There you are.

With your head on your mother’s chest, listening to the muffled rumbles as she speaks. She seems to have two voices: the voice inside her ribcage that sounds like she is underwater and the voice that is launched into midair like an arrow. 

You are sucking your thumb. 

You’ve been told that since you are now seven years old, you are too old to be sucking your thumb. In fact, one of your uncles told you that earlier tonight. You twirl your hair around your pointer finger while its neighboring digit lies perfectly nestled between your tongue and the roof of your mouth. Your attention drifts around the room. You glance from the Christmas tree to the ruddy faces of your aunts and uncles. 

The floor of the room is strewn with crinkled wrapping paper and no one seems concerned with the mess. Your aunts and uncles take turns telling stories. It reminds you of “Show and Tell,” when you bring something to school and tell your friends everything you know about it. But you don’t listen to what the grown-ups say. You watch what they do. They make your mother laugh, her chest shaking so much that you lift your head to wait out the quaking of her torso. 

And it’s then, when you lift your head, that your eyes land on your two dead uncles by the telephone.

Their portraits sit next to the rotary phone on a desk in the hallway at the bottom of the stairs. You knew neither of them in real life, but in your imagination, you have met them. Everyone tells you “This happened before you were born” and “This was after Georgie died,” and all the befores and all the afters eventually lead to now, which doesn’t seem as exciting. 

Now seems like you missed the action. 

Now means people you should have known are missing. 

So sometimes, like tonight, you choose to chat with those missing people.

Your eyelids begin to droop and in this magical purgatory between sleep and wake, your eyes serve as cameras, zooming in on those fixtures sitting next to the telephone. Your sleepiness encourages them to shift in their frames—to speak with you, to share how they feel left out too, to answer questions that you have not yet dared to ask aloud.

From your vantage point on your mother’s lap, black-and-white 18-year-old Georgie smiles in his frame. You know that if you stand directly in front of the frame, his head is almost the same size as yours. You can’t see the rest of his body. He has a sparkle in his eye and looks like he might be cracking up because of a joke the photographer told him. This makes you feel relaxed. He seems brave and you feel that dying was okay for someone so happy, even if it happened far away in a place called Vietnam. 

Next to Georgie’s picture is one of his younger brother Tommy, standing next to his bike and squinting from the abundant sunshine. He is wearing pants that get wider at the bottom, and he has long hair. Not as long as yours, but definitely longer than any boys you know. He looks shy and like he doesn’t want his picture taken. He only wants to ride his bike. You have felt like that. You feel bad that the car he was driving crashed.

Your mom’s chest jiggles again, prompting you to get up and move to the hallway. You want to be able to see the picture on the wall opposite the stairs—the one of your grandfather. It’s too high up for his eyes to meet yours so you climb a couple of the stairs to prop yourself up. His frame is wide, and next to his head is another frame that has ribbons and medals inside it. He seems proud of them as he poses for the camera in his Boston Fire Lieutenant hat. 

It’s funny to you that his name is also George because he has the same shiny eyeballs as Uncle Georgie and seems to have the same hilarious photographer. 

You peer around the corner, back into the living room, to see what’s so funny that it has all the living adults using what Mrs. Wilson would call their “outside voices.” You watch them through the frame of the doorway. They won’t stop moving—shifting their bodies, thrusting bottles between their lips, waving their hands to get someone’s attention across the room. No one is in charge. Everyone is talking. There’s too much going on in there. 

You feel a deep connection with your uncle Tommy, dodging the sun and squinting to find you down the hall. The living room is filled with that sort of brightness. Not really in your eyes, but more like the sounds are too loud for your ears. Tommy would rather be riding his bike than stare into the blinding sun, forcing a smile at the photographer. 

You’d rather be home. 

You cozy up to the door frame and plant your feet on the threshold and realize that you are sucking your thumb once again.

You try to figure out how many hours you have been awake today. Christmas Day always seems like the longest day of the year—waking up early and going to bed late. You look at all the toys on the floor waiting to be packed into the car. You know the walk to the car will be freezing cold. You imagine yourself half-sleeping in your dad’s arms as he takes you from the car to the mattress in your third-floor bedroom and tucks you into the covers with tights and dress still on. 

Daddy. 

It seems like your dad should be here by now. He has been gone for most of the day, and you miss him. 

You can tell how late it is because, in the midst of this rambunctious crowd, your little brother is sleeping at the end of the couch. With his eyes closed and mouth wide open, the skin around his lips shimmers with remnants of candy cane spittle. Across the room, you can see the tiny bundle that is your one-month-old sister in your grandmother’s arms and your sleeping five-year-old sister, in her black velvet dress, draped across your aunt’s lap. Looking at all of them makes you feel the heaviness of your own eyes, the physical sense of how late it is on this Christmas night. 

You battle to stay awake so you can greet your dad at the door because it seems that no one else plans on leaving that living room. 

In the darkened hallway, you practice choreography from your part in The Nutcracker and pretend that you are dancing for Georgie and Tommy and your grandfather. You love dancing for Georgie and your grandfather since they are always smiling at you. Their only expressions for your entire life are smiles. 

Tommy’s squint makes him seem skeptical. You keep rehearsing the dance, trying to change his look in your mind. You two are the only ones in the house that seem dissatisfied. All the living people are laughing and shouting. The other two dead people are smiling. 

The living and the dead. 

In preparation for First Communion this year, you’ve been learning The Apostles’ Creed and you’ve memorized this part: he is seated at the right hand of the Father, and he will come to judge the living and the dead. And here you are: seated. The living room over there and the dead room over here, filled with pictures of men you’ve never met. You don’t know if you’re judging them, but the prayer seems meant for you. You wonder who will join the dead next. 

Suddenly, the worry descends upon you.

Covers you like a blanket. 

Where is Daddy? 

It is so late. 

You look over at your grandfather and imagine your father’s face in the frame. Your father’s memorial would have ribbons and medals from the Boston Police Department instead of the Boston Fire Department. It seems too easy for him to be placed in a frame and put in this hallway somewhere. 

You wonder if he would be smiling like the Georges or squinting like Tommy. You have never worried about your dad before now, but this is the first Christmas that he’s been a Boston Police Officer. 

What if something happens to him? 

Your mom can’t carry you and all three of your siblings up three flights of stairs, so you will have to help, but you are not strong enough to carry your four-year-old brother or your five-year-old sister, and you are too nervous to carry your one-month-old sister. 

You sit on the carpeted stairs and bargain with the three dead men while sucking your thumb again. You lose track of when your thumb is inside and outside of your mouth, and it reminds you of Nani’s cigarettes, which sometimes she is smoking and sometimes are burning between her fingers. 

In your mind, you tell George, Tommy, and your grandfather that there are three of them together in Heaven, and they don’t need your dad there yet. You need him here and alive. If they really cared about you, they would not take him to Heaven tonight. 

You imagine the people in the living room having had similar conversations on that very same carpeted step, pleading for the safe return of their brothers, sons, father, husband. 

And now they are just silly: your uncle Dickie is making funny faces, crossing his eyes at you from across the room. Or carefree: your aunt Denise ruffles your hair as she skips by you on the stairs on her way to the bathroom. 

You see headlights outside. 

This is not unusual for a city street, but your grandmother’s house sits on a dead-end street in Boston. The headlights mean someone is coming here!

Then you remember the stories you’ve heard of cars that pull up to the house carrying people who get out and knock on the door to deliver bad news, and it seems that it is more likely to happen to this family than any other family in the whole world. 

In the dark, you sit on the carpeted step in the midst of three dead men and stare at the front door. 

You hear footsteps and then the sound of the storm door opening. There is no knocking. The doorknob turns before the door opens toward you. 

Your dad walks into the dim hallway and closes the door behind him. His back is to you, and his dark blue uniform looks more wrinkled than this morning. His movements are familiar to you. You know how he likes to hustle inside after being outside in the freezing cold. How his feet dance a little bit to get the soles of his shoes clean. How he reaches into his back pocket to get his wallet out. And even though you can’t see him do it, you know his lips form an “O” when you hear his giant exhale. 

You want to exhale too. He is back. He is safe. 

You are the only one who notices he’s arrived.

He rolls his shoulders like your dance teacher does during warm-up. He lowers one ear to his shoulder, holds it for four counts and repeats it on the other side. You breathe a bit slower and notice, in this moment, that your dad is a bit of a dancer himself. He turns to his right, where the desk with Tommy’s and George’s pictures are, but he doesn’t stop. He continues turning and sees you sitting on the stairs.

“Ho! Ho! Ho!” 

He winks at you, and you smile even though your thumb is in your mouth. “What are you doing out here in the dark?”

“It’s too loud in the living room.” Your tongue bounces up against your thumb but he understands you. He always understands you. 

“Yeah, it’s nice out here,” he says as he sits down next to you. Like he’s emptying his tank of all the O’s he can muster up, he takes a deep breath, forms one last “O” with his mouth and blows it out. You watch him go from police officer to dad. You watch him breathe again. He glances over at George and Tommy, and then back at you. You watch him go from dad to brother to son. You watch him breathe again and again, until his lips curl under, press together, and form a smile. He squints at you. You recognize that sparkle in his eye. 

For a few minutes, the two of you sit on the stairs, side-by-side in the company of the dead, listening together to the hoots and hollers coming from the living room.