I Saw Mommy Kissing

I’m sure you’ve heard the song. It’s everywhere during December. Cute little kid, chirping about sneaking out of bed to peek at presents and getting the unpleasant surprise of Mommy smooching on Santa. Like most things in life, the reality isn’t quite so cute.

It was Christmas Eve, or maybe super early Christmas morning, I didn’t check the clock when I slipped the covers down over my flannel-covered legs. It was long enough past bedtime that the wooden floors had given up any lingering warmth and were shockingly cold against my bare feet. Rather than fumble to find my slippers, I lifted up onto my toes to minimize contact with the floor. (And to be sneakier. Every seven year old knows that tip-toeing turns you into a ninja.)

Mom and Dad always left my bedroom door cracked at night. They said it was so they would hear me if I called out in the night. But we all knew it was to let in a trickle of light from the hall, so that I wouldn’t be afraid there alone in the dark. The bonus of the open door was I didn’t have to worry about the creak of the old iron handle when it turned. I only needed to nudge the door, slip it open a tiny bit more, just enough for me to squeeze through the opening and out into the hall.

It was quiet everywhere. But not dark. The tree was lit up in the living room, sending shafts of shifting reds and greens down the hall to my feet. I followed the path the dots of light created on the floor, knowing they would lead me to the presents nestled under the tree. I wasn’t going to open anything. I just wanted to pick them up, feel the weight, test for shaking pieces. I wanted to guess and dream about what was inside.

As I reached the doorway to the living room, I realized it wasn’t as silent as I initially thought. There was a gentle rustle coming from the living room, the sound of fabric sliding against skin. I was just young enough that I wasn’t sure if I was about to catch Santa in the act, or catch my parents pretending that Santa was real. I wanted to know, though. I wanted to know exactly who it was that put presents under the tree every year. So I didn’t turn away, return to bed. Instead, I crept closer to the wall, leaned forward a bit, so that I could peer around the doorway and see who Santa really was.

It was my mom. And a man. Not my dad. Not Santa, either. This man was tall, dressed in rough dark clothing that looked like it had been covering his body for weeks while he rolled around in the mud. Or worse. He was wearing some sort of strange hat that I couldn’t quite see. I couldn’t see it clearly, or his face, because he had his head tipped down, his lips apparently locked on Mom’s. They were kissing.

My seven year old brain couldn’t process this. Mom kissing someone other than Dad. I must have stepped forward to try to see more, gather more information to help me figure out what was happening. I must have made a sound, a creak of a floorboard, a sharp intake of breath, a startled “no.” They heard me. I was caught.

Mom spun to face the noise in the hall, maybe thinking Dad had caught her in the act. Her movement revealed the man behind her.

What I thought was a hat was a large set of curved dingy white horns. Below the horns, his face was a twisted snarl of scorched flesh broken by tufts of wiry black hair. I pulled air into my lungs to scream, but I wasn’t able to make a sound. I just held the air trapped inside, frozen in place along with every muscle in my body.

Sensing my urge to scream, Mom made a shushing gesture and whispered at me to be quiet. We didn’t want to wake up Dad. I kind of thought that was exactly what we should do. Wake up Dad so he could deal with the man-thing that had been kissing Mom.

I slumped to the floor, the hard thump of my tail-bone against the wood finally knocking the air out of me in a whoosh. I closed my eyes, wishing that when I opened them I would see an empty living room. Just a tree. No Mom. No strange goat man. I would have been happy at that point to lose all the presents if the people went with them.

When I opened my eyes, the man was crouched on the floor right in front of me. I don’t know how I didn’t hear him move across the floor. From here, I could see his filthy feet. They weren’t feet at all. They were hooves. I also don’t know how I didn’t smell his approach. He was foul. How did Mom stand kissing this?

Then he smiled. Broken black teeth jutted from raw red gums.

I so wanted to scream. But he held one gnarled bony blackened finger in front of his ruined mouth.

“Shhhhh,” he said. His voice was deep, dark, sandpaper. “You’ve been a very bad boy.”

We stared at each other. He seemed to be waiting for me to say something, maybe argue that I was really a good boy, but I couldn’t form any words.

“I like to punish bad boys at Christmastime.” He reached for me with his final word.

I found my voice. “Technically I didn’t do anything wrong,” I whispered. “I didn’t get a chance to peek.”

The man goat pondered this technicality for a moment, but must have decided it wasn’t enough for me to avoid punishment. His hand began moving again.

“She’s been worse.” I lifted one trembling hand in the air and pointed to where Mom still stood next to the tree.

The nasty man thing froze, his head tipped to one side.

“She’s married,” I explained. “But she’s been out here kissing you.”

That slow slimy smile spread across his face again, a chuckle that sounded like rocks in a tumbler rolled out of his chest.

“You’re a very smart boy,” he said as he stood. “And you’re right. She’s been a very, very bad girl.”

The second he turned his back to move to Mom I was gone. Down the hall and into my room. I risked the clattery screech of the doorknob to make sure it was closed and locked behind me before I climbed into bed and buried myself under the covers.

I don’t know what exactly he did to Mom. I didn’t hear any sounds from the living room. I never heard footsteps in the hall, or voices. She was just gone when I woke up in the morning. Dad seemed mildly puzzled, but not really surprised. It was like he always thought she would disappear without a trace, leave us behind when she moved on to the next thing.

I never told him what happened that night. I never told him that I saw Mommy kissing Krampus.

Credo

I was looking through my notebook from a Playwriting class I took in college and came across this Credo, written in 1997 by a much younger me. Surprisingly, it still applies.

I believe in the sound of the wind blowing through the trees. I believe in a mountain night so clear I can see the entire galaxy spiraling out before me. The feel of cold rain. The smell of the ocean. Sand between my toes. Jetty rocks cutting to my soles. Fireworks on all sides. Waves crashing. Silence. Stillness. Thought. Self-contained. Observant. Ant on a blade of grass. How small? How large? Equal. Different. Same substance. Laughter. The joining of souls that have met before. Separating to meet again. We hope. The pain of parting. Feeling the thread of a stretched connection. Feeling the threat of scissors. Unable to stop them. Remembrance. Shadows. Connected, but unclear. Sharing. Not sharing. What to hide? Me? My mask? You’ll never know. Multiple personalities? Maybe so. Dotting the is to avoid the next thought. Stalling. Protection. Safety. Revealing. One piece at a time. The ones I want to give. Some I don’t understand. Search for self. Search for knowledge. Will knowledge help find self? Or is it completely useless? Money. What it does. What it doesn’t do. The ability to live by denying the real life. Entitlement. To what? To whatever they want. I sometimes crave that stability. That ability to continue. Through my life and through others. Leaving a mark. Making an impact on the world and those I encounter in it. Not being forgotten— insignificant. Being needed. Value. Purpose.

An Anonymous Girl and other November Reads

I finished nine books in the month of November:

The First Conspiracy by Brad Meltzer and John Mensch (ARC)
A Gathering of Shadows by V.E. Schwab
An Anonymous Girl by Greer Hendricks and Sarah Pekkanen (ARC)
Before and Again by Barbara Delinsky (audiobook)
Turtles all the Way Down by John Green
The Cure by Douglas E. Richards
The Dark is Rising by Susan Cooper
The Red Pyramid by Rick Riordan
The Girl He Used to Know by Tracey Garvis Graves (ARC)

I also wrote over 52,000 words this month, and I am a little bit tired!

I’ve included my review of my favorite ARC of the month below. You can click on the links here to see my reviews of the other two.
The First Conspiracy https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2580740007 

The Girl He Used to Know https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2604139127


I received an Advance Reader’s Copy of An Anonymous Girl by Greer Hendricks and Sarah Pekkanen from the publisher (St. Martin’s Press) in exchange for an honest review. An Anonymous Girl is scheduled for release on January 8, 2019.

I read The Wife Between Us last year and struggled with some plot and character issues. This made me a little hesitant to pick up another book by this duo. While An Anonymous Girl did have some minor issues for me, I was overall pleasantly surprised by the read.

This is the story of Jess. Jess is living on her own in New York City, working as a makeup artist for hire for a local company. On one of her jobs, Jess overhears an invitation to a psychological study and manages to get herself on the subject list in order to make some extra money. The study is digging into the topics of ethics and morality. These are the topics of the whole story. What would you be willing to do for personal gain? What would you have to gain to violate your personal ethics?

Jess gets pulled into the life of the doctor who is running the study, accepting more money than she could have dreamed possible. Just to answer some questions about her past. And then to put herself in real-life situations (or maybe they’re staged, Jess is unsure….).

The events of the story unfold in NYC. Because I have been to New York, I was able to see the story unfold in this city. If I hadn’t been there, however, I think the descriptions in the novel would have led me to envision as a much calmer, quieter city than it is in reality.

Where the chaos lived was in the plot and the characters. For the duration of the story, lies and deception prevail. Like the characters, you find yourself constantly questioning every move of every individual. There were spots in the story where I got so lost in the layers of lies that I was mostly sure something happened in the plot that contradicted a previous plot point. Because of all the lies and questions, however, I was never sure if the issue was in my memory or an actual plot issue.

What I am more sure of is my impression of the characters. I struggled a lot with the psychiatrist running the study. This character is written in a very precise way, with the chapters told from this point of view written in second person, which I think was intended to mimic clinical, scientific writing. This was a very difficult point of view for me to connect with. I struggled to connect the voice here with the actions the character was taking.

The biggest glitch for me was the final moments of the story. There is one last twist, literally on the last two pages of the novel. This twist felt very contradictory to the character. It seemed to undo the entire arc of the character in question, throwing them right back to where they started the story. This stood out a lot to me, as the character had made great strides in the preceding chapters.

Overall, An Anonymous Girl was a more enjoyable story for me than the previous one by this pair of authors. They are very good at putting together twist and turns, making the reader question what they are reading. I think this pair will get even better as they continue writing, delivering stories with seamlessly woven plots and hopefully characters who are entirely consistent.