REBIRTHDAY chapter 18

Christmas cookie swap

This is the final chapter, everybody! If you enjoyed reading Rebirthday, I’d really appreciate it if you could subscribe to the Substack. Just follow the prompts. It’s free and will help me gather numbers to show an agent if I’m lucky enough to sell this book later on. Thanks again for all the support. It means the world to me!

Photo by Libby Penner on Unsplash

Natalia felt her eyelashes growing before she could see them. She tried not to touch her eyes, sitting in Cristina’s recliner as snow blew sideways outside. A trio of electric candles glowed on the windowsill.

Kai let down her phone. “Your liner’s smudged, girl.” She ran her thumb across Natalia’s eyelid again. “Try not to touch your face at all, okay?”

“I know, but if you could feel how itchy it is right now,” said Natalia, clearing her throat. “You’d be impressed.” She raised her party plate close to her face. “Okay, action.”

Kai braced her wrists together, holding her phone upright.

Natalia plucked a piece of cherry chocolate fudge off the plate and held it up to the camera. “My favorite Christmas treat is Abuela’s fudge. It’s always the first thing we run out of at her cookie swap.”

Kai leaned forward for a tight shot.

“This layer is cherry,” Natalia said, tapping the top layer with her metallic nail extension, “and this is regular fudge.” Then she popped the whole thing into her mouth.

“Mmm,” she said, trying to chew slowly.

Kai cut. “It was okay. Can you do one more?”

Natalia ran her tongue over her teeth. “Sure,” she said, “I mean, if I have to.” Outside, a dark SUV parked at the curb.

A woman stepped out, shielding her eyes, followed by two grade-school girls in puffer coats.

“Paige,” called Natalia, “It’s Maren.”

Paige ran to open the door. The girls tumbled in with a gust of cold air, kicking off their boots. “It smells sweet in here,” one of them said. Maren came in holding a tartan-patterned tin aloft. “Should I open these?” She side hugged Paige with a cackle. “I baked them in Scotland.”

The second girl, who had by now sidled up to Kai, jerked back, saying, “That’s not true, you bought them last night on Amazon.”

“Here,” Natalia said, handing the girl a sugar cookie. She immediately bit into it and swooned.

“Not too many,” Maren said, taking a corner of the couch nearest Natalia. “Your hair! Is it me, or does it look a little darker? I don’t know. So many girls say their texture’s different after chemo.”

“My eyelids are so itchy, they’re driving me crazy.” Sara and Will had taken her to see Maren the week before, at a clinic near the University, her first visit off the hospital grounds. She’d been the oldest patient in the waiting room. Mothers held toddlers in their laps while the bigger kids played games on their iPads, leaving the little chairs and tables untouched.

Cristina came in from the kitchen with a platter and dipped it in front of Maren, pointing with crimson fingernails, “These are peanut butter blossoms, you remember my fudge—”

“Wait,” said Maren, taking up an aqua, Christmas-tree shaped cookie. “Did you make spritz? By hand?”

“I did! Gail showed me how to use her little press. It’s so easy. And aren’t they cute? Take another one.”

Maren obeyed, declaring how buttery they tasted.

“Say,” Cristina said, “have you spoken to Chase’s mother at all? Since the hospital? She’s been on my mind so much during the holidays. I know she and Sara kind of lost contact. Understandably.”

Maren covered her mouth as she chewed. “Only once or twice, by text, but yeah, it’s only been six weeks, so, early days.” Maren looked to Natalia. “She asks how you’re doing, though.”

“I can’t imagine,” said Cristina.

Natalia wanted to say something about how his sketch was on her corkboard in her bedroom but said nothing. Stacey had memorialized her son’s social media accounts, so everything was still viewable, and sometimes people would make comments on the old pictures, which Stacey faithfully answered.

Natalia hadn’t commented on any of the dead pictures, though she had scrolled through Chase’s entire Instagram account, all the way back to when he was 12, before he’d gotten sick. Big gaps of time would roll between pictures back then.

Likewise, Stacey capped his CaringBridge page with the announcement of his celebration of life. When Natalia asked Sara if they could go, she made an excuse about not being invited, though the announcement was out there for everybody to see.

Silence occupied all of them for a moment. Cristina turned to the girls, asking, “Who’s ready to choose some cookies?”

“Me!” should both of them, as they trailed Paige and Cristina into the dining room, where the table was laid out, extra leaf and all, with dozens of cookies and bars and things dipped in almond bark and sprinkled with green and blue and red crystals. Gail had brought a batch of paper-thin lefse, or as Cristina called them, “potato tortillas, they’re addictive,” rolled up like cigars with butter and sugar and cut into pinwheels.

Kai got up to assist them. Maren’s eye went to one of the angel tchotchkes on the table between them. She touched the chipped wing. “Where’s Miss Izzy?”

“She’s at home, writing artist’s statements for finals.”

“December, right,” Maren said, looking past Natalia, to the wall, where a portrait from Cristina’s wedding hung. A smile crossed her face. Natalia turned; a miniature veil popped out from the curve of young Cristina’s beehive.

“I love that,” Maren said. “I guess we know where your dimples came from.”

Natalia’s hand went automatically to the divot in her cheek. The kitchen door, where she’d last seen her mother, was empty.

“Oh, I almost forgot,” said Maren, accepting a half-eaten lefse from one of her daughters, who zoomed off again, “congratulations on your anniversary.”

“Huh?”

“Today is your 100-day anniversary. Since your diagnosis.”

Natalia wasn’t sure how to feel. “Did you hear that, Paige?” she called. “I’ve survive a hundred days.”

Paige, who was Saran-wrapping a tower of cookie laden plates, said, “I was going to tell you, but then you said no more cancer stuff. I didn’t want to break your rules.”

“No, that’s not what I said,” Natalia butt in. “I said I’m retiring as a cancerfluencer. No more videos about having leukemia, or bald head makeup tutorials, that sort of thing. Right, Kai?”

“Yup,” Kai said, who was taking a wide shot of the table from the corner. “Lifestyle content only.”

Maren dusted off her hands and pressed them between her knees. “Are you getting a lot of cancer talk at school?”

“No. I mean, I’m getting stared at, because high school boys.” She ran her palm over the tiny hairs studding her scalp. “I want to fit in, that’s all. I want to be normal.”

“Do you know what you want to do next? Maybe take a gap year?”

Sara came out of the kitchen now, crossing the dining room. “That’s exactly what I told her,” she said, scanning Natalia in a way that reminded her of Dr. Lonergan. “But she says she wants to go straight through. But what do I know? I’m only a mom.”

“I think we should stay synced up,” Paige said.

“It makes sense, we’ll be able to travel home at the same time, study abroad together.”

“Well, anyway, we’ve still got some time,” said Sara.

The twins ran by in a streak of giggles. One of them played Fur Elise, triple-speed, on the piano.

Maren sat upright. “Hey! Guys? Could you wash your hands before you start touching tings? And not so loud, please.”

Natalia pulled her legs up onto the recliner, rocking herself. Kai and Paige had ranked long lists of schools, debated pros and cons endlessly. She had none of that. “Mom wants me to stay close to home,” she said.

Sara shook her head. “That’s not what I said.”

“You don’t have to say it. I can tell that’s what you want. All the schools you like for me are literally in Minnesota.”

Sara lips pulled into a smirk. “I said I thought Iowa City was nice.”

“Whoo-hoo,” said Natalia, with a twirl of her finger. “What do you say, Maren? Do you think I should take it easy?”

Maren sat slackly. Natalia had never seen her quite so natural. The cold, diffuse afternoon light emphasized the lines under her neck and around her lips. A faint scent came off her clinic blouse, a ticklish, high, citrus smell. Her voice took on the tone of a thought experiment. “If it were one of my girls, I’m sure I’d want them to stay close too,” she said, catching Sara’s eye. “But what do you want to do?”

Two competing renditions of Chopsticks strained the precarious tuning of Cristina’s piano, while the girls tried to shove each other off the ends of the bench.

“I don’t know yet,” said Natalia. Maren strained to hear her over the piano. She raised her voice. “I’m still figuring that out.”