still alive. While the train passed on its way and the river birch shivered in the wind and the woman outside the Trackside Pizza tried to get warm enough to sleep, my mother told me that she had always wondered the same thing.

I was once told, while sitting in the parking lot of the hospital, just past the new apartments that were built just past the supermarket, that I was killing her. I think that was supposed to be a secret.

My mother drank her tea, and over the silence of the evening, we talked of our town.